Method Man

The Wings Theatre is by no means an ideal performance space. Tucked away in a basement on one of the Western-most blocks of Greenwich Village, the theatre is small, with tiny, rickety chairs and an absence of air conditioning. During the performance I saw, there were occasional problems with sound quality, theatergoers were sweating and several audience members continually talked to themselves. None of this mattered, though, as the lights came up on The Rarest of Birds. The 2008-2009 theatre season has just begun, but star Omar Prince delivers a turn that must be remembered at the end of the season as one of its best.

Prince plays late film legend Montgomery Clift in this one-man show, conceived, directed and written by the talented John Lisbon Wood. Clift, the tortured artist with an unfettered commitment to realism who was unfairly locked into comparison with Marlon Brando as one of two dominant actors to emerge during the 1950s’ Method acting era, experienced far more misfortunes than did his counterpart: drug addiction, a crippling lack of sexual confidence, a disfiguring car accident, and an untimely early death.

Rarest – the title comes from a reference made to Clift in a review – puts Clift’s entire life on display, both private and public. Wood sets it in 1962, as the star’s life and luck are already headed on their last lap, on the 1962 set of Freud, the unsuccessful John Huston film. The director has locked Clift alone in a dressing room to sober up and calm down. Clift, in between drinking, pill-popping, and shooting up, turns this time-out into a de facto therapy session with an absent Sigmund Freud, effectively addressing the audience with details of his life and work.

Wood structures this show in a non-linear way, to better mirror the inner workings of Clift’s mind. For instance, Clift talks about working on the late 1950s film Lonelyhearts long before he ever details his problems with earlier films like A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity. The effect can be frustrating for those wanting a strictly chronological interpretation of Clift’s filmography, but his fractured reflections become easy to adjust to.

What is clear is how meticulously researched Rarest is. Wood’s play is comprehensive but too interesting to be merely encyclopedic. He provides anecdotal references to his early work in Red River and The Search; his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor borne from A Place in the Sun; skirmishes with Frank Sinatra on From Here to Eternity and the many battles he had with studio brass, directors, and writers to improve scripts. Clift claims here that his dialogue upgrades in The Heiress are what won Olivia de Havilland an Oscar for the film. (Despite four acting nods of his own, Clift never won an Academy Award).

Wood also chronicles the actor’s deepening chemical dependency and health issues including colitis and dysentery. Perhaps the play’s greatest strength comes when it addresses Clift’s clandestine gay relationships. The actor’s self-doubt about his sexual prowess led to a lifetime of promiscuity and disappointment.

Prince’s performance is so specific, so physically detailed and emotionally bare, it stands as a textbook example of Method acting on par with Clift’s work itself. He makes Clift’s desperation and pain palpable through a series of carefully modulated tics: his inebriated swagger, the glazed look in his eyes, the way he treats his body with equal parts interest and repulsion. Prince makes Clift seem very much like a child who never came close to feeling comfortable with himself. His performance is what constantly drives Rarest and elevates what could have been mere exposition to a real performance.

Rarest is a fitting tribute to one of the all-time greats this craft has ever known. At the performance I saw, a technical glitch caused Prince’s curtain call to be cut short, which is a shame. A performance this dedicated deserves all the recognition it can get.

The Kids Aren't Alright

Based loosely on a true story, Jason Stuart’s one-woman play, Washing Machine, presents several perspectives from those involved in the case of five year-old girl Rebecca “Hope” Wagner who, while her mother used a nearby payphone, mysteriously drowned in a washing machine at a Virginia laundromat three years ago. The range of perspectives, verbal or otherwise, include those of the little girl, her mother, a young playmate (theorizing that Rebecca may have been stolen by the fictional “Birdman”), her insecure and painfully self-conscious pubescent brother, the Russian owner of the laundromat, a predictably detached insurance adjuster charged with determining the monetary worth of the girl’s life, and the old man who had used the machine prior to the incident, losing the coins which somehow later activated the machine when the child climbed into it.

Akiko Kosaka’s set is stunning in its simplicity. Most of the play’s action takes place inside a circular plastic structure, replete with patterned holes, resembling the inside of a commercial washing machine. The center of this construction serves as the vortex of character vantage points, all acted ably by the versatile Dana Berger. Plastic bags filled with water hang from the structure and other parts of the stage, representing the attractive nuisance of the machine’s watery recesses for the little girl.

Ben Kato employs a host of innovative lighting techniques to illustrate the characters’ confusion, the machine’s motion, and to help the slight and unimposing Berger transform into a range of personalities. Kato’s lighting works seamlessly with the sound design of Elizabeth Rhodes. Harsh and amplified clicks of the electric machine’s various cycles indicate jerking character shifts. Like the washing machine, the airtight doors of which shut one out (or in this case, in) until a cycle completes, the action moves quickly—a new character appears just as you’re processing the words of the previous one. With some exceptions, lighting and music are generally compatible.

Mr. Stuart is obviously a Who fan. “Pure n’ Easy” and “Getting in Tune” are among the pre-performance house songs. Ms. Berger wears a Who t-shirt throughout the play, and the girl’s mother talks guiltily about wanting to smoke cigarettes and listen to “Baba O’Riley” rather than attend to motherly concerns, even firing off a round of Pete Townshend windmills as she speaks.

“Baba O’Riley”—all five minutes and ten seconds of it—returns at the end of the play, its jumpy and frenetic ending mimicking the confusion inside the washing machine. It’s a somewhat unfortunate choice—the song has been so diluted by its use as the opening theme for CSI-NY that here it unintentionally makes the girl’s struggles resemble a moribund music video. If a Who song must be used, may I suggest the more obscure “In a Hand or a Face,” with its continual refrain: “I am going round and round”?

Under Michael Chamberlin’s taut direction, Ms. Berger deftly shifts characters in the blink of an eye and yanks us, often mesmerized, along with her. Ms. Berger starred in the first production of Washing Machine) last summer at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, and she has clearly honed her rapid transformations down to the nanosecond.

Unlike its characters, Washing Machine doesn’t point fingers. From the brother who dares the girl into the machine, to the mother who disappears, to the laundromat owner who knows that the machine has a mechanical problem, everyone, including society, is complicit in the death of this young girl. The play asks one tough question of its audience, and it's enough: How can we become so irreparably consumed with our own petty issues that we can forever lose track of an innocent child?

Ain't Theft Grand

The entrance to the Sargent Theatre at the American Theatre of Actors warns of “approximated nudity,” a promise of ideas both low-brow and winningly entertaining. And the show featuring such adornments, Heist, lives up to just that dichotomous expectation. Heist is written by Paul Cohen, who proved extremely adroit at mature narrative with this season’s Cherubina. This time, however, the premise is more puerile. A group of thieves – Blowfish (Amanda Boekelheide), Seahorse (Jeff Clarke) and The Sturgeon (Rachel Jablin) – have conspired to lift a jewelry store. They have meticulously researched and blueprinted the entire operation. One thing standing in their way, however, is that famous New York dilemma: location, location, location.

The store in question is located behind a small Off-Off-Broadway theatre mounting a one-woman show. This radically feminist show within the show has a very specific theme: clitoral explosions. As a result, the three thieves must sync their dynamite blasts with the orgasms of the star of this performance piece, Ophelia (Tracy Weller). The idea is that as Ophelia experiences orgasm, the applause and laughter generated by her performance will drown out the sound of the ensuing explosions next door.

But there is a major problem: the edgy show is a bust. The bungling burglars must work to make the show a hit just to ensure that their own larceny goes off without a hitch, causing Ophelia to get entangled with both Seahorse and a renegade named Jaguar (Christopher Ryan Richards). Some of these scenes felt shoehorned in, as staged, and the fact that Richards – and only Richards – played two roles (the second of which is an overzealous Off-Off-Broadway critic) confused the action.

Heist is a clever amalgam of genres, though it is in general too light to work as a truly successful heist show, full as it is of betrayals and red herrings. However, a lot of Cohen’s comedic dialogue remains smart (even the double entendres), and he also provides much insider theatre lingo. The jewel store plot itself is actually the lesser part of Heist; the more arresting scenes star Weller on stage, appearing in front of a backdrop made to resemble female genitalia (designed by Kris Thor). In a major credit to Cohen, what should be merely a stunt works, providing constant humor without feeling gratuitous. Neither does a group of vagina-shaped puppets that dominate several scenes in the latter half of the play.

What weighs the show down then? Thor’s stilted direction. Though Cohen’s spunky plot escalates appropriately, Thor never really hoists the action of Heist to a higher level as the plot progresses. The last few scenes move along at a clip the same length as the early scenes do, when they should have more momentum; by this time, more is at stake and the characters are desperate.

Additionally, the five members that round out Thor’s ensemble are inconsistent. Weller stands out in a potentially embarrassing role. She could have fallen flat on her face as Ophelia, self-satisfied and sex-obsessed, but pulls it off. The other women in the show, Boekelheide and Jablin, have less enticing characters. I wish I knew a bit more about the background of the three robbers. How did they meet? Who recruited whom? Boekelheide plays a more interesting part – Blowfish has rougher edges than The Sturgeon – and is more interesting to watch than Jablin, who is saddled with a largely redundant role. Neither, however, captivate during their scenes in the planning stage nor in the show’s more climactic moments.

Clarke’s scenes with Boekelheide and Jablin could also use a little polishing. He demonstrates better chemistry with Weller than with Seahorse’s criminal cohorts. Richards, however, was the most intriguing performer of the bunch. The actor was able to bounce back and forth between two very divergent character types and was not afraid to fall on his face in doing so.

That same spirit carries Heist itself a long way. Cohen’s desire to merge the silly with the suspenseful takes the show very far, but despite a lot of promise, the show remains a few shades short of arresting.

Broad Strokes

To analyze the life of an artist seems a foolish, perhaps doomed, endeavor. Words are incapable of characterizing the magic behind the brush stroke, often seeming trivializing and petty, or unfairly sweeping. In A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe Natalie Mosco’s lyrical script skips through the life of O’Keeffe, but fails to capture the vast beauty of her art. It could even be said that the play, mostly a lengthy monologue, dissolves the mystery of her art by dissection. Jumping quickly from scenes in a long life, Mosco spends considerable time and energy, but only skims the surface of the work and life of O’Keeffe. In performance the show’s title seems painfully apt: we are brushing the surface of something fleeting and impossible to hold. The play opens with the stark solitude of the older O’Keeffe. In the desert, with only wild turkeys and the enormity of her “myth” to keep her company, she muses philosophically about the problematic relationship between the artist’s life and her art: “They won’t understand my art any better if they see how I live: It’s all there on the canvas…Where I was born and where and how I live is unimportant—it’s what I’ve done with where I’ve been that should be of interest.” During the next hour and a half this key notion is disregarded, while Mosco covers the disparate places, the opportunistic people, and the various incarnations of the artist herself. Perhaps it’s appropriate that this survey is an inadequate way of exploring O’Keeffe’s canvases, but this kind of irony has no place in such a sincere production.

After introducing the wise, confident O’Keeffe, Mosco explores her troubled side in scenes from a sanitarium and her childhood. In covering such an eventful life, Mosco unfortunately follows the form of a jumbled timeline. Rather than follow a narrative arc, the show lists accomplishments like a résumé, hitting upon so many events that Mosco speaks with breathless speed. Perhaps some editing, or a narrower focus—fewer scenes, selecting a specific period or piece—would help.

Despite problems with the show’s premise, Mosco’s confidence and clear vision are impressive strengths when it comes to portraying an imporant female artist. She adopts the many incarnations of O’Keeffe, twisting her limbs gracefully to evoke the natural shapes one assumes danced in O’Keeffe’s mind. Still, the show drags and there is not enough movement to make up for such a text-laden script.

Supporting Mosco are two highly capable actors that similarly adapt to the multitude of parts. David Lloyd Walters, playing and representing the men in Georgia’s life, walks a fine line between boorishness and enviable confidence. He exudes the sort of clarity of expression and self-possession that Georgia cannot, highlighting the doubt that plagues and stifles her. Virginia Roncetti has the unenviable task of playing the female non-Georgias—less talented and either fawning or jealous. Even with this material, she is a playful chameleon who is entertaining to watch in all forms. Yet, the characters are often black and white interpretations that force the viewer to strictly adhere to Mosco’s point of view.

This controlling vision is further demonstrated through the use of a projector and screen that offer images of O’Keefe’s paintings and photographs of her and characters in her life. The photographs are wonderful, but the goofy revisions of O’Keeffe’s paintings inexplicably break down the work and set its pieces into motion. The animations are often crude takes on the paintings; stark contrasts to the serious artist portrayed by Mosco. It is an odd decision to modify the final object when we are asked to sympathize so much with the artist’s independent vision.

Unlike the projector, the show’s other backdrop, a strip of blue sky with wispy clouds, is a stunningly simple evocation of space and limitlessness. Though obviously a screen on a stage, when the sky appears it seems to come into the fullness of being with O’Keeffe’s conception of it. In its simplicity, this screen achieves what the collaged details of the projection do not.

Director Robert Kalfin deftly moves the actors around the screens, wisely mining the rare interactions between them for all their comic and tragic worth. Yet, his strict dedication to Mosco’s script cannot help a production that is stilted and lacking nuance.

Unsurprisingly, the play’s initial claims turn out to be true: after hearing the history, the art is not better “seen,” nor is the artist. It is unclear why Mosco, a talented writer and performer, understanding the complications of biography, commits herself so enthusiastically to this straightforward, unenlightening format. To learn more about an artist one should see an exhibit; as Mosco’s character states: look at her work, not at her.

Life and Times

Founded in 1992, The Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America is a major presenter of dramatic material emphasizing Chinese history and the Chinese immigrant experience. Under the leadership of accomplished artistic director Joanna Chan, the theater has produced work important not just to the Asian American community, for which it serves a central role, but to the New York theater community as a whole. As an artist, Chan has written, adapted and directed over fifty productions that have enjoyed presentation across the globe. Chan’s latest play, Forbidden City West, produced by the Yangtze Rep and currently running at Theater for the New City, won’t count among its successes. Part bio-play, part book musical, part variety show, the production fails at achieving any semblance of stylistic unity or dramatic import.

Forbidden City West aims to tell the story of legendary Chinese-American performer Jadin Wong, who headlined at the San Francisco nightclub from which the play takes its title. Photographed on the cover of Life Magazine in 1940 and achieving international success at a time when Chinese-American performers seldom did, Wong came to symbolize the performative exoticism of the Orient for white America. Later in life, she ran a talent agency specializing in Asian-American actors, and in doing so became a mentor to new generations of Asian-American artists.

The real-life Jadin (pronounced jayDEEN) sounds like a compelling, complicated woman, but as portrayed by Debbie Wong (in her youth) and Ji Lian Wang (in her later years), she comes across as startlingly one-note. Wong’s Jadin is consistently spunky, confident, and a bit remorseful; Wang’s is kind, instructive, and a bit remorseful. The curiosity of the elder Jadin developing an accent that she never had in her youth is not nearly so troublesome as the fact that, though the production spans Jadin’s life from childhood well into her eighties, at no point do we see any real depth of character. The problem lies in large part with the script: though it depicts Jadin in a number of what ought to be high stakes situations (delivering her infant brother, parachuting into the black forest during WWII, fighting racism in the performance world), there are depressingly few moments of actual dramatic action. Without conflict or character development, Forbidden City West renders what must have been a fascinating life unnecessarily dull.

Although Forbidden City West bills itself as a musical, its songs (with music by Gregory Frederick and lyrics by Chan) seldom advance the plot. Instead, variety show-like, they provide musical interludes: a tap dance, an Italian aria, a comic karate number. Perhaps the numbers are intended as an homage to the nightclub from which the play takes its title, but even the full-company numbers fail to sparkle with the energy needed to justify their presence.

The play would benefit from a tighter focus on the life of its protagonist, but instead the slow-paced production meanders far and wide. Its scope includes numerous scenes of Jadin’s mother as a young girl (singing in Chinese and reading in English) and of immigrant Chinese men (complaining about the state of their world), which provide context but not much more. A single scene of each might suffice; instead they reappear throughout the production with little new to offer each time. Similarly, the elder Jadin’s relationship with an aspiring writer (he must learn to make his screenplays marketable rather than political) accomplish in four scenes what a cleaner script could accomplish in two.

It’s easy to understand why Chan felt drawn to create a production centered on the life of Jaydin Wong. Forbidden City West serves as a reminder that compelling source material isn’t enough to save a production.

Wrestling the Demon of Art

DADAnewyork's Brunch at the Luthers, the latest work by self-described "activist playwright" Misha Shulman, is a collection of "Dadaist" vignettes that purports "to explain the Western consciousness," whatever that is. According to the press release, said consciousness is "ruled by such surrealistic influences as Bush, Bin Laden, Trump, Hurricane Katrina, and the tragic situation in Africa." Because "what leads to wars is the strict adherence to logic," Shulman hopes to combat war with a Dadaist "assault on logic." Brunch at the Luthers starts somewhat promisingly with a quartet of actors, standing before music stands, chanting nonsense-words and nonsense-phrases in monotonous harmony, fascistically conducted by a man in a wig reminiscent of a signer of the Declaration of Independence or a British barrister. This would be better were the actors not conspicuously reading their lines from highlighted pages, or were the words less pretentious. "Wrestling a demon of art--Don't!" they bark.

In another piece, three women in bureaucratic suits investigate whether blood spilled on a floor is blood or water; how it got there; whose blood, if blood, it is, and whether it matters. Perhaps the terms reference Bin Laden's "your blood is blood and our blood is water" speech. Predictably, they don't discover how the blood -- if it is blood -- was indeed spilled, because they get distracted by semantics. This is the only real insight or intelligible idea that the play offers, but it's hardly original that bureaucracy can be deployed, deliberately or accidentally, to obscure atrocity. This piece is written by Normandy Raven Sherwood, also responsible for the set and costume design. Some of the other earlier vignettes were also authored by people other than Shulman.

Once we get to the main attraction, Shulman's depiction of a brunch party at the Luther household, a sense of deja vu sets in. Mr and Mrs Luther appear very similar to the M. and Mme. Martin (get it? Martin... Luther?) of Romanian Absurdist Eugene Ionesco's masterpiece The Bald Soprano, only much less entertaining.

Mr and Mrs Luther are preparing brunch for an acquaintance, "State Congressman" Mansfield, (a biologically female "undercover feminist" in a man's suit and necktie, identified by the playwright as "a riff on Hillary Clinton"), and Mansfield's "niece or nephew," Harlot Sierra O'Toul.

Ms or Mr O'Toul may or may not be coming to brunch, and is either an "erotic dancer" or an "exotic dancer." That "erotic" entertainment often gets billed as "exotic," or foreign, and vice versa is a good point, that might have been intriguingly explored at greater depth. The arrival of some guests, bearing gift bags containing decoy ducks and decorated with Hanukkah and Christmas imagery, calls into question the religion of the Luthers, and lets the audience know that symbols are to be distrusted and identities are unstable.

As the play meanders forward, cocoa is made, rubber duckies and feathers eaten, diners start quacking like ducks (after Ionesco's humans-turned-rhinoceri) and then O'Toul appears. Like Mansfield, she is a biological woman (apparently), with the poses and voice of a cross between 1950s fictional icons Betty Rizzo and Beebo Brinker. (The) Harlot does a garish, cross-eyed, ungainly "erotic/exotic" dance on an oriental carpet, suggesting the Jazz Age's "Salome dancers" who, while the causes for World War II materialized, capitalized of Jews, Muslims, "the Orient," sexuality, homosexuality, and women. Like King Herod -- arguably another Absurdist character, given his depiction in Wilde's Salome, Mr Luther gets noticeably hot and bothered. Then his wife and the other guests exclude him from the gathering, and the apartment, and form a conga circle themselves.

All of the actors except for Kroos, playing Mr Luther, speak in stiff, wooden voices and use body language that is exaggerated but lacks the discipline and clarity of intentional Expressionist-influenced acting, such as that seen in the work of Stephen Berkoff or, here in New York, Rabbit Hole Ensemble. The blocking is nonsensical: in one scene, actors stand directly in front of others who are talking.

This "activist" play does not shed any light on how "logic" causes wars. That is a shame, because I really wanted to find out how that works. The most infamous wars, it seems, are caused by a regime's own "assault on logic." In order to keep the wholly irrational institution of race-based slavery, pre-Civil-War American politicians had to rape the logic of the European Enlightenment philosophy that informs the Declaration of Independence in order to craft a Constitution where all men are created equal, but some are counted as only three-fifths of a person.

In the pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler crafted an entire belief system based on inherently illogical principles, then ruthlessly silenced or drove out almost everyone who tried to subject it to the cold fire of logic. World War II broke out because, after a good while of this and many millions of deaths, reason needed to be restored. Lastly, the Bush administration has failed to give a consistent logical explanation for having started the present war in Iraq. This is probably because they never had one.

To sum up, Brunch at the Luthers is a piece of self-indulgent pretentious rubbish. However, if you like Dada -- or, rather, Shulman's idea of Dada -- these words should not deter you from seeing it, because reason is oppressive, and language deceptive and meaningless.

Tortured Souls

You pretty much can’t throw a rock in New York without hitting a marquis advertising an Iraq-themed film or play. While Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End echoes a few notes we’ve heard before, it achieves a level of grace and beauty that is rare among current artistic efforts. It is refreshing to have a show that is poetic without being preachy. Three absolutely enthralling actors deliver one roughly 30-minute monologue apiece and their words paint an exceptionally vivid picture of the far reaches of the war. The characters are Lynndie England, the American soldier photographed next to tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, David Kelly, the British weapons inspector who allegedly killed himself after revealing that his government exaggerated the threat of WMDs, and Nerhjas Al Saffarh, a Communist who was tortured along with her children by Saddam Hussein’s secret police. In the play notes, Thompson admits that news accounts of these figures were merely a springboard for her fictionalized imaginings of them.

This format doesn’t work so well with the portrait of England. Perhaps it is because this scandal is so well known and Thompson goes for the easy explanation. Her sketch of England is extremely similar to the popularized caricature of the American soldier: ignorant white trash whose violent impulses are suddenly given free reign.

Although this character may lack a third dimension, actress Teri Lamm smoothly conveys all sides to the Private: cocky soldier, defensive scapegoat, senseless hick, and even scorned lover. On its own, the monologue is an interesting exploration of a person who is just a devilish face and a thumbs-up to many of us. But after being wowed by the other exceptional stories in the play, it pales by comparison.

The play shifts into higher gear with David Kelly. He’s already dying when we meet him. Rocco Sisto offers a wonderfully reserved performance as a soft-spoken scientist. The playwright depicts Kelly as a wise, yet self-consciously cowardly man. He offers poignant deathbed observations (“When we are young, our death is impossible... Part of the... salve of aging, is that our death starts to make a sort of sense”) and equal amounts of justification and condemnation of the lies he agreed to tell. When he speaks of how soldiers murdered an Iraqi family he’d befriended, Sisto makes Kelly so full of shame that he can’t reach an adequate volume. It ends up sounding like he’s telling a bedtime story, which makes his tale all the more horrifying.

The lyricism of Thompson’s work is best showcased in the final monologue, delivered by a phenomenal Heather Raffo. She is a charm-machine with a motherly grin and playful demeanor (her jabs at linguistic differences between English and Arabic are adorable).

However, there is a weathered quality to Raffo’s delivery that hints at something darker. We find the root of this is Al Saffarh’s visit to the eponymous Palace of the End, a former castle transformed into a torture compound by Hussein. Her explanation of the ordeal she endured with her young sons is saturated with pride and pain, but never fear. She smiles as she recalls how her oldest was forced to watch her rape: “His eyes looked into my eyes only. So wise for fifteen.”

Thompson frames Al Saffarh’s entire account through a maternal lens. She makes for a fine domestic counterpoint to the belligerent England, who, in spite of her fatigue-covered baby bump, has no qualms singing out, “Flyin low and feeling mean. Find a family by the stream. Pick ‘em off and hear ‘em scream, Napalm sticks to kids.”

Al Saffarh remembers being pregnant when she was captured. She admits initially thinking that her captors would spare her because their culture would not permit the killing of a pregnant woman or a child. This is not the case. Kelly and England similarly expect for their people to protect them, but receive a harsh awakening as they are destroyed by their own sides. England is portrayed as a scapegoat for the Army and as an unfortunate product of a violent culture, while Kelly is bullied and threatened (and possibly killed, according to some theories) by the British government. It is a fitting touch for a play that demands that you look inward and question your own culpability.

Three's Company

A Perfect Couple, Brooke Behrman's sharp new play, is currently running at the DR2 Theatre under the auspices of WET, where Sasha Eden and Victoria Pettibone produce a single fully mounted production a year. For a theater aiming to improve representation of women in the arts, A Perfect Couple is a perfect choice. The production opens to Emma (Annie McNamara), alone onstage, fixing breakfast in her best friends’ kitchen (designed with elegant simplicity by Neil Patel). When Isaac (James Waterston) stumbles in, Emma plops berries into his mouth; when Amy (Dana Eskelson) enters, she rests her arms on Emma’s shoulders. Under the smart direction of Maria Mileaf, the affectionate intimacy with which the good friends reach for one another is less a form of flirtation than of familiarity.

If McNamara works a bit too hard at playing the quirky, perpetually single city girl, maybe it’s because Emma herself is performing that role for her domesticated friends. As twenty-somethings in Manhattan, the threesome led similar lives. Now, as they reach 40, Amy and Isaac have become engaged and moved upstate. They worry that Emma is lonely and outgrowing her urban life; Emma worries that as they befriend couples and families, she’ll no longer be included. But A Perfect Couple is not simply a story of friends with divergent lives caught in a game of city mouse/ country mouse.

Over the course of the weekend, they find themselves questioning not just how they can maintain relevance in each other’s lives, but how they have fit together throughout their shared history. The title of the play alludes not only to the notion of a perfectly matched pair (which could refer to any coupling of characters), but to “perfect” in the numeric sense of the word: a perfect couple means exactly two.

Their lives, the friends realize, have never been so simple. Amy worries that 15 years ago Emma and Isaac were in love (even if they didn’t know it), and maybe are still (even if they don’t know it). It’s unclear whether she is more distressed by the possibility that her fiancé loves her best friend or that her best friend is closer to her fiancé than to her. So invested are they in one another that extricating the details of who means what to whom proves almost impossible.

In a lesser play, the hinted infidelities would be fully realized. Emma and Isaac would have an affair and someone (anyone) would make out with the cute, considerably younger boy next door (Elan Moss-Bachrach, who nails the easy charm and chillaxed confidence of a male liberal arts grad). What separates A Perfect Couple from less sophisticated scripts a la Sex and the City is its refusal to indulge in easy payoff.

Instead, the would-be trysts remain remote, not only un-acted upon, but nearly unacknowledged. It’s a lovely if risky choice that will frustrate audience members who prefer explicit action to circular discussion fueled by fraught emotional conflict. Tensions arise as much from the course the characters’ lives have taken as from the courses they haven’t. The hesitancy and confusion with which they approach a crucial juncture of their lives is as heartbreaking as it is intelligent.

Coming of age following the sexual revolution of the 60’s and the consciousness-raising of the 70’s, the characters spent their young adulthood enjoying the relaxed gender roles and independence of twenty-something Manhattanites at the end of the 20th century. “We didn’t have anything else to do besides be together,” recalls Amy of their all-day Sunday brunches, "All three of us. We were falling in love."

The play spares audiences an academic lecture on third-wave feminism, instead allowing Amy and Emma to casually compare their lives to their mothers (whom they agree have not ended up well) and the women of their mothers' generation (whose options were perhaps less complicated, if more codified). Yet even as their freewheeling young adulthood has left them uncertain how to transition into a middle-age with traditional adult relationships, they look back on it fondly.

“The three of us were a pair,” says Emma, “For a while.” Times change.

Ex Machina, Into History

Everyone knows that film actors like to go on crusades, especially if they're unlikely to go down in history as brilliant actors. Brigitte Bardot tries to prevent the murder of animals, Charlton Heston campaigned to prevent the prevention of the murder of people, and 1940s screen siren Hedy Lamarr invented Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) to prevent the Nazis from winning World War II, and tried to get the US government to consider using it. Yes, really. If you want to learn the true story of how Lamarr invented FHSS, and what subsequently happened to her creation, Frequency Hopping, written and directed by Elyse Singer, reveals all. Frequency Hopping is especially memorable for its impressive array of new media, by production and media designer Elaine J. McCarthy. This ranges from computer animation projected on scrims, swathing the actors in two-dimensional images and popping them into the landscapes of gigantic 1940s photographs, to the incidental music, which emanates from several large player-pianos, without a human musician in sight. The latter is provided by Eric Singer's LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, programmed by Paul Lehrmann of the Ballet Mecanique Project. Anyone interested in the use of technology in theatre should go see this show: in this regard, it is inspiring and challenging. In the 1950s, on live radio, Lamarr's sometime confidant, revolutionary Hollywood composer George Antheil, reminisces about his involvement with Lamarr. What exactly was its nature? Was Antheil the star's lover, or did they share something more extraordinary? When the two met, Antheil was supplementing his composer's fees by peddling disturbing quackery about "endocrinology" that sounds like eugenics. (He thinks that a certain endocrinological profile makes "men like Wilde and da Vinci" gay.) Lamarr wants to enlarge her breasts using hormones. Once she's gotten a diagnosis out of Antheil, she tells him that really she wants his help with her hobby: "making secret weapons." An exemplar of geek glamour in Angela M. Kahler's elegant, dignified period costumes and J. Janas and R. Greene's naturalistic, historically accurate wigs, Newhouse's Lamarr soon invents FHSS -- and discovers that sexism in Hollywood and Washington is more powerful than the best frequency-jamming apparatus.

Singer's exploration of Lamarr and Antheil's shared belief in the power of their imaginations to harness technology to create beauty and preserve life is truly revolutionary. Such optimism is rare in science fiction, which tends to be dominated by predictions of technological dystopia, and absolutely needs to be explored more thoroughly in our culture. The California-based STAGE award, which recognizes and provides development for plays about science and technology, should help. As the New York Times reported, Frequency Hopping went through a lengthy and, Singer admitted, energy-sapping process of "play development" before STAGE gave it the recognition that in part allows us to see it today.

While Frequency Hopping is interesting, it also frustratingly sounds like a very innovative engineering lecture rather than a human drama. The plethora of technological bells and whistles does not help: rather, it competes with the actors. When Lamarr (Erica Newhouse) and Antheil (Joseph Urla) endearingly play, like children, that they are a torpedo and an airplane, this could have been a moment of great theatricality. Unfortunately, a computer-animated airplane and torpedo appear on the scrims; flight paths zoom around them in glowing loops of dashes, and mock the merely human actors' attempts to suggest machines in flight. In another scene, news footage of Nazis marching in a parade loses its power to frighten by being shown partially in reverse, and to jaunty electronic music, making it seem as if the goose-stepping storm-troopers are actually a troupe of dancers.

These two scenes reveal what is right and wrong with Frequency Hopping. The technology, and the story of a technological breakthrough, is compelling, accessible, and magical. I loved the concept, and wanted to love its execution. However, the scenery-chewing technology -- onstage and in the exposition -- often drowns out the humanity. That is a shame, because it was Lamarr and Antheil's humanity, as well as their scientific curiosity and technical know-how, that inspired them to apply their scientific curiosity to combat the most inhumane technocracy the world has ever known.

Shifty is Nifty

Shifty villains indeed abound in All Kinds of Shifty Villains, Disgraced Productions’s delightful if rather two-dimensional film noir spoof, now playing at the Kraine Theater. So does a silent, affable, rubber-limbed circus clown in a red nose. But is the clown a villain? And are the villains of the noir world – the femme fatale, the ambitious maniac, the cops and robbers – actually a carload of sad clowns? All Kinds of Shifty Villains, scripted by Robert Attenweiler and directed by Rachel Klein, asks these questions, none too seriously. The answers they come up with are more fun than a phone booth full of Maltese Falcons. This is the kind of noir story that opens with a hardboiled, womanizing private eye, Max Quarterhorse, gamely played by Joe Stipek. As the San Francisco fog lifts, Quarterhorse is trying to quit smoking and drinking because, among other reasons, the local police precinct has banned these pastime. The cops don’t want it to "turn into a graveyard” or “a drunk tank.” While they’re worrying about atmosphere and sobriety, a lunatic is planting bombs around the city, a femme fatale has a secret, Quarterhorse’s secretary, “the kid,” desperately wants him to realize that she’s a woman, and a matronly arms dealer’s pair of thuggish sons face an agonizing decision: cereal for breakfast, or whisky?

As deftly directed by Klein, the physical comedy is broad, balletic, and reminiscent of the Marx brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Each member of the ensemble cast has developed a specific body language for his or her character, which makes up for the deliberately cardboard characterizations.

Attenweiler's dialogue is often raucous with whimsical absurdism. "You came here for something," one of the thug brothers accuses Quarterhorse, "and something can turn into prison bars, just as cereal can turn into whisky." Some jokes, however, are tired and predictable. The woman who wants to be kidnapped because it’s the only way to indulge her rope fetish isn’t surprising at first, and gets less interesting the longer the gag (no pun intended) is played out. When Attenweiler gets the absurdities of the noir genre right, he gets them very right. "Max is sure" that a bomb "is on the roof!" one cop shouts at another. “Right!” the other cop replies, “We'll check the rest of the building!"

Lisa Soverino's lighting design aptly creates the dim spaces and chiaroscuro of the films. Emily Taradash's costumes look like Halloween costume knockoffs of classic 1930s-40s attire. The costumes impressively survive what must be the considerable stress of circus-style performance.

Noir is built on suspense, and sometimes this play is too silly and too loosely structured to have any. The action goes on for quite some time after the last bomb threat is neutralized, and the characters are not fully developed enough to incite anxiety as to whether they will find fulfillment as well as safety. This is largely the same kind of trouble that weakens Broadway’s otherwise brilliant and funny vintage-film spoof Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Like its bumbling cops, All Kinds of Shifty Villains doesn’t look into anything too deeply, but is certainly amusing.

Please Don't Kill Birds

After killing a raven in the forest, a king is cursed by the bird's owner. The only way to break the curse is to find a woman with “skin white as marble, lips red as scarlet, and hair black like the raven's wing.” Such is the story behind 18th century dramatist Carlo Gozzi's play The Raven . Gozzi wrote fairy tales for a Commedia Dell'Arte troupe in Venice. The story has been adapted by Ellen Stewart at La MaMa ETC, and transformed in a musical set in China and utilizing traditional theatrical elements from that country. The dazzling adaptation proves that some stories are universal, able to cross cultural, geographical, and time boundaries. Hoping to help his brother, King Millo, escape from the curse, Jennaro goes off in search a woman possessing the qualities needed to break the curse. He finds Armilla, the daughter of King Norando, a powerful magician. Jennaro soon finds out that should he give Armilla to King Millo, the king will be killed. And if he does not give Armilla to the king, Jennaro himself will turn into a statue. Caught in a rough spot, Jennaro does his best to save his brother, coming up against almost insurmountable obstacles.

Stewart's production of the fairy tale is mesmerizing. Three projection screens line the back wall, first showing ocean waves and a boat advancing towards the audience. When the boat nearly reaches the edge of the screen, a real boat emerges from behind and is assembled before the audience's eyes. The space of the entire theater is subsequently utilized, with scenes occurring in the walkway above and to the side of the audience, in the aisles, and on the large stage. It is a big idea and it is quite right that it should completely overtake a large space.

Musicians line the stage right side of the space. The music, composed by Stewart with Michael Sirotta, is a mix of both live and recorded music, often playing simultaneously and occasionally making it difficult to hear and comprehend the words sung by the performers. The difficultly in comprehending some of the words could also stem from the fact that they occasionally were in Mandarin, with an English translation (I assume) following.

The conventions of Commedia have been mostly replaced by conventions from the Beijing Opera. There are several dances throughout which feature twirling and flowing fabric and ribbons. Everything on stage is highly stylized, from the entrances and exits to the way in which the words are sung. Pantalone and Tartaglia, two ministers to the brothers, each have specific movements they perform before speaking. Additionally, the characters each have intricately painted faces and gaudily embroidered costumes. The change in theatrical style shows the way in which stories are able to float across the collective world and speak to different people at different times while retaining relevance.

The Raven is a spectacular production, from its story to to its music to its movement. Although one could guess that the ending will be happy, the final result of the tale is surprising, keeping the story above the level of predictability that commonly haunts fairy tales. The engaging tale and sparkling production values are sure to be enjoyed by anyone who should happen to venture into The Annex at La MaMa.

Keep The Change

A sleepy southern town receives an alarming wake up call the day Fatlinda Paloka moves in. As the self proclaimed matriarch of an Albanian family she has planted roots in Greenville, Georgia, opening a pizza store with food that is so addictive, the townspeople go through shaky, manic withdrawals when they do not have it. The world is changing for the town of Greenville the same way it is changing for veteran ad man Ray Crother (Brendan Wahlers) as he sits on a bench in Central Park contemplating the depths of his unhappiness.

In Marcy Wallabout’s production of The Resistible Rise of Fatlinda Paloka and Timothy Dowd’s Crother Spyglass we meet characters struggling to find acceptance, both for themselves and for the people around them. The two partnering plays have completely different stories but similar morals at their hearts. They also share something else - the same strengths and weaknesses.

The play’s strongest elements are their relatable, relevant themes that audiences can empathize with and attach themselves to. Their shared downfall is that the characters are not yet strong enough to shoulder the full weight of these themes.

Dowd’s play, Crother Spyglass, opens the evening, introducing the audience to Ray Crothers. Ray is an unhappy man and he takes that unhappiness out on Adam (Timothy McDonough) a young boy with the kind of earnest naiveté you will only find in a recent college grad.

Adam is eager to do his best in his new job as an assistant. However, his eagerness wanes when Ray tells him the job involves performing domestic tasks for their sadistic boss. Ray has allowed this boss to humiliate him on many occasions and looks forward to seeing those humiliations passed on to someone else.

Adam and another ambitious graduate student named, Christine (Erin Leigh Schmoyer) deliver a respectable message about confidence and self worth. Though they are young, they are able to see their CEO’s ridiculous demands for what they are – ridiculous. When Ray threatens them, “you gotta do what the boss says or you’ll get fired,” they look shocked at his audacity rather than afraid for their jobs.

Christine and Adam are nicely drawn supporting characters but Ray remains a question mark throughout. He is the story’s centerpiece and yet he never develops to the point where we understand why he allows himself to be subjected to this behavior. Why has it taken several years for him to see what these kids realized in an instant? Why has it taken him so long to accept that things need to change?

In the following piece, Wallabout’s The Resistible Rise of Fatlinda Paloka, the character’s need to accept change is much more overt. A wave of immigrants has washed into a small southern town led by the boisterous Fatlinda Paloka.

Fatlinda hints at a mysterious past, yet we never get more than a vague sense of what that past is. We also do not get a clear sense of who she is: a colorful character or a heartless witch? Does her family love and respect her drive to succeed or fear and hate her strong personality? And what should we, the viewer, feel towards her? Is she putting drugs in her pizza or merely displaying some superior cooking skills to bridge the cultural gap? Without knowing her true intentions it is hard to know if we should root for her success or hope for her failure.

Dowd and Wallabout’s plays feel like they have a lot to say, but they haven’t allocated their time well enough to say it. In Crother Spyglass more time is needed to get a handle on Ray Crothers’s true personality, and in The Resistible Rise of Fatlinda too much time is spent on sight gags and side stories that distract from the central plot.

The two productions have important social messages that they are trying to deliver. The themes are there and they are good themes, they just need stronger, clearer main characters to embody them.

An Angry and Revealing Hedwig

You want to see a play, that friend of yours who hates plays is in town, and wants to go to a concert, and has brought along someone whose only interest is politics. And drag queens. And hates Broadway musicals. The solution? John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s cult rock-drag-politics and decidedly anti-traditional 1998 musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now directed by Marc Eardley, for 3S Theatre Collective, at the Barrow Mansion in Jersey City. If you haven’t seen this show yet, then you’ve probably been living in the title character’s wig box. Mitchell and Trask’s whimsical allusions and wordplay span the Platonic creation myth to cold war history, playfully revealing connections between topical problems and existential mysteries. Trask’s music competes easily with the rock classics of which Hedwig sings snatches throughout his mid-gig banter. Whitton’s spirited performance will delight the show’s fans while showing the previously uninitiated why Hedwig has become a legend.

In that legend, Hansel Schmitt (played by sonorous cabaret singer and actor Jonathan Whitton) hates life in East Berlin, with his quasi-fascist drone of a mother, and without his sexually abusive father, an American soldier sometime stationed in West Berlin. Like his mother, Hansel is soon seduced by an American “sugar daddy” in uniform, who offers him a new life in Kansas, the part of America famously located on the oppressive, grey side of the Rainbow Curtain. Hence a botched sex change, which turns Hansel into one Mrs. Hedwig Robertson, saddled with an “angry inch” of his natural genitalia, and, soon, reams of abandonment, loss, anger, and artistic inspiration.

The biggest loss of Hedwig’s life, however, is either his American soul mate, army brat and famous rocker Tommy Gnosis, who fled from the indeterminateness of his “angry inch” and own confusion, or Hedwig’s passionately-authored songs, which Tommy stole and presented to the world as his own. While performing a gig in a hideous dive on the night of one of Tommy’s big commercial concerts, Hedwig finally reveals all, and tries to work out how he is incomplete, and whether he can put himself together again.

I say “he” and “his,” in contrast to most authors writing on this play and its film adaptation, because that is the best way to describe Hedwig. Unlike the other iconic East German transgender character, the heroine of Doug Wright’s Pulitzer-winning drama I Am My Own Wife, Hedwig does not become a woman because he has always felt like one, or ever felt like one, but because the laws on both sides of the Iron Curtain will not allow him to marry his GI Joe while remaining a man. Hedwig arguably does not see himself as a woman, but as a mutilated gay man. He describes his “angry inch” as the place “where my vagina never was.” He resists facile identification as a woman, or with either side of the various walls that cut up his world, and ours.

Disturbingly, Hedwig has brought with him more than an inch of baggage from Germany. Throughout the show, he disparages and maltreats his “husband” and roadie Yitzhak (Louise Stewart), an Eastern European Jewish drag king (or is Yitzhak a drag queen, appearing not in drag, simply played by a woman?). “Atrocity, for man, woman… or freak,” Hedwig announces as he liberally spritzes perfume in Yitzhak’s face. As Hedwig’s dissolution increases, Yitzhak rebels, reaching for the human dignity and choices.

As Hedwig, Whitton is vehement, tragicomic, and, yes, extremely angry. Stewart gives a subtler performance as Yitzhak. She shows moments of fatigue, hatred, and subversion, but generally the character remains a device, without a full-fledged self. The band accompany the two actors with great verve and powerful sound, though sometimes it was a bit too powerful, muffling the specific wording of Hedwig’s rage.

Stephen K. Dobray’s set is minimal but effective, consisting only of the instruments and sound equipment of Hedwig and her “Angry Inch” band, some battered luggage, and a wall covered with graffiti. Some of the graffiti seemed to make the time-setting confusing. Hedwig arrived in Kansas in time for the fall of the Berlin Wall, but one graffiti slogan is “Impeach Bush”—imaginable only a decade later, unless it refers to the first president of that name.

Hedwig’s costumes, relatively simple concoctions of hot pink plastic, black leather, and gold lame, look suitably like the detritus of the 1980s. Designed by Laurie Marman, they aren’t as cheekily creative as they might be: the original Off-Broadway Hedwig’s blonde ringlets were shaped by toilet paper tubes. However, they are just ostentatious enough to articulate the character’s media-created glam-trash ideal of American womanhood.

“If there was a fourth wall,” Hedwig warns the audience, “you couldn’t see the actors.” This genre-bending, gender-bending piece, as realized by 3S, is transformatively revealing.

Theater on the Edge

How did theater fail America? In his incisive, entertaining, and often poignant monologue, acclaimed writer and performer Mike Daisey’s answer might surprise you. A pungent mix of raw personal experience and savvy cultural critique, How Theater Failed America is both a sensitive self-reflection and an emphatic call to arms. And, however you think you might answer the central question right now, Daisey will challenge your ideas about what theater is, what it has become, and what it could be. Seated behind a table on a bare stage, with only a stack of notes and a glass of water for company, Daisey admits right away that the title of his show is all wrong. “You should not have come here,” he declares, since most likely we already know (or think we know) what the show will be about: Disney’s homogenization of theater into a gooey tourist commodity; the distractions of iPods and other technology; the ever-dwindling state of arts funding; and the debilitating taste pronouncements of all-powerful theater critics at the New York Times.

But, instead of pointing a finger at those shadowy outside forces, Daisey implicates himself and us, the audience stuck in the “stifling dark”: “You did it, I did it, we did it.” The problem is not so much how theater failed America, he says, but how theater became America (the alternate title an artistic director friend proffered for the show).

This all probably sounds very Michael Moore, and in some ways the similarities are there—like the controversial documentary auteur, Daisey is also a larger-than-life force working to upend and revolutionize his art form. However, Daisey’s approach, although it can be in-your-face and demanding, is gentler. Although he is sharply critical of how theater is breaking down, he holds up and reveres those moments when it has worked and when it has made a difference; in short, why we will always so desperately need it in our culture. He’s from the theater and for the theater, and his project draws on personal anecdotes to create a reverent, yet cautionary, love letter.

Flashing back to his youth in a sparsely populated region of western Maine, Daisey offers vibrant anecdotes about the people and places that enchanted him with the theater: his “madman” college theater director Dick Sewell, who bounded over theater seats to give his cast inspired notes; the summer Daisey and five friends ran their own small theater company at a small resort, playing all of the roles, doing all of the technical work, and subsisting on Ramen; and directing a scrappy group of high-school students in a one-act play competition.

As a teenager, watching plays rotating in repertory one summer, Daisey became obsessed with “the space between the plays,” cherishing the opportunity to see actors change roles and change missions, all within “a small world, constantly transforming.” With his wide eyes, wild gestures, and dramatic intonation, Daisey’s enthusiasm is infectious, but so is his despair; he brackets joyful memories with the deep chasms he has discovered dotting the larger theater scene.

Instead of a vibrant community, Daisey finds a regional landscape peppered with “glorified roadhouses,” where actors are flown in for compact, three-and-a-half-week rehearsal periods. Theater, he discovers, has become something of a machine, more of a corporation than a group of plucky, hard-working people.

I won’t give away much more, even though it’s tempting—indeed, I found myself taking more notes here than at almost any other production I’ve attended. But Daisey’s devotion to theater is never more apparent than when he reveals how theater brought him out of a depressive, suicidal year of his life. And his epiphany while performing at a small theater in Seattle—as an unlikely character doing an unspeakable deed—makes for both sidesplitting comedy and searing commentary.

Daisey made big theater news in April 2007 when, during a performance of his monologue Invincible Summer at the American Repertory Theater, 78 audience members walked out in protest, one of them unceremoniously upturning Daisey's ever-present water glass, soaking his notes. Ostensibly, the conservative school group was offended by the show’s profanity, and while Daisey does throw in the occasional F-bomb, he artfully balances shock value with sincere testimonial.

In How Theater Failed America, Daisey shapes personal experience into a stirring action plan. Theater is about creation, and as he outlines his perspective on the state of the art, Daisey leaves it to us to take the next step. A single ghost light on the stage fades as Daisey begins his monologue, as if his bright, energized voice were poised to beam out for all of us. It glows again as Daisey concludes—a reminder to keep the stage illuminated whenever, wherever, and however we can.

Check out www.mikedaisey.com for information on post-show roundtables with theater professionals that will take place throughout the month of June.

Molding an Image

In his new play, Edward Albee for the first time writes about a real person, sculptor Louise Nevelson. Born in 1899 outside Kiev, Russia, of Jewish parents, Nevelson immigrated with her family at age 6 to join her father in Rockland, Maine, where he had gone before. Eventually she left for New York and became a major American artist. Though Albee’s choice may seem baffling, the artists have a lot in common. Albee’s late partner was a sculptor, and Nevelson was a friend for many years. Albee makes much of Nevelson’s struggle to be accepted as an artist—to “occupy” her space. It’s easy to forget that his own star waned during the 1970s and 1980s, until he stormed back with Three Tall Women in 1992. After a series of flops like The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, and Malcolm, nothing he wrote would have been advertised as “Edward Albee’s ——,” as this play is. (“Occupant” is a sign the dying Nevelson had placed outside her hospital door to stymie streams of visitors.)

There are other parallels. Nevelson battled alcoholism, as Albee did, and both were bedeviled by parental issues. On her own, Nevelson dealt with an unhappy marriage, an unwanted child who later became a sculptor himself, a series of lovers, and a struggle to be recognized as a woman in a man’s world. “With any luck,” says Nevelson, “you turn into whoever you want to be, and with even better luck you turn into whoever you should be. No, you got somebody in you right from the start, and if you’re lucky you figure out who it is and you become it.”

The reinvention of oneself is a significant American preoccupation, and the artist who fights through pain and childhood misery to follow his dream is a theme that echoes throughout American drama, from The Glass Menagerie to A Chorus Line. Albee is free to rework those themes, but he hasn’t done enough to spruce up their overfamiliarity.

In Occupant, Nevelson’s interviewer (Larry Bryggman, playing the Man) knows all about her, and his measured, chronological review of her life has few sparks, unless you count Nevelson’s periodic exasperation at the Man’s assertions, and his occasional fluster at discovering something he didn’t know. Albee supplies a few low-intensity flourishes: Nevelson (Mercedes Ruehl), for instance, is giving the interview post mortem. She is astonished that the Man must explain who she is―it’s only 20 years since she died, after all. “You have to introduce me?” she asks. “People don’t know who I am?” Man: “People who knew you know you.” The point—that she’s vain, that her image as an outrageously clad Artist (with a capital A) is more famous than her work—registers quickly, but the give-and-take goes on and on, as if it were a plot twist on the order of Hedda Gabler’s burning Lovborg’s manuscript.

Director Pam MacKinnon has gotten two outstanding performances from Ruehl and Bryggman. The former creates a fascinating monstre sacré: a vain, assertive, querulous egoist. The flashy clothes are there, down to double-layered sable eyelashes. (Ruehl’s natural contribution is strikingly long fingers, like those of a basketball player, which Nevelson was as a teenager.) Designer Jane Greenwood has dressed Ruehl in wildly colorful clothing, a Nevelson trademark, accessorized with a large metal necklace that looks like an ancient key that Indiana Jones would use to unlock a subterranean chamber. Bryggman’s natty interviewer, for his part, communes with the audience through sly glances and skeptical looks, and he baits Nevelson cunningly.

Even though the actors help offset the dryness of the presentation, MacKinnon has treated the text with excessive deference. For example, early on the Man says, “No offence” and Nevelson responds, “None taken. Is that what they say… none taken?” Later, reaching for a word, she asks, “You know you’ll never fit in; you know you’ll always be a … an exotic, is that the word?”

Now, a woman of 88 who lived in the United States from age 6 would know the simple idioms of a language she's been speaking all that time. She would know what “exotic” means, so Nevelson's uncertainty makes little sense. But it serves to keep the ball rolling, so to speak, because Albee's play has few dramatic thrills or surprises, merely points of interest. As heartfelt as the author's admiration for Nevelson is, Occupant is likely to please only art enthusiasts and his own devotees.

Best-Laid Plans

Michael Frayn is best known for two wildly different plays: the farce Noises Off (1982) and the particle-physics drama Copenhagen (1998). Yet, in all his plays his preoccupation is the same: man’s disastrous attempt to impose order on his surroundings, and the way life resists. In Benefactors, his dark-humored 1985 follow-up to Noises Off, he focuses on two couples. One, David and Jane, live a comfortable middle-class existence in London. David, an architect, has won the job of providing low-cost housing in southwest London (very unfashionable and gritty back then) in a project called Basuto Road. Meanwhile, their friends, Colin and Sheila, are having some marital troubles. Colin belittles his wife and treats her condescendingly. Jane suggests that David hire Sheila part-time to help boost her self-esteem, and from that benevolent impulse comes nearly a decade of disasters.

Frayn is satirizing liberal do-goodism, and his echoes of Ibsen (the architect Solness in The Master Builder, as well as the well-meaning but inept Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck) suggest the depths of his seriousness. Anyone expecting door-slamming farce should be forewarned. The humor here is grim, and the situation is bleak.

David, played with rationalism and openness and a necessary touch of the milquetoast by James Arden, finds himself beset by building codes, underground power cables, open-space advocates, and public opposition, and to each he must cede a part of his vision. “I’m not going to build towers,” he says initially. “No one wants to live in a tower.” But David’s frustration builds as his original concept of homes surrounding a courtyard in the style of Cambridge University eventually becomes two 15-story skyscrapers to accommodate all the outside interests.

As David’s project is undermined, so is his wife’s rehabilitation of their neighbors’ lives. Sheila, played with querulous apprehension by Francine Margolis, who’s a bit too physically sturdy to be completely persuasive as the mousy waif, but is otherwise excellent (though dressed unflatteringly), is secretly in love with David, but she flounders at taking care of all the work that children and home require (she can’t drive). Sheila is continually belittled by Ian Gould’s prickly Colin, a journalist whose skepticism has curdled into contempt.

Meanwhile, Jane, played with a wry forthrightness by Lisa Blankenship, is trying to get herself out of the house. She’s a trained anthropologist and resists being David’s helper: “I hate helping people,” she says. “I want to study them.” As Sheila becomes more entwined in the lives of David and Jane, Colin becomes more isolated. He leaks information about David’s plans to the press, and pretty soon Sheila decides she has to leave him. Jane and David become her reluctant benefactors and take in her and her children.

As is the practice of Folding Chair Classical Theatre, which concentrates on text and actors, there is virtually no scenery—a table and four chairs for David’s architectural study; a small stool with a telephone; and upstage, a bar that holds drinks and a coffeepot. The rest is a black box. The virtue of such a production is that it focuses attention on the text and the playing of the piece, and the skilled cast brings forth Frayn’s psychological complexity pretty well.

“You want everyone to love you,” says Jane to Colin, “or you want everyone to love you in spite of being hateful.” Later, when Colin accuses Jane of hating Basuto Road, Jane’s stunned reaction is superbly revealing. Nevertheless, a play about architecture almost cries out for a visual metaphor or some indication of the class of people who inhabit it, especially as it moves from bourgeois comfort to the dilapidated squat where the disgruntled Colin eventually finds himself.

Apart from that, the particulars of Frayn’s play have dated, certainly; today no one would think of housing the poor in towers, and yet towers are highly desirable as middle- and upper-class residences, at least in New York. And the language of social engineering in England is different from what it is here, so there’s a linguistic barrier that presents an obstacle to one’s understanding. Still, Folding Chair’s resurrection of Benefactors, and the company’s emphasis on the text and the actors, is admirable, and it offers a useful, if limited, revisitation of this overlooked work.

A Dog Eat Dog World

Acting is all about choices. What do the characters want? How do they resolve to get it? When confronted with a number of options, what decision do they make? In improvisation, actors strive to make bold and immediate choices. Consequently, when Dan Safer, artistic director of the avant-garde, improv-heavy theatre troupe Witness Relocation decided to base a new work on Behavioral Choice Theatre, the resulting work, Vicious Dogs on Premises, cuts to the essence of theatre. In this examination of life in a dystopian land of doglike humans, Witness Relocation examines the relationship of choice to oppression, freedom, fear and happiness. An episodic work, Vicious Dogs consists of a number of vignettes and improvs divided by the ringing of a bell, like a horrific combination of boxing match—or perhaps dogfight?—and game show. Scenes scripted by Innovative Theatre Award-winning playwright Saviana Stanescu give the work structure and momentum, while the unscripted parts are closely tied to the scenes’s themes.

The casting of the show's four performers in the various etudes and scenes, and the order in which they are presented, are determined at random at the beginning of each performance. This allows as many combinations of the play's parts as hands dealt from a scrupulously shuffled deck of playing cards. Each night, the actors, devoid of choice, play the hand they are dealt. So too, Witness Relocation suggests, do many people outside the playhouse. In an oppressive state, people have no choices, but are certainly not free and often not happy. The question this juxtaposition raises is broad and frightening: do we want to have a choice, about anything? Does it take courage to demand to have choices, or maturity to make them?

Across the board, the performers an co-choreographers (Heather Christian, Sean Donovan, Mike Mikos and Laura Berlin Stinger—are agile dancers. When playing dogs, they are eerily doglike. In one scene, each of the four mimetically transforms into a different sort of dog, ranging in facial expression and movement from the fanatical rambunctiousness of a retriever to the bared-teeth, leash-straining grimace of a more menacing canine. They work well as an ensemble: no individual performer dominates the piece, and a scene in which a majority of three interrogate the odd one out shows the trio operating as if with one mind.

Kaz Phillips’s video art, on screens set in the upstage wall is somewhat less vital. The image of a bare lightbulb in the interrogation scene is clever but hardly unexpected or shocking. Anatomical drawings of the insides of dogs add nothing to the dialogue and dance, and sometimes distract the viewer from the live performance.

Sometimes the topicality seems a bit strained. According to the press release, the plight of Michael Vicks's abused dogs, “trained to fight” and therefore permanently unsocializable, inspired Safer “to muse on how much people, too, can heal after they are tortured in their own lives.” One of the improv scenes consists of a woman reporting on the latest vapid news gleaned from surveillance of celebrities. Whatever violation of privacy "Amy Winehouse" has endured lately, it seems, is not exactly torture. In the scripted scenes, “torture” ranges from the genuinely horrific (Abu Ghraib) to the “torture” of having loved and lost in a cynical urban dating scene dominated by computers. Stanescu's tongue-in-cheek depiction of the latter situation keeps things in perspective.

In Vicious Dogs, Stanescu and company make trenchant observations about our dog-eat-dog world in sharply visual, kinetic ways.

Born Again

With both tragic and triumphant results, teen pregnancy has pushed its way beyond depressing news statistics and into popular culture: in Broadway’s Spring Awakening, Wendla’s unplanned pregnancy puts her on a catastrophic path, while in the sunnier movie Juno, the title character gamely faces her pregnancy armed with sharp wit and a hipster soundtrack. And it seems that nobody is immune from problematic conception. The 2004 film Saved! threw a pregnant teenager into the least welcoming environment imaginable: a fundamentalist Christian high school. A good-natured spoof on the idiosyncrasies of organized religion, Saved has now been resurrected as an honest-to-goodness, singing, dancing musical. With its flashy design, spirited cast, and kicky choreography, it’s a wonder the title lost its exclamation point somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, it also lost much of the gleeful, goofy spoofiness that made it such a cult favorite.

Many of the characters in Saved have extremely good intentions. When, at the beginning of their senior year, Mary’s longtime boyfriend Dean confides in her that he thinks he’s gay, she decides to consummate their relationship in order to “save” him, taking sage advice from Jesus—of course!—who appears to her in a vision. The shared intimacy doesn’t do the trick, however, as Mary’s pious BFF Hillary Faye catches wind of the secret and alerts the school. Dean is shipped away to a detention center called Mercy House to be cured of his “faggotry"; Mary winds up pregnant, alienated from her straight-and-narrow popular friends and smothered in baggy K-mart clothing.

As far as committed Christians go, and as played by the wistful, plaintive Celia Keenan-Bolger, Mary is as devout as they come—she’s part of a praise-happy vocal trio called the “Christian Jewels” and a regular member of “P-Group” (translation: prayer group). But when she steps outside of her comfort zone, Mary finds acceptance with the school’s outsiders: Cassandra, a rebel Jewish transfer student, and Roland, Hillary Faye’s younger, wheelchair-bound, and avowedly atheist brother. In addition to these and other assorted teenage dramas, the plot folds in a blossoming yet forbidden romance between Mary’s widowed mother, Lillian, and the school’s unhappily married principal, Pastor Skip.

At two and a half hours, Saved attempts to cover a lot of ground, but ultimately loses its focus. Slipping back and forth across the line between spoof and sincerity, it’s sometimes hard to know whether you’re being preached at or performed to.

Still, the comedy, often derived from the exaggerated behavior of the overtly religious, frequently hits its mark. Lines like “We’re psyched for His arrival!” and “Can’t you get with the Lord?” craftily wed Christian rhetoric with trendy teen-speak. And the devious Hillary Faye, played to pert perfection by the charismatic Mary Faber, is a walking fountain of hypocrisy and righteousness—she immediately dubs newcomer Cassandra “a good get for God,” and her blithe, deluded fantasy of “Heaven” is one of the show's strongest musical moments.

But these tart scenarios lose their zing when mired in the rest of the middling material. The music is particularly disappointing. Written by the prodigious Michael Friedman (who pens magnificent, witty material for the renegade theater troupe The Civilians), this score rarely coheres into anything catchy or memorable. Perhaps aiming to fit the material, it settles into the realm of the pseudo, and the resulting songs lack a distinctive personality: we’re stuck with pseudo rock, pseudo rap, and pseudo musical theater. Even the lyrics lack energy: one particular phrase rhymes “screwy” with “life buoy.” Silly? Yes. Spoofy? Maybe. But within this confused show, it’s hard to separate intentional, ironic “bad” writing from just plain bad writing.

Perhaps if it were focused and trimmed to 90 minutes, the show could find a more resonant core. The talent is certainly there: designers Scott Pask (set) and Donald Holder (lights) have created a dazzling back wall covered in a panel of lights, cross-cut into squares to evoke stained-glass windows; Sergio Trujillo (Jersey Boys) has given the girl trio some snappy moves; and the young cast is armed with fistfuls of energy. Veteran performers John Dossett and Julia Murney are wasted in the grown-up roles, but they valiantly struggle to hold up their wispy storyline.

As Mary’s mother, Murney delivers one of the more poignant, “real” messages about religion—in short, that it’s more important to have faith than to follow a strict list of rules. Although Saved often eerily echoes the damaging repression constricting the nineteenth-century teenagers in Spring Awakening, Lillian’s redemptive words would never be offered by Wendla’s unforgiving mother. Repression may always be part of our culture, but here, at least, we are presented with more than one way to be Saved.

Say What?

Stomp and Shout an’ Work it All Out is about one of the strangest cases in FBI history. The story takes place between 1964 and 1966 – the two year span that it took for the FBI to decipher the lyrics to the popular rock ‘n’ roll song "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen. The lyrics presented a problem to government officials, who suspected that the screechy words might be obscene. Unfortunately, lead singer Jack Ely’s voice is too garbled to know for certain. If the lyrics are obscene, they would violate the Interstate Transportation of Obscene Material act, subjecting the singers, producers and everyone involved with the song’s distribution to severe fines and prosecution. Playwright James Carmichael has created a play with several interesting layers. He has captured the feeling of restless uncertainty in an era when the nation was changing and teenagers were starting to realize that their country was more concerned with censoring their music than protecting them from war. Fortunately, there are also some memorable and relatable characters that elevate this play to something more than a timeline of history.

The acting is so real that at times the story feels more like a documentary. Carmichael has a clear sense of who his characters are and what has happened in their past to make them the way they are now. The production features a large ensemble of actors: parents, political figures, federal agents, hippies, teenagers, and other brief, but pivotal roles where various actors use their brief scenes to make a tremendous impact.

One such actor is Khris Lewin, who plays Marv Schlacter, a self-righteous producer that distributed the record. Lewin is an unmovable force, impossible for the FBI to ruffle. But, despite his obnoxious level of confidence, he is the hero of the scene. The FBI investigation is ridiculous, and he is one of the few people unafraid to say so.

Brian D. Coats also has a brief but story-defining moment portraying a down-on-his-luck songwriter, Richard Berry. Coats walks with a limp and slowly buttons a faded musician’s jacket, his movements telling a story of hard times and difficult circumstances.

At the heart of Stomp and Shout an’ Work it All Out is a quieter drama, a fading bond between a hardened father, Ray (Frank Rodriguez) and his feisty teenage daughter (Katrina Foy). Rodriguez plays Ray, the father torn between his duties to the FBI to investigate this song and his responsibilities at home as a single parent. Ray shows a softer side in the dark, smoke-filled interrogation rooms, suggesting that perhaps there is an empathetic human beneath that steel façade. His partner, Chris, (Jeremy Schwartz) tends to frighten his subjects into silence, whereas Ray’s gentle, understanding tone coaxes the information out of them.

It is hard to say whether Stomp and Shout an' Work It All Out is a comedy or a drama. The same elements of the story that make it humorous also make it horrifying. It is amazing to think that during one of the most politically charged times in history the FBI spent two years investigating the origins of a rock ‘n’ roll song.

The popularity of Louie Louie is often credited to its having a catchy rhythm rather than an important message. Fortunately, the same cannot be said about Stomp and Shout an’ Work It All Out. There is certainly a juicy background, as there always is when dealing with political intrigue, but the characters touch your heart, and, in the end, we are left with much more melody.

In 1966, the FBI officially closed the investigation into Louie Louie’s lyrics, concluding that the song is too unintelligible to interpret as obscene or otherwise. So what are those garbled words Jack Ely was screaming into the microphone the day he recorded the song? The world may never know.

Stephen Burdman: Making Theatre a Walk in the Park

Stephen Burdman serves as Artistic Director of the New York Classical Theater. Every summer, New York Classical presents several productions of free, minimalist promenade, or roving classical theatre in Central Park, near the 103rd Street / Central Park North entrance. This year's repertoire includes Cymbeline, reviewed this month by offoffonline.

Q: Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's least-often produced plays. Why did you choose it for New York Classical's 2008 production?

Stephen Burdman: Our mission is to present "popular classics and forgotten masterpieces" - and I think that Cymbeline fits very well into the latter part of our mission. I also happen to love the play - I directed it in 2002 at NYU's Tisch School for the Arts. Louis Scheeder, Director/Founder of the Classical Studio and Dean of Faculty at NYU Tisch School for the Arts, is directing the current production. When I approached him to work for us, this was one of the plays that he wanted to do. Our audience has also seen many Shakespeare productions from us - ten, in fact - and I felt that this was an important play to which they should be exposed.

Q: Cymbeline famously occupies an intriguingly ambiguous place in terms of genre. What is it? A comedy? A tragicomedy? A romance? Something else? And does it matter?

Burdman: For me, I really don't think it matters. In fact, much like The Winter's Tale - which one of my board members describes as a "greatest hits" of Shakespeare: Magic, Comedy, Tragedy, et cetera. Since the first great tragic-comedy, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, I feel audiences are open to the mixing of genres. For me, this makes the piece more interesting.

Q: It is certainly a fascinating piece. This year, Lincoln Center Theatre presented Cymbeline, starring Martha Plimpton, Michael Cerveris, and Phylicia Rashad. How does your Cymbeline differ from that one?

Burdman: Well, first of all, it is outside. Second, it is roving - each scene takes place in a different location and the audience follows the play from place to place as the performance moves from scene to scene within twelve acres of Central Park. Third, there is no scenery. And fourth, all of our rehearsals and performances are free and open to the public. I am not able to tell you the differences in the productions, as I never saw the Lincoln Center production, but ours is very interactive and runs two hours, without an intermission.

Q: Your summer 2007 show, George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, is a brilliant comedic classic, but also a disturbing satire of army recruitment for unpopular and unintelligible wars. Contemporary parallels were inescapable. Contrarily, Lincoln Center's Cymbeline has been called an "escapist" play, and even criticized for its supposed lack of modern relevance. How does your Cymbeline speak to contemporary society?

Burdman: Our produciton of Cymbeline is about relationships - father to daughter, father to sons, husbands to wives, brothers to sister, friends to friends and many more. Plays become classics when they are able to reach beyond their contemporary audiences and reveal something essential to the human condition. Cymbeline does this through relationships.

Q: What is up next for you and New York Classical?

Burdman: This summer we are presenting Macbeth throughout Battery Park/Castle Clinton (6/26-7/12) and then George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance - our first Shaw - in Central Park (7/31-8/24). In the summer of 2009, we will be celebrating our 10th Anniversary Season with a production of King Lear in Central Park followed by The Tempest in Battery Park. We will close that season with a Moliere comedy in August 2009 in Central Park. Plans are also underway for 2010, but are not secured yet.