Grandma's Kitchen

As one of three major productions this year, The H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players and New Heritage Theatre Group presented The Kitchen, written by Roger Parris and directed by Arthur French, at The Poet's Den on 309 East 108th Street. Featuring an all-black cast, the play is set during the 1950s in Harlem, where a boardinghouse landlord faces the predicament of allowing an ex-tenant a safe haven while he faces life or death. "Grandma" serves as a mother figure to everyone in the house — her kitchen their meeting place. Originally played by Louise Mike, Johnnie Mae steps in as Grandma after Mike sprained her ankle. Although she reads from a script, even using it as a prop, Mae did an excellent job conveying the message: blood is not always thicker than water.

During the opening scene, Taylor (Craig Anthony Bannister) is the topic of discussion among the tenants Ivan (Albert Eggleston), Muriel (Kimberlee Monroe) and Grandma’s cousin Philip (Ward Nixon) on a Saturday morning.  Taylor, an ex-tenant, is a known gambler. After giving all his winnings to the woman he loved, Taylor aims to get back on his feet after she flees the city with all his loot. During breakfast, Philip and Grandma have a pivotal fall-out, which confuses the audience — there’s really no basis but is the turning point of the play.

That evening, Taylor shows up at Grandma’s covered in blood, seeking refuge from the neighborhood hustler Raymond Peaks (Leopold Lowe). The scene is unseen, but Taylor describes the scuffle at the local bar; gambling, drugs, liquor and the badmouthing of his lover play their parts in Peaks stabbing him. It’s a bit unclear why Peaks is trying to murder Taylor; the story isn’t conveyed, but Grandma harbors him until he can plan an escape from the city. While at the boardinghouse, Taylor reflects to Muriel where he went wrong, acknowledging how he “always liked the fast life,” teaching her how to shoot craps. Muriel, just released from an asylum, conserves Taylor’s location, keeping him company during the day and playing Grandma’s numbers at night.

The show begins to pick up towards the second half where the more interesting scenes ironically happen outside of the kitchen between the male cast members. Over a bottle of whiskey, Peaks, Philip and Ivan are coming from the bar — Peaks hints at stabbing Taylor and tips the gents that he’s after him. The two men still have no idea Taylor’s hiding out in their own home; Ivan is unfazed but Philip is intrigued. Philip and Peaks appear to be in cahoots — Philip is leaving for South Africa and bringing Peaks back diamonds and possibly narcotics. 

In the next scene, Ivan relays the conversation he had with Peaks and Philip to Grandma and Muriel. Taylor is listening in the adjacent room. The girls continue to act aloof while the three of them celebrate Ivan’s birthday over a bottle of bourbon. Ivan tells Grandma she and Philip should reconcile to appreciate the meaning of family.

The next morning, Philip drops by and Grandma apologizes for losing her temper. He accepts but leaves with a piece of paper — a numbers slip with Taylor’s name and the date of a few days prior. The jig is up. He immediately informs Peaks that Taylor’s at the boardinghouse, on a park bench — a rather enjoyable scene with excellent lighting. They begin to conspire how Peaks can get into the house, posing a robbery to kill Taylor. Peaks asks why Philip would set up his cousin and he admits jealousy. 

In the last scene, Philip is able to rig the door for Peaks and leaves for South Africa immediately after, to avoid capture. Peaks holds Grandma, Muriel and Taylor at gunpoint and with an unexpected twist, Muriel stabs Peaks to death; causing her to slip into a mental state that lands her back into the asylum. 

The ending seems a bit rushed as they cut to three months later. Taylor leaves for Washington, D.C. to stay with his brother. Ivan brings Muriel to the house to visit Grandma; she hasn’t spoken since the incident, but after Grandma gives her a pair of dice left by Taylor, she instantly becomes herself again and the lights dim.

This show is very predictable in terms of racial issues and how they trigger thoughts of the time, but there isn’t much happening throughout the play besides the major scenes described. Centered around “the kitchen,” the only reference made is a spiel by Ivan and why it’s his favorite place. The story is good, but difficult to follow; the timing is a bit off and there are a few lines said with no transition, lead-up or explanation. However, the overall production is enjoyable, offering some comic relief and reputable acting. 

A Journey Home

What is an American? As children of immigrants, who are we really? And where are we from? Some ancestral homeland or from wherever we were raised? Questions such as these are at the heart of East Towards Home, written by Billy Yalowitz and directed by David Schechter, which recently ended its run at the Theater for the New City. At its best, this show is charming and relatable. At its worst, however, this show is nothing more than self-indulgent. This uneven play presents wonderful musical interludes, but the plot leaves much to be desired.

The story centers around a young man, played by David Kremenitzer, ostensibly our narrator/playwright Yalowitz at a younger age, trying to find his place in folk music and socialist revolution. In order to do so, we all travel back in time to meet him as a small boy, learning to play in his multi-racial neighborhood. We journey with him through the trials and tribulations of childhood, such as baseball tryouts, bullying, summer camp and annoying old neighbors. One such neighbor, Sylvie, portrayed by Eleanor Reissa, proves to be an essential cog in the story; she knew the young man's musical hero, Woody Guthrie, and participated directly in early to mid-twentieth century Communism in America.

When the show focuses on these satellite narrative threads, it is at its best. Sylvie’s story sheds light on a moment in our history often overlooked, bringing out the beauty of Yiddish speech and traditional dance. The highlight of the show comes in the fourth performer — Brian Gunter’s performing of folk music as Woody Guthrie. He is an extremely skilled musician, who brings to life both the sounds and meanings of this music style. The play consists of three interlocking narratives; these two and the play's driving narrative arc. Although this is meant to show the links between Guthrie, Sylvie, and our protagonist, it is often disorienting and left me wondering in which story we find ourselves at any given moment.

The tale of the young man, however, often falls flat. Despite wanting to sympathize with him, I found myself wondering why he felt so lost.  He seemed to have a great understanding of the world and to have been given some incredible opportunities. Yes, he was a victim of discrimination, anti-Semitism, and political oppression, which are no small matters, but he seemed to have the wherewithal to overcome it.  By including himself as an older man as a character, it was always clear he had found his way home. It also made it seem like this production was somewhat of a celebration of itself. He had overcome and lived to make a play of it.

All in all, the notion of a lost young person trying to find his place in the world does seem universal. The music is wonderful and the use of projections and direct audience address work nicely to engage the spectators in active thought about the issues presented.  Unfortunately, the takeaway is diminished by the story being too specific. Ultimately, this is not a play about us, the people bearing witness. It is an individual recitation, meant to show us who this particular person is, not what might be possible if we work together.

Voices from the Depths

Stories about illegal crossings reveal the bravery of those who confront innumerable dangers to escape terrible living conditions. Their goal is to ultimately achieve a better life for their families and themselves. Each immigrant has a deeply emotional story to tell about persecution, extreme poverty, sickness, the perils of the crossing, and the discovery that their destination is as filled with problems as their countries of origin. These are the stories that make up Rumore di acque (Noise in the Waters), a melologue, which is a short work created for voice and music, produced by Teatro delle Albe and written and directed by Marco Martinelli. The piece is a collection of all those migrant voices that can be heard along the Strait of Sicily, the 90-mile wide portion of the Mediterranean Sea that divides North Africa and Sicily. Some of their tales are being told for audiences at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club by a solitary demon on a volcanic island in the Mediterranean Sea.

In the melologue, a bureaucrat working for the Ministro dell’ Inferno (Minister of Hell), a clear reference to the Italian Ministro dell’ Interno (Minister of the Interior), is appointed to a deserted volcanic islet located in the middle of the Sicilian strait. The island is suggested in the bare theatrical space by a spiral of stones on the floor. The narrator stands at the center of the spiral, symbolizing his location within the bowels of the watery and volcanic hell. This figure wears dark sunglasses and a blue military uniform adorned with medals, establishing a physical reference to the now defunct Muammar Qaddafi. The General, magnificently performed by Alessandro Renda, explains in a gravelly voice that his job is to count and record all the African immigrants who have perished on their voyage to Europe. Nevertheless, the narrator never expresses any emotion towards the subjects and only shows outrage for the fish, which make his job harder by eating the flesh of the dead at sea. He is only interested in the numbers, a clear indictment of how Italian and North African governments are indifferent to the plight of immigrants.

Among his deliberations about numbers, his anger with the fish, and a discussion about how inferior bureaucrats should address him, the general tells us the sad stories of four African refugees. The character and his delivery never really lead the audience into an emotional involvement with his stories. The listener rejects everything that the narrator stands for. In this way, Martinelli resists manipulating the audience’s emotions and forces us to think critically about what the character really represents and where we are located in his narrative. Although the general is a representative of power, the refugees are still heard through the painfully beautiful music and vocals of Enzo and Lorenzo Mancuso. While the general is at center stage, the Mancuso brothers play and sing from stage right. They occupy a dreamlike space outside the volcanic islet from where their vocals act out the desperation and pathos of those who have sacrificed themselves for a better life.

Rumore di acque presents stories of refugees from Libya and many communities throughout the Sahara that are as relevant to Europe and Africa as to the United States and Latin America. The writing, direction, performance and music blend harmoniously to make audiences see the plight of immigrants and the indifference of those in power.

Rumore di acque is performed in Italian with supertitles in English. It runs until Feb. 16 at La MaMa's First Floor Theatre (74A East 4th St.). Evening performances are 7:30 p.m. on Thursday through Saturday; matinee performances are 2:30 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $18 and $13 for students and seniors. For tickets, call 212-475-7710 or visit www.lamama.org.       

Side Effects

In The Window, Marta Mondelli makes a compelling debut as both playwright and one-third of the piece’s ensemble. It’s a play that while rooted in the writer’s love for classic cinema is much less a locked-room mystery, and instead becomes more of a study of the time and its effects on women. With shows like Mad Men in the mainstream, we have all been inundated by iconic images of the mid- to late-1950s: a picturesque suburb; housewives in homes decked out with all the modern conveniences; and of course, all the advertising that came along with this new modern lifestyle. Basically, the very product of what was then a new industrial boom. However, while baking apple pies and being a homemaker like Donna Reed on acid may seem like a walk in the park compared to today’s modern-working woman, appearances can often be deceiving, as Mondelli further explores.

At the start of the play, we meet Eva (Cristina Lippolis), a young twenty-something who was recently jilted at the altar and has since spent what was to be her honeymoon working as a taste tester of sorts for a soda company.  As Tester Number 52, we watch Eva read her manual and look up various possible side effects of the experiment.  However, the side effects would ultimately end with not only physical repercussions, but psychological as well.  Throughout the duration of the play, Eva starts noticing suspicious activities outside her courtyard-facing window and begins to believe that a neighbor has been murdered. Skeptical of these supposed strange disturbances is Eva’s aunt Nora (playwright Mondelli), twice-married Park Avenue socialite who is staying in the apartment to keep her niece company.

What's intriguing about The Window was not only the feel of 1950s New York as soon as one enters the Cherry Lane Theatre's performance space (scenic designers Nicholas Biagetti and Pedro Marnoto cleverly put up a laundry line by the aisle seats, which hit you overhead just as find your seat), but also the thematic content itself. While there were certainly cinematic elements such as the use of the fourth wall as the titular window in question, the play felt more akin to some of the great literature that came out of that time — particularly, J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, in which a young girl suffers a breakdown. While Eva is certainly down the road to a breakdown herself, she appears to be holding onto a certain idea of womanhood she has been taught to attain for herself in the form of marriage. Nora, on the other hand, clearly despising the small "window" of time a woman is expected to enjoy her life, often proclaims to leave her wealthy husband for a humble and much younger writer, Bill (Scott Freeman). Thematically, this is effortlessly tackled throughout the play, most notably in Mondelli's dialogue. For instance, when referring to the pair of canaries left behind by Eva's ex-husband-to-be Spencer, Nora says to her: "They're birds: they were never meant to be caged." At this point, one can only wonder if it's only the birds she's talking about.

When a time period serves as another character as it does here, one has to expect it reflected in the look and feel of the entire production. As previously mentioned, the set design appeared historically accurate; short of acquiring an actual vintage Frigidaire icebox (which instead was painted onto a sepia-colored backdrop), the bottles of soda and canned goods handled by Eva seemed right out of the period, which added an authenticity to the production. Also adding a '50s touch are exquisite costumes (Nora's shift dresses and stylish trench coat), but also provided some interesting symbolism (Eva's yellow dress mirroring the yellow of the "caged" canaries.)

As for the actors, Lippolis' Eva moves with the grace of a ‘50s-era starlet, She is more than believable for her character's reserved, polite girl-next-door demeanor. In fact, she is perfect: from the way she moves across the room to the way she sips her soda, to even her diction – everything about her seemed like she jumped out of a black-and-white film and into our own Technicolor world. To think for a second that she might be like every tech-savvy twenty-something out there seems just as unlikely as the murder committed out of her window. As her aunt’s young lover Bill, Freeman too seems a man out of time, exuding a presence that recalls that of a young Marlon Brando a la A Streetcar Named Desire. To say that he holds his own against his female counterparts would be an understatement; he gives more to the character than what he has been given, and it is unfortunate indeed that Bill isn't explored more as a character. However, it is Mondelli herself who steals the show with her feisty and fabulous Nora. She has a dazzling presence onstage, as bubbly as the champagne she laps up and at once witty and surprisingly observant.

If you love old movies just as much as Mondelli does, than you'll delight in the subtle references the play makes. However, for fans who not only enjoy period drama, but love to reflect on its history, The Window is definitely a treat.

Human Contact in Internet Age

In the age of Facebook, texting, and Skype, everyone has heard a variation of the following expression at least once: “I prefer to speak to someone face to face rather than through a device.” This statement directly points to the problems of establishing human connections through the use of technology and media. Nevertheless, it is also very common to hear that technology brings the world closer together so that two friends can remain in contact regardless of their years of separation. We Were Nothing!, which was written by Will Arbery (in collaboration with Shelley Fort, Elly Smokler, Emilie Soffe, and Lisa Szolovits) and directed by Lisa Szolovits, avoids a simplistic answer to these judgments. Is that impossibility to communicate or achieve intimacy due to our dependence on technology or to a much deeper human limitation? The play’s references to communication technologies go back to the mid-twentieth century and the use of the telegram, which indicated the end of each sentence with a resounding "stop," and so refuses to accept that this failure to connect is a problem only limited to the Internet age. 

Despite the fact that the separation of the two main characters is at the center of the show, it takes place in a private apartment, managed for the production by Deidre Works (the exact location is confidential until tickets are purchased). The apartment’s living room has a capacity for approximately 30 audience members. This successfully recreates a cozy and intimate space from which to explore the distance between Shelley (Emilie Soffe) and Kelly (Elly Smokler). The comfortable and informal costumes by Clara Fath make the characters belong to that living room, even when they are communicating through technology from distant places. Isabella Byrd's lighting adds to the warmth of the location and at times transforms the living room into a virtual space, such as a switching on of a light which makes an opening on a wall become a computer screen through which the characters are able to Skype. Although the area is small, the actresses’ energetic performance is never restricted by spatial limitations. They jump through a partition opening, reveal a space hidden by curtains, and, one time, leave the performance area for a few seconds. At this point, even if the audience cannot see them, members remain riveted to their vocal presence, a proof of great theater acting.

In the play, Shelley and Kelly are twenty-something women with distinct and truthful personalities, a result of a strong artistic collaboration topped by Arbery’s writing, Szolovits’s direction, and the actresses’ performances.

While Shelley is somewhat insecure, needy, and a bit more open to share her emotions; Kelly is supportive and rather emotionally inexpressive, even when she appears to be outgoing. Both women reveal breakups, discuss a father’s illness, or make fun of past acquaintances by speaking to each other on their cellphones, e-mailing, texting, and Skyping. Yet no matter how many times they “like” one of their photos or comments on Facebook or reveal their fear of growing up through Gchat, each is incapable of effectively responding to the other’s personal questions or observations.  This idea is carried throughout the play and the action leads to their climactic face-to-face meeting. At this point, the play may provide an answer or raise more questions about intimacy and closeness in our world.

Is the inability to connect with each other in the twenty-first century due to the dominating role of technology or because of our human condition? By staging this distance in such a close environment, We Were Nothing! reveals in an entertaining way that the answer to this question may be elusive, yet crucial to each person present in that living room. 

We Were Nothing! will play a four-week engagement from January 17 to February 9, on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 5:00 p.m. The show will be performed inside a private residence near Union Square. The exact address and directions to the venue will be released only to ticket holders. Tickets are $20.00 and available online at www.artful.ly/store/events/2099.

Beach Blanket Bust

Actor-director-writer Chuck Blasius draws on tried-and-true antecedents for his new play, I Could Say More: in the vein of The Boys in the Band, a group of ostensible friends (but not all gay) gather, and in the process a lot of dirty laundry is aired. The bringing together of characters of disparate backgrounds goes back at least as far as Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, while the summer house setting (by Clifton Chadick) has been used effectively by Richard Greenberg in Eastern Standard; by Terrence McNally in Love! Valour! Compassion!; and by Chuck Ranberg in the charmingly nostalgic End of the World Party. At the Hudson Guild Theatre, however, a pall of staleness clings to this tedious, overlong production.

Blasius himself plays Carl, a writer facing midlife crisis who is one of the hosts. He has recently married his boyfriend of 15 years, Drew (Brett Douglas), and they have a son, Jason (Brandon Smalls). Carl and Drew are playing host to Drew’s middle-aged slacker brother Phil (Grant James Varjas), for whom Carl carries an inexplicable torch, and Phil’s date for the weekend, an easygoing "himbo" named Dyson (Frank Delessio) — although Phil has a husband who is working back in New York. Also present are Keith McDermott’s Skip, an older gay man of refinement and sensitivity who has worked as a director, and his foreign-born wife of many years, Rakel (Monique Vukovic), with whom he has a child from a heterosexual liaison (rather like La Cage aux Folles). Last to arrive are Lila (Kate Hodge), a hard-drinking longtime friend, and Joe (Robert Gomes), her brand-new, heavily tattooed working-class boyfriend who has a habit of mouthing politically incorrect observations — notably about Jason’s mixed race — but who has a fundamental decency.

Blasius does himself no favors by directing and acting in his own play; at times he drops vowels and his diction is muddy; scenes of overlapping dialogue in which he participates make neither conversation intelligible; and, given that Carl is a shrill, controlling martinet, the role requires an actor of much more charisma than the playwright possesses for an audience to warm to him. Carl’s obnoxiousness may be due to recently giving up drinking and smoking, but without sensing something pleasant in the character, an audience has no reason to care about him.

That lack of empathy strains the believability of the central relationship. Douglas’s Drew is a charming, self-effacing, yet unexpectedly strong partner, and clearly a doting father; it’s baffling that he would stay with Carl, or be attracted to him in the first place.

Much the same problem applies to Phil; Varjas swings between sullenness and recalcitrance. Blasius, however, has at least written some good speeches and scenes for the other cast members, and there’s a strong sense of the frayed fraternal bond between Drew and Phil, who are held together only by an inheritance that hasn’t been processed yet. In a play about gay relationships, one is conditioned to expect a good deal of bitchy humor, but there’s a dearth of it here. Occasionally a line brings a solid laugh, but the dourness of the proceedings overwhelms any lightness.

The complications that arise sometimes strain credibility. Carl hasn't planned dinner, so there are complaints of nothing to eat. (Strangely, the next day he claims to have “all this food from last night.”) Dyson is vegan, which would require that he communicate it in advance to his prospective hosts, not spring it on them. When Phil and Dyson want to go to a nearby gay bar but have been drinking, Drew refuses to give them his car keys. Yet one is expected to believe that Dyson, a complete stranger, steals the keys and goes anyway. 

Fortunately, McDermott, Gomes and Vukovic excel in lending varied dimensions to their characters. In particular, Vukovic brings a sense of painfully won wisdom to Rakel, who is being treated for breast cancer.

Brian Tovar’s lighting is well done, but too much is required of it in the plodding last scenes of the play, as the summer drags on and Carl lingers alone in a funk. In fact, by the time I Could Say More ends, one is relieved that nothing is left to say.

I Could Say More runs through Feb. 1 at the Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 W 26th St., between 9th and 10th Avenues. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and at 7 p.m. on Sunday; there is a special Monday performance at 8 p.m. on Jan. 27. Tickets may be ordered by calling 866-811-4111 or 212-352-3101 or visiting othersideproductions.org.

Theater of the Mind

Theater allows us to see people at their most vulnerable. In a live performance, anything can happen: lines can be forgotten, injuries can occur and things can always go wrong. Yet Ruff, by Peggy Shaw, reminds us how meaningful that vulnerability can be. We attend the theater to connect on a human level. Shaw invites us into her harrowing experience, giving us the chance to mourn, laugh, and love, along with her. In this, it is precisely what theater should — and even must — be to maintain relevance in an increasingly mediatized world.

In this one-person show, Shaw tells stories about her life, particularly her recent experiences surrounding and as consequence of her stroke. Medical dramas have the potential to be maudlin, but this production is transcendent. She finds not only the profundity but also the absurd humor in her, and our, human condition. At every turn, as witness to her trauma and triumph, it is hard to know whether to life or cry. This feeling is situated precisely at the crossroads of the ridiculous and the sublime, like so much of our experience of being alive.

She links her physical condition to deep philosophical ideas, making poetry out of even her darkest tales. Shaw expertly draws connections between what has happened to her and events that may seem far afield from one person’s stroke.  She muses about family, memory, community and technology. This last thematic element is key; the entire aesthetic of the theater links this intimately personal theatrical piece with our technologized world via television and projection screens.

Shaw does not shy away from her potential problems performing; rather, she brilliantly delights in them, drawing attention to them from the show's start. The choice of Shaw and collaborator Lois Weaver to provide the performer with her text via television screens on stage is brilliant. It works both to guide Shaw through the meandering, stream-of-conscious monologue while acting as subtle commentary on the presence of memory in a world in which everything is digitally recorded.

Shaw allows this theme of mind and memory to evoke the spirits of her great downtown forbears and contemporaries in the space of La MaMa's First Floor Theatre. Facing her own mortality makes Shaw face how many have been lost before her and what traces they have left behind. What is left when a live performance ends? Is a recording of that performance the thing itself or is it only in our untrustworthy memories that the plays of old reside?

This play addresses such grand questions without providing clear-cut answers, as theater is the place to ask, not necessarily explain. In its depth, Ruff is a slap-in-the-face reminder about the brevity and ephemerality of life. However, in its jokes, quips and witticisms, it is proof that it is only through humor that we can truly represent what it means to be human. And, in her bravery of being live in the theater with her audiences and her mind's images simultaneously, Shaw has created a piece of theater not to be missed.

Ruff runs from Jan. 9-26 at the La MaMa First Floor Theater on 74A East 4th Street. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at lamama.org. Adult tickets: $20; Students/Seniors: $15.

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.