Heaven on My Mind

What do the atomic bomb, a girl in white attending her prom, and infomercials for seeds have in common? On the surface, it seems, nothing. Yet Heaven on Earth , written by Charles L. Mee and created by Witness Relocation and Ildi! Eldi, includes all of these elements in a consistent and a coherent way that is equal parts hilarious, thought-provoking, poignant, and joyful. This true work of art grapples with the complicated questions of what it means to be mortal in a world in which life could end, suddenly, at any moment. To summarize a specific plot in this play would be difficult and perhaps contrary to the play’s intentions. Knowing too much of what will be seen on stage also could spoil one wonderful aspect of this play: its element of surprise. Each scene, each detail included, is an unexpected treat.

This play does not have a traditional structure. Essentially, the it is a collage of scenes that all have something to do with the human condition and the concept of finding a “heaven on earth.” The characters contemplate a genius scientist’s notion of being uploaded into cyberspace as a form of immortality; a film is screened of a man reminiscing about his childhood during the Dust Bowl; a racecar driver discusses his recent experience in a major competition and the thrill of the race; etc. Are any of these aforementioned situations examples of heaven? Can there be joy in the worst possible circumstances? Would living forever be more wonderful than only living a short while but in that time frame having had someone’s love and having reciprocated those feelings?

The direction of this piece is consistent and the collage works beautifully to riff on the themes being addressed without feeling heavy-handed or too straightforward. The piece incorporates poetic text, compelling physical movement and dance, film, technical effects, even showtunes. What could come across as a hodgepodge of elements is, rather, expertly conducted by Dan Safer. Safer, as director and choreographer, is able to cleverly counterpose text on one notion with movement or stage business meant to evoke another. The stage pictures here are sumptuous feasts for the eyes and the text is unconditionally brilliant, whether it is evoking bizarre and charming humor or presenting hard-hitting and emotional realities of what it means to be human.

Mee is a true artist in his playwriting and this work is no exception. The words, full of subtle meanings, can resonate in a viewer’s head long after the play has ended. Each line of text raises important questions without providing direct, succinct answers. The actors all have great skill in how to turn a phrase, pacing their speeches with perfect timing. In addition, the movement work in this production is exquisite. All of the performers are superb in their various roles, showing their range of performance abilities. Also worth singling out is the lighting and set design by Jay Ryan. The lighting is perfectly linked to the tone of the atmosphere in each scene and the set, in its clever simplicity, is utilized ideally for a play of this nature.

Heaven on Earth is a poetic reminder of the transience of human life. Despite numerous possibilities of heavens, there is no way for us to know that our advanced human civilization will even be remembered, much less that our insignificant individual lives will have made any impact. And yet, this play is a celebration of precisely that seemingly insignificant blessing known as life. Do not wait for a heaven; do not even spend your finite days searching for one. Life itself is a heaven and this play is one of life’s pleasures, not to be missed

Russian Winner

Geoffrey Rush, currently an Oscar nominee for playing a serious, thoughtful character in The King’s Speech, lets loose with a comic tour de force in Belvoir Theatre’s revival of Diary of a Madman, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's short story that he first played in 1989 for Australian director Neil Armfield. The revived production is a swansong for Armfield, who is retiring as artistic director of Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. Occupying the stage alone for most of the time, Rush plays Poprishchin, a minor clerk in a Russian bureaucracy circa the 1850s. Dressed by Tess Schoenfeld in period clothes—he wears a dark green velvet coat with breeches and a cravat, and sports a fringe of long, lifeless red hair—he looks like a Cruikshank engraving of a Dickens character. The top of his head is bald, except for an eruption of red in an isolated quiff at the front, and his dyspeptic volubility is rather like W.C. Fields on speed.

Poprishchin harbors feelings of superiority—he’s a gentleman, he continually points out to the Finnish servant (Yael Stone), Tuovi, who attends him but barely understands Russian. Like Rodney Dangerfield, Poprishchin gets no respect—the soup he’s fed is just broth, while a boarder downstairs who works for the Interior Ministry is fed dumplings. He badmouths his landlady as a former streetwalker, and while trying to assuage the feelings of poor Tuovi that Finns are good, he mutters, “Lapland barbarians who converse mainly with reindeer.”

The character takes on the appearance of a old-time vaudevillian under Mark Shelton's sometimes harsh footlighting—and his turn is brilliantly handled by Rush. There’s a bit of meta-theater as Poprishchin interacts with two musicians—Paul Cutlan and Erkki Veltheim—who contribute choreographed sound effects of rain, horses’ hooves and writing with a quill pen—at the last, the violin saws dissonantly. “I don’t even know you!” he declares in exasperation when the music becomes intrusive to his story. Cutlan and Veltheim between them play saxophone, violin, guitar, clarinet and gongs.

The vaudevillian ethos extends to moments when Poprishchin interacts with the audience, as he asks someone to hold a cup of tea. But mostly he narrates his character’s diary, the story of a low-level bureaucrat whose menial job it is to provide sharpened quills for his superiors to write with. Poprishchin grumbles and grouses about the injustices done to him like a precursor of Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners and, like Walter Mitty, he constructs a fantasy life, in which he woos the boss’s daughter, the lovely Sophia (Stone), and he is rightfully rewarded. But he also becomes oddly delusional, convinced that two dogs of hers are exchanging love letters, which he tries to retrieve. Gradually, as his fantasies become more outlandish, he becomes the madman of the title, less a figure of foolishness than one of pity. In his final, most ruinous fantasy, he believes he’s the rightful king of Spain.

Guiding the audience through the comedy and the bitterness requires a range of emotions, and Rush moves from daffiness to dire straits with aplomb. Not just does he inflect the words and pause brilliantly (especially when he reads the dogs’ love letters), but he moves with a dancer’s grace—it is a surprisingly physical performance. Helping the mood changes, too, is superb lighting by Shelton, from sides, casting long shadows on the walls, to blue night streaming through the skylight, to crossing spotlights that impart a clownish, jack-in-the-box appearance to Poprishchin.

Gogol’s story may not be on your list of reading, but there can hardly be a better substitute than seeing it come alive in this riveting adaptation.

Popping the Question(s)

Anyone who has ever thought, while seated on a therapist’s couch, “this would make great material!” is in luck. At Interviewing the Audience, running this month at The Vineyard Theatre, writer and director Zach Helm invites select audience members to join him on a pair of great looking chairs while answering questions about themselves. Anyone who has never harbored such a fantasy -- or who would rather see a live talk show for free -- should head uptown to a Letterman taping. Originally created by monologist Spalding Gray in 1981, Interviewing the Audience reverses Gray’s standard storytelling technique: rather than drawing on his own autobiography, with Interviewing the Audience, Gray questioned audience members about their lives. In the years since Gray’s 2004 death, both personal storytelling (The Moth) and audience interview programs (This American Life) have become cultural mainstays; both can trace their roots, at least in part, to Spalding Gray.

Gray’s own work, however, continues to receive attention in its own right. At P.S. 122, an ensemble of actors performed selections his monologues as part of last month’s Coil Festival. At HERE, Lian Amaris recently staged her own monologue in response to his acclaimed monologue-turned-film, Swimming to Cambodia. And film festivals the world over are screening Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s new Spalding Gray documentary. With Interviewing The Audience, The Vineyard joins the Gray-enthused fold.

Each performance of Interviewing the Audience consists of three audience interviews. Whereas Gray conducted his production with a specific set of questions, Helm prefers to let his chats meander. He likes to point out whenever his interview subjects say things that are particularly meaningful or revealing, and like a therapist – or theater director – says it back to them in easily digestible sound bites. (“When you’re on your own, you make your own” he surmised last week when a young set designer/ Starbucks manager described a correlation between independence and innovation.) To Helm’s credit, these platitudes never feel forced – just, frequently, trite.

An oriental rug and a square patch of lighting, bolstered by red and black pendent lamps hanging from the fly space, create an intimate setting for the conversation, while The Vineyard’s deep proscenium creates a theatrical frame for each conversation. A glass coffee table functions as a sort of protective barrier between the house and the off-white chairs on which the interview takes place, sturdy enough to keep interview subjects from feeling over-exposed but light enough to grant audience members a full view of the stage picture. Helm matches the set’s comfortably mod aesthetic, from his gray argyle sweater down to the red stripe of his socks. Such carefully conceived production values go a long way toward marking the performance as a piece of theater, working to separate it from the sort of people watching made possible at coffee shops all over the city (where admission is the price of a latte, not a $50 theater seat).

Helm takes pains to emphasize the ephemera of the production. He begins each show by announcing the date (“This is the January 8, 2011 performance of Interviewing the Audience”) and closes each evening by reminding audiences of the date, adding with a certain degree of solemnity that the evening’s performance can never be repeated. That may be so – but one gets the sense that while the specifics of each performance vary, the production is unlikely to change in any substantive way.

It is hard to imagine Helm’s formula (ask audience members how they came to the show, ask perceptive-but-not-probing follow up questions, comment on how meaningful their conversation is) eliciting wildly different evenings. In the original productions, Spalding Gray’s use of uniform questions perhaps better created opportunities for difference by placing the focus on audience response (and not just on a friendly chat). Even rich variety requires structure.

Culture Clash: disOriented Uses Dance to Examine One's Roots

“Who am I?” is a question often asked in dramatic works; the search for one’s identity has been a familiar theme going back as far as Oedipus Rex’s trek to the Oracle of Delphi. Kyoung H. Park’s most current work, Theatre C’s disOriented, tackles that very question in a contemporary way, looking at what it is to straddle separate cultures.

disOriented is the story of Ju Yeon (Amy Kim Washke), a Korean immigrant living in New York. A family crisis forces her to visit her homeland and face the family and lifestyle she has abandoned, reflecting upon the choices that led to her geographical and emotional estrangement.

For Park, the road to disOriented’s evolution is also a long and winding one. “I wrote disOriented for the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writer’s Programme,” Park said. “During my residency, I actually wanted to write a political play; I had this really crazy dream of writing a play for world peace. However, at the Royal Court, I was handed a copy of A Raisin in the Sun and the suggestion to write a ‘debut play.’ I thought to myself: I’m going to have to write about my family, and I really don’t want to do that.”

However, the personal and the creative blended in a way that proved very fulfilling to Park. “When I was brainstorming for ideas, I remembered a bus ride I took in Seoul after visiting my ill grandparents, and I thought that it would be interesting to write a play about my mother’s line. Until 2005, I had never lived in Korea, but [going there] to meet my mother’s family was like returning to the motherland, and though I was reluctant at first, writing disOriented helped me learn my family’s history and find my roots in Korea.” It took four years for the play to take shape, including two workshops and a reading.

disOriented may tackle traditional themes of family and identity, but it is performed in a far more modern way, in keeping with theatre C’s mission of blending distinct performance art forms in order to tell Ju Yeon’s story, particularly dance, since that is the protagonist’s chief passion.

“I was trying to write a modern, Korean family drama, but I wasn’t able to make the play linear,” Park said. “I decided to keep the dancer and just dig deeper into the fragments of memories and history I was trying to write. Structurally, disOriented goes back and forth in time and place, and a Korean fan dancer kept on appearing on stage.

Once the story itself began to take shape, the next challenge was how to physically incorporate dance into the work. “The greatest challenge in fusing dance to the story was finding a performer who was well-versed in Korean fan dancing as well as contemporary western dance, and a choreographer who could help us both create the dancing narrative and integrate it into the text as scripted,” director Carlos Armesto (and artistic director of Theatre C) explains. It fell upon lead actress Lee, a contemporary Korean fan dancer with a background in ballet and modern dance, and choreographer Elisabetta Spuria, a frequent collaborator of Theater C, to create the dances for disOriented. The company worked together to determine how dance, movement, sound (including the snapping of fans) could coalesce in a way that furthered Park’s story and remained true to the work’s original Korean sources.

This, of course, is much easier said than done. “The greatest challenge in writing disOriented was remaining true to traditional, Korean cultural values while writing this play for Western audiences,” Park said. “Koreans are very expressive people, but we do a lot of non-verbal communication because unlike America (or the West), Korea is a mono-cultural society in which everyone shares extremely similar values, beliefs, and social practices. I had to negotiate how much I would write into the play as dialogue, and how much I would keep unsaid in the text. That active choice of not speaking certain truths, especially when they can be hurtful to others, is a bizarre and confusing choice for those who may not understand Korean culture.” The multicultural theme permeated the entire production of disOriented; collaborators come not just form Korea, but also Italy, Chile, Colombia, the Philippines, China and the United States.

All of which leaves a lot of the aforementioned non-verbal truths to be communicated through the show’s choreography. The dances in disOriented are scripted to underline specific themes and moments in the play, functioning both at a narrative and emotional level (influences include Pina Bausch, Mark Morris and Shen Wei Dance Arts). “We also use traditional, Korean percussion music as inspiration for the play, so the voices scripted slowly disintegrate into an almost percussive ensemble song towards the end of the play, and this progression is deliberate to examine how the modernization of society affects and transforms social units, such as a family,” according to Armesto.

disOriented may take place in a specific, foreign culture, but Armesto, Park and the rest of Theatre C have gone to great pains to make sure that all the elements portray a story about family struggles in an ever-changing world. Stories don’t get much more universal than that.

disOriented runs from February 16 through March 5 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Further information can be found at www.theatreC.org.

The Church Against the Stars

The Starry Messenger by Ira Hauptman is a drama based on Galileo’s emotional dilemma over whether to recant his theories on the rotation of the earth and how his decision will affect him and his family. The Catholic Church calls his ideas heresy, saying it has long been established that the earth is the center with the sun revolving around it. The play opens with Castelli, Gallileo’s young idolizing assistant, played by the likable Jeremy Rish, looking through a telescope in an effort to see four moons surrounding Jupiter.The Starry Messenger, titled after a treatise written by Galileo in 1610, expresses some of those ideas about planets and moons. Early in the play we meet our threatening conflict: two mafioso, red clothed Cardinals, Zacchia and Borgia, played expertly by Louis Vuolo and Brian Gagne respectively. Jorge Luna as Vincenzio, Galileo’s bastard son, serves as a breath of fresh air throughout the play. Vincenzio’s only concern is removing his illegitimate status and Luna plays this with non-calculating delight. David Little as Galileo is a solid performer and aptly carries the play.

Galileo’s other children, his two illegitimate daughters, were sent to live in the convent as nuns. Marnye Young plays Victoria/ Suor Maria Celeste, a passionate devoted daughter with dental problems, to full heights. Young, as Maria Celeste, is torn between her pressures of the church vs. her belief and a devotion to her father. Young plays extreme anguish well but I feel that more tenderness and subtlety might have rounded out the performance.

Elisa Matula does an admirable performance as Livia, Sister Arcangela, the insane daughter suffering from demons and visions of torment. Playwright Hauptam ads an interesting and entertaining element as the source of Archangelica’s visions are glimpses of of modern day. This causes her to spew contemporary science and physics terms which no one except the audience understands. Her terrifying vision of the invention of a bomb especially resonates, making the point that Galileo’s theories could be the beginning of a path to evil.

The sharp choice to make the set a theater in the round proves quite successful. Innovative greenery and solar elements by Megan E. Healey, costume and set designer, disguised the lighting grid adding uniqueness to the minimalist set of moving benches. Costumes seem appropriate to the period. Vincenzio’s flamboyant and pretentious outfit to celebrate his legitimacy is a cause for a chuckle.

The staging by director Susan Einhorn is innovative and the actors frame themselves well on equal portions of the stage in a wholly organic way. Einhorn creates a seamless ensemble with a team of very committed actors. Jeff Greenberg, the lighting designer, deserves recognition for his ingenious rotating star display on the stage floor. This rotating light show is especially paramount following scenes of conflict between Galileo and the Cardinals.

Death is prevalent in the time period that this play is taking place. I could have gone without the dramatization of both sisters’ deaths in the play as they border on melodramatic. However, I was itching to see the death of Carndinal Zacchia. In one scene Cardinal Borgia (Gagne) warns Zacchia about his health issues as he gets over excited in his vehemence directed at Galileo. I found myself distracted in anticipation of the moment when Zacchia keels over, which he never does.

The Starry Messenger is a well acted drama on all counts. Though, as the playwright says, it is not entirely historical, it might serve as a refresher to our origins in science and space.

Dying Souls

The star-laden cast of Three Sisters is sure to draw eager audiences to Classic Stage Company’s home on 13th Street. But in a season that has seen the failure of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, stars are no guarantee of success, so it’s necessary to affirm that Austin Pendleton’s production of Chekhov’s play deserves to be a hot ticket. A year after their father’s death, the siblings of the title, who are daughters of a general, languish in a backwater of Russia. They share a home with their brother Andrey, socializing frequently with officers from the local garrison and discussing their happy memories and hopes of returning to Moscow, where they grew up.

But it’s the future that’s on the mind of the new commanding colonel, Vershinin (Peter Sarsgaard), smiling and luxuriating in their warmth—and particularly in the company of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s captivated Masha. Vershinin philosophizes that society will get better and better, perhaps only gradually over generations, but mankind is always advancing. In the present, however, there is only uncertainty: “There’s no way we can guess what will be considered important and serious, and what will be considered petty and silly,” he tells the sisters. It’s the genius of the play to show the characters’ fine spirits slowly degenerate and their hopes dwindle over the years.

Top to bottom the cast is irresistible, from Jessica Hecht’s stalwart, sensitive Olga, to Juliet Rylance’s lovely, distressed Irina, to Anson Mount’s brooding loose cannon Solyony. They include servants—George Morfogen’s deaf-ish, hangdog Ferapont, Roberta Maxwell’s fearful, occasionally grousing Anfisa—and the military men garrisoned in the town—notably Eben Moss-Bachrach’s cultured and gentlemanly Baron Tuzenbach, smitten with Irina, and Louis Zorich’s bluff military doctor, Chebutykin, who has given up drink but adheres to a fatalistic view of life at odds with Vershinin’s.

As they all grapple with destiny, they are painfully human and foolish: Irina, for instance, is sure that a life of work will be fulfilling, but once she has a job, she finds it stultifying, and the working class life alters her behavior in a way she dislikes. The sisters find their cultured upbringing—speaking foreign languages, playing music—is relentlessly eroded by their surroundings. Even Vershinin’s sunny outlook grows dimmer as he deals with a possibly insane wife and her suicidal impulses.

“Most of the people in this town are so vulgar, so unpleasant, so stupid,” Masha complains to Vershinin, with whom she has an affair to escape her arid marriage. “Vulgarity upsets me, it wounds me; I get physically sick when I see someone who lacks finesse, who lacks kindness and gentleness.”

Filling that bill is Marin Ireland’s Natasha, the irritating, wheedling upstart who captures the heart of Josh Hamilton’s passionate Andrey and then, in marriage, turns him into a morose cuckold. Nattering about her offspring and maneuvering the sisters out of their rooms and eventually their home, Natasha is the essence of crassness. (Paul Huntley has provided her a marvelous wig, so that when Ireland stomps around, curls bounce around like she’s a bobble-headed doll.) It’s part of Chekhov’s genius that one is never sure that Natasha might not have been a better person if the sisters had treated her better; her first hints of bad behavior feel like the worm turning, but as she continues, she becomes heartless.

Pendleton’s direction is superb; he even takes judicious liberties. During the Act III fire, Olga, echoing Masha’s delicacy of feeling, complains of Natasha’s insensitivity after she yells at the aged Anfisa. Here Anfisa doesn’t exit when Chekhov indicates it, but huddles for protection in Olga’s lap for many more lines during Natasha’s tirade. The director makes another canny interpolation by adding a kiss when Solyony declares his love for Irina; the trembling soldier leans in slowly and their lips touch. It works beautifully, and the romantic tension between the actors is electric.

The missteps in the production are minimal. In Paul Schmidt’s translation Natasha calls Andrey “Andy,” and it sounds bogus and grating; also, an occasional phrase—e.g., “You are the limit!”—seems too modern for the characters. One also has to gloss over the fact that Sarsgaard’s Vershinin is equal in age to Masha and Olga and could hardly have remembered the sisters as “little girls,” but otherwise he’s fine as Masha’s easygoing, optimistic lover. When he departs at the climax, leaving Masha to her husband, the dull, doting schoolteacher Kulygin (Paul Lazar), Gyllenhaal responds with rafter-shaking hysterics.

It may be that Ira Gershwin was thinking of Three Sisters when he wrote the lyrics to “But Not for Me” (“With love to lead the way/I’ve found more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play could guarantee”). Chekhov’s play has plenty of gloom, it’s true, but this production is exhilarating, essential viewing.

The Bumpy Road to Love

How I Fell in Love is a play with a simple message: Keep looking for love and never give up. There’s not much to chew over or reflect on after one leaves the theater, but a sterling cast and savvy direction by Jules Ochoa make Joel Fields’ play a treat for theatergoers. Heavily reliant on alternating monologues, the work focuses on two people who only meet about a third of the way through, after the audience learns their disastrous and comic dating histories. First up is Tommy Schrider’s Todd, a warm, somewhat naïve carpet-layer who recounts his misbegotten amours with a wry appreciation of his bad luck.

“I'm working on myself now, trying not to be so negative,” he confides as he describes a meeting with a metal-folk band singer named Crystal (Roya Shanks) and his pursuit of her. The evening devolves as Crystal “flits off to the other side of the room, dancing with some girl in a way that looks very bisexual,” says Todd, whose wingman Ron ends up connecting with Crystal.

Meanwhile, Polly Lee’s neurotic Nessa, a British doctor, works in a hospital alongside a strapping medic named Eric (Mark Doherty) who, she discovers too late, is married. She’s fallen for him hook, line, and sinker; she fantasizes about a life-and-death situation in which she saves Eric but alas, the wife perishes. Then Nessa unexpectedly finds him weeping in the coffee room, and Eric discloses that his marriage is falling apart. Her hopes soar, and before long they are having an affair.

Simultaneously Todd has moved on to a woman named Louise (Shanks again) at a barbecue. They seem to hit it off, although, says Todd, “I keep looking over, wondering … when some beefy boyfriend will appear and thank me for entertaining her while he was at the gym bench-pressing his Porsche.”

The rocky preludes to Todd and Nessa’s emotional miseries eventually lead to their meeting in a therapists’ waiting room, where they seem the ideal solution for each other. They connect as friends, and begin an affair, which hits the skids, bounces back, and is sorely tested. Fields, who has written teleplays for Ugly Betty and Dirt, provides a generous helping of emotional colors as well as comic moments that make his play more satisfying than the average rom-com movie. There may be nothing new in the stresses that Nessa and Todd face, but they feel important at the time.

“Flowers from men are not acts of generosity,” Todd advises Nessa after she’s been impressed by Eric’s sending her blooms following a bad patch between them. “Why don’t women get this?” he asks. “You get flowers and you get all mushy and think, ‘Oooh, he sent flowers...’ But what you really should be thinking is ‘What did he do?’ or ‘What does he want?’ ’Cause those are the only two reasons a man sends flowers.”

Ochoa’s direction keeps the feelings raw and honest, even if, at times, the dialogue veers toward a Lifetime movie (“I'm sorry. It's me. It's not you. You're a marvelous, splendid human being. And this time with you, it's as close as I've ever come to actually touching what's really in here...”).

Schrider and Lee make the soapiest moments work, however, and they also exhibit a persuasive chemistry that drives the play forward and keeps one caring about their characters—a good thing, since appearances by Eric and Louise are infrequent, though welcome. Late in the play, though, Nessa’s weepiness (Lee is adept at turning on the waterworks) and her tendency to sabotage her future with doubts just slightly unbalance one’s sympathies.

Wilson Chin and David Arsenault pull the audience into the Abingdon’s small space by decorating the surrounding walls with images of Los Angeles—Chateau Marmont, a neon bar sign, the skyline—interspersed with color rectangles, Mondrian-style, in hues like pumpkin, celadon and federal blue. A couple pillars have Joseph Cornell-like boxes, from which, for instance, Nessa fetches a book, writing pad and pen. The modern setting is warm, inventive, and efficient.

How I Fell in Love is an apt title for what promises to be a “date play,” and it delivers in spades. But anyone who goes, single or attached, is likely to have an enjoyable time.

Trouble in Texas

People like to examine their origins via art. Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams, The Coen Brothers, and many, many more have all at one point or another created fictional versions of their childhood homes. About writing out her experiences, Woolf once said, “It is only by putting it in to words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.” Perhaps playwright Stephen Bittrich is attempting to do something along these lines in his play, Home of the Great Pecan: that is, turn his hometown, Seguin, Texas, into something else so it can no longer hurt him. However, he doesn’t make Seguin ‘whole’ so much as laughable. The Drilling Company then runs with the silliness of the script to the point of absurdity, making Home of the Great Pecan mildly entertaining at best, disturbing at worst.

The play goes something like this: during preparations for the annual Pecan Festival, the town’s beloved Great Pecan is stolen, which sends everyone in a tizzy. Meanwhile, Tammie Lynn Schneider is determined to get her boyfriend Greeley Green to stop fooling around and marry her, by any means necessary. And all the while, strange lights flash and rumors of flying saucers are whispered left and right.

Design elements of the production are nicely executed: the small stage is adorned with Texan flags and Christmas lights, with panels that spin to create different locations and flexible set pieces used in varying ways. Miriam Nilofa Crowe’s lighting design is impressively versatile. Both she and set designer Jen Varbalow use the materials at their disposal to the fullest. They create a workable, malleable space for the company to play in.

The rest of the work does not quite live up to its surroundings. There’s something that rubs me the wrong way about this production’s tone. Almost everyone in the town of Seguin comes off as a bit unbalanced and laughable. One begins to wonder if Bittrich wrote himself into the play as the young, angry misfit Yankee Chucky Connors, and if Home of the Great Pecan is a kind of adolescent revenge against the town that never made him feel welcome.

But, I have to acknowledge that there are moments when characters exhibit signs of depth, and some relationships hint at complexity. Greeley, while sharing a beer with his best friend Ed, waxes philosophical about the meaning of life and the needs of man. Near the end of the play, we learn that Sonia, the Hispanic owner of the beauty parlor, has a thing for Les, the small-minded hardware store owner. These bits interest me, but are dissapointingly underdeveloped.

Instead, director Hamilton Clancey focuses on comedy. Loud comedy. Bombastic comedy. Often, ineffective comedy. The best example of this is the scene in which we meet Reverend Pat, played by Scott Baker. We are treated to (or made to endure) one of the Reverend’s sermons. He screams and shouts and waves his arms and dances around the stage, sweating and spitting profusely. It’s terrifying and grotesque. And then, one scene later, we have to watch as the still-dripping Reverend attempts to seduce the young Rose – and succeeds! Their kiss is cringe-worthy.

One performance I do enjoy is that of Amanda Dillard, who plays Pricilla Rotweiller, a young hopeful for the Miss Pecan crown. As she’s rehearsing her acceptance speech, she is sugary sweet, but her demeanor drops the second her mother interrupts her: Dillard growls her response. The theft of the Great Pecan hits her hard and leads to a hilarious, righteous breakdown. I only wish someone had pointed out the size of the space to her: her screaming literally hurt my ears at times.

It seems like The Drilling Company wants to produce work that tests the senses, that’s visceral and in your face, while Home of the Great Pecan wants to be something else entirely (a romantic comedy/indie flick, perhaps). Maybe they just aren’t meant to be together. One wonders what would happen if this company got their hands on some Artaud - that could be out of this world.

House of Love

Romantic comedies, so often a staple of commercial theater in the past, have largely been pushed to the sidelines. When was the last time a Barefoot in the Park or a Same Time, Next Year dominated a season? One has to go back a full decade to Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife just to find an original romantic comedy that was even nominated for a Best Play Tony Award. To matter, shows now need to possess a stylistic edge or bear witness to current issues; the rest, it seems, are little more than trifles compared to the weightier material around them. So it’s a thrill to see a show like Matt Morillo’s The Inventor, The Escort, The Photographer, Her Boyfriend and His Girlfriend, now playing at Theater for the New City. Morillo’s recent string of honest relationship plays (including All Aboard the Marriage Hearse and Angry Young Women in Low Rise Jeans with High Class Issues) have made him a recent star of the venue, but his current work shows just how sturdy the subgenre can be.

Inventor is a traditional work; it honors the rhythm and roots of romantic comedies past. Its plot recalls Neil Simon’s early classic Plaza Suite, interweaving two separate tales taking place in the same location. In this case, it’s a Manhattan walk-up on the night of a punishing blizzard building (much credit goes to savvy set designer Mark Marcante).

The play follows five characters (conveniently delineated by the play’s lengthy title). The first act takes place in the apartment of Jeffrey (David R. Doumeng), a loner who’s made a mint inventing adult products. Adam has called for the services of Julia (Jessica Durdock) to act out a fantasy of his. Both are saddled with insecurities and disappointment, and break through the walls they have put up to get to really know each other and form a connection.

And while this could have been nothing more than the cliché-riddled stuff of stale sitcoms, Morillo (who directs his own play) makes Inventor utterly contemporary. The dialogue never seems stilted or false. Jeffrey and Julia talk like any couple today would talk, in totally polished fashion. This act is perfectly paced, with snappy dialogue on Morillo’s part and impeccable timing on the part of Doumeng and Durdock (the latter does a particularly effective job of shading in subtext to her character).

The second act of Inventor occurs upstairs, in the apartment of Karen (Emily Campion – the photographer) and her estranged boyfriend John (Tom Pilutik). Karen has given John a chance to redeem himself – he can have one affair to get it out of his system. John has very generously obliged, helping himself to Molly (Maria Rowene), a dancer who happens to have a longstanding connection to Karen and John.

This tale actually stems from an earlier work of Morillo’s (co-written with Maria Micheles), called Stay Over, and it stands as proof that a playwright’s work is never done. I reviewed Stay in its initial run two years ago and was not very impressed with it. At less than an hour it was overstuffed and puerile, and hardly stood on its own. It’s still not quite perfect; the situation starts feeling circular and it could be whittled down (at more than two-and-a-half hours, the play’s running time feels a bit bloated). However, the three actors are sharp, particularly Pilutik in a committed performance that’s unafraid to embrace John’s sleazy ways.

And when paired with the first act, the two tales work marvelously in tandem with one another. Expanding it has made the work better and lent thematic grandeur to Morillo’s subject, which is the way men and women relate to one another. The two acts stand as a perfect contrast to one another. Jeffrey and Julia hide behind fake guises and even fake names, and yet there’s a kernel of honesty and affection to everything they say to one another. The triangle of John, Karen and Molly, however, is quite casually blunt, and yet the things they say to each other carry no real currency. Words are just words to them, used to get themselves out of a situation, whereas with Jeffrey and Julia, it deepens the moment.

It’s quite fitting that in giving CPR to a past work of his, Morillo has gotten to the heart of the matter. Long live the romantic comedy.

Send in the Clowns

Wacky and delightful, Room 17B now playing at 59E59 is the most recent conjuring of stage magic from acclaimed comedy troupe Parallel Exit (This Way That Way, Cut to the Chase). At just a hair over an hour, Room 17B provides laughs aplenty with a thoroughly modern blend of physical comedy, dance, mime, and slapstick. The controlled and precisely choreographed chaos creates much merriment. The audience, comprised of a mix of ages (including a number of children at the show I attended), thoroughly enjoyed the frivolity from start to finish.

The intimate, 50-seat Theater C at 59E59 is the perfect venue for the zany antics of this talented quartet of clowns. With an evocatively lit set fitted out by three-time Drama Desk nominated designer Maruti Evans with wall-to-ceiling filing cabinets, the space includes three doors — each marked “Room 17B” — which provide three times the opportunities for comic entrances and exits.

Without giving away the twenty or so scenes that make up the show, suffice it to say that Room 17B is a beguiling blend of music and mayhem in the vein of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton — influences directly cited by the members of Parallel Exit. With exaggerated movements and little to no dialogue, the fearsome foursome of funnymen act out various personae of office workers (boss, minion, kiss-up) in a variety of glee inducing gags. The office-like setting sets up a show in which power struggles between the players becomes the main conceit.

Some of the bits are more successful than others, but none of them fail to elicit at least a giggle or two. Many of the shticks produce heartfelt guffaws. The opening “dance” number, in particular, is energetic and hilarious as it introduces us to the agile performers: Mike Dobson, Joel Jeske, Danny Gardner, and Brent McBeth.

Like The Three Stooges plus one, each performer creates a distinct personality with little more than a raised eyebrow or a goofy frozen smile. The mock enmity between frenemies Gardner and McBeth generates some gut-busting moments. And the charismatic Jeske (Audience Choice Best Clown Act in 2009) practically steals the show with his wordless tomfoolery.

Special praise should also go out to Dobson’s excellent marimba work and alluring original compositions. His musical accompaniment is like a cross between Lionel Hampton and Danny Elfman, adding a wicked yet playful element to the onstage shenanigans.

Fluid direction by Parallel Exit Artistic Director Mark Lonergan keeps the action at a necessary lightening pace. There are a few moments that could, however, be tightened up, such as the semi-confusing “Blimp Demolition Derby” bit. And the “Peking Opera” joke falls a little flat from an intense build-up that produces little payoff. But the “Pigeon in the Park” and “Rival Ice Cream Truck Drivers” mimes are laugh-out-loud hysterical.

Cackles and chortles also come from improvised audience participation segments. Fearful ticket holders are forewarned that no one is safe from the mock humiliation that awaits. And all attendees should be sure to read the wonderfully designed program very carefully before the show since it provides many clues for the jokes to come.

Hands down, Room 17B is one of the most thoroughly entertaining hours I have spent at the theater in ages. This circus of cut ups, dressed in business suits, act absurd and desperately try to one-up each other. It is no wonder the troupe was nominated for a 2008 Drama Desk for Unique Theatrical Experience. Parallel Exit is simply unparalleled.

Fire and Ice

Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman shows that the late, rarely performed masterwork has unexpected juice. Unlike A Doll’s House, which provides a window into the pre-feminist past that has changed mightily since that play was written, this 1896 work is a timeless portrait of a man whose pursuit of wealth leads him to ruin. The splendid Abbey Theatre production at BAM is a demonstration of the riches to be found in lesser-known Ibsen works. The plot touches on art vs. business, work vs. family, and especially the dangers of the pursuit of power. There are even occasional elements that recall the folkloric Ibsen of Peer Gynt: Borkman’s boyhood working in the mines is suggested by the clangor of picks and shovels in Ian Dickinson’s sound design. “Down there it sings, the iron ore,” reminisces Borkman to a companion.

At the outset, Borkman is living as a hermit on the second floor of a manor house. Convicted of embezzlement at the bank he ran, and released from prison eight years earlier, Borkman sees only two regular visitors: his old clerk, Foldal, and Foldal’s daughter, Frida, who plays piano for him.

The first floor is occupied by Borkman’s wife, Gunhild, who has not set eyes on him since the trial. The estate, however, is owned by Ella Rentheim, Gunhild’s twin sister, who installed Mrs. Borkman there following the notorious case—Ella’s funds at the bank were the only ones untouched by Borkman, who once loved her. Moreover, after the trial the emotionally devastated Gunhild allowed Ella to raise her son, Erhart, until he was 14. The boy returned to Gunhild at the time of Borkman’s release, and Ella has not seen Erhart in the eight years since. And only rarely does son visit father.

Now, however, Lindsay Duncan’s world-weary Ella is dying, and she has come to see Gunhild, precipitating a struggle among the three older characters for the possession of Erhart (Marty Rea). Gunhild, played by Fiona Shaw with maternal smothering and fierce resentment at her lot, demands that Erhart stay with her and care for her. Ella wants to free him from Gunhild so he can spend the next few months with her. And Borkman (Alan Rickman) expects his son to clear his name.

But Rea’s Erhart is unbowed by their power and remains his own man: he is in love with Mrs. Fanny Wilton (Cathy Belton), who has been abandoned by her husband. Their relationship perhaps draws on Ibsen’s own late-life infatuation with a younger woman and his disdain of social mores: Fanny is older than Erhart, and she isn’t divorced.

Although the trio of principals have emotions frozen in the past, under James Macdonald’s direction the lead actors find passion, pain and humor in their frigid lives. Tom Pye has set the play in a dark void with huge snowbanks circling the perimeter of the stage, suggesting both the coldness and isolation of the characters.

Borkman is chillier than some of Ibsen’s heroes. His monomania for power, though he intended to use it for the betterment of society, has disrupted and ruined the lives of his family, Foldal, and everyone who invested with him. (Think of Bernard Madoff.) And though he claims to be the victim of an injustice, Borkman is arrogant and unbending both in his carriage and his opinion of himself. Yet Rickman gives him a polish and pride that elicit one’s sympathy for him. And Frank McGuinness’s translation allows him what feel like comic aphorisms worthy of Oscar Wilde. When Borkman claims to have wanted power in order to bring happiness to the world, Gunhild rebukes him: “You had power to make me happy—did you use it?” Borkman responds, dryly: “In a shipwreck, someone always drowns.”

Ella, who was in love with Borkman before he ceded her to his rival, lawyer Hinkel, in exchange for Hinkel's helping him advance at the bank, has never loved anyone else, with the exception of Erhart. Duncan makes her a woman stronger in composure and intelligence than passion, but one feels her desperate need for her nephew.

Ibsen leavens the grim story with large amounts of humor. Shaw in particular finds laughs where one least expects them. When Ella asks Gunhild if she doesn’t occasionally meet Borkman, Shaw almost throws away the line, “Bump into him at parties, you mean?” Her performance is masterly in timing and intonation.

If at times the play becomes melodramatic, and the last scene notably so, it is more Ibsen’s fault than that of the superb cast embodying the tortured souls of his grim yet fascinating play.

Bruised, Bothered and Bewildered

The modest-sized hotel room cum theater features a wild-eyed tiger portrait hung over the bed, a 1960’s radio, and fourteen folding chairs. If it weren’t for the slick production design (by Chris Keegan and director Travis Chamberlain, who runs lights and sound while perched atop a hotel room dresser), the setting might suggest the sort of skits vacationing children put on for their relatives. But Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes is not child’s play: it’s a whip smart romp through the boundaries of sex and violence, betrayal and fidelity. Written in 1970 but not published until 2008, Green Eyes played to sold out houses at The Bushwick Starr, as part of Target Margin’s Unknown Williams festival earlier this year. Now, under the auspices of P.S. 122’s Coil Festival, Chamberlain has remounted the production inside midtown’s Hudson Hotel. Aside from the obvious stunt of performing a play in a hotel room (light designer Derek Wright deserves a gold star for his work in this tight setting), the atypical performance space adds a disarming layer of playfulness not necessarily expected of a 30-minute psychological thriller that opens to a naked woman with bruises all over her body and a sullen husband demanding to know how they got there.

Williams never explicitly solves the mystery. Did the newlywed couple engage in rough honeymoon sex that the bridegroom has blocked out? Or did his wife sneak home a stranger while he drank himself into a stupor on Bourbon Street? Chamberlain takes pains not to paint either spouse as a victim, though they are damaged (and damaging) in their respective ways. As the tormented young soldier Claude Dunphy, Adam Couperthwaite brings a raw earnestness that creates sharp tension with Erin Markey’s more calculated take on Mrs. Dunphy, whose terrors are, perhaps, more deliciously mystifying. He is haunted by the horrors of Vietnam, which his new wife will not (cannot?) understand. Yet she is the one with the physical bruises at the outset of the play, and her demons are just as perplexing.

A three-part lecture series, The Kindness of Strangeness, presented in conjunction with Green Eyes at The Museum of Art and Design this month, contextualizes Williams as a member of the last century’s queer avant-garde. It’s helpful to note, for instance, that shortly after penning Green Eyes Williams publicly came out as a gay man. What is strangeness? Queerness?

Green Eyes is not a gay love story disguised in heteronormativity; this couple’s behavior is far from the norm. Remarkably, with Green Eyes, Williams anticipates by decades the inclusion of BDSM under the rubric of queer sexuality. That deviant desires exist across gender and sexual spectra is, by now, well-worn territory. Chamberlain skillfully takes Green Eyes one step further by locating the playfulness – the pleasure – in deviance. This is transgressive theater at its very best.

River of No Return

Harry Appleman, the dying poet of Jovanka Bach’s play Nightsong for the Boatman, is seldom at a loss for words. He rails against his unfair predicament, and seeks to hide from his imminent fate. The untidy drama that unfolds, like Harry’s life, resembles a sloppy rough draft, offering allegory in place of real character development, and lacking any variation on the “washed up” writer archetype that is all too familiar. Directed by John Stark, the play opens with Harry (John DiFusco) playing dice with an unnamed bloke on the outer docks of an undefined city. It soon becomes clear that the bloke is actually the boatman of the River Styx, the mythical river of the dead, and that Harry is playing the game for his life. He loses, in short order, and is instructed by the boatman to report back to the docks in one week’s time for his farewell voyage to the undiscovered country.

Rather than keeping his appointment, Harry hides out. The problem is he has told his daughter Jessie (Amanda Landis) to come to the docks to see him off (a complication that, not unlike other plot points, is never justified or explained). Once Harry realizes the mix up, he sets out to undo his misdeed and save his little girl.

The play’s premise, though plenty hokey, is not helped by its staid structure and stock characters. Through a series of cluttered flashbacks, and copious blackouts, we revisit Harry’s debauched life. We meet his considerably younger girlfriend Sheila (Nicole Gabriella Scipione), his jealous colleague Larry (J. Lawrence Landis), his fed up ex-wife Emily (Donna Luisa Guinan), and a sniveling doctoral student named Gordon (Geoffrey Hillback). Though these characters serve as bystanders to Harry’s spiraling off the tracks, it is never apparent what we, or they, are supposed to like about Harry in the first place. His character is the textbook cliché of the flawed, hack writer: womanizer (check!), smug academic (check!), creatively blocked (check!), disdainful of family life (check!), heavy drinker (you know it!). After all this, his crossing the Styx doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. About the only redeeming aspect of Harry is that he was once a brilliant poet, but Bach mars this pretense when she has the character recite his breakthrough poetry aloud. Harry’s poetry is not the stuff of the National Book Award, as the character mentions having won. Sometimes, it is best to leave “brilliance” to the audience’s imagination.

Joe Morrissey’s lights and John DeYoung’s music do a fine job of underscoring the mythical undertone of the piece. Considering the multiple locales of the play, and the limited stage space, Jaret Sacrey’s painted backdrop of a set is unobtrusive, if not particularly inventive.

At its heart, Nightsong for the Boatman is a Faustian tale of a writer forced to confront death so that he may see the wrongs of his ways, and how, contemplating these wrongs, he could become a better man and artist. There’s clearly a lot of soul to squeeze out of this conceit (forgive the quip), but Bach’s script provides little variation or nuance on the theme.

Stark and his cast pull together and move things along at a steady clip. Bach’s dialogue is compressed and never stagnant, but the thread of the piece is too thin to deliver a meaningful end.

Oh Dear, Abbie

ABBIE, now playing at the West End Theater at The Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew on the Upper West Side, is a one-man show about radical 60s and 70s activist Abbie Hoffman. Adapted from Hoffman’s own speeches and writings and starring actor, educator, and native New Yorker Bern Cohen, ABBIE is an interesting tale, not so interestingly told. Subtitled The Personal Story of the Clown Prince of the Sixties Revolution, this 75-minute solo performance describes itself as an intimate portrait of the leader of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”) and author of the counterculture manifesto Steal This Book. Unfortunately, ABBIE drains all the life out of the controversial “Chicago Seven” member. Instead of being energizing, the show is oddly enervating.

Retired school principal and professional film actor Bern Cohen (27 Dresses, Holy Rollers, Brooklyn Rules), whose recent stage credits include The Assistant at the Turtle Shell Theater, boasts an actual connection to Hoffman. In addition to crossing paths with him at a 1971 Columbia University protest, Cohen was mistakenly arrested in 1976 in Ohio because of his physical resemblance to the infamous anarchist when Hoffman was a wanted man on cocaine charges. This incident spurred a lifelong interest in Cohen of all things Hoffman.

ABBIE is presented as a 1987 “sociology lecture” by Hoffman, complete with slides and video from Morgan Paul Freeman, a former Black Eyed Peas and Erykah Badu video projectionist. However, these images are too few and too far between to really add anything to the “lecture.” Mostly they are used as addenda to Hoffman’s talking points (“Here is a picture of my father… my house… my high school…” etc.). Showing the images on a larger screen, or, even better, projecting them on the unused wall space of the theater, might have given them more of an impact, as would smoother transitions.

The main problem with ABBIE, though, lies in the performance. Although Mr. Cohen wrote the script for this, his pet project, he struggled to remember his lines at the show I attended. Whether he was unprepared, under-rehearsed, or both, his Hoffman was unfocused and seemingly uncomfortable on stage. Director Thomas Caruso (Around the World in 80 Days at Penguin Rep, Associate Director of Bombay Dreams and Follies on Broadway) did not help matters by having Cohen in constant motion, repeatedly rearranging the set’s furniture and moving from chair to stool over and over again. As an acting teacher once told me, “There is power in stillness.”

Besides being 15 years too old to play Hoffman (who committed suicide at age 52 in 1989), the 67-year-old Cohen lacks nuance as the social and anti-war activist, never delving the depths of Hoffman’s revolutionary character. This is, after all, a man who suffered beatings by the police and was forced underground into hiding because of his actions. In addition, Hoffman was a slick salesman of guerilla theater tactics and outrageous media stunts, such as dropping cash onto the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. Whatever is being sold in ABBIE by Cohen is simply not being sold hard enough.

This first-person narrative of the life of Abbot Howard Hoffman is too pat and too dull for such an irascible and irrepressibly comic figure. Even an A&E Biography has more edge than ABBIE. Where is the humor? The passion? The outrageousness? The pain? The relatively short show drags on and on without a spark of life, ending unceremoniously with a clip of Hoffman himself talking about death.

Instead of spending their money on $38 tickets to ABBIE, fans of “the clown prince of the 60s revolution” are advised to check out his brilliant autobiography for real insight into the man. Or perhaps wait for the much-anticipated portrayal of Hoffman by Sasha Baron Cohen (Borat, Brüno) in the Aaron Sorkin-scripted film, The Trial of The Chicago Seven, currently in development?

Seeing the Reality of War

How can you tell that what you see is real? So ponders Frank Hasek, a twenty-first century rendering of the character Woyzeck, created by Georg Buchner. Private Hasek, the protagonist of Reservoir, by Eric Henry Sanders, is a not a relic of a bygone era. Rather, he is a very real and a very realistic product of contemporary combat. The play's greatest strength is its text. Sanders has done a truly commendable job of retelling this tale for a modern-day audience. We meet Frank after he has returned from his tour of duty. He attempts to readjust to his life at home in light of his horrific wartime experiences: his relationship with his girlfriend, his place in the Army, and even his sense of control over himself hang in the balance. As he succumbs to PTSD, his ability to cope with the world around him slowly but surely deteriorates. Due to his loss of mental clarity, he finds it difficult to convince himself of what he should believe and what are merely figments of his addled mind.

The story is told in an episodic manner, as was its source material. The director, Hamilton Clancy, has found subtle but useful ways of keeping this structure from being either overly distancing or too confusing. Through simple devices such as turning on a household light fixture when in a domestic space or displaying cheap flowers when in a doctor's office, it is always clear where the characters are in any given scene.

In addition to telling a meaningful and affecting story about the horrors of war and the effects that participating in combat have on the average soldier, the play also presents powerful and evocative poetic language. Single lines stand out as clear explanations of concepts and emotions that would otherwise need pages of dialogue to convey. The weight of what is being discussed is never lost, not even in the few terse moments of comedic release. It is always clear that what is being discussed is important and worth hearing, no matter how painful it might be to listen to.

The design aesthetic maintains the dark mood of the text while highlighting the plot points in interesting ways. The set is simple, made up of only a few chairs and stools and some chicken wire, and yet it is capable of evoking myriad locations. The chicken wire, in particular, gives the sense of entrapment that the characters are experiencing. Frank may no longer be "in country" but he is never far from being surrounded by its effects. The lighting completes the ambiance, using dim lighting to solidify the tone of the piece and then contrasting it with the unnatural brightness of some interior locales.

The performances are, in general, good. Alessandro Colla gives a compelling and empathetic representation of Frank Hasek. In addition, Karla Hendrick is worth mentioning for her turn as the therapist. She does an impressive job of conveying the internal turmoil of being someone who wants to help and who understands her patients' struggles and someone who is under the thumb of the U.S. Military hierarchy. Her struggle throws into relief the idea that Hasek may only be the product of a system; perhaps he never was in control of his own fate or identity at all.

Overall, Reservoir has the potential to be a really significant work of theater. There are moments of great poignancy in the piece. The play presents a disturbing reality in a way that forces its audiences to pay attention. This is assuredly a play to see and believe.

War and Play

"I am speaking to you now of how bodies are transformed into different bodies" says a Churchill-like voice, crackled and fuzzy as if coming through an old wireless radio as his words are projected on a screen center stage, over an image of Earth. So begins Pants on Fire's adaptation of Metamorphoses , currently running at The Flea Theater. Though the proclamation sounds sweeping and serious, this production is anything but. Rather, Pants on Fire's Metamorphoses interprets the theme of transformation as might a vaudevillian or a circus performer: the ensemble transforms itself into slap-happy caricatures of musicians, puppeteers, and entertainers of all kinds, transforming the tales in Metamorphoses into fodder for their fun-making. Director Peter Bramley and his company have produced some highly theatrical, well-made, entertaining work. The company sets Metamorphoses in 1940's Britain, during WWII. Narcissus is a Bogart-esque film star, Cupid's a knicker-wearing schoolboy, and Echo bears a striking resemblance to Rosie the Riveter. These references aid in making the stories more accessible, something Pants on Fire strives to do in all its work and certainly achieves here. They are also adept at creating a specific, non-realistic and wonderfully whimsical world to play and perform in. Nearly everything the versatile cast of seven does is humorously stylized and exaggerated. Set and sound is low tech but inventive: music is either performed live by the actors or pumped in through an old-fashioned phonograph. The actors vocalize all other sound effects, at one point creating the sound of a passing plane they’re ‘watching’ fly by, effectively adjusting their volume as it approaches and quickly recedes.

The set is a thing of theatrical genius. Designed by Samuel Wyer (who also designed puppets and illustrations in the piece), it primarily consists of a series of five or six panels that the actors move around the stage at regular intervals. These panels transform the tiny Flea theater into multiple spaces, suggesting everything from a lake to the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Most fun is when actors shuffle the panels around the space, revealing someone where no one had been a moment before, as if by magic.

Pants on Fire is all about using the theatrical tools at their disposal, and they work them to their fullest here, incorporating song, dance, puppetry, body doubles, and inventive costume pieces, among other things. At one point, a woman lifts her skirt, revealing green tulle ruffles underneath which, thrown over her head and combined with her brown tights, transforms her into a pretty convincing tree.

While the entire ensemble is formidable, I find Eloise Secker, (who plays the aforementioned tree among other roles) particularly exceptional. With chameleon-like ease, she morphs from one role to the next, unrecognizable at times. She can mould her face like putty, putting it to use as anything from a young spurned lover to a severe political villain. I particularly enjoy her portrayal of Medusa as a dowdy housewife in a flowered nightdress.

Despite the fact that many of Ovid’s stories end tragically, Pants on Fire's telling of the tales keeps them light. The troupe's Metamorphoses takes the concept of transformation and enacts it, actively transforming set, sound, and story from one thing to the next, joyfully celebrating the possibility inherent in the idea that things are always changing.

That is, until the play’s final moments, when the piece takes a sharp left turn. Tiresius, the blind oracle, is asked what the future holds. He responds, “War...between nature and man!” He continues to describe the world’s return to chaos, due to man’s inharmonious dealings with nature, as images of natural destruction appear on the CS screen. All of a sudden, we are meant to understand Ovid’s stories as warning tales of our future doom. It is so idiosyncratic with the rest of the play that it feels tacked on, almost as an afterthought.

But, thankfully, the moment is brief, and the play ends not with it but with the crackly Churchill voice, reciting Ovid: "The world is changing. Heaven and everything under it will take on new forms, as will the earth too, and everything here upon it, as even we will, for we are a part of it also, not merely bodies, but winged spirits." To my ears, it strikes a more hopeful tune, as does the rest of the play. Its actions speak louder than its tales.

So, despite the random global warming tie-in, I say go see Pants on Fire’s Metamorphoses before this jolly band of Brits fly their way back to England like the winged spirits they are.

Mid-Life Crisis

A Small Fire, by Adam Bock, is an excellent play that is less than excellently produced. The play is a study of a marriage thrown into crisis mode. On the brink of her daughter's wedding, Emily Bridges (Michelle Pawk) loses her sense of smell. What begins as something minor and manageable quickly turns devastating as Bridges' sight and hearing fail her as well and she becomes completely reliant on her husband, John (Reed Birney). Pain and frustration build as the couple begins to cope with their impossible situation, struggling to keep from losing one another entirely. The play takes place over a short period of time, perhaps a few weeks, and much is unknown: we know little of the characters' past, and their future, the major ways in which Emily's illness will change the Bridges' lives, is left uncertain. This short time span allows us to share in the Bridges' dawning realization of what is happening to Emily, to imagine the horror of suddenly finding oneself cut off from one's world, living in darkness and silence.

Bock's script doesn't situate the Bridges in a particular class or location, but the colloquialism of the characters' speech, when read, seems to connect the characters, to bind them as a family. He uses (or doesn’t use) punctuation to score the rhythms of his characters’ speech. For example, talking to his daughter one night, John says:

“She is I know she is. But. I don't know how it happens but somehow you can get tied to each other. You're gonna see with Henry. Your Mom and I we're different about some things but I'm lucky she didn't like being alone because I can't. I can't be.”

While Pawk leans into these rhythms, sometimes overplaying them, Birney muffles them, adapting the text to his own way of speaking. This distances the characters from one another, as if they are living in different worlds, different plays even, which cheapens their otherwise stellar performances.

This lack of unity and specificity is a fault of the production as a whole. The set design is vague and tells us little about who or where the Bridges are. Several sound bytes sound like (possibly are) instrumental covers of indie rock songs, jarringly out of place. Even the costume design is odd: Pawk speaks roughly but dresses exquisitely, and the juxtaposition is confusing. This all makes it more difficult to enter into the Bridges’ world and really care about their struggle.

The production does manage to execute the play’s few lyrical moments beautifully. The lighting design (by David Weiner) enhanced the tone of several scenes, heightening the mood and increasing the drama in subtle ways, never overbearing but quite affective. At the end of one scene, all lights go down save one just behind and above Emily, just for a moment, before all goes dark. The moment is a visual illustration of her extreme isolation, and the clarity of it is striking.

An equally striking moment occurs when Emily is having a dream. While her recorded voice describes the dream, where she can see and hear and smell again, she stands downstage, looking out into the audience. Upstage, panels move aside to reveal a beautiful, billowing, blue-green curtain, which, with the help of lighting, completely transforms the space, taking us from the Bridges' home to an ethereal otherwhere. The moment is an accomplishment in scenic prowess, and an example of how much can be done with relatively little.

Just after this dream comes the play's resolution, one that wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the brief time span of the play. Emily awakes from her dream, out of bed, disoriented and upset, and John attempts to comfort her. Slowly, sweetly, they begin to kiss, and this moves into passionate love-making. The scene is expertly staged: it is intense, beautiful and honest. As they reach orgasm, the audience also experiences a release, a release of the tension and frustration that their situation creates. It is a relief in the realization that despite everything that separates them, the Bridges are still able to connect, however momentary that connection may be.

Still, these highly dramatic or theatrical moments are the exception: the bulk of the play is conversation, and it would have been much better served if the director, Trip Cullman, had focused more on text and less on billowing curtains and steamy love scenes. A Small Fire is a strong play, but this production does not quite do it justice.

A Fun Little Dystopia on Utopia Parkway

Looking for an alternative to the same old holiday celebrations? If so, check out Dollface, an off-beat comic musical at Theater for the New City. The show is at times irreverently hilarious despite being a bit uneven overall. Its heart is in the right place, however, and its sentiment triumphs in the long run. The storyline focuses on Dolores Zuckerman, a young woman living in Queens hoping for her big break into television stardom as a comedienne. At the same time, she is also wishing for her fiancé of thirteen years to pop the question. A monkey wrench is thrown into Dolores’s life plans when she finds herself entangled in a local jewelry heist that turns lethal for a neighbor’s wife. From here, the plot races forward as the various residents try to ascertain exactly what happened and who is to blame.

The play is given an ingenious framing device. By opening the show with a staged advert for an imaginary cigarette brand, the audience is immediately given the sense of being in a 1950s television program and not in the realm of reality. However, this context is quickly forgotten as the audience is introduced to a slew of characters and an intricately woven, if at times overly complicated, plot. There are extraneous threads in this musical, such as Dolores’s short-lived occupation as a health aide in an assisted living facility. These subplots appear to be included solely as vehicles for comic elements and are therefore unnecessary to the already dense plot unfolding on stage.

In general, the production’s main flaw is its length. Clocking in at nearly two hours, the plot line feels too weak to warrant such a long theatrical telling. Sequences seem to go on longer than needed, particularly due to musical reprises. In addition, the change over times between scenes often seem unnecessarily long. The pauses between one scene and the next end up acting as a distancing, if inadvertent, break to the dramatic action unfolding on stage. The humor of the piece is frequently diffused because a joke is stretched past the point of being clever or a punch line is too long deferred. Some of the raunchier elements are quite witty, but there are innuendos that perhaps go too far or are too blatant to be as funny as that might be. The show is best when it is suggestive, employing double entendres, rather than when it is just broadcasting the sexual or scatalogical joke.

The main strength of this production is its actors. The performances are all quite good, with Linda Shell giving a particularly notable turn in the title role. All of the actors pull off their characters with a touch of charm and a great deal of humor. It is easy to like Dolores and the band of misfits that she has assembled around her, and this is due in great part to how sympathetically they are portrayed. The piece has the potential to easily become one in which the audience laughs at dated stereotypes. Rather than giving into this somewhat clichéd impulse, these performers bring out their personages’ most likable characteristics. In its absurdity, this play feels like a realistic rendering of an outer borough New York City neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century.

There is great fun to be had at Dollface. The sense of innocence that has become synonymous with 1950s television programming is, oddly enough, ubiquitous in this so-called raunchy musical. Dolores is a protagonist who is easy to root for and this production does a commendable job of spotlighting her. This production serves as a welcome interruption to the conventional warm and fuzzy holiday entertainments. In so doing, it allows its spectators to walk away feeling just as charmed as they would have from a more traditional holiday tale.

"A Fable" of Discovery

A Wonderfully Flat Thing, created by Manju Shandler and Basmat Hazan with script adaptation by Valerie Work and direction by David Winitsky, is a journey of self-discovery for young children, ages three and up, based on A Fable by Mark Twain. The creators' focus for the production is a simplified interpretation of Twain’s concluding moral: “You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination.” The playfulness and clarity of the show’s central notions about self-discovery are clearly communicated and enjoyed by the younger audience members. Twain is struggling to write a tale and decides to take a nap. In his dream, his animal characters come to life. The Cat, performed by Emily Hartford, goes into the forest to report to the other animals that she has discovered a wonderfully flat thing that shows her the most beautiful cat she has ever seen. Donkey, Jake Goodman (who also plays Twain), casts doubt that such a thing could exist. Each animal – Donkey, Snake performed by Sarah Painter, Ostrich by Sarae Garcia, and Elephant by Shawn Shafner – goes to Twain’s room to see for themselves, only to discover a video projected gateway mirror in which each animal sees something different.

Shandler and Hazan use puppetry, dance, video and music to bring their interpretation of the fable to life. The overall set and puppetry design are playful and colorful. The set clearly defines both Twain’s room and the forest, and creates two central flexible spaces. The video, designed by David Tirosh, plays a central role as both the mirror’s reflection and as exaggerated or spectacular versions of each animal self as they look into the mirror. The video is projected on an upstage scrim, which provides an exaggerated view into the mirror, while the downstage area is a flexible space used for dance and traveling from one location to the other.

The puppets are expressive and colorful. They include a string marionette and body puppets. A challenge with the puppets, however, is the manipulation. The actors are clearly and intentionally visible, but the live human actors often draw attention away from the puppet character they are portraying. Despite this, the children in the audience found the puppet characters engaging. The original music by Tamar Muskal compliments the script and provides a thread through the show.

Early in the production, The Cat directly addresses and engages with the children during the performance. The other animal characters continue to include the children throughout the show by asking them questions, for their help, and sitting with them to watch various moments. While this strategy assists the children to remain focused on the story, most are quick to point their way and say that what the animals are looking into is a mirror. They also easily connect the projected image with the mirror. Despite their ready understanding of what is happening on stage, the children are no less delighted by the animals' confusion and their antics on stage, in the video, and in their live double image performed behind the scrim.

The fun of A Wonderfully Flat Thing is its accessible interpretation of Twain’s moral about self-reflection and interpretation, and the delight the audience takes in helping the animal characters along on their journey to self-discovery. This production is an entertaining event for families, particularly with children ages three to seven years.

Bros, Brawls, Booze and Shubert

If you are looking for the one seasonal play to see this winter, Three Pianos is it. Exhuberantly directed by Rachel Chavkin and written/performed by the beyond talented trio of Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy and Dave Malloy, Three Pianos is so many things: funny, intelligent, irreverant, self-referential, self-deprecating, sad and beautiful, to name a few. After winning an Obie for its run at the Ontological Hysteric last spring, it’s been repolished and moved into New York Theatre Workshop, and is now a more elegant but no less honest version of its former self. The premise is as follows: three friends hanging out on a cold winter’s night, drinking and joking and arguing, stumble into a discussion of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, about which they joke, argue, and perform, drinking copiously throughout. One of the three, (Dave Malloy) recently broke up with his girlfriend, and the comparison between his twenty-first century depression and coping mechanisms and the melancholic, romantic wanderings of the narrator in Winterreise allows the trio to weave their own relationships to Winterreise and one another into their discussion and performances of Shubert’s beautiful and strange song cycle.

The gorgeous set (excellently designed by Andreea Mincic) resembles an apartment downstage and a wintery wasteland upstage, with large, bare tree branches and vertical fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. As the trio delve further into their imaginings inspired by the piece, they pull props, like an 18th century lamp, or a mail carrier’s tricycle, from unexpected places. One of my favorite gags is when Malloy pulls a bottle of vodka from a small birdhouse. He and his fellow castmates are eager to share the booze, serving us wine before we take our seats and passing more bottles around at several moments during the play.

A prominent feature of the set is its namesake, the three pianos, which the performers use together and apart. I know little about the art of piano playing, but in my opinion, all three men are superb. I am further impressed by the variety of things they manage to do with these instruments, constantly re-arranging them into different configurations on the set, often playing them as they go: at one point, they arrange the three pianos in a triangle facing inwards, and rotate in a circle, playing and singing as they move. A highly entertaining and impressive feat.

When not wowing us with piano bravado, the trio spends a good amount of time arguing, especially as the play progresses and the alcohol runs dry. They argue about the music, how to represent it and talk about it, what to include and leave out. The discussion is often lighthearted, but it can get intense. At one moment, Malloy says to Burkhardt and Duffy, “…sometimes when you start talking, and talking, and talking, I hate every single thing you’re saying, and it makes me want to, literally, literally, gouge out your eyes. With a piece of glass.”

These moments bring forward the trio’s creative process, their struggles and tensions, which reminds us of the subjectivity of the piece, that Three Pianos is more about Duffy, Burkhardt and Malloys’ relationship to and struggles with Winterreise than it is about Winterreise itself.

Throughout Three Pianos , we rarely get to hear Winterreise without bits of gimmick attached to it, which is fine with me: it’s fun and keeps things moving. It also sets us up for the final moments of the piece. Near Three Pianos’ end there is a long silence: in it, we feel the trio’s exhaustion. Malloy plucks at a couple of random keys on the piano. Finally, Duffy breaks the silence with a, “Sooo…”. These sounds somehow inspire Burkhardt, who asks Duffy and Malloy to repeat and tweak them. He says to Duffy, “Alec, can you say that word you’ve been saying, um, differently? Or just say a different word…?” Duffy responds with, “sooo whaaat…?” asking the question that may be on the minds of his audience. So what? What are we supposed to take from this piece, all the irreverance, the arguing, the alcohol?

It continues: Alec: Rick, you know my life is totally fine without us doing this…things are going well for me and I’m really happy. Rick: Oh.

A pause.

Malloy:I wonder how my ex is doing. I wonder if she’s cold.

The three begin the final song in Winterreise, “Der Lieermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man),” a quietly haunting piece, played and sung simply by all three at their pianos. It begins to lightly snow on the winter waste-land. It’s a beautiful moment, and a kind of answer. Three Pianos shows us the pains of creation and collaboration, the ways in which we cope with dark times, and the beauty and poetry within that darkness. It is an important piece of theater that you will regret missing. So go, enjoy the wine and song. I promise no eye-gouging urges will occur.