Pretty as a Picture

The aims of a playwright are not so different from those of a painter—both endeavor to present a representation of life that is viewed through the prism of their ideals. In Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, Joel Gross has crafted such a richly imagined portrait of the life of the Queen, a friend, and their lover, that it’s easy to forget one’s history. With exquisite performances from the actors, the viewer is drawn into this fictional microcosm—a portrait in miniature that allows Gross to tell a sweeping tale that covers 20 years of the Queen’s life, leading up to the Revolution. If the ways in which history is bent to the interest of the artist are a bit too perfect, the flawless acting and the grace of the direction make it seem natural. After all, such perfection is expected, and admired, in a work of art. In Gross’s story, Marie is a pawn in the perverse love games of two manipulators: Elisabeth Louise Vigee le Brun, a beautiful young portraitist, and Count Alexis de Ligne, an ironic liberal. At the start of the play, Elisabeth, played with cruel flippancy by Samantha Ives, is seeking to gain royal favor to further her career. The opening scene sketches and nearly fills in her character: a charming, witty, but highly insensitive woman of low birth. The unevenness of the character—sometimes malicious, at other times tearful, gives Ms. Ives occasional trouble, but overall she manages Elisa’s mood swings and her impressive self-importance adroitly.

As Elisa paints she spars with her more-than subject, the Count, whom she mocks for his nobility. Their early flirtations humorously establish the tensions that will later tear them, and France, apart. At this point, however, class is the butt of every joke, and Elisa commands each punch line. Until Marie Antoinette, the 19-year-old Queen of France shows up, occasionally interfering, but also unintentionally fulfilling the painter and the Count’s designs. Though guileless and woefully stupid, the seemingly innocent Queen upsets the relations between the duo, setting in motion a dangerous ménage et trois that imperils them all.

As Marie, Amanda Jones is perfectly regal and excitingly free. In particular, in a scene in which Marie details the horrors of her deflowering by her husband, Louis XVI, Jones is as lovely as a portrait and yet refuses to remain still—she is the buzzing center of energy around which the other characters revolve. And despite her flaws, her girlish infatuations, and her ignorance, Jones’s Marie is quite sympathetic.

In rendering Marie as a hopelessly and helplessly sweet person Gross uses his boldest strokes. By making Marie sympathetic (a trait that emphasizes the wicked guile of those who use her), his queen is the victim. At one point Elisa says Marie was “born to be devoured by the mob.” Her friends who have likewise devoured her are therefore responsible for setting her downfall in motion.

Of course, with such a pathetic Marie at its center, the play gives little credit to what the Queen refers to as “the rabble.” The mob beyond Versailles is given voice through Alexis (an admirably game Jonathan Kells Phillips), who is made out to be an idealistic fool. By extension, the Revolution is represented as chaotic folly. While Marie falls victim to the intriguers, the revolting peasants are lawless monsters who cruelly mock the imprisoned Marie by giving her funeral flowers. Gross reverses the traditional caricature: while Marie is a fleshed out character with a range of emotions (not reduced to one fateful line), the peasantry is a faceless mob making impossible demands and baseless accusations.

Director Robert Kalfin puts the finishing touches on Gross’s portrait by placing his actors within frames onstage, with appropriately dramatic lighting and posturing. The audience’s gaze lingers the exquisite details of court life, specifically the costumes, designed by T. Michael Hall, which are gorgeous representations of the sumptuousness Elisa endeavors to capture on canvas.

In keeping with Gross’s tightly woven narrative, he uses controlling metaphors to emphasize the play’s themes. At its height, the era’s elegance is reflected in an impeccably dressed and mannered (i.e. silent) footman (Hugo Salazar, Jr.) who gracefully introduces characters and scenes. As the terror mounts, the footman becomes increasingly surly until he finally tosses off his powdered wig in anger. Standing in for the disgruntled peasantry, the footman is a simple means of representing the emotions of the lower class.

This representation underscores the focus of the show: the peasants are the unseen and unknown beyond the palace. Far more important to this story are the rises and falls of Marie’s temperament, and status. Though the victimization of Marie, and the opportunism of both Elisa and the playwright, can be frustrating given the historical context, the play is a touching, humorous portrait of the things in its frame.

Beat Down

The revival of Tom O’Neil’s Kerouac opens auspiciously. As a frenetic jazz track plays in the background, we observe the fabled writer of On the Road and other tales of the Beat Generation, typing feverishly at a Royal manual typewriter. The play’s program promises appearances by Jack Kerouac’s fascinating colleagues, partners in crime and fellow travelers, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. This reunion has all the makings of a juicy and captivating spectacle. Unfortunately, even at only an hour long, Kerouac quickly becomes tedious and ultimately fails to satisfy. The play takes place on the evening of Kerouac’s death. Though appearing much younger and far less weathered than the 47-year-old author would have looked in October 1969, actor John William Schiffbauer certainly fits the romantic, idealized part. Handsome, wearing summer loungewear and casual slacks, he resembles the youthful version of the writer in many of the photographs that survive.

As Kerouac retches from cirrhosis of the liver in his final hours, the ghosts of Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and even a prostitute named "Red" appear to him. While Cassady pre-deceased Kerouac by some 20 months, Ginsberg didn’t actually die until 1997, so perhaps these ghosts are more accurately projections of Kerouac’s alcohol-drenched imagination.

Whatever they are, these projections sure do have bones to pick with the dying beatnik and with each other, and Kerouac has some choice words for them as well. Ceaselessly rehashing old and fairly well-documented rows, the characters berate each other for wasting prodigious talents, sleeping with each other’s lovers, being poseurs and posturers, being “full of crap,” and on and on, ad nauseum. Occasionally, the characters are given lines that seem more appropriate for the 1980s or even later. For example, at one point Cassady improbably utters, in something like valley speak, “Oh…my…Gawd!”

Casandera M.J. Lollar’s costume design works well for Schiffbauer but Halleluyah Walcott as Neal Cassady and Adam Thomas Smith as Allen Ginsberg resemble models from a J. Crew catalog, gearing up for a casual Friday at the office. Justin Field’s lighting is appropriately dim, like a jazz club or a lonely room, and Michael Flanagan’s direction is crisp, but neither can compensate for the script’s drawbacks.

Ginsberg, curiously, looks more like an accountant than a wild-haired poet, and is painted, perhaps inadvertently, as an annoyingly schoolmarmish and opportunistic entrepreneur, proudly tuned into the real world of publishing, chastising the other two for dumbly chasing women and alcohol. While Ginsberg was unquestionably a tireless promoter, responsible for much of the attention the Beats received, the reality is that Kerouac devoted as much time as did any of the them to seeking publication; he was relentless in getting On the Road and his earlier The Town and the City published.

Cassady, for his part, comes off primarily as a woman-stealing parasite, a soulless thief and con artist supreme. While he was all of these things, to an extent, and while all the Beats had serious moral failings, they were also complicated and torn individuals. Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty, the hero of On the Road, was far more than a con man, and that simply doesn’t come through in this play. For example, his rambling 16,000 letter to Kerouac actually inspired the latter’s stylistic technique for that groundbreaking work.

Also in the room with the expiring Kerouac are the projections of two freelance writers (Mickey Pizzo and William Gozdziewski), pouring over books, arguing over money and honing Kerouac’s 300-word obituary, due the next morning. One writer wants to play up Kerouac’s “womanizing” and scandals from the past while the other wants to emphasize Kerouac’s humanity and passion for the sacredness of life and sensuality, and experimentation and madness in the name of art. Their presence, while temporarily relieving the constant bickering of the three leads, does little to move the play forward.

There is little doubt that Jack Kerouac was a sour man at the end of his life. Drunk much of the time, bigoted and burned out, he disdained the flourishing hippie movement that he and his Beat compatriots had spawned. Yet, there is ample evidence that his many Beat comrades, particularly Ginsberg, revered him as the flawed but once holy catalyst of their own movement and, indeed, honored his accomplishments intensely, despite his numerous weaknesses, until the very end. They knew he was more than the sum of his parts; this play only gives us unsavory bits.

O’Neil portrays Kerouac best in a short soliloquy he gives Schiffbauer. In this all-too-brief absence of the Ginsberg and Cassady characters pointing fingers at each other, Kerouac poignantly attempts to encapsulate his beliefs, passions and desires.

Here are three of the most important and exciting literary and counter-cultural figures of the 20th century. Yet, they are not at all interesting in Kerouac. O’Neil’s nearly exclusive fixation on the sniping and bitterness seems to have missed much of these men and their real importance. None of the three leads has the necessary depth or immersion in their characters to portray these complex figures; consequently, each seems one-dimensionally acidic—as someone you want to flee from, rather than get to know.

Stuck In a Bank, Stuck in a Life

It's a bank robbery gone wrong. The hostages have freed themselves from the rope that was holding them and are dancing with Heistman's henchmen. A detective is speaking to Heistman, the leader of the robbery, from a bullhorn, telling him the place is surrounded and that there is no escape. Yet, through it all, Heistman has the time to wax poetic on the meaning of happiness and love and fear. El Gato Teatro's Heistman is a beautiful and dense piece of dance theater. The music is pounding and catchy. The costumes are bright and skimpy. The movement is jerky, almost as if the characters are unsure of what they are meant to be doing. Heistman initially directs his henchman, telling them when to go, how to move, but seems to lag behind near the end, following instead of leading. Is this because the game is up? Or because he has found a deeper meaning in all this? The show is short, barely an hour, and leaves many questions. Did Heistman succeed? The detective informs him that he did a good job, but in the end, who is calling the shots, the henchman, the hostages, or Heistman?

Heistman is entertaining at the same time that it is thought-provoking. Anyone can get stuck somewhere, trapped in their own thoughts, trapped in an unfriendly situation. Life often backfires, and it is comforting to know that even if things do not go as planned, there is usually a way out. It's particularly nice if that way out includes catchy music and dance.

Heistman is playing as part of Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory 2008.

In Toronto It's Half the Size

When you open the newspaper in Toronto, you are likely to find the front pages filled with what New Yorkers might call "little things:" a handicapped man who had to pay a fine for using his wife's handicap sticker on his car; an op-ed urging the legalization of prostitution; a state environmental law slowly moving through the initial stages of confirmation by Parliament. Not much talk of war, corruption, lies and greed on the vast scale we're used to in the New York papers. In these same newspapers every July you'll also find listings for the dozens of plays at the Toronto Fringe Festival. The majority of these plays also come from a smaller perspective. They are plays about little things, sometimes about nothing at all. Those plays at the festival that do seem to be in dialogue with world events manage to be so in an understated way, without screaming out their timeliness and relevance in frenetic Big Apple style.

Out of the half dozen plays I caught at the festival, perhaps the most authentic Torontonian experience was sitting at the Pauper's Pub on Bloor Street with a pint of Keith's, watching the charmingly disarming Opera on the Rocks. Out of the midst of the drinkers, a group of four, their eyes glued to the hockey game on the TV screen, break into operatic song. He's open, pass the puck! Go, go, go, down the wing...oh shit." Using the mundane language of hockey spectators, the plain contemporary English of BFF's meeting for martinis on a TGIF, and the small talk of a horny bar fly, the company of talented singers make the most of this overly-dramatic theatrical form. Reminiscent of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's contrasting simplicity of language with grandeur of form, the opera takes the drama we all feel our lives infused with, and turns it into a collective joke. The result is a bar full of happy people laughing to their heart's content. In the funniest and most out-there scene in the opera, we witness a Lavalife date between two people whose online profiles enhance their height by a couple feet, their profession from nobodys to surgeons and even their skin color from one race to another. After the discovery of the mutual lies, the couple unites through their love of the local hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Within minutes he's on top of her on the bar dry humping as they orgasmically release names of Maple Leafs players to the air in operatic fervor.

On the other side of the vernacular spectrum, Pericles Snowdon's Bluebeard uses heightened poetic language, along with seasoned, controlled acting, to tell a grim version of a dark fairy tale. One of the strongest theatrical evenings at the festival, this imperfect British play arrived in Toronto after a run in both London and New York. From its description, Bluebeard seemed to be one of the few plays in the festival that directly addresses world events. Though it was written before the incestuous Austrian family had been revealed to the press and released from its twenty four year underground imprisonment, it is hard to ignore the story's echo in Bluebeard. The female ensemble portrays the story of four girls brought up in an underground dungeon, never allowed out by the girls' mother, Blue. Featuring the best acting I saw in the TFF (stand out performances include Andrea Runge as Piglet and Kat Lanteigne as Rooster), Snowdon's poetic control of the language drives the dark mood of the play along, touching along the way on issues of political subjugation, gender politics, and environmental disasters. The main question of the play, "Isn't it better to be put away somewhere safe than to get sent out to a world without a heart," is spoken too bluntly by the characters, and this thrusts the audience out of the play. In general the play is best when it is doing what the Fringe was created for - exploring new avenues for storytelling in a theatrical setting - and weakest when it follows the traditional path of the dramatic writer - tying up loose ends and providing explanations for characters' behavior, leading up to a culminating event. In David Metheson's production, these moments come across untidy and confusing, and pale in comparison to the rich, playful theatrical world created in the first half of the evening.

However, when watching this year's choice for Best New Play at the Fringe, you can't help but excuse the more interesting playwrights for trying to keep their work within a traditional frame. Rachel Blair's Wake is a well structured yet bland play about three brothers coming together at their father's funeral. The play's greatest strength lies in its oscillation between the present and the past, slowly revealing the memories that make up the emotional content of the brothers' relationship. Blair successfully uses her structure to portray the experience of a wake. And Frank Cox O'Connell gives a memorable performance as the shy Shane. Still, it's hard not to hope for more emotional engagement, as well as theatrical experimentation, from the winner of a major Fringe Festival.

One theatrical event that stood out as an interesting contemporary form was Barry Smith's American Squatter. More a presenter than an actor, Smith uses a projector connected to his laptop to tell the story of how the son of an L.A clean freak ends up squatting in London in "a zen-like state of disarray." Engaging and funny, Smith, a comic journalist from Boulder, Colorado, is in full control of his unique form. His ongoing use of video and photo footage, accompanied by entertaining PowerPoint-like amusement, gives American Squatter a twenty first century zing. In this moment, when the memoir seems to be encroaching upon the novel's status as king of the published word, Smith's theatrical memoir made a lot of sense inside the walls of Toronto's Factory Theater.

In the same space, I caught Balls, a two hander by Rob Salerno. Perhaps in a more American fashion than the vast majority of plays at the festival, the program for this Canadian play spoke directly about its political drive. A male response to The Vagina Monologues, Salerno felt that if the monologue is the appropriate form for women, the male experience is one of duality ("masculinity is not a one man show.") So the two characters play off of each other like boys do, cracking jokes about kicking each other in the nuts, about screwing each other's mothers, even going so far as the off-putting visual of a magazine dedicated to that singular type of sexual perversion, Clown Porn. But Balls does not stay in the mundane for long. Instead it travels to a challenging place for these male prototypes. Early in the play we watch Paul (Salerno) discover that he has testicular cancer. His buddy (Adam Goldhamer) helps him through the chemo, operations and other heavy ordeals, until, and this is where the play takes an unnecessary turn, he discovers that he too is sick with the same disease. "A real man needs only one," the play's T-shirt reads. Similarly, one case of testicular cancer would have been quite enough for the one play. Nonetheless, Salerno's staging is simple and direct, and the play ends with the moving picture of one man alone without his friend.

Balls is typical of many of the Canadian plays at the TFF in that it is on the Canadian Fringe circuit, making its way west from Montreal all the way to British Columbia. It's a summer of low budget stage fun for these little troupes, many of whom are making their first steps on the Canadian stage. The opportunity that the TFF, as well as the other Fringe Fests around the country offers is invaluable to many young theatricians. Also, all box office proceeds go directly to the companies.

The Fringe Fest culture in Canada has a long and wide-spread history, and you definitely feel it standing in the long lines to get into the shows. The festival is well established here, and most of the play-goers I spoke with were long time Fringe viewers who had already seen at least a handful of shows this year alone. The 2008 TFF had just under 150 shows, and sold close to 60,000 tickets. That's an average of almost 400 viewers per run. Unlike the New York Fringe, here every show helps spread the word about other performances in the Festival. Whether it's that helpful community vibe or the strong Fringe history in this country, audiences are sizeable, and in large part supportive.

Many Canadian theater professionals speak more highly of the upcoming Summer Works festival, showcasing new Canadian plays. That festival is juried, and so they say the quality tends to be higher. Acceptance into the Fringe, on the other hand, is by lottery (around one out of four submissions accepted), no jury involved, a system with its obvious pros and cons.

For someone who's been in the loud New York theater scene for close to a decade now, there is something enticing about the subdued quality of plays here (as well as the way they are presented and talked about.) While at moments it feels like they are just chickening out of saying what they have to say about the world, it also makes you look harder to find the meaning of the piece. Granted, often there's not much there to find aside from some cutesy dialogue or a gag, but when done properly it functions as an invitation for the audience to engage in the material in whatever way they choose. Everything doesn't have to be so damn big. Only in the US is a small coffee actually huge. In Toronto, it's half the size.

A Funny Kind of War

One always hopes that enterprising theater companies will unearth lost treasures, as the Mint and the Peccadillo have been doing for several years. The discovery of a 1977 artifact, Easy Outs, or the Adventures of Alphonse on the Lam, is laudable for the risk-taking EndTimes Productions, but unfortunately it’s valuable only as a signpost for the career of Chip Keyes, a performer of stand-up comedy in the 1970s who later went to Hollywood and has made a career of writing for television, notably Perfect Strangers. Nowadays, the f-word is everywhere in stand-up, but Easy Outs is quaintly of its time: It shuns blue language and tries to score comic points in the spirit of the Three Stooges, the Borscht Belt, and classic vaudeville. It’s 1969 and Alphonse (Alessandro Colla) has a low draft lottery number (one of a number of dated elements). Alphonse tells his girlfriend, Genevieve, that he’s leaving for “a small, neutral, peace-loving country.” He doesn’t want to be sent to Vietnam and killed, he says, although he doesn’t really articulate any philosophical opposition to the war. Genevieve (Sarah Scoofs), however, has romantic notions that Alphonse should resist the war, go to prison, and provide her with a reason to write folk songs about his suffering (a topical reference to Joan Baez, whose husband did time).

Once Alphonse reaches his destination, he is drafted into its military—the small, neutral, peace-loving country is at war. There follow various misadventures as the hero escapes from his unit and then assumes the identity of The Wolf, a guerrilla leader, and becomes ever more embroiled in armed struggles with cartoonish characters: a monocled, Nazi-accented sergeant; a money-grubbing monk; hungry, horny soldiers; and various fifth columnists. Director Russell Dobular has cast some game young actors who have backgrounds in improv and stand-up, and some of the gags work even when they lead nowhere, but not nearly enough.

For instance, Alphonse gets mixed up in an assassination plot with three inept (but well-played) revolutionaries: Jessica Ko is Gerta, the Maoist brains behind the dissidents; Sergio Fuenzalida is a vain, brainless guerrilla; and Marek Sapieyevski is Sam, a vaguely Eastern European agent secretly in love with Gerta. Their mantra is “The cause!”; when one of them declaims the phrase, the others immediately shout, “The cause!” It’s classic Three Stooges business, and Keyes’s feeling for this tried-and-true comedy is on target, though it’s overly familiar. Some of the byplay is moderately amusing—Fuenzalida is a cartoon Latino, but endearing in his stereotype.

Still, the whole is wildly uneven. Ray Chao can’t do much with the monk’s irritating mania of free-associating words: “Technically. Technicolor. Technology, technician, polytech, high-tech, Georgia Tech… Tech me out to da ball game!” Chao also adds a touchie-feelie feyness to the character that’s plain creepy. (Dobular also pushes too hard to get humor out of this scene—why should the monk bend over and reach between his legs to receive a payoff from Alphonse? Possibly because nothing else in the scene is funny, and he’s desperate for a laugh.) Keyes gives a similar shtick to The Wolf (Jeremy Pape) who, wounded and delirious, assumes various pop culture personas that stop the play cold. Both are characters that Robin Williams might pull off, but in the hands of anything less than genius they just fall flat.

As Alphonse, however, Alessandro Colla provides a charming, deftly reactive performance. He underscores the character’s naivete and bewilderment as he’s drawn more and more into various tangled webs in the episodic, ever-darkening plot. He’s a bit nebbishy and a bit inept, and yet he’s blessed with a klaxon voice that can he can shade into a gravelly murmur. One can believe he has the charisma to substitute for The Wolf. Adam P. Murphy also delivers a splendid but brief turn as a CIA agent.

EndTimes’s production values are effective but minimal: a raft with a sail, some tables and a bar, and a fountain help set various scenes. In fact, it has the feel of the Fringe Festival come early. Easy Outs is a young man’s play, one that shows a talent not yet fully formed but with an affinity for wordplay and low-comedy hijinks—it’s a small stepping-stone on the way to the sublime silliness of Perfect Strangers.

Out of Nowhere

No wonder TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi have a cult following among improvisation students across the country. These long-form improv masters, veterans of Chicago's famed Second-City and currently playing in a sporadic but open run at the Barrow Street Theater, are wildly gifted and a joy to watch. Creators of "insta-plays from scratch" according to their press kit, the two actors simply begin an entirely improvised 60-minute long play the moment the curtain goes up. The plays do not come from audience suggestions (as is the case with many improv shows) but instead sprout from nowhere but the actors' vivid imaginations.

And what imaginations! The plots of these mini-plays almost defy explanation, as Jagodowski and Pasquesi switch in-and-out of characters and incorporate each other's tiniest suggestions in the moment of the scene and, equally, into the ever-evolving backstory of the play.

On this particular evening, the show began with Anita, a lonely widow, chatting up Ron, the maitre d' at a French restaurant called the Bon Vivant, by telling him she felt she had one more great love left in her life.

Soon on the scene came Marcel, a singing waiter with a soft spot for "sweet Anita," eager to reveal his recent and surprising discovery that the scallop special was not made with real scallops but with shark fin instead.

In the words of the cook who enlightened Marcel about the culinary switcharoo, "Tell me, from a scallop, how many scallops do think you get? One. And how many do you think you can get from a huge shark tail?"

As far-fetched as some of the situations can become, both actors do in-depth character work on stage. Such serious acting work provides a sense of emotional truth that adds continuity and lends credibility to their performances, and is often quite moving.

"Yes, she's searching for love," says Marcel when Ron warns him that Anita is on the prowl. "But who isn't? I am always searching for love. All day, all the time. Aren't you?"

Both actors are verbally dexterious, with advanced degrees in double-entendre and aural nuance. And while their humour veers more towards the absurd and existential than to the blue (a weakness of much improv), the performance I saw did feature a perfectly timed one-liner about pulled pork, jerked chicken and beef strogonoff.

What makes TJ and Dave such an exceptional experience is not only how quickly and subtly their minds work in the real danger of spontaneous live performance, but also the trust and easy camraderie that is evident between the two actors. I highly recommend that you catch them during one of their Barrow Street Theater stints.

Disturbia

Much of the existing coverage on Tony Glazer’s Stain has, unsurprisingly, focused on its shock-worthy dialogue and disturbing themes. Amidst an effectively written story that forces the audience to digest one harrowing twist after another, its politically conservative set of characters elicit uncensored racism, uninhibited sexual conversations between parents and children, and suppressed secrets that, when brought to the surface, are accompanied by verbal abuse. But while the work is tough to watch and occasionally forces an audience member to wonder how much of its allure is due to its degree of shock value, Glazer’s drama offers a beautifully paced, convincingly performed stage experience.

Directed by Scott C. Embler of Vital Theatre Company, Stain opens with a father-and son exchange that immediately reveals both the disconcerting lack of boundaries in its family relationships and a sense of underlying dread. Fifteen-year-old Thomas (played with a haunting sense of awareness by Tobias Segal) is spending weekly father-son time with Arthur (Jim O’Connor), who has divorced his mother a few years prior. As Arthur, sitting on a park bench, unloads his uncensored revulsion towards women and minorities upon his son, gunshots can be heard in the distance. Neither one reacts.

Thomas reveals to his father, with both surprising lack of shame and a suppressed sense of neglect, that his relationship with a much older woman, Carla (Karina Arroyave) has recently ended. Soon after the graffiti-stained brick wall of the park opens up into Thomas’s family’s home, Carla shows up at its door and announces to his mother (Summer Crockett Moore) and grandmother (Joanna Bayless) that she is pregnant. What follows is Thomas’s desperate investigation into the reasons behind his parents’ divorce, setting off a chain of revelations that soon make his impending teen fatherhood seem like the least controversial aspect of the play.

Stain’s structure of a family tragedy in which the audience’s initial impressions are flipped upon each unveiled secret is certainly familiar in theater; Glazer’s use of dark, verbal humor, meanwhile, adds a sense of much-needed buoyancy to his work that reminds one of films like Burr Steers’ Igby Goes Down. Characters in Stain make jabs about the power of Botox, women’s sexual needs and the uncool-factor of the rock band Nickleback; a particularly humorous bit pokes fun at the frustration of voice-activated customer service lines.

It’s Tobias Segal’s performance, however, that brings authentic vulnerability into a story that sometimes feels too deliberate in its execution. While with his parents, Thomas speaks in a hoarse, singsongy voice that reveals a desperate need for affection; while smoking with his friend George (Peter Brensinger) on a makeshift bench, he appears to both escape behind a facade of rebellion and momentarily take control of his social role. Like a real teenager, Segal shows the rehearsed nature of Thomas’s sporadic confidence by fiddling his hands in his pockets or twitching his leg under the table. When he tells his grandmother that feeling the area around him helps him think, or wonders if his father is embarrassed to look at him, his heartbreaking narrative becomes almost tangible.

Joanna Bayless, Summer Crockett Moore and Jim O’Connor also deliver believable, multilayered performances as Thomas’s disjointed family. As his mother Julia, Moore has a particularly challenging narrative to carry, and her decision to internalize much of her character’s moral struggle appears to have been the right one; one can only hope that most actors tackling Julia’s character would find it difficult to recognize themselves in her horrific secret.

IT Awards Nominations Announced

At 8 pm July 21, 2008, the IT Awards (New York Innovative Theatre Awards) announced its 2008 Award Nominees at an event held at "Our Lady of Pompeii" located at 25 Carmine Street in the West Village. The 2008 Nominees were selected from an adjudication pool of over 3,000 artists. Nominees include 127 individual artists, 47 different productions and 40 theater companies.

In spite of the oppressive July weather, the nomination party was well-attended by nominees, their collaborators and other supporters of Off-Off-Broadway theater.

The 2008 IT Awards Ceremony will take place the evening of September 22, 2008. It was announced at the nomination party that the award ceremony will be opened with a performance by Blue Man Group.

A complete list of the IT Award Nominees can be viewed at the official IT Awards website, www.nyitawards.com, along with a description of the Awards' adjudication process. offoffonline congratulates this year's nominees and looks forward to further honoring their achievements in September.

The First Step Is. . .

Life can be shaky at times for everyone. In Bridget Harris' Out of Control, four women with addictive tendencies meet to share and find strength together. However, things get a little out of hand when they invite a guest speaker, Peter, who thinks he understands women completely. Peter begins to date Sweetie, a member of the group who occasionally smokes pot. Their relationship causes conflict between Sweetie and Brenda, Sweetie's co-worker and tutor who has recently joined the Overindulgers Anonymous group. Although everyone in the play is supposedly an “overindulger,” the play glosses over each woman's issue in order to fit everything in. The result is a low energy, superficial show without much explanation or development. The actors do their best with the weak material. Kat Ross is adorable as Sweetie, the kind of dumb yet endearing single mother pothead. Beverley Prentice is strong as Brenda, a lesbian who needs a job and is slightly bitter about the hand fate has dealt her. Danahar Dempsey is swarmy yet charming as Peter, the woman-controlling psychologist. And yet the dialogue that comes out of the characters' mouths is incredibly bland. When discussing their mysterious co-worker Mary, Sweetie says to Brenda, “running away. . . wow, do you think?” The script is full of weak exclamations and careless repetition.

The play never takes the time to fully develop the characters, instead skirting around their issues. Brenda is portrayed as bitter and heartbroken yet time is not spent examining or developing her problems. Sweeties is more of an occasional pot smoker than an actual addict, so what is driving her to hang out with addicts? More time is spent with the problems of other characters, Dolores and Bunny, who are kleptomaniacs and alcoholics respectively, than with Brenda and Sweetie. Yet the time spent with their problems is just to depict them, not to explain or rationalize them. The result is an unfulfilling sketch when a more meaty play is promised.

The weak script is not helped by the weak staging. Many scenes feature the four women sitting in a circle talking. Or Brenda and Sweetie sitting in Sweetie's trailer smoking. The pacing is incredibly low energy, which is unusual for a comedy, and the constant sitting limits action and does not give the audience much to look at.

Out of Control tries to surprise the audience by throwing in a plot twist towards the end. However, anyone paying the least bit of attention could figure out what the twist will be midway through the performance. With its weak storyline and character development, Out of Control proves to be anything but.

Paint It Black

If the Midtown International Theatre Festival (MITF), now in its ninth year, is serious about making its claim as a theater festival worthy of renown, it’s going to have to considerably amp up some of its offerings. What has struck me the most about the two plays I saw this week is how stunningly mediocre they are. The Red Paintball is an innocuous play, a sketch really. In fact, it began as a 10-minute skit and was expanded into a one-hour play. At one hour, it’s too long.

In The Red Paintball, a group of students at a Catholic high school decide to play a prank on their overbearing, self-righteous and hypocritical dean of students, Maxwell Morrison, (Vincent DiGeronimo) by shooting him with a paintball gun as he passes by on his scooter. His inevitable interrogation of this group comprises the bulk of the play.

The character of Maxwell Morrison is descended from a long line of bungling, boobish authority figures that include Mr. Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mr. Vernon from The Breakfast Club and Dean Wormer from Animal House. Mr. DiGeronimo does his best to milk the much-too-long running jokes about his attraction to Luke and his command of the sycophantic Mary (Alyssa Schroeter), to whom he tosses Hershey Kisses when he’s trying to extract information from her. He plays his over-the-top role much like Dana Carvey did as the Church Lady in Saturday Night Live. But even the Church Lady knew when to stop.

Having said that, there are a few talents in this lot. Robbie Simpson shows great physical comedic range as Luke, the resistant object of Morrison’s attention. His wide-eyed faces transmit revulsion and terror far better than do the lines he has been provided. Alexandra Heinen is stereotypically perfect as Norma Spiegel, Morrison’s apathetic but wise secretary who refuses to get worked up about anything. Will Szigethy as Matthew, though, is one of those canned chubby loser characters straight from a Judd Apatow film, and Mary Pasquale as girl-from-the-hood Johanna really needs to work on her gangsta mannerisms and speech.

In the end, The Red Paintball is simply a bore, grinding one joke to death. We have seen all this prattle before, and it’s been done far better. The Red Paintball adds nothing to the genre. It’s the type of play that’s better slotted for the recreation room in the high school basement, or amateur improv night, with an audience of knowing family and friends. The Red Paintball is about as funny as any random episode of Head of the Class, with the same tired, predictable jokes, and appears to have been developed for the same audience.

Who vets plays like The Red Paintball? I don’t fault the novice playwrights as much as I do the MITF itself, for putting this amateurish embarrassment on as a play and then inviting serious criticism. It’s like setting the poor playwrights up as clay pigeons at a skeet shooting range.

According to the play’s program, a full-length musical of this play is in the works. Perhaps The Red Paintball will find its identity as a musical; it’s not very funny as a comedy.

So Many Wives, So Little Time

Most people have trouble keeping up with one significant other. King Solomon had 700 wives, so imagine the straits he must have found himself in. Add to that the fact that several of his wives wouldn't convert to Judaism, ultimately corrupting him and leading to God's wrath on the people of Israel. Ginger Reiter's new musical 700 Wives is a dazzling and bright depiction of King Solomon, his romance with the Queen of Sheba, and his ultimate downfall. However, while the story is engaging, the production often fails to live up to the greatness of its subject. Students of the Old Testament may not appreciate 700 Wives style. It is a campy romp, chockablock with anachronisms (Jessica Simpson and Sarah Jessica Parker as potential wives of Solomon) and one liners. Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, who so bewitched King David with her rooftop bathing, is played as a stereotypical, overbearing Jewish mother by Andriana Pachella. After Solomon marries his 700 wives and things are not going so well, King Hiram of Tyre (a strong Ed Deacy), who originally told Solomon to marry his enemies' daughters and thus put off war, exclaims “did I tell him to eat every cookie in every box?”

Laughs abound, but some things just don't make sense. The characters occasionally use archaisms of English such as “thine” and “increaseth” which, while they imitate older translations of the Bible, don't fit in with the rest of the dialogue and language of the script. Solomon and Sheba's son Menelik is given a head of dreads and a Jamaican accent, even though he is the Ethiopian prince and predates Rastafarianism by several thousand years.

The song and dance numbers are not particularly remarkable. The prerecorded music sounds as if it were a demo tape. Worse still, it occasionally drowns out the vocals of the actors, despite the fact that there are several microphones. The chorus' voices do not blend well; it is possible to hear who is flat and who is straining for the high notes. There is one standout tune, however. The jazzy “Dust to Dust” features a live saxophone (played by Blanche Farrell Smith, who also does standout performance as one of the wives), and is a finger-poppingly catchy song.

Despite its campy nature and feel-good vibe, it is possible to walk away from the show with a relevant contemporary political message. As the story goes, God did not punish Solomon directly for straying, but instead held off punishment until his successor should reign. Echoes of the current situation in Iraq can be seen. The current king has made a mess, and it is left for the next in line to clean up the mess or suffer the consequences of someone else's actions.

700 Wives is ultimately a pretty run-of-the-mill musical dealing with what could be a pretty fascinating myth. Not much is known about the relationship between Solomon and Sheba; there are only thirteen verses in the Old Testament that describe her travels to Jerusalem. 700 Wives does a decent job of expanding the story and, intentionally or not, of connecting it to modern times. Fans of camp and corn will enjoy 700 Wives ; those with a more serious mind towards myth and legend had better stay away.

Laughter, Meter, and War

A prince swaps places with his manservant in order to avoid marriage to a queen and go in search of his love. Only his love is a stable boy. And the queen is a real ball breaker. And back at home, his older brother, King Tater, has started war with everyone despite the alliances his father made. In Duncan Pflaster's Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants Shakespeare meets Charles Ludlam and the Theater of the Ridiculous meets contemporary politics. The result is a hilarious hour and a half of iambic pentameter, missing manhoods, lost hearts, and political scheming. Like his predecessor Ludlam, Pflaster's work is a pastiche of styles. The rhyme and meter imitates Shakespeare, the epic structure is a nod to Brecht, the utter silliness apes Ludlam and the Theater of the Ridiculous, and the heroic quest structure is similar to that found in all myths. King Kartoffelpuffen has given his kingdom to his oldest son Tater and married his other children off to neighboring kingdoms for peace and political gain. This causes Trevor and Grumbelino, his servant, to switch places, the princess Lana to be separated from her love Geoffrey and blinded in order to marry King Soignee of the Blind Sybarites, and the stable boy, Toby, to kill all the horses and run off. And then there is the pesky Morty, who continually floats across stage to gently remind Trevor that he is going to die. Someday. A lot is going on in the play, but it never feels overwhelmed or crowded, due to its episodic structure. The audience clapped at the end of each episode, making it feel more as if we were watching a series of sketches rather than one unified play.

The verse flows off the actor's tongues as if they were made to speak using rhyming couplets and pentameter. The meter never distracts or obscures what the characters are saying. The ensemble, twelve actors playing 27 roles, is tightly knit. Several had participated in an earlier reading of the show, and there is a real sense of unity and connectedness among them.

Pflaster, as director as well as playwright, makes full use of the bare stage. Entrances and exits come from all sides. It is never unclear where the scene is taking place, despite the lack of scenery.The cast, the director/playwright, and the sound, light, and costume designers come together to paint a descriptive picture at all times.

Its ridiculousness aside, Prince Trevor comes with a message. Pflaster wrote the play because the “re-election of George W. Bush [had angered him].” Echoes of the current president are visible in King Tater, who acts like an insolent little boy in his attempt to grab land and power. The play also makes a case for love of all stripes. Trevor's love for Toby is frowned upon at first, but certain characters warm to it as the play goes on, leading to new acceptances and understandings.

Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants is a fantastic evening of theater. The play wears its influences well and provides laugh after laugh while jabbing at contemporary politics. Prince Trevor is a good show for anyone who, angered or saddened by the events around them, needs a good laugh.

Couples at War

Because the events of Yom Kippur are mostly confined to the living room of a young couple in Israel--a space whose clashing fabrics indicate both modesty and twenty-something carelessness--its coming-of-age themes about forgiveness, patriotic responsibility and death have the potential to appear especially hefty. Some of its most powerful moments take place when its four main characters cork a bottle of wine after returning from streets mauled by war, react to a blazing alarm or shield their fear of loneliness with raised chins and crossed arms. The play is framed around the Yom Kippur war of 1973, a conflict whose trickling political implications and impact on the collective consciousness of the Israeli can hardly be understated. Watching the play's four young characters become imprinted with the experience of war, an audience member can feel herself wanting Yom Kippur to live up to its stakes and expectations. It's thus a pity that, in the end, its story and writing feel too neatly packaged to make a distinctive impact.

Written by Meri Wallace, the play begins when two American married couples (Yitz, Yael, Ephraim and Sarah) prepare to observe the Jewish holiday in Israel. When a war against Egypt and Syria begins unexpectedly, Yitz is forced to leave pregnant Yael behind as he joins his fellow Israeli soldiers in combat. As Yael begins to raise her baby alone and awaits her husband's return, Ephraim and Sarah battle a distance of their own. Later, through a friendship with a local army captain and an unexpected visit from Yitz's estranged mother, Yael begins to vocalize an internal battle between her loyalty for Israel and her worry for her son's safety.

Wallace's script is heavily grounded in plot, and moves quickly from one scene to the next. Each exchange between characters ends with a definite fade to black, transitioning after some furniture shuffling into the following frame on the storyboard. The dialogue has the same deliberate quality: Her characters communicate in grammatically rounded phrases, many of which feel almost too familiar: "that certainly puts a new spin to the story," says a character after finding out the truth about his friend's love affair. "I was overwhelmed by your beauty," another says to profess his love. "Take this scarf. It will keep you warm," Yael says when Yitz departs for the war. Each bit of dialogue is closely edited, and never hazy in its meaning. When confrontations are expected, Wallace quickly cuts to the chase; in the first meeting between Yael and her neglectful mother-in-law, for example, the scene moves almost instantly from greetings to a full-blown verbal battle.

Arela Rivas does a fine job with the character of Yael, adding a complexity to her lines with her expressive eyes and effortless body movements. When she is hit by loneliness, she trembles and appears prematurely old; when she begins to rediscover her humor, one can see a tomboyish spark behind her close-lipped smile. In a scene between her and Shane Jerome (Yitz), their attraction is believable. Other actors, particularly Aylam Orian's army captain Avi, give noteworthy, appealing and vulnerable performances. Orion Delwaterman, however, as Sarah's husband Ephraim, doesn't bring quite enough magnetism into the play's most morally ambiguous character. His bursts of frustration play as too loud and his concealed attraction for Yael as excessively sheepish, causing a viewer to feel discomfort, rather than curiosity, in his presence.

Although Yom Kippur's unexpectedly open-ended conclusion is an affecting reflection of Yael' s conflict between motherly worry and patriotism, it only comes to stand in revealing contrast to the production's biggest flaw: its lack of unanswered questions. "This is war," its characters say to remind one another of the source of their elevated anxieties, but the extent of their confusion never translates in the dialogue. Each conflict is articulated with little ambiguity.

In an example, Rachel, a fellow new mother and an Israeli, reminds Yael of the glaring differences between American and local lifestyles. She mentions the plentitude of TVs, cars and accessible education in Yael's home country.

"War is part of life for Israelis. But you chose to come," Rachel says, in a line that, while true, both underlines the conflict that lies beneath her and Yael's friendship, and leaves us slightly dissatisfied.

Double Negatives

For a production in which the main characters attack artistic and aesthetic clichés with a vengeance, Elisa Abatsis’ Daguerreotypes sure embraces a lot of them. Despite its attempts to window-dress itself with depth, Daguerreotypes is, basically, a mawkish “you-and-me-against-the-adults” love story between two preciously hip and knowing twenty-somethings; they even have really cool names. We’ve seen this formula already this season (Jason Chimonides’ The Optimist comes instantly to mind); and it’s one that usually reveals more about the playwright than the play itself.

We first see Gemma as a precocious seventeen-year old painter with a penchant for philosophical musings straight out of One Tree Hill: “If this was forever, and if this, maybe, didn’t end, like ever, I would-I mean, that could possibly be a good thing…”. Studying at the Hebron Academy boarding school in Maine, Gemma has an affair with forty-something Professor Frodick (played by the seemingly younger Doug Rossi). If you’ve guessed that his surname will later serve as joke fodder, you’re right. Gemma is infatuated with Frodick. He wants her to consider her art school future while she just wants to run away with him and live on love.

Five years pass. Gemma has art shows with Frodick’s help. Frodick commits suicide. Why? We never find out. He even returns several times as a ghost but still he doesn’t tell us. Where is John Edward when you need him?

Artistically blocked by this trauma, Gemma returns to the small town of Chagrin Falls (yes, it’s a real place), Ohio, to become a photographic assistant to the fifty-something Henry, a sensitive guy who works in the understandably struggling cottage industry of stillborn baby photography. Henry, played a bit too stiffly by Alfred Gingold, is the only character in this play capable of profundity. A true artist but a lousy businessman, he’s fond of whiskey and was a former boyfriend of Gemma’s mother, Darcy Applebaum, a finally sober and now fading B-movie actress. Darcy has returned to Henry’s life and reveals an authentic talent for counseling grieving mothers.

Chase, working in Henry’s studio and apparently relegated to obscurity after losing out on an art school scholarship (to Gemma), minces no words in expressing that he wants his new competition gone! Not really, though, because he’s always been, like, in love with her! Like a sixth grader saddled with a crush he can’t handle, Chase constantly hurls nasty insults Gemma’s way; despite this, and on the urging of Frodick’s ghost, she improbably falls in love with him, too.

It’s only near the end of the play that its title takes on significance. A daguerreotype is an early example of photography in which an image is exposed directly onto an appropriate silver coated surface. Daguerreotypes were popular in the nineteenth century, in part because they produced otherworldly, glowing qualities in their subjects. Each daguerreotype is one-of-a-kind; no negatives exist.

The noble Henry insists on shredding the negatives of the stillborn babies whose mothers change their minds about ordering pictures; Chase wants to keep them on file. What this dripping metaphor means to the play is anyone’s guess and all could be correct. The babies’ photographs are one-of-a-kind, caught in a moment. If unpurchased by their parents, they’re gone forever into the shredder.

Jared Morgenstern as the jumpy and socially inept Chase is the clear standout in this production. Something of a cross between Steve Carell and Adam Sandler, Mr. Morgenstern has the comedic chops to give Chase some substance despite his bad lines. He pulls off some of the funnier bits in the play, and dilutes much of the venom in the childish insults directed at Gemma. Storm Garner, as Gemma, simply lacks the range to deflect all the blows engagingly; Gemma remains a one-dimensional character all the way through.

Ms. Abatsis’ script, predictable and, yes, clichéd in far too many places, feels like juvenilia. Nonetheless, it has some bona fide humor and shows flickers of accomplishment and potential. The playwright only touches on the really interesting stuff of this play—Henry and his need to document these failed births—and defaults to the trite relationship mush. The truth is that Gemma and Chase really aren’t that interesting; we’ve seen them before in countless plays about young adults.

Ms. Abatsis has a keen sense for dialogue which keeps up the play’s momentum. Yet, the unacknowledged irony of the play is that, in the end, Gemma, purportedly so headstrong and independent, ultimately depends on two men, one misguided and then dead, and the other envious, bitter and grasping, to tell her how to live her life.

Daguerreotypes is part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival.

Paradise Lost

During the Vietnam War the island of Penang in Malaysia was a destination for rest and relaxation (R&R) for troops, but in James L. Larocca’s eponymous play it is also the source of a mystery about his hero, Tim Riordan. An offering of the Midtown International Theater Festival, Penang is about many things: the pressures of combat, the need for human connection amid killing fields, and the age-old question of why God permits pain and evil to flourish. It is also about primal fears, and it provides a great deal to chew on. Tim Riordan (Brett Davidson) is a Navy lieutenant whose job is guiding helicopters on and off the deck of his ship in the Mekong Delta. One night in 1968, in the darkness and against the wind, a foolish pilot tries to take off and kills himself and several men on deck, including Tim’s closest friend.

The scene jumps to a hospital room in San Diego, where Tim is being treated by a doctor, Leona Kaufman (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz), after an attempted suicide. Employing a top-notch bedside manner, warm and calm, Kaufman teases out the reason for Tim’s slitting his wrists after his return from R&R in Penang, seemingly in good psychological health. Scenes alternate between hospital and island paradise as she learns what happened in Penang following the copter crash. The mishap that killed Tim’s friend wasn’t the first time he lost a buddy unexpectedly.

In Penang, Tim strikes up a friendship with a U.S. Air Force captain, Richard DeLuca, aka “Luke.” Luke is a stereotypical native of Queens with a thick Sopranos-style accent (he uses the overworked “Fuggedaboudit” as a catch phrase), a snappy delivery, and a yen for pretentious irony, particularly during a turgid anticlerical diatribe. A little goes a long way, and Robert Sabri pushes too hard, tipping the balance from engagingly brash to downright annoying.

For a while, though, the actors convey a believable friendship, as they hire a Malaysian guide named Jimmy Chen (Ben Hersey). Hersey adds color and lightness to the proceedings, until he speaks of the cruelties of the Japanese in World War II and the death of his son. That leads to Tim’s losing control in an existential rant. “They died, that’s all, they just died,” he says. “They died alone, so all alone. They died in hell...”

The friendship, moreover, leads into unexpected territory: a drunken sexual liaison, the limits of which are murky. “I don’t think it was about sex or that kind of stuff at all,” says Tim. “It was about friendship and just being there and caring and helping each other.” Yet one may read in Tim’s succession of intense relationships with his dead friends a suggestion of repressed homosexuality, and he balks at connecting with women in Penang. (The lean Davidson, with the looks of a male model, has an epicene quality that works nicely for the character.) But Sabri’s rough-edged Luke is a bizarre object of affection: Imagine Montgomery Clift drawn to Jerry Lewis.

Director Donya K. Washington has staged the story simply (there are no credits for set or costumes, which is probably why Tim wears anachronistic cargo shorts) with a bed and two metal folding chairs, but at times during the first performance the scenes moved sluggishly. Unusually, a great deal resides on David Schulder's sound design, which starts off with noises of war and segues to classical music, evoking Apocalypse Now. It is near-constant, often muted in the background, and it incorporates both sounds of war and songs like Neil Diamond’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.”

Occasionally, though, the sound undermines the actors, particularly Kullberg-Bendz and Hersey in quieter scenes; they need to project better. It’s a shame, because Kullberg-Bendz is outstanding as the therapist, evoking a lively concern and professionalism. Dave Powers as Luke’s hulking roommate at the Air Force base also provides a deft counterpoint in his sexual brutality to the connection that Luke and Tim make.

Although Penang has a lot of interesting ideas, they don’t meld together perfectly, and some elements seem underdeveloped. Still, Larocca has created characters interesting enough to hold one’s attention, and he’s not afraid to take his plot to dark corners. That’s something to please any serious theatergoer.

On-Key Comedy

It's the High School Musical of the a capella world mixed with the comic sensibility of Will and Grace . Part unabashed schtick and part schmaltz, Perfect Harmony , the Clurman Theater's latest offering about two high school acapella groups preparing for the national championship, is nonetheless thoroughly entertaining. This is in no small part due to clever writing by Andrew Grosso and to the able timing of most of this young and spirited cast, and in particular, to Sean Patrick Dugan and Kathy Searle in their dual roles.

The premise is fairly simple. There are two a capella groups, the uber-victorious Acafellas and the underappreciated Ladies in Red . Each group is comprised of distinct personalities that rub against each other in a desire to determine the direction of the group and the musical numbers to be presented at the national championships.

In the Acafellas , Senior "Pitch" Lassiter A. Jayson III (an appealing Vayu O'Donnell) has an artistic crisis-of-conscience that prompts him to want to expose the "ugly" underneath the "beautiful" in the music in order for it to be truly artistic. This move pits him directly against Philip Fellows V (Benjamin Huber) who is dead set on maintaining their successful formula and winning the national title at all costs, and by any dubious means.

Rounding out the Acafellas is a hunky former quarterback named JB (Scott Janes) who catches the eye of talent scout Kiki Tune (a hilarious Searle); a mute boy who sings, well named Jasper (Clayton Apgar); and Simon Depardieu (Dugan), a nebbishy freshman with a mouth full of canker sores.

The Ladies in Red are led by perfectionist Melody McDaniels (a crisp Dana Acheson) who must keep the nubile Meghan Beans (Amy Rutberg) from turning her conservative choreography into that of a Britney Spears video and/or stealing her boyfriend. Equally, Russian renegade Michaela (Searle) must be prevented from randomly changing the words to the songs-in-progress. Meanwhile, shy Valerie (in a lovely turn by Margie Stokley) is acutely glance-phobic and needs confidence boosting, while Turret's-striken stage manager Kerri Taylor (Nisi Sturgis) constantly blurts out obsenities at inopportune moments.

Musical numbers are woven into the groups' rehearsals and interspersed with monologues from individual a capella group members as well as members of their greater community, including a School Psychologist (Apgar) and a Vocal Therapist (Stugis). The musical performances themselves are certainly less effective than the irony that accompanies them.

Director Andrew Grosso uses the stage fully. The set design by Eliza Brown is simple but effective; and Becky Lasky's costumes (from naughty schoolgirl to icky talent manager to spacesuit and floor length plaid skirts) are tongue-in-cheek and contribute greatly to Perfect Harmony's overall effect of being well-produced.

Rather like Sour Cream & Onion Pringles or cheerleading movies like Bring It On , this show is a guilty pleasure. Its plot is so predictable at times that it almost shouldn't be as fun as it is to watch. And yet the writing is full of tiny, quick verbal surprises and original moments, and the cast is uniformally high energy. Recommended as an summer outing for a young audience.

My Big Fat Freak Wedding

The Wedding Play is a lot like the gigantic cake that occupies a chunk of the stage during the first act: impossible to ignore, very sweet, and a bit too much. There are slices of great laughs and good performances, but digesting the whole course is a lengthy and sometimes tedious endeavor. During the two-hour play, you’re constantly reminded that a.) weddings make people crazy and b.) it’s hard to tell twins apart. By the time intermission rolls around, it’s a bit jarring to realize you’re only halfway done.

The plot centers on the Desario family on the day of daughter Sarah’s wedding. Mom and Dad seem on the verge of either insanity or homicide, while twins/maids-of-honor Clara and Zoe (both Lindsay Wolf) work through budding romances. Murphy’s law ensues with an absent groom, the wrong cake, and a “quintet” that’s actually a punk rock band (offering an amusingly lowbrow original song in the second act by Ryan Dowd).

Amid the chaos, Clara's date, Daniel (Joseph Mathers), has arrived early. It’s their first meeting, as the “couple” has shared an Internet courtship over the last 11 months. Daniel’s sex-crazed friend, Nick (Michael Mraz, bearing a strong resemblance to Sean William Scott of several sex-crazed teen flicks) has tagged along and quickly heats things up with Zoe.

Zoe despises Daniel and tries to derail his relationship with Clara at every turn. This particular conflict drags on and on until a fairly unsurprising twist comes in the second act. It doesn’t help that Zoe’s unabashed wickedness and Clara’s cavity-inducing sweetness are so exaggerated, they grow a bit stale by the end of the show.

With its predictable characters, the only way the play can shock you is by piling on irrational twists and coincidences. By the end, many characters make decisions that betray their established personalities.

The cast acts so hyper (the first act contains lots of running and yelling), it seems like they’ve mainlined Red Bull. Fortunately, both Mathers and Corey Ann Haydu as the bride ground the show with performances that balance comic prowess with restraint. As just about everything has hit the fan, Haydu has a believable breakdown and a scowl that completely deserves the frozen reaction it elicits. And when Daniel faces Clara’s bizarre attempts at seduction – think lots of writhing and a squeaky Marilyn Monroe impression – his contorted face and confused exclamation (“I mean this as kindly, and sweetly as possible. What the [expletive] is wrong with you?”) is like a breath of fresh air.

Mark Souza is also in good form as the narrator and several other roles. With a voice made for action movie trailers, almost everything out of his mouth is hilarious. Unfortunately, quoting a few gems would spoil some of the show’s twists.

Playwright Brian MacInnis Smallwood, who penned last year’s very funny 12th Night of the Living Dead, has a knack for snappy one-liners and quirky comedy. In this sense, The Wedding Play pans out like a sitcom. But most sitcoms wrap in 30 minutes for a reason: there’s only so much quirkiness and perkiness a person can take.

Strange Pacific Overtures

The adulation of World War II veterans as a Band of Brothers doesn’t get much of a boost from Neal Bell’s Somewhere in the Pacific, a 2000 play about Marines and sailors on a transport ship heading for Okinawa in 1945. Bell’s introduction to the published play (a portion is included in the playbill) cites his inspiration for it as Coming Out Under Fire, Gay Men and Women in World War Two, by Allan Berube. A second book, With the Old Breed, by Eugene B. Sledge, gave him a “nitty-gritty sense of what men living through that kind of combat endured,” he writes. Bell’s homework is reflected in his use of period slang: “pogey” for a weak Marine, and “Don’t beat your gums” for “Shut up.” His first scene especially captures the tension and boredom of waiting for something to happen, but pretty quickly the play turns dark and surreal. Don’t look for valor here.

Bell intersperses real action with dreams. At times a scene occurs before the previous one, and it’s not always clear whether the action scenes are real—one between a gay teenage swabbie, Billy (nicely played with eagerness, caution and ennui by Michael Wrynn Doyle), and a married but spurned Marine named Hobie (John Stokvis), has them nuzzling high above the ship while swinging on ropes, as if they were in the rigging of an 18th-century frigate. You may spend time wondering how that is possible on a WWII-era ship rather than listening to the dialogue, until they suddenly fall into a void. And a short time later, two other men, Chotkowski and a sour loner named McGuiness, hear two thuds, as if bodies were hitting the deck.

It’s possible that the double thuds were not Billy and Hobie hitting the deck, but two torpedos that eventually do hit the ship—perhaps it’s within minutes, perhaps time has elapsed; the timeline, however, is disorienting, even on the printed page, since some scenes precede rather than follow the previous ones. Under Jim Petosa's direction it plays like a confused fever dream and tends to be off-putting. Laura J. Eckelman’s evocative lighting doesn't do much to sort the real from the dreams.

The warriors in his grim melodrama include the ship’s captain, Albers, who thinks he hears the voice of his dead son reciting his final bloodstained letter, which details the desecration of Japanese bodies by McGuiness. Albers is convinced someone has hijacked the public address system on the ship, so he pursues a Queeglike inquiry into his hallucination to find the culprit. His aide DeLucca (a fine Alec Strum), balks at the captain’s obsession and is one of the few men who seems solidly heterosexual and a mentally prepared professional warrior. McGuiness (James Smith), a sour, tight-lipped loner who served with the captain’s son, is racked with guilt about an incident of cowardice; his nightmare involves mutilation of the buddy he abandoned, a sweetly dim Southerner named Duane (a likable MacLeod Andrews). But does he carry a torch for Duane? Rounding out the group is Chotkowski, a strapping Marine who struggles to live with his fear of death and doesn’t balk at telling off the unstable Albers.

The actors all play their parts capably, although Malcolm Madera as the captain becomes mostly unintelligible when he yells during his big scene. What one doesn’t get is a feeling that the Marines are part of a unit, that they have some camaraderie and rapport in spite of their friction. (It’s ironic that many in the Potomac Theatre Company are graduates of Middlebury College in Vermont and presumably have worked together before.)

Bell’s inspiration, of course, suggests that the play will yield some insight into gay history, but not much happens beyond establishing that gays have always been in the military. There’s a nod to cross-dressing (and South Pacific), since Billy is rehearsing a drag show with a grass skirt and coconut bra, while on deck the dialogue comes off as bitchier than, say, in From Here to Eternity. But the play is less compelling in the end than the real-life brouhaha that the issue created during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” debates of the 1990s.

Somewhere in the Pacific plays on a double bill with Sarah Kane's Crave. Because I misunderstood the starting time of Crave, which is 45 minutes long, I was unable to see it.

Mother Courage

Performer Christen Clifford holds little back in BabyLove, her one-woman show at The Green Room at 45 Bleecker in which she chronicles the physical and emotional changes she underwent before, during, and following the birth of her first child. The show, which runs slightly over an hour but leaves you wanting much more, is to be praised for both its humor and its honesty. This highly enjoyable extended monologue (which began as a piece penned by Clifford for Nerve.com) chronicles the full journey of changes that its creator and star went through. Clifford begins the show in a fairly explicit manner by describing her attempts at conception, but her in-your-face presentation style is never off-putting. In fact, she achieves the opposite, creating a show that is always intimate and engaging, as she segues from talking about her younger days of sexual adventurousness to counting the myriad ways childbirth has changed her outlook on sex, love, maturity, and her relationship with her husband.

Talking to her audience as though they were her girlfriends, Clifford discusses the fears and expectations that come along with impending first-time motherhood. Will she always love her child unconditionally? Will her child love her in return? Would she actually prefer to have a son over a daughter?

The show, directed and partially developed by Julie Kramer, is candid and confessional. BabyLove offers a warts-and-all look at maternity and motherhood, and Kramer's assured hand ensures that though the play's tone gradually becomes more serious, it does so in measured, artful doses. Clifford discusses her changing body and supplies a detailed account of her entire childbirth experience. She also conveys the ways she grew disenchanted with her vagina and the way her sex life with her husband waned and then morphed into something new. (In one hilarious anecdote, Clifford describes how an attempt to multi-task intimacy and baby-rearing turned into an inadvertent threesome).

Sex does not totally dominate BabyLove, however. The show also features a fair amount of material on women’s health in general. For example, Clifford discusses the perils of simultaneous breast-feeding and masturbation, as well as the importance of Kegel exercises. Clifford continually revs the energy up by using water guns to over-exaggerate her breasts when nursing, pantomiming the act of breast-feeding, and even giving away prizes to a select few audience members.

What is most important about BabyLove is its refreshing confessionalism. We still live in a society where women who enjoy their sex lives, and even more brazenly, enjoy publicly discussing them, are considered somewhat taboo. Clifford bucks those conventions in a way that is entirely human and universal, never strictly sensational. She is who she is and makes no apologies for that, whether being tough or vulnerable, sassy or sentimental. I doubt there was single audience member – female or male – who did not find a kernel of truth in something she had to share. Chances are they found many.

Clifford is nothing short of a revelation. The actress’s ability to rebound between moments funny, tender and potentially embarrassing is astonishing, and the pace, timing, and tone with which she does it is nothing short of balletic. Clifford commands the stage from start to finish (though choreographer Julie Atlas Muz should be given credit as well for giving BabyLove some shape). This is a primary case of a performer being completely at ease – with her audience, wither her material, but most of all, with herself – and should not be missed.

Footloose

“Zany.” “Madcap.” Hackneyed as those words have become, they’re nonetheless appropriate to describe David Lindsay-Abaire’s 1997 play, A Devil Inside, which is something like Curb Your Enthusiasm meets South Park. The play is currently being presented by the fledgling but gifted Wide Eyed Productions Company. When a script is zany and madcap, even one from a playwright as contemporary and talented as Lindsay-Abaire, it runs the risk of wearing out its audience once they’ve gotten the joke. I’m glad to report that Wide Eyed Productions not only keeps the audience interested throughout the script’s accrued silliness, but the actors appear to be having a genuinely good time doing so.

A Devil Inside is a dark comedy, ultimately pointless, yet fun, filled with characters who make the term “dysfunctional” banal. The plot centers around Gene Slater (Sage Seals), a 21-year old skateboarder whose mother, after several attempts, finally cajoles him into “becoming a man” by avenging what she believes was the murder of his 416-pound father 14 years earlier in the Poconos. The father, having read that he could walk off several pounds per day, had decided to just keep walking until he reached his ideal weight. All that remains of him are his feet, which Mrs. Slater (Kristin Skye Hoffmann), an East Village laundromat owner, has dutifully preserved in a formaldehyde-filled jar.

The cluttered set maximizes the stage area by making itself an interesting jumble of functionality. The action jumps back and forth from the laundromat to an appliance repair shop, so one side of the set features washing machines and the other side is a workbench. The rest of the clever set features a projection screen (showing the inside of a subway car and a bar) for train and tavern scenes. Because, in addition to feet, devils and guns are prominent in the play, what little wall space is left of the set features sketches of devils and a man pointing a gun.

Among the cast standouts is Andrew Harriss as Carl Raymonds. Mr. Harriss reminds me of a particularly deranged Chris Elliott. Carl is a professor of Russian literature, obsessed with Dostoyevsky and with his wife, Lily (Lauren Bahlman), a rock climber whom Carl believes has perished in the Poconos. Lily, having lost a foot in the climb (yes, feet are a huge deal in this play), is actually hiding out in Brad Bradford’s appliance repair shop in the East Village. Carl has coincidentally passed by the shop and has seen Brad, such a “dull” individual that Carl becomes compelled to kill him in Dostoyevskian fashion—that is, for no apparent reason. Carl doesn’t recall that Brad was once a student of his or that Brad had a major crush on him.

Mr. Harriss commands the wacky role of the alcoholic Carl — preoccupied, ranting hysterically and, with a shrug of his shoulders or a grunt, dismissing the advances of the lovelorn Caitlin Boyd (Liz White), a current student who happens to be crushing on him. Harriss stomps around the small stage much like...well, like an insane professor. I actually averted my eyes when he looked my way, concerned that he might ask me a question.

Jake Paque is often hilarious as the brain-injured Brad, who has been whacked over the head by Gene’s flying skateboard after a tragic accident that, as you have probably guessed, coincidentally involved most of the other characters. Brad believes that a devil from a piece of wallpaper has chewed its way through his eye.

Ms. Hoffmann turns in a solid tongue-in-cheek performance as Mrs. Slater, who wears relics of her star-crossed family’s catastrophes (among them, Gene’s skateboard and her brother’s torn baby blanket — the only thing that remained after he was eaten by dogs) on a sash. And Ms. White is thoroughly convincing as the young Caitlin, so hopelessly infatuated with Carl that she unscrupulously helps him attempt to kill Brad.

The plot of A Devil Inside contains more improbable coincidences and relationships than even Larry David could think up. It’s a challenging play for director Justin Ness’ New York debut, but he and a young cast of up-and-comers meet the challenge joyfully, embracing the play’s ridiculousness and upping the ante. It’s best to sit back, suspend your considerable disbelief, and simply let the actors entertain you, because that’s what this troupe does best.