Sex and the Kitty

It all starts with a sociological questionnaire. Well, actually it all started as part of a Paula Vogel workshop for Yale School of Drama M.F.A. playwright Dorothy Fortenberry. Given the theme of the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, with literary and artistic examples provided from the W.B. Yeats poem to other works, Fortenberry addresses the as-seen-on-TV version of female sexuality versus something a bit darker, more perverse, and certainly more funny. Her modern-day Caitlin and the Swan places the rather violent tale into the present amid three college-era gal pals, who have forged ahead into the new territory of adulthood, career, and relationships, while keeping each other as touchstones along the way. The play opens with the friends discussing the dubious success of a former classmate whose sociological study they all received, basically consisting of comparing notes among the young women’s “progress” in life. Caitlin, played by The Management’s talented Marguerite French, is a floundering, somewhat naïve SAT prep tutor living with her boyfriend Doug, an attorney. Her friend Priya, played in an excellent deadpan by Shetal Shah, is a busy resident gynecologist, a lesbian who seems too preoccupied for any relationship beyond a fling. And finally there’s Rachel, hysterically portrayed by Teresa Stephenson, who has fallen in love and started to cheat on her husband with, wait for it... a pig. No, not your typical brute, but the actual four-legged kind, whom she names “Pete.” They “met cute,” on a farm, etc., etc. The ups and downs of her affaire de coeur lead to much drama and heartbreak (as one might imagine), but also seems to incite Caitlin to act in a way that she’s never felt before, as perhaps do Priya’s NSA affairs, including one, she reveals, to do with a certain household feline named Emma. Sure, some excitement may have been missing in her relationship with straight-laced Doug, played by Fortenberry’s fellow Yalie Brian Robert Burns, but it’s while tutoring Bastian, portrayed sweetly by Jake Aron, that her desires alight onto a fixation. But in this askew world, it’s not even for the innocent 18-year-old student, but rather the wild swan that lives in his backyard pond.

Directed by The Management’s co-artistic director Joshua Conkel, who is well versed in expressing the left-of-center mindset (as shown in his own plays ), while rooting it squarely into a familiar pop culture landscape; his vision blends well with Fortenberry’s comedic writing. (You can tell Caitlin’s romantic notions are getting the better of her when she wistfully asks Bastian the swan’s name. He replies, “I call him, swan.”) Here, the female characters are largely unapologetic and bold in their behavior and relationships, and in Rachel’s case even a bit world-wearied, which is a relief to see versus the usual glut of SATC superficiality. The men, on the other hand, seem surprisingly sensitive and communicative. Caitlin’s boyfriend Doug is painfully honest and open about his feelings, instead of the presumed emotionally out-of-touch and/or sulky (or worse), especially when sex is suddenly taken off the table. Caitlin’s student Bastian seems fairly enlightened and understanding for having a strong crush on her and being, well, the hormonally-charged age of 18? (Or maybe this is all me and I’ve been exclusively dating cavemen all these years...)

But another highlight of this production is the dream ballet, fantasy, and live action sequences choreographed imaginatively by Croft Vaughn and starring the gifted dancer Elliott T. Reiland. Reiland wonderfully interprets both the non-speaking Pig, in full costume and with all of the usual misbehaviors (finally, a guy I can recognize!), and the Swan, in a pared-down stylized form, who seems unruffled by Caitlin’s unspeakable desires. How she resolves this adds the shock and true anguish lying at the bottom of Fortenberry’s piece, and while tough, I admire her for taking it all the way.

The movements are evocative, visceral, funny and even frightening, and very well presented. I’m somewhat surprised that not a single feather was used on the Swan costume, which might have been a nice touch, as well as potentially being more suggestive, and certainly not out of place amongst the other toys and props used throughout, which made their appearance courtesy of adult-toy supplier Babeland. (Maybe a quick trip back down to the store on Rivington Street?) But regardless, Reiland communicates it swimmingly. Also the details of the hair and make-up on Stephenson as Rachel in key scenes are downright inspired.

Under St. Marks is a tight space, but feels cozy and well utilized. The simple set pieces – from bed to shelving unit, to outdoor seating to coffee bar, express what they need to and are changed up by the actors as we watch. Even a simply-fashioned tree signifying the outdoors is a minimalist achievement. This is a delightful pond of talent definitely worth dipping into. Just watch those fingers!

Fading Signals

Resembling something from David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Jim Findlay’s set for Stephanie Fleischmann’s and Christina Campanella’s Red Fly/Blue Bottle teems with antique clocks, radios, microphones, analog tubes, light bulbs, television sets, chairs, record players and valises. All these items are meant to represent the passage or documentation of time. At the back of the stage, The Old Lady (Black-Eyed Susan) sits in something like a ham radio booth, examining insects through a microscope. She classifies them by genus and species, and marvels at their years of pupation. She attempts to recapture time by offering each, however insignificant it may be to others, a place. She recounts what Fleischmann has described elsewhere as the play’s “important threshold moments;” like a Pavlovian dog The Old Lady pairs events with stimuli such as the buzzing of a fly or the flicker of a lightning bug. With the refrain “another soul swallowed,” she documents peoples’ disappearances.

What exists of a plot is simple, though blurred, and mostly sung to the often eerie music of The Operator (Campanella), who employs old Acetone organs, accordions and toy pianos to achieve the sounds of a clandestine sideshow. A character called The Man (Chris Lee) leaves for a war and ultimately disappears. Such interruptions open giant existential holes in his life and that of his lover, Clarissa (Jesse Hawley), who may be a younger version of The Old Lady and who spends the rest of her life ruminating on those moments and their ripple effects. The explosion of a clock is a metaphor for the permanent separation of the two young lovers. The Old Lady later says the clock can be repaired, but it’s missing a spring which isn’t made anymore.

Clarissa obsessively tries to reconstruct time and understand its passage by assembling and re-assembling objects at her threshold moment and by repeatedly speak-singing their names as if she were reciting a language poem: “pin clover thread cufflink feather spoon spring pin clover thread cufflink feather spoon spring.” Like incantations, each action and recitation is imbued with potentially apocalyptic meaning.

The technical aspects of Red Fly/Blue Bottle are masterful and beautifully executed. Peter Norrman’s video and particularly Mirat Tal’s expert live video work anchor this piece in both the present and the past. There is an unbelievably great scene where The Man (Chris Lee) rides a train to his unknown destination. Scenery flashes by and he is being filmed and projected onto another screen, where we see him from another vantage point, in black and white, slowed down, on what appears to be vintage film stock. This ingenious device places him simultaneously in the present and the past. Like the Old Lady, marveling at how time changes organisms and swallows souls, The Man marvels at how time rips people from each other, leaving nothing but awe: “See my hand. It held hers.”

Despite its dazzling technological work and fascinatingly creepy music, Red Fly/Blue Bottle sometimes becomes tedious, falling victim to its own preciousness and fable. The themes occasionally become bloated, as what exists of the narrative doesn’t have enough meat to sustain it. Yet, the sheer technical brilliance of its creators saves the day.

The most powerful, and indeed, poignant part of the work is also the most accessible. Old photographic portraits of people, presumably all dead, flash in rapid-fire succession across the several video screens of various sizes that adorn the stage. Voices from all around soon call out names and nicknames, even the pet names of lovers, as the photos flash and the music builds.

It’s as if they’re calling out from a video cemetery of sorts, vying simply to say the name of the deceased, to fix the names in space and time, to affirm their existence. It’s the indescribable mystery of where time goes, fleeing with its possessions, that so obsesses Fleischmann and Campanella. It’s as elusive as a blip on a video monitor, a flash of a lightning bug—first here, now there—or a garbled radio message traveling from the past through space.

Red Fly/Blue Bottle is another in a recent spate of bold experimental pieces that largely eschew plot and linear narrative in favor of challenging theatrical devices that foreground aspects other than text. This production will greatly reward both the novice and the connoisseur of new downtown theater.

Triumphant Celtic Revival

Four-plus hours of early 20th century drama may not sound like your idea of a great way to spend a weekend, but the inventive and intrepid Irish Repertory Theatre has put together a production that might just change your mind. Presented over two evenings, The Yeats Project is comprised of eight fully-staged one act plays by William Butler Yeats. During the Rep’s Yeats festival, all of Yeats' plays (26 in total) will grace the Irish Rep stage as either readings or full productions from April 8 to May 3. The evening billed as Cycle A features Yeats’ very first play, The Countess Cathleen; The Cat and the Moon; and On Baile’s Strand. Irish Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Charlotte Moore directs all three plays.

The Countess Cathleen is a quaint morality tale with Faustian overtones set in “olden times” Ireland. Given the benign quality of the script, it comes as something of a shock to find out that, when first produced in Dublin by Yeats in 1899, dozens of police officers were called to the theater to repel protesters, a Catholic Cardinal and Catholic students signed vehement protests, and the local newspaper wrote vicious condemnations daily. All of this took place because the play’s saintly Countess Cathleen, who sells her soul to save the starving populace, is spared by God at the end of the play. In 1899, when you sold your soul to the devil, it was unacceptable to expect (or depict) any outcome but the worst. A play about a merciful God who forgave the sin was blasphemous and unacceptable.

In a modern context, the text seems almost whimsically virtuous. Terry Donnelly (Countess Cathleen) and Fiana Tiobin (Oona, her nurse) manage to imbue their performances with enough urgency and reality to keep the play from sliding into melodrama, and Patrick Fitzgerald’s delightfully manic demon enlivens things. Director Moore creates a rather static world, and the actors seem uncomfortably placed at times. But a large scrim at the back of the theater featuring an outstanding series of projections by designer Jan Hartley provides context and enhances the mood of the play with gorgeous Irish landscapes and castle interiors.

One of Yeats’ prose comedies follows, The Cat and the Moon, which features an increasingly likeable Fitzgerald as a blind beggar and Sean Gormley as his crippled companion. The men have come to a saint’s shrine to beg for cures for their afflictions and end up descending into delightfully entertaining squabbles over injustices, imagined and real, that they have committed against one another. Justin Stoney, Amanda Sprecher, and William J. Ward are introduced as a wandering troupe of musicians and quickly become on of the major high points in the production. This trio play pipes, lutes, violins and drums to great effect in plays throughout the two nights. In particular, Stoney dazzles on a simple recorder-style pipe and sings Irish folk songs as if he were born to do nothing else.

About On Baile’s Strand, Yeats said, in his notes to Notes to Poems 1899-1905, that it “must always be a little overcomplicated when played by itself. And that is something of an understatement. The play is part of a cycle of five plays Yeats wrote about the legendary Irish king Cuchulain. It is play of great lyrical power and prowess, but demands a lot of the audience. The play discusses at length the political pressures of the emerging unification of feudal Ireland and is burdened with a lot of exposition for a rather simple story. Cuchulain once loved a fierce Scottish queen who has sent her son to her court to kill him. At its best, the play feels like one of Shakespeare’s lesser known history plays. Kevin Collins manages some riveting moments as King Cuchulain, despite having some of the most cumbersome dialogue. And Stoney creates a menacing yet still deeply-touching character with The Young Man.

Cycle B, the second evening, includes The Land of Heart’s Desire, directed by Moore, and four plays directed by producing director Ciarán O’Reilly: The Pot of Broth; Purgatory, A Full Moon in March, and Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

The Land of Heart’s Desire was, during Yeats’ lifetime, his most-produced play. It is easy to see the charm of this simply presented fairytale about an newly-married Irish country girl who is seduced away from hearth and home by a wicked fairy child. Standout Fiona Tobin, as the young wife’s bitterly complaining mother-in-law Bridget, delivers a wonderfully realized and recognizable Irish shrew. Ward (Bridget’s husband Maurteen) and Peter Cormican (as a hapless Catholic priest Father Hart) are also superb and make the language sing as they try to persuade the young wife not to run off with the fairies. Director Moore slightly deflates the energy in the play by introducing the supernatural element, in the form of Sprecher (the Fairy Child) rather bluntly. Although Sprecher is a likeable young actress, skipping onstage in something that looks like an Ice Capades outfit and proclaiming yourself a fairy child only works well in drag shows.

One of the festival highlights is introduced next, The Pot of Broth. This exuberant and joyous comedy is laugh out loud funny from the first moment, when Donnelly (Sibby) runs across stage screaming bloody murder and energetically chasing down a bedraggled chicken. The play is a simple Irish folk story in which a Tramp stops by the house of a miserly woman and tricks her into feeding him dinner using nothing but his wits and a bucket-load of artful lies. Fitzgerald could not be better as The Tramp. Blessed with tremendous charm and more than his share of brash Irish blarney, Fitzgerald fills his role with an oily obsequiousness that is pure pleasure to watch. Equally delightful, as the miserly and domineering Sibby, Donnelly evokes huge laughs from the audience with every screech and avaricious glance. She is truly an actress at the top of her game. Completing the festival’s best cast, Cormican, as Sibby’s long-suffering husband John, balances her fiery energy with a placidity and slyness that is richly rewarding.

Purgatory is an interesting play that combines a chilling Irish ghost story with elements of the Biblical Isaac and Abraham story. An Old Man (Corrigan) tells his son, Boy (Stoney), the story of his parents’ disastrous marriage and the tragic consequences of their misalliance. Jan Hartley’s wonderful projection of an old Irish manor house helps tell the story in dramatic fashion. However, the actors seem to be trapped in a plodding moroseness that overshadows the complexity of the language. It does not come off as an evolving character study of an initially likeable but ultimately sinister character, but more like the final brooding confession of a melodrama villain.

The lavish and beautifully directed fourth play of the evening, A Full Moon in March, is one of Yeats’ most fully developed ‘dancer plays.’ Although there are dances in several of his plays, the ‘dancer plays’ are classified thusly based on their integral use of dance, masks, ritual, Japanese Noh elements, and experimentation with movement. A Full Moon in March plays on the Salome story and features a cold Queen (Amanda Quaid) who has offered her hand in marriage as the prize in a competition to determine the best singer in the realm. When a grotesque Swineherd (Collins) enters her bedchamber to compete, he learns that she uses the competition as an excuse to cut off the head of competitors that offend her. This is because she is “cruel as the winter of virginity.” The antidote to her cruelty is a consumptive, passionate dance with the swineherd’s severed head, wherein his blood might enter and fertilize her barren womb. The action is underscored with beautiful songs and music by our traveling minstrels (Stoney, Sprecher, and Ward).

A Full Moon in March is the most fully realized play in the festival, and you feel as if Yeats might have sat in and overseen rehearsals. The immediacy and accessibility for modern audiences comes as something of a surprise after the earlier plays, with their quaint and old-fashioned air. Special kudos to costume designer David Toser for the heightened and passionate look of this piece. Quaid is fantastically ferocious and brings just the right balance of harshness and fragility. Collins is utterly transformed by a brilliantly creepy mask from designer Bob Flanagan. Director O’Reilly deserves tremendous credit for seamlessly pulling off an extremely challenging script.

The closing play for Cycle B is, appropriately, the play Yeats received the most critical success with, Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The Cathleen Ni Houlihan mentioned in the title refers to an Irish queen who, in song, represents Ireland itself. The play is set during the 1798 Irish rebellion, which was aided by the French. The plays opens showing us a happy Irish household preparing for the wedding of their young son Michael (Collins). His father (Ward) has eager plans for the bride money. His mother (Donnelly) hopes to send his brother (Stoney) to the priesthood with their new wealth. His brother is looking forward to a puppy the bride has promised him. Into this house enters a strange woman in a dark cloak, Tobin, beautifully vibrant, as Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Cathleen speaks darkly about losing her “four beautiful fields” and about how she can’t return home because there are “too many strangers in the house.” The mother and father see only a strange old woman in need of charity. But Michael and the audience begin to realize the woman is Ireland herself. When the French troops land, Michael must chose between domestic tranquility and fighting for his beloved Ireland.

The politics are as relevant and the emotions just as stirring today as when Yeats wrote Cathleen Ni Houlihan. It is sparsely staged and subtlety performed, choices which contribute to the simplicity and strength of the message. All in all, the play is a rousing conclusion to a truly epic and largely successful adventure in dramatic revival. Yeats would be proud.

A festival pass good for one admission to all Yeats Projects events is $100. Single tickets to both Cycle A and Cycle B performances are $65 and $55. For more information and a detailed calendar of events visit http://www.irishrep.org.

Paint it Black

Watch enough of the “I Love the [insert decade here]” pop culture shows on VH1 and you’ll be familiar with Michael Ian Black, one of their most frequent talking heads. The comedian, a graduate of sketch comedy troupe The State, has also been seen on several other television programs, usually playing various riffs on himself. Black has branched out, slightly, in recent years, and become an author. In 2008, he published My Custom Van ... And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face. Joe Jung of Project: Theater has refashioned roughly a dozen of these comic essays into their current show, My Custom Van, directed by Jung. Black’s theatrics may be zany, but they aren’t inherently theatrical; it’s just sardonic humor. So the onus falls on Project: Theater to build from Black’s foundation and fill the stage.

And fill they do, to a point. Project: Theater achieves half of its mission, which is to “produce engaging, creative and entertaining theater with an emphasis on works that are new,” and Van (which can be seen at the Upper West Side’s Drilling Company Theatre). This production does just that, selecting roughly a dozen vignettes from Black’s book and magnifying them in some of the most enjoyably over-the-top ways imaginable.

Van is a night of ribald humor. Its characters, all inhabiting some corner of Black’s mind, are all id and no superego. This show can get loud and dirty, and is probably best enjoyed by a younger audience.

Take, for example, M. Ian Black, the blustery character played by Andrew McLeod (all character names are pretty much spins on that of the author). M. Ian recounts in great detail his many conquests from the previous weekend. The man is an arrogant cad, prone to overstatement and over sharing, but McLeod, clad in a business suit and orating with the bravado of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, gives a performance of hilarious bluster.

Josh Tussin turns the volume up even higher in a pair of scenes as “M.I.B.” In one, he brags about having sported an impressive array of facial hair; in the second, he rages about throwing the most awesome taco party ever. It’s hard to imagine from where the actor draws his energy. I’ll let him keep that a secret.

The whole ensemble, which also includes Amanda Byron, Brian Frank, and Jung himself, is rock-solid. And Chad Lefebvre’s stellar lighting and projection design becomes an important character throughout the evening. But despite their immense talent, Van’s fractured episodic structure of chapters feels far less consequential than did their last production, a marvelous revival of The Secretaries. Here, all the pieces are in play, but they remain just that: pieces. It’s more like a night of consistently smart stand-up routines than a coherent work.

And it must be said, I’m not sure what this work does to support the other half of the Project: Theater mission, to stimulate “an immediate and compelling dialogue between artist and audience by asking questions rather than giving answers.” Van is great fun, but doesn’t take on a life of its own at the end of the evening. If questions were posed, I’m not sure I heard any beneath all the irreverent humor, impeccably delivered as it was.

Jung and his skilled cast and crew deserve much praise for turning Black’s writing into a stage piece. It may not be full of insight, but it sure is full of laughs.

High Fidelity

So, not only are you a young African American woman searching for identity in Berkeley, California, with a granola chewing, enlightened mom, while all your friends live in the-significantly-less-enlightened Oakland; your aunt is also the legendary Civil Rights activist Angela Davis. Oh, and you’re named after her too. Good luck. No wonder Eisa Davis spends so much of her dynamic, exuberantly autobiographical play, Angela’s Mixtape, listening to the radio.

Presented by New Georges and the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Angela’s Mixtape tracks Eisa’s journey into womanhood through a rich tapestry of music – sometimes sung, sometimes recorded. This is her “mixtape” of human experience, a sort-of thesis proposal for her collegiate aunt to see if Eisa measures up to the strong Davis women who reared her. As in the best hip-hop, Ms. Davis samples influences as varied as Marx, Debussy, and Back to the Future in her pursuit of self.

And does Davis’s “tape” make the cut? Absolutely. A sharp, unifying staging from director Liesl Tommy imbues Davis’s bouncy narrative with the perfect rhythm. Eisa’s questions about fitting in, classifying her race to friends, and later, wrestling with her family legacy, mature naturally in the story and are often punctuated with harmonic bits of a capella singing. Music, Davis proves, keeps time superbly.

Davis, who was recently on Broadway in Passing Strange, might have trouble surmounting that intertext, since Mixtape covers a lot of the same ground. Race, family, and music figure heavily into both pieces, but Davis’s script carries a potent political charge and draws an interesting conclusion about art as activism. Where Passing Strange was content to be a fun ride from adolescence to adulthood, Mixtape’s protagonist emerges from her larval stage actualized and equipped to take on social injustice, like her aunt did in the seventies.

Only one aspect felt self-indulgent – a scene near the end when Eisa directly asks Aunt Angela if she has lived up to her name. Eisa’s struggle with this is discreetly transmitted quite well throughout the play, but something short circuits in the blunt stating of it. Suddenly we see Eisa, the playwright asking for approval, as opposed to Eisa the character, which puts audiences in an uncomfortable position.

But any minor discomfort will be worth it, because Ms. Davis is a joy to watch otherwise. Deftly communicating a wide range of ages and intents throughout, she truly feels at home amid Clint Ramos’s beautiful light-boxes, photographs and scenic design. Dancing or sulking, she attacks every action with copious amounts of energy. In a particularly affecting moment, Eisa decides to describe herself as mixed-race to schoolmates, and her immediate reaction of both relief and heartbreak is intensely honest.

Kim Brockington, Denise Burse, Ayesha Ngaujah, and Linda Powell provide fine support for Davis in a number of roles, usually distinguished by smart costume triggers from designer Jessica Jahn. Only Ngaujah occasionally eluded recognition, when swapping between Eisa’s stepsister and cousin. Powell, as Angela, has an unenviable task, as her legendary character is talked about for much of the play. But Powell plays it cool and subdued, allowing our knowledge of her activist days to fill in any blanks. Brockington and Burse as Mom and Grandma both give very genuine, fully rounded performances.

Angela’s Mixtape is an intricate compilation of influences, full of music and meaning, of heart and heritage. From collections like these, our lives gain perspective. Sometimes these tracks need to be lined up and properly ordered before you can make sense of them.

Peck a Little, Talk a Lot

The layout for Diana Basmajian’s production of Limonade Tous les Jours, the Charles Mee play about May-December love in the time of croissants, is such that the audience sits on either of two sides of a small stage area at Chelsea’s Cell Theater. It’s a tight squeeze, and a problematic one as well. Anyone not sitting in one of the two “front” rows often has a difficult time seeing much of the action. What is clear from any seat, however, is what a star turn Eleanor Handley is giving as Ya-Ya, a divorced Parisian cabaret singer. She meets Andrew (Austin Pendleton) at a café. He’s in his fifties, while she is in her twenties, but the two share something in common. They are both coming off of failed marriages, Andrew to a woman a decade his junior and Ya-Ya to another older man who cheated his marriage away.

The two share something else as well: a love for the word. The two sit together and talk, and over the course of Limonade talk a great deal more. And their willingness to talk about their mutual aversion to love somehow leads to a love affair between the two of them.

Limonade follows a series of conversations between these two characters about the nature of love. Andrew thinks with his head, while Ya-Ya follows her heart. But while Mee’s play wants to show how love can find a way, his work actually has a different problem. He never makes clear why these two characters wouldn’t stay together. They come together immediately and fall into bed almost as easily. Any wall that either of them puts up feels inorganic, meant to stall the work’s inevitable outcome.

Basmajian’s direction shows plenty of smarts. Since the entire action occurs in the same space, she utilizes effective transitions like co-star Anton Briones’ impressive tap number (choreographed by Erin Porvaznika) and several filmed scenes of the lovers frolicking through the streets of Paris (video design is provided by Tee McKnight) to help distinguish between scenes. This suggests some texture to Andrew and Ya-Ya’s relationship, that time has gone by and they have forged a real connection in the moments they share between scenes. And Hilary Noxon’s set is quite functional.

However, other decisions do not work. In addition to the difficulty seeing both leads at the same time, several scenes depict the lovers in post-coital bliss, in such places as a makeshift bed and bathtub. Handley strips down to her undergarments while Pendleton removes nothing more than his shoes, glasses and camera. This inequity is distracting. Either have both actors strip down for realism or let them both pantomime having made love. I spent too much time wondering why this decision was made, and it distanced me from the action.

Truth be told, aside from several Edith Piaf torch numbers ably sung by Handley, there is very little action in Limonade. What there is is plenty of conversation. However, the emotional center of the play never builds. Both characters’ beliefs are clear from Mee’s first scene. We know as much about them twenty minutes in as we would if the play were to carry on for another two hours at the same pace.

Both lead actors seem to be operating on different levels as well. Pendleton is a terrific actor (The Last Sweet Days of Isaac, The Little Foxes) in addition to being an esteemed writer, director and teacher, and he underplays his role here almost too much. He can be so stoic that I often doubted he had any real investment in his affair. The splendid Handley, on the other hand, is a luminous presence and is far more ebullient, as her age naturally dictates. Passion oozes out of every pore of her body. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her onstage – which is why when Limonade asks Andrew to fall out of love with Ya-Ya, it’s too much of a reach.

What Limonade is ultimately lacking is an obstacle, something to put Andrew and Ya-Ya’s burgeoning relationship in jeopardy and make those watching truly care about them. As it stands right now, the only obstacles are those between the audience and the stage.

Failed commitment

Fans of Tina Howe’s work will recognize familiar touchstones in her new play: a preoccupation with Boston WASPs, artists and poets; women of strong convictions; and the thorny relations of parents and children. There’s also her fondness for hats, which goes back to Painting Churches, when Fanny Gardner first appears in a bathrobe and hat; here Jane Alexander assumes an identical ensemble. Alexander plays Catherine Sargent, a cousin of John Singer Sargent and a renowned painter in her own right, who is “legally blind,” a term frequently applied to patients with macular degeneration. Her affliction is not stated, but Catherine describes her vision as “just a bit blurry on some edges,” which fits the bill. Divorced from one of the brahmin Lowells, Catherine has been taken away from her comfortable surroundings in Boston by her son, Royal (Jack Gilpin), a Columbia professor of poetry with a special interest in Yeats. Royal wants her near him, though he rarely visits her, and she abuses him for it.

Catherine’s residence is a nursing home in Riverdale, N.Y., where she encounters a new roommate, Rennie Waltzer (Lynn Cohen). Rennie is a fizzy Jewish woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and in need of a wheelchair or walker. As depressed as Catherine is, Rennie is the opposite.

Catherine is a devotée of the painter Manet, and in one of two really engaging moments in the play, she describes why the artist’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—a reproduction hangs over her bed—is a crucial work in art history: it’s because Manet showed a naked woman sitting on a picnic blanket. “It wasn’t the fact of her nakedness that was so shocking, but its implausibility,” she tells Rennie’s family. “Placing a naked woman in a public place sounded the call for artistic freedom, telling the artist he could paint not only what he wanted, but how.”

It’s a mantra that Howe, who also wrote Coastal Disturbances, Museum, and Pride’s Crossing, might marshal in defense of Chasing Manet, which is rife with implausibility. Anyone familiar with assisted living or a nursing home will find little credibility in director Michael Wilson’s production. Apart from the loud mayhem of the patients’ cries, this facility is so wildly off base as to appear that Wilson and dramaturg Rachel Ely haven’t done any homework.

First off, partial blindness is no reason for Catherine to be in a nursing home. She is mentally sound and no danger to herself, unlike the other inhabitants; she should be in assisted living. Why Royal has put her in a nursing home is not explained. And if she is legally blind, she would have learned to use a cane, yet she doesn’t use one and none is on stage. Even more absurd is that medicine, including sleeping pills, is left on side tables in easy reach of the blind woman and the Alzheimer’s victim. This facility is bucking to have its license revoked—if it has one!

Howe’s plot and tone combine One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Golden Girls, with Cohen playing a role akin to the dotty Sophia in that sitcom, and Catherine as an acid Beatrice Arthur. Rennie is full of malapropisms—“division” for “diversion,” “pottery” for “poetry”—and she grins and goes off on loopy outbursts. Nevertheless, Catherine hatches a plan with Rennie to escape. They’re going to “chase Manet,” as it were—to do their own thing and head for Paris. One is supposed to cheer their indomitable spirits, but it’s hard when the drama is so contrived.

Then, too, Howe indulges in the facile comic maneuver of having old people swear like today’s teenagers to get a laugh. Catherine calls a “Bronx cheer” vulgar, but moments later is dropping the F-bomb on poor Royal. Catherine rhapsodizes about being caught by her ex-husband in flagrante delicto with a younger art student—classy, isn’t that? And Catherine is also cruel. “Beauty was never your strong suit,” she tells Royal, in one of her offhand observations. By the time Howe has the two senior citizens singing an anthem to stool softener, you’ll be itching for social services to close down this institution.

Alexander understands Catherine’s frustration, restlessness, and indomitability, but the part squanders her talents. Cohen has a field day hamming as the scattered Rennie, yet makes the most of one painful scene when she realizes her husband has died. Other actors assume multiple roles effectively, and David Margulies has the second fine speech, as a silent patient who suddenly snaps into a riveting monologue that reveals him as an archeologist who discovered a mystical treasure in the Fertile Crescent. But there’s very little value in this infertile tale.

Tuff Tawk

Whether it be the Jonas Brothers, ALF or the Twilight series, most of us have our own guilty pleasures: people or works that are in no aesthetic sense good but that always put a fond smile on our faces. For the narrator played by the masterful Zachary Oberzan in Rambo Solo, that work is First Blood -- not the film that gave birth to the Sylvester Stallone franchise, but David Morell’s 1972 debut novel on which Ted Kotcheff’s film was originally based. Solo is Oberzan’s attempt to lovingly reenact the novel. He doesn’t play himself, per se, nor does he actively play the character of wronged vet John Rambo. Instead, he plays an aficionado with a Stallone drawl, addressing an audience to whom he speaks with the familiarity of new friends seated on the floor of Soho Rep’s Walkerspace.

Oberzan explains how his obsession with the Morrell novel was borne from a viewing of the film on HBO as an adolescent. Afterwards, he bought the novel and read it ad mauseum. In Solo, he narrates Morell’s entire original plot, occasionally commenting on its incongruities and sometimes pointing out how it differs from the film. He also offers legitimate analytic commentary about such things as the bond forged between Rambo and Sheriff Wilfred Teasle (one of the characters hunting down the renegade soldier, played in the film by Brian Dennehy).

Nature Theatre of Oklahoma created Solo. The genesis of this show is purportedly a recorded phone conversation that took place between Pavol Liska and Oberzan. Liska and Kelly Cooper co-conceived and directed this meta work, whose novelty stretches almost all the way through the end of the performance (the show’s last fifteen minutes could have been abbreviated). But there are two things that elevate this original work.

The first is Solo’s overall structure. Oberzan performs his reenactment against a triptych of videos depicting three different versions of the actor giving the same performance in his own studio apartment. (Peter Nigrini is credited with video work and Matt Tierney with sound.) Not only does this satisfy a basic element of audience curiosity (who doesn’t sometimes wonder about the personal details of a performer while watching him or her?), but it is fascinating to see how well-prepared Oberzan is. His live performance matches at least one of the recorded ones almost perfectly at any given time. When Oberzan’s live presentation may skew off by a second or two, he easily realigns his performance to one of the other videos in no time. (It appears that an earpiece he wears keeps him on track.)

The second reason is Oberzan himself. The dynamic performer completely immerses himself as the narrator with enough octane to fuel this avant garde monologue piece. He makes the speaker a three-dimensional man, odd enough to be hopelessly devoted to a dismissed pulp novel yet passionate enough to think that perhaps the work is worth re-examining. He makes his persona’s boneheadedness oddly lovable, and his exuberance absolutely contagious. After a while, the speaker’s gruff rhythms make the dialogue sound like its own kind of poetry.

Particularly amusing is how Oberzan wholeheartedly embraces his own low-rent storytelling techniques. He throws M & Ms on the stage floor to simulate gunfire, and hides under a towel in his bathtub when Rambo must hide from his enemies in a riverbed. And his ebullience for the tale is contagious. He establishes a connection with the audience from the onset of the show, creating a communal feeling that never dies.

Here’s hoping that Oberzan and Nature Theatre of Oklahoma will take on the forgotten Stallone arm-wrestling classic Over the Top next.

Of God's and Atoms

Uneasy nuclear paranoia radiates from Trinity 5:29, Axis Company’s brisk, deftly staged meditation on Robert Oppenheimer and the test of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Rather than a straight docudrama, director Randy Sharp has opted instead to focus on the historical weight of the test, often evoking religious allusions to good effect. Brought to Los Alamos by President Harry S. Truman, Oppenheimer and his possibly communist lover Jean Tatlock find themselves faced with a giant wooden crate, within which resides an unseen atomic conductor. Their every movement around the crate is watched closely by General Groves, who eventually brings Tatlock’s political leanings into question.

At Los Alamos, Truman is more God than President – making his lapdog Groves the over-achieving archangel, I suppose – and the piece frequently experiments with Biblical allegory. In one segment straight out of Genesis, Tatlock entices Oppenheimer to peer inside the giant crate, though Truman has expressly forbidden it. Later, Oppenheimer stands in for Jonah when he is trapped in the crate. Indeed, these religious citations provide a perfect context for the creation of the atomic bomb: what is the extent of mankind’s power? What is the extent of mankind’s right to dabble in such power?

Trinity’s script (no singular playwright is credited) is terse and cryptic, as though every line of dialogue shields a well-guarded secret of national interest. At one point, Tatlock tries to spoon-feed Oppenheimer radioactive condensation from the conductor under threat from Groves, a fascinating scene that clearly illustrates the desperate sense of life and death hanging over Los Alamos in July of 1945. While someone seeking an informative biography of Oppenheimer might be disappointed, the snappish, abstract text offers a worthy examination of his historical significance.

Director Sharp and his designers economically create a spooky, sanitized aesthetic using only tinny period music, hard lights and a few set pieces. The staging is meticulous and purposely rigid, probably to highlight the military aspects of the narrative. Brian Barnhart, Marc Palmieri and Britt Genelin turn in solid performances as Truman, Groves and Tatlock, respectively, but Edgar Oliver’s Oppenheimer is a bizarrely theatrical creature, nearing the realm of farce. Not an inappropriate choice considering Oppenheimer’s larger-than-life historical status, but next to the more grounded cast members, Oliver’s velvety line readings evoked old Hollywood more than nuclear physics.

And then after forty-five minutes, Trinity 5:29 ends abruptly in a flash of light. My audience was dumbstruck by the swift intensity of the piece, blinkingly wondering if the play was really over or if it was just intermission. Despite some unevenness in the cast, Axis Company’s rumination on man’s destructive atomic destiny closes aptly – a blast of radiance and then nothing.

Far From the Tree?

The tennis-court style staging of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, directed by Kathleen O’Neill, puts one immediately into the action and witty repartee of one of George Bernard Shaw’s best plays, without feeling the least bit self-conscious. The minimalist set, designed by Ben Salzbach for the black box space is at once intimate and all-encompassing, sandwiched between dual risers of viewers, a perfect vantage point to observe all of the nuances and developments (and perhaps other viewers’ reactions) volleying back and forth among the six talented players. From the first moments of the play when we meet Miss Vivie Warren, played crisply by Caralyn Kozlowski, the modern young woman drawn by Shaw circa 1893 is so contemporary that we feel as if we might know her. Her distant yet generously supportive mother, Mrs. Warren, is a former prostitute and current “manager” of several brothels across the continent. Joy Franz brings depth and humility to the superficially stereotypical, yet complex character, especially in her lapses back to the girl she once was, torn between her limited options and burning ambition.

The conflict between these two strong women, both somewhat defined by their circumstances, whether comfortable or trail-blazing, incites the next two hours, with nary a dull moment in the swiftly paced four acts. With its biting feminist perspective, shifting relationships, and social commentary as only Shaw can deliver, the play created such a shock in his time that it was immediately banned after publication, causing an eight-year delay in its production on the London stage.

In his extensive Author’s Apology, Shaw addresses his critics, further elucidating the need for meaningful social criticism, which is often (even today) totally misunderstood. This case directly evokes our current climate, like the ongoing debate over sex education, for example, becoming politicized and being misconstrued as condoning behavior instead of preventing disease, now a global health concern. The issues in Shaw’s essay are fresh, and the backstory of Victorian England’s response to his play further contextualizes his work for us now.

On a lighter note, upon stepping into Manhattan Theatre Source, I’m informed by my savvy companion that the same Greenwich Village location once housed Fred Leighton’s dress shop (when he was still importing clothing from Mexico, before moving uptown and into celebrity jewelry design). It’s a colorful tidbit, and the lobby does still feel a bit like a showroom, complete with a welcoming violinist, Jennifer Axelson, playing in front of the telltale shop windows, and an inviting café space and gallery/bookstore further inside. But it’s upstairs in the black box theater space where the real transformations happen now.

Joseph Franchini’s performance as Praed is also a gem, from the time he nervously approaches to meet Vivie and becomes inexorably drawn into the family’s drama. He too is a rather helpless and limited product of his station, as you could argue is Mrs. Warren’s “business partner,” Sir George Crofts (his title somehow making him all the more repulsive), played by David Palmer Brown. That each character wholeheartedly believes in his own standpoint and worldview, whether with a sense of naïveté or entitlement, makes their interactions captivating and provocative to watch throughout the performance.

Two other male characters, Frank Gardner, played suavely by James Dutton, and his father, Ashton Crosby’s bumbling Reverend Gardner, further complicate matters as a potential love interest for Vivie, and perhaps her mother – present and/or past – respectively. (Confusing? Yes!) Their unique positions round out the plot in intriguing and amusing ways.

Like the tennis match setup, we’re watching for chinks in the armor, machinations being conceived or enacted, perhaps crafting our own theories. Franz’ Mrs. Warren deliciously flirts, manipulates, schemes, performs, and finally pleads her desires, trying anything to insinuate herself back into her daughter’s life. But once Vivie learns the whole truth about her mother’s choices, it may be too late. And Mrs. Warren’s concept of love-as-ROI, the commodity that has dictated her entire “professional” life, just doesn’t seem to be working this time around. At the same time, Vivie is not unlike her mother, matter-of-factly making a choice and trying to strike out on her own. The bottom line for women here: no matter what the circumstances, one’s choices can often be severely limited. Many salient points, brilliantly woven through by Shaw, are up for modern conversation.

Finally, the wonderful costuming by David Withrow also expresses the ideas of the play beautifully. Mrs. Warren’s fine dress, high style and overall affectations directly contrast with Vivie’s smart tied-back dress/riding trousers and ankle boot combo. She often sports the tools of her trade, and while the others seem content to revel in their hats, gloves, canes, and other accoutrements, Kozlowski’s Vivie eschews hats, picks off her lace gloves finger by finger, and fidgets with her pouches, watch and pens. Praed’s hat and tight suit are perfect for him, and all of the characters are well clad and coiffed, evoking the period as well as the individual roles they’ve chosen in their society. And it all fits like a glove (or to be more site-specific, like a Fred Leighton import).

Commuting is Hell

What if you were waiting for a bus that never came? There are simple answers, of course — walk, complain, litigate, or maybe just go home. But what if you spent years, a lifetime, waiting? Tracing the same steps trod by Beckett in Waiting for Godot, Nobel-prizewinning Chinese writer Gao Xingjan constructs an uncanny reality centered around a bus stop. The Bus Stop is simultaneously a send up and a reconsideration of Beckett — for Gao’s characters wait is movement, carrying them from purgatory to the closest approximation of redemption: control of their fate. Though bleak, Gao’s vision is not without hope: movement is possible if you move. Gao’s existential queries are given voice by a diverse and entertaining cast of characters, seeming to be randomly united by their presence at a suburban bus stop. A silent man, a chess player, a young hothead, a fidgety girl, a mother, a student and a store director wait together for transportation to the city. As they wait, the old man frames the discussion, “When you stand in line according to the rules there are always those who don’t go by the rules.”

With the passage of time, these figures become more desperate, but also more intimate, sharing personal details, specifically their reasons for traveling to the city. The tragic question arises: if one does not hope or have dreams of a better life, what does the present, or the passage of time, mean?

To render this bleak, but familiar landscape Samantha Schect, also the show’s director, has designed a set with a swirling white circle beneath a wooden, cross-shaped bus stop sign at its center, directing the eye to this void. The entire set creates an atmosphere of endlessness and helplessness, of being sucked in to an unidentified center. Additionally, each group of audience seats, four in total, looks like its own bus terminal. With the repetition of structure, there is the sense of community, but by walling off each section, the seating underscores themes of alienation and desperation.

Though much of the existential musing is neither new nor mind-blowing, Gao’s play distinguishes itself with clever humor and criticism of Chinese society and government. The show’s program tells us that Communist Party officials labeled the play, which opened in Beijing in 1983, “spiritual pollution.” It’s not hard to see what provoked such a response. Gao’s characters initially regard waiting as an act of “social morality” — whether or not one has to wait indicates his station in life. That these people wait eternally signifies their meaninglessness in the eyes of the government. By setting opinions so ludicrous, but so common, against a ridiculous backdrop, Gao undermines this way of thinking, and kindly saves his characters from the void.

But salvation does not come easily, or quickly. The path is fraught with painful realizations. A young girl played with an endearing, yet heartbreaking level of anxiety by Alice Oh realizes that she will grow old and that, in the words of the mother, a woman’s life is waiting: waiting to get married, waiting to have children, waiting for them to age. Life is an eternal struggle, with eternally delayed gratification.

The concerns of the characters are most acute when they reveal what draws them to the city. The young girl was supposed to meet a man. As the possibility of a union dims, she is forced to blurt out: “I’ve become so petty…I know it’s not right to feel this way, but whenever I see city girls wearing those high-heeled shoes, I feel like they’re walking all over me and flaunting themselves to humiliate me…You can’t imagine how jealous I am.”

Thankfully, Gao balances the desperate notes with humor, animated most vividly by Jamie Grayson as Director Ma. Director Ma epitomizes the elitist who enjoys playing the system; he is happy with his station and cares nothing for his fellow men. Yet he finds himself stuck with this group because his bribes have failed. Throughout the play Grayson tickles the other characters like a giddy devil, enticing them to give up on the dream of the city and return to the comforts of home. His character is hilariously glib and Grayson hams it up, providing the easy laughter a struggling citizen desperately needs.

Though some of the jokes and criticism are lost in translation (the idea that one cannot sue a bus company is completely laughable on this side of the Pacific), the fact that a play condemned as pernicious by Communist officials resonates with an American audience attests to the strength of the writing and acting. If the show can occasionally be too funny to carry gravity, this isn’t necessarily a problem — who needs the philosophical quandaries of Beckett when you can get up and go?

A Tragedy of Epic Proportions

The Oresteia is a bold task for any theater company to take on in its entirety, and thankfully Classic Stage Company gets that, and gets it (mostly) right. With three plays presented in two parts (Part 1: Agamemnon & Elektra, and Part 2: Orestes), there are some huge flaws in CSC’s production, but there are also some wonderful moments. Most of those moments occur in Part 2: Orestes, so my advice is this: skip the flawed first half entirely and just see Part 2: Orestes, or if you must see the earlier parts, make darn sure you sit in the center section, as the two side sections aren’t worth the price of admission, even if that price is free. The traditional Oresteia, by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, is a trilogy of plays tackling the events surrounding the aftermath of the Trojan War, specifically the curse on the house of Atreus. The first play (Agamemnon) deals with the return of King Agamemnon to his home after ten brutal years of battle, only to be viciously murdered by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra and her scheming lover Aegisthus. In the second play (Electra) Clytemnestra and Aegisthus get what’s coming to them when Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, returns from his self-imposed exile and conspires with his sister Electra and friend Pylades to avenge Agamemnon’s death. The final play (The Euminides) chronicles Orestes\' flight from the justice-seeking Furies and ultimate forgiveness at the hands of Apollo.

Rather than simply remounting another production of the Aeschylus classic, CSC Artistic Director Brian Kulick approached poet & playwright Anne Carson, who had already translated versions of Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Orestes, with the idea of creating a new Oresteia from the work of all three famous Greeks. She would translate Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first part of his famous trilogy, and combine it with the afore-mentioned translations of Elektra and Orestes to create an Oresteia that was different and new, yet still clung roughly to the tale originally crafted by Aeschylus. So what we are presented with finally by CSC is An Oresteia translated by Anne Carson, comprised of Part 1: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos & Elektra by Sophokles, directed by Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas, and Part 2: Orestes by Euripides, directed by Paul Lazar. Phew!

The absolute shining star of this production is the script by Anne Carson. While maintaining a line-by-line translation from the original texts, including changing the names of the playwrights and characters to reflect a closer translation of the Greek (Clytemnestra becoming Klytaimestra, for example, and Electra becoming Elektra) Ms. Carson manages to inject new life into the words, making them fresh and contemporary. If only Mr. Kulick and his co-director Gisela Cardenas could have done the same with their direction of Part 1: Agamemnon & Elektra. For Part 2: Orestes, Paul Lazar steps in to direct and does a masterful job, struggling against the almost overwhelming obstacle that is the monstrosity of the trilogy\'s set to deliver a bizarre yet intuitively insightful production.

The biggest drawback of the entire production is the scenic design. As the audience members enter the theater, they are greeted by the sight of three men in white overalls and black aprons relentlessly scrubbing the stage (consisting mainly of unpainted plywood and 2x4 lumber, making me wonder if the budget didn’t include money to buy paint), which is coated in layers and layers of caked-on blood. No explanation is given for who these men are or why they seem to be performing a task worthy of Tantalus himself; perhaps the blood represents the many sacrifices Klytaimestra has been offering up to the gods in her husband’s absence. Whatever the case may be, there is certainly an expectation in the air, the promise of bloody deeds past, with more blood to come.

Unfortunately, the set not only looks unfinished but it is grossly unwieldy, to the point that the poor actors ended up struggling with doors that would not open or worse, refused to stay open at the appropriate times. The side-section audiences were forced to watch the action unfold through a narrow window set into a protective wall (ostensibly to keep the audience from getting splattered) or on a small screen that prevented them from viewing any detail. To solve these major design problems, the protective walls need to be removed, and the doors need to have hinged kick-stops attached.

Of course, set changes wouldn’t solve the general unwieldiness of the direction in the first two plays of this saga. Thankfully there are some bright moments if you decide to see the epic in its entirety. In Agamemnon, Steve Mellor has an all too short appearance as the titular ruler. Craig Baldwin makes a superb eleventh-hour entry as Aigisthos, and manages maniacally to save the end of the first play. Stephanie Roth Haberle seems to be well cast as Klytaimestra, bringing an appropriate Lady Mackers quality to the role, but ultimately her interpretation is too whiny and petulant for us to have any empathy for her; she often staggers about stage as if intoxicated, and during the famous beacon scene (which Peter Jackson stole to such good effect in his Return of the King film) I was just embarrassed for her. The only strong feeling I was left with by the first intermission was that of being violated, something which is done to the audience quite a few times throughout the course of the first play, with flung props, pointed guns, and even a hose brought out to douse Kassandra (played with wide-eyed insanity by Doan Ly), which seemed a nod to Ivan Van Hove’s Misanthrope and little more.

The second play, Elektra, is only slightly more bearable, due mainly to the (no pun intended) electrifying performance of Annika Boras as Elektra. The whole conceit of the second play (chorus as sunbathers around a swimming-pool) only served to remind me of last year’s Oedipus Loves You by Irish punk-rock theater company Pan Pan, who set their Greek tragedy in a middle-class backyard complete with barbecue and children’s wading pool. It worked brilliantly for Pan Pan, but for this production it just falls flat. For example, it’s never quite clear why Elektra keeps jars of mud on her swimming-pool patio. Or why one of the sun-bathing chorus members starts prophesying to the sound of a tinkling piano, absent-mindedly tossing Tarot cards into the pool from her perch on a diving board. Luckily it is over quickly enough, and we can get to the truly interesting matter contained in Part 2: Orestes.

A word about this final act before we begin. The post-murder tale of the pursuit of Orestes by the Euminides (or Furies as they are more commonly known here) is bizarre and often problematic to stage. It is concerned with the Big Ideas of Justice and Family, and as such it doesn’t have concrete events like violent deaths to give it a point of entry (although it can only happen because of the violent deaths of the previous tales); as such, I usually find it the most difficult part of the story to “get into”, but also thematically the most interesting. I think it’s a bold choice to bring on another director to deal with such heady themes, and I applaud Brian Kulick and CSC for choosing Paul Lazar to helm this particular piece.

Undoubtedly Part 2: Orestes is influenced by both Mac Wellman and Big Dance Theater, both of whom director Paul Lazar has strong connections to; you can see this influence clearly in the casting of actors like Steve Mellor, David Neumann, Karinne Keithley, and Jess Barbagallo, all of whom have worked with Mac and/or Big Dance, and all of whom bring a delightful energy to the stage.

Steve Mellor is delightful as Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother and possible savior to his nephew Orestes, played stoically by Mickey Solis. Annika Boras returns as Elektra, playing the beat-poet to the hilt. David Neumann is entrancing to watch, both as he channels Tom Waites and as he dances, alone or with Karinne Keithley. Ms. Keithley dances and lends her ethereal voice in song as Chorus, together with Dan Hurlin. There is a particularly touching scene wherein the Chorus recites a cry to heaven first in Greek, then in translation, together with some magical visual aides. The multi-talented Keithley also plays Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen (yes, that Helen!), and victim of a certain famous pair of siblings’ kidnapping plot.

Jess Barbagallo returns in this segment, once again playing Pylades, Orestes “silent friend” of Elektra, now no longer so silent, delivering an impassioned justification for the murder (“assassination”) of Helen. Eric Dyer (of Radiohole fame) makes an appearance quite literally as the Deux Ex Machina (“God in the Machine”) Apollo, who shows up at the end to set everything aright. I would have liked to have actually seen Eric’s brief moment on stage, but since my view was obstructed, I can only assume from the looks of those audience members lucky enough to see it that it was glorious.

Set in a dream-like reality reminiscent of a beat-poet’s café, the only thing missing was a hookah (actually, there probably was a hookah, I just missed it because of the obstructed view). Combining music, dance, a rhythmic delivery, and earnest performances, this final play of An Oresteia almost made up for the tediousness of the first two plays. Given the choice, I would highly recommend skipping Part 1: Agamemnon & Elektra, as there is always the library or Internet if you want to know the details of the Trojan War or the curse on the House of Atreus, and purchasing tickets to <An Oresteia Part 2: Orestes, a thought provoking examination of human nature that packs a humorous punch.

A Hairy Proposition

The mother-daughter relationship can often be complex, to say the least. Set in a 19th century Dime Museum, A Slight Headache, directed by Jessica Bauman, explores the fantastical relationship between a mother and daughter, with both roles played by veteran performance artist and writer Alyson Pou. That these characters are connected by their long, intertwined, inseparable hair is a primary problem, but also the element upon which their livelihood as a sideshow-type attraction is based, which marks both the root and split ends of their conflict. This is a fun and captivating piece, housed appropriately in the Melville Gallery, a warm, rustic space of the South Street Seaport Museum (donated for the project), and reminiscent of the historic Lower Manhattan setting for many real curiosity museums of the day, including P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which once stood several blocks away at Broadway and Ann Street.

And Pou has recreated this milieu even further, by designing an installation of oddities, displayed around the back of the theater space/curiosity museum. Ushered in by the Tour Guide, played by Gregory Cohen Frumin, the performance begins in the lobby as he introduces the amazing collection we are about to view, including the main attraction, the mystical mother and daughter, shown on huge painted advertising banners. But first, he escorts us through the red velvet curtains, to examine one marvel after another: the rare Bearded Piranha, an excavated baby Cyclops skull, the jaunty Crocodile Mummies, and more, each with its own story to tell and fanciful accompanying artwork/pseudo-documentation, also by Pou. Frumin, a New York-based performance artist whose background includes a two-year Vassar College fellowship for research and practice-based theater studies in Italy, is instantly engaging and quirky, less carnival barker than reverential custodian (albeit kind of an endearingly goofy one). Later in the piece he also contributes his skills behind the scenes as puppeteer.

I was lucky enough to attend a performance with several kids in the audience (old enough for the one-hour plus attention span), who oohed and aahed utterly captivated as each oddity was revealed and illuminated by our guide. I felt heartened by the old-time interactivity of this, despite our technology-dominated age. It allowed us for a moment to step back into a time of imagination and wonder, with tales of far-off lands (and freedom from our fact-laden internet culture), a flight of fancy that everyone present seemed delighted to take.

And then the curtains were closed, candles extinguished, and we settled into our seats for the main attraction. Pou’s extensive wig and costume, both designed by Emily Pepper, were spectacular and revealed much of the story themselves. Portraying both Mother and Daughter, Pou switches back and forth between the two roles, setting the otherwise identical characters apart by the timbre of their voices, gestures, and quite opposed viewpoints. The mother tells the story of how her daughter first sprung forth from a tiny bump on her forehead (the cause of “a slight headache”), and developed into a full-grown offspring, without separating from their deeply connected, interwoven hair, which could never be cut. Part tall tale and part psychological exploration, the mother brings to life other colorful characters in her journey, like a nefarious would-be surgeon from whom she barely escapes.

Finally finding refuge in the all-encompassing world of “entertainment,” the mother and daughter have become headliners... as it were. However, the daughter has discovered some (real?) talents of her own, and is less willing to continue on merely as an extension of her mother and their tired “act,” which she is all too happy to try to reveal to the audience. They come to terms with this for the rest of the one-act play, the daughter waxing poetic about her dreams and plotting her escape, while the mother performs her usual numbers, along with the Maestro Matt Falber, who plays piano and other keys and percussives in accompaniment. The piece seems able to contain even a bit more music, while perhaps not a musical per se (although it does harken back to similar Gypsy-esque and Americana themes), I could see the Maestro’s function and character possibly more fully developed.

Illustrating some of the storytelling as well is a shadow puppet sequence, designed by Meghan Williams and operated behind a screen by Frumin. Artfully executed, this gives added dimension to the work, while maybe also being slightly underused. A key item coveted by the daughter, the bearded lady’s silver scissors is shown, but seeing silhouettes of some of the colorful characters as well, like the bearded lady for example, might have proven interesting too. The speeches are well drawn though, and Pou channels the amazing tales via both characters, who we sense almost appearing visibly together, inexorably attached to each other, even though she is often only turning around, or stepping behind a curtain. It’s all classic showmanship, wrapped up in ribbons and delivered with a flourish, even if the ending feels a bit anti-climactic. But definitely step right up for a very worthwhile theater experience, with multimedia of the traditional varieties, and much fun for children of all ages.

Outlook Hazy

Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing ridiculous headgear? Probing and humorous philosophical questions like these are supposedly at the heart of Bob Jude Ferrante’s comedy A New Theory of Vision, but you might be hard pressed to find them under the crude technical effects and bizarre story swerves. As the late Douglas Adams – something of a comedic philosopher himself, paraphrased above – might say, laboring through A New Theory of Vision’s cross-eyed gook of ghosts and computer graphics is “unpleasantly like being drunk.” Doesn’t seem so bad? Just ask a glass of water.

Vision follows Berkeley philosophy chair Lee Krebs (a committed Eric Percival), as he wrestles with his department, who wants him to write another best-seller, and visions of his dead girlfriend. When an uneasy student with Aspergers Syndrome, Erich (Matt Steiner) proposes Lee use virtual reality to develop a fresh perspective on philosophy, Lee agrees. Despite concerns from the student’s counselor (Maeve Yore), Lee and Erich embark on a poetic and surreal journey of discovery.

Never mind that technical stuff feels ten years old – choppy virtual reality hardly seems relevant in an era of iPhones and World of Warcraft. Ferrante’s play (and this production in particular) has many faults, but it certainly doesn’t want for ambition. Hanging a whole narrative on the quest to write a philosophy book about cyberspace is a tall enough order; factoring in Lee’s dead girlfriend and a handicapped sidekick suggests that the playwright had a very, very big story to tell. Or rather, several stories to tell. Vision’s script suffers most from a case of mistaken identity – first it thinks it’s Good Will Hunting, where a downtrodden professor reaches out to troubled student; then it thinks it’s The Omen, about a conniving, but brilliant devil-child (Steiner comes off a little too robotic) who sabotages those closest to him; and finally the script settles on The Cell, in which the counselor, Cara, helps Lee confront his psychological problems through special effects. Did I mention this is a comedy?

Also strange – a lot of talk about Lee’s work “hurting” Erich dominates the earlier scenes of the play, and indeed Erich is eventually hospitalized… but from what? Long hours at the computer? Then, from his hospital bed, Erich deviously orchestrates the downfall of Cara’s husband and, to some extent, Lee by posing as other people online. Cara is devastated by this, but not so devastated that a suddenly repentant Erich can’t convince her to help “rescue” Lee from continually reliving the death of his former girlfriend. There are interesting characters (Yore works wonders as Cara) and interesting ideas (like online ethics or V.R. philosophy) in Vision, but Ferrante’s short attention span keeps them from fully developing.

Also troubling, the play takes its title from Lee’s first widely popular book, a book that Lee wrote years ago and is desperately trying to escape. The specter of the book and Lee’s inability to live up to its success seems like a metaphor for his need to emotionally get past the death of his girlfriend, Jane. In both cases, he refuses to deal with the past. By titling the play A New Theory of Vision, , Ferrante sends a subconscious message that it was ultimately the more important of Lee’s books and that, metaphorically, he will NEVER really outrun his past. This problem is unnecessary because we have NO IDEA what either of Lee’s books is really about, so there’s no reason the virtual reality book he writes over the course of the play with Erich couldn’t be called “A New Theory of Vision.” (Some quick research reveals an even deeper level to this frustration – “A New Theory of Vision” is actually the title of a REAL book by Lee’s philosopher idol, George Berkeley!)

But there are things to like too. Throughout the earlier parts of the show, various characters interacting with Ted “become” his dead girlfriend Jane, by suddenly adopting her British accent and mannerisms. Ferrante and Parker showed surprising restraint here and the buildup leads nicely to the later part of the play where Lee confronts his demons, even if he does so in a laughable V.R. helmet made from a pilot’s jiffy hood.

The biggest highlight of this clumsy staging by Cat Parker is George Allison’s inventive, but inconsistent production design. Using the entire set as a projection surface, Allison creates a wide range of environments with video: the Berkeley campus, the Bay Bridge, and an abstract swirl of colors to represent cyberspace. In one neat sequence, as Lee tries to translate a bit of Latin, the words scroll above him when he figures it out. Or when he remembers his dead girlfriend, Allison punctuates it nicely with flashes of her body and the newspaper headline about her death. Cool stuff, but very distracting if the video fails to sync with the action on stage or cuts out altogether, as it did many times during the performance I attended. Like Adams said, “Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”

Though buried under unsuccessful video effects, baffling plot turns and insubstantial philosophy, A New Theory of Vision brims with good ideas. Maybe after a tune-up, it can cure its astigmatism.

Keeping It in the Family

The basic premise of Christina Anderson’s Inked Baby faces the danger of falling into sensational, soapy water: When husband and wife Gloria (LaChanze) and Greer (Damon Gupton) cannot conceive a child, they decide to have Greer instead conceive with her younger sister Lena (Angela Lewis). Only despite modern fertility innovations, the three opt for conception the old-fashioned way, with Gloria’s husband and sister in bed together for the most strictly scientific of reasons. Some writers might make the journey leading to this decision the crux of their show. Not so for Anderson, an emerging voice with plenty of promise. The intimate encounter between Greer and Lena kicks off her Baby, which just opened at Playwrights Horizons. She takes what could have been merely an odd love triangle and fashions a story that is about much more – and also, at times both refreshingly and disappointingly, about even less.

Anderson has more on her mind than domestic drama. Baby also packs a whopping amount of social commentary, though director Kate Whoriskey (Ruined) keeps the show moving at such a fluid, involving pace that one never tastes the medicine on its way down.

Baby takes place in an unknown American city, but one that represents Chicago or Detroit. Gloria, Greer and Lena have lived under one roof ever since Lena was laid off from a New York job in the finance sector. It is the childhood home of the two girls, built and tended by their father, who passed away when the girls were young. Lena, roughly a decade Gloria’s junior, was sent off to school and so has spent the better part of her life away from home while Gloria took care of their ailing father.

Between their differences in age, education, and fortunes in love and genetics, there are ample reasons for tension between the two sisters, but Anderson doesn’t really mine any of them. Instead, Greer and Gloria become disengaged from one another in ways that seem less than organic, with Gloria morphing into an unpleasant nag and an unfaithful drag.

At this point, Baby shifts away from the home front and into more metaphysical – and perhaps, even, metaphorical – terrain. It seems that perhaps the reason for Gloria’s past miscarriages has little to do with her own biology and more to do with the family’s lifelong exposure to an industrial waste dump. Greer, Lena’s childhood friend Ky (Nikkole Salter), and Odlum (Che Ayende), Gloria’s secret man, all manifest frightening symptoms of a new kind of virus, one that has them spewing soil from various parts of their body. Though clearly not HIV, Anderson clearly recalls both the dismissal and panic that arose during the disease’s early days.

Baby then becomes about something very different from what it initially suggests. Rather than debating the bioethical issues of what happens when a surrogate mother is a close relative, the show tackles the issue of environmental racism. The low-income area where these characters have lived may literally be hazardous to their health. Anderson’s play is undeniably steeped in the current state of the African-American experience. The playwright pays literal homage to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun both in her dialogue and, presumably, in the naming of Lena’s character.

This is heavy stuff, doled out in quite a palatable manner, but while Baby transfers its subject matter, it never quite reaches any transcendent level. Instead of cresting, the problems of the individual characters in the play give way to the politics of their creator. Anderson is to be applauded for her ambition, but in switching from a realistic predicament to one less so, she loosens the grip she has on her audience.

This is not the fault of Whoriskey’s excellent cast, who all tap into their characters’ (often) unspoken emotions of fear, grief and shame. Gupton is impressive, and it is nice to see Tony-winner LaChanze (The Color Purple) shine in a non-musical role. The real discovery is the incandescent Lewis, who never hits a false note. All actors, though, are to be commended for finding the poetry in Anderson’s dialogue and for making their characters’ emotions identifiable for audiences of any race.

Unconventional as it may be, Baby is certainly a work worthy of much attention and discussion. Anderson has given birth to a child of which she can be proud.

Powers That Be

The congressional controversy over arts funding in the recent stimulus bill has a historic precedent: The Federal Theatre Project. Created as part of the WPA, the project employed out-of-work theater artists during the Great Depression. If the recent funding debate revolved around the legitimacy of art's claim to stimulus dollars, the controversy in the 1930’s more directly questioned artists' patriotism; the Federal Theatre Project was dogged by complaints of un-Americanism throughout its four-year history. Before its demise in 1939, the nationally funded program produced a number of experimental works, among them a series of Living Newspapers, episodic scripts that presented in-depth examinations of contemporary issues. Power, a living newspaper written by Arthur Arent in 1937, tackled the development of electrical power and the ensuing national debate over whether it should be privately or publicly controlled. Though still nontraditional in structure, techniques pioneered by Living Newspapers enjoy prominence today. A source of employment for out-of-work journalists who researched each project’s theme as though it were a news article, the writers' findings ultimately formed the script of each production. That playwriting technique now exists in the form of investigative theater, a term popularized by The Civilians, whose interview-based scripts address complicated cultural issues. As a theatrical genre that combines journalism and performance, living newspapers also anticipated the split screen debates of television news programs and the back-and-forth critiques of opposing political blogs; living newspapers featured scenes designed to serve as counterpoints to one another (a meeting of a farming community followed by an electric company meeting) as a means of challenging audiences and keeping them engaged. That begs the question: in an era overfilled with rapid-fire point-counterpoint arguments, can the structure of a living newspaper still prove effective? As revived by the Metropolitan Playhouse, the answer is yes.

Power’s nine-member ensemble plays a whopping total of 150 roles. Some characters exist in single vignettes, others reappear throughout the production, lending a warm familiarity to the play’s continually changing landscape, which stretches from Hoboken, NJ to the farms of Tennessee. Rafael Jordan leads the cast as an everyman frustrated by the monopoly of private electrical companies and each of the actors demonstrates cool agility as they switch from role to role. Dressed in Sidney Fortner’s period costumes, the actors take on a variety of exaggerated mannerisms and approximated accents. Their portrayals stop short of farce. Look elsewhere for goofily reductive characterizations; Power is an energetic presentation of multiple, contradictory perspectives.

As if to further emphasize the importance of electricity, lighting designer Maryvel Bergen keeps the intensity bright for most of the production and audiences can see one another across the stage. Under the direction of Mark Harborth, rather than feeling invasive, that creates a communal environment appropriate to the play’s spirit of audience engagement. Harborth, also the set designer, has newspapers plastered across the floor and splashed across the back wall, a simple but powerful reminder that the play imagines itself as a newspaper come to life.

Despite its inclusion of a wide swath of American voices, Power is as much an editorial as a news report. It’s an appropriate production both for the Metropolitan Playhouse’s seasonal focus on Work in America and also, of course, because of our country’s renewed debate over the role of government in the private sector. Moments of Power are eerily reminiscent not just of our economic crisis but of our heated conversations about how to deal with it. The parallels are powerful.

Something Asunder Down Under

Characters on the fringe of society have often made for riveting works of art, from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe to Our Country’s Good to Separate Tables. The Production Company’s current staging of Patricia Cornelius’ 2003 play Love, directed by Mark Armstrong and playing at Center Stage, focuses on a trio of such characters and, as her simple title suggests, asks just what these three would do for love. Do not be mistaken, however. While Cornelius’ title is simple, her play is anything but. Winner of the Wal Cherry Award, a prestigious Australian honor bestowed upon new plays, Love is a challenging work, for both the audience and the trio of resourceful actors bringing the show to life. The play wonders who deserves love. Does everyone? What is love? Can it really exist in different forms with different people at the same time?

Love portrays people who use that term when what they really mean is want or need. Full of vim and vitriol, Cornelius connects the dots between three very intense characters, all constantly in need. Annie (Erin Maya Darke) is a prostitute and drug addict who falls for Tanya (Bronwen Coleman). Their passionate affair comes to an end when Tanya is imprisoned (one of the play’s few details that might benefit from further embellishment).

Enter Lorenzo (Ken Matthews), a fellow junkie and manipulator. Annie easily falls for him, or at least she thinks so – perhaps she has just fallen into his web, thinking she is starkly in need of someone to take care of her as Tanya had. However, Lorenzo doesn’t quite fill the void left by Tanya. When her incarceration is over, Tanya returns to Annie and Lorenzo remains in the picture. They form the oddest threesome, at times repellent and at other times oddly beguiling in their symbiosis. All of them, it seems, serve a need for one another.

Cornelius’ bizarre love triangle is an astute portrayal of desperate living, mainly because she does a superlative job shading in the details of these characters’ sordid lives. But it is the three actors who take her sturdy foundation and run with it. Witness Matthews’ work, in which humor, libido and drug-infused mania collide in a perfect storm. Watch Coleman balance her tough persona with touches of maternal instinct, with attention to both the nurturing instinct and sense of ownership that goes along with that.

And pay close attention to Darke’s complicated character development. As Love progresses, Annie’s ping-ponging begins to take a devastating toll on the character. Darke clues the audience in with subtle cues, embracing realism and subtlety over more obvious tricks. It is to the entire cast’s credit, though, that all three elicit equal amounts of empathy. Annie is not the protagonist of the show; rather, all three characters share that honor.

Cornelius is a co-founder of the Melbourne Workers Theatre, which seeks to elucidate the flaws in mainstream perception of Australian culture and identity. She has succeeded with a play that is both stark and soulful. Every moment is layered with texture. Like Armstrong’s last Production Company work, The Most Damaging Wound, Love is a deeply rich project. One can look into the face of any of the show’s characters and read into them a different motivation for just how and why events have escalated. Sarah Bader’s dead-on sound cues and Dan Henry’s expert lighting further strengthen the mood of the play.

A variety of reasons drive Cornelius’ characters to make poor decisions, but in Armstrong’s production, nary a one can be found.

State of Fear

The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) has a knack for resurrection, unearthing worthy revivals of long-ignored theatrical gems. Last spring, TACT presented Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a play that had not been seen in New York for more than 30 years. Now TACT reaches back even further into the past, bringing us, for the first time since its 1964 premiere, a New York City production of Arthur Miller’s riveting Incident at Vichy. Incident at Vichy opens quickly, spotlighting a lone man — a prisoner — anxiously sitting on a bench outside an office. Lights go out and then come up again. This time there are two men. We see additional men, and eventually their captors, each time the lights go up. Here, director Scott Alan Evans departs uncharacteristically from the script’s production notes, where lights go up at once and all characters wear fixed expressions. Evans’ technique works terrifically and underscores the continuous accumulation of prisoners, a theme which the play revisits at its conclusion.

The French town of Vichy was occupied by the Germans from 1940-1944, and the play takes place in 1942. Men are being rounded up by local authorities collaborating with the Nazis. Ostensibly brought to the compound for a “paper check,” some of the men have heard nebulous rumors of sinister plots against Jews, and of railroad cars and concentration camps. All except one of the men are Jewish. Some believe these rumors are preposterous and that if they just do what they are told, they will be released. Others feel that escape is impossible and that they must try to overpower their captors. As they wait to be summoned, their arguments about their captors’ intentions form the basis of the play’s action. Though we learn that the rumors are true, some remain incredulous.

Scott Bradley’s set design is powerfully faithful to Miller’s description of “a warehouse, perhaps an armory or part of a railroad station not used by the public.” The office where interrogations take place, with pipes emanating from its roof, itself suggests a furnace-like structure. Sound designer Jill BC Du Boff deftly injects a dull and ominous mechanical hum to the action. The spaces between the prisoners on the bench, however, are tight and sometimes appear to impede the actors’ fullness of language. Evans, attempting to illustrate confinement, keeps the prisoners close together and forgoes much of the stage’s available space, but perhaps he should have again broken slightly from the script and permitted them to stalk the stage more often. When the actors do this their exchanges are more expansive for it.

In a cast of 16, some actors are naturally stronger than others. Though they come close at times, none, though, entirely convey the sheer and obvious terror Miller’s script describes. Prisoner foils — the psychiatrist Leduc (Christopher Burns) and the actor Monceau — are slightly mismatched here; Gregory Salata as Monceau is more proficient, with greater range. Todd Gearhart, a TACT mainstay, plays an excellent Von Berg, a sympathetic non-Jewish Austrian nobleman who has been caught in the dragnet. Mr. Gearhart, perhaps wisely dispensing with the accent, deftly straddles his character’s tendency toward finding “shreds of hope” where they don’t exist and his absolute first-hand knowledge of the ruthlessness of Nazism.

That savagery is apparent in the conflicted Major (played with convincing and edgy menace by Jack Koenig, and with great costuming by David Toser) and the Nazi loyalist Professor Hoffman (Jeffrey C. Hawkins), a servant of something called the “Race Institute.” His job is to examine the noses and penises of the prisoners to find out if they are Jewish. The arguments between Leduc and Monceau are mirrored by angry exchanges between the Major and the Professor over why they must perform their duties.

TACT’s program explains that Incident at Vichy received mixed reviews from critics and defensive letters from theater goers when it premiered at Lincoln Center. The program suggests that some of these may have represented thinly veiled reactions to the play’s implicit accusations of societal guilt for the rise of Nazism, and for the Holocaust. The gist of these reactions was that Miller effectively insulated himself from criticism by surrounding his play with events and sentiments that were politically incorrect to attack. Unfortunately, these self-serving comments distracted from an honest evaluation of the work and its meaning.

There is no doubt that Incident at Vichy is a thorough and broad condemnation of inaction in the face of evil. Miller was unapologetic about making the audience uncomfortable. And, even with Leduc psychoanalyzing the rationales of the survival strategies of his fellow prisoners, Miller’s writing mostly avoids overt didacticism. TACT’s production is a potent and fitting return of this overlooked classic.

Tracing a Rumor

A chronic mistrust between the sexes takes center stage in WorkShop Theater Company’s She Said, She Said, an ensemble story that appears to have been designed to initiate discussion about issues beyond its scope. Its six characters float in and out of its framework, each conveying a finely drawn archetype and serving a very deliberate purpose. There’s a twenty-something whose sexuality teeters between objectification and empowerment, a victim of domestic violence who is hesitant to label herself as such, and an impassioned old-school feminist. As its title indicates, She Said, She Said focuses on the consequences of telling the truth and relying on word-of mouth accounts of a past event. We learn early on that a rape may have taken place inside a crumpling marriage, but never have the opportunity to witness the incident in question. As in watching John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, we begin to study its characters’ mannerisms, words and reactions to discover who is lying and why. Although Jamie’s (Shelley McPherson) account of her husband’s violent actions feels convincing, the offstage nature of the play’s central event prompts us to view it with an investigative eye.

Men are the perpetrators in She Said, She Said, but the moral ambiguity of its two male characters also serves to their advantage. While its women feel at times excessively familiar, we cannot help but want to learn more about the men who complicate their lives.

Writer Kathryn Chetkovich, whose background is in authoring short stories, allows characters Dan (Tom Berdik) and Ross (Mark Hofmaier) ample time to show the range of their frustration, and strong performances only add to the simultaneously sympathetic and frightening nature of their characters. As Ross, Jamie’s husband with an ominous angry side, Mark Hofmaier is a particular standout. Projecting an unexpected sadness into his posture and glare, he manages to avoid turning Ross into a villain, and instead deepens our curiosity about the play’s most divisive character.

The play’s four women, meanwhile, offer a convincing portrayal of female friendship. Dee Dee Friedman’s fiery Nina sometimes tips the balance of an otherwise delicate scene, but many of us are likely to recognize this personality type in our own circles of friends. Ashley Anderson, meanwhile, injects a sense of pride and ownership into CoCo, a young waitress whose tendency to attract men’s attentions turns out to be more of a personal crutch than a source of power.

Mark Symczak’s elegant stage design provides an added level of artistry and symbolism into the production. Layered white curtains punctuate scene changes, serve as a canvas for projected family photographs, and allow the stage to morph from a living room into a neighborhood bar. This approach results in quick, smooth transitions from one scene to the next, as it eliminates the need to lug furniture around the stage.

As an example of a neatly edited play, She Said, She Said is a success. The play was polished into its final form over several years at WorkShop Theater Company’s development seminars, and the final product includes almost nothing extraneous or distracting. Because every turning point in the plot takes place offstage, its characters come across as talky and passive at points, but by the time it reaches its ambiguous final scene, their brooding desperation just might feel eerily familiar.

Forget about Letting the Sun Shine in, the Catchphrase this Year Should Be “Rain On!”

Every once in a while a musical comes along that captures the spirit of its time flawlessly. The New Hopeville Comics, A New Rock Opera from Commander Squish Productions, is one of these shows. Don’t be misled by the four-color poster featuring the heroic Perfect Man and his gal pal Molly. This is not your typical kid-friendly comic adventure. Owing more to the mature themes of shows like Rent and the macabre sensibilities of Little Shop of Horrors than it does to any of the Sunday funnies or the caped crusaders that ostensibly inspired it (and I should know, I have boxes and boxes of Batman and Justice League taking up space in my closets), The New Hopeville Comics begins as a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek flight through crazy comic land, and ends up landing very much in the world we live in today, with a message so powerful (and delivered so powerfully) it brought tears to this reviewer’s eyes. For a storyline featuring Man of Steel-like Perfect Man and his trio of supervillains with the heavy-handed yet appropriate monikers Sex, Drugs, and Rockenroll, this three-act little super-hero song and dance piece turns out to be thrillingly deep. Featuring bravura acting performances, show-stopping dance numbers (choreographed by Ashley Adamek), and an ensemble that blends so well I think my heart actually skipped a beat several times, New Hopeville Comics is one of those rare pieces that can truly be called a theatrical gem.

Among the many fine performances were Chris Crittelli as the golly-gee-willikers goody-two-shoed Perfect Man, whose song-and-dance delivery of certain lines brought the house to tears of laughter; Aaron Phillips as Felix, the nerdy dare-I-say sidekick who quickly comes into his own after a hilarious sequence of events; and the amazing trio of Terren Wooten Clarke (Sex), Carl Conway Maguire (Drugs), and John Bennett (Rockenroll), who very nearly steal the show with their antics. There were more than a few Forbidden Broadway-like moments, such as Perfect Man trying to convince his gal Molly (played by Sarah Hayes Donnell) to stay with him while performing Chorus Line choreography, or when Felix leads the revolution in the second act marching in step and singing “One Day More”, but the villainous trio of Sex, Drugs, & Rockenroll manage to top everything with a vibrant number ending in a calypso (“a Calypso!?!”). Later, the villains lead the entire town’s populace in a raucous revelry that is so wrong it can only be right. Christine Dwyer as April, Molly’s later love interest, has a beautiful and powerful voice, which she gets to show off towards the end.

The production values were fantastic, with bright, colorful costumes (designed by Denise Schumaker) that stood out against the darker but still colorful set (designed by Steve Royal). The band (under the direction of Tim Matson) was rocking, and delivered Nate Weida’s score with aplomb. In fact, the only major criticism I have with the show is that the leads were not supported with microphones, so they were sometimes lost in the music and vocal power of the ensemble.

Quite possibly the best thing about The New Hopeville Comics is the message. What begins as a sinister refrain delivered by the villains early on in the show, “Rain On!” becomes a powerful message of hope. With a nod to everything from Rent’s “No Day But Today” to Eric Draven’s “It Can’t Rain All The Time” (from the film The Crow), from 110 Degrees in the Shade to Broadway's Hair, “Rain On!” empowers the disenfranchised to realize that times are hard right now for everyone, and that we need to do the best we can with our circumstances right now. For that we don’t need a super-hero, we just need ourselves. And maybe a little help from our friends.

Speaking of help from our friends, all proceeds from this production will be donated to Fountain House and the SJM Pediatric Transplant Foundation.