Fly Me to the Moon

Has the state of the world ever seemed so dismal that leaving planet Earth looked like the only practical answer? In Mare Cognitum, a pleasant, but sometimes too gloomy entry in Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear’s Get S.O.M. repertory merger, three fed-up roommates decide to boldly go where no twenty-somethings have gone before. Faced with the ever-widening precipice of war and full-fledged adulthood, Lena, Jeff and Thomas are immobilized like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, unable to muster up the will to join the protest just outside their window or even to go on a job interview. Jeff has made himself a protest sign that reads “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” even though the rally is protesting the US government’s imminent bombing of another country, but he has yet to get out of his pajamas. College student Lena distances herself by critiquing the protest, although an unnamed, hipster classmate’s shrewder assessment makes her feel even more academically and politically ineffectual. Thomas the atheist comes to terms with the fact that he has actually been going to confession all these weeks and not to job interviews. Imaginative denial obviously runs high in this apartment, but it takes the depressing news that the bombing has commenced to launch our protagonists into a Quixotic extra-planetary adventure.

Jeff and Lena in particular (played by Kyle Walters and Devon Caraway) show a refined skill in make-believe, staging a “practice” protest in the apartment before unsuccessfully attempting to join the actual one downstairs. In general, playwright David McGee does well to let his characters play with each other and the audience like this; indeed, they seem quite aware when they are reenacting each other’s flashbacks and happily pretend to be secondary characters with enthusiasm. If the tone weren’t perfect, this sort of high style narrative device wouldn’t work, but McGee’s ebullient attitude and lively characters work hard to persuade you that there is nothing weird about it. More importantly, when these three make like Apollo-era astronauts and fly their apartment to the moon, you don’t question it. McGee and director Jesse Edward Rosbrow draw a line between fantasy and reality that is sharp, believable and entertaining.

What does feel out of place, though, are the intensely devastated reactions the characters experience when they return to the same-old, disheartening Earth at the end. McGee obviously intends some reference to the spiritual disillusionment astronauts are said to suffer upon coming back to Terra Firma, but when his high-spirited characters experience heartbreak so totally – like Jeff, who crumples against a wall sobbing – it feels like too much, too quickly. The notion that Lena, Jeff and Thomas are detached enough to pretend to fly to the moon is one thing, but to see them reduced to husks of people when their knowingly make-believe adventure ends is near laughable. In short, things are pretty bad on Earth these days, but they can’t suddenly feel that much worse than before.

Director Rosbrow stages the action convincingly within the confines of a living room, and the world he creates for the characters is particularly accented by a thorough sound design from Jared M. Silver. There is almost always specific environmental noise coming from outside the apartment – the protest, a garbage truck, and later, otherworldly moon noises. Elisha Schaefer’s set design and Wilburn Bonnell’s lighting design satisfy until an underwhelming “Earthrise” on the Moon spoils an otherwise nice moment – though given the level of production and likely budgetary limitations, it almost feels unfair to mention it.

The cast leaps to task as necessary, with Walters giving the most endearing performance as Cowardly Lion-ish Jeff. Caraway’s bossy, inconstant Lena is convincingly vigilant to the point of nuisance, though she softens in some very affecting moments with Jeff. Justin Howard as Thomas is, by design, left out of a lot of the fun, but one of the play’s funniest moments comes when he reluctantly agrees to join the imaginary journey.

Back in the real real world, Mare Cognitum represents another kind of unique escape – the escape from expense. Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear is actually an amalgamation of Theatre of the Expendable, Small Pond Entertainment, and Cross-Eyed Bear Productions, three theater companies that have banded together to save on theater rental and production costs. A fitting set-up – three companies coming together to play – for McGee’s playful lunar romp.

Best Western

In the last major production of Sam Shepard's True West, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly famously alternated performances as Austin and Lee, the play's antagonistic brothers. Nearly a decade later, smartly creative theater company Curious Frog has brought the play back to New York with an equally playful approach: in place of the last production's Broadway house, Curious Frog has staged the production in an East Village apartment. Like the 2000 Broadway production, Curious Frog's quirky treatment of the contemporary classic is much more than an impressive stunt (and it's that, too). Under the solid direction of Isaac Byrne, the production's unique setting and cast -- the family is Asian-American -- bring fresh insight to the familiar work of American drama. Shepard's story of near primal rivalry between estranged brothers is among his least surreal plays, and Curious Frog's staging emphasizes the play's realism. Folding chairs line the walls of the intimate performance space, leaving literally little room for actorly artifice. That staging reveals how skillfully the text accomplishes the unlikely: Austin (Alvin Chan), an Ivy-educated screenwriter who addresses his drunk, drifter brother Lee (Edward Chin-Lyn) with equal parts exasperation and condescension, all but takes his place by the drama's end. A number of Shepard-influenced plays have attempted similar fraternal switches with greater affectation and less success (this season's Three Changes at Playwright's Horizons, last season's American Sligo at Rattlestick), so it's refreshing to see the conceit work.

Anyone seeking to create site specific theater in New York should see Curious Frog's True West, making note of the comprehensive ways in which the production uses design elements in its found space. David Ogle's scenic design doesn't quite transform the East Village sublet into a house in suburban LA, but it need not. He instead capitalizes on the strengths of the space, creating an environment simultaneously homey and claustrophobic, never taking for granted that audiences will be tickled simply at seeing theater in an apartment building. Together with Chelsea Chorpenning's period props, the scenic design lends the space a comfortable familiarity that helps put audiences at ease with their location inside the home, treating audiences less like intruders and more like a part of the design scheme. It also appropriately incorporates Ross Graham's dramatic light design, which smartly locates opportunities for lending the natural setting a powerful theatricality.

If creating a fully-designed production in the sublet apartment poses exciting challenges to the designers, the actors face equally daunting tasks. Over the course of the play, the brothers' interactions turn increasingly violent. Their fight sequences appear tightly choreographed (fight design by Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum ), so that while the action is powerfully startling for up-close audience members to witness, it's also safe. And fun. As Lee, the more initially destructive brother, Chin-Lyn exhibits an angry, destitute optimism which frustrates the restrained Austin. In the second half of the play, when Austin's growing sense of futility turns to enraged desperation, Chan comes into his own and the showdown between the brothers takes off. Part of the pleasure of seeing the production is sitting steps away as a typewriter is destroyed by an iron golf club, as the brothers smash potted plants and one another.

The title of True West alludes to the play's insistence on the artifice of both the vanishing American frontier and the false promises of Hollywood. By making the brothers Asian-American, Curious Frog cleverly adds an additional layer. The play's exploration of authenticity and the illusive American dream applies seamlessly to characters of color, making a strong case for nontraditional, race-conscious casting (which is different from colorblind casting, and frustratingly uncommon.) Beyond that, it's neat to see how a True West with Asian-Americans maintains the integrity of the text while adding a new dynamism to particular lines (Lee's image of his brother's success that includes his being chased by blonds; Austin's story about their pathetic father's doggy bag of Chop Suey).

The best revelation of the casting, however, has nothing to do with the brothers. It comes at the end of the play, when their mother returns to find her grown sons wrecking her home. The mother's appearance in the final scene of True West is among the script's more problematic aspects; her uncomprehending reaction to her trashed house, her sons' violence, and even the outside world is inexplicably peculiar. But as played by Mami Kimura, originally from Japan, Mom is not not simply a daffy woman in deep denial. She's also an immigrant. It makes infinitely more sense, in this production, that her sons treat her protectively even as they believe themselves capable of exploiting and misleading her. Kimura's accented English bolsters the mother's general appearance of incomprehension. To her sons, she's literally a foreigner.

"Look at you," Lee asks his brother early in the play "You think yer regular lookin'?" Whatever the answer to that question, Curious Frog's True West is decidedly not; its found space and nontraditional cast give it a facade all its own. At the same time, it's a scrupulously faithful production of a terrific script: a True West defined by conservatism and adventurousness.

Boys Not Allowed

No-one would ever have described the life of a 30-something woman as “easy.” But in the post-Sex and the City era, in which rowdy banter over brunch has become a cliché and nights of martini-shaped cocktails are part of a mating dance to land Mr. Big and his penthouse apartment, women are forced to spend more and more time explaining where their own desires fit into this frantic spectrum of expectations. On one side are relatives demanding a summer wedding and a baby bump; on the other, the now-archaic image of a power-hungry “single gal.” For all these reasons, shows like Mel & El: Show and Tell are arguably more necessary than ever. During a time in which writing a story about female friendship and singlehood is likely to be met with more than a few eye rolls, exploring the emotional shades of gray in what it means to be a woman takes creative guts. This is exactly what Mel and El does, in a rowdy, heartfelt, and endearing production.

Written by two real-life best friends, Melanie Adelman and Ellie Dvorkin, this mini-musical is the latest in the duo’s string of collaborations, which includes a Gotham Comedy Club appearance, a NYMF entry, and a subsequent year-long run of their festival show, Mel and El: This Show Rhymes, at The Duplex. Lounging in a hot pink room plastered with images of ‘80s icons like Guns N’ Roses, Cher and Meat Loaf, the pair reminisce about their long friendship, address their secret desires (strangers’ babies are becoming cuter by the day), argue about their differences (El is an exhibitionist, Mel more tightly wound), and even sing about their darker traumas (plastic surgery, a lifelong obsession to be perfect).

It’s the paradigm of this physical space that allows us to get to know these two characters so quickly; surrounded by mementos of their childhoods, Mel and El don’t have to deal with the burdens of a public façade, and let us know early on that inside this room-within-a stage, they feel safe. “Our little pink box is where we are/It’s better than a disco, better than a bar/We do what we like, we’re totally free/You can be you and I can be me,” they sing, and we both sense their lack of pretention and feel honored to be let into their world. As they recall the routines, innuendo-laden inside jokes and over-the top dreams of their teenage years, we root for them—because many of us, even as adults, act just as foolishly when we think that nobody is watching.

Mel and El’s private territory isn’t wholly free from intrusion; their nagging mothers—one a pill-popping stereotype of a Jewish mother and one a foul-mouthed Brit—make two brief appearances during the show. Instead of being played by two additional actors, however, they are introduced as a pair of puppets (handled by Jeremiah Holmes) that resemble characters in Avenue Q. The choice is hilarious and unexpectedly poignant; like the invisible, metallic-voiced parents in early Peanuts cartoons, these demanding grown-ups are a different species altogether.

The score, composed by Patrick Spencer Bodd, doesn’t always match up to Adelman and Dvorkin’s gleefully written text, but boasts a few standouts. "She’s My Bitch," the show’s opening and closing number, is appropriately catchy, while "I’m Hatin’ on Ya" cleverly channels a mid-‘90s pop rap song. Despite the show’s outrageous feel, a few ballads give momentum to its narrative and keep it from spinning in place. Some quieter moments—especially the usually jovial El’s song about her experiences with plastic surgery—are downright haunting in their sense of lived realism. “I’d managed to avoid the scene/Where every Jewish princess cuts her face apart at age thirteen,” she sings, creating a pained moment that’s difficult to forget.

Like Mel and El, most of us know that hiding in our childhood bedrooms won’t provide permanent protection against the world’s expectations or keep us from panicking about the numerous dreams we were too self-doubting or preoccupied to fulfill. But unlike so many tales about single women, the work encourages us to find comfort in what we already have—and find hilarity in both our secret desires and our shortcomings.

I Need Directions to Heaven

Despite a fascinating historic subject, Equilicuá Producciones’ New York premiere of Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s Way to Heaven gets lost along the road due to casting, directorial, and occasional writing problems. The script has moments of tremendous beauty and profundity, but the production team should have stopped to ask for directions on this circuitous trip to paradise. For subject matter, Mayorga could not have reached higher or tackled a more satisfyingly dramatic story. The play presents fragments of personal stories around the Theresienstadt concentration camp run by the Nazis during World War II. When the Danish government insists on sending the Red Cross in to evaluate conditions at Theresienstadt, the Nazis revamp the camp into a public relations tool to convince the world that the concentration camps for Jewish and political prisoners are innocuous little villages with balloon sellers in the town square, quaint little synagogues, orchestras playing daily, and joyous inmates.

This historically accurate deception concealed the fact that inmates were constantly being shipped to extermination camps at Auschwitz, over a quarter of the inmates were dying of hunger or disease-- and of the 15,000 Jewish children that were enrolled in Theresienstadt’s fake schools, art programs, and sports leagues, less than 100 would survive the war.

The play is structured into five scenes, the first of which is the weakest, getting the evening off to a rocky start. Shawn Parr plays the Danish Red Cross worker who tours the camp and signs an extremely rosy report on the conditions of the inmates. Unfortunately the script gives him and the audience no clue who he is talking to. He recites an oral history of his experiences that has all the charm and character of a high school text book entry. Inexplicably he is wearing an overcoat and plaid pajamas, which contributes to a bewildering lack of context and place. And while Parr has a nice speaking voice, that doesn’t really compensate for a lack of character and notable line problems.

The second scene contains the largest cast. Their energy, and the most inventive staging of the evening from director Matthew Earnest, liven things up a bit. The ensemble plays camp inmates called upon to perform bogus village-life scenes, scripted by the camp commandant. Ten-year-old Samantha Rahn (The Girl) is the clear, luminous stand out. Rahn has an extraordinary presence and composure for such a young actress. She was transplanted from the American premiere of the play in Raleigh, NC. The only other exquisitely cast actor in the play is another transplant from the same production, Francisco Reyes (The Commandant).

Reyes takes welcome center stage in scene three, delivering a riveting monologue to an unseen Red Cross worker with all the oily charm of a seasoned bureaucratic grifter. The script provides Reyes the opportunity to shine that it denied Parr. There is never a doubt who Reyes is talking to, where he is, or what lies beneath the surface his charming, lying, well-met exterior. Reyes is picture perfect as a Nazi poster boy for maniacal artifice and seductive guile.

Scene four features a duologue between Reyes’ Commandant and Mark Farr as the camp’s Jewish mayor, Gershom Gottfried. Reyes continues to deliver, but his philosophy-obsessed, theater-loving Commandant does not find an adequate foil in Farr. Farr’s Gottfried is clearly the emotional heart of the play. He is given the tortured power to decide which inmates will be “cast” in the production and which will be sent for extermination. But, Earnest could hardly have found a less tortured or tragic-looking actor. Farr is a pleasant, placid-looking, even-keeled man who never sells the idea that he is suffering crippling moral dilemmas. His helpless fury over being forced to send children to gas chambers looks a bit more like a petulant sulk over losing a squash game at the gym. The last scene, the emotional climax delivered as a monologue by Farr, falls flat on this lack of expressiveness. Rahn, however, does a nice job bringing some pathos to the final moments as a doomed child about to be swallowed by the Nazi death machine.

The Way to Heaven presents an interesting look at this little known curiosity of World War II history, and the performances by Rahn and Reyes manage to be very haunting. But, fair warning, the road to heaven is a little bumpy. Seat belts recommended.

For tickets and showtimes, consult the show’s website at www.waytoheaventheplay.com.

The Joke's on You, Too

The question of why we humans lie has certainly been explored by writers, sociologists and child psychologists alike. But like our other inherent inclinations toward morally questionable behavior, the subject continues to baffle—and inspire—us. No Tea Productions’ Liars, a compilation of eight one-act comedies by eight different writers, examines lying through a broad, sometimes fantastical lens: among its more extreme characters are a Red Bull-fueled film agent, a homicidal Santa Claus and a bathroom scale prone to vicious insults. At its most poignant, however, the work discovers irony and humor in everyday scenarios that are likely to ring true and be almost embarrassingly familiar. On several occasions it honestly and effectively nails us, while keeping us in on the joke. Liars starts off with Jeremy Mather’s "Sausage Party," a work that heavily draws on this idea of familiarity and also prevails as one of the collection’s most memorable pieces. Set at a generic house party (think pretzel bags, handles of vodka and Dixie cups), Mather’s work narrates a hilarious collision between Brad (Jesse Bernath), his straight-talking girlfriend Cassie (Sabrina Farhi), and Brad’s sloppy, relentlessly embarrassing friend Isaac (Mather himself). As we watch these characters casually double-cross each other to fulfill temporary urges and save face, we are likely to recognize our own tendencies to cop out with a white lie. Mather’s text is raunchy without delving into gross-out territory, and includes several effectively timed one-liners.

The following two plays, "Weight" by director Lindsey Moore and "LOL" by Caroline O’Hare, rely on setting up comedic scenarios rather than delving into narratives, but still push Liars forward as a cohesive work. Without uttering a single word, Alicia Barnatchez is magnetic as a woman who tries to make peace with her verbally abusive scale in "Weight," and displays similar, vulnerable spunk as a hopeful chat room visitor in "LOL."

Some of the weakest moments in Liars occur after its midpoint. "Peek," a depiction of a nightmarish first date, benefits from a genuinely funny setup and features another committed performance by Jeremy Mather, but suffers from an excessive number of scenes that give the play a dragging feel. Meanwhile, Joe Musso’s "Wisconsin" and Matt Sears’ "Lore" seem out of place in the production. "Wisconsin" is a stand-alone joke with an unremarkable punch line, while "Lore," a dramatic clash between an enraged Santa and a little girl, is too radical a departure from the collection’s more relatable moments.

Liars picks up at the end, however, with "Evacuation Plan," a clever and heartfelt work penned by No Tea's artistic director Jeff Sproul. Starring Sproul as a guy who unsuccessfully attempts to conceal his odd habits from a new girlfriend, the work contrasts elements of surprising sweetness with an ironic undertone: as some characters discover safety in honesty, others continue to initiate romantic relationships under a false façade.

Transitions from one play to the next are smooth, and good use is made of the small stage at Under St. Marks. The cast of actors, many of whom have appeared in previous No Tea Productions, have thrown themselves into their roles so wholeheartedly that even the image of chairs doubling as urinals doesn’t distract us from their strangely familiar world. Even as we laugh, many of us are likely to shake our heads in uneasy recognition.

Best Friends…Forever?

Teen roles are among the most challenging to portray. Their problems often look trivial to adult audiences, while their contemporaries feel as though their lives are depicted in too facile a manner (it must be particularly hard to for a teenager to identify with a character being portrayed by a performer whose age is actually a decade or so older). Fear not, though. Director Geordie Broadwater and his Babel Theatre Project company have mounted in Christmas Is Miles Away a production that mines the landscape of teen confusion and disaffection at the Connelly Theatre. This is due in large part to Chloe Moss’ perceptive script.

Moss, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize recipient this year, has an acute understanding of young emotions, those that are deeply felt but whose expression is difficult, and occasionally discouraged by others. In the course of eleven scenes spanning two years, structured in a deliberately meandering style, Moss charts the lives of three semi-bright young things.

Christie (Alex Fast) and Luke (Roger Lirtsman) are two sixteen-year-olds coming of age in Manchester, England, in the winter of 1989. The two are best friends, or, at least, a teenage version of such. As they talk of girls, travel, and other topics just within their purview, their conversations are riddled with the subtle power plays typical of ones looking to undercut the other in the areas in which they are most insecure.

Over time, life happens. Christie’s father passes away, and he begins to date Julie (Emily Landham), while Luke joins the army. Moss’s scenes, usually separated by several months apiece, develop each character’s gradual estrangement from one another, and their feeble attempts to remain connected despite their changing interests and experiences. As Christie pursues his more artistic impulses, Luke enlists in the first Gulf War.

The role of the war, and how it changes Luke, is the one area that I think Moss could have expanded further. Where the playwright does excel beyond many others, however, is her ability to make the disconnect between these mentalities palpable through her use of pauses, silences, clipped dialogue, and things left unsaid but understood; I was reminded of the profundity of Ernest Hemingway’s The End of Something.

The three actors are a major gift to Christmas, locating that precise point in which teenagers can be completely wrapped up in their lives and still emerge as sympathetic. Fast has a bit more material to work with on the page; Moss provides a roadmap of awkwardness and fear for Christie, which Fast navigates perfectly. Lirtsman is required to be a bit more resourceful, using more actorly tools to show Luke’s hidden pockets of worry and volatility to shine through. Lirtsman thrives with such a challenge, however, giving a performance that is as physically specific as it is emotionally colored.

Landham fits into the play nicely, showing how Julie, as a woman, can simultaneously be worth both more currency and less to two male friends at the same time. In Christmas, Moss looks at the different forms of behavior that occur between men still maturing when alone with each other, when alone with women, and when in mixed company, and her insight into such intimacy is incalculable. It is Landham’s role to show the toll these changes in behavior can have on a relationship, and, she, too, delivers a performance of stunning dedication.

Perhaps one of the more remarkable traits of Christmas is that despite the deceptively complicated subject matter and layered performances, this show is actually quite easy to sit through, thanks to Broadwater’s fluid pacing. No scene goes on for too long nor gives any audience member a chance for distraction. Daniel Zimmerman’s scenic design changes and Dan Scully’s lighting cues go a long way to moving the show along in such a seamless manner.

One thing is for sure: in a play about the fragility of friendship, it is important to keep the right people by your side. I hope that the Babel Theatre Project and Moss stick together to come up with more works to match this success.

The Opposites of Sex

Uncertainty reigns in Jonathan Marc Sherman’s strangely unsatisfying 1993 play about college students confronting the gray-shaded real world from their ivory towers. Their initiation is the case of a favorite professor who is accused of sexual harassment. Could it be that the popular Whitey McCoy (Jonathan Hogan) forced troubled student Jack Kahn (Michael Carbonaro) into sexual acts, as Jack has accused him? Or is McCoy telling the truth when he says that a very drunk, sexually conflicted Jack came to his quarters late one night and made a pass at him that Whitey rebuffed? Then, says Whitey, Jack asked to stay the night and was gone in the morning. As in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, differing versions of the event are shown, and both look plausible.

Sherman’s title refers to the Greek school of philosophy in which one views both sides of a debate in order to become more persuasive and win one’s opponent to one’s side. The scandal of Jack and Whitey is only a prelude to a second act in which the focus turns to Whitey’s staunchest defender, caught in a similar situation. Though the nuance is interesting, the interweaving of the two stories doesn’t really work.

The manipulative, womanizing Xavier Reynolds (Charlie Hewson), nicknamed Ex, grapples not only with raging testosterone but also with confusion about sexual behavior. Ex, dumped by his girlfriend Robin (Natalie Knepp) for cheating, puts the moves on Robin’s friend Debbie (Mahira Kakkar), who confessed a fantasy to him: that she be taken sexually against her will—by him. But as soon as Ex starts to paw her, she resists him, and he stops. In the opinion of Ex’s bandmate Willy, though, she had issued Ex an invitation. Which of the men is right? Would Ex have been accused of rape? Or would he have been a victim of mixed signals?

For Debbie, there’s no uncertainty about what took place. Nor, indeed, for Robin. When Ex begs Robin to marry him, following the incident with Debbie, he claims that only after Debbie’s rejection did he realize his need and love for Robin. (It’s a tribute to Hewson and director James Warwick that this change of heart plays so persuasively.)

“You make these meaningless little distinctions in life,” Ex tells the skeptical Robin, suggesting he’s missed the point. In a comedy of errors, when Ex discovers another chum (Ian Alda, in a sad and funny turn as a dating loser) in Robin’s bed, he too jumps to a wrong conclusion. Ironically, it’s the ever-high Willy who recognizes the pervading uncertainty of such cases as he plays devil’s advocate to Ex’s fervent support of Whitey: “But the problem of the thing is, like, nobody fucking knows,” he says.

The play serves as a fine showcase for young actors, and they inhabit the characters convincingly on Charles Corcoran’s simple but detailed set of two dorm rooms. Hewson is a narcissistic, exuberantly randy Ex, and Maximillian Osinski is often hilarious as the drug-fueled Willy, who may be gay. Knepp is a level-headed Robin, but the role is a bit contrived. Because Robin is editor of the school paper, she probes the issue of Whitey’s dismissal and serves as a connecting thread for Whitey’s dilemma and the students’ grappling with it.

Since the second half feels somewhat detached from the first, even Robin’s climactic valedictory speech, a rumination about the university’s court settlement with Whitey, doesn’t successfully pull the whole together.

“This doesn’t feel like a fight, or a debate—not really,” she says, lamenting the black-and-white idealism she’s been taught (and suggesting that the students are a long way from grasping the complexity of life). “This feels like compromise. This feels … very hollow.” It’s a shame that a play that has so many interesting aspects doesn’t register more strongly in the whole.

In the Closet, Hanging Together

That “temperamental” was a euphemism for “homosexual” in the early 1950s is just one of the tidbits audiences may discover in Jon Marans’s impressive dramatic reconstruction of the history of the Mattachine Society, its founders, and the claustrophobic lives of gay men in the 1950s. Although the Stonewall riots in June 1969 are considered the birth of the modern gay-rights movement, The Temperamentals establishes that decades earlier there were ideas in the air that have become common currency in discussing gay rights. “We are not broken heterosexuals,” says protagonist Harry Hay, a former B-movie actor, Communist, and married temperamental. “We are an oppressed minority.”

Starting in 1950, the play follows Harry (Thomas Jay Ryan) and his boyfriend, a young Austrian immigrant named Rudi Gernreich (Michael Urie, employing a subtle Teutonic accent). Gernreich will go on to become a major fashion designer, renowned for introducing the string bikini in the 1960s. (Theatergoers may recall that Marans’ celebrated 1996 play, Old Wicked Songs, took place in Vienna; the Austrian connection here is more tangential, however.)

Although The Temperamentals takes the Hay-Gernreich affair as a starting point, it broadens through flashbacks to encompass the founding of the Mattachine Society and the stories of its principals. They include Bob Hull (Matthew Schneck), a gregarious playboy in the gay world, and his mousy ex-boyfriend but devoted friend, Chuck Rowland (Tom Beckett). Also crucial is carnival roustabout Dale Jennings (Sam Breslin Wright), whose open challenge of a public-restroom arrest becomes a landmark case, although his acquittal via hung jury is ignored by the mainstream press. In the characters’ whispers, glances, furtive touching, and oblique comments, Marans summons up a world of oppressive fear and shame. Daniel Kluger’s discordant sound design conveys the unsettled nerves that these men must have experienced as they gingerly sought out like-minded companions.

Most of the actors double as other characters—even Urie, who’s best known as the flamboyant Marc St. James on Ugly Betty, gets to play a thuggish restaurant employee, with aplomb, to point up that California laws of the era specifically forbade service to homosexuals. And the superb Beckett is periodically a natty, epicene Vincente Minnelli, who is approached to join the Society. It’s thought that, because Minnelli is married to Judy Garland and therefore must be heterosexual, he will be able to draw the sympathies of straight people to their cause.

Jonathan Silverstein’s bare-bones production in a small, black-box theater features folding chairs that, upended, double as terrain. The simplicity of the design (by Clint Ramos, who also supplied the beautifully tailored men’s suits) allows one to focus on the actors and the information—and there’s a lot of it. Swift cross-cutting helps convey mountains of facts quickly; however, at times they become overwhelming. A powerful scene in a diner segues quickly through a discussion of an “underground railroad” and then hurtles into a scene that, with its religious language, sounds like a church meeting, but turns out to be a Mattachine gathering. At such moments one is apt to feel bewildered.

Apart from the breakneck flow of information, occasionally Marans’ writing has the ring of contrivance from hindsight: Harry tells Rudi, “Someday the Temperamentals will not only be making the quotes, but be in them…. I guarantee it will happen.” And it’s unfortunate that Ryan’s blunt, macho Harry and Urie's Rudi don’t have much chemistry together. (That may be because the politics takes over.) Still, in an era when openly gay people are fighting for the right to marry, this time-travel back to the nuclear winter of the closet is absorbing, despite its bumps.

Marans writes crisp dialogue and has a nice sense of irony as well. Even as Bob resents the oppression of gays, he announces: “Some things are better kept separate. Like bourbon and barbiturates. Communism and Christianity. Negroes and whites.” It’s a sentiment that now seems as alien as the notion that gay men should find solace in marrying women, or that equal rights should depend on the will of the majority and not on the words of the Founding Fathers.

War Will Always Be With Us

“War is our imprint, war is our mark… war is absolutely what we do,” states Uncle Pinkie in Finding the Rooster, the new production at the 13th Street Repertory Company written and directed by Terence Patrick Hughes. The play focuses on a family at war – both through its complex involvement with the military and international armed conflicts, and because of the family’s internal struggles. A married couple, Richard and Evelyn Fine, are in the throes of a bitter divorce when Richard makes the choice to have their misbehaving son, Oscar, “dismantled” into many small pieces and then reassembled once he has arrived at military school. The Fines have already lost one son in military conflict, and Pinkie, Oscar’s uncle on his mother’s side, was named a war hero for his experiences in the D-Day landing at Normandy. What Pinkie did was “find the rooster;" he won a medal for the way in which he would enter small villages and kill the local rooster, the town’s alarm clock, allowing the soldiers time to occupy the town before the citizens awoke. In addition, Richard’s family, whose nouveau riche status is noted, has made its wealth through the production of weaponry; they have become rich off of war.

All of this amounts to a very complicated story. It is often hard to tie all of the loose threads of the story together in order to create a cohesive whole. The play is clearly in the same vein as such dramatic classics as Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, but does not add anything new to the conversation about the conflict that can arise from family money being procured off of war, particularly a war to which the family has sacrificed a family member’s life. The world of the play is aware of the dense literary world in which it exists; the characters, particularly Pinkie, are preoccupied with the great authors and classic works of literature, they quote constantly from famous writing, and the play’s second act is entirely set within a library.

In this second act, which is more directly centered around Oscar and Pinkie than was the first act (the first act is much more driven by the divorce plot-line and the actual dismantling of Oscar), the play hits on its most compelling theme, the point that makes it unique from many other plays about the effects of war on families. Because Pinkie has such a close relationship with literature – he tells exciting tales of times spent with the greatest authors of the twentieth century – and because Pinkie has made such an impression on Oscar through these stories, the second act highlights the strange relationship between great literary art and war. Many of the authors mentioned or cited had themselves lived through important military conflicts, even having directly participated in some cases. Pinkie himself is a veteran of war and a storyteller.

It is clear that the fantastical tales that Pinkie tells of his great adventures with these literary giants have allowed him to escape the reality of his life, and perhaps to suppress or erase what he experienced during wartime. The play sets out an interesting comparison between war as a cause of experiences, and literature as a potential effect of such experiences. It almost seems as if literature can act as a protection or as an antidote to conflict. In a particularly telling moment, bookcases are used to hold back a slew of divorce lawyers who are attempting to break-in to the library. The particular shelves used are chosen for their “weight.”

Hughes’s play also raises interesting questions about identity for each of the characters; they grapple with who they are and how this persona can be defined. Is identity defined through one’s clothes (Oscar is preoccupied with wearing his late brother’s military attire, for example), through the stories one relates of one’s own life (in the case of Pinkie), through one’s financial status (the difference between Evelyn’s old and Richard’s new wealth), or through the opinions of others? However, these compelling questions are sometimes hard to keep track of during the play because there are so many things going on simultaneously. In addition, much action is kept off-stage, because each act is grounded in a sole location. Because so much is told and not shown, it is hard to recall exactly what has happened and what it means to and for each of the characters. It is very much a text-driven play, and there is a lot of information of which to keep track.

So much of the action is driven by dialogue, and perhaps because of this, there are many good one-liners throughout the play. In particular, Stoker, who comes in to dismantle Oscar, is given a great deal of very humorous quips. In his portrayal of Stoker, Reggie Oldham delivers these jokes with punch and verve. Kevin Hauver portrays Pinkie in such a manner as to encapsulate beautifully the thin line between reality and fiction when one tells of one’s own life. His speeches are poignantly written and very well-performed. The rest of the actors – Jonathan Harper Schlieman, Kathryn Neville Browne, and Dave Benger – try their hardest to keep the energy high no matter which of the issues raised by the play is at stake. If the text were slightly less at war with itself over which is the main theme and directed more precisely at one issue, then perhaps the play would be able to have a clearer effect on its viewer.

Dance of Death

There’s a lot to admire in the dazzling Gin & ‘It’, now playing at P.S. 122 in the East Village. Created and directed by Reid Farrington, a former video designer for The Wooster Group, this multimedia production shares a similar aesthetic with that boundary-pushing ensemble, melding film installation and live performance in spectacular fashion. Farrington’s The Passion of Joan of Arc from 2008 (also at P.S. 122) was his directorial debut. Gin & ‘It’ reaches further than that visually stunning solo performance of Carl Theodor Dryer’s 1928 silent film masterpiece with four live performers onstage recreating Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. The actors from the master of suspense’s 1948 thriller starring Jimmy Stewart and Farley Granger have been digitally isolated and projected on to moveable screens that a quartet of Grips shuttle around the set while simultaneously enacting the film’s main actions in a striking celluloid/human hybrid.

Most of Rope, a retelling of the infamous and true Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb story of two gay, Nietzschean “supermen” who kill a friend for the thrill of it, remains intact for much of Gin & ‘It’. A few reels of the film are intentionally left out towards the end, but the narrative does not suffer for that omission.

Rope was called a “stunt” by Hitchcock, who was attempting to portray the one-act, one-set drama as having been shot in one continuous take. Gin & ‘It’, likewise, tries to recreate the complexity of the technical demands of such a shoot. Farrington’s intricate choreography of the action is awesome to behold, especially when the Grips act out moments of the film with the help of simple props such as cigarette lighters or hats, with the faces or various body parts of the film’s actors displayed on the moveable screens.

Having rewatched Rope before attending the show, I was able to concentrate on the ballet-like rhythms of the hard-working Grips, who hit their cues with precision, except for a probable newcomer (played by Christopher Loar) who kept missing his marks and was reproached with barks of “It’s gotta be perfect!” by head Grip Karl Allen. This obsession with perfection parallels the killers’ own desire for supremacy.

Additional layers added on to the recreation of this filmic “perfect crime” become the most fascinating aspects of the production. The flirtation between and subtle sexuality of the cast members mimics the unspoken gay relationship of the movie’s killers, Brandon and Phillip. (“It” being, after all, the term coined by Hitchcock and screenwriter Arthur Laurents for homosexuality to evade the censors.) And when Chris, the not-so-perfect Grip, is bound, gagged, and hung from his feet in the middle of the stage, the violence is an obvious correlation to the strangulation of the “inferior” classmate of the Leopold and Loeb stand-ins that gives the film its title.

Although I found the production a bit too esoteric for the average theatergoer, I was fascinated by the blurring of filmmaking and theatermaking techniques on display. Is the show simply a visual diary of the attempt to recreate Hitchcock’s film onstage? Or is it an insider’s view of what it takes to create a precisely-orchestrated multimedia production, including the training (and hazing) of cast members and technicians?

A familiarity with both the original source material and perhaps even the behind-the-scenes workings of movies or theater (or both) might be helpful in appreciating the complexity of the goings-on onstage. But the interweaving of film, theater, and technique in Gin & ‘It’ remains an inventive and fastidious tour de force that stands as a fitting homage to Hitchcock himself and the spirit of artistic creation as well.

Puppets, But Why?

That Franz Kafka had issues with his father is perhaps common knowledge. That these issues influenced his work, particularly “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” is also well known.  And so along comes Drama of Works, a renowned puppet theater, to split Kafka into three versions of himself in order to depict art imitating life. While the depiction is successful, it is unclear if it was necessary.  Kafka #1 is a wooden marionette, carved by Miroslav Trejtnar. The marionette has sunken cheeks and a sad disposition and is accompanied by a hacking cough. Kafka #2 is simply a wooden letter K, of which there are various sizes depending on how much control K has of the situation.  The third puppet is Gregor-Bug, complete with long feelers and six legs. That Kafka is a puppet is reflective of how he approached life—he could never speak out to his father (his thoughts scribbled down in a letter that was never sent), his engagement was eventually broken off, as he only communicated with his fiancée, Felicia (here represented by the letter “F”) through writing.   Puppet Kafka’s method of story-telling is fragmented. “The Metamorphosis” is cut in with episodes from Kafka’s own life as well as added “interrogation scenes” where Greta, the Mother, and the Father are interviewed by a empty suit puppet. Its story is where the piece falls down.  Chopping up “The Metamorphosis” makes it difficult to delve into the story of Gregor and his plight, as the audience is quickly pulled out of it and into the story of Kafka the man or the letter. The parallels between the man and his creation are evident and it seems redundant to hammer them home. Additionally, the interrogation scenes, meant to bring other Kafka works to mind, are unnecessary and add to the story where the story alone should suffice.   Though the story feels forced, and its attempt to examine the parallels between life and art obvious, the visual presentation of the play is stunning. The set is half sized, so that the puppets fit nicely but the human actors overrule the playing space. The balance between actors and puppets is finely maintained—this isn’t the type of puppetry where the puppeteer remains hidden behind a curtain. In fact, the visible puppeteering serves as yet another reminder of how outside forces acted upon and controlled Kafka and Gregor (pre-Bug and as Bug).   The puppets are a mix of traditional marionettes and found object constructions. Kafka finds himself interrogated by desk lamps while the boarder the Samsas take in are represented by shadows on the wall. The two most creatively constructed puppets were Gregor-Bug and the cleaning lady. Gregor-Bug consists of two overturned bread baskets, dish scrubbers, and long feathers while the charwoman puppet was made of a mop and a dusting brush, with a carved sponge for her face. Additionally, the two puppeteer/actors playing Gregor-Bug and the charwoman did an excellent job in bringing their puppets to life.   Puppet Kafka purports to examine the parallels between life and art, and what better way to do so then by mixing live actors with inanimate puppets? However, the way Puppet Kafka unfolds makes one wonder if the parallels need to be or should be examined in such a framework, as the stories are weakened by being cut up and mixed together. The presentation is pleasant and the concept intriguing, but Puppet Kafka never gets to the why and wherefore of the matter.

In a Fictional South, Something Familiar

Trembling in the grasp of a recession, we have been asked to reflect—most notably by President Obama—on the last time in our country’s history when blunders on the high level caused a state of economic emergency. The difference between the Great Depression and what many have coined “The Great Recession” is one of only three letters. But although Jacqueline Goldfinger’s The Oath is set in a Southern town during the Depression, she has asked us to not focus on this weighty parallel. “Whether the current economic downturn is the new Great Depression or not doesn’t interest me,” she states in her playwright’s note. "What really interests me is how pressure forces people to reveal their true selves," she continues.

It’s perhaps due to her deliberate subtlety that The Oath’s symbolism is so affecting. The story is laden with religious parallels, questions of female identity and themes of secrecy and familial duty, but the presence of a nationwide crisis that hovers over its cast of characters is what allows us to relate to them right off the bat—even before Goldfinger dismantles, in a startlingly effective manner, the initial archetypes that these characters represent.

The Oath’s poster, which depicts imposing church windows and the tagline, "a southern gothic tale," may easily evoke supernatural and creepy associations in a modern theatergoer, but onstage the work plays out as a straightforward family narrative. Set in a small-town parish in Florida, the play tells the story of a preacher (Anthony Crep) who becomes closely involved in the lives of the town's former minister’s three daughters (Louise Flory, Dianna Martin and Sarah Chaney). Their father, never seen onstage, has been confined to his bedroom for over a year with a condition that isn’t initially revealed, while the three unmarried women attempt to both run the parish and deal with the pervasive poverty and consequent desperation that’s currently affecting their community.

All three start off as stereotypes—while Deck (Martin) tends to the coffee pot and the laundry basket, Cebe (Flory) sneaks around town with different men in a rebellious tirade. Meanwhile, Ophelia (Chaney) casts an imposing, stiff shadow over the desk at which her father used to sit, charging community members money for blessings and counting her winnings. When Joshua arrives, he proceeds to push for the truth behind the reverend’s yearlong absence, and finds himself head-on with the sisters’ desire to conceal their individual—and collective—secrets.

That these archetypes give way to remarkable layers of moral ambiguity as the story progresses speaks to both the quality of the writing and the extraordinary devotion of the performers. Even when Cebe bursts into a sarcastic cackle, there’s a manic, rageful element to her seeming lack of rules that awakens our curiosity. Meanwhile, Deck appears so deliberately resigned to her role as an old maid that her momentary outburst early in the play hints at a deep-seeded trauma. While Ophelia’s turn from a stern, money-grubbing matriarch into a vulnerable, lonely soul feels hurried, she provides a steadier counterpoint to her more troubled sisters.

Like The Roundtable Ensemble’s recent tale of military wives, Silent Heroes, the world of The Oath is one ruled by invisible men. From the never-seen former preacher to the president of the church board and, most notably, Christ himself, offstage male figures control the choices of each of the play’s women. In a cleverly ironic setup, Joshua is nevertheless merely a visitor in a world of women. As the sole male cast member, Anthony Crep brings just the right element of earnestness and sympathy into Joshua. In his attempt to restore a community and a family, his loyal intentions sometimes give way to desperation.

More than many mainstream works, The Oath achieves a near-perfect equilibrium between the quality of its writing and its performances. Goldfinger has balanced her story nicely, enabling dynamic, revealing interactions between different pairs of characters, and balancing them out with several powerful monologues. Under the guidance of director Cristina Alicea, each of the actors seems to have understood the depth of the exceptional material, and showcases these characters to their full, sometimes frightening potential.

Gender Benders

Downtown queer theater doesn’t come more “out there” than Cracked Ice, a mélange of drag, music, circus acts, monologues, and campy costumes that plays as a kind of vaudeville fever dream about the current financial crisis and Bernard Madoff. Directed by Circus Amok founder Jennifer Miller, the show features contributions from Kenny Mellman, one half of the Kiki & Herb show; Deb Margolin, a veteran of Split Britches; and the Wau Wau Sisters. Be warned: The humor in the show is an acquired taste. This is the sort of thing you’ll like if you like this sort of thing. The level of comedy can be discerned from the punned names of the two main characters, the Liberty sisters: Statua Liberty (Miller) and Sybil Liberty (Carlton Cyrus Ward). The central conceit is that Sybil, without the knowledge of Statua, has invested the sisters’ money in a Ponzi scheme run by Madoff and, of course, lost it all. Miller and Ward play their characters as if they were Laverne and Shirley on speed, and Miller has directed others to the same level of hysteria, notably Salley May as a roller skater named Flo.

Even if the dialogue isn’t Noel Coward, it would help to understand the alternately rushed and swallowed lines from several of the cast. Even the Liberty sisters’ jokes, credited to Jay Leno, often fizzle because of a lack of comic timing or audibility. Rae C. Wright (who resembles Simone de Beauvoir) has the advantage of more measured speech in less frantic roles, as she cross-dresses as a plumber, who morphs into a woman named Bernadette, who is actually Bernard Madoff in disguise. I think. The rest of the drag in the show is in the English style. That means that there’s no attempt to disguise the facial or chest hair on the men (and Miller, who has a full beard and chest hair, doesn’t disguise hers).

Costumers Jonathan Berger and Charlotte Lily Gaspard have gone all-out on headdresses, spangles and boas, and Berger, who also did the sets, cleverly hangs mobiles of diamond shapes, in powder blue and silver spangles, over the audience, a nice visual play on the “ice” of the title.

Periodically, the Wau Wau sisters (Tanya Gagne and Adrienne Truscott) appear behind a two-dimensional bathtub with (painted cardboard) plants growing in it, and clopping on in Lederhosen and wooden shoes. (It’s a toss-up if they’re Swiss or Dutch.) They are the sons of Bernadette, apparently, who is Bernard Madoff in disguise.

Jokes are thrown out willy-nilly, as when the plumber enters and asks, “Anybody need their pipes cleaned?” And sometimes there are delightful turns of phrase: "I just tell the truth in a completely false way," says Bernadette/Bernie.

But the Keystone Kops–style slapstick grows tiresome; it’s not hilarious just to show up and throw things around. Interspersed with these antics are dances and songs, with music and lyrics by Mellman (Herb of Kiki & Herb). The songs provide amiable interludes, but it’s the physical aspects of the show that succeed best. They include the dexterous Miller and Ward juggling Indian clubs, courtesy of their experience with Circus Amok, and one of the Wau Wau Sisters singing a brief, 60-second song as the other holds a handstand for the full minute.

Melman at the piano also provides unobtrusive underscoring to much of the action as well, although Novice Theory, one of the various rotating guest artists who appear in the show, did a smashing accordion piece on the night I attended—one that he wrote.

Most impressive is the choreography by Faye Driscoll, one of whose pieces excels in silence. Driscoll’s dances are demanding and executed with vigor and synchronization by the cast. Unlike the rest of the show, they seem to have been rehearsed sufficiently. Certainly, when one of the funniest moments is the accidental loss of two wigs, and Miller herself looks unsure which wig to retrieve for her character because they are nearly identical, it’s a good guess that some aspects of the show haven’t been polished quite enough.

Not So Suddenly, Last Summer

For most recent high school graduates, the summer before college is a series of innocuous adventures: house parties, road trips, maybe the occasional hookup between shopping sprees at Bed Bath & Beyond. That’s not the case for beleaguered Allegra (Marnie Schulenberg), the heroine, or closest thing there is to one, of Adam Szymkowicz’s sharp play, Pretty Theft, which closes the Flux Theatre Ensemble’s 2009-2010 season. The Dartmouth-bound Allegra is the kind of good girl found in Tom Petty songs. Sympathy abounds for her: her mother is abusive and aloof, her father is dying, and she chooses to spend her summer working in a group home for troubled adults.

Don’t be fooled, though: Theft is in no way one of those formulaic, “that summer changed my life” works. Far from it, in fact, as anyone familiar with the playwright’s work can attest. Szymkowicz’s plays are of a more irreverent ilk. His dialogue is quirky but character-appropriate and while his plots aren’t quite linear, they’re not crazily labyrinthine either. Characters travel along jagged lines that occasionally intersect. This is refreshing because while we can’t foresee the path Theft takes, its destination seems completely justifiable when it is reached.

So when Allegra connects with Suzy (an effervescent Maria Portman Kelly), a classmate who excelled in promiscuity and petty larceny while Allegra majored in scholastics, one expects the show to hit the requisite notes of friendship, betrayal, and self-discovery. To Szymkowicz’s credit, Theft does (thanks in part to Zach Robidas’ spot-on portrayal of a doltish All-American teen boyfriend), and then, unsatisfied at merely appealing to the lowest creative denominator, moves way beyond that.

Allegra meets Joe (Brian Pracht), an autistic patient with a penchant for stealing other’s belongings and lashing out at his caretakers. The two, orphaned by the world in so many ways, develop an understanding that is both dramatically rich and emotionally satisfying. But Allegra surprises herself by finding connections between herself and Suzy as well, in a friendship that takes a half-step back for every step forward that it moves.

Szymkowicz entwines Allegra’s story with that of the enigmatic Marco (marvelously inhabited by Todd D’Amour), a grifter in a Western greasy spoon who flirts with his waitress, played by Candice Holdorf (in typical fashion, Holdorf makes the most of every scene, suggesting a lifetime of disappointment and settling for a character not even granted a first name). All of the principle characters are guilty of various types of theft - as the play title suggests - born of their various needs, but they share more than just this thematic kink. Eventually, these disparate characters’ lives will converge.

It is to director Angela Astle’s credit that these characters do so at a perfectly measured pace. She is a resourceful director who knows how to take advantage of every tool in her arsenal, including set designer Heather Cohn’s versatile production layout, in which the same set pieces evoke a ballet studio, diner, mall, and even a bedroom, within Tribeca’s Access Theater. (Kudos to the ensemble cast for so quickly executing these changes).

More importantly, of course, Astle has assembled a top-notch cast. Pracht is nothing short of a divine presence, heartbreaking and true, and Kelly navigates the tightrope of providing comic relief while suggesting Suzy’s deep vulnerability. Schulenberg, as anyone who saw her in last fall’s Angel Eaters, is a gifted actress, and it is a privilege to watch her carry Theft. She captures the nuances of what the costs and gains of a lonely life are. However, I would have liked for her to have explored Allegra’s darker impulses a bit further.

In a play about stealing, though, it is altogether appropriate to applaud D’Amour, who very nearly steals Theft by show’s end. I’ve praised the gravelly-voiced actor before for his work in What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends, and yet I was still struck by his expert portrayal, one so insidious that it creeps right up on the audience. Of course, in a production as well executed as Pretty Theft, as in life, the signs were right there all along.

It would be a crime to miss them.

Autonomantastic!

Historic con artists, gothic ghosts, duplicitous chess-playing automatons, slapstick-infused 18th century Austrian royalty, and ingeniously used pop-up books are just a few of the wondrous delights that intersect in Bond Street Theatre’s The Mechanical. Writer and director Michael McGuigan has created an endlessly inventive experience with an outstanding ensemble of actors in his sprawling historical and fantastical epic. The kaleidoscopic script centers around a mechanical hoax that toured Europe and America between 1770 and 1854. Known as The Turk, this Automaton Chess Player was invented to amuse Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and consisted of a box and a metal mannequin dressed to resemble a Turkish mystic. An accomplished chess player hid inside the box and made chess moves for the “thinking automaton,” defeating the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. McGuigan’s script combines the historical Turk with a re-imagined working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In the play, Mary Shelley’s ghost discovers that her legacy is endangered because the Creature resurrected by her Victor Frankenstein deserts her story and hides inside the automaton as the master chess player. She enters the world of her own, and McGuigan’s, fantasy to bodily possess characters and try to lure the Creature back into the plot of her own novel.

The actors in the ensemble create all the magic and mystery required with their highly physical and expressively energetic performances. In particular Joanna Sherman and Anna Zastrow are called upon to serve as exotic scenic elements, dancing sailors, Austrian and French royalty, and slapstick narrators straight out of a classic Three Stooges episode. Sherman and Zastrow make their diverse roles look effortless with impressive athleticism and the precise, physical specificity of Ninja masters or, well, at least, veteran vaudeville jugglers.

Meghan Frank is also delightful in a dual role (Mary Shelley’s ghost and Victor Frankenstein’s wife Elizabeth). She is referred to in the play as “quite beautiful, quite charming, and quite possibly deranged.” That seems to fit Frank’s evocative gothic creepiness and her aura of restrained mania.

Frank also served as the designer of a gorgeous puppet made of book pages (portraying the drowned little girl, whose death is blamed on the Creature). And with McGuigan, she designed projections that run throughout the play and provide fascinating context and ambience for the play.

Actors who can be magically captivating during long scenes where they have no lines but grunts—and do so working under a head wrapping that binds their face into grotesqueries—deserve special rewards in heaven. Joshua Wynter, as the Creature, turns his own body into passionate sculpture and embodies a deliciously sinister but compellingly vulnerable bundle of resurrected flesh.

McGuigan’s direction is the real star of the evening, though. The scope of vision for the play is broad and dazzling. The enchanting physicality of the choreographed transitions, the skillful use of puppets and flowing scenic elements, and the surprise introduction of pop-up books with miniatures of set pieces—it all combines into a uniquely exciting and charming journey.

Costume designer Carla Bellisio and a wonderful soundscape (uncredited) also contribute greatly to the allure of the piece.

McGuigan’s script, however, suffers a bit in comparison with the other outstanding design and performance work on the production. While the first act is almost entirely absorbing, the second act loses focus quickly. An unfortunate decision to bookend the script with an unnecessary sub-plot about a theatrical renovation contributes to a sense of messiness and makes the ending of the play seem drawn out. There are also a few moments where it feels as if McGuigan is writing a research paper on The Turk and not a dramatic portrayal.

For theater-goers who like a sense of adventure to their drama and the warm feeling of falling into a meticulously crafted (if occasionally over-sprawling) fantasy world, The Mechanical is certain to impress and entertain.

For tickets and showtimes, consult the venue’s website at www.theaterforthenewcity.net .

Sheep's Clothing

A man strung upside down from a high ceiling recites spoken word poetry into a microphone held up to him by a young woman on the ground, beside whom sits a table of technicians. Whether viewing the image silhouetted against a giant scrim peaks your interest or makes you roll your eyes is only a partial indication of how you will react to the whole of How Soon is Now?, a mixed media riff on vengeance by experimental performance company Bluemouth. Using the story of Peter and the Wolf as a point of departure, How Soon is Now? takes aim at the practice of exacting revenge in the name of justice. The production begins in the balcony of Brooklyn's gorgeous Irondale Center, a converted church, with a whimsical children’s cartoon, animated by Heather Schibli. The opening segment does more to ease audiences into the production than to set the show’s tone, which is a shame because How Soon is Now? has a cloying tendency to veer toward self-seriousness that a greater sense of whimsy would help undercut.

The production roves through the balcony before settling into the Irondale’s large main space, loosely constructed as a renegade courtroom (set by Stephen O’Connell and Don Woods). In place of the cerebral monologues that dominate traditional courtroom drama, How Soon is Now utilizes aesthetic elements to make its appeal viscerally. Film and video projections in muted hues (Cameron Davis, Stephen O’Conell, Sabrina Reeves and Richard Windeyer) create a backdrop at once dreary and kinetic. Music and sound (Richard Windeyer and Omar Zubair) underscore the performers’ spoken word and dance segments, while Zubair’s live percussion helps build dramatic tension.

The dance oriented piece, under the guidance of movement consultant Vanessa Walters, features choreography reminiscent of modern dance, European folkdance, and contact improvisation. The hodgepodge of styles is well suited to a production that celebrates a lot of different artistic elements, and when it works it does so because the performers execute their spirited movements with athletic prowess and artistic specificity. Often, though, the effect is muddled by the performers allowing their exuberance to overwhelm their control.

From the outset, How Soon is Now sides firmly with the persecuted wolf (Stephen O’Connell) and against vigilante justice. Yet the hour and fifteen minute production fails to fully develop that concept. Peter (Lucy Simic) rushes to the wolf’s defense, but aside from the character’s name, a connection to the Peter of the folklore is never established. Indeed, beyond its use of the folktale’s conclusion, when the town captures the wolf, as a plot device, How Soon is Now draws little from the fable. While the creators of the piece seem keen on audience communication, they fail to mine their myriad source materials for a translatable point. In the absence of dramatic clarity, potency turns to preciousness.

How Soon is Now? was collectively created by an artistic team of twelve. The energy of large group collaboration makes itself apparent in the shared enthusiasm of the performers; an outside eye might have helped them harness that energy to lend greater clarity to the performance. There’s a lot going on in How Soon is Now? that certainly resulted from a lot of dedicated artistic exploration. Without a director to focus the production’s disparate elements, its power gets lost.

Like a Horse and Carriage?

When a play opens to a happy, healthy couple engaged in happy, healthy foreplay, you know they're in for trouble. In All Aboard the Marriage Hearse, written and directed by Matt Morillo, the happy couples' segue from bliss to fury is quick but organic. Sean and Amy have been together for three years. He doesn't believe in marriage. She does. Morillo is a sharp playwright who who deftly intertwines comic zingers with impassioned disputes and understands how to pace his own script. His second published play, Marriage Hearse premiered last year at Theater for the New City, which has revived the original production. Nick Coleman and Jessica Moreno reprise the roles they originated, and their ease with both their characters and each other make the play work. As Sean and Amy, they are affable and impassioned, and their chemistry is terrific. If we as an audience didn't understand why they should be together in the first place, the play would fall apart. It doesn't: Coleman and Moreno quickly establish how well-suited their characters are, then spend the rest of the play mining the underlying friction that plagues their relationship. Amy and Sean both have firm, diametrically opposed convictions regarding marriage. The play consists of their all-night fight over the issue -- he gets the "logical" arguments; she the "emotional" ones -- but while their neatly scripted points are occasionally insightful, they are rarely fresh.

Even if you accept the play's traditional notion that women want marriage and men do not, the year-old play still feels dated. In 2009, the practice of upper middle class urbanites living in a committed, monogamous relationship without an official marriage license is hardly as radical as the production implies. Sean, and therefore the play, believes the primary problem with marriage is its permanence. Morillo's script argues that, should a couple fall out of love, they should be free to part ways without dealing with the hassles of church or state; it seems the play's real problem is not with marriage but with divorce.

Conspicuously absent from Sean and Amy's debate is any recognition of the current controversy over same-sex marriage, an improbable omission in an era when questions surrounding the definition and purpose of marriage are at the forefront of a national conversation. Each character could borrow rhetoric from both sides of that debate to terrific effect, enhancing their arguments and keeping the play from feeling like it belongs to a different decade. Instead, they rehash whether or not it's healthy for married couples to stay together for the sake of the kids, with Sean insisting, "That's what f-ed up our generation!" Really? At most, they are thirty-five-years old; the 1970s and 1980's were full of at least as much cultural insistence that children are strong enough to cope with divorce as concern that it leaves them scarred.

A sleepy question early in the play of whose turn it is to clean the kitchen is about the only indication that the play is set solidly in the twenty-first century. Even Amy and Sean's gendered professions feel plucked from a smart play of a generation ago: she teaches elementary school and he's a humorist at the New Yorker. It would be interesting -- and plausible -- to see someone stage a production of Marriage Hearse set slightly earlier in American history. Certainly were the play set a couple of decades ago, Amy and Sean's religious differences (he's Catholic, she's Jewish, neither practices much) could add more dramatic tension to the prospect of their nuptials. Instead, while their disparate religious upbringings nicely inform Coleman and Moreno's characterizations, the use of duel religions functions primarily as a way of emphasizing the multiple religious and political dimensions to the institution of marriage. That prevents the argument against marriage from becoming a polemic against a singular religious or political practice. It's a smart choice indicative of the play as a whole: structurally savvy in the service of character and plot but lacking wide social import.

"I'm not the first person to come up with this idea," says Sean of his marital skepticism. Indeed, he is not. One need only look to recent New York theater seasons to see marriage reexamined; last season's Drunken City by Adam Bock, at Playwrights Horizons, explored what significance marriage holds for contemporary twenty-somethings; the season before Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only questioned the importance of marriage at MTC. Curiously, the current production at Theater for the New City on the LES is not nearly so edgy as the productions further uptown. If it lacks potency as the political play it wants to be, Marriage Hearse succeeds as what it is: a character-driven love story.

The History of Stuff

Recent interest in the environmental crisis has spawned a new sort of genre in speculative fiction – the exploration of mankind’s long-term impact on the planet; most notably the tendency to leave our junk all over the place. Thanks to Pixar’s hypnotic masterpiece Wall-E, it is trendy to sift through future fossil records of refuse in search of meaning and, perhaps, a precise flash point where our wasteful race went wrong. In Wall-E, landfills of useless items choked out humanity's progress, but in Ashlin Halfnight’s contemplative new play, Artifacts of Consequence, our leftover stuff takes on a deeper meaning after civilization has fallen. At some unspecified point in the future, contemporary society has collapsed; leaving Ari, Minna and Dallas in an underwater repopulation facility, where they catalogue found items and tend to the other sedated citizens. We are never told exactly what ended the world in Artifacts – Cholera? Flooding? – but soon enough we become aware that food replacement pills from “The Department” are running short and internal tensions are running high. The arrival of a wanderer named Theo seems to brighten up sprightly Ari’s mood, but before long the pressure of maintaining the facility becomes too great for Minna.

Halfnight and the immensely capable director Kristjan Thor’s great conceit here is the strict ritual of archiving things like sneakers, literature, and Twizzlers. An invisible garage door opens along the apron of the stage and the characters present the audience with each knick-knack for evaluation. In cases of literature and plays, a troupe of groggy-eyed actors is awakened from sedation to read the words aloud. You see, Dallas (Jayd McCarty) was once a curator at the Smithsonian and he has trouble admitting that the food needed to save the human race is more important than the great literary achievements of history.

Halfnight and Thor present the small human moments just right – while singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from Oklahoma, a usually sedated actor (Tobias Burns) suddenly swaggers charismatically, caught up in the music; or allowing each character to savor a stick of chewing gum for the first time in years; or Theo’s (Marty Keiser) nostalgic smile as he cradles a Chewbacca action figure and delivers the line, “Laugh it up fuzz ball.” Yes, Halfnight and Thor often remind us, these are just things, but they are also adept signposts for our memories and, in dire straights, able surrogates for happier days.

The mood is almost spoiled towards the end, as the circumstances become more dismal and the “garage door” is left open. From there on, the characters frequently address the audience about their mental states or predicaments, which feels overly meta at best and like a cheat at worst. Eventually, Ari even remarks that she expected a better ending. Breaking the fourth wall is a proud theatrical tradition and, to be sure, an example of the practice is all but cited here in the evaluation of a passage from Our Town. But this sort of on-the-nose commentary seems tonally at odds with the subtle and specific world that Halfnight and Thor – not to mention the exemplary design team of Jennifer de Fouchier, Kathleen Dobbins, and Mark Valadez – worked so hard to craft.

Beyond that, there are some superbly honest flashes towards the end of Artifacts, such as an-all-too-truthful decision from Theo and a uniquely stunning ending beat. Overall, Thor’s comprehensive staging reinforces Halfnight’s wistful anthology of brick-a-brack and sentiment with unparalleled style. Sara Buffamanti imparts much heart to the piece in her role of Ari, the 80’s movie obsessed innocent coming of age in world much darker than Dirty Dancing suggested. Her romance with Keiser’s genial Theo lends the piece relief it would sorely miss otherwise.

McCarty and Rebecca Lingafelter (as Minna) are interesting parental figures for the other characters, and their bracing chemistry suggests that each possesses a rich past. While Lingafelter is at her neurotic best in Minna’s more obsessive-compulsive moments, she tackles her character’s eventual breakdown very respectably. And again, Tobias Burns, Hanna Cheek and Amy Newhall make great numb actors in their short scenes.

Through anthropology and atmosphere, Artifacts of Consequence searches for significance in the scraps of society and, more often than not, this formidable work finds it.

Germ Warfare

Imagine a time when a doctor might refuse, out of plain arrogance or class entitlement, to wash his hands after conducting an autopsy. Imagine that doctor then using those hands to help a woman deliver a baby. Such practices, unthinkable now, occurred every day in 1840s Vienna and resulted in an uncontrollable epidemic of puerperal fever, an easily preventable bacterial infection that killed thousands of mothers, many desperately poor, while in labor. This all took place more than a decade before Louis Pasteur succeeded in convincing Europe of the germ theory of disease. Ben Trawick-Smith’s new play, What Happens to Women Here, part of Stone Soup Theatre’s Diagnosing the Present series, focuses on the efforts of one doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis (Morgan Nichols) who, years before Pasteur, realized but could not convince his colleagues of the contagiousness and simple prevention of puerperal fever. Distraught, he eventually descended into madness. Though the play is based on actual historical figures, Mr. Trawick-Smith has written the play as a work of fiction.

The play is set in two obstetrical divisions of a hospital; doctors run the first and midwives the second. The latter division has a much lower mortality rate. The midwives, Semmelweis observes, routinely wash their hands between procedures. The doctors, from a higher class than those they serve, conduct autopsies on the dead patients and then feel insulted if someone suggests they should wash their hands. Doctors, we are informed, do not get dirty.

The "science play" is a difficult sub-genre because its plot must usually conform to a larger scientific theory or story. Carl Djerassi’s plays about advances in reproductive science are perfect examples of this often precarious accommodation. What Happens to Women Here is only partially successful, as it tries to juggle a science plot along with a love story of sorts.

This parallel plot line follows Tobias and Theresa, a very young couple from different socio-economic classes. Theresa becomes pregnant and winds up at the doctors’ clinic. Eventually, the lives of Theresa and Semmelweis intersect in a predictable way. I’m not convinced that this plot line is entirely necessary to this 100-minute play, though exchanges between Theresa and her close friend, Carli (Jennifer Boehm), are helpful to illustrate that era’s sexual mores and myths.

While its scenes follow each other quickly, the production is sometimes workmanlike and didactic, recalling Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, the classic play about a nearly hysterical doctor who tries to warn his community about microbes at the local baths. What Happens to Women Here also wants to warn us of the dangers of willful ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence. Yet, it leaves some questions unexplained.

We never fully learn, for example, what motivates Semmelweis’ supervising physician, Johann Klein (Eric Rice) to discontinue the recommendation of Semmelweis that all doctors wash their hands, even in the face of irrefutable evidence. Klein has indulged the upstart Semmelweis twice regarding two of his ineffective theories. Semmelweis had posited one theory that priests ringing last rite bells cause the women deadly stress. Though such theories prove naïve, that history doesn’t explain why Klein clamps down on the only theory that proves helpful.

The play waveringly suggests that the autocratic Klein actually wants these women, who are young, poor and often prostitutes—dead. He somewhat improbably confides to Semmelweis that he had once fallen in love with one of his patients, who then died, so now he doesn’t seem to care about the women anymore. In any case, he declares, the hospital’s actual charges are the babies, not their mothers.

Mr. Nichols sometimes goes too far over the top in his eye-bulging portrayal of the increasingly mad Semmelweis, yet he captures the young doctor’s frustration in the face of maddening bureaucratic inertia. Ellen DiStasi is notable for her portrayal of a mature and no-nonsense midwife, suspicious of the haughty doctors and their practices. Jonathan Cottle’s set design is serviceable and uses the small space well, employing an office on a “second floor” where we see the “behind the scenes” intrigue. Jessica Lustig’s period costumes are imaginative and convincing.

What Happens to Women Here, if not "entertaining," offers a glimpse into a world where pregnancy once meant likely death. As a historical lesson, it succeeds, though it will probably be of interest mainly to those (and I am one) who are fascinated by those small historical steps that, in retrospect, are really giant leaps.

Welcome To The Dollhouse

If you don’t like your reality, create a new one. So believes young Lina (Kendra Mylnechuk, in this performance, Brenda Jean Foley in others) an imaginative young girl who can only cope with her loveless household if she regards her family as toys that “may or may not really exist.” Lina’s “toys” live in a fancy white dollhouse and reside in the idyllic Nantucket – not the one in Massachusetts, she explains – a different one that does not really exist. Written by Amy Fox and directed by Terry Berliner, One Thing I Like To Say Is takes audiences behind dollhouse doors into a reality so cold one can understand why Lina and her older brother, Toby (Brian Gillespie) spent their young lives trying to escape it.

Though presented by the Cockeyed Optimist Theater Company – a company whose mission is to share the “positive essence of being human” the optimism in this tale of broken homes and severed family ties is not immediately clear. But halfway through the production takes a surprising turn, blossoming into a sensitive and touching story about the resiliency of the human spirit to show love even when encumbered by a life where love has never been shown.

Wilson Chin designed the stage to resemble the whimsical interior of a dollhouse, decorated with brightly colored walls and lime green furniture. Even the characters look as if they were plucked from the shelves of a toy store.

Mylnechuk wears a bright pink dress that bounces when she walks. She has wide childlike eyes and a huge smile that refuses to leave her face, even in the worst of times. Gillespie also maintains a happy plastic front. He reveals his character’s insecurities in his nervously wringing hands and wild, unsettled eyes, always searching the room for an escape route.

Within the walls of this life sized dollhouse we meet Toby and Lina’s mother (played by Gillespie in earrings and a pink beaded necklace,) an unfaithful wife and drunk, and their father (played by Mylnechuk with a deep growling voice and reading glasses) also a drunk with a suggestion of violent tendencies. We also meet Lina’s alter ego -- a Scottish butler who dotes on Toby and manufactures happy moments to distract him from running away from home.

Toby is clearly the only ray of sunshine in Lina’s life and when their parents send him to reform school she stands in the center of her playroom, clenches her fists and screams with a deep, primal agony for her brother.

Sixteen years pass before a glimmer of optimism seeps into the lives of these doomed characters. It appears in the form of a lonesome teenager named Kevin (Michael Mattie) the possible biological son of either Lina or Toby. Though the siblings’ lives are hopelessly fractured when he arrives at their doorstep, Toby’s distressed wife, Sam (Jolie Curtsinger) graciously accepts Kevin into her home and more importantly, into her heart.

Sam is arguably the only sane character in this play. She fills the role that Lina wished a fictional Scottish butler could have filled years ago: a person strong enough and kind enough to hold her family together.

Fox’s tight, complex story arc acknowledges the depth of the siblings’ emotional problems but never judges their unusual coping methods. Their reluctance to completely surrender their childhood fantasies is understandable, especially since their shared imaginary games are the only pleasant memory of their past.

But in the spirit of optimism, this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, what’s so wrong with living in a dream world when the people you love most are living there with you?