Lost in Time

Dark humor, detachment and fatalistic dialogue make for a trippy road trip to Pennsylvania in Matthew Freeman’s new play When is a Clock?, currently running at the Access Theater. Presented by Blue Coyote Theater Group, Freeman’s script renders played-out family dramas like divorce and adultery in a fresh, almost psychedelic form. After all-around wet noodle Gordon’s wife leaves him, his only clue to discern her whereabouts is a mysterious bookmark from Cornersville, PA. In fractured chronological order, we meet Gordon’s wife, son and co-workers, each of whom contributes to her leaving. When Gordon finally finds his wife and confronts the strange shaman she has shacked up with in Cornersville, he learns a baffling truth about the nature of their relationship.

Hardly a typical play, Freeman’s script is really a collection of monologues broken up by a few two-character scenes. What really works about the monologues is that most of them only make sense in hindsight, as we are often shown half of a conversation without knowing who is being addressed—only later are we shown the monologue in context. It is a simple trick, but an effective one that adds many layers to each performance of each repeated scene, especially when scenes we have watched a few times suddenly swerve or deviate. The language of the text balances poetic flourish with stark pragmatism very uniquely, and as a result the voice of When is a Clock? sounds like nothing else. That said, from the final confrontation on, the play’s cohesion gets a little unstuck, preventing audiences from clearly ascertaining exactly what has happened and, even more important, what it might mean.

Since Freeman’s talky prose vividly describes each environment, Director Kyle Ancowitz and the design team opts instead for high style, which clicks very well with the script. The projections of lonely small town roads, the upright bed that standing actors “lie” in, the overall rigid staging (and re-staging!) of the scenes — everything beefs up the atmosphere of disconnect. The characters move from one location to the next like chess pieces, moving according to some unknown set of rules, alternately addressing the audience or each other. At times they appear through illuminated fabric walls, adding a ghostly quality to their comings and goings.

It was easy to buy Gordon as a disillusioned husband, thanks to Tom Stagg's precise, subdued performance. His runaway wife Browyn, played by Tracey Gilbert, comes across as both sympathetic and irrational — roped into a strange belief system to fill the void left by her husband. The entire cast is pitch-perfect, with especially good performances from Matthey Trumbull as Gordon’s fish-hating boss and David Delgrosso as the overzealous, statistic-spouting cop investigating Browyn’s disappearance.

Despite a let-down ending, When is a Clock? skirts traditional structure and content aptly, leaving in its wake something wholly new. The tone lands somewhere between the films of Todd Solondz and the surreal paintings of Salvator Dali — a bizarre, but still mundane landscape of non-related non-entities, desperately seeking connection.

Crimes of the Heart and the Pen

When the mesmerizing Elena Abril Fiero casts her spell it is nearly impossible to escape entanglement, obsession, something akin to rapture. This near-religious experience is perfectly realized by the cast and artistic crew presenting Mary Fengar Gail’s The Judas Tree , a journey into madness. Gail’s world, in which the beautiful and the macabre live side by side, is stunningly rendered with superb acting, a grim chorus, and subtle lighting effects. It is easy to imagine oneself in Fiero’s sanctuary and to believe in the supreme power of myths, but it is equally easy to focus on the shifts in tone and to emerge from the trance. When her sacrificial practices are removed from the garden haven and scrutinized in a California courtroom, the abominable nature of her crimes is clear, her culpability, less so. Cloaked thickly in metaphor, the story of Dorothea Puente, a California serial killer who murdered nine elderly boarders in her home and buried them in her yard, becomes a mystical tale about the self-proclaimed priestess, Elena Fiero, who sacrifices victims to the Madreguera, a sort of earth goddess. The story is bewitching, but like much art that draws from “true” crime as its inspiration, it often comes dangerously close to fetishizing horror, and worshipping playfully at the cult of the serial killer.

The murders committed by Puente bear scant resemblance to the dramatized sacrifices executed by Fiero. There was nothing romantic about her actions—she killed and then forged her victims’ social security checks to live in luxury—and, unceremoniously, she sits in prison to this day.

Where Puente was obvious and cold, Fiero is complicated and fiery with passion. Gail has imbued the character with the sort of mad, fascinating messianic dreams and visions that bring allusions to Christ, Mayan ritual, and mother goddesses. As Fiero, Roseanne Medina is a vision: absolutely beautiful, she embodies the cunning and the fierceness of the character, while still making her alluring. With her charm and looks, Elena entraps lost souls with the intent of sacrificing them to the Madreguera. These sacrifices yield a heavenly garden of vibrant color. Notably, the set does not literally feature a garden; the flowers are figuratively represented by light that spreads across the floor in a pattern reminiscent of stained glass.

There are many moments in the show where rapturous devotion is faithfully and sympathetically created. It is impressive that Lorca Peress, as director, resists the urge to judge her characters, something that Gail believes society is too quick to do. That burden is placed on the audience, toward which the actors direct their testimony throughout Fiero’s trial. Gail uses the frame of a courtroom drama to launch into her more romantic, sensual story, told through the use of flashbacks and monologues. Representing the most bewitched character, Arturo Salvia, a former detective, performs these monologues in his tortured, transformed state: a tree. Specifically, he has changed into a Judas tree, signifying his betrayal of his former lover, Fiero.

The play’s structure and severe character turns require deft transitioning from the actors and the director. With rare exception, these changes occur gracefully. As Salvia, John Haggerty shifts wonderfully from the stereotypically skeptical detective to a breathlessly emotional tree. His physical morphing and the show’s choreography (by Jennifer Chin) bring to vivid life Gail’s poetic impulses. In an impressive sequence, Silva is digging up the garden, afraid that his worst fears will be realized. To demonstrate the task and its haunting nature, the Chorus Corpus Flora (five talented singers and dancers) acts as the earth being parted (a visual that corresponds with the themes of the play).

While the garden scenes are among the production’s finest moments, it is in the poetic mode that the play loses its footing. Some lines are striking in their spare, raw evocation of natural splendor, with the ability to find exceptional parallels between the world of plants and the world of men. Other times, these connections seem forced, the metaphors over-extended, the puns silly (e.g. “barking up the wrong tree” and “treedom”).

At times this production is alluring portrait of fanaticism, but its shortcomings highlight the impossibility of qualifying insanity, or trying to develop a metaphor to control it. While the show leaves it to the audience to judge, there is no way to understand a character such as Fiero, and it is left with a hauntingly empty feeling about her fate and a bleak sense of the world she leaves behind. Gail’s poetic and occasionally obsessive exploration of this character is compelling, but the perverse nature of this investigation and its presentation are left unexplored.

Reading Between the Lines

The most important advice I can impart to anyone considering attending the Elevator Repair Service’s (ERS’s) daring two-and-a-half hour reading-performance of The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) is to first read or re-read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or at least its first section, which is what this production comprises. Otherwise, you may feel the overwhelming urge to flee the theater during intermission and hit the bookstore for guidance. Those who have read the novel may remember just how baffling it was; I can recall flinging the book across my college dorm room in frustration. Faithful to the book, this Off-Broadway production jumbles events from 17 separate days over a 20-year span; even those familiar with the story may be unclear about what is happening at any given time. The best solution for this production is to simply give yourself over to the chaos.

The title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life...is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The literal “idiot” in the heavily symbolic The Sound and the Fury is the innocent Benjy Compson, a 33-year old (the age of Jesus at his death) mentally challenged man often referred to by the novel’s other characters as “deef and dumb.” Despite his challenges, he somehow remembers conversations verbatim, though time and events blur with dazzling frequency.

If you think the book was confounding, wait until you see this play. With the exception of cursory descriptions of the Compsons projected on the wall and a family chart in the program, ERS does little to help us decipher the action; indeed it willfully does all it can to confuse the audience even further. Twelve actors each play up to four different roles of the 27 in total, and actors wantonly switch genders and races. There are even two Benjys of different sexes (Susie Sokol-unfortunately sporting what appears to be a George Harrison wig from the ‘60s-and Aaron Landsman). As “scenes” morph into each other, actors pass a paperback of the novel to each other and narrate or read the “lines” of whomever they happen to be representing at the time.

The production magnifies the text and often takes creative license by inserting music, dance (sometimes irritatingly overdone) and other action where it doesn’t occur in the book. The effect is to re-imagine the section as might a particularly whimsical reader. With ERS reading between these lines, the sound and the fury come often. Bickering and dissension in the family often devolve into food fights, smacks and screaming, causing Benjy to inaudibly cry or lash out by throwing things.

David Zinn’s set design impeccably replicates the sitting room of a family with means but in decline, as such a room might have existed in turn of the century Mississippi — replete with period photographs, carpeting, furniture and even a vintage radio. Matt Tierney’s sound design brings this all to a boil with a sometimes ear-splitting cacophony of banjo music, hollering, stomping and general tumult, the amplification and blurring of which bring Benjy to a state of bewilderment and hysteria he cannot express. John Collins’ direction is crisp and the actors are almost flawlessly rehearsed and choreographed, moving seamlessly between scenes and among themselves.

The question remains, though: does ERS break down the barriers between play and novel? Yes and no. I can recommend this production only to literary buffs and those who might nevertheless wish to dabble in its often-excruciating experimentalism.

By boldly presenting the confusion that a reader might feel, combining it with Benjy’s obvious discomposure and highlighting it all with cacophonous sounds and character chaos, ERS succeeds in challenging the audience and embracing the disorganization of what even Faulkner himself characterized as a four-part failure of sorts. And, in presenting the Compsons even more vividly than the book does, the production succeeds in evoking humor that may not flow from the text but seems entirely natural and appropriate nonetheless.

Yet, this same chaos, with interchangeable characters faithfully uttering every single word of text, including phrases such as “Caddy said” or “Jason said” or “T.P said,” as is necessary to keep track of the story’s proceedings, ironically serves to remind the audience just why a novel is a novel and not a play.

Love on the Run

Like Brooklyn’s Gallery Players, the Astoria Performing Arts Center has found a niche in reviving recent Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Previous ventures have included solid productions of A New Brain and Proof, but their latest offering, an energetic revival of the short-lived 1997 musical Triumph of Love, proves that some shows that die in Manhattan are better off left buried on the island. A blithe and breezy adaptation of Marivaux’s 1732 comic adventure, Triumph of Love chronicles the efforts of the brazen Princess Leonide to woo the man she worships from afar. Disguised as a dapper gentleman, with her friend and accomplice Corine in tow, she conspires to penetrate the philosopher Hermocrates’ stately Greco-French garden, which is both sanctuary and prison to her beloved. But when the object of her affection turns out to be Agis, the rightful Prince of Sparta (and inconveniently plotting her own murder), Leonide must figure out how to reveal her affection without losing her heart or her head.

Sound confusing? James Magruder’s scatter-brained plot ties itself in knots that are infuriating rather than intriguing, and the uneven writing—which pairs the elevated rhythms of Shakespeare with the crass comedy of a bawdy commedia dell’arte revue—fails to create a beguiling (or even believable) world. Instead, like the characters, the audience is left running in virtual circles, chasing down any semblance of connection.

But, in defense of APAC, the central problem isn’t the direction (mostly efficient and well-paced) or the acting (which ranges from excellent to strained). Under the confident baton of Jeffrey Campos, the orchestra makes lovely music, Adam Coffia's period costumes are perfectly draped and dazzling, and Michael P. Kramer’s multi-level set is a sumptuous land of fountains and ivy-covered walls. No, the problem here is the show itself, which presents a spectacular hurdle—making palatable entertainment from mostly forgettable songs and an inconsequential story.

In fact, New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the original Broadway production a “flat-footed parade of raunchy double-entendres and double takes that give new meaning to the phrase ‘low comedy.’”

So why revive a show that was so derisively dismissed? It’s pure wishful thinking, and you have to give director Brian Swasey credit for rising to the task. His mad-cap direction is filled with spirit and sass, and he has assembled a cast who give the show their all and then some.

The winning Abby Baum fairly bursts with enthusiasm as the cagey Princess Leonide; her ebullience doesn’t create much dimension, but she sings prettily and gestures determinedly. As the object of her affection, Tripp Pettigrew doesn’t do much besides pace and sputter, but he valiantly strives to match Baum’s vivaciousness.

After arriving in the garden, Corine (Ashley Speigel) joins forces with a jester, Harlequin (Philip Deyesso), and the gardener, Dimas (Justin Birdsong), to try to help Leonide accomplish her goal. Charged with unearthing comedy from the most vulgar and banal of sources, the trio find some humor in the playful vaudevillian romp “Henchmen Are Forgotten.” But Speigel and Deyesso all too often fall into fits of mugging that distract from the other action on stage, falling into the comedy trap of trying much too hard. The always excellent Birdsong is reduced to resurrecting laughs (which he does) from such sexual innuendo-prone words as “tuber.”

The more serious characters fare better. Rational siblings Hermocrates (Richard Rice Alan) and Hesione (Erika Amato) are both seduced by Leonide’s charms—Hermocrates knows Leonide is a woman; Hesione is convinced she is a man. Alan finds some refreshing levity in his sensual awakening, but Amato is hands-down the star of this production. It helps that she has the best song, the heartbreaking ballad “Serenity,” but she articulates every inch of her tightly laced character so persuasively that hers is the fate you lament at the end of the production. Bewitched and bullied by the scheming Leonide, Hesione serves as the emotional anchor in this overwhelmingly silly story. In fact, Amato’s elegant presence and velvety voice are the best reasons to revisit this show.

Ironically, Betty Buckley’s performance as the tortured Hesione was one of the very few praised elements (and the only Tony Award-nomination) in the original Triumph of Love. Jeffrey Stock (music) and Susan Birkenhead (lyrics) not only gave her the sweet “Serenity,” but also the opening (sung) lines of the show. An announcement that beautiful and commanding will certainly grab an audience’s attention long enough to entice them into taking the journey—it seems that it pays to be the sole voice of reason in a land of nonsense.

Tune In

Boys serenade girls on the sidewalk and girls are charmed, rather than alarmed. The handsomest man in the room will approach the strangest girl on the wall and admire her for being different. A skeptical young woman is won over by the offer of taking a ride in a surrey with fringe on top. This is not a world you live in everyday, which makes it all the more appealing to live in for the moment - a special, fleeting moment - which is the feeling, Rogers & Hammerstein’s musical revue, Grand Night For Singing conveys from its onset. Being in the audience for this play is like watching a comedy with people who laugh right before the punch line of every joke. Three familiar notes could inspire a rippling of gasps. Couples would elbow each other whispering, “here it comes,” just as a singer proceeded into a well known chorus. A Grand Night For Singing had the audience’s full attention from the moment it opened, with a spotlight shining down on Michael Harren, the musical director and pianist.

Director David Fuller creates an evening of nostalgia and enchantment with a bit of modern sass thrown in. The revue features some classic Rogers & Hammerstein songs such as, Shall We Dance, and Oh, What A Beautiful Morning and some lesser known gems that audiences may not have heard before, but will likely find themselves humming every day until they surrender to the need to hear them again. The collection of songs are performed by five talented singers: three women, Kerry Conte, Jessica Greeley and Judith Jarosz, and two men, Mishi Schueller and David Tillistrand.

There are thirty-six songs altogether, some silly, comedic numbers, others somber romantic ballads. The tunes are arranged in a nicely thematic order. A song from the musical, Flower Drum Song about two men telling their girlfriends, Don’t Marry Me, slips effortlessly into a spirited version of South Pacific’s catchy song, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair, a zesty little number about a girl emotionally detaching herself from a man who has rattled her confidence.

In an interesting director’s choice, all three female singers team up for I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair, giving this old classic a delightful, modern feel. In the past, the song has been performed by one woman – the one that was hurt by the man - with a chorus of female voices echoing her sentiments in the background. But when the song is performed by three women in harmony there is more power behind the words. The three female singers blend into one, strong confident voice. The song is no longer about a single woman’s journey to self realization, it is about three feisty girlfriends getting together to commiserate and say, “who needs him?”

Each song tells its own little story and each little story makes you want to see the larger one it has been plucked from. How does the married man who takes one last enjoyable spin with his tap dancing partners adjust to his new life as a husband? Does the boy ever get together with the girl that he is too afraid to take out for a French fried potato and a T-bone steak? Does the troubled young lover ever learn exactly how one solves a problem like Maria?

A Broadway musical in a small Off Off Broadway space offers a rare treat - great songs, great performances and an affordable price. The only thing missing is the decadent scenery with the large mechanical props that rotate on and off the stage. But the five-actor ensemble of A Grand Night For Singing proves, that with beautiful voices, celebrated music and some charming, upbeat acting - who needs all the rest?

Rock the Cradle

In the “Special Thanks” section to Piper Mckenzie’s rich new production of Babylon, Babylon, writer/director Jeff Lewonczyk thanks (among others) Robert Altman, The Blue Man Group, Herodotus and the writers of the Old Testament. Never before has a piece of information in a playbill so succinctly summarized the content of the show on stage, because Lewonczyk’s opulent Mesopotamian happening, currently running at the Brick Theater, synthesizes the best aspects of those four influences with notable ease. The transformed Brick Theater simulates the ancient Temple of Ishtar in Babylon, where about a dozen devoted female worshippers have come to pay their respects to the goddess of fertility and war – hopefully before the invading Persian army breaches the city walls and makes slaves of all Babylonians. But Ishtar worship isn’t really like any other kind of worship. The ritual involves a female waiting for a male suitor to approach and offer a coin. Then the pair retreat to the “Holy Ground,” where they pay their respects to the fertility aspect of Ishtar’s personality in a quite appropriate manner. Never mind that many of these women make reference to being married; in these different times Ishtar worship seems to trump all other forms of romantic communion.

Lewonczyk’s play occurs all around the audience in real time. As Babylon, Babylon’s 33 cast members mill about, we shift focus between their various conversations. While unique personal reasons have brought these women and men to the Temple of Ishtar on this historic occasion, each story provides subtle distinctions on the themes of sexuality, death and destiny in the ancient world. The High Priestess of the Temple agrees to hide her disguised cousin, the fearful Prince of Babylon, in the Temple until the war is over. Another girl is desperate for her little sister to lose her virginity in the Temple, so it will not be taken by an invading Persian rapist. One female devotee of Ishtar comes back to “worship” several times during the play, very eager please either her goddess or herself. Midway through we meet Enheduana, a recently reincarnated “Seeker of Vengeance” with a grudge against Ishtar and her Temple. Her arrival and actions eventually resolve the play, dragging everything into complete, brutal entropy.

In writing, the piece sounds like very heavy material, but Lewonczyk and his team have created a sort of party atmosphere. For the most part the material plays with dark humor and humanity, tempered occasionally with ominous strains of ancient myths retold or hints of Babylon’s bloody prospects peaking through the Temple door. Often there is music, chanting and reserved dancing when the cast imparts one of the many ancient myths, like Ishtar’s descent into the underworld and my favorite, her battle with warrior-king Gilgamesh. While the lighting and scenic design were both a little sparse for my taste, Julianna Kroboth’s stunning costumes and the overall attitude of the piece created a persuasive atmosphere. Fight director Qui Nguyen’s brawl at the end deserves much respect, simply for the amount of bodies and moving parts involved.

No one in the massive cast stands out as distractingly hammy or bad. While I won’t run down the roll call, there was generally an impressive naturalism at work in the acting. These characters aren’t historical caricatures; they are simply people – desperate, devoted or just seeking distraction. As the High Priestess and circus ringleader, Hope Cartelli displays much aptness to both seduce and devastate. Fred Backus brings a particularly enjoyable jerkiness to Timgiratee, a jilting lover. Lewonczyk himself plays Logios the narrator with much charm. And as I said before, Adam Swiderski and Aaron Baker’s cheesy, super-heroic take on Gilgamesh and Enkidu is most entertaining.

Swiderski, in fact, plays an important triple role in the proceedings. As Gilgamesh, he represents the tragic mythological hero of the old style; as Zuuthusu the doomed old man, Swiderski represents the helplessness and weakness of the Babylonians' present predicament; and as Tom Kazanski, a modern day American soldier stationed in Iraq (just 50 kilometers from the ruins of Babylon), Lewonczyk uses Swiderski to make the final assessment of the region’s destiny. The inclusion of the time-lost (or hallucinating, whatever) soldier could have been an aggravating attempt to shoehorn modern politics into the piece. In Lewonczyk’s hands, though, it is merely a reserved observation: why has there always been war in “The Cradle of Civilization?”

The chatty, flashy, legendary, holy party that is Babylon, Babylon might not answer that question, but it sure has a lot of fun asking it.

Dancing With Wolves

In Chinese Opera there is no scenery other than a table and chair. Stories are told through movement and pantomime. When a new character enters for the first time, it is customary for them to introduce themselves through a poem, and, in the end, everyone recites a valuable lesson. Director and actress Kuang-Yu Fong delivers this disclaimer before Little Red Riding Hood: The Chinese Opera begins. She also tells us that the play will feature a troupe of Beijing and Kun Opera performers who will sing in their native Mandarin but speak in English they only just learned for this show. After delivering this speech, Fong disappears backstage and returns as Little Red.

Little Red Riding Hood: The Chinese Opera, produced by Chinese Theatre Works, re-invents a traditional Western fairy tale in a refreshingly untraditional manner. It features the visual beauty of Chinese Opera with a stunning arrangement of acrobatics and conventional Chinese dance techniques. The Hunter (Hui Zhang) is a martial-arts hero, the Wolf (Zijun Mo) a swift and agile predator and Little Red (Fong), a sweet-faced, sword-wielding warrior.

The fight choreography is fast-paced and dazzling to watch, especially in the theater’s small, intimate space, which is just wide enough to accommodate the actor’s extensive range of movement. Though the floor is made of flat black boards, both Mo and Zhang use it to launch themselves into flips and jumps that reach amazing heights. Zhang manages to twirl several times in the air before landing in a threatening battle stance, his sword poised in an arc above his head.

Wolf is a menacing creature with wide, scowling eyes and a pale white face streaked with thick black stripes. There is a glob of red that starts from his lips and spreads down his chin, giving the impression that he has forgotten to wipe his mouth after his last meal. Upon hearing that Wolf is stalking the roads, Hunter, who has always been afraid of wolves, realizes that now is the time to conquer his fear.

In the meantime, Wolf has set his hungry eyes on Little Red, who skips innocently along the path to her Grandmother’s (Ying Zhang) house. Her Mother (Fanying Meng) has dressed her in a long red cape with flower trim and equipped her with a red-tasseled sword for protection. Referring to Little Red as his “juicy dumpling” Wolf pretends to be a lost and loyal dog to win the girl’s trust. He tricks her into leaving the road to pick flowers, hoping to find an opportunity to eat her in the weeds.

Unfortunately for Wolf, Little Red gives new meaning to the term “fast food.” Every time he is about to pounce on her crouching figure, she springs to her feet in excitement, the tip of her sword accidentally grazing his throat. Wolf decides it will be easier to catch this active young girl unawares at her Grandmother’s house.

With Grandma in peril, Little Red walking naively into a trap, the Hunter prowling the vicinity with his sword, and Wolf bursting in to announce, “I just drop by for dinner,” the scene is set for a climatic confrontation. Mo and Zhang are so dynamic in their own moments that it is easy to imagine the level of spectacular action we will see when their paths cross for this final fight. Both performers deliver on the high expectation.

By the play's end, Hunter learns to conquer his fear, Wolf learns not to eat little girls who are handy with swords, Grandmother learns that it is always good to have a broomstick handy, and Little Red advises us that “A sword means nothing if a person cannot hear a lie from a truth,” wisely adding, “Or tell the difference between a dog and a wolf.”

Poe as Comedian

Watching The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether , a dramatic adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, I was struck by the desire to find the original and read it alone, to hide in a corner and allow sinister thoughts to take root in my imagination, consume my mind like ivy, and terrify me. Poe’s skill for evoking suspense, tension, and paranoia is undeniable, and his best works render internal terror palpably on the page. Unfortunately, these talents are not as strongly employed in this theatrical version of The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether . In the story, a foolish Visitor is received for a dinner at an insane asylum in the French countryside. Though the hints of pending doom are anything but subtle, the Visitor persists in his curiosity, leading him to uncover the obvious (and therefore less terrifying) truth about his hosts. That this revelation produces a lackluster climax is one of the major problems with a dramatic retelling.

However, as with Poe’s story, the production begins with promise: foreboding organ music, simultaneously piercing and deep, introduces the show. As credits roll, shadow puppets float into view, and eventually two figures emerge to tell the tale. The puppets, beautifully and intricately designed by Candice Burridge (also the show’s director), are a throwback to a performance mode popular in the mid to late 1800s (Poe’s era).

The shadow puppetry is endearing and funny, but conveys none of the dread that builds so gradually and surreptitiously in Poe’s stories. Still, with the perkily spooky music, written by John Vomit, the light style is enjoyable. The music echoes the creations of Danny Elfman, composer for many of Tim Burton’s films. Indeed, much of the shadow puppetry is reminiscent of Burton’s stop-animation films.

Though it does not add suspense, the shadow theater is the most effective element of the production. The mode allows for the narrative to take center stage, and Poe’s cleverly wandering sentences, packed with the glorious adjectives and exclamations of 19th-century American literature (Capital! Cavalier!), can be focused on. However, when the screen is turned off and the actors appear onstage (a scene change that uses a cleverly v-shaped set designed by Mark Marcante), the charm of the shadow theater dissolves.

As the Visitor, Dan Drogynous is physically as lovely a rendering of Poe’s sensibilities as the puppets: his face is perfectly pinched and sallow, his hair as wilted as a dying flower. However, he struggles to master the tone and pace of Poe’s language, which prevents the audience from becoming enraptured by the tale of the asylum. The Visitor’s curiosity leads him to investigate the asylum’s famous “soothing method,” according to which the keepers of the asylum never contradict the patients, but reinforce their delusions as though real.

Upon entering the asylum, the Visitor meets a diverse group of eccentrics, led by Monsier Maillard. In the role, Zen Masley booms impressively, projecting through a mop of a mustache. He leads a group of perversely strange characters, which include three puppets. The cast is jubilant and frenzied in its madness, but the reason for using puppets is unclear. Certainly it is easier to make a puppet look like a frog or a teapot than it is a man, but there is greater humor in the perception of the madman that he is a teapot, and in the sane man’s perception that he should not contradict him.

For all of his probing, the Visitor is rewarded with a grand show. Costume designer Susan Lasanta Gittens has vividly imagined the gaudy accoutrements described by Poe—beads, feathers, and bad makeup abound, and the characters prance about like children that have raided mother's vanity. Amidst this prancing, the cast trades the spotlight in a series of monologues that would alarm any sane visitor and prompt a hasty retreat. Yet the visitor stays, hypnotized by Maillard. However, screams from within the asylum disrupt the dinner, and arouse the Visitor from his stupor. He again asks questions and uncovers the frightening revelation about Maillard and his cohorts.

In the case of this show, the conceits of storytelling do not necessarily translate well to the stage. It is deflating that the narrator is the character who is ever seeking, and being sought by, the terrible and the bizarre. Since he is telling the story in the past tense, we know that whatever harm or misfortune befell him was not so horrible. With this knowledge, the story becomes, rather than horrific, a satire of treatments for psychosis in the 1800s, as well as a commentary upon social understanding of psychoses. The problem is that Poe’s talents as a comedian and satirist are not as brilliant as his ability to haunt, and this production does little to make the story more compelling.

Nothing Ever Happens on Mars

For years Sci-Fi writers like H. G. Wells and Kim Stanley Robinson have looked to the red planet and tried to dream what it holds in store for the human race. Will its tripod-like inhabitants destroy us? Or will we terraform the barren world to suit our needs and live there? MIT professor Jay Scheib, who conceived PS 122's stimulating, but sometimes incoherent new production Untitled Mars (this title may change), seems to think that folks on Mars will suffer from the same ambition, lust and madness that the rest of us do on Earth. With help from the Budapest theater company Pont Muhely, Scheib transports his chaotic vision of a not-too-distant Martian habitat to the stage. Or is it, as the dialogue sometimes suggests, merely a simulation of a Martian habitat in Utah? This experience, perhaps more akin to performance art than a typical play, is often very vague. There are usually two or three things going on at once and obviously we're not meant to lap up every detail. Regardless, Scheib's characters have obviously adapted negatively to their confined existence away from society. We are immersed in the station psychiatrist's fight to keep her clinic open, a go-getting plumber's real estate venture in the Olympis Mons region, and a repairwoman's struggle to keep hold of her sanity.

Scheib and his team of scenic, light, video and sound designers have woven a persuasive tapestry out of the show's technical elements, a superb effort that is more than worth the price of admission. Here is not a theatrical Mars, nor a minimal one. Scheib's portrait is one of efficiency, borrowing heavily from contemporary technology. At one end of the stage there is a white, cylindrical module that is maybe 15 feet in diameter. This functions as a sort of central command for everything and there is a long window all the way around, so that the audience can see the actors inside. On the other end of the stage is an all white, but otherwise typical conference room. Between the two structures there is a long table and a plethora of projection surfaces. There are video cameras positioned liberally about the stage and at any given moment, one or two of them are projecting onto one of the screens. Amid constant radio chatter and otherworldly sound effects, the cast – sometimes in full spacesuits – moves in and out of these two habitats. Often, the audience must rely on monitors to see what is going on or to try to make out garbled dialogue, which adds to the overall sense of absorption into the piece.

When this sensory cacophony quiets down and only a couple of characters are featured, audience members hungry for rich characterization might find that the human parts of Untitled Mars don't quite measure up to its stylistic sum. Despite a sincere effort from the cast, they are only ciphers carrying out rote motions. None of the characters, like the plumber or the repairwoman, are particularly empathetic; and indeed, this might be the point. The play is clearly about a big idea – the good and bad elements of human nature exported to a new world – but the mode of the piece doesn’t allow us to easily wrangle any cathartic resolution out of its complex texture. Like the members of this habitat’s crew, perhaps this is only an experiment and we aren’t supposed to be able to read any emotions through these pixilated video images. Maybe Scheib is channeling some bleak premonition of man’s future, where the devices around us have choked out our genuine emotions. Or am I giving him too much credit?

Either way, several plot points are lost in the play's detached opaqueness. One crew member transforms into a green Martian, complete with an alligator tail, but we don't know if he is actually transforming, if he is aping a Martian as part of the training simulation or if his transformation is just a metaphorical echo of an earlier remark that claims humans will actually have to, in a manner of speaking, "become" Martians to survive the planet's harsh terrain. Narrative elusiveness and aloofness can sometimes be valuable tools in theater, lending a piece great applicability – but in the case of Untitled Mars, I always felt like I was missing something. If the play had been overtly performance art, with no illusion of a narrative structure or characterization, the story incongruities and lack of character depth wouldn’t have mattered. But since there are characters and there is a definite story being told, the absence of these elements felt detrimental.

This cast is asked to do some pretty strange things — simulate sex both on stage and on camera, dress in space suits and, in some cases, just show up to pre-record a quick video snippet. No matter the nature of the role, every cast member handles the material with unimpeachable naturalism. Natalie Thomas' silent performance as the temporally-confused Mannie largely consists of dance, but she exudes an appropriate and endearing childlike quality. Helio the lower-class Martian is also quite funny in the hands of a deadpan Karl Allen.

Purposely or not, Untitled Mars lacks some heart, but more than makes up for it with its conceptual and technical surefootedness. As they say, sometimes the story being told is not as important as how it is told. In this case it is told with considerable elegance and ingenuity, creating a glum, if unfocused, facsimile of man's destiny on the red planet.

Grin and Bear It

Paul Rudnick tosses out jokes like confetti in The New Century, an umbrella title for four one-acts that combine two old works with two new ones. The first three plays have main characters who are prototypes for gay heroes: They are resilient in the face of daunting adversity and determined to prevail over their circumstances while holding on to their humanity. In Pride and Joy a Long Island Jewish matron, Helene Nadler, recounts her relationship with her three children, whose sexual preferences are gay but still all over the map. "I am here to tell you, to prove to you, that I am the most accepting, the most tolerant, and the most loving mother of all time," she announces sternly, trying to make a virtue of her discomfort. Helene’s dealings with her offspring provide ample evidence of her claim. Her daughter is a lesbian mother; one of her sons is a male-to-female transsexual who is also lesbian ("Ronnie," she asks, "didn’t you take the long way round?"); and her second son is into leather and excretions.

Linda Lavin is brilliantly nuanced as the well-groomed Jewish mother, gradually losing the battle to maintain her composure and embrace the fringes of sexuality that her children inhabit. "So many people’s children, they hide everything," laments Helene, dropping her mask momentarily. "They live separate, secret lives. They’re like strangers. I love those children."

Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach is a revised version of a 1998 play that was also part of a bill at the Drama Dept. in 2001. (That version didn’t include Mr. Charles’s fantasy about showering in Vietnam with John McCain.) In Nicholas Martin’s sharply paced evening, Peter Bartlett, who played the role in both earlier productions, is yet again the nightly cable show host who was banned from New York City for being "too gay."

"What causes homosexuality?" a viewer wants to know. Mr. Charles responds, "I do. I am so deeply homosexual that, with just a glance, I can actually turn someone gay." Mr. Charles is accompanied by his dim "ward," the hunky Shane (Mike Doyle, a stranger to body fat), who appears in oddball getups—a military man, Robin from Batman, and totally naked, providing a visual aid to a hilarious history of gay theater. Rudnick’s quips for Mr. Charles are worthy of Oscar Wilde: "A gay woman is not simply Paul Bunyan with a cat." And, reminiscing about his life, "Oh, there have been men, and boys, and Wedgewood." But Mr. Charles also knows that effeminate men are a dying breed in a gym-obsessed world. "I am the last of my kind," he says with wistful stoicism. "I shall perish, like the dinosaur. Unless, of course, Steven Spielberg discovers some ancient DNA from Paul Lynde and makes more."

In the monologue Crafty, Barbara (Jane Houdyshell) is a cheery craftswoman who is consumed by her passion. "I intend to create a series of commemorative plaques, saluting the history of American crafts," she says with pride, and recounts the various media each plaque will display, from colored gravel to macaroni collage on Michelob beer bottles. But her mania is also a refuge from the death of her son Hank from AIDS. She balked at accepting his orientation and still speaks in euphemisms about him, with a middle American reticence about intensely personal revelations. Houdyshell makes that inner conflict deeply poignant.

In the last play, The New Century, Rudnick brings all his characters together for a feeble valedictory in a New York City hospital’s nursery area, where Helene is watching over her grandchild. It’s a contrived situation, but the characters have by then provided so much pleasure that it’s easy to accept the improbability.

However, Rudnick raises serious concerns about the world that the infants in this new century will inherit, and he seems to backpedal from the moral authority and humanism that make Mr. Charles, Helene, and Barbara so vibrant. Here, Shane takes center stage and espouses a hedonistic philosophy of shopping and dancing. The last image of the characters boogeying is a silly and weak conclusion to an otherwise deliciously funny evening.

Great Leaps

The word gymnastics tends to bring to mind images of terrycloth headbands, Reagan-era leotards, and Olympic medals. While it is a sport that requires a great amount of athleticism, there is also a performance aspect of gymnastics that is often overlooked in the pining for Olympic glory. Conceived in 1997 as a novel performance event, Aeros combines the athletic ability of gymnastics with the aesthetics of dance. The Aeros company is made up of members of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation. The pieces are choreographed and directed by Daniel Ezralow, David Parsons, and Moses Pendleton, each a well known name in the dance world. The resulting mixture is a highly enthralling and entertaining show that is designed for families and actually is appropriate for all ages. The opening dance, “Iconography,” has sixteen bodies lying on the stage in rows and columns of four. One body stands, walking up and down, back and forth through the aisles created by the prostrate bodies. The figures on the floor sit up, lie down, and turn to the side, all in perfect unison. They are accompanied by a color changing scrim and trance music. The first standing body joins the others in formation while another stands up and begins to walk. The piece explores the body as a form and a shape, rather than as part of a human being.

A few other pieces, “Dresses” and “Handstands” also depict the body as a form divorced from the person inside it. In “Dresses” two performers balance upside down, their white-tights-clad legs high in the air. They move their legs, but the legs no longer seem to be a part of a human. The illusion is busted when the two dancers flip over, revealing their heads and the rest of themselves. The reappearance of the human is a reminder of the ability and strength of the performers.

The movements are at times dizzying. “Handstands” features blacklit bodies wearing white unitards walking across stage on their hands or bent over backwards. They are sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. In either case, the repetitive motion of glowing white heads and footless bodies moving across space is hypnotizing. “Stretch” is similar: pairs of gymnasts perform cartwheels across stage in unison, over and over. The effect was such that at one point I was convinced there was a mirror stretched across the stage, and had to blink my eyes to get rid of the illusion.

As Aeros is a family-oriented show, there were several pieces which appealed more to children than to adults. “Table” and “Mushrooms,” while still demonstrating athletic prowess, were comedic and very silly and elicited a lot of giggles from the younger audience members. The two works featured four men arguing, one at a table and the other over who would get a seat on two giant stools. The fights quickly turned into movements, with two men circling on the stools and two others chasing their legs. In “Table,” the four men leapt from the ground onto the tabletop as though it were no big deal. The spins and jumps dazzled the audience. Another piece, “Rope” featured the patterns made by the twirling glow of dark jump ropes. It was an interesting and unique-looking performance, but the rope twirling did not contain enough novelty for an entire piece.

Child-friendly entertainment is often mind-numbingly dumbed down or simplistic and, more often than not, material that adults would never see on their own. Aeros, like most family shows, is bright and colorful. However, Aeros offers enough intellectual and artistic stimulation for an adult to be entertained while at the same time not boring the kids.

Simon and Juliette

Upon entering the York Theatre, located inside Saint Peter’s Church, theatergoers will find a space that resembles a photo gallery as much as a church or a theater. Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project features photographs shot by child survivors of the Rwandan genocide. The exhibit provides contextualization for Sonja Linden’s play, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda, a fictional account of one such child. Produced by the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, the production opens to a young woman, silhouetted against a background bathed in bright yellow light, loudly and clearly describing the night her family was killed. From there, the play moves to a London refugee center which Simon, her writing teacher, describes as “industrial” and to her bleak hostel bedroom. Both settings, as conceived by light designer Tony Mulanix and set designer Rohit Kapoor, are made up of grays. With the guidance of Simon, Juliette spends the duration of the play learning to speak truth to horror, and, as she does, color is gradually reintroduced to her world.

“It’s the personal story that will make people really understand what went on,” explains Simon, as he urges Juliette to rewrite her historical examination of the genocide as a personal account. By exploring large scale human atrocities through a two-character play, Sonja, who based the play in part on her relationship with a young woman she met while working with Rwandan refugees, is clearly attempting to heed the advice she has her character say. Yet, despite the fully realized, decidedly entertaining performances delivered by both actors, there is not enough in the text to move either character beyond convenient archetype.

The production purports to educate audiences about the Rwandan genocide, but those atrocities take a backseat to the budding friendship between Simon and Juliette, which forms the heart of the story. That Juliette has survived a unique horror has little bearing on the familiar tale of a flawed but kindly mentor guiding a scarred protégé to regain her own voice. With some textual tweaking, Juliette could become a survivor of gang violence or child abuse, and the essence of the story would go unchanged. That may be director Elise Stone’s point – that underneath, we’re really all just the same – but the lack of specificity feels inappropriate and misguided.

Susan Heyward nails the role of Juliette with a spunky sense of self and a bravely upturned chin, while Joseph J. Menino lends Simon a bemused smile and heartfelt confidence in his new friend. Much of the sweet humor created by their relationship is of the cultural misunderstanding variety common to immigrant experiences (he thinks how impressed she must be by his car; she notes that it’s not as nice as her father’s). As they’re relationship grows, Simon becomes conscious of his own ignorance and takes it upon himself to learn about the genocide his pupil survived. Still, his newfound awareness of key dates in Rwandan history hardly constitutes “a lot” as Juliette comments near the end of the play. The problem is emblematic of the entire production; in its attempts to be universal, the production sacrifices a level of detail that might have made it genuinely enlightening.

At best, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document… will serve as a surprisingly upbeat hour and a half that celebrates survival while inspiring audiences to educate themselves further on global human rights atrocities. With cute humor and likable characters, it’s hard to think of another play about genocide as pleasant to watch as this one.

While most of the play focuses on Simon helping Juliette to find the words for her testimony, she helps him with his writing as well. He finds her story so inspirational that the poems he writes about her, we are told, are the first masterful pieces of writing he’s completed in years. It appears that Sonja was likewise touched by her experiences working with refugee populations; I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document… is the playwright’s version of her character’s poems. If she had a teacher like Simon urging her toward specificity, her writing might improve as much her characters’ does.

Uncensored

“I burn a candle in the window till dawn,” wrote a young Anna Akhmatova in 1912, "there’s no one at all I miss.” At twenty-two, the woman who would go on to become Russia’s cherished twentieth century poet had published her first book. As the century progressed, and her early acclaimed love poems gave way to musings on national terror, she would come to miss a great deal. Akhmatova led a life ripe with dramatic tensions that Rebecca Schull examines in her new play On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhmatova, an homage to the poet. Romantically linked to several prominent national figures, Akhmatova found her love life deeply affected by Russia’s tumultuous politics. Lenin executed her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumiliov, in 1921. Her third husband, art historian Nikolai Punin, died in a labor camp. She also saw her son repeatedly arrested and sent to the camps despite her tireless efforts to have him released, and many of her close friends and members of her literary circle were executed, imprisoned, or exiled, as their writing, like hers, became censored material.

The greatest accomplishment of On Naked Soil lies in its spot-on dramatic realization of the tone of Akhmatova’s poetry itself. Political and personal hardships make for dynamic art, yet Akhmatova’s short verses, with their simple syntax and strict meter, resist indulgent melodrama. Her work is astonishing for what the poet Joseph Brodsky called its “note of controlled terror” and it is precisely that note which On Naked Soil strikes so remarkably.

The three-character play features Schull in the title role, as it moves back and forth between the late 1930’s and the late 1960’s, and depicts Akhmatova in dialogue with her friends Nadezhda Mendelstam (Lenore Loveman) and Lydia Chukovskaya (Sue Cremin), a young writer who chronicled their meetings. Early scenes between Anna and Lydia come off a bit like convenient devices through which to relate the life story of the great poet; she has only to respond to the questions of her congenial protégé.

Later, these early exchanges are mimicked when Lydia comes to the apartment to memorize verse in secret as Anna relates bland stories of her childhood, lest anyone listen and become suspicious. The tense scene articulates the danger of merely writing down controversial words – and the power of Akmatova’s poetry – with a whisper rather than a scream. What sets Anna and Lydia’s exchanges apart from more formulaic writing about mentor relationships in times of crisis is how they allow audiences to become acquainted with Akhmatova: neither a proud prima donna nor humbled wise woman. In response to Lydia’s longing for a way to cope with a missing husband and endangered child, she tells her: “It’s very simple. I have no advice for you.” They drink a lot of tea and talk about the past. That’s in keeping with the spirit of Akhmatova’s poems, which favor description over prescription, and under the direction of Susan Einhorn, even exposition is fraught with a sense of imminent danger.

Given that, as a writer, Akhmatova rejected the symbolist movement, it’s appropriate that a play about her life depicts her through realism. Even when the characters speak in Akhmatova’s verse, they do so as realistically drawn characters reciting beautifully memorized poems, not characters using language as a form of dislocation. That contrasts to Schull’s performative recordings of Akmatova’s poetry that sometimes play over scene transitions; escape from the grey world of the play comes through its use of mixed media. Aaron Rhyne’s video projections include both photographic images of the characters’ real-life counterparts as wells as surreal footage of their memories. Portions of Akmatova’s texts are projected both over video images and directly onto the enormous storm clouds that form the backdrop of Ursula Belden’s scenic design.

At best, the projections and the play work in tandem to create a sense of both historical import and artistic truth, as in a rare moment of Anna alone onstage, collapsing into choked sobs. As she weeps, her writing is projected against the back wall; her private hysteria never overwhelms the steadfast nature of her writing. Rather than dramatize the personal turmoil that fueled the restrained power of her poetry, On Naked Soil uses mixed media to examine the fundamental tensions between the writer’s life and work.

Distilling a famous poet’s personal history and her poems, along with the course of 20th century Russian history, into a three character play is no small undertaking, and at times On Naked Soil is difficult to follow. Audiences would do well to look over the helpful program notes, which include a chronology of the play’s events. Yet, both newcomers to Akhmatova and longtime fans will likely come away from the production inspired by its source material – and eager to become more familiar with it.

Love, Leisure, and Philosophy

Waiting in line to get a cheeseburger, holding a cold beer in my hand, I smiled when the woman in front of me said “What a great idea. What a great concept.” I responded, “Yeah, I’m already having a better time than I do at most shows.” Indeed, my favorite moments of Charles Mee’s Fire Island, now playing at the 3LD Arts Center, came before a word of the playwright’s text had been uttered. Surrounded by enormous high-definition video of beautiful island landscapes, milling about the space or sitting on cushions and low-to-the-ground beach chairs next to coolers full of ice, soda, and beer, the audience members chatted and smiled and took in the atmosphere. This friendly, unstructured feeling persisted even once the performance had begun. The food truck left but the coolers of beer and soda remained. In between scenes actors and audience members alike dashed or stretched to grab a cold one. As enjoyable as all of this was, though, about half an hour into it I couldn’t help but wishing that the text itself provided comparable pleasures.

Fire Island is one of Mee’s meditative, conceptual works. A series of episodes—some loosely linked together, others not—finds hyper-articulate men and women of leisure flirting, arguing, having sex, and walking along the beach, all while expounding on and debating the nature(s) of love. This is well-worn ground for the playwright, and those familiar with his other work will recognize passages from more successful plays peppered throughout. Filia vs eros, the history of marriage, the aesthetics of soap operas, differences between the genders: these and other topics emerge as sites for mildly angsty musings as various couples wind their way through the space. Sometimes they stroll; sometimes they chase one another, playfully or otherwise. They shout, they whisper, they caress, they laugh. Through all of this, though, they never seem to be going anywhere. Mee conceives of his island paradise as a landscape outside of time, a place that enables long philosophical conversations about passions and preoccupations.

Some of the scenes play out on the enormous video screens, some occur live in the space. A few, intriguingly, occur both on video and live. The actors are not asked to reproduce their taped performances, but allow the words and emotions and gestures of the live scenes to overlap with and slide up against those they previously recorded. The actors are miked, but we are still able to hear where the voices are coming from when the scenes are played live and the actors are moving through the space. These moments raise a host of issues too academic to pursue here, but it is worth noting that theatre scholars and enthusiasts interested in ongoing debates about “presence” and “liveness” will find much food for thought.

The video projections are stunning and calming, successfully providing a sense of place and time that encourages the audience to sit back and soak in the experience of the production rather than engaging it in more conventional ways. A live band that combines classic rock with Tuvan throat-singing and a hostess who occasionally circulates through the space offering to pour wine for audience members add to the festive, laid-back atmosphere.

I am of a mixed mind about the text itself. It seems specious to complain that the musings and aphorisms about the nature of love often feel clichéd. Indeed, part of Mee’s ongoing project is to explore the fact that philosophers of antiquity can sound clichéd and soap operas profound, and that there may be a fractured and fragmented series of links between the most disparate of sources. To complain that we have heard these questions and thoughts from Mee before also seems beside the point.

Again: recycling, re-imaging, and re-making are precisely the foundation for his often celebrated work. The lack of palpable urgency or passion in conversations about love, sex, suicide, etc. struck me as strange, but it also struck me as at the core of the production: Mee’s Fire Island, as realized by director Kevin Cunningham and his team of technical wizards, is meant to provide a soothing backdrop for fraught conversations and thus allow some perspective on and distance from them.

As I have often enjoyed Mee’s plays, then, what was it that was bothering me about this one?

Another question may provide the answer. Watching the scenes unfold between various couples, I repeatedly asked myself “Who are these people?” Who are these people who have so much time to sit around talking about things they have clearly talked about before? Who are these people who take the breath-taking beauty of their island real estate for granted and not for luxury? Mee has not created characters to people his island; he has created vessels for his own leisurely musings. None of these figures is in any way aware of the privilege that allows them to spend so much time recycling their thoughts and longings. They have no responsibilities and their actions have no consequences. As such, their conflicts fall flat. These characters aren’t in crises or in the throes of passion; the only thing at stake here is whether they will find adequate comfort in one another and whether they will find words eloquent enough, clever enough, trenchant enough to pass the time.

Still, though, the cheeseburger was really good.

Dirty Roses

Most people like roses. Why, then, do so many get annoyed when someone tries to sell them one on the subway? Or on the street corner? Are these items any less genuine than those we might buy in a shop? Doesn’t the subway rose peddler deserve to attempt to earn his living? Perhaps it is the fact that many of these sellers are immigrants, people with no “right” to be here, that makes us avoid and scorn them. Robert Schneider’s one man show Dirt delves deep into the issues of immigration and racism, particularly how such things affect and penetrate those who are its victims. Sad, played earnestly by Christopher John Domig, is an Arab, not Kurd, as he stresses often, immigrant who was smitten with English from the moment he heard the word “Kodak” (as in the film). However, now in America, selling roses on the subway, Sad is disgusted with himself. He believes he has no right to live here, no right to sit on the park benches, and no right to dirty America’s public toilets. What holds Sad back, who is it that makes him believe he has no rights? It is society in general, but it is also he himself. He has absorbed the hatred he feels around and against him, making this hatred his own. It is made most clear in the way he refuses to give his family name and when he screams racial slurs and curses at his unseen roommate.

Sad does not embody the American ideal of the man who pulls himself up from his bootstraps, the man who ultimately triumphs out of great adversity. He’s been fully beaten down by the rules and attitudes of his new country. Despite how much his audience may want him to triumph, despite the hope he may still have, it is clear that the odds of him making it are slim, as he has become his own enemy.

Thematically and structurally, Dirt is a rough play to sit through. The play makes use of a lot of repetition. Sad tells the audience his name and that he is thirty several times, perhaps as a way of remembering who he is, perhaps as a way of fooling us. He shows a picture of his mother multiple times. Each time he shows the picture, more details emerge from the past, details he perhaps does not want us to know. Almost everything out of Sad’s mouth, even the repeated things, is contradicted at some later point. He also ends the play several times, each time saying he must go, blowing out the candle he has lit and moving toward the stage exit. Yet, several times, he returns to begin a new variation on the same theme. The fake endings are clever at first but become tiring after awhile, particularly when it becomes clear that Sad has nothing new or different to say.

Domig is an able, engaging performer. He sits in a chair center stage for much of the play but is able to maintain a high level of energy. It is when he is up and moving, however, that his earnestness and even a shred of hope become evident in his demeanor.

Ultimately, Dirt is an upsetting play. It is an hour and a half of filth and hatred, of watching a man overcome by the scorn and abuse of the world around him. An initial reaction to watching Sad may be “but I’m not like that. . .” until the realization comes that we are all implicit in the hatred, fear, and rejection of those who are not like us, particularly in a post 9/11 society, one currently at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Written over fifteen years ago, Dirt speaks more to our society today than ever before.

Saints and Sinners

Pain—psychological, physical, emotional—dominates Stephen Adly Guirgis’s wrenching new memory play, The Little Flower of East Orange, which examines in detail the love-hate relationship between a son and his mother. But most dominant in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s production for the Public is a performance from Ellen Burstyn so masterly and intense that it is often uncomfortable to watch. The hulking Michael Shannon as the son, Danny, narrates from prison. Shannon, with an unruly mop of brown hair and a frequent squint, has the weary, lived-in appearance of the drunk and drug addict that Danny is. He wants to tell us about his mother, Therese Marie O’Connor, named for the Catholic St. Theresa, known as “the Little Flower.” Therese (Burstyn) has been found at the bottom of a flight of steps in the Cloisters, her wheelchair turned over, and her memory apparently gone. She is in critical condition in a New York hospital, and orderlies and nurses, particularly one named Magnolia (Lisa Colón-Zayas), help keep her alive.

As Danny describes the slow process of discovering what has happened to his mother, we see in flashback scenes of her childhood, showing that Therese was brought up by a deaf father who was a brutal drunk, yet whom she adored.

As Therese recovers, she and Danny spend more time together, and old wounds are opened. Therese, like most mothers, is both nurturer and oppressor, probing into her son’s life with love and ineptitude, and devoted to her Irish Catholic faith. Inevitably and repeatedly they clash. Danny’s attempts to clean himself up at rehab clinics usually end abruptly after Therese pulls a stunt to get him back to her side. And her hope that he’ll reunite with his former girlfriend grates on him until he explodes. Their relationship is so minutely observed and truthful that it is anguishing to watch, and Burstyn, eyes often red and watery during their powerful scenes, conveys a welter of conflicting emotions.

The play's issues are essentially religious ones: devotion, grace, love, and charity. Does Therese’s father have the right to be forgiven for his actions, which caused her to be crippled for life? At what point does Therese’s unbounded forgiveness toward him distort the facts, and which becomes more important, the truth or a lie? And is her choice of forgiveness toward him the right one? Should she, as Danny insists, have sought therapy to face the truth as he sees it?

Guirgis’s portrait of the family relationships is very strong, as is his sense of the issues, but, although Hoffman gives the hospital an effective atmosphere of bustle and urgency, Guirgis’s attempts to introduce humor into them misfire badly. Ajay Naidu’s Dr. Shankar is used effectively to tweak bureaucracy (he has a caring side as well), but Shankar’s repeated mistaking of Magnolia’s name—calling her Mongolia—is a cheap joke. What doctor from India wouldn’t know that Mongolia is a country and think it’s someone’s name? It’s not like there’s a language barrier.

David Zayas’s foul-mouthed hospital orderly Espinosa also presents problems. He’s alternately bullying and kind, but Espinosa’s persistent vulgarity wouldn’t be tolerated in a real hospital for very long, at least not when he’s flinging it in front of the patients. Guirgis apparently thinks that it’s funny to have Espinosa abuse a man who is keeping a vigil over his dying mother, calling the clueless fellow puto, and he even goes so far as to set up the unwitting mark for a tasteless practical joke.

At other moments the writing is inspired: Danny’s self-sacrificing sister Justina (Elizabeth Canavan, at times implacably furious, at others crisply efficient) reports to Danny that their mother has disappeared in a hilarious sequence that combines speaking and stage direction: “Shreek!, shreek!, sob! sob! DANNY!/Shreek, shreek!, wail, wail! MOMMY GONE!” And frequently there are deftly comic lines in keeping with the characters. As Therese hammers Danny with questions, he says, “Let’s just, uh, move on to some other painful, debilitating subject now, if that’s okay.”

The bickering continues after Danny insists on bringing her home to care for her rather than put her in a nursing facility. Even then she’s difficult, as old people are. Ultimately, the play finds peace for Therese and, for Danny, a deeper understanding of his mother’s life. It’s possible, as the title suggests, that even the most flawed among us may attain grace and sainthood. Despite it missteps, Guirgis’s superbly acted play is a full meal for audiences seeking serious drama.

Captivating

Writing a rock musical that focuses on being kidnapped in a war-torn country is just about as daring as breaking into song at gunpoint. The creators of Hostage Song use an appealingly fresh approach. To counter the trembling pleas we see on television, they give the show's captives a voice that is both comic and a little rock n' roll, while presenting most of the action as role-playing and dreaming, rather than suffering. This leads to several touching and unexpectedly humorous moments. It's an impressive achievement based on concept alone. But the show doesn’t venture beyond the conceptual. Stale character development and hit-and-miss writing hold this production back, leaving generic stories and the shell of a good show where an inventive portrait could have been.

Emphasizing transcendence, the show applies a light tone to the dark situation. In the first scene, the captives – Jennifer (Hanna Cheek) and Jim (Paul Thureen) – are playing “I Spy” in their cell. They’re also blindfolded. They pass the time through games, memories, and imagining various scenarios. Clay McLeod Chapman, who wrote the spoken portions of the play, shows real skill here, offering convincing snippets of marriage, parenthood, and budding romance in very short sequences. A scene in which Jim imagines talking to his son (a wonderfully versatile Abe Goldfarb) about girls is funny, warm, and probably five minutes long.

However, give Chapman an extended timeframe and melodramatic flourishes rise up to quash the beautifully simple prose (the old adage of "show, don't tell" comes to mind). When Jennifer remarks how her dead translator's blood remains on her face, the description is grounded in the sensual: "His blood's become brittle. Crackles across my cheeks, my forehead. Whenever I open my mouth, I can feel it crumble along the lining of my lips." Yet, when she slips into talking about what it represents, the metaphorical commentary distances us from a moment that had been so powerfully immediate.

The overdramatic portions are awkward because most of the play relies on restrained emotions. Instead of hammering away at fear or dread, Kyle Jarrow's song lyrics, for instance, tend to focus on staying strong and wishing for the happiness of loved ones. This hopeful tone blends well with Jarrow’s percussive and energetic music. The four-man band – cleverly located behind sliding black panels that reveal and conceal them at the right moments– bounces to the beats. In one fist-pumping anthem, Jennifer sings about her resilience:

"She'd find a way to show the world the Last thing that she needs at night are Lullabies with silly words like Don't be scared now Jenny baby"

Even when addressing the hostages' tragic situation with the music, Jarrow makes the language so nonchalant that it's almost comical. Jim sings about getting beaten and threatened with death, saying "Well, that's at least the gist of it," adding, "it sure doesn't look good." Really, Jim?

By forgoing the natural reactions of fear or anger, the creators face an uphill battle in making Jim and Jennifer seem real. Instead of unique personas that might show us the humanity behind the blindfolds, the characters are more like Jarrow and Chapman's playthings – pieces in a game. Not to say that Cheek and Thureen don’t give it their all: limited by blindfolds, ropes around their hands, and an incredibly restrained approach, they still offer touching performances.

But this does little to add the dimensions and depth that the script lacks. Their backgrounds seemed culled from a warehouse of familiar motifs (a lover coming to your window; eating ice cream as a kid) never telling a truly unique story. Yes, it's good for them to have memories to which the audience can relate, but if Chapman and Jarrow want to show that hostages have something to say other than “help me,” it would’ve been nice to meet people rather than archetypes.

When it hits the mark, however, Hostage Song dredges up perspectives that should prove historically interesting long after our current war has ended. Take, for instance, the issue of terrorism in the YouTube era. In the same monologue, Jim's son talks about being able to watch both porn and his father's decapitation on the Internet. He describes the latter scene with scientific detail: "You can see the flesh separate into little dots. The bleeding seems to seep into the computer screen...A million pixels channel his blood down the front of his jumpsuit."

This is the show's greatest strength: presenting gruesome scenarios in a plain yet poetic style. If only the characters were drawn this well, perhaps appearing to actually be made of flesh and blood, rather than just a series of methodically assembled dots.

Hopelessly Devoted

Duality runs throughout Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: Rome vs. Egypt, sensuality vs. discipline, wife vs. mistress, honor vs. betrayal. Although the play offers a visual feast for designers—two widely different physical worlds need to be shown—a successful production also needs two major performances, and that may be why it’s the least performed of the great tragedies. Darko Tresnjak’s production, in keeping with Theatre for a New Audience’s theme this season of cultural connections among Africa, Europe, and America, features an updating of the period from double-digits A.D. to the late 19th century. Linda Cho’s costumes evoke the Four Feathers era of British rule in North Africa, with tall helmets and khakis for the Romans, albeit with sashes and chevrons in turquoise that look a bit flashy for those stoic folk. The Egyptian court exudes the Alexandria of Constantine Cavafy (whose poem “The God Forsakes Antony” serves as an epigraph in the program): the attendant Alexas wears a black suit and a fez and carries a horsehair whisk, while the eunuch Mardian (a strikingly tall Erik Singer) has the pantalooned appearance of an Arabian Nights character.

As Cleopatra, Laila Robins is a fine queen of the Nile, with pre-Raphaelite curls and feline cheekbones. Her infinite variety encompasses strength, vanity, sensuality, intelligence, and passion, blazingly displayed when she pummels the messenger who reports Antony’s marriage to Caesar’s sister Octavia. But Robins’s Cleopatra also has an amusing self-awareness. When her handmaiden Charmian praises Julius Caesar, irritating the queen, Charmian points out that she is only echoing Cleopatra’s own statements about her late lover. “My salad days, when I was green in judgment,” says the queen in an unusual reading that turns the line into a throwaway joke on herself, yet without any revisionist disdain for her former opinion.

The character of Antony is harder to pull off, because the hero of Julius Caesar hasn’t much opportunity to show nobility. He’s hit the skids. Unfortunately, Marton Csokas hasn't whatever innate charisma might be needed to suggest a formerly exalted general; rather, he comes off as an ordinary enlisted man. He’d be an effective Enobarbus, if John Douglas Thompson’s Enobarbus weren’t already solid enough.

Antony’s big opportunity to show his mettle comes in his return to Rome, yet here Tresnjak, whose touches are often insightful, seems to undercut Antony’s preparedness as a warrior when the triumvirate (Caesar, Lepidus, Antony) faces the rebellious Pompey with only their swords, while Pompey’s men wield rifles. The carousing in the same scene is conflated with a later scene when Octavius and his sister Octavia (Lisa Velten Smith) enter; the result is that here they discover Antony sporting with a wench. It’s amusing, but not a moment that lends Antony luster, since he's caught with his pants down (figuratively).

The character certainly doesn’t need help undermining himself. He lets Cleopatra (Robins, wearing the pants literally, with blouse and boots) persuade him to let her join the disastrous sea battle at Actium. Rather than die by his own hand, he asks Eros (Randy Harrison) to kill him, and after Eros dispatches himself rather than do it, Antony botches his own suicide. On his deathbed he tells Cleopatra that Maecenas is the one to trust in Caesar’s entourage, when it’s Dolabella who proves sympathetic.

Tresnjak contributes several inspired touches. Early on this Cleopatra is pregnant, and delivered of a baby; as a counterpoint, Octavia becomes pregnant after her marriage to Antony and also delivers a child. (It’s a fascinating idea, yet it points up that Antony is more potent in the bedroom than on the battlefield.) And as the messenger cowers before Cleopatra after his first beating, Mardian nods his head from behind her to help him choose the safest answers to her questions.

As usual, Tresnjak gets good work from his young actors (as well as from veteran George Morfogen as even-tempered Lepidus, both a diplomat and a dupe). James Knight is such a virile, principled Pompey that one hopes there’s a Coriolanus in his future, and Michael Rogers as the Clown who brings the asp introduces levity when it's most needed. Only Jeffrey Carlson’s neurotic Octavius proves disappointing, with a habit of putting his hands to his face as if he’s about to do an impression of Jack Benny or Ed Wynn. He's not steely enough for an emperor-to-be. On the whole, though, Tresnjak’s production has so many assets that it would be a shame to miss it.

Curiouser and Curiouser

"Seizures suck," declares Molly, a young woman afflicted with them, to her doctor. "They show up like ghosts." That is why Molly would like to get rid of them, and the doctors can accomplish that, by removing part of her brain.Unfortunately, more than Molly's epilepsy might be lost in that endeavor.

Molly's story is one of several intertwined tales of brain damage, disease, and transformation treated provocatively yet conscientiously by Rabbit Hole Ensemble in their haunting piece A Rope in the Abyss.

Earlier this theatrical season, a character in Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll proposed that humans could build an artificial brain "out of beer cans" if we only knew how a real one works. The same frustration confronts Rabbit Hole's characters, but they explore the problem in greater detail than Stoppard's. Like the titular rope, each of Rabbit Hole's stories begins with familiar people, naturalistically (for the most part) portrayed, then plummets into mysterious places that science has not yet fully explained.

When a person loses their memory or changes personality, are they still "themselves?" Is the real self a "soul" that inhabits the brain? Can love survive in the absence of memory, self, and language? Is it better to fully comprehend one's grief or guilt, or is amnesia, in this context, a blessing? And can humans communicate in a vocabulary made out of different kinds of pickles?

A Rope in the Abyss asks all those questions, and then some, but modestly provides no declarative answers. Focused sharply yet broadly on its subject matter and tautly, unpretentiously, and empathetically constructed, each of the stories is a miniature drama, with lightly sketched characters filled in vividly by the passionate, technically precise acting of the four-actor ensemble.

In keeping with Rabbit Hole's signature aesthetic, there is nearly no set, absolutely basic costumes, no sound effects other than those created by the actors, and special effects consisting merely of the sharp, deliberate use of lighting to create striking chiaroscuro, shadows, and contours that help tell the story.

Playwright and director Edward Elefterion, who very deservedly won the 2007 Midtown International Theatre Festival's award for Outstanding Direction for Nosferatu: The Morning of My Death, works magic again with clear characterisation, painterly tableaux, and brisk pacing.

As Molly, Tatiana Gomberg (the ethereal Mina Harker of The Night of Nosferatu) conveys this bewildered young woman's desperate desire for a cure and subconscious fear of losing her self. Gomberg also shines as catankerous health nut Lorraine, who, after being "dead for two minutes" after a stroke, changes every aspect of her personality, horrifying her slacker son Harold (Dan Ajl Kitrosser). Both of Lorraine's personalities as acted by Gomberg are wholly convincing, and consequently compel the audience to share Harold's confusion.

As Harold and amnesiac murderer Russ, Kitrosser pulls off some tone-changing physical comedy, but also adequately conveys the horror that both characters ultimately experience. The tale of the murderer, narrated in pseudo-Seussian rhyming couplets, is the least successful of the many narratives. Its scientific context is explained less clearly and completely than the other stories.

This is unfortunate because its subject--repressed and recovered memory--is perhaps the most controversial within the medical establishment, with some medical scholars and practitioners declaring that repressed-memory-recovery is a myth and others insisting it is a common occurrence. The whimsical verse poetry perhaps illustrates the character's mind (Russ is an LSD addict, initially) but it is ultimately a case of style substituted for substance.

Overall, however, A Rope in the Abyss constantly intrigues and engages as it winds through many conflicts and lives. That is no easy rope trick.

Kitrosser's interpretation of a third role, haunted Iraq War veteran, is the least patronizing performance of that type that I have seen in a long time, and I have seen several.

The final two members of the ensemble, Nosferatu actors Danny Ashkenasi and Emily Hartford, spin a sad and beautiful love story about Hugh, an opera singer who loses most of his memories to an aneurism and Donna, Hugh's loving but overwhelmed, frustrated, and alienated wife. Yes, you do get to hear Ashkenasi sing opera, and it sounds convincingly operatic.

The moment in which the opera springs forth from the recesses of Hugh's damaged mind is the play's most surreal and mysterious moment. I can't tell you the details, but not because I don't remember them. I do. In fact, A Rope in the Abyss, will remain in my memory, I hope, for a good long time.

Sands of Time

In the preface to his 1960 one-act play The American Dream, Edward Albee famously decried a minority of critics who had deemed the content of his absurdist play “nihilist, immoral, defeatist.” It’s hard to imagine a time when the content of The American Dream threatened some people; nearly 50 years later the play seems quaint and a bit dated. The Cherry Lane Theatre has invited Mr. Albee, who recently turned 80 years old, to direct the current pairing of the The American Dream and the related The Sandbox. The American Dream is nowhere near as shocking today as it might have been a half-century ago, and that absence of shock to a contemporary audience takes some of the teeth out of this production, which is, as Albee insists, tenaciously true to the text.

The story of The American Dream goes like this: “Mommy” has married “Daddy” for his money. Daddy and Mommy have reluctantly permitted “Grandma” to live with them, albeit under the sink. The ageist Mommy keeps the sassy Grandma (think Vicki Lawrence in Mama’s Family) in check by threatening to call the “Van Man” on her and put her out to pasture once and for all.

Grandma, however, has her own ideas. Having won a lot of money in a baking contest, she plans to make a run for it. In the meantime, Daddy and Mommy have forgotten why they have invited Mrs. Barker from the adoption agency to their home. Grandma explains, however: apparently they weren’t happy with the child they “bought” 20 years before and are seeking “satisfaction” by getting a replacement. The replacement is a shallow, damaged young man that Grandma calls “The American Dream.” And, yes, it appears that Mommy and Daddy killed the first child, but this fact is explained so obtusely in the play that it comes nowhere near the “startling tale of murder and morality” that the current press release promises.

Yet, it’s a treat to witness how Albee meant these plays to be seen. Though Albee introduced the notion of the absurd to popular American theater, his direction of The American Dream imbues the characters with a humanity that’s not apparent if one simply reads the play. In the production, we actually feel empathy for the doddering Daddy (played by George Bartenieff) rather than viewing him as the mechanical servant he seems to be in the book. Judith Ivey’s Mommy, obsessed with social status and getting “satisfaction,” is more vulnerable under Albee’s direction. Both Bartenieff and Ivey appear to play their characters as straight as possible.

However, because they do come across as more human in this production, the absurdness of the play and its dialogue sometimes get in the way and result in misfires. For instance, when Mrs. Barker (the excellent Kathleen Butler, whose judicious use of facial expressions saves her character) suddenly yanks her dress off to get more comfortable in the family’s living room, it’s simply incongruous because to that point the production has not felt surreal enough to support that action.

Other aspects of the production were slightly disappointing. Lois Markle as Grandma is a last-minute replacement for Myra Carter, who took ill before the production. Markle was a bit unsure of some of her lines — this might be overlooked in other productions, but Albee's work demands precision timing. At one point, she hesitated quite noticeably. When she finally came through with the correct line I was momentarily tempted to high-five the woman sitting next to me.

In a recent American Theatre interview, Albee opined candidly that the 13-minute The Sandbox is the closest he has ever come to a perfect piece; he states that, had he gone on five minutes longer, he probably would have made a mistake.

In The Sandbox, Mommy and Daddy are back and this time they’re sending Grandma off to her death. They bring her to a beach where they deposit her in a sandbox, and wait, with the help of a cellist, for the moment to arrive. A buff young man performing calisthenics on the beach is revealed to be a somewhat insecure Angel of Death, come to take Grandma away. His exercises mimic the flapping of wings and Nicole Pearce’s lighting is sublime. This is where Albee’s use of the absurd works completely. Albee is right. Even 50 years later The Sandbox remains a nearly perfect piece.