Spirits of Christmas

Charles Dickens may have resurrected the tradition of telling tales guaranteed to cause fright on Christmas Eve, but RadioTheatre and Dan Bianchi are giving Dickens a run for his money.   

Giving gifts, singing carols and sending generic holiday cards are the norm each year, but it seems the culture of telling ghost stories at Christmas has become lost over several decades. Set in old Manhattan and told during RadioTheatre’s late-night broadcast, Bianchi, and director R. Patrick Alberty awaken imaginations and create a supernatural experience in the most simplistic way with Ghosts of Christmas Past. 

The stage is set for four — the host narrates from tale to tale while three storytellers move seamlessly from character to character. As director of sound and music, Bianchi allows listeners and viewers to imagine a setting fit for six ghostly tales. Frank Zilinyl, R. Patrick Alberty, Adam Segaller and Zoe V. Speas are dressed in all black, lurking in the shadows. Speas’s makeup is beautiful but hauntingly pale.  The snowstorm outside helped to create a dark and drafty theater with a red, gigantic skull as the backdrop, adding the perfect touch.  

As the dial is turned to RadioTheatre, the host’s (Zilinyl) voice is eerie from the outset. “It Happened On Christmas” highlights just how busy and jaded the typical New Yorker can be. Mr. Carter (Alberty) runs into the super, Mr. Beasley (Segaller), while on his way to church on Christmas Day; Beasley’s on his way up to the roof to “check on the pigeons.” Shortly after, Mrs. Cacciatore (Speas) hysterically screams to her neighbors that she’s seen Beasley fall from the roof to his death, everyone laughs and brushes her off.  Why wouldn’t they? His body has disappeared. A man doesn’t get up and walk away, after falling stories to his death. Does he? It isn't until the tenants of the building need their super, that they realize he is in fact dead, and missing…

Written to be a little less dark, “A Wonderful Crazy” begins with the often-unbelievable fact, that most people do not enjoy Christmas. On Christmas Eve, John (Segaller), bombarded with debt and despair, spends his holiday at a bar. An old friend, Mike (Alberty), shows up and offers his checkbook and a chance at love. John is baffled — how does John know Linda (Speas) is his heart’s desire? Why is he offering him a second chance at life? The bartender (Zilinyl) drops a major bomb on John, causing him to evaluate everything that’s happened in his past and what’s in store for Linda and his future, proving not all ghosts are haunting Zilinyl — giving hope that guardian angles do exist.

“The Calling” literally causes chills down the spine. Taking place in 1911, a young man (Segaller) loses his wife after she goes to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; she leaps to her death after being caught in the infamous fire. Nine months later on Christmas Eve, he sets the table, prepares an elaborate meal and awaits her return. Sound effects paint a mental picture of a spirit entering the hallway as a neighbor’s dog howls at the wind. Horrified by her ghostly presence that is not like that of his wife’s, he cowards away.  The narrator (Speas) has the ability to grasp the audience’s spirit so that they’ll hang on her every word, spinning the fear of the deceased wife, to anger at the uninviting husband; angry that he is gutless and causes his love to flee, when all she wanted was warmth and love. It is absolutely magnificent.

During the conclusion, the host drops a hint that they wish to broadcast every year during RadioTheatre, keeping with the Victorian tradition of celebrating Christmas among the supernatural. Bianchi hopes to return next year with more ghastly folklore. As long as the dead keep on living, New York is sure to tune-in, embracing the paranormal in the East Village.

RadioTheatre's Ghosts of Christmas Past presented by the Horse Trade Theater Group at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4^th Street) runs through Jan. 12. The following schedule is current: Sunday, Dec. 29 at 3 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 8 at 8 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 11 at 6 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 12 at 6 p.m. General admission is $18 and $15 for students. Tickets may be purchased by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444 or are available online at www.horsetrade.info.   

Stumbling Toward Eternity

The bleakness that often characterizes Irish dramatist Conor McPherson’s work is tempered by the climactic scene in his new play, The Night Alive, which is being presented at the Atlantic Theater Company, a venue during the last decade for his plays Port Authority and Dublin Carol. As fans of the Irish author know, McPherson embraces using supernatural elements that often carry a sense of dread — or worse. In The Weir (1999), a group of people in an Irish pub tell ghost stories to pass the time, but the most vivid one sends chills up the spine. Shining City (2006) featured a scene that had audiences screaming and jumping out of their seats. The hero of The Seafarer (2007) chances an ultimate high-stakes poker game with the Devil.

That sense of real evil in the world is largely subdued in McPherson’s new play, The Night Alive, which has transferred from the Donmar Warehouse in London under the author’s direction. Although the supernatural element is neither so flashy nor so chilling, it is there, but it is used for a very different effect. As usual, too, McPherson portrays modern Ireland with sympathy and clear eyes. Poverty, struggle, drink, stupidity and violence are part of the picture, but so are compassion and unexpected kindness.

As the play opens, the middle-aged Tommy (a scruffy Ciarán Hinds) has brought a young woman named Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne) to his home, a room of extraordinary chaos in a rambling old house (superbly designed by Soutra Gilmour, as are the costumes). Aimee's nose is bleeding from a beating; Tommy has rescued her. Soon they are joined by Michael McElhatton’s slow-witted Doc, a chum of Tommy’s who has been tossed out of his sister’s flat where he’s become an unwelcome guest. Doc hopes to bunk at Tommy’s for the night, but Aimee has been offered the extra cot. Though Tommy resists letting Doc stay, he eventually relents.

Tommy finds himself attracted to Aimee, but her past brings him trouble. Doc has heard that she is “on the game,” and Kenneth, her pimp, played with a vicious and unbalanced élan by Brian Gleeson, eventually shows up.

Adding to the pressures on Tommy is his uncle, Maurice, who owns the house and, from his Catholicism, disapproves of Tommy’s friends, slovenliness and separation from wife and children. Jim Norton, an indispensable part of McPherson’s best plays, invests his character, who is alternately bullying and empathetic, with elegance and a flailing loneliness.

McPherson's writing is tight too; it takes only Doc's lingering hand on Tommy's shoulder to raise a suspicion that he's homosexual, and only a couple passing references to cement the fact. As the troubles sort themselves out, there is welcome humor, notably an exchange in which Doc tries to explain to Aimee the evolution of his nickname from “Brian” to “Bri” to “Doc” because the last is shorter than "Bri." There’s nifty low comedy, too, when Maurice, who knows someone is stealing his vegetables from his garden, stumbles across a bag of turnips and overlooks a much more shocking discovery because of his fixation.

Nonetheless, a deep-seated darkness looms throughout. Aimee explains to Tommy that she stayed with Kenneth because she always figured suicide was an option. And the devout Maurice confesses to Tommy: “There’s even days when mass just takes you nowhere, just deposits you back on the pavement, just another invisible man, knowing that the end is sneaking in on you and knowing it’s gonna be the worst part of your life.”

The linchpin of the play is Tommy, and Hinds mines the richness of the character — Tommy tries to cheat Doc and belittles him, but fundamentally cares about his friend and habitually looks after him. It’s a portrait of the way poverty can force decent people to flirt with injustice. But after all the anguish and scrambling and bickering in the characters’ day-to-day existence, McPherson embraces something new for him: a sense that good can win out with perseverance. It's a big step forward for the author, who in the last decade has brought his near-fatal alcoholism under control. As so often in literature, it’s Doc, the “holy fool,” who articulates the truth; his speech in the last moments of the play sets up the surprisingly mundane vision of paradise in McPherson’s brave new work.

The Night Alive plays at the Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th St., through Feb. 2. Evening performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday and Sunday and 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 3 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets are $65 and are available by visiting atlantictheater.org.

Great Birnam Wood in Harlem

Shakespeare's Macbeth is as topical this month as year-end bonuses and the holiday windows at Saks Fifth Avenue. Ethan Hawke is giving a much-discussed performance in the title role at Lincoln Center. The entertainment press is trumpeting a film adaptation, featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, which begins shooting immediately after New Year's. The Park Avenue Armory has announced that Sir Kenneth Branagh will make his New York stage debut next summer in a highly praised production of the play seen earlier this year at the Manchester International Festival in England. And Punchdrunk's Sleep No More, the "immersive" entertainment inspired by the Shakespearean tragedy, is in the third year of an open-ended run down in Chelsea. 

Less publicized — and somewhat off the beaten path — is another Macbeth, which is being presented by What Dreams May Co. Theatre and features non-traditional casting. (The company appears committed to equal opportunity for women, despite the disproportionate number of male roles in the Shakespearean canon.) This fleet, streamlined production of Shakespeare's most compact tragedy is at the 133rd Street Arts Center in Harlem through Dec. 21.

Macbeth was first performed early in the reign of King James I of England (1603-1625) by The King’s Men, a London troupe of which Shakespeare was a member. Since the King was also James VI of Scotland, his accession, upon the death of Elizabeth I, united the crowns of the two nations. Shakespeare likely intended the play to curry favor with the monarch; his depiction of Banquo, an ancestor of the King, as a virtuous man whose children are destined to be kings appears to be an oblique defense of James's divine right to the thrones of both countries.

Macbeth, in the words of G. Wilson Knight, is "Shakespeare's most profound and mature vision of evil." At the beginning of the play, the title character (Alan Brincks), a near relative of King Duncan of Scotland, encounters a group of witches who predict that he will become king but that the descendants of his friend Banquo (Lindsey Zelli) will ultimately occupy the throne. Spurred by his ambitious wife (Nicole Schalmo), Macbeth kills Duncan (Joshuah Laird) to make the witches' prophecy come true. Murder follows murder as Macbeth tries to conceal his crimes. Hoping to secure the royal succession for his own family, he has Banquo killed. But Banquo’s son, Fleance (Zoe Sjogerman), and Malcolm (Vince Reese), Duncan's rightful heir, flee the country and survive the brief, bloody interregnum of King Macbeth.

In a program note, director Christina Sheehan describes Macbethas “an adrenaline rush of a play”; and her swift-paced direction, utilizing every inch of the auditorium's tiny playing area, keeps the actors on the move and the audience wide awake. The cast — 12 talented Millennials, five of them playing two or three roles — is consistently adept with Shakespearean verse. Brincks and Schalmo, an imposing pair with ample on-stage chemistry, play the Macbeths as besotted with each other and mutually aroused by the prospect of power. As Banquo, Zelli is the embodiment of rectitude and her cross-gender casting works well. Jonathan Emerson is a volcanic Macduff, infuriated by the murder of his king; crushed by the slaughter of his wife and children; determined throughout that justice will be done. The Act IV scene in which Emerson's Macduff goads Reese's Prince Malcolm to avenge his father's death and reclaim the throne for his family is the production's most emotionally powerful point.

Though the playbill lists no credits for scenic, costume, or lighting design, someone has made wise choices in each of those departments. The players work on a largely unadorned stage, furnished with chairs and a few props. A fanciful banner brings Great Birnam Wood "to high Dunsinane hill" simply but with theatrical flair. The theater's lighting equipment, though rudimentary, is deployed to suitably eerie effect. The actors wear street clothes with a few adroitly designed enhancements — spooky hooded cloaks for highwaymen and supernatural figures; richly colored sashes for the royals; and a couple of sheets of silky, scarlet fabric representing battlefield casualties and the blood of murder victims. Reese, doubling as fight director, has choreographed a compelling final scene, and the actors wield their weapons convincingly in all episodes of combat. 

The cast of this Macbeth is mature enough to meet the technical challenges of Shakespeare's text and young enough to lend a hip quality to the proceedings. The entertaining result supports Mary McCarthy’s assertion, half a century ago, that “bloodstained Macbeth, of all Shakespeare’s characters” seems “the most ‘modern’” and the most readily transposed "into contemporary battle dress or a sport shirt and slacks.”

Macbeth by William Shakespeare presented by What Dreams May Co. Theatre, 308 West 133rd Street between St. Nicholas and Frederick Douglas Boulevard in Harlem, runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. through Saturday, Dec. 21. Tickets: $18. Running time is two hoursn including one intermission. Tickets may be purchased by visiting www.brownpapertickets.com/event/495842 or calling 1-800-838-3006. 

Life's Bitter Dregs

The correspondence of director Alan Schneider and his friend Samuel Beckett indicates that the Irish playwright never wanted his radio play All That Fall adapted for theatrical presentation. His response to an overture by Schneider, entrusted with numerous Beckett plays during the author’s lifetime, including Waiting for Godot, indicates Beckett’s final decision was essentially “Let it stay as it is.”

Happily, British director Trevor Nunn hasn’t heeded that advice, and his stage adaptation works wonderfully well. How to turn a radio play into a piece of theater? Set it in a radio station with the actors portraying actual voice performers. Cherry Truluck’s set features 10 microphones hanging from the ceilings in a zigzag pattern in a gray room. A half dozen chairs on either side of the room allow for sitting for the actors as they await their cues, and recording is signaled by a red light over an upstage door. For verisimilitude, Paul Groothuis’s sound effects don’t always synchronize with the actors. As Eileen Atkins’s Mrs. Rooney trudges in the studio, after all, her actual footsteps don’t need to be aligned with the scraping sounds provided for radio listeners. Nunn’s ingenious concept allows the play to breathe for the stage.

It helps that Nunn has assembled a sterling cast, headed by acting legends Atkins and Michael Gambon as her blind, irascible husband. The action consists of Mrs. Rooney’s walk to the train station to meet her husband’s train, and their walk back to their home in a storm. But there’s no mistake that this is a Beckett play: it’s bleak and funny; it mocks religion, underlines the misery of life, and leaves you in an exhilarated funk. If you’re new to Beckett and want to just dip your toe in, these 75 minutes are a good way to start.

As Mrs. Rooney sets out, she meets various residents of her Irish village. There’s Christy (Ruairi Conaghan), driving a cart with a donkey that he beats, upsetting Mrs. Rooney: “No, no, enough! Take her by the snaffle and pull her eyes away from me. Oh this is awful!” The theme of life itself as a painful burden arises again when she encounters Mr. Slocum (Trevor Cooper) in his car. After a comical interlude with Slocum trying to push Mrs. Rooney into the car and finally succeeding, he runs over a chicken. “What a death!” cries Mrs. Rooney. “One minute picking happy at the dung, on the road, in the sun, with now and then a dust bath, and then — bang! — all her troubles over.”

But even the routine inquiries about loved ones elicit unhappy news. When she meets a bicyclist, Mr. Tyler (Frank Grimes), she asks, “What news of your poor daughter?” “Fair, fair,” he responds. “They removed everything, you know, the whole...er…bag of tricks. Now I am grandchildless.” Near the end of the play she asks a young boy, Jerry, “How is your poor father?” and Jerry answers, “They took him away, Ma’am.” “Then you are all alone?” she asks. “Yes, Ma’am,” says the boy.

Though the existential woes are relentless, they mix cheek by jowl with comedy. The kind but unappreciated Slocum at one point sits in silence, prompting Mrs. Rooney to ask, “What are you doing, Mr. Slocum?” Slocum’s deadpan answer: “Gazing straight before me, Mrs. Rooney, through the windscreen, into the void.”

Religion, too, takes a hit. Discussing the vicar’s text for the Sunday service, Mrs. Rooney tells her husband, “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down” (Psalm 145:14). There’s a pause as Gambon’s gruff, boisterous Rooney and his wife take it in, then they erupt in derisive laughter.

Beckett aficionados will recognize recurring elements from other plays: a young boy, Jerry, echoes the messenger boy in Waiting for Godot; Mr. Rooney is blind, just as Hamm in Endgame (played terrifically in a 2004 West End production by Gambon, who wore dark glasses) and Pozzo in Godot; a reference to a ditch calls to mind the same in Godot. Some of the writing is obviously mordantly funny; not so obvious is what an actress like Atkins can make of a simple line such as “Do you want some dung?”

Gambon makes a relatively late entrance, but provides a solid foil to Atkins’s worn down, caviling wife. The blind Mr. Rooney rails like Lear, and it is surely no accident that they make their way through a pelting rain to get home. It makes one realize that Gloucester’s line “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods/They kill us for their sport” might have been written by Beckett rather than Shakespeare.

All That Fall plays through Dec. 8. Evening performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7 p.m. and Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Matinees are Wednesday and Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. There will be no performance on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28. Single tickets are $70 and may be purchased by calling Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 or going to www.59e59.org.

Hamlet on the Upper West Side

The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is the longest of William Shakespeare’s 36 plays and probably the most complex. In the four centuries since the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the band of players to which the Bard belonged) first presented Hamlet, critics have expended countless gallons of ink debating the play's strengths and flaws. Harold Bloom calls Hamlet “our world’s most advanced drama, imitated but scarcely transcended by Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello and Beckett.” T.S. Eliot finds the play “puzzling” and “disquieting,” and declares that, “far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece,” it's “an artistic failure.” The fact that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most frequently produced work indicates that audiences, on the whole, are less skeptical of its merits than Eliot.

The contours of Prince Hamlet’s story come from Historia Danica by Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques. Shakespeare remolded the existing material to the shape of the English revenge tragedies popular in his day. The result, as always with Shakespeare, is altogether different from the sources on which the playwright drew. In Shakespeare’s version, Hamlet, a student at the University of Wittenberg, has returned to Denmark for his father's funeral. By a ghostly visitation (the Ghost being his father, the late King), Hamlet receives a piece of life-changing news: the King didn’t die from a snakebite, as generally believed; he was poisoned by Claudius, the new king who is Hamlet’s paternal uncle and now his stepfather. The social strictures of the day demand that the son avenge the parent's death; yet, for most of the play, Hamlet procrastinates, keening over his loss, fuming about his mother’s swift re-marriage to the avaricious uncle, pondering mortality and that “undiscovered country from whose bourn / no traveler returns.” He masks his intentions and his real emotions with an "antic disposition."

On Manhattan's Upper West Side, the small, ambitious Frog and Peach Theatre Company is offering Hamlet with a film-noir flavor that enhances the mysterious qualities of Shakespeare's plot and underscores what's most suspenseful in the dialogue. The Frog and Peach Hamlet gets off to a sluggish start but, as the student-prince figures out what's rotten in Denmark, the pace accelerates. After a single intermission (which falls surprisingly early in the proceedings), the action moves with a sense of inexorability toward the company's engrossing enactment of the duel scene, with its moving reversals and many deaths. The cast — six members of the Actors' Equity Association and eight non-union performers — handles Shakespeare’s blank verse competently and, in some cases, with élan.

Brando Boniver plays Hamlet as a straight-shooter who's discovering how deceitful the world can be. He's a meditative sophomore, learning to dissemble for his own protection. Boniver's mixture of naivety and wisdom gives an interesting slant to the Prince's familiar monologues. Imposingly tall and clad, of course, in black, Boniver leavens Hamlet’s melancholy with considerable humor; here and there, he refreshes a well-known line with a dash of Millennial inflection. He delivers the play's most famous soliloquy — "to be, or not to be" — in feigned madness, waltzing Ophelia (Megan McGarvey) around the stage. This unexpected bit of blocking invigorates a passage that's familiar to the point of being stale; and, in this staging, the soliloquy works both as an expression of Hamlet's thoughts on the mortal condition and, from Ophelia's point of view, as a burst of creepy logorrhea about suicide. 

As Horatio, Hamlet’s closest friend and the one who survives to tell the Prince's tale, Jonathan Reed Wexler is the very model of loyalty and comradely affection. Of all the cast, Wexler is most at ease with Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. His unadorned delivery of the "flights of angels" speech, as well as the subsequent lines about the "carnal, bloody and unnatural acts" he has witnessed, provides a moving summary of all the preceding turmoil. It’s tempting to imagine what Wexler's vocal skill, unaffected style, and assured stage presence would bring to the title role.

Director Lynnea Benson has trimmed Shakespeare's text judiciously (the performance runs only slightly more than two and a half hours), and offers some interesting innovations. A single Player (Roger Rathburn) represents the traveling troupe that arrives in Elsinore to "catch the conscience of the King." To make this casting-efficiency work, Horatio joins Rathburn in the play-within-a-play; and Wexler, gussied up in tacky road-show finery, wrings considerable humor out of Horatio's consternation at being pressed by Hamlet into service as an amateur thespian.  

Benson has cast Amy Frances Quint and Ilaria Amadasi as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's supposed-friends from Wittenberg, invited to Denmark by Claudius to spy on the Prince. Quint and Amadasi are a couple of Bond Girls, too mature to be undergraduates (even if Wittenberg had enrolled women in those days). They simper and posture and paw Boniver like a pair of medieval Mrs. Robinsons. This non-traditional casting is a risky directorial gambit; but the louche qualities with which Quint and Amadasi imbue their characters make Rosencrantz and Guildenstern effective foils to Boniver's fundamentally ingenuous Hamlet. In most productions, Hamlet's emotionless sacrifice of the lives of his erstwhile friends is unnerving. In the Frog and Peach production, Quint and Amadasi are cold-hearted foxes outfoxed by the Prince; and their treachery proves a milestone in Hamlet's education about the dark side of humankind. It all makes sense.  

Despite a few Nordic touches, the scenic design by Andy Estep is not committed to a particular locale; and the costumes by Lindsey L. Vandevier reflect no particular era. Both scenery and clothes have been managed admirably on a tight budget and, in their simplicity, serve their purpose well. Some weaknesses in the production may be a function of the church-basement nature of the The West End Theatre. Broadway veteran Dennis Parichy has to contend with a primitive lighting system; and the original score by Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner gets a less-than-fair hearing due to the abruptness of all the sound cues.

By the time Frog and Prince Company finishes its run, there will be other Hamlets competing for attention in the Tri-State area. In the weeks ahead, English actor Rory Kinnear (of Skyfall fame) will be seen in the title role at various cinemas in the region as the Royal National Theatre reprises its worldwide broadcast of the 2010 production; Kevin Kline is including material from Hamlet in his one-man show at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton; and the Bedlam Theatre Company will commence an open-ended run of its 4-actor Hamlet at the Culture Project on Bleecker Street. The prevalence of Shakespeare's greatest creation in and around New York this autumn confirms Harold Bloom's declaration: "There is no end to Hamlet or to Hamlet, because there is no end to Shakespeare."

William Shakespeare's Hamlet presented by The Frog and Peach Theatre Company at The West End Theatre (above the Church of St. Paul/St. Andrew, 236 West 86th Street) runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m., through Sunday, November 10. General admission $18; seniors and students $12. 

The Truth Isn't Easy

The Israeli Arab, Ali Said, says that he met Eileen in the hallway of the Mayfair Hotel; in his account, their eyes met and they went into a room for wild sex. “I’m a wonderful lover. She enjoyed herself,” Ali informs his interrogator, Dov (Ezra Barnes). Not so, Eileen tells Dov in a separate interview. She met him in the park, where he approached her and began a conversation, though it did indeed end in intercourse. She was a virgin, even at fortysomething. No, says Ali, she was definitely not a virgin.

Lucile Lichtblau's play The English Bride is a compact, fascinating play about what we know about people — what anyone can know — and what lies folks will tell and even believe to keep their lives under control. This exercise among three liars, which recalls the classic film Rashomon, is based on a 1986 incident in which a Muslim Arab was arrested for attempting to blow up an El Al flight in Britain. As Dov, an Israeli Mossad agent, interviews the accused bomber and the woman who loved him, he has no qualms about employing lies to find the truth. The structure, a collection of monologues and two-person scenes that unfold as Dov tries to separate the truth from lies, is admirably lean and vigorous in the hands of director Carl Wallnau.

As the meeting and deepening relationship between Ali (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) and Eileen (Amy Griffin) is recounted, the story appears straightforward. She and Ali have small disagreements — will the child she’s carrying be a boy or a girl? Will it have Eileen’s fair complexion or Ali’s darker skin? Will she agree to wear a veil? Wallnau makes sure that Lichtblau’s plot, which snakes around on itself, delivers all the surprises forcefully — a woman in the audience gasped involuntarily in the last minutes as an important plot point proved shockingly bogus.

Griffin, in the title role of an unprepossessing refugee from the northern British city of Leeds, sports a persuasive regional accent. Eileen talks confidently but masks the desperation of a woman on the cusp of middle age and fleeing a miserable life with a depressing family. Ali’s attraction to her is different from that of other men, she says. “He was different,” she tells Dov. “With him, I always believed down deep he meant what he said even though I never let on to him that I believed him,” adding “my mum used to tell me ‘never trust a man who smiles.’” The last is a nice touch, a suggestion of painful family life and past close-mindedness, and Lichtblau’s understanding of her characters is reflected by several such small moments. One can accept those as facts, but so many others about Eileen are offered and rescinded that one’s head may spin by the end.

Nor is Eileen's story the only fluid one. Ali, played by Goodfriend with initial hostility and then canny charm toward his questioner, is never what he seems. The action, set in interrogation rooms, the park, an airport and elsewhere, is served well by Bob Phillips’s design: three different levels set in a corner, with a bench on each of the side levels. The whole area is backed by a curtain of interlocking paper loops resembling a chain link that one finds usually in doorways; here they provide a stunning pattern for Joyce Liao to cast her evocative lighting.

Said, invested with confidence and much courtliness by Goodfriend, is a handsome man who claims he picked up Eileen in the hallway of the hotel where she works, but who denies attempting to blow up an airplane. Yet, although a bombing is central to the plot, Lichtblau forbears demonizing Ali and only occasionally makes a reference to the political situation in the Middle East. After Eileen learns that Ali is an Arab, she says, “I didn’t know Arabs lived in Israel,” and he answers, “that’s something the Israelis have trouble with as well.” The play avoids emphasizing the hot-button topics of the political crisis in favor of the personal relationship of the couple, although Ali’s motivation for the crime he is accused of draws inevitably on politics. Indeed, there is a clash of the personal with his political motivation as Eileen reveals she is pregnant and slowly one realizes that Ali expects Eileen to wear a veil and raise the child as a Muslim, though she wants to raise it Catholic.

As Eileen and Ali offer Dov their divergent perspectives, they move together and enact the scenes in the way that whichever principal is speaking remembers. And although Dov listens, he knows from experience that he has to sift for the truth. “She’s a born liar,” he says, after Eileen misidentifies someone. “Most people are,” he adds, “myself included.” Barnes finds the cool aloofness in Dov as well as the confidence of someone used to the upper hand — which may also be a subtle reflection of the political landscape. A play touching on any aspect of the Middle East cannot fail to seem familiar at times, but Wallnau manages to keep that sense fleeting as he strips layer after layer of mendacity to help the audience reach — what? Not the truth, but a murky approximation of it.

The English Bride plays at 59E59 Theater through Nov. 17 on the following schedule: Tuesday-Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8:30 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sunday at 3:30 and 7:30 p.m.

A Groaner in Verona

Updating Shakespeare is like putting a diaper on a porcupine. It's not strictly necessary, but if you are going to do it, you had better be very careful. Director Tea Alagic’s production for the Classic Stage Company is so illogical and reckless that, if the metaphor were literal, she’d look like a pincushion.

For starters, Alagic, whose credits don't include Shakespeare, has played fast and loose with the text. There are cuts, but that’s to be expected. (As on Broadway, Paris's slaying is omitted.) Yet sometimes, she has just ignored the words. Right away, when the Montagues and Capulets fight and Benvolio (McKinley Belcher III) says, “Put up your swords,” it’s a puzzlement. The brawlers haven’t got swords — they’ve been fighting with their hands. Do they have invisible swords? Is this Shakespeare by way of Hogwarts? Later, though, when Romeo tries to commit suicide, he actually has a knife, and Friar Laurence disarms him. After Juliet has visited the cleric and returns home, she tells David Garrison’s Lord Capulet that she is enjoined “to fall prostrate here” to beg his forgiveness — and she kneels. Apparently “prostrate” meant something else in Verona. Perhaps the most ludicrous scene is the second brawl, in which Mercutio is slain. Again without weapons, the actors grab tiny packets of stage blood and punch their opponents, smearing gouts of red on one another. It's death by stage prop.

As one might expect in this situation, extraneous business receives closer attention. When Mercutio suffers a hangover following the party at the Capulets’, he fumbles with a bottle of aspirin — a real one. As a joke, it's cute but irrelevant. And when Romeo and Juliet meet at the Capulets’ costume ball, the hero is wearing a giant Winnie-the-Pooh head, simply to let lighting designer Jason Lyons cast funny shadows on the rear wall. It’s clever business, but the laughter it produces undercuts the romance.

With such a scattershot approach to the text, it’s no wonder that the acting varies wildly. Garrison employs a hastily yet precisely spoken naturalism as Lord Capulet. Elizabeth Olsen’s Juliet (who looks way past 14) recites clearly but without inspiration. Julian Cihi’s Romeo, though he’s too puppyish, finds the right emotional tone in isolated places, and, like Garrison, attempts to make the heightened verse sound natural.

Ironically, the most damaging casting is that of Daniel Davis as Friar Laurence. He is in command of language, rhythm, meaning and inflection to a degree that makes you wish this Romeo and Juliet would morph into King Lear just to keep hearing him talk. He is so compelling that everyone around him looks inept by comparison, with a couple exceptions.

Kathryn Meisle’s Lady Capulet also speaks the language fluidly, but she looks less comfortable dressed as a cougar in Clint Ramos’s hot pink jacket and slacks with leopard-print blouse and shoes. T.R. Knight brings intelligence and clarity to his low-key Mercutio. And Daphne Rubin-Vega, cast against type as Juliet’s Nurse, turns in a fascinating performance.

Making the Nurse Hispanic is one of Alagic’s curiosities that works. Why there are so many Hispanics in an Italian city — Dion Mucciacito’s Tybalt is another — is unexplained, but in this case, it lends credence to the Nurse’s reaction at hearing of Tybalt’s killing: “Oh, Tybalt, Tybalt. The best friend I had.” Although the part is often played by middle-aged to older actresses, the text makes clear that the Nurse only weaned Juliet 11 years before, so Rubin-Vega’s age is right. Nevertheless, her glamour is a shock. Ramos puts her in a mantilla and dark glasses at one point, suggesting an Italian movie star of the 1960s, like Monica Vitti or Claudia Cardinale, although the text is peppered with Spanglish and not Italian. But the actress nails the humor in the Nurse’s blathering with a musician’s attention to rhythm and phrasing.

This production has no clear time or place — it’s a mishmash. Alagic seems to be trying to kill the romanticism at every turn. The floor of the essentially bare stage (a waist-high upstage platform and nine tubular chairs are the only other set pieces) seems to be that of a gymnasium, and there’s no balcony in the balcony scene. Juliet wears boots and a shift that make her look like a refugee from a rave. And Alagic even cuts a chunk of the final scene so the play ends not with the lyrical, “Never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Instead, with lines of the Prince’s now assigned to Friar Laurence, the play ends with an abrupt blackout. It’s more Jacobean than Shakespearean, yet it is an interesting choice — unlike so many that have gone before.

George Kelly Comes Forth

Philip Goes Forth, George Kelly’s Depression era comedy-drama, chronicles a conventional young man’s plunge into bohemian New York. Back in 1931, when the play premiered, Kelly’s work was as popular and as integral to American culture as that of his fellow Pulitzer Prize recipient Eugene O’Neill. Today he's remembered principally, if at all, as an uncle of Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning movie star whose 1956 wedding to Prince Rainier revived the economic fortunes of Monaco by bringing worldwide attention (and flocks of tourists) to that Mediterranean principality. Ah, the ironies of history.

In George Kelly’s day, Broadway audiences were accustomed to playwrights easing them gingerly into the dramatic action. Philip Goes Forth opens with something few writers would risk today: 40 minutes of solid exposition, including backstory disclosures by a conveniently loquacious parlor maid.

Just out of college, Philip Eldridge (Bernardo Cubría) has returned to his hometown, 500 miles from New York. He's training as an executive at his father’s firm (precise business unspecified) but longs to be in show biz. Philip's Babbitt-like father (Cliff Bemis) thinks his son should be grateful that he’s got a secure job in the midst of the Depression. The “old man” scoffs at Philip's declaration that he wants to write plays; the young man packs up his wounded pride and heads for Manhattan.

With the first act dedicated to set-up, Philip Goes Forth finally gets going in Act Two, when the protagonist takes refuge in a Murray Hill rooming house where all inhabitants have artistic aspirations. His compatriots include a hack writer (Teddy Bergman), an unsuccessful composer (Brian Keith MacDonald), and one person – a poet – with a genuine gift (Rachel Moulton). Their little community is overseen by a former stage star (Kathryn Kates), sympathetic to the challenges and disappointments faced by those in the arts.

Kelly’s theme in Philip Goes Forth is the contrast between genuine artists and the mere wannabes who are drawn to la vie de bohème but lack the vision, passion, or application necessary to create anything worthwhile. In an earlier play (and Broadway hit), The Torch-Bearers (1922), Kelly lampooned the pretensions of suburban aesthetes. The masterstroke of that Kelly classic is the magniloquent Mrs. J. Duro Pampinelli, director of a thoroughly awful Little Theater group. Mrs. Pampinelli, vividly drawn by the playwright (and catnip to generations of character actresses), is the very model of a hick-town culture-vulture. Philip Goes Forth – like The Torch-Bearers — pokes fun at pseudo-artists and the Philistines who love them. The characters of Philip Goes Forth, however, lack the intricacy and gusto of Mrs. Pampinelli; they represent ideas with which Kelly is grappling, but don't spring to life like the best of the playwright's creations.

Director Jerry Ruiz and his ten actors work hard to give Kelly's lackluster script a patina of professionalism. Cubría plays the title role with gung-ho energy and the earnestness of the adolescent hero in a Horatio Alger novel. As Philip's odyssey progresses, the actor re-calibrates his performance to reflect all the young man is learning in the New York School of Hard Knocks. Cubría woos ingénue Natalie Kuhn with an innocence — or, rather, naivety — that’s at once daffy and believable. Kuhn, who manages to be both dewy-eyed and down-to-earth, lends credibility to sweet banalities, such as: “I think it’s wonderful that you should want to do something on your own. After all, [your father’s] achievement isn’t yours. And you’re a man, as well as he is… I should think he’d respect you all the more for it.” 

Bemis, Moulton, and Christine Toy Johnson (as Philip’s sympathetic aunt, Mrs. Randolph) give notably engaging performances. Carole Healey, playing a two-faced society matron (Mrs. Oliver), has two scenes of high comedy in which the tone of Kelly's writing is somewhat out of kilter with the rest of the play. Flamboyant but not quite over-the-top, Healey imbues the flat character of Mrs. Oliver with surprising dimension and gets the evening's loudest, most prolonged laughs. When events stray down a melodramatic path, neither Kelly nor the slightly uneven supporting cast are at their best. 

Steven C. Kemp (sets), Christian DeAngelis (lights) and Joshua Yocom (props) evoke the 1930s in contrasting scenic designs for a provincial living room in Act One and the townhouse of the second and third acts. The former is all right angles, unadorned and startlingly white; the townhouse has deep, warm hues, oblique lines and exotic bric-a-brac. The handsome costumes by Carisa Kelly enhance the production's period flavor. Contemplating the extremes of old-fashioned formality with which the designer has clothed her actors while also listening to the handful of speeches that are most alien to a 2013 sensibility, playgoers may be perplexed. Does what's stilted and jejune in Philip Goes Forth reflect merely the social rigidity of the era the dramatist is depicting or a limitation in Kelly's craft? Those acquainted with other works by the playwright, especially The Torch-Bearers and The Show-Off (1924), are likely to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The Mint Theater Company focuses on plays that have been neglected and, in some cases, forgotten. For 18 years, this troupe, under producing artistic director Jonathan Bank, has resurrected worthy dramas. Though not likely to be remembered as one of the company's most valuable rediscoveries, Philip Goes Forth is a diverting piece by a playwright who ought to be more than a footnote in the biography of Princess Grace.

Edging into the Ruling Class

The Keen Company’s revival of The Film Society, the 1988 play that established the talent of Jon Robin Baitz, shows a playwright in his mid-20s already possessed of uncommon insight, yet decades away from Other Desert Cities. Though it draws on Baitz’s early days living in South Africa, it is an astonishingly mature play, as André Bishop notes in the preface to the 1993 paperback edition from Theatre Communications Group.

In short, punchy scenes set in 1970 in Durban, South Africa, Baitz shows the way institutionalized racism survives and invidiously co-opts people with nobler impulses. Jonathon Balton (Euan Morton) is a teacher at Blenheim, a private boys’ prep school where he has instituted a “film society.” It’s nothing much: he shows films such as Touch of Evil and Top Hat in a feeble attempt to impart culture to the students. The films are as much for his soul as for refining their feelings, which he knows are influenced by their white parents' apartheid views.

Although Jonathon chafes at the school’s rigid strictures and kowtowing to those parents, it is his two best friends and fellow teachers, Terry Sinclair (David Barlow) and his wife, Nan (Mandy Siegfried), who seriously rock the boat. Terry has repeatedly organized events in which the boys can meet or be spoken to by a black activist. As the play opens, the parents are in an uproar that a black minister was the surprise speaker at the school’s Centenary Day.

Though the incident precipitates a crisis for Terry and, indirectly, Nan, Jonathon tries his best to protect both of them. He and Terry have been friends since childhood, and he tolerates Terry’s reckless activism because of it. Nonetheless, Jonathon is under pressure to conform from the pompous but well-intentioned headmaster, Neville Sutter (a composed and weary Gerry Bamman), who is himself feeling the heat from Jonathon’s meddlesome mother (Roberta Maxwell), a grande dame given to wearing caftans and turbans. Maxwell finds a nice balance of iron authority and honeyed wheedling; her late husband was headmaster at Blenheim, and she has the money to parlay Jonathon into the same position.

The young Baitz is particularly accomplished at crisscrossing all the strands of the drama: the brutal racism of South Africa, embodied by Richmond Hoxie’s apoplectic teacher, Hamish Fox, who invokes the Mau-Mau uprising and General Idi Amin as reasons for the rightness of white supremacy; Jonathon’s desperate, failing attempts to win concessions for his friends and, later, after gaining power, to fully protect them; and the way he is maneuvered into the job by the powers-that-be. (His absorption into the establishment is given a nice visual effect from the gradual improvement of his appearance in suits designed by Jennifer Paar.)

Nor does The Film Society ever become too obvious a symbol; you have to listen closely as the drama progresses to follow its fortunes. The whole play, though, requires close attention, as Jonathon is manipulated incrementally; director Jonathan Silverstein has done a fine job of keeping one guessing what’s going to happen next. (One quibble, though; it’s unlikely that anyone with cultivation, when asked for a drink, would simply hand over the one he’d been sipping and then fix a fresh one for himself, as Jonathon does when Nan asks.)

Steven C. Kemp’s set is visually striking and underscores the political situation. It features three functional playing areas — the school office, Terry and Nan’s home, and Mrs. Balton’s parlor — but surmounting them is a huge painting on the rear wall, a representation of the St. George’s and St. Andrew’s crosses melded in white, representing the British Empire, which had ruled South Africa. But the white of the crosses, though dominating, is eroding, and in places underneath one sees the kente patterns of black African tribes — a neat visual complement to the political situation.

Morton is a multilayered Jonathon. The text at various points suggests Jonathon is a closeted homosexual, and Morton finds body language to enhance that notion, but he’s never a pushover. He may not pick his battles wisely, but he’s easygoing and composed in taking on issues he cares about. As he slowly assumes more authority, one sees his transformation to a bureaucrat who, like Neville, has no life but the school’s. Barlow creates a Terry who is as irritating as he must be, but still sympathetic; he is, after all, on the side of the angels, and Siegfried's Nan is a loyal though often exasperated partner for him.

That the play has stood up after more than two decades is a measure of Baitz's talent. If one wants to see the first steps toward the playwright's masterly Other Desert Cities, this is the place to start.

Take a Trip Down Under

Who doesn’t love a good Aussie accent? The U.S. premiere of Australian Made Entertainment’s Once We Lived Here, with book and lyrics by Dean Bryant, music by Mathew Frank and direction by Matthew Foster, is an Australian production through and through. From the “G’Daybill” to the glossary of phrases from down under, to the actors’ accents, to the lingo, you are truly transported to the outback throughout this moving production.

Once We Lived Here has a plot that everyone can recognize — a family is brought together by unfortunate circumstances for a few uncomfortable days of pretending to have anything in common at this stage in their lives and eventually, family secrets are spilled. But despite the somewhat stale general story-arc, Once We Lived Here contains twists and turns, and character development that engulfs the audience and makes them truly care about the stories unfolding on stage.

Since their father’s tragic death, the three siblings of Once We Lived Here (Amy, Lecy and Shaun) have splintered apart. Although each of them disproves of how the others are living their lives, they all return to the family sheep station, Emoh Ruo (“Our Home”) to check in on mother Claire, who is sick and doesn’t have much time left.

Lecy, played by Morgan Cowling, is a one-time nerd who has grown up, moved to the city and hasn’t looked back. Trying to branch into the world of television, she’s accused by her siblings of only caring about material things. But as the show develops, we see that Lecy isn’t as confident as she would like the world to think. To Cowling’s credit, Lecy’s change throughout the show gradually builds until you can’t help but be moved by her. 

Shaun, played by Adam Rennie, is an instantly likeable musician who hasn’t had much success. Living on the road and playing gigs, he’s never stuck to anything for too long. Memories from his past haunt him, which is extremely evident during his performance of “The Shearing Shed” (Rennie’s voice is spectacular).  

Amy, played by Kathleen Foster, is the oldest and has lived at Emoh Ruo with Claire since her father’s death, desperately trying to run the farm despite a drought that won't break and finances that continue to slip. Though written as the character that would seemingly get the most understanding from an audience, Foster's portrayal of Amy left me hesitant to root for her. 

As if there weren’t already enough catching up going on, in typical motherly fashion, Claire (Renee Claire Bergeron) also invites Burke (Sean Cleary) to visit. Years earlier, Burke came to Emoh Ruo to help out and fell in love with Amy. But it’s been eight years since then and Amy insists that it’s too late to rekindle the old romance.

As the week progresses and the bush fires draw closer, the family is forced to confront things that they’ve avoided for far too long. Although it may sound cliché, audience members are sure to relate to at least one character and to slowly fall in love with the folks of Emoh Ruo.

The songs are catchy, the lyrics are not too predictable, and the performances of them are stellar. Standouts included “The Shearing Shed,” “As Far As the Eye Can See” and “We Like It That Way.” There are laughs along the way, though you’ll likely find yourself wiping your eyes as well. 

The set, impressive for such a small space, was used well and the lighting helped seamlessly signal flashbacks. 

At some point, most people question how they’re even related to their family members. But in the end, family is family. And as Claire reminds her kids, “there’s nothing perfect out there, just what works and doesn’t work.” Once We Live Here works. 

All Steamed Up and Boiling Over

TACT’s revival of William Inge’s 1963 play Natural Affection is the first since the Broadway premiere. Though the drama flopped (perhaps partly attributable to the 1962 newspaper strike that killed off the New York Daily Mirror), it proves much sturdier 50 years later than one might expect.  

In the lecture collection Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights, the renowned acting teacher declares, “Inge loves women for their helplessness, their tenderness, their ability to raise families, their goodness of heart to the people they’re involved with. He’s very much a woman-protective writer.” One virtue of TACT’s production, strongly cast as usual, is that whatever tenderness and helplessness Adler was thinking of during her lecture, Inge has moved on.

In Natural Affection, Inge tackles the hot topics that simmered just before civil rights eruptions took over as No. 1: working women; unmarried couples living together; repressed homosexuality; and disaffected youth, then known as juvenile delinquents. And although the characters talk about Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth for comic effect, the playwright takes a cue from it. Natural Affection has plot elements as lurid as anything in Williams.

Director Jenn Thompson introduces a saxophone playing jazz music periodically to underscore the hothouse atmosphere, where sexual attitudes are more open and casual than the repressed yearnings in Inge's Pulitzer Prize–winning Picnic. Kathryn Erbe’s level-headed Sue Barker, the female protagonist, lives unmarried with Bernie Slovenk, a car salesman (Alec Beard). She’s a successful buyer of women’s lingerie at a department story, but Bernie is having a tough time at his job selling cars, and he chafes at Sue’s income, which is greater than his. Though she longs for marriage, he balks at any union until he can be the breadwinner.

The urban setting, Chicago, is also unusual for Inge. Sue and Bernie live in a comfortable, modern and slightly tacky apartment building (designed by John McDermott with stripes on the hallway walls that suggest a prison). The equilibrium is upset when Sue’s son Donnie (Chris Bert), born out of wedlock, is scheduled to visit for Christmas. When she had Donnie at 18, Sue placed him in an orphanage. When she got him out, he fell in with the wrong crowd. After stealing a car and beating a woman, he was sentenced to reform school. Now Sue wants to give him a taste of family love during his Christmas visit, but she doesn’t realize that Donnie has permission to stay out on parole if she’ll agree to look after him during the last year of his sentence. 

Two neighbors, Vince and Claire Brinkman, complicate the relationships: Bernie has had a few flings with would-be model Claire (a ravishing, petulant Victoria Mack); Vince (John Pankow) cannot satisfy her sexually and is a heavy drinker. Inge suggests also that Vince may be a repressed homosexual with a yen for Bernie. Beard as Bernie does a nice job of finding affection and disillusion in the character, chafing at the failure of his ambitions, struggling to be faithful to Sue and finding himself at sea. To Inge’s credit, neither Bernie nor Sue is perfect, and Erbe balances Sue’s guilt and confidence, and her obligations to lover and son — until Inge introduces a character revelation that’s hard to swallow.

By that time, though, the play has veered into overheated melodrama. One can almost feel the story go off the rails when Vince goes on a drunken tirade against everything modern: television, movies, abstract paintings and brutalist buildings. Pankow does the bravura moment full justice, but it sounds as if it’s the author’s philippic, and the play's last act, with twists and violence, moves into potboiler territory. (Inge’s title is double-edged because “natural” can mean something good and appropriate, or, in describing a child like Donnie, illegitimate; the opposite meanings apply to different relationships in the play.)

Thompson's direction is mostly solid, although an early, brief scene with Donnie and Gil, a fellow inmate on leave, doesn't work. Gil should be a menacing presence, but Tobi Aremu is too well-scrubbed and casual; only the subject matter — Gil’s sounding out Donnie about whether he could kill people — suggests he’s dangerous. Thompson interpolates a moment when the fleeing Gil grabs a knickknack and pockets it, but the petty theft is almost laughable as a marker of criminality. (And, unfortunately, the move primes an audience for someone to comment on the missing item, but it doesn’t happen.) Nonetheless, her production demonstrates that this unfamiliar Inge play has much more food for thought than the term “flop” would suggest.

Life and Death in South Africa

What can we truly say to own in this life? Our homes, our gods? Our own mortality and deaths? Ndebele Funeral, written by Zoey Martinson, directed by Awoye Timpo, and presented by Smoke and Mirrors Collaborative, brilliantly uses this theme of ownership as an aspect of the human condition to present a multifaceted, complex and utterly transcendent work of theater. 

This is no mere AIDS play nor post-apartheid post-colonial drama, though it engages the real-world stakes of both of those issues. Rather, it is an emotionally-driven exploration of what it means to have faith in something when we have so little control over our own fates. It delves into the question of what it means to be human in a world where the odds always seem stacked against humankind.

We meet Daweti (played by Martinson) awakening in a strange sort of bed, which we later learn is a self-constructed coffin, a personally designed final resting place. The action of the drama centers around her interactions with the day's two visitors: her longtime best friend Thabo (Yusef Miller) and a fieldworker for the government, Jan (Jonathan David Martin), on-site at her shack to take stock of how well she has used some subsidized building materials. Of course, we can surmise that she has put them to good use; the house she has built is not to live in now, but for her imminent future.

The richness of this play is not just in its honest story, which shows us both bits of Daweti's past with Thabo and touches of the difficult present that each of the three characters face. Much of what makes this play so meaningful is the way in which it is told — a fourth-wall breaking style of performance, that incorporates music, rhythm, physicality, and narrative storytelling, interspersed throughout the forward-moving action. Because of this, the world of this play seems blessed with the same magic that each of its characters is trying to capture in his or her own life.

The actors are all exceptionally good in their roles. They bring these characters to life as complicated individuals, not just as mouthpieces for the various philosophical perspectives presented in the text. Miller makes Thabo joyful yet haunted, a perfect counterpart to Martinson's harsh but charming Daweti. Martin creates an utterly sympathetic Jan who, rather than feeling like the oppressor, displays the vulnerability of his social position while still attempting to exert power over his circumstances.

The setting, in its simplicity, brings to life Daweti's messy, unfinished shack, with a sense of reality, even though it merely suggests the completed structure. The only drawback is the lighting, which at times to create moods, becomes a bit too dark to allow the audience to really engage with the facial expressions of the actors on stage.

All in all, Ndebele Funeral is everything great theater should be: it is entertaining with its humor and musical numbers; it is thought-provoking in its philosophizing and use of historical information; and it is heart-wrenching in its representation of the depths that we will go to in the name of love and friendship. If the one thing we can own is our memories, then this is a work to keep with us, long after the house lights have come on. It is a play that reminds us of the impact that the lives of others have on us. And that is a connection not easily severed, even if we do commit to never look back.

Cultural Wasteland

Anne Washburn's ambitious but labored Mr. Burns is subtitled A Post-Electric Play. The central conceit is that in the future an undefined catastrophe has occurred (there are references to a quarantine, a “bug,” and empty and burned cities). All electricity has stopped, and worse, nuclear power plants are melting down. Around a campfire (niftily envisioned by designer Neil Patel as a smoking TV set), a group of survivors share stories about episodes of The Simpsons to keep their minds off their plight.

The title refers, of course, to Homer Simpson's villainous boss at the nuclear plant in the cartoon series. Meanwhile, the principals (all carrying the same first names as the actors who play them) try to piece together TV episodes from jumbled memories as if each were another Homer — the blind Greek one — assembling The Iliad; they falter and trail off and balk and interrupt one another. Although the play was partly developed by the actors' own reconstruction of an episode, which may account for some self-indulgence, it's a plodding start to a demanding play. One wishes director Steve Cosson had sped things up a bit.

Among the most proficient of the reconstructors is Matthew (Matthew Maher), whose most helpful colleagues are Susannah (Susannah Flood) and Jenny (Jennifer R. Morris). Their reconstruction, however, is suddenly interrupted by a stranger, Gibson (Gibson Frazier), who arrives from Framingham, Mass. In one of Washburn’s best ideas, the campfire group asks his story, and then each, following a custom that has apparently arisen among the refugees and survivors, reads 10 names from a personal log in hopes that Gibson will have information on the survival of someone in the log that he carries; Gibson, in kind, reads 10 names as well. Although it's time consuming, one senses the isolation and disappointment as name after name brings no response.

Beset by fears of radioactive fallout from disabled plants, they trade rumors of heroic last-ditch efforts, underground seepage and no-go zones, and then they return to The Simpsons. Other bits of pop culture, from the film Cape Fear, with Robert Mitchum, and the remake with Robert De Niro, to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, also bubble up.

In the second scene, seven years have passed. The principals have been joined by Quincy (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), and they are preparing to put on a Simpsons episode, albeit on a shoestring. During the intervening years, rival troupes have popped up (as well as theater circuits), all laying claim to various episodes of The Simpsons. It may be amusing or disheartening that what these performers want to preserve seems so trivial next to Shakespeare or Moliere or Chekhov, whose works, one must assume, cannot be remembered so well.

Nonetheless, there are suggestions that civilization is making a comeback; there are haves and have-nots, and Gibson offers the opinion that Chablis will come back into fashion because “people are ready for status again.” In this world, though, wealthier troupes pay for lines to Simpsons episodes that are remembered by various people, and shysters try to sell bogus lines or claim credit for lines that they had nothing to do with. And the actors find solace in the high quality of their commercials. (Washburn doesn't clarify whether they are presented during the play.) The cast rehearses their episode, but the scene ends with a twist drawn from other kinds of TV series, such as 24 and Strike Back.

A leap forward of 75 years brings a well-appointed troupe —with nicely painted backdrops and excellent lighting (Justin Townsend’s work is exemplary in all three segments), performing an episode of The Simpsons in costumes and striking half-masks. There is music (by Michael Friedman). The result is a pastiche of The Simpsons that incorporates bits of G&S, a Greek chorus, rap, and the catch phrase from the 1940 Bob Hope vehicle The Ghost Breakers: “Feets, don’t fail me now!” A reference to Chablis suggests that the original script of the shoestring company has served as the template for the production.

In its own way, Washburn’s apocalyptic drama echoes the history of theater, as culture forms and re-forms itself, passing through natural disasters and war and accruing .classic bits over time. The idea is full of promise, but the work is too often taxing rather than compelling, and feels ramshackle at times. Even so, the actors work hard, and they are all good. Sam Breslin Wright has the title role, but the plays-within-the-play are too cumbersome, and the whole enterprise, calculated to spark one’s intellect, ends up numbing the mind.

Miss Lonely Hearts

Closing out Theater for the New City (TNC)’s imaginative Dream Up Festival is an unusual offering from Hungarian-American troupe Pilvax Players, titled Liselotte in May. If you’re the type who has ever wondered what it was really like as Miss Lonelyhearts in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, then look no further. The play, written by Zsolt Pozsgai, centers around the eponymous character as she becomes desperate in her search for a soulmate. Just as she turns 30, Liselotte realizes, living all alone in her New York City apartment, that she has no one to share her life with. In a pathetic attempt to find her special someone, she posts a personal ad for a husband.

Sounds like the makings of your average romantic comedy — until you take into account the fact that each one of Liselotte’s suitors end up dead on the first date! In this vein, the play is more like a romantic comedy gone haywire, with the comedy part definitely amped up in the first half. Much of the funny bits are due to Chris Kardos’ scene-stealing performances as each of the lonely heart’s various suitors. 

Kardos is the ultimate character actor, effortlessly shape-shifting from one persona to the next. In one scene, he is an awkward and very nervous German butcher named Ludwig; in another, he’s a butt-crack-baring plumber with a New York accent. Each character has their own set of idiosyncrasies, and with this comes a whole lot of physical quirks, which Kardos takes on with much gusto as he falls over chairs and even gamely walks around with his coveralls dragging precariously to his knees, inciting much laughter from the audience. It is this sharp knowledge of physicality — coupled with his impeccable timing — that makes Kardos one talent to watch. 

As the play’s Liselotte herself, Kata Ruzsik is a vibrant actress and quite believable as a young woman frantic in her pursuit of happiness. Despite a few rushed line readings at the beginning, Ruzsik starts to hit her stride by the second scene. She takes in just as much as Kardos gives in terms of performance, playing against his suitors well and creating an energetic exchange between them that keeps us all enthralled. 

While the two actors’ comedic banter is certainly entertaining, it’s not all fun and games for Liselotte — after all, there is still the consequences of all those dead suitors to contend with. As each male character dies with each scene, the play’s tone takes a serious turn in its latter half. Maddened by the trauma of watching all of her paramours die so suddenly and tragically, the play culminates in the last of the deaths, as she meets Roland, an escaped psych ward patient whose poems Liselotte somehow seems to have memorized. It is here where her character takes a turn for the worse,

Presented by TNC artistic director Crystal Field, the whole premise behind the Dream Up Festival is for new works to push the boundaries of the form so that the play is presented in an untraditional way, and Liselotte definitely pulls this off. Much of the play — due to its inventive storytelling — felt very much like an independent film, both tonally and visually. Edina Tokodi’s set design reflects the femininity we see in Liselotte at the beginning of the play, with a simple set built around hanging canvases as the backdrop of her Bleecker Street-based apartment. As the play slowly takes its dark turn, Roland Udvari’s lighting design becomes noticeable in the form of second-long blackouts, with the actors sometimes repeating their lines — much like quick cuts in suspense films. 

This particular technique was intriguing; while at first confusing, it gradually became effective as the play went on, especially by the time Liselotte met troubled Roland. It called to mind the film Swimfan, which utilizes the same method, and in the end, it created the desired effect. In fact, a lot of these moments happened throughout the latter half, sometimes repeating certain scenes after another scene had passed, giving the impression that perhaps it was all a part of Liselotte’s imagination.      

Agota Hodi’s costumes are also worth mentioning, as they also echo the transition the title character goes through. At the beginning of the play, we find the still hopeful Liselotte in sophisticated heels and a demure but colorful sundress, cinched at the waist with a wide belt. She is like any other young, fashion-conscious city girl about to go on a date. As the scene-after-scene passes and bodies of her potential husbands drop like flies, Liselotte’s wardrobe is pared down to more organic, natural silhouettes and materials. For example, when we meet British radicalist Henrik, Liselotte’s costumes take on an artsy flair, as she is dressed in a white jersey dress. Then, by the time Roland comes around, she is in a loose shirt and black leggings, her hair up in a tousled bun and mascara running down her face. It is as if she morphs into the person she thinks each man wants her to be instead of them conforming to her needs.

Liselotte in May is certainly a play that explores the boundaries of imaginative storytelling and takes it to new heights. While it hit some snags rhythmically at the start, it eventually gains momentum and dares to challenge the way a play is performed. Supported by an outstanding cast and creative team, every element of the play — from the set to the lighting to the costumes — helped to achieve their vision cohesively and to great effect. Liselotte in May teases, delights and shocks to the core and makes for a memorable visit to the theater.

Becoming the Black Man

The title of Will Power’s new play, Fetch Clay, Make Man, has fascinating echoes. It refers directly to its two protagonists, boxer Cassius Clay and Stepin Fetchit, the Hollywood film actor of the 1930s and ’40s whose portrayal of shiftless, lazy Negroes earned him widespread contempt. But the syntax of the title also brings to mind the creation story of the golem. The words themselves might be a mantra for its creator, and it's linked to Power’s theme: the American obsession with reinventing oneself, and the impossibility of escaping the past.

Set in 1965 in the week of a crucial boxing match with Sonny Liston, the play begins with Ali's summoning Fetchit to his Maine training camp. Reinvention is everywhere: Negroes are calling themselves blacks. Clay had just rechristened himself Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam. His intimates include Brother Rashid (John Earl Jelks), a security chief with a past, and Sonji, his young wife, who rebels against Islamic strictures. In flashbacks we also meet William Fox (Richard Masur), the Eastern European Jew who founded Fox Pictures, which put Fetchit under contract for movies such as John Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend, with Will Rogers, and Dimples, with Shirley Temple.

Power lets Fetchit make the case (as he did late in life) that his shiftless, whining character was actually subversive: he was being paid to work and by wiggling out of it, he actually forced white people to do the labor instead. But even through that lens it’s hard to discern a positive spin in the role, and it's likely director Des McAnuff avoids using any clips of Fetchit on film because viewers would find him less sympathetic with firsthand experience of his embarrassing portrayals.

Designer Riccardo Hernandez has set the action on a large, sterile, raised square, with the audience on three sides — a training room in Lewiston, Maine. Fetchit (his real name was Lincoln Perry) enters this arena with just a hint of subservience, and he even does a brief shuck-and-jive movement to persuade Ali that it’s really him. Gradually, though, as Fetchit realizes Ali may be his ticket to redemption, he hatches big plans for himself and the boxer. Throughout, one senses that bitterness and ambition propel him, even when he outfoxes Fox to become the first black man with a screen credit and one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers. Ali, meanwhile, knows Fetchit was friends with Jack Johnson (the boxer played by James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope), and he suspects the character actor knows the secret of Johnson's rumored "anchor punch."

Fisher fills the bill physically and emotionally as Ali. Tall and strapping, the actor presents a rising legend who is immature, prankish, apprehensive and morally doctrinaire. He is determined to have a pure, Islam-respecting wife, and he’s deeply in love with Nikki M. James’s more easy-going Sonji, who has shrewdly hidden her past as a good-time girl. The Nation of Islam's world of black, white and gray is emphasized by Paul Tazewell’s costumes for the Muslims, but Sonji sheds her clerical robes and dons vivid purple and later orange outfits. Her dresses and a cobalt sports jacket for Fetchit are nifty visual signals that they don’t belong.

Masur shines in his few scenes as the blustering Fox, particularly an early monologue when he describes to Fetchit the way he surmounted his ancestry to become a “white man”: “Do I miss being me sometimes? Sure. Would I trade the new me for the old me? Not on your life. Trust me, it’s better on this side.”

As the fifth chameleon, Jelks mostly yells and glowers, enraged at what Fetchit represents yet bowing to Ali’s orders. Though, in the main, McAnuff's direction is helpful and propulsive, the antagonistic characters bellow often, and some of it becomes tiresome. And whether you take all the doubling of personae as evidence of Power’s single-mindedness about his theme or feel it has a sledgehammer effect may depend on your tolerance for the shouting.

However, the playwright adeptly backgrounds his story, from the amusing doggerel Ali loved to spout to the danger he faced from followers of Malcolm X, who had recently been assassinated. Ali chose rural Maine for the Liston fight to keep a closer eye on outsiders arriving in town. There is rich material in Fetch Clay, Make Man: Power has fashioned an intelligent drama from two iconic figures struggling with race and identity amid the social ferment of the 1960s.

A Lesson of Love and Loss

From the moment the lights dimmed and music started, I knew that 23 Year Old Myth was not going to be your average jukebox musical. With a genre-bending soundtrack (ranging from the indie hits of Florence and the Machine and MGMT, to original material by members of the company such as Emma Barash and playwright Leslie Gauthier), the play – which is part of Theater for the New City’s Dream Up Festival — is a musical about one girl’s journey of love and loss in the city, all told through the plucking strings of the ukulele. 

Loosely based on Gauthier’s own personal experiences, the play finds Girl 1 (played by Gauthier herself) falling in love with Girl 2 (Lindsay Cook), just as she is diagnosed with cancer. Narrated by a lone figure dressed as a subway busker, known as Ukulele Man (Brendan McDonough), 23 Year Old Myth is presented in a series of scenes that act as “snippets” of the journey. The transitions from scene to scene are clever, with the company not only doubling as stagehands but also as props — and even part of the set themselves — with some pushing and pulling the bed into place while one poses as a standing lampshade. Daniel Geggatt and Michael Steiner’s set is meant to reflect this youthful, metropolitan feel of the play: a single bed facing the audience lengthwise; and later on, a couple of chairs, hospital curtains, a metal food tray, as well the aforementioned handheld lampshades; and two blue subway pillars stand at opposite ends of the stage, with a single yellow line demarcating where the platform ends and where the tracks begin, a sign of the journey to come.

In the first few of these scenes, Gauthier memorably captures life as a twenty-something living in New York City: young, vital and alive. The show opens with the cast all dressed by Jenny Kessler in variations of blue jeans and white shirts, standing in various positions onstage and yelling out typical “New York-isms” in alternating spurts (“I lost my MetroCard!” “Wallet in Cab!”), as Girl 1 makes her way across the stage. She stands on a subway platform, singing along to Florence and the Machine’s “Between Two Lungs” at the top of her lungs – in all appearances, just a regular 22-year-old starting her life. In the middle of her private concert, Girl 1’s train arrives, and she runs for it, only to trip just as the doors close. Her journey has started, if with a little fumble. 

It is here we first take notice of Ukulele Man, who softly provides musical accompaniment throughout the play. He is not quite Stew of Passing Strange, though not quite Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, either. McDonough’s character seems more in the vein of Evita’s Che, a sort of hipster bearing witness to the struggles of Girl 1 with her illness and how it affects her relationships. Midway through he disappears, perhaps signifying how people in your life will come and go, depending on your need for them. He helps tell Girl 1's story with as much wit and pathos as needed, as do the rest of the vibrant cast. 

In fact, it is the company’s energy that truly makes this show, providing each scene with the right balance of both humor and humility, especially during the middle portion of the show, the bulk of which takes place during Girl 1’s time at the hospital. Together, they breathe life into Gauthier’s wonderfully natural dialogue and make certain moments seem as if we’re witnessing our own friends interact. 

In one scene, Girl 1 visits an old friend (the delightful Barash), who stumbles through the painfully realistic discomfort of greeting someone whom you know is dying. Girl 2 struggles with how to take every reaction to her situation. How does one go back to being young again when every question or proposal comes underscored with the possibility that you may die? This scene (and every scene before and after, for that matter) in the latter half of the show treads this line with beautiful execution, veering back and forth from laughter to tears, and back to laughter once again.

According to the show’s program, the show is based on “the parallels between falling in love and being diagnosed with a disease,” an idea which is represented through Girl 1 and Girl 2’s relationship. Cook’s Girl 2 is like any lover confronted with a disease; her portrayal is one of selfless strength and love at the beginning, yet filled with regretful inadequacy towards the end. Just as with the disease, their relationship goes through stages of positivity, denial, anger and finally acceptance. That is, after all, the journey of life.

23 Year-Old Myth is a story of mythical proportions, taking you on a journey where the littlest things can have the biggest impact. This unusual musical play takes you by surprise, bringing moments filled with laughter and tears, plucking at your heartstrings.    

Portrait of an Angry Young Man

“Welcome. Welcome to Vienna, the city of joy and gaiety. Of love and romance. The city of dreams. The year is 1910. On the eve of the Great War. On the eve of the end of the world.” And so begins Final Analysis, Otho Eskin’s award-winning play, now in repertory with Breakfast With Mugabe at The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre. 

Final Analysis, which takes place in the course of a single day in a Viennese coffee shop, focuses on the lives of some of Vienna’s most well-known residents: Sigmund Freud (Gannon McHale), the man who created a new science of the mind; Gustav Mahler (Ezra Barnes), one of the greatest composers and orchestral conductors of his era; Alma Mahler (Elizabeth Jasicki), his wife who would have love affairs with the leading artists of Vienna; and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Michael Satow), who dominated philosophical thought for half a century.

One of the most compelling scenes from director Ludovica Villar-Hauser features a conversation between the young Wittgenstein, and the elder Freud. Wittgenstein, contemptuous of the decaying society that surrounds him and disgusted by his own homosexual desire, has arrived at the point of hopelessness. And he sees no way out, no salvation.

Ludwig: "Our world is infected by a plague. That is the source of her hysteria, as you call it. Not some distasteful event in her childhood."

Freud: "Plague? What are you talking about? I’ve seen no reports of plague."

Ludwig: "Because it is silent. Invisible. Your science will not prevent annihilation — for her, for you, for all of us."

Freud: "That’s only coffee-house talk."

Ludwig: "Vienna is dying. The Empire is dying. Europe is dying. If you listen carefully, you can hear the death rattle of a dying world."

What I most enjoyed about this play were the deep philosophical questions which it asks about love, art, ethnic identity, and perhaps most interesting of all, hate.

Is hate love’s dark companion?

Eskin explores this question through the character of the Young Man played excellently by Ryan Garbayo. This Young Man would go onto to be one of the twentieth century’s most reviled figures: Adolf Hitler (who lived in Vienna from 1909-1913).

The Young Man begins the play as a starving, but determined artist who tries to ingratiate himself to Vienna’s cultural elite. He attempts to sell his painting of Vienna’s cityscape to Alma Mahler; he tries to persuade Wittgenstein to invite him to one of his famous soirees; and he forces a disinterested Gustav Mahler to read the opening pages of his opera.

So what happens to this ambitious artist?

Alma laughs at him, refuses to buy, and declares that it may be his destiny to starve. Wittgenstein scoffs and treats the anti-Semitic Young Man with contempt. And the most crushing blow of all is delivered by Gustav Mahler, one of the Young Man’s artist heroes. What does Mahler think of his opera?

“This is worthless trash!” he says.

Soon after this rejection, the Young Man abandons his love of art and his grandiose artistic ambitions. “I wanted to be an artist, to create beauty — to do something that would make people remember me. But the world denies me my canvas and paints.”

Instead he chooses to embrace the hate that simmers inside him. “My hatred keeps me warm at night, feeds me when I’m hungry, keeps me company when I’m alone, gives my life purpose. So long as I can hold onto that rage, I can survive. I have something to live for. I can triumph.”

Theoretical Physics for Dummies

“Do you feel like you’re in science class?” an audience member asked me as I stood in line for the restroom during the intermission of And It Spins Twice, playing as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Shockingly, for a show set in parallel universes where three fourths of the characters are theoretical physicists discussing concepts like gravity, membranes and string theory, I did not feel like I was in science class. 

It says a lot of playwright Alexis Roblan’s script, which uses clever metaphors like guitar strings and the Titanic to make these complex ideas a little easier to swallow. Instead of groaning at the mention of protons, neutrons and electrons, audience members will find themselves drawn into the two stories being told.

In one universe, Lucia Grillo plays Beth, a theoretical physicist and physics professor whose husband Ryan, played by Thom Christensen, has just left her. Grillo’s Beth is either angry or weepy throughout the show, which is understandable given her circumstances. But despite all her crying, it never really made me care.

In the other universe, a more compelling story unfolds, thanks in part to the wonderful chemistry between Marlena Kalm’s Liz (a theoretical physics graduate student) and Thom Christensen’s parallel universe version of Ryan (a singer/songwriter obsessed with the idea that somewhere out there in the vast expanse of space, another version of himself could be Bono.) The two are just starting out their relationship, which is dotted with humor. When Liz tells Ryan she’s addicted to his eyes, he retorts, “Not my hot 40-year-old-man body?” But their relationship gains a depth to it as the piece progresses and the two take on much more meaningful conversations.

In both universes, Liz and Beth are approached by June (Julia Campanelli), a “cosmologist, astrologer, author, healer and inspiration” to Beth and a world-renowned physicist to Liz. She’s convinced that Liz and Beth’s equation for predicting the collision of two universes’ membranes is correct, and that the time is now.

Director Michael Padden does a great job staging the show, seamlessly flowing between the two parallel universes with the help of lighting designer and stage manager Joe Cabrera. Though the set is not elaborate, consisting of only two tables and three chairs, it is more than adequate. The minimal set helps the audience to focus and contemplate on the questions being raised throughout the show.

Questions like, would you want to know if the world were about to end? And if you did know, how would you want to spend your last day? (Ryan suggests he would, “drink absinthe, and eat chocolate, make love to my girlfriend and get my favorite pizza from the West Village.”) Another probing question is do you believe in supersymmetry? The theory that “every subatomic particle in existence has a superpartner, an exact complement, a mirror image which completes it?”

And perhaps the most moving question is whether or not there is a rhyme or reason for anything. Both Liz and Beth at one point during the play wonder, “I never thought there was a plan, but there are supposed to be rules, aren’t there?”

The Haunted Dictator

Breakfast with Mugabe, a troubling, Macbeth-like play, which won the prestigious John Whiting Award in 2006, has finally arrived in New York (The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre). The play, written by Fraser Grace and directed by David Shookhoff, centers around the malevolent spirit or ngozi which haunts Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

A departed spirit may become an ngozi either through dying violently or not receiving the proper burial rites. The ngozi appears to Mugabe in the guise of one of his former freedom fighting comrades, General Josiah Tongogara. Tongogara was expected by many to become the first president of independent Zimbabwe. And as such, he was a threat to Mugabe’s own political ambitions, much in the same way that Banquo was a threat to Macbeth’s ruthless desire to be king. Tongogara’s death, which occurred just before the 1980 elections that brought Mugabe to power, was officially ruled an accident. Yet rumors have always swirled regarding Mugabe’s involvement in his former comrade’s untimely end.

Che Ayende, who plays Gabriel, the President's bodyguard, nearly steals the show. His good looks and deadpan humor instantly won over the audience. Ezra Barnes plays Dr. Andrew Peric, the white psychiatrist who is hired to cure the President of the ngozi. In addition to being a psychiatrist, he is also a farmer involved in a court battle to stay on his land, as embittered war veterans encroach on his property. Michael Rogers brings intensity, vulnerability and well-placed humor to his portrayal of Mugabe. And Rosalyn Coleman, who looks gorgeous in traditional African garb (thanks to costume designer Teresa Snider-Stein), is Mugabe’s younger wife — 40 years younger! She is desperate to see the President cured, so that he will finally let her go and allow her to start a new life. 

A testament to this play’s power is that it will likely upset at least two different factions. Firstly, those who would like to see Mugabe portrayed two-dimensionally as a psychopathic dictator; and secondly, those who would like to see Mugabe championed (however few) as an unjustly treated African freedom fighter whom Western powers have conspired to destroy. 

Over the last decade, highly touted documentaries including Mugabe and the White African directed by Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson, and memoirs such as The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin have documented the turmoil, strife and chaos which have engulfed Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The narrative presented in such works has been rather simple: Mugabe is a racist dictator, hell bent on expelling all white farmers from Zimbabwe and redistributing their land amongst his cronies; and it is Mugabe’s land distribution policy and refusal to relinquish power which has plunged the country into a crisis.

Thankfully, Breakfast with Mugabe does not take us down this well-trodden path. A fact that speaks to Fraser Grace’s talent as the writer, but which may doom the play at the box office. The simple narrative of bad man Mugabe against heroic white farmers would have been a much easier sell. It would have demanded less of the audience: less imagination, thought or sophistication. But instead Grace has created an imaginative and complex piece of theater which plunges the audience into one man’s sick and guilty conscience. 

I hope that Grace and the strong cast of Breakfast with Mugabe are rewarded for their efforts. 

Sliding Down the Pole

If you're wondering what to see at this year's Fringe Festival, you won’t go wrong if you head to Valerie Hager’s autobiographical, solo show, Naked in Alaska. It chronicles the joys, frustrations and heart break Hager experienced in her 10-year career as a stripper which took her from Tijuana all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska.

So it’s just another stripper confession story, chock full of cliches and stereotypes?

Hardly!

Over the last few years, the stripper memoir has become an American cultural phenomenon. Booty-shaking, pole-climbing, tell-alls, such as Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl, Ruth Fowler’s Girl, Undressed and Lacy Lane’s Confessions of a Stripper were runaway best-sellers which spawned numerous imitations. It’s a genre ridden with cliches and one of the most persistent (and annoying) is the female protagonist who comes from a educated, middle-class background and is the “last person you would ever expect to be stripping." (Cody says, “I had spent my entire life choking on normalcy, decency and Jif sandwiches…for me stripping was an unusual kind of escape.”)

Stripping may have been an escape for Hager, but it was hardly an escape from normalcy, decency or peanut butter sandwiches. Rather, hers was an escape from a harrowing adolescence. Describing her young, troubled self, Hager says “I was this young girl who was a secret bulimic for over a decade, who became a crystal meth addict and was expelled from high school.”

It’s that kind of unadorned honesty and humility that makes the show so compelling.

Early in the show, Hager and her impressive director Scott Wesley Slavin demolish the “Last Girl in the World" cliche and use the show’s multimedia format to great effect. The play opens with Hager shooting up crystal meth, while a montage of childhood photos rapidly flashes on a projection screen. It was an exciting and promising opening to a show which didn’t fail to deliver. 

As it should have been, Venue #5 at the Lower East Side’s Theater of Whimsy was tightly packed with exuberant and slightly tipsy theater lovers. Throughout the evening, Hager’s energy, honesty and humor kept the crowd rollicking with laughter and applauding her seductive pole dancing. She has talent, guts, charisma, a taut petite frame and a treasure trove of distinct mannerisms, voices and impersonations. Over the course of the show, she plays a dozen characters, and plays them well. (Charlie, a stooped-back, foul-mouthed, African-American stripper, was a particular crowd favorite.)

“It’s a show dedicated to the outcast, the forgotten,” Hager says. “I wrote Naked in Alaska for any of us who have ever felt different and or on the fringe.” While the show may be dedicated to outcasts and other marginal figures, Hager’s search for something to belong to, her own “tribe,” is something that many, if not all us, can relate to. 

So get down to the Theatre of Whimsy (aka the C.O.W.), grab a few drinks at the lobby bar, and catch Naked in Alaska before it moves on to Chicago’s Fringe Festival at the end of the month. Because as one audience member said after the show, “I am so glad I came. So glad.”