Show for Sale

People often wonder where artists get their material and ideas from, what makes them write a specific line instead of another. With Annie Dorsen's Democracy In America , such mystery is gone. The entire show was available for purchase. In the months preceding its opening, anyone could go online and buy something—text, music, movement—that would ultimately end up in Democracy in America . The result is a collage of ideas and thoughts from individuals across the country. The purchases were varied. David N. bought a “Starring You” credit in the program. Harriette D. bought Rhett Butler's famous line: “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.” A student at St. Ann's Academy bought the zombie dance from “Thriller” in slow motion. The variety and seeming disconnectedness of each element of the piece was used to illustrate Alexis de Tocqueville's (author of the great book Democracy in America ) question regarding how a nation could be assembled from a large group of individuals.

Initially, connection seemed unlikely. The show started with a word, spoken by the performer Anthony Torn, followed by a movement executed by another performer, Philippa Kaye. A sinking feeling that this show may simply be a parade of words and images from across America appeared. However, that feeling was put to rest as the performers began to gel the purchased fragments together. Kaye and Okwui Okpokwasili do the Thriller dance while singing “Soldier boy, oh my little soldier boy.” A striptease is followed by an ad for the contemporary dance venue Joyce Soho. A little girl recites a rather grown up poem on video while Kaye dances with fans to Ride of the Valkyries .

There is no grand overarching theme that appears among the fragments—the fragments themselves are the theme. Dorsen did not intend for the piece to be a statement on America's culture or politics. However, statements are inevitably made throughout the piece. Two poster sized images of Abu Ghraib hang from the sides of the cube shaped set. One is labeled “theater” and the other “not theater.” The images, while an embarrassing reminder of America's recent missteps, raise the question of just what is theater these days? It could be anything from two people discussing politics loudly in public to a traditional Broadway show. It could also be, for the guards at Abu Ghraib, the act of torturing and photographing prisoners. Yet, by labeling one image theater and the other not, the definition is further blurred.

The visual and performance aspects of the show are effective. The set is simple: a raised square platform with poles on all four corners and a video screen stretched between the rear poles. The three performers each have their strengths: Okpokwasili in singing, Kaye in movement, and Torn in his delivery of the lines. Together, the three meld into a cohesive ensemble when called for, in a way similar to America itself. Individuality remains yet the performers are working as a unit.

Democracy in America offers an accurate portrait of America—comprised of the good, the bad, and the plain embarrassing. As an experiment in form and construction, it works. The decision to let the collected purchases speak for themselves, instead of attempting to manipulate a meaning from them, is an admirable one, as it creates an authentic image of what de Tocqueville described.

Beer Bad

Drunken City takes place during one of those capital-letter “Nights That Changed Everyone’s Lives,” an evening where every character comes to a crossroads and makes a major realization about his or her life. Writer Adam Bock (who recently scored a smash with Manhattan Theatre Club’s The Receptionist) merges Sex and the City-style storytelling with Shakespearean structure to portray a sextet looking for love in both the right and wrong places. His result feels a tad recycled. Marnie (Cassie Beck), Linda (Sue Jean Kim) and Melissa (Maria Dizzia) are three best friends from Long Island who have become engaged at the same time. Melissa, though, has gone on to dump her philandering boyfriend, and envies Marnie, whose fiancée, we learn, is another ex of Melissa’s.

Marnie, meanwhile, has second thoughts of her own about her engagement. Unfortunately, these fears rear their ugly head during her bachelorette party at a downtown Manhattan bar, where Marnie meets Frank (Mike Colter) and sparks fly. Frank is out for a simple night on the town with his friend Eddie (Barrett Foa). It turns out that both also hail from the same Long Island town. When Melissa calls on friend Bob (Alfredo Narcisco) to come into the city and bail Marnie out, the coincidences continue as Bob and Eddie proceed to fall for each other as well.

These coincidences seem both convenient and trite, ridding City of much interest: how much can an audience invest in events that seem utterly foreordained? Director Trip Cullman does a yeoman’s job keeping the show energized and occasionally frenzied, allowing us to view the play’s events through the prism of someone who might have thrown back a few glasses of champagne themself. One major decision, though, to have the stage dramatically tilt to the left or right, hurtling its actors to the floor, during moments of great realization, feels too gimmicky and juvenile (David Korins designed the set).

One also cannot help but feel that Bock spoon-feeds his ideas out to the audience. The notion that City’s characters are getting married for the sake of being married is hardly a new one, and if Bock was unable to plumb any deeper into the topic, he could have arrived at a more artful way of saying so than giving his actors monologues that tell us these things on their own.

The six actors do a lot of heavy lifting. Colter and Foa are both charming, and Kim demonstrates a nimble sense of humor. Narcisco in particular impresses; his character appears late, and yet immediately blends in with the ensemble. He justifies every scene to show someone who is both macho and sensitive, and whose pride has caused him to spend more nights alone than he cares to let on.

It is the two lead women that dominate the action, and both Beck and Dizzia create women that are complex and real, even if City never feels the same way. Beck reminds me of many women her age I have seen. Marnie seems ditzy, but only to mask an insecurity that has caused her to be calculating in life. Dizzia (seen in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice) similarly nails such insecurity in Melissa, though her character manifests such in a more manipulative way, straddling the line between pain and humor perfectly.

But Bock has nowhere to go with the more serious elements of City, so he chooses to eschew them in favor of happy endings and pairings (in fact, the one character who doesn’t end up with a mate is left to skulk off, without any sense of the closure all the other characters get to enjoy). As a result, one leaves City feeling the same lack of balance that his actors do onstage.

Love Child

Rachel looks appalled from the moment she opens the door to Wanda’s cramped Louisiana trailer. She is appalled that the trailer is sweltering, appalled that Wanda’s idea of lunch is a slice of American cheese on white bread, but most of all, appalled that the precious baby she hopes to one day call her daughter is in this trailer park woman’s stomach. The stage is set for Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance, a gripping and heartrending drama that examines the rollercoaster experience of an open adoption and the emotional havoc it wreaks on everyone involved.

There is a lot of dancing in this story. Wanda (Suzie Cho) and her husband, Al (James Michael Farrell) dance around the issue that after four kids they are too poor to support a fifth. Film studio executives Rachel (Maria Riboli) and Richard (John Stanisci) dance around the uncomfortable fact that Al is taking advantage of their situation, especially when he tries to pass off a new Corvette as one of the pre-natal expenses they are obligated to pay.

But at the heart of the story is a dance between two women: Wanda and Rachel, one who always wanted a baby and the other who has more than she ever wanted. Rachel is jittery and appropriately horrified by the conditions her future baby is subjected to.

Riboli is fully believable as a seemingly together woman quickly unraveling in a world far outside her comfort zone. When Wanda offers Rachel a seat at her kitchen table, she slides into it with all the apprehension of easing into an electric chair, fingering her necklace, fanning her face, and wondering whether to cross or uncross her arms.

Wanda’s guard is also up. She has a gracious smile but sharp, distrusting eyes, as if daring Rachel to judge her. Having already raised four children it is awkward for her to have someone looking at the bulge in her belly as if it were a puppy in a window she can’t wait to take home.

Cho and Riboli have a natural chemistry with each other. They fill up the stage with their personalities, drawing you into their world. Watching them, you can feel the scorching sun, taste the cheap, bland food and imagine the neighbor’s wild dogs, which can be heard yapping in the distance.

The Baby Dance is not a sappy, sweet story about the love of a baby changing a person’s life. There are no neat little packages and no promise of a happy ending, even if everything does go as planned. Al taints the entire situation by continuing to use the baby as a bargaining chip and insinuating that he won’t sign away his parental rights until he gets everything he asks for. Richard isn’t sure he wants a baby from such a poor, uneducated family, and at times considers calling the whole thing off just to get these people out of his life.

Anderson’s The Baby Dance is a vivid slice of life, one that shows the complexity of the feelings involved in both adopting a baby and giving one up. The day Wanda goes into labor, harsh words are exchanged, tempers fly, and a happy occasion is marred by everyone’s personal feelings for each other. Somewhere in this mess is an innocent baby coming into a world full of hardship and conflict.

The richer couple spends most of the play being appalled at the poorer one, the poorer couple spends their time distrusting and acting cold towards the richer one, but by the production’s emotionally draining end everyone steps back to look at the situation honestly, and with new eyes. They seem to realize only after it is all over that the one person they are really each appalled with is themself.

One on One Cruelty

It has its way of sucking you in. Starts off in a café, fun little chat with a friend over coffee, why not? Then out into the streets of the East Village, a spring stroll to get hooked up with some good times. But then it starts getting gradually heavier, more uncomfortable, with nasty revelations about your friend coming one after the next, until you’re not sure whether to walk away when she looks you in the eye and asks if you understand her. But the search for heroin continues. Street Limbo Blues suggests that it doesn’t take a particular type of person to become a junkie. Or, as director Taurie Kinoshita writes in the program, “Addiction is a sickness, not a choice.” It all sounds a bit cliché. We’ve been through this lesson in high school, we’ve seen it on TV and read it in the newspapers. We get it. But when has this issue ever made a demand for you to face it, and the way it is treated in this country? The Hawaiian based Cruel Theatre forces its audience to confront this major societal question, through use of some of the ideas of the twentieth century’s greatest theatrical minds.

In Artaudian fashion, the interaction between the performers and their audience is direct. Your best friend (if you’re as lucky as I was you’ll get Brazilian beauty Juju - a lively, convincing performance by Nancy Valeria Rendal) walks in to find you in Café Pick Me Up on Ave. A. She speaks to you about herself, her problems, and then leads you out to find your fix for the night. On this depressing adventure you’ll meet a drug dealer or two and a crew of young junkies. You’ll cringe as your best friend uses her body to try and hook up some angel dust. But, ultimately, the tone of the evening is up to each spectator. Building on Augusto Boal’s concept of the Spect-actor, the actors are trained to play with whatever they get from their intimate audience. This way, each performance (the play lasts one hour and is performed several times every evening to one to three audience members at a time) is guaranteed to be different. Artaud’s disgust with theatre that is dead before the curtain even opens is relieved.

As may be appropriate for a play about drug addiction, it begins fun and quickly goes downhill. The politics of the piece remain unclear until after it is over, when the spect-actors are handed their program. If they are moved enough to read the director’s “Diatribe on the Drug War” then their political conception about it may be challenged. Otherwise, they are likely to leave with the same denial-based distaste for junkies with which they walked into the café. The strongest moment of my evening came on the subway on the way home, when I found out from the program that sixty-eight percent of all crimes committed in the US are drug-related. More than two-thirds of our corrupt privatized prison system thrives on an un-winnable war, one which Kinoshita believes could be fought much more successfully through legalization. Perhaps there is a wiser way to spend the enormous amounts of money that go from our pockets to the prison lords of this country.

The Cruel Theatre lives up to its name, and provides a difficult experience which is likely to sit in your stomach or dreams for some time after. In that sense, their exciting theatricality works to do what they set out to do, and there is much to be learned from their play with the under-used theatrical ideas of the company’s three main influences, Artaud, Boal and Grotowski. Perhaps, if the play itself didn't make you want to get out of there as soon as possible, the political message would have come across more clearly as well. Nonetheless, this is a type of theater that audiences will find hard to ignore, and most likely they will find themselves engaging in the questions the play raises.

Glass Half Empty

A subdued hipster vibe was in effect the evening I attended The Optimist, a new play by Jason Chimonides. The sound system piped in Radiohead, lots of people dressed in black seemed to know each other, and the show started a casual 15 minutes late. And, because the play’s action takes place in a motel room, each audience member received a souvenir Optimist room key card along with the program. Unfortunately, this ultimately silly play made me want to check out early. Directed by Jace Alexander, best known as the director of FX’s Rescue Me, The Optimist is about a pair of “well-bred and intelligent” (from the press release) 20-something fraternal twin brothers, Noel and Declan. The brothers hole up for a weekend in an Econo Lodge in Tallahassee to attend both the funeral of a friend who died in some sort of riding accident, and the wedding of their widower father to the woman with whom he carried on a 30-year adulterous affair. The volatile Noel blames his father for his mother’s death, accusing him of letting her drive when he knew she suffered from post-stroke seizures. On top of all this, Noel’s ex-girlfriend, Nicole, whom he still secretly loves, is in town for the funeral.

Unfortunately, Matt Burns as Noel and Chris Thorn as Declan thoroughly overact their parts, much like extreme, self-obsessed personalities might on, oh, perhaps a cable TV show. Caitlin FitzGerald tries hard as Nicole, but she can’t compete with the oozing macho bluster of both brothers. Her character is ineffectual and easily drowned out for most of the play.

The looming ceremonies stir up a whole lot of emo in the excitable Noel, who constantly stomps around the room, often in his underwear. He angrily glues his father’s secret love letters onto a giant wooden middle finger he plans to hold up at the wedding. He yanks mattresses and box springs from the beds to create a makeshift boxing ring in the room; he wants to fight his father (a former vet and Notre Dame linebacker nicknamed “Hambone”) to relieve his considerable Oedipal angst. Noel blasts Nirvana on his CD player, screams “arrgggghhh” a lot, and bounces off walls. And, just in case the audience can’t fully grasp the psychic pain Noel is in, Chimonides/Alexander make him attempt to eat the share of his friend’s ashes that her family gives to him. This scene proved to be, unintentionally, the funniest of the play. Noel tortures himself relentlessly; the play would have been more appropriately titled The Masochist.

Declan observes all of this with amusement, yet he is equally annoying. Declan is the terminally preppy kid in your dorm who takes one too many bong hits and rambles on about Schopenhauer. While smarmy and self-important, deep down, all Declan really wants to do is drink and get laid. Chris Thorn so consciously acts the role that, like Noel, Declan is more of a caricature than a believable character.

Chimonides unfortunately forgoes a potential powder keg of a conflict by failing to introduce us to the 66 year-old Hambone, by far the most interesting personality in the play, but Hambone is just a sub-plot, after all. In the second act, it becomes apparent that The Optimist is really about the relationship between Noel and Nicole. Nicole explains why she has moved to Nebraska and why she plans to wed a demolitions expert with no soul. She calls Noel an “optimist” because he expects everything to behave in accordance with his laws and truly feels whatever life happens to toss his way—unlike the demolitions expert, come to think of it. Nicole begins to fall for Noel all over again. But, alas, Noel has, during the course of this brief weekend, learned a heck of a lot about himself and so throws a monkey wrench in Nicole’s sudden plans. Oh, and something else pretty major, but not really, happens. That’s about it.

On the positive side, Travis McHale’s set perfectly replicates a double room at an Econo Lodge, right down to the air vents near the ceiling, the exit signs on the back of the door, and even the stucco on the hallway walls.

Mr. Chimonides’ play has one or two clever moments, particularly when Declan ruminates on mortality, but these don’t come frequently enough to save this sometimes-embarrassing play. Just call me a realist.

Madness!

Early in Denis Woychuk’s new rock musical, Attorney for the Damned , a narrator poses the question: “What makes a hero?” The musical, a warped, nonsensical journey through the criminal justice system, doesn’t really try to deal with this question. So, instead, let’s contemplate another question: What makes a good musical? Is it a good book with catchy songs? A heavy moral issue? Spectacle? It’s not an easy question to answer, but I think it’s fair to say that Attorney misses the mark. Even with lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, the show fails to sustain audience interest, as well as its own credibility. Founded on a weak premise (an innocent attorney who had wanted to help "widows, orphans, and the poor," but now defends "perps who like to fuck, then fight”), the production completely devolves into a bizarre farce that, more bizarrely, tries to make a statement.

The plot, though wandering and incoherent, initially focuses on Laura Skyhorse (Allison Johnson), a young defense attorney who tries to assuage her guilty conscience by defending the mentally ill. Skyhorse is part Native American, but it seems that the sole purpose for this background detail is to allow her counterpart, the bitter Assistant District Attorney Vancussy (Juliana Smith), to make racist comments. The ADA’s racism is just one of several jabs Woychuk throws at lawyers. As with the show’s other criticisms, his complaints about the profession are often silly one-liners (e.g.: “where do vampires learn to suck blood? Law school”). Though some of these lines are humorous, their appeal is overshadowed by the show’s meaningless preoccupation with sex.

Woychuk is a former lawyer himself, who for some years defended the criminally insane. The job left him with guilt and inspired much self-analysis, some of which has taken public form: a book, articles, this musical. Yet, no matter how exciting and emotional his cases were, this presentation is a ridiculous romp that rouses confusion, if it rouses anything at all.

The show’s lyrics are among its faults, but though the actors are required to sing such lines as "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven/But my wife turned out to be/Not in love with me,” their performances are the most entertaining parts of the show. In the lead role, Johnson sings with a sweet conviction that matches her character, while Denny Blake and Pat Mattingly, playing the mentally ill, bring a soulful, raspy sound to their numbers. As Vancussy, Smith offers an appropriate contrast—she opts for the pop style and brash belting that go with her pumps.

Even with the cast’s solid performances, the production drags. Part of the problem is the frequently awkward positioning of the actors. They spend so much time serenading the audience that there is no chemistry between them; their relationships are unbelievable and uninteresting. Perhaps, if more scenes featured shared numbers, rather than solos, this would be less of an issue.

As the production drags, the plot plows ahead with a series of extremely unlikely romances. First, the headstrong prosecutor, who happens to be a nymphomaniac, desperately solicits the sexual attention of a psychologist, Dr. Marcus Blake (a peculiarly jubilant Ray Fisher). Another scene features Dr. Blake and Skyhorse testing the doctor’s mind control device in a perverse way. The show ends with the dizzyingly incomprehensible: sex between the ingénue attorney and her recently freed client, a criminally insane man who had cut off his former girlfriend’s finger, in a deserted subway tunnel where the two are hiding from another criminally insane man who is hunting them down and trying to kill them.

At this point, are you thinking about heroes? Are you thinking about the plight of the insane, or the errors of the “justice” system? Or, to put it in the words of Vancussy, who directly asked the audience, “are you still with us?” The delayed and weak response from the audience answered her question perfectly. And how could one be expected to be interested in a show that can hardly stay on one topic long enough to offer insight, that opts for cheesy, glib, and offensive jokes over wit, that somehow, no matter how unlikely, finds sex when its looking for heroes?

For a man who has taken some time to reflect on his past, Woychuk’s musical is full of odd choices: why has he created a show that treats its characters cruelly, and is so explicitly sexual, yet confounded? If the writer and his director want the audience to ponder questions of heroism, to be entertained, or even just to “stay with them,” creating unsympathetic characters and dull songs isn’t the way. Perhaps Attorney for the Damned is not as unredeemable as its characters, but it would take quite a bit of rehab to make things work.

Potty Talk

If all performance toys with the boundaries of public and private space, Ladies & Gents, currently playing at (yes) the public bathrooms by the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, does so with a unique impudence. It’s site specific theater at its cheekiest. Publicity materials bill the Irish play, an Edinburgh Fringe Festival hit, as a “live noir thriller” and indeed, moments of the production are truly frightening. It’s hard to imagine the play’s chills sweeping over its audiences were they seated in a cozy proscenium or black box. In a lesser production, the public-bathrooms-as-theatrical-stage concept would be a cute gimmick. In Ladies & Gents , written and directed by Paul Walker, it is crucial to the performance.

Ladies & Gents is a production ripe with ambiguities. The location feels at once dirty and dank (the cavernous public toilets are dimly lit by Sinead McKenna’s effectively earie light design) yet grandiosely gorgeous (the Bethesda Fountain, not to mention Central Park, rivals any Broadway house in terms of presentational beauty). A period piece (it’s based on a 1957 Dublin tabloid scandal), the play is fortuitously prescient (the scandal centers on tawdry politicians caught with prostitutes). Such dichotomies smoothly support the plot, which deals with double standards of class and gender in a society whose sharp social stratification leads to twin dangers of repressed desire and remorseless fury.

The disciplined ensemble masters naturalism necessary for a thriller that places actors literally a breath away from the audience. At the same time, they never sacrifice an otherworldliness appropriate both to the period of the piece and to the noir genre. The actors’ success is no small feat: the production requires them to run each scene six times over the course of a single evening.

Ladies & Gents embraces variables from the first moments of the production, when audience members are handed colored slips of paper. Black paper indicates beginning the performance in the men’s room; white paper the ladies’ room. After approximately twenty minutes, each scene concludes and audiences switch bathrooms in order to see the other scene. Both of the scenes raise questions which the subsequent scene answers. Still, the order in which audiences view the scenes inherently affects their experience of the production, going so far as to potentially alter how scary the thriller really is.

But the variables welcomed by the performance experiment don’t end with running order. To name a few: how does the seven o’clock performance, with the sun not yet set, differ from the nine o’clock, when the park is empty? How would rain affect the production? Snow? How might theatre-goers whose groups are split by the colored cards perceive the play differently than couples watching the play together? Is a men’s room filled predominantly with women different from a group made up of mostly men?

Although these issues will likely be explored many times over the course of the play’s two-week run, the performance space is small: only the actors will learn the answers first-hand. They will have earned the knowledge. Everyone else will have to be satisfied by a single performance. When that performance is a sharp, polished play staged in public bathroom, it’s hard not to be.

Let There Be Peace

No sex until the war is over. Such is the premise of Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata , translated by Drue Robinson Hagan and produced by the Gallery Players. Lysistrata gathers all the women of Greece together and convinces them to swear an oath that they will not sleep with their husbands until a truce is called to the Peloponnsian War, which had been going on for some twenty years at the time the comedy was written. A common issue with Aristophanes' plays is that his work is very specific to its own time; a lot of references and allusions in his text are lost on a modern audience. Ms. Hagan's translation does a fine job of contemporizing the script, adding a fun flair and rhyming couplets. Yet, one wonders if the ideas of Lysistrata work in our society. Lysistrata is boisterous and spirited. The play opens with all the women, led by Lysistrata (played by an energetic Meagan Prahl) singing a song in which they wish they were born in a more revolutionary and relevant time, in which they wish they were “punk rockers.” While the song does not relate to the plot of the play per se, it sets the stage for what turns out to be a very rambunctious evening. Sound effects are exaggerated: the chorus of older women dump buckets of water on the chorus of old men. The sound is that of a wave crashing against the shoreline; the water that actually emerges from the buckets is a sprinkling of paper confetti. The many fight scenes (choreographed by Maggie MacDonald) are accompanied by “bonks” and “boings” for punches and groin grabs. The women's oath to not have sex is an old school hip hop style call and response chant.

The set design consists of graffiti covered walls featuring lots of peace signs. The male chorus' costumes are grubby old man pajamas and thermals, the female chorus' costumes are brightly colored house dresses and bathrobes. The women's costumes are slinky, sexually suggestive dresses. Myrrhine, whose husband attempts to seduce her (with hilarious results), wears a blue dress so short that it could just be a shirt. Is this really a play that gives power to women or a play that simply gives men something to look at?

Furthermore, does Lysistrata speak to our time? In her director's note, Alexa Polmer states that the play is “one woman's quest to propel the powerless to end a twenty year old war. . .over two millenia later. . . we as a society are faced with a similar question regarding the current war.” While similarities exist - we are currently engaged a war that, at the moment, seems endless - it is unclear whether the translation's addition of contemporary references to the play works. The old men are called the “axis of evil” and references are made to a “homeland security.” Are such references too flip? Hagan has done a great job of making the play clear, and as Aristophanes himself made culture specific jokes, it should be all right for his translator to adapt the jokes to her own time.

Lysistrata is very entertaining, and as comedy should, educates while it entertains. The idea of women denying their husbands sex seems almost quaint in our society, yet the product is still funny. It also does raise the question, how does a country end a seemingly endless war? The play was read worldwide in 2003 as a protest to the impending Iraq war and is still relevant five years later, as that war plods on. With its radical suggestion for a way to end war, the play is important viewing for anyone wondering how we will get out of the war we're currently in.

Unadulterated Pleasure

The American Globe Theatre’s presentation of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is as fine a rendering of this gorgeous play as any I have seen. That’s no mean feat for a Shakespearean company that likely operates on a fraction of the budget of more established ones. Yet, now in its 19th season, the American Globe Theatre has managed to become Times Square’s longest running Off-Off Broadway theater. The Winter’s Tale is, above all, the story of one who regretfully makes catastrophic decisions, improbably receives a second chance, and then smartly runs with it. King Leontes of Sicilia, hosting for a long period his boyhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, mistakenly believes that his beloved queen, Hermione, and Polixenes are having an adulterous affair. The delusion sets in motion a chain of events that lead to the estrangement of Polixenes, the imprisonment of Hermione, the death of Leontes’ only son-heir, and the intended murder of his baby girl, Perdita, who Leontes erroneously believes to be the bastard daughter of Polixenes.

Against the better counsel of everyone in his court, Leontes forges ahead, destroys his life and nearly ruins his kingdom. Richard Fay shines as a chastened Leontes finally recognizing the error of his ways; he literally grovels in agony as Paulina, Hermione’s senior lady, rubs salt into his wounds. The powerful final scene tugs at the heart strings appropriately yet never descends into sappiness.

Director John Basil remains for the most part entirely true to the original text, slightly embellishing it for the better on occasion and introducing dances and songs in several scenes. As Leontes, the confident Fay utterly commands his lines: fearsome in one scene, bitter in the next, child-like and confused in another. His descriptions to his counsel, Camillo, of Hermione’s imagined transgressions are animated and comical; at one point he thrusts his nose at Camillo’s to illustrate adulterous behavior he claims to have witnessed. Yet, never do we doubt his tight rein over those who, as much as they suspect their king’s beliefs, must perform his insane bidding on pain of death.

Jim Parks’ period costuming is conservative but clever. He lends Leontes and his lords a bit of a hip flair while still placing them firmly within the time of the play. Kevin Lee Allen’s imaginative set design fully utilizes a modest space: two spiral stairways on either side of the stage lend symmetry and a bit of grandeur to the black box, while the vertical rise offers Leontes the ability to look down on his minions while making forceful, if misguided, pronouncements that will forever alter their lives. Alisa Claire’s choreography of peasant dances is charming, and Mark Hankla’s lighting, particularly when it isolates Leontes, is frequently inspired.

My quibbles with the direction are minor. Christina Shipp as the grown-up Perdita didn’t quite convey the inherent majesty that the natural born daughter of royalty is said to possess, and Paulina, played strongly by Diedra Da Silva, dipped momentarily into farce at a point of the play that demands restraint. Jefferson Slinkard’s employment of a feigned Mexican/Italian/something else accent when he, as a disguised Polixenes, confronts his disaffected son, Florizel, needs work. I detected a slight flagging of energy during the last quarter of the play which happily picked up by the final scenes.

Standouts among the cast are Fay as Leontes, Elizabeth Keefe as Hermione, whose trial speech elicits the pity her plight deserves, Geoffrey Barnes as the simple yet humorous son of a shepherd, and a remarkably agile and appropriately hammy Mat Sanders as the ne’er do well, Autolycus.

The best Shakespeare answers ambiguous questions occasionally posed by the text and Mr. Basil is unafraid to engage those questions. While prior familiarity with the play always helps, do not feel intimidated by unadulterated (pardon the pun) Shakespeare. You will get it, and the American Globe Theatre’s rendition of this great play will pleasantly surprise even the most bard shy. This is currently the best theater bargain in Times Square.

Galactic Battlestar

Are you anxiously awaiting the return of Battlestar Galactica? Do you consider Joss Whedon a personal hero? Do you ever find yourself wishing plays had more fight scenes, bigger guns, and killer montages? If so, drop your comic book/Guitar Hero controller/X-wing model and run over to Vampire Cowboys' latest production, Fight Girl Battle World. Actually, even if you're not into the sci-fi or fantasy scene – if you simply enjoy a good adventure with smart writing – Fight Girl is probably the most fun show you'll watch this year.

The play focuses on E-V (a sassy Melissa Paladino), a sort of futuristic gladiator on a planet called Battle World who believes she is the last human in the universe. That is, until she receives a surprise visit from General Dan'h (Temar Underwood), the former "Alliance" army leader responsible for annihilating nearly all of her species. Feeling a bit guilty about the genocide, Dan'h has decided to inform E-V that “there is another” (Star Wars references abound here) and wants to help her find the last human male to start procreating ASAP.

The "other" is Adon-Ra (Noshir Dalal), a mass-murderer who's slowly avenging the death of his species. With their names as a dead giveaway, the play cleverly uses Genesis as a springboard. Although I'm pretty sure that lasers, hamster-like aliens with German accents, and giant spaceships aren't included in the Bible, the theme runs throughout the play with a cute tie-in at the end.

Rounding out the gang that's hunting for the other half of humanity is Dan’h’s sexy – yet sexually mysterious – pilot, J'an Jah (Maureen Sebastian) and LC-4 (Paco Tolson), a sarcastic robot with a blue, Peter Brady-style mop. The entire team is delightful, with particularly hilarious turns from Underwood and Tolson.

In a funky pink wig that looks more club kid than space invader, Underwood has the appropriately exaggerated expressions of a comic book character. He also gives Dan'h an over-the-top unplaceable accent that's fantastically campy.

As LC-4, Tolson portrays the ‘bot like a dorky teenage version of Star Wars’s C-3PO. Always quick with a retort or a kazoo-like giggle, his LC-4 is an amusing blend of loveable and annoying.

As with most sci-fi stories, there has to be an omnipotent, generically-named government set out to destroy our heroes. In Fight Girl, this is the United Galactic Alliance. Its leader is literally a puppet monarch: created by puppeteer David Valentine, the Alliance's president looks and moves just like a Muppet (voiced by Jon Hoche). His underlings include Commander G'Bril (Andrea Marie Smith) and Mikah Monoch (a deliciously malicious Elena Chang).

Director Robert Ross Parker and playwright Qui Nguyen infuse every aspect of the show with the rock 'em, sock 'em action associated with comics. While we've seen countless films tackle the genre lately, Parker and Nguyen forego the pricey special effects of blockbusters with some amazingly creative choreography. Stunning scenes convey slow-motion chase sequences, zero gravity, and a particularly clever presentation of a shootout between three spaceships.

The set, developed by Nick Francone, serves as the perfect playground for the athletic ensemble. While one half of the stage contains the interior of a spaceship, the other side contains a sort of puppet theater box that covers the actors from the waist down, allowing for the choreography's many tricks.

Parker and Nguyen's commitment to comics is perfectly depicted in the final battle. In this scene, only two fighters are left to duke it out. To mimic multiple angles and frames at once, several different actors (all clad in the same costume and a glittery ninja mask) portray each character.

The show is indeed part homage to and part parody of sci-fi. Whether it's a training montage set to a Rocky tune or a groovy interpretation of “warp speed,” it never takes itself too seriously. However, beneath all the zaniness, Nguyen gives us a smart critique of our culture's obsession with violence. While satisfying our need to see fancy weaponry and some awesome take-downs, his universe reviles humanity for this very thing.

Kitsch! Nostalgia! & Cultural Imperialism!

The third annual New York Ukulele Festival is upon us. This year, it brings with it a brand new musical about a ragtag band of ukulele players who save the world from a fascist dystopia run by an all-powerful pharmaceutical company. Upon reading this, some of you may have already grabbed your credit cards and datebooks while others may be making a mental note to stay out of the East Village for a couple of weeks. Both are understandable reactions. Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!, written by festival founder Uke Jackson, is an ostensibly activist, anti-corporate kitsch-fest set in a not-too-distant future. Sex is illegal. Monogamy is outlawed. Excessive sadness, happiness, anger, and lust are all medicated away by legislative mandate. Only the “corporate top ten” musical acts are allowed to perform and sell their music. Max (John Forkner), Liz (Lindsay Foreman), and Julie (Meg Cavanaugh) are three spirited young musicians who dream of cracking the top ten and bringing their smiley-faced music to the masses but have little hope of doing so until they meet Pete (Andrew Guilarte), a back-alley ruffian who may or may not have once been one of the top ten himself. Fame and fortune, twists and turns, and a revolution of sorts ensue.

The intentionally cornball, slapstick energy works for a while and the performers bring admirable enthusiasm and comic timing to a show that is clearly a lot of fun to perform. Terry Waldo’s music, performed by the actors and by two onstage musicians (Waldo on piano and John Gill on percussion) is enjoyable in its way, though fourteen songs in an eighty-minute show that’s also chock-full of plot and dialogue make for a rushed and superficial experience that doesn’t embody feel-good nostalgia so much as declare it. The result is rather like being surrounded by shouting, grinning theme-park performers who keep asking “Isn’t this fun?!? Huh?! Huh?!? Isn’t it?!?” without giving you a chance to respond.

Indeed, for a play that purports to deplore the dehumanized superficiality of contemporary culture, Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! presents the audience with a surprisingly one-note idea of what “good music” is. Just as the fictional citizenry of the Corporation are sedated into a chemical contentment, the audience for this show are asked to respond in an almost Pavlovian manner to music that signifies a tiki-bar vision of happy playfulness.

Ironically enough, the vision of authentic, heartfelt, handmade music presented by Jackson’s play relies on nostalgia for an aesthetic almost as artificial as 21st-century top-ten pop. The ukulele and the homegrown Hawaiian music it represented were repackaged, appropriated, and commodified by Tin Pan Alley songwriters and vaudeville producers who smelled “the next big thing.” Having recently annexed Hawaii, the United States quickly plasticized, commercialized, and capitalized on its culture, selling the world a vision of smiling, hip-swaying natives in coconut-shell bras who wanted nothing more than to serve as hotel lobby entertainment for vacationers from the mainland. Ukulele players from Ernest Kai, to Eddie Kamae, to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, to Jake Shimabukuro have shown again and again that their instrument of choice is capable of a great deal more.

It is telling that “ukulele” is mispronounced (from a Hawaiian perspective) throughout the play. Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! can all too easily be read as a celebration of and nostalgia for the willful ignorance of early-American imperialism. It may seem unfair to saddle a such a lighthearted show with that kind of baggage, but wistful evocations of simpler, happier times tend to rely on distortions of history and culture that carry their own dangers and pitfalls. I can’t help but wonder whether, 90 years from now, a sweet and silly show with energetic young performers will mourn for the simpler, happier music of Britney’s first CD.

Women in the Shadows

Despite Susan Sontag’s famous claim that camp sensibility is essentially apolitical because it is purely aesthetic, and that it is about a refusal to identify or engage with extreme emotions, the impulse behind camp has often, if not always, been a reaction to and sympathy with great pain. The politics of camp are a politics of persistent, if sometimes coded, visibility. It is that visibility, that celebration of the artificial, barely disguised codes of gender and sexual difference, which fueled the paradigm-shifting events at the Stonewall Tavern in 1969. Beebo Brinker Chronicles, adapted by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman from a series of novels by Ann Bannon, is not full-on camp, but there is a campiness in its stylization of emotion and its celebration of Bannon’s gloriously over-the-top hardboiled language. Unlike true camp, however, Beebo Brinker Chronicles lets the curtain slip a little so we can see the pain beneath the laughs.

Bannon’s books, first published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are feverish, emotionally charged pulp novels about lesbians struggling against heteronormativity to find sex, love, and a sense of self. These tales of butch and femme, of housewives and barflies, are infused with a sweaty-palmed urgency and sensual turn of phrase that drove them to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in a time when no one could claim that a flirtation with lesbianism was in any way “fashionable.”

The performances, slightly stylized and over-the-top, are remarkable. Three in particular stand out: Autumn Dornfield’s Beth is a frenzied bundle of repressed desire, struggling to maintain dignity as she discovers a new life in Greenwich Village. Beebo herself (Jennn Colella) is a hardened and cynical but still secretly romantic figure who is afraid anyone attracted to as masculine a woman as she must actually want a man. Jack (David Greenspan) is an aging, semi-closeted alcoholic with a taste for younger men. Each of these actors embraces the tone of the production, balancing stylization with passion, and irony with pathos. Greenspan in particular is in his element here. His peculiar, self-aware acting style always brings with it a distinct whiff of metatheatricality, and in Beebo Brinker Chronicles he shines with such wit and precision that the other actors, fine as they are, fade by comparison.

Rachel Hauck’s cleverly efficient set is constructed and painted to evoke the faded glory of fifties-era pulp fiction book covers. Nicole Pearce’s lights and Theresa Squire’s costumes further add to this atmosphere, not so much recreating a time as re-imagining a memory of a fiction. The affectionate nostalgia of the production design compliment nicely the work of the actors and the playwrights. Credit for the cohesion of these various elements must go to director Leigh Silverman.

In the play's opening scenes, the tone is all humor and irony, but as the action progresses it becomes clear that the humor is both a way to mask the great pain that drives the story and a reminder to the audience that things, in many ways, are different now. As recent headlines attest, there can still be good reasons to fear coming out as gay or lesbian, but for much of the audience of Beebo Brinker Chronicles, this show is a chance to celebrate how much has had to change in order for these tales to be rendered as a brightly lit object of nostalgia rather than a guilty, dog-eared pleasure hidden carefully under the mattress.

The Haunting

The faces may change, but the expressions stay the same. Watching Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Governor Spitzer’s press conferences this week, it’s become clear that sometimes forced stoicism and suppressed emotions are a more tragic sight than tears. In Ghosts, it’s the face of Mrs. Alving, the widow of a secretly immoral, but publicly respected man, and on Monday, it was the face of Silda Wall Spitzer as she listened to her husband address his connection to a prostitution ring. The obvious parallels between theater and current events point to the timelessness of Ibsen’s work. Regge Life, the director of Ghosts now at the Pearl Theater, highlights this trait in his notes to the play and presents his production in a simple, stripped down manner that allows the raw emotions and humanity of the 19th century text to shine through its age. Yes, people can actually say the word “syphilis” out loud now. Yes, women sometimes leave the jerks they’ve married (almost hourly if you watch Lifetime). Yet even though the work has lost its shock value, the words and behaviors of the characters still ring true.

As Mrs. Alving, Joanne Camp wears a sunken expression that shows slight hints of mourning and exhaustion. Mrs. Alving’s life of enduring her husband’s adultery, alcoholism, and hypocrisy has taken its toll. Though Camp speaks in a controlled deadpan that suggests fortitude, she’s almost always propping herself up – clutching the top of a chair while she stands, digging each fist into the couch as she sits – as if needing constant support to simply stay upright.

The trickle-down effects of scandal can be devastating. While Mrs. Alving has tried to manage her husband’s mistakes, they still threaten to wreck several lives after his death. The victims include their son, Osvald (John Behlmann), who has inherited insanity-inducing syphilis from his father, and the household’s maid, Regina (Keiana Richard), whose true parentage has been kept hidden from her.

The cast is at its finest when the characters seem as though they’re trying to behave contrary to their thoughts. Whether it’s Mrs. Alving trying to hold herself together as she comes apart or the gradual decay of Osvald’s sunny façade, the actors make the slightest glance or tone revealing.

As Ghosts heavily focuses on keeping up appearances, this approach is appropriate. Although Mrs. Alving hates her husband, she’s erecting an orphanage in his honor (though a hidden agenda accompanies this). For this task, she’s enlisted the help of Pastor Manders, who acts as an advisor on finances, legal matters, and anything else he deems in need of advising (which, it becomes evident, is everything). In one of his many didactic speeches, Pastor Manders says, “there are many occasions in life when one must rely upon the opinions of others.” He then asks, “How else would society continue?”

Manders (Tom Galantich) and Jakob Engstrand (TJ Edwards), the bum whom we initially believe to be Regina’s father, are likely the characters most concerned with social mores, but for different reasons. While the Pastor endlessly preaches the importance of public opinion, Engstrand endlessly exploits it.

As conservatism has become a favorite punching bag for the arts community, the Manders character is ripe for a few jabs. Galantich, however, delivers his indignant declarations with an earnestness that allows them to be amusing to a modern audience, while still being faithful to their historical context. Whether he’s in complete preacher mode, making a fiery case against “illicit relationships” or flabbergasted that Engstrand tricked him into putting falsehoods into the church register (he gives a good gasp or two), his pompous pastor is dead-on.

Although Manders is slow to respect or trust women, he allows Engstrand to manipulate him at every turn, with debilitating results. As Engstrand, Edwards speaks in monologues that, though full of stutters and deferential nods to the ground, are as slick as his greasy hair. He so deftly plays the hustler that he even seems a bit innocent at the play’s beginning. While Regina berates him for his foolishness, her anger doesn’t seem to match the harmless man we first meet. Only as the play progresses does Edwards allow an occasional smile or gleeful aside to show Engstrand’s true self.

When this production treats the theme of the past haunting the present as a subtle, lingering presence, the tension is discomforting and heartbreaking. The mood set by Camp’s slow actions and speech is enhanced by Harry Feiner’s gloomy set and Stephen Petrilli’s foggy lighting of the backdrop. As Mrs. Alving slowly reveals each of her husband’s sins, the fog around the rear stage even seems to spread.

In the second act, everyone’s ghosts come to the forefront. While the consequential raising of volume and tempers isn’t quite as chilling as the whispered secrets and deceitful interactions, the earlier scenes make the climax’s departure from politeness all the more powerful.

After Mrs. Alving and Osvald fiercely argue over a dramatic request, the play returns to its previous hushed tones. The final scene – a mother silently weeping at her son’s side – resonates far more loudly than any shout that came before. It is truly haunting.

Boom Town

From cowboy movies of the Wild West to space age science fiction novels, new frontiers have long provided effective backdrops for dramatic storytelling. Spanning the years 1982 to 1992, Jonathan Wallace's new play shapeshifter, directed by Glory Sims Bowen, sets a family drama against the frontier of computer software development. The dotcom boom, which spawned enormous change in everything from corporate culture to sense of community to conceptions of cool, ought to serve as an engagingly fraught environment in which to contemplate adaptation. Yet Wallace's text never succeeds in mining the implications of the bourgeoning field for all they are worth. Early in the production, one gets the feeling that were the Malloys a family of cabinetmakers or chemists, shapeshifter would be no more or less effective.

What might have been a fascinating study in the human metaphors implicit in software design instead becomes merely a standard family drama: a story of how a blandly dysfunctional childhood (dad died; mom went nuts) haunts the siblings throughout their adult lives. The Malloys are textbook cases of sibling pecking order. Liam (Shane Jerome), the eldest sibling, brims with business acumen and bitter entitlement while Deirdre (Shelley Virginia), the baby of the family, is a creative thinker and resolutely antiestablishment. Awkward middle child Aidan (V. Orion Delwaterman) finds himself torn between the two.

Happily, the production is remarkably well cast. As the grown siblings, Jerome, Virginia and Delwaterman convey subtle familial characteristics underneath each character's nicely developed idiosynchracies. Interestingly, the change the Malloys' experience over the years is most apparent as reflected in the women who love them. Deirdre's girlfriend Victoria (Yvonne Roen) and Liam's girlfriend Darcy (Jennifer Boehm) initially appear as two-dimensional comic clichés (an angry dyke and a ditzy actress, respectivly). Both Roen and Boehm demonstrate considerable skill in transforming their roles into genuinely compelling characters.

Set on a beach in Mantauk, the play requires a feeling of outdoorsy openness. For a play staged in the intimate TBG Arts Center Studio Theatre, that presents a challenge which scenic designer Stephanie Tucci meets admirably: the entire space is painted in seascape blues. Ryan Metzler's light design enhances the feeling of openess. Costumes, designed by David Thompson, help indicate both passage of time and character quirks. That Liam's socks continually match his preppy shirts is a particularly inspired touch.

The play is at its best during the dramatic outbursts and emotional meltdowns that serve as centerpieces to each of the play’s three acts. Bowen adeptly finds the precise comedy that keeps the scenes from dissolving into full-blown melodrama without sacrificing their intensity or dramatic import. The implication that this is a family only truly at home when at furious odds with itself, however, does not make up for the uneven hesitancy of the scenes that surround the explosions.

Frustratingly, the script often requires that multiple characters remain present even amidst intensely personal conflict between just two of them. Though that impropriety is occasionally acknowledged (“you have a wonderful sense of time and place,” scoffs Liam to Darcy at the end of Act II), Wallace ought to have tried simply granting his characters exits. Instead, the production has long periods in which actors are forced to stare politely into space on a stage far too intimate for their passivity to feel plausible.

Anyone interested in a new play’s depiction of American family drama should find in shapeshifter a pleasant evening at the theater. Those seeking a meditation on the implications of dotcom culture will have to keep waiting.

Boo

There are many different ways to scare people: a clap of thunder when you least expect it, flashing strobe lights that disorient your vision, or a single flickering bulb in a dimly lit room threatening to plunge you into darkness. The Exchange’s fright fest of short plays titled, The Scariest, utilizes all of these elements to make you jump and squirm uncomfortably in your seat. Bare bulbs hang from the ceiling; plastic drapings serve as walls and at the end of the long wooden stage stands an ominous red door.

Unfortunately, the goose bumps end here. For a series of pieces titled The Scariest, the stories themselves are not really scary. They are, however, sinister, creepy and not for the faint of heart.

In Gary Sunshine’s The Names of Foods, a man describes burning his infant daughter to death. Dan Dietz’s Lobster Boy asks us to imagine the horror of a young boy as he realizes that he has killed the one person in his life he loved the most. In Kristin Newbom’s Revelations, two children’s jackets are pulled from a box, both of them covered with blood and bullet holes.

These stories and images are certainly dark and horrific, but they tap more into the raw human suffering you hear on the news than the gleefully spine-tingling stories you tell around a campfire.

The idea to produce The Scariest came about when The Exchange commissioned several young playwrights to write short horror stories inspired by the work of classic writers Hans Christian Anderson, WW Jacobs, Nathanial Hawthorne and the Book Of Revelation. But you do not need to know these writers’ works to enjoy or understand the adaptations depicted here. In fact, you are better off not reading the originals since The Exchange’s writers put their own unique spins on the stories.

Nathanial Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, rewritten by Laura Schellhardt as The Apothecary’s Daughter, feels the most in line with the evening of creeps and chills that the title promises to serve. It has just the right mix of spine-tingling terror and campfire humor. The story revolves around a lonely apothecary’s daughter (Mandy Siegfried) whose constant exposure to poisonous plants has turned her own skin so toxic that she can kill a fly by blowing on it.

Another fun piece is Liz Duffy Adams' The Uses Of Fear, a sensory piece that toys with your mind. A disembodied voice delivers the entire monologue in the dark, describing a series of scenarios designed to get your paranoia flowing.

The final piece, Revelations, has a lackluster beginning - a writer (Siegfried) is writing about not being able to write - but later picks up as different characters start jumping into her body to help her out. The characters quickly take over, forcing the writer to pull a disturbing story out of the repressed section of her mind. Finally, a “Cleaner” (Joaquin Torres) has to be called in to get all the characters out, an act that leaves the writer feeling renewed and refreshed.

The Cleaner has a surprisingly comical entrance that is worth withholding for the visual delight it brings. A warm glow fills the room as he unites the characters and audience in song, giving everyone the first uplifting moment they have had all night. It feels as if this man is not only here for the characters, but for the viewer as well. After this evening of macabre works and distressing images you need someone to clear out the shadows and bring in a much needed ray of light.

Strangled In the Heat

No effort was spared in recreating the tropical feel of the Mexican coast in this current incarnation of Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana at T. Schreiber Studios. George Allison’s lush set – which includes a thatched hut, exotic plants and actual rainfall – steamily ushers the audience into a world of lonely people fighting for their psychic lives in the heat of summer at the dilapidated Costa Verde Hotel. As a whole, the cast fares well over the course of this lengthy but well-directed show, which, like many of Williams’ later plays, examines the polarity between man’s bestial desire and his spiritual longing.

The lusty widow Maxine Faulk (a feisty Janet Saia) tends to the Costa Verde and copes with her husband’s recent death with the help of rum-cocos and romps with her hard-bodied houseboys, Pedro and Pancho. Rapacious and practical, it is clear from the start of the play that Maxine is determined to survive.

Perched more precariously on the divide between earthly hunger and spiritual striving is clergyman-on-the-verge Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (the frenetic Derek Roche). An expelled minister turned travel guide, Shannon shows up at the hotel with a hijacked tour group of Baptist music teachers and a bus key that he refuses to surrender. Among the disgruntled traveling party is an irate church chaperone (Pat Patterson) -- prone to spitting out the word “defrocked” at the Reverend -- and her besotted underage prodigy (Alecia Medley,) whom Shannon has recently deflowered.

At any given lull, the Verde's lazy veranda is punctuated by a swarm of beefy and overbearing (remember the play is set in 1940) German tourists who heartily sing, slap and lift each other. Here as elsewhere, costume design by Karen Ann Ledger is precise and colorful.

Last to arrive are Nantucket spinster and gypsy portrait artist Hannah Jelkes (a touching Denise Fiore) and her distinguished grandfather, a 97-year old poet-on-demand (the lovely Peter Judd). This pair of creative hucksters, with a history of parlaying their artistic gifts into world travel on the pay-as-you-go plan, are at the end of their joint financial rope. With empty coffers, they have no choice but to appeal to the Widow Faulk to house them for the evening on credit.

In contrast to Maxine, the demure Hannah (whose exchanges with Shannon constitute much of the second act) would have Shannon return to his original spiritual leanings. At one point she tells him, “I respect a person that has had to howl and fight for his decency and bit of goodness much more than I respect the lucky ones that had theirs handed out to them at birth.” Fiore steals the show with her quiet understatement and deep sense of stillness, especially in this climatic scene.

Roche also does a soulful job throughout the play, especially in his more intense passages. Yet, while one feels Shannon’s spiritual thirst quite specifically in Roche's portrayal, one never quite feels that white-knuckling alcoholic thirst of the Black-Irish-on-the wagon that is intimated in the first act.

Also worth noting is Peter Aguero's fine and humorous performance as Jake Latta, and the plethora of tropical sounds that are provided by Chris Rummel.

For fans of Williams work, this lovingly presented version of The Night Of The Iguana is a must see.

Lives Adrift

There is something shamefully exhilarating about watching crazy women teeter at the edge of the deep end. Kristen Kosmas’s new play, Hello Failure , a clever and funny exploration of the ways people cope with loneliness and introspection, gives the audience this kind of detached perspective, allowing one to consider the way it feels looking in versus looking out. While watching others in pain is perversely cathartic, it is hardly comforting. In ways charming, witty, and sad, Hello Failure covers the vast and confusing mental landscapes of seven submariners’ wives. The play follows the women’s intertwining lives as they struggle with a profound existential loneliness that seized their lives with their husbands’ extended departures. They are all disturbingly quirky, and yet often seem like robots attempting to perform scripts that rarely work. At regular meetings the women struggle to define their lives so that they may live in the world with relative success. Sadly, their efforts mostly fail. The women share the stage and their problems throughout, but cannot reach self or joint understanding. Their disjointed experiences give the play its structure, which means that there is little plot development, but the dialogue and the actors are clever enough to sustain the show.

Echoing the disjointed emotional states of the characters, director Ken Rus Schmoll moves his actors around a stage divided to simultaneously present scenes in several locations: a cramped bathroom, a car, and a room in a museum. Through the seamless shifting between breakdowns and near-breakdowns, the audience gets to experience something like living inside a fractured mind. The show revolves around the chatter that occurs when people are waiting, but this idea is neither as simple nor as innocent as it might sound. Occasionally, one longs for something to happen, just as these women do. The fact that nothing changes reinforces the agony of waiting.

At first, the play’s overt means of presenting disjointed beauty can be frustrating (it’s as though the characters are too cognizant of their performances). However, the play takes a welcome turn when we leave indecipherable monologues for the dynamic meeting juxtaposed with Rebecca’s mad dialogue with a vibrant ghost (a masterfully absurd Matthew Maher). As Rebecca, Kosmas assumes the toughest role. Though Rebecca’s madness can seem contrived, her speeches are not without lovely and unique observations, made more touching by Kosmas’s childlike excitement.

That a play about suffering and emotional breakdowns is so funny is a testament to Kosmas’s fantastic and whimsical sense of humor. The playwright has a wonderful way of finding the humor in casual patterns of speech; idioms are distorted by their presence in this alternate reality and grammar is is playfully interrogated. The women occupy a quirky, but devastating other place defined by deceptively barbed chatter, tenuous social connections, and a handbook filled with Soviet-style advice on how to manage the “stages of deployment.”

Amidst such strange surroundings, it would be easy for an actor to lose touch with the audience. Delightfully, all of the actors inhabit their characters with a level of naturalness that is engaging and perfectly in tune with the tone of Kosmas’s script. Indeed, the actors are so well in tune with each other that they can recite the same monologue simultaneously. When Rebecca and Kate (played with aggressive jubilance by Joan Jubett) share the stage and a speech, their different approaches to the same script demonstrate their subjective, unique pains, despite the seemingly obvious similarities between their experiences.

In some moments, the cleverness of the script is distracting, and the show is self-conscious to the point of philosophical detachment. However, the concluding speech, a joint monologue performed in unison by the entire cast and directed at the audience, is a self-conscious, but bold and effective way to tie together some of the previously scattered messages about anguish. Kosmas uses each character’s specific plight to address the feelings of disconnectedness that plague modern life, and unites them at the end to attribute the problem to self-obsession. The final scene suggests that the most healing shift could be away from the self, which might be the only way to ignore troublesome thoughts about how one “fits into the scheme of things.”

Hello Failure initially seems like it will be an absurd fantasy: Rebecca writes a letter to a dead man, a submarine inventor named Horace Hunley, who later makes a magical (and hilarious) appearance in her bathroom. But as much as these women dream, as much as they try to take part in alternate impossible worlds, they are, pitifully, in a world where men cannot fly and submarines sink, where the house does not fall apart even as you do. In such a world, the question arises, how does one cope? Could the answer be so simple and so devastating as one cannot?

U.S. on the March

George Santayana declared, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That may explain why the revival of this 1973 piece of documentary theater, originally written in response to the Vietnam War, comes as a shock. Although most people may know that the United States took possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, almost no one remembers that after the treaty with Spain, from 1899 to 1902, the United States put down a Filipino independence movement with tactics that were as brutal as anything the Taliban thought up. Among the many astonishing parallels with more recent U.S. interventions is the use of “the water cure” to get information from suspected insurgents. Playwrights Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler took their title from an editorial in The Nation in 1900, a year after United States annexed the former territories of Spain and an election year in which imperialism was hotly debated. In the article, the periodical catalogued the U.S. depredations: “Liberty crushed to earth by the land of liberty...broken promises...trenches full of Filipino dead...smoking heaps where once were happy villages...desolate fields, ruined industries...starving women and children.” Year One covers the run-up to the Spanish-American War and its grisly aftermath, and the characters include some of the most famous Americans of the time.

Drawn from correspondence, speeches, debates, and official documents, the play features a vast array of characters, including generals, political bosses, party leaders, observers, and two Irish stereotypes, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Hennessey, who bring a bit of comic relief while also representing the attitudes of the common man. Among the Imperialists were President William McKinley, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, and patrician Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of the Massachusetts dynasty (“Hooray for dear old Boston/The home of the bean and the cod./Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots/And the Cabots speak only to God”), who was at loggerheads with his senior senator, George Frisbie Hoar, leader of the Anti-Imperialists.

The Anti-Imperialists included ex-Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, who offered President McKinley $20 million to buy the Philippines so he could free the citizens. (Only Twain and Carnegie appear in the play.) Unusually, it was the older generation of former abolitionists who battled to keep the country true to its ideals, while the younger generation, epitomized by Roosevelt, were itching for expansion.

The debate touched on all aspects of American life in unexpected ways, as when eye-patched "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, a Senator from South Carolina, admonishes Lodge and his cohorts: “We inherited our race problem. But you are going out in search of yours. ... Let me ask you then, if the Filipinos are not fit for self-government, how dared you put the southern states into the hands of Negroes, as being fit not only to govern themselves, but also to govern white men?”

The production by Alex Roe employs 11 actors in 43 named roles, including three women, although none of the decision-makers of the period were female. But at two and a half hours, and even with two intermissions and a fascinating subject, the production is taxing. Part of it is the amount of information presented, but some of the actors also spoke haltingly, as if still mastering their characters. Perhaps as they become more comfortable with the huge parts the pace will pick up.

Still, there was confident and sharp work from J.M. McDonough in all his roles, including Carnegie and Tillman; Michael Hardart as the young, irascible, determined Roosevelt; and David Patrick Ford as minor characters and as an impressive singer of the national anthem. Roe utilized the small black box space well. A balcony served as platform for the politicians as well as a ship’s deck for Commodore Dewey (the master of gunboat diplomacy, who had already opened Japan and who sank the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila), and flags and music added visual interest.

A host of moments links the play to our own time, from the descriptions of the burnings and starvation inflicted on the Philippines, to the startling debates between the self-righteous imperialists led by a bull-headed Republican President, to the official reassurances that “The boys will be home by Christmas.” If it sometimes plays more as history lesson than drama, it still has a lot of juice.

Teen Disharmony

Teen angst weighs heavily on the characters in The Gay Barber's Apartment, Larry Traiger's high school soap opera receiving a shoestring production from Half Assiduity Arts.

Disaffected youth have been a staple of plays since Wedekind, who supplied the original for Broadway’s current hit Spring Awakening, which also has oppressed, aimless youth caught in the throes of romance. Traiger’s play is bleaker than the Tony-winner, mixing the anomie-ridden types from This Is Our Youth with hopeless romantic relationships. The protagonists here, the handsome Henry (Alex Hurt, who also directed) and the nebbishy Jonas (Joseph Aniska, who did the lighting), take drugs, and seem to have little prospect of finding their soulmates, if such females exist.

The macho Henry, who occasionally indulges in fight club antics, is obsessed with sexual pleasure rather than a loving relationship. Jonas, who is sleeping with a girl named Mary (Carolina Mesarina), chafes at shopping for prom clothes with her, endures a regimen of abstinence that she imposes, apparently because he doesn't share Mary's opinion of romantic movies, and even receives a pummeling at one point.

The guys gossip about who's sleeping with whom and bet on each other's worst instincts, but their entanglements seem like a tempest in a teapot. Yet Henry and Jonas exult at their success at arriving in the adult world and escaping high school, dominated by a fearsome Dean Hunt (they are presumably attending a private institution). The stern, officious older adult is reminiscent of teen comedies or Saturday morning shows like Saved by the Bell. But Jeff Pucillo, the only Equity member of the cast, brings confidence and polish to the vaguely silly role—in a contrast to the other performances. Hunt enters abruptly into the minds/memories of his former students as a larger-than-life tyrant who bellows at their transgressions. At one point Pucillo jumps through an open window onto a bed, and he descends in a parachute in the niftiest piece of Hurt’s generally ramshackle staging. (In the opening scene, for instance, Jonas is receiving a haircut from the title character and is wearing aviator sunglasses—what barber gives a haircut to someone wearing glasses? What person who cares about his grooming leaves glasses on during a haircut?)

The barber of the title, Venice (J. Stephen Brantley), provides a haven for the youths as well as drugs and a friendly ear, in contrast to the dean. Yet Traiger leaves undeveloped this odd relationship between a 45-year-old gay man and two straight teenagers. It’s apparently not exploitative, but one wonders how they met and why straight adolescents are so comfortable with an older gay man. Without some compelling explanation, the situation remains puzzling and unconvincing.

Unfortunately, on the only preview night, the production was clearly having severe technical problems that may have thrown off the cast. Occasional monologues were intended to be accompanied by lighting changes, signaled with a motion of the actors’ hands. If there was a lighting cue that worked all evening, it must have been an accident. Stretches of awkward silence took the air out of some scenes, and the time shifts among them were difficult to follow: scenes encompass high school as well as college. Still, Pucillo and Hurt managed to deliver solid work amid the chaos.

Chuck Pukanecz’s set was pretty effective for a budget that probably couldn’t buy a Happy Meal. The barber’s apartment didn’t look like that of a gay man; it would have seemed sparse to Mother Teresa. But Pukanecz managed to create a variety of playing areas on a cramped stage, including apartments, one with an adjoining room, and a park. The scene shifts were sometimes clumsy, but his invention was admirable (and a painted drop by “the artist currently known as Walter” suited the space well).

Traiger’s play has some interesting writing, especially a monologue about a Thanksgiving turkey, and the young, personable author himself takes tickets and offers drinks. Likable as he is, this play doesn’t offer much of a meal, let alone trimmings.

After the Storm

If crisis lends itself well to drama, it’s not hard to imagine the variety of plays that might come out of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, from an epic a la Angels in America, for example, that would follow a diverse group of individuals as they respond to the crisis, to a Titanic-style melodrama, perhaps, about a plucky Louisiana debutante and her tragic gang-leader lover. But just two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, with much of the devastated areas still in states of deep disrepair, we’re not yet ready for a sweeping epic. The disaster itself is still too close, the extent of its overreaching effects still too unknown. That uncertainty does not mean, of course, that contemporary playwrights can’t or shouldn’t create new works dealing with the horrors of the hurricane. Playwright Beau Willimon takes a smart approach to the task in his short new drama Lower Ninth, currently playing at the Flea Theater, by maintaining an extremely tight focus on three characters immediately following the storm.

Even the physical landscape of the play is small: Lower Ninth opens with Malcolm (James McDaniel) and E-Z (Gaius Charles) trapped on a rooftop, praying over a body wrapped in garbage bags, and awaiting rescue. Their shingled roof, by set designer Donyale Werle, provides enough levels to create interesting stage pictures without undermining the feeling of entrapment so fundamental to the piece.

E-Z and Malcolm wait out the heat on the roof, stranded with a body and a Bible, and spend much of the play contemplating each. They run through a series of expected tropes (“I’m happy you found God. But I wanna know when God is gonna find us”) that, while not exactly original or enlightening, carry the characters along on their quests for literal and spiritual salvation that make up the backbone of the play.

The actors, all accomplished film and television stars, fit right at home within the play’s focused scope, crafting natural characters with nuanced fears and desperations. Their ease with the material – and one another – allows for the welcome humor and surprising lightness that pervade much of the piece. McDaniel’s Malcolm evokes kind authority as a drug addict turned patriarch to Charles’ E-Z, a matter-of-fact teenager trying hard to act tough, though Charles never quite reaches the levels of anger that E-Z supposedly exudes. In his brief scene as Lowboy, Gbenga Akinnagbe imbues his character with a groundedness that appropriately resists the scene’s potential sentimentality.

Save for a few choice moments, director Daniel Goldstein brings out playfulness in the text. In doing so, he both isolates the play’s scenes of true horror and permits the characters to come across as endearingly sympathetic. In a drama like Lower Ninth, with a focus on an intimate group of characters literally struggling for survival, it’s important that we want, as an audience, to root for them. We do.

Some of the play’s most poignant moments occur not during the scenes themselves but in the interludes between them. Rather than traditional fades to black to distinguish between scenes, Lower Ninth scenes are divided by the actors arranging themselves into new positions beneath dimmed lights, underscored by a single trumpet. The music, composed by Aaron Meicht, lends the play an appropriate Creole feel while making what would otherwise be numerous transitions into their own complete moments. Goldstein does not shy away from holding such moments longer than might seem absolutely necessary, and the results are arrestingly evocative of the endless waiting the characters face. They have no relief from it, and the transitions keep the audience from experiencing that release either.

Audiences, of course, will be able to escape the world once the play ends. It might not leave them with much to talk about, but it will provide them likable characters to watch in an impossibly difficult situation for the brief seventy minutes of the play’s duration. What the future holds for the victims of the storm is, as for their real life counterparts, uncertain.