Winnie and Willie

The Theater of the Absurd is a daunting prospect to the entertainment-seeking theatergoer—it requires the unconscionable appeal of, say, Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, whose season of Absurdist Theater last year brought Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land to Broadway. As Beckett decimated man's relationship to God and Pinter eulogized the doomed existence of memories and mind, audiences who had seen the X-Men movies or Lord of the Rings happily received their dose of British strangeness through the familiar faces of their beloved English thespians. Accordingly, this year, the Flea Theater’s production of Beckett’s Happy Days stars husband-wife team Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub, and through their familiar faces, they feed us that unfamiliar brand of the absurd.

Happy Days is insistently strange, as is director Andrei Belgrader’s conception of it; the premise of Beckett’s absurdist play holds that Winnie (played by the sparkling Brooke Adams) is stuck waist-deep in the Earth, while her husband Willie (Ms. Adams’ real-life partner Tony Shalhoub) is free to wriggle and struggle in a hole behind her. Sorrowful antics ensue as Winnie eventually reconciles herself to her happy entrapment. Winnie’s seemingly mindless babble—which we come to realize is a kind of coping mechanism, as well as the hidden engine of the play—is what she herself calls a “great mercy,” adding that “what one can bring up, one brings up all.”

Ms. Adams electrifies Winnie’s disillusioned musings on life’s slow passage; the otherwise strange and somber dialogue is rendered alive and active, so much so that even during Winnie’s particularly existentialist speeches, we find commonality in her persistent contentedness. Her pearly, infectious smile and rich, languorous voice hook us to our seats, as does the expressive grayness of her wide, limpid eyes. Her face is a performer all by itself since we only see her from the waist-up, and we rarely, if at all, see Willie’s face; Ms. Adams’ changing features are the only actors on stage that anchor us to Beckett’s dialogue.

Winnie’s props are an umbrella and a black bag that she takes significant comfort in—they are seemingly ordinary personal effects, but they take on a surreal life of their own as she meticulously presents them to the audience and proceeds to use them. She brushes her teeth, wipes her glasses, and shapes her fingernails in front of us, taking great pains in the doing. It is here, in these diurnal little acts of the everyman, that the ordinary theatergoer finds Beckett’s modern-day relevancies. He creates metaphorical meaning in the bland rituals of the everyday, and gives unsuspecting life to our possessions, shaming us for our grasping materialism but also identifying with us. Today’s encroachment of technology into our quotidian conventionalities is much like Winnie’s overweening attention to her lipstick, her toothbrush, her umbrella, her gun, or Willie’s penchant for reading aloud from the newspaper, or looking at erotic postcards (one of the few activities given to Willie, which Mr. Shalhoub soaks with comedy.)

Director Andrei Belgrader makes the production hum with a social and emotional dystopia that portends the end of life in more ways than one. Beckett’s dry observations (“the Earth is tight today” and “there is so little atmosphere”) are bleakly elemental, and even environmentally aware (a reference apropos of modern troubles.) The sun-bright lighting that trains on Ms. Adams’ captured form like many blinding spotlights is “the great heat” that Winnie spiritually beckons with the words “Hail Holy Light!” The set is a positive marvel of minimalist design—the yellow-brown hill that Winnie crowns and crows over slips into a depression behind her, shielding Willie from the sight of his wife, but not the sound of her voice. A panorama of blue skies contributes to the ostensible optimism of the production, all courtesy of scenic designer Takeshi Kata.

Yet, even with the magnitude of her role (Peggy Ashcroft called Winnie “one of those parts that actresses will want to play in the way that actors aim at Hamlet—a ‘summit’ part”), Ms. Adams minimizes her presence cleverly at times, watching the audience perform their laughs and silences just as we watch her slip in and out of her happy tragedies. Mr. Shalhoub, earthy veteran of stage and screen, is a discreet comedic presence, but his wife is the very symbol of theatrical emasculation as Winnie, and we can only pity Willie and laugh at him for his dazed benightedness. The happy days that the two share are peppered with Beckett’s discomfiting (yet deeply personal) existentialism, but the powerful, character-driven performance of Ms. Adams makes this a must-see for any complacently content theatergoer.

The Theater of the Absurd ran until July 18 at The Flea Theater (41 White St. between Church and Broadway) in Manhattan. For more information, visit www.theflea.org.

A Chinese Tragedy in Subtitles

At first glance, Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America's newest experimental production Behind The Mask seems as unapproachable and daunting as the foreign-language category of the Oscars. The entire play is spoken, performed and occasionally sung in that beautifully intimidating language, Mandarin Chinese. One might view it appreciatively from afar, mildly aware that time and effort has been put into presenting a culturally distinctive performance for a largely English-speaking audience. Film has progressed (in more ways than one) beyond that of its centuries-old grudging cousin, the theater. As with Ida, the winner of the Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, or as with any of the acclaimed films of Akira Kurosawa's pastoral Japan, Francois Truffaut's urban France, or Abbas Kiarostami's childlike Iran, one would expect theater to follow in film's foreign language experiment. But, as Behind The Mask shows us, the medium of theater performance does not always sit well with subtitles. 

Director Chongren Fan gambles with a single, slippery aspect of his audience's attention: that the subtitles running on a screen next to the performers will not distract from the performers themselves. Understandably, most of the audience is of Chinese descent, and the flashing white words do not faze them, but many (including this writer) possess an embarrassingly rudimentary understanding of Mandarin Chinese, and must prepare themselves for a veritable tennis match of reading the dialogue and actually watching the show. During one monologue, an actor mentions "the magic of attention" that first drew her into the world of theater. But the medium she professes to worship struggles to hold onto that magic, at least for English speakers watching an aurally enchanting, yet unhappily remote, Chinese-language performance.

But beyond such technical (and bodily) hardships, everyone in the audience—English or Chinese-speaking—understands that they are watching a play about a rehearsal for a play. A struggling theater troupe somewhere in China is putting on their production of an ancient myth about a tyrannical king who kills his master swordsmiths when he realizes that their blood is required to forge the world's sharpest blades. Sixteen years after the twin deaths, the swordsmiths' son Mei Jian Chi seeks his revenge against the bloodthirsty king, and (with a considerable recalculation of what it means to live and die) offers his decapitated "living head" as part of a deal to kill the ruler. In sporadic, poignant interruptions, the actors rehearsing the play break off into individual monologues, describing their lives as artists in a largely discouraging contemporary environment. 

Fan toys with several peculiar themes in Behind The Mask, but perhaps one is more ubiquitous than we think: life after death. Dead characters regularly walk and talk to living ones; death is signified by the removal of a brightly colored mask covering the actors' faces, and the mask itself becomes a "living head." Behind The Mask's ghosts, both real and cerebral, are as present as the living. Old vendettas and dead generational vengeances thrive in the hearts of the young, as do ancient values. In this respect, there is an organic, moving parallel to be drawn between Mei Jian Chi's quest to find his courage and each individual actor's risky decision to become a performer. Writers Fend BaiMing and Huang WeiRuo have mastered the stumbling, yet stirring, speeches of the sons and daughters of austere Asian parents. There is a controlled rebellion and rapt wonderment in their words as the actors of the theater troupe defend their creative decisions and their all-consuming love for the theater.

It is not difficult to picture any one of this play's actual performers delivering similar addresses to their own parents at some point in their lives. Behind their exuberant dialogue plays a rousing soundtrack, emotive and airy during the monologues, and warlike and drum-heavy during the mythologizing. It's no wonder that the music regulates the pulse of the play; composer Xiren Wang is a self-described "aural magician." More striking to the eye is the red-and-yellow-colored set, with flashy posters of Bruce Lee and eyeless Kabuki masks gazing out at the audience. A giant tragedy mask occupies center stage; it seems to portend an inevitable resolution to the play's tensions between life and death. So although the English speaker, that ever-adaptable breed of audience, finds a vexing inability to fully appreciate Fan's enchanting take on Behind The Mask, strong communal performances and a good deal of affable philosophy serve up a delicious, if neck-cracking, feast for their eyes and ears. 

Presented by the Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America, Behind the Mask—a Play by Chinese authors Feng BaiMing and Huang WeiRuo, ran at Theater for the New City (155 First Ave. between 9th and 10th Sts. in Manhattan) through July 12.  For more information, visit www.yangtze-rep-theatre.org.

The Devil’s Advocate

Classic Stage Company’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, directed by Andrei Belgrader, doesn’t do away with Marlowe’s mighty line, but his pioneering iambic pentameter has a hard time keeping up with a good deal of lowbrow tomfoolery inserted by Belgrader and his co-adaptor, David Bridel. To be fair, Marlowe larded his play with comic relief, but the CSC production often strains for humorous effect. Early on, when two necromancers visit Faustus, they speak in silly voices for no apparent reason, one of them sounding like a hoarse Munchkin. 

The comedy helps leaven the well-known story of death and damnation for the medieval scholar with encyclopedic knowledge who seeks omnipotence as well. Besides Marlowe’s play, its most notable appearances are in operas by Gounod and Busoni and in a novel by Thomas Mann (the last is not easy reading).

By selling his soul to Beelzebub, Faustus gains the service of Mephistopheles for 24 years, but he fritters away all the advantages he has with childish nonsense. He tweaks the Pope and European rulers; he summons long-dead historical figures (including Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” in Marlowe’s phrase); and has himself a lot of sexual fun. Initially, Faust demands that Mephistopheles find him a beautiful wife, but Mephistopheles tells him that marriage is a sacrament of God, and because Faustus has renounced God, he must be content with concubines. That’s apparently not a problem.

Bridel and Belgrader have understandably changed a great deal. They have cut whole passages skillfully, dropping many references to classical myths and characters and adding plenty of business that's not in the original, including audience interactivity that’s surely more close-up than Elizabethan actors ever got to their spectators. The changes get down to the nitty-gritty, too, as the adapters substitute individual words for ones they deem too obscure for a modern audience, and update archaic locutions. Thus Marlowe’s

Faustus, begin thine incantations
And try if devils will obey thy hest
Seeing thou hast pray’d and sacrific’d to them.

is streamlined to:

Faustus, begin your incantations
And see if devils will obey your will
Once you have prayed and sacrificed to them.

The reworking is extensive, and only occasionally puzzling. Surely Marlowe’s “The framing of this circle on the ground/Brings thunder, whirlwinds, storm and lightning” not only has better iambic scansion than “The framing of this circle on the ground/Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning,” but “storm” is also a word more commonly used than “tempest.”

As Faustus, Chris Noth handles the verse with clarity and intelligence, and he shows a troubled, ambitious, scornful spirit. But Faustus’s philosophical musings cannot sustain one’s interest entirely, so besides comedy, Marlowe includes pageantry (the Pope, an emperor, a selection of demons and phantoms) for the eyes. The pageantry here is pretty thin, but Bridel and Belgrader embrace the secondary plots more than that of Faustus, and the imbalance is noticeable. It’s present in the underlings enlisted by Faustus’s own servant, Wagner, who doubles as the Chorus: Lucas Caleb Rooney’s strapping Robin, who swipes Faustus’s books of magic with a barking, raffish energy to teach himself the dark arts; and then Robin’s own protégé, Ken Cheeseman’s idiot peasant Dick, who gives rise to plenty of punning. “I shall be the Devil’s Dick,” he cries exultantly, in just one of a series of Dick jokes that bump vulgarly against the higher-brow issues involving God and the fall of man. 

Zach Grenier brings a weary glumness to Mephistopheles, the devil who remembers longingly the joys of Paradise but who has adapted to the reality that he’ll never know them again. His glances at Faustus show what a fool he thinks the doctor is, and he seems the real tragic figure. Belgrader also includes a good deal of audience participation, as Mephistopheles sniffs out sinners at close quarters, and there is one clever twist as the Seven Deadly Sins are presented, although their forming a kick line as they whinny out a song is just directorial froufrou.

Still, if bumblers and hijinks diminish the tragic effect and Marlowe’s transporting poetry, the production retains integrity. And if Faustus’s final descent to the fiery pit isn’t likely to bring forth any catharsis, that’s partly because Faustus concerns himself with trifling pranks. It's too bad, though, that Belgrader couldn't imbue this production with a bit more gravitas.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus plays at Classic Stage Company (136 E. 13^th St. between 3rd and 4th Aves.) through July 12. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday-Thursday and 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets may be obtained by calling 212- 352-3101 or visiting www.classicstage.org.

Mamet in a Minor Key

The umbrella title Ghost Stories encompasses two David Mamet one-acts that were produced together 30 years ago by Lincoln Center. Now revived by the Atlantic Theater Company for its own 30^th anniversary—it was founded by Mamet, William H. Macy, Glenn Close and Kate Winslet—the productions of Prairie du Chien and The Shawl at the Atlantic’s Stage II are miniatures, yet they bear the signs of Mamet’s hand. They are not just for completist fans of the author, however.

The opener, Prairie du Chien, takes place in 1910 on a train traveling through Wisconsin. As two men play cards (Jim Frangione is the older; Nate Dendy the younger, the Dealer), it’s apparent that the older has been losing and is suspicious of the Dealer. Their play, however, is mere window dressing for the story that unfolds in the other half of the car, where a younger man, aka the Listener (Jason Ritter), sits with a child sleeping at his side. In short order, the Storyteller (Jordan Lage, one of Atlantic’s founding members) enters, and he begins to tell the story of a farmer, a black hired hand, and the farmer’s wife. It is a love triangle that ends violently, but it also has elements that are inexplicable unless one believes in the supernatural.

The farmer, it transpires, suspected his wife of infidelity and killed her and the hired hand, then set the house and barn on fire and hanged himself. The sheriff and the Storyteller rode up and saw the flames; the former attended to the house, where the wife was, and the Storyteller rushed to the barn, where he found the hired hand and the wife, in a red dress, dead. But the sheriff claims the wife was in the house and directed him to the barn. The strangeness of the story increases as the red dress takes a crucial role in the bizarre tale of the sheriff’s demise years later.

Under Scott Zigler’s direction, the description of events unfolds in a leisurely manner, slowly building suspense; for both plays Jeff Croiter's atmospheric lighting contributes immeasurably to a mood of dread and uncertainty. Prairie du Chien originated as a radio play, however, and it depends heavily on dialogue, which Lage’s Storyteller delivers in a subdued manner, sometimes bordering on inaudible. Although a burst of violence—the only one in the evening—brings the story to a climax, the reliance on narration mutes some of the interest.

The Shawl is the more successful of the two. In it, a psychic (Arliss Howard) reels in a woman, Miss A (Mary McCann) as he “divines” why she has come to him and what her problem is. Howard plays the psychic beautifully, pausing and seeming to pull images out of the ether, with faraway looks and soothing speech, always using suggestion to help her reveal points about herself. He is assisted by his protégé/lover Charles (Ritter again), who wants to make a quick killing. “It comes down to confidence,” John, the psychic, explains to him. “They’ll test you. And you can do nothing till you have their trust.” John’s power to read clients rivals that of Sherlock Holmes, but Miss A proves particularly tricky.

McCann (also a founding member of the Atlantic) taps into Miss A’s wariness, yet also displays at times a brisk confidence. The table reading scene is particularly effective, as Howard’s bogus diviner plants the seeds of belief and tries to nurture them the trust of his mark. Miss A has a problem that she wants a decision about, and his ability to read her helps him lead her to it. Mamet has a double twist in store, however, that brings the drama to a fascinating, eerie conclusion.

The one-acts fit together nicely, since both are about what one can trust as true and what cannot be trusted. The search for the truth, suggests The Shawl, may lead to it, but in unexplainable ways. The revival of these one-acts are a fitting tribute to the Atlantic and its co-founder.

The Atlantic Stage II hosts Ghost Stories: The Shawl and Prairie du Chien through June 28 at 300 West 16^th St. Evening performances are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Matinees are at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets may be purchased by calling Ovation Tix at (866) 811-4111 or at ovationtix.com; or by visiting the box office at 336 W. 20^th St. or visiting atlantictheater.org.

In Persistence of Mediocrity

Francis Newton Souza was an Indian-born visual artist who skyrocketed to the top of the London art scene in the late 1950s. His work at the time was heralded as “uncovering the underbelly of existence,” and the artist himself had “upturned everything.” Soon his fame dwindled, and he struggled to sell even his inoffensive landscapes (over his more emotive, sexually charged nudes). When Souza died a depressed, bankrupt pauper in 2002, his art began to sell at auction houses and museums like ice cream on a hot day. Sam Marks, writer of The Old Masters currently running at The Flea Theater, is particularly fascinated with this phenomenon: that of the "lost artist," the rebel in absentia. As his main character morosely points out, "There have been a few artists… who turned their back on the art world, in one way or another, and then became hot."

The play deals with failed artist and expectant father Ben Schmitt (Rory Kulz) as he fights against what he thinks is a slow descent into suburbia and ordinariness. His beautiful, sharp-tongued, architect of a wife Olive (Alesandra Nahodil) is pregnant, but her desire for a nuclear family is a menacing specter to Ben. His old art school friend Henry Olson has disappeared, but the latter’s paintings arrive at Ben’s door one morning, brought along by Henry’s girlfriend, the prettily mysterious Lara (Adelind Horan). As he shows them to galleries and his friend’s works cast a spell over the art world, Ben seeks to find his own calling, even at the cost of a lost artist’s success. 

The main stage at The Flea Theater is decidedly small (it seats 74 at maximum capacity), yet an even smaller space (seating 40) exists below it. The “joyful hell in a small space” that the Flea seeks to instill through performance is perhaps taken a tad too seriously; walking into this basement-like set is the first jolt of unnerving intimacy we get as the production runs its hour-and-a-half long course. The space itself is a long rectangle, perfect for set designer Andrew Diaz’s vision of an unfinished apartment, complete with piles of sheet rock, scaffolding, and dozens of half-opened cardboard boxes. The program includes a description of a featured artist’s works that hang on the incomplete walls of the set, in a rather ironic stab at publicity for contemporary visual art. 

The production is rife with a high Chelsea dialect, unique to that district’s art scene both in attitude and vocabulary; for instance, here’s Ben talking to a gallerist about Henry’s work: “There are touches of the photorealism. But when comparing them to other neorealists it’s not steely, like Richter, and it’s not candy coated, like Elizabeth Peyton.” But to shield us from our intellectual insecurities, there is Lara, the laid-back, spontaneous manic pixie dreamboat, with her defensive indifference to Rauschenberg and Klee and Richter. The rapid-fire delivery of the lines, particularly between Kulz and Horan, is reminiscent of Hollywood oldies like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, minus the screwball comedy, but double the erotic will-they-won’t-they. Director Brandon Stock’s “examination of marriage” might have benefited from fewer shouting matches and a greater focus on the couple’s dynamics itself; Horan’s Lara, rather than said dynamics, dominates the production. Yet there is a wry cynicism in Kulz’s performance that slowly progresses to despairing disillusionment, and his character is often brought down to earth by a staunchly realistic wife, played to sympathetic perfection by Nahodil. 

Kulz as a particularly reflective Ben. 

We find it especially difficult to sympathize with the main character; indeed, Ben spends most of the play as the insensitive, pretentious, wannabe-Old-Master who seeks to dethrone his Souza-esque best friend from the “allure of the lost artist” that Henry possesses. But it is in Ben’s temperamental evolution where Marks’ charged, controlled script reaches its dramatic crescendo, in more ways than one. At the tail end of a destructive fight between Ben and Olive, the audience finally understands the extent of Ben’s ambition, and how that ambition isn’t so different from our own. Ben seeks to rise above his forced mantle of mediocrity, and he struggles under the lightness of its weight: “I have tried. For years I have tried to be the guy who teaches a little and works a little and goes out a little and had a little career and fucks a little and has a little family and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t fucking work.” 

It is this passive struggle that seems to be the perennial cause of our own rare, active movements: quitting a dead-end job, abandoning a troubled marriage and ending a toxic friendship. Ben does all of these things, thinking it will give him a chance to soar above the rest of the muddled, mediocre heap of humanity and place him alongside the echelons of the Old Masters. But all he does is join our ranks. So if you don’t mind a few glancing blows to your comfortable existence, or a sudden urge to reshuffle your priorities, Marks’ new play is well worth a visit. 

The Old Masters runs until June 28 at The Flea Theater (41 White Street between Church and Broadway). Performances are Monday-Saturday at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. (Note: there are no performances June 23-26.) Tickets are $15-$35 with lowest priced tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis. For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or visit www.theflea.org.

A Lost Family

Middle-aged hippie housewife and Beatles’ fan Anna (Deborah Offner) is at the center of her dysfunctional family as she tests her Catholic faith and battles with the “awful monkey in [her] head” during the days before Christmas. The “monkey” is actually a belittling teenage version of herself as Anna 2 (Catherine Dupont), who recalls Anna’s past abortion and drug use. Her Jewish atheist husband Henry (Larry Cahn) suffers from dementia and sleeps his days away on the couch as their adopted 18-year-old son Jude (Adam Weppler) smokes marijuana and seeks his own identity.

Playwright Nancy Manocherian explores how this family struggles with loss, identity and being incomplete with the past. Anna “had to pay for [her] father’s suicide” because of her abortion and Henry stopped “being a Jew” when he was bullied as a boy. Jude never met his biological Romanian mother and believes the “cockroach will survive, but [humans are] on a path of entropy.” Even when Anna is confronted with a life-altering situation, her denial does not allow her to take responsibility for her actions. Hey Jude attempts to venture beyond a psychological inquiry into socially impaired family dynamics and leaves the audience craving closure with these characters.

Jude’s challenge to grasp his father’s dementia is authentically performed by Weppler. The dynamics between Jude and his retired father reminded me of my younger cousin who struggled to make sense of his father’s multiple sclerosis. Jude is so eager to understand Henry, but he cannot relate because Jude has never had dementia. Jude does his best to care for his father and wants to bond by attending sporting events together. Henry brings comic relief by wearing an adult diaper on his head and then later returns wearing Anna’s church hat. Even though Henry’s dementia is the elephant in the room, Anna’s lunacy does not give Henry the space to develop as a character. Also, instead of being an insanity trigger for Anna, Anna 2 could be a stronger antagonist for Dupont to portray. Offner effectively conveys her character's extreme complexities and subtle need to control everyone in her life. Director Kira Simring has the challenge of creating sufficient room for all of these characters to breath so they are not overshadowed by Anna’s mental illness. Hey Jude could be mistaken for Hey Anna.

The set design by Peiyi Wong increases this production’s value with an ideal living room outside of New York City in 2007. The light colored walls, shelves, curtains and hardwood floors allow for the decorated Christmas tree to instantly set the holiday tone. Finding Henry asleep on the plush, brown sofa and holding a pillow with the television on is like standing in a neighbor’s living room. This home is a natural representation of many modern households in America. However, the missing wall next to the xylophone is a distracting black hole and when the actors point at cockroaches there are none to be seen. The morning light in the windows by lighting designer Gertjan Houben adds to the ethereal feeling that the audience is waking up with this family, and we get to see how Henry starts his day.

For audience members who did not grow up listening to the Beatles, they might not relate to the Beatles’ nostalgia that Anna shares, or the era that she experienced as a young woman. The generational contrast can be felt when Jude says, “There’s never anything to eat in this house. Unless you’re a vegetarian, and Paul McCartney doesn’t live here.” Likewise, when Henry refers to the song “Rumania, Rumania,” some might not get the cultural reference or know of Yiddish jazz singers, The Barry Sisters, who were popular during the 1950s. Lastly, when Anna sings her version of Shirley Ellis’ “The Clapping Song” from 1965, some might not recognize the original lyrics. If you are not familiar with these songs, they are worth listening to online and reading the lyrics for their stories.

Hey Jude falls short of conveying a clear message and allows a general audience to draw their own conclusions. It is like driving past a fight on the side of the road and later wondering if the police or an ambulance ever came to take anyone to the hospital. We want to know if these characters ever find any peace or if they just continue to cope with their circumstances. The value is seeing aspects of our own family members in these performances. Hey Jude is recommended for those who are not so concerned about a resolution and are entertained by watching a modern family struggle.

Hey Jude runs until June 21 at Urban Stages (259 West 30th St. between 7th and 8th Aves.) in Manhattan. Evening performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., and matinee performances are Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased by visiting thecelltheatre.org or by calling Brown Paper Tickets at 800-838-3006.

A Man Unmade

On the night of a performance, the stained glass windows in the Theatre at St. Clement's are shuttered up, and the fans spin drowsily above the darkened rostrum. The only light filters mutely through a grimy window of an abandoned warehouse on stage. The production company that has chosen the modest chapel to stage its newest play is The Private Theatre, which has a self-described penchant for “staging productions in unexpected venues.” So while St. Clement's might masquerade as a place of worship on Sundays, the dim, churchly setting belies the emotional violence of director John Gould Rubin’s production of A Queen for a Day.

An aging “made man” in the Costa crime family, Giovanni “Nino” Cinquimani (a chameleonic David Proval) is faced with a dilemma when he is told to give up his mob boss brother Pasquale “Pat” Cinquimani (Vincent Pastore) as part of a one-day immunity deal also known as "a queen for a day." Nino’s wary lawyer, Sanford Weiss (David Deblinger) urges his client to take the proffer agreement, but Nino’s loyalty to his brother and the crime family, as well as a lover from the past (in one of the more astonishing plot twists of the production) torment his final decision. Mononymously-named actress Portia plays the biting, disdainful federal prosecutor (Patricia Cole) who pushes Nino’s buttons, resolute in her determination to hear damning evidence against Pat Cinquimani.

David Proval’s blustering depiction of a “made” man slowly brought to pieces by his secretive past easily carries the production. Nino's apprehensions balloon as the primary players (Proval, Portia and Deblinger) triangulate about the stage in choreographic strategy. Rubin plays with the script’s alluring tension between masculinity and effete weakness to great effect, and the almost-bare stage is appropriate for the passions that seize the anguished main character. 

Proval and Pastore’s staccatic, shoulder-shrugging gestures and drawling, Italian-Brooklyn accents are immediately reminiscent of that particular brand of Mean Streets machismo and swear-happy dialogue from The Sopranos. Indeed, Proval brings some of his Sopranos character Richie Aprile’s irascibility to Nino, as does the hugely impressive Vincent Pastore, whose Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero was a popular mobster on the HBO show. Even Proval’s respective character histories are striking in their coincidence: Richie Aprile worked for his younger brother, a famed mob boss, as does Nino, who serves as a caporegime under Pat, “the boss of all bosses.” But the presiding influence on this nostalgic play is the Italian-American neighborhood sentimentality that seeps through the mannerisms and the accented confrontations, and it is the result of a series of deliberate choices in the script, written by lawyer-turned-playwright Michael Ricigliano, Jr.

Through Nino, Ricigliano paints a picture of a cohesive Brooklyn community, heavy with Italian-American tradition: “The widows dressed in black for husbands who’d been dead for 30 years. All the old-timers played brisc and raced pigeons… we played stickball all day and parents thought nothing of smacking their neighbors kids like their own.” The famed mafiosi loyalty to blood and crime family kinship are adequately expressed as well: both Nino and Pat have a deep, unfettered love for their mother (who isn’t “crazy” like other Sicilian women), hatred of all things weak, and an ambition for all things "respectable." Consequently, Nino’s eventual breakdown becomes especially pitiful; there is a minute-long scene where the two brothers cry together on stage. Even when the dialogue slips into heavy-handed commentary—the gentrification of north Brooklyn is taken particularly seriously—the performances offset it with careful, nuanced delivery. A lengthy exposition on a Catholic festival’s annual Dance of the Giglio is punctuated beautifully with Proval’s breathy singing voice.

In a splendid cooperation of scenic and lighting design by Andreea Mincic and Isabella F. Byrd, there is a set and light change halfway through this intermission-less drama, but it involves none of your blacking-out, between-scenes music that usually accompanies the scraping of furniture or taps of hurried footsteps across the changing stage. The play ends on an irreverently cinematic note, suitably shocking and Scorsese-esque in its scope. The violence that usually accompanies a tale about mafiosi crime families explodes after an emotional peak, leaving the viewer somewhat distressed as the lights return and the actors take their bow. But genre-lovers will thrive on the conscious nods to wiseguy braggadocio, the darkly humorous jibes at crime culture, and an undeniably potent assembly of old Sopranos stars. Or, if you’ve only watched The Godfather once and think Gotti is a kind of Italian cheese, you get to see a most unusual mob boss sing and weep on stage.

A Queen for a Day is written by Michael Ricigliano, Jr. and directed by John Gould Rubin. It runs through July 26 at Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 West 46 St. between 9th and 10th Aves.). Evening performances are Sunday through Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. Matinees are held on Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 and available for purchase by phone at 866-811-4111 and 212-352-3101 or online at http://aqueenforadayplay.com/tickets/.

Dean Martin at Cafe Verona

Shakespeare's best romances, whether they end in tears or in double weddings, start off fraught with comic possibility, and most stagings of The Two Gentlemen of Verona are intensely aware of that fact. Director Hamilton Clancy and The Drilling Company's production of one of the Bard's earliest plays is properly sensitive to said comedic potential, even in the somewhat chaotic environs of Bryant Park on a weekend afternoon. The play seems particularly popular this season, with an acclaimed production by Fiasco Theater running concurrently with this one. A three-storied stage serves as a set for both Cafe Verona and the Emperor's Court in Milan; Shakespeare's two gentlemen gravitate between the two cities, just as their inconstant affections flit from one girl to the next. 

An ambitious Proteus (Brian Patrick Murphy) woos a particularly fearless Julia (Tori Ernst) in Verona, while his friend Valentine (Andrew Gombas)—Shakespeare’s requisite love-mocker—goes to Milan to seek his fortunes. Both Valentine and Proteus fall hard and fast for Silvia (Kristin Piacentile), and later deal with the oncoming storm of nascent comedic devices dear to the Bard’s heart: lost love letters, cross-dressing women and fickle men. The unsurpassed star of the show is Chewy-Bear Aquino, the winsome little dog that plays Crab; he almost outperforms his master, Launce (Eric Paterniani). 

The comic performances are reliably humorous, with a fantastic Speed (Drew Valins) and near-incoherently accented Launce, played to perfection by Eric Paterniani. Bryant Park on a spring evening is anarchic, and the players strive to hold our attention; Brian Patrick Murphy struts about and gestures like a Mean Streets antihero (Mr. Murphy is involved in Mr. Scorsese’s upcoming Rock N’ Roll project), while Julia and her wonderfully sassy best friend Lucetta (Lauriel Friedman) engage in girlish banter and the odd catfight.

But there’s a reason why The Two Gentlemen of Verona isn’t performed on stage as much as other works in the Bard’s canon. Lines of love and longing that would later become peerless in Shakespeare’s romances are rendered lukewarm here, barring perhaps Valentine’s famous love monologue to Silvia. The words utterly redeem Clancy’s bumbling-in-love Valentine and give him the deep solemnity of a lovelorn, despairing man torn from his betrothed: "What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?"

Shakespeare’s early play depends greatly on the manic expressiveness and movement of its actors (it was performed with restless gusto by a Royal Shakespeare Company revival of Two Gentlemen last year), but Clancy otherwise mutes what might have been rip-roaring situational comedy in favor of schmaltzy music cues and no-fear-Shakespeare every man references (“I am one that am nourished by my/ victuals: Chipotle!” and “stop mewling like a bum on the L train!”). At times, there seemed to be more humor in the glances of passers-by eyeing the makeshift stage with the wary curiosity of watching a street performance and hearing Old English simultaneously. 

But the undisputed strength of this Two Gentlemen production rests on this theme: the easy forgiveness of friends. The neat double wedding that concludes this Elizabethan comedy could just as easily have been a funeral: when Proteus begs Valentine’s forgiveness for trying to steal his girl, there is a moment of unyielding hatred in Gombas’ raised fist, and the audience wonders (as it often does in Shakespeare’s dark comedies) if Valentine will go the way of Vergil’s Aeneas and strike down his mercy-seeking enemy. Instead, he lets his hand fall and embraces his best friend in forgiveness, as does Julia, who has a startlingly pre-feminist line: "it is the lesser blot, modesty finds/women to change their shapes than men their minds."

The set seems deliberately makeshift, with three raised platforms serving as a restaurant, an emperor’s court and an outlaw’s hideout (appropriately called Governor’s Island, in keeping with the production’s New York flavor) but set designer Jennifer Varbalow makes the festive Little Italy habitat quite endearing. The setting itself is unabashedly Italian, and Dean Martin’s lilting voice is a constant refrain between scene changes. Perhaps "That's Amore" too neatly captures the senseless scrappiness of love; it’s one of those songs that play on a loop in your head. So if you're looking for that elusive alliance between Shakespeare and New York City, this season's Bryant Park Shakespeare might just serve you with a decent caper through Little Italy and a few laughs for good measure. 

Presented by Bryant Park Shakespeare, The Drilling Company's production of Two Gentlemen of Verona ran from May 15- 31 at Bryant Park (6th Ave. at 42nd St.) in Manhattan. For more information, call 212-873-9050 or visit www.shakespeareintheparkinglot.com and www.drillingcompany.org.

All That Jazz

For many Americans, the height of the Jazz Age undoubtedly reached its apex in the Roaring Twenties; particularly, when the Harlem Renaissance had both black and white night owls of the country flocking to the neighborhood's mysterious speakeasies and smoky basement-level dens for some of the best live music New York City had to offer. However, for playwright John Attanas, the very new, percussive sounds of jazz was only just beginning to find its groove, as the country moved into the early 1950s. Such is the world of Attana's newest work, All Gone West.

Set in post-war New York City, we meet Sam Samos (Joseph Robinson), a young and handsome war vet who learns about the fast-paced rhythms of the city—and of course jazz—from his fellow vet and black saxophone player Sonny Green (Jesse Means). Not long after settling in the city, Sam finds himself falling for Mary (Kristen French), a beautiful secretary at City College, whom he encounters one night when she walks into his bar with an older man, Joe (Glen Williamson), a professor at the college with alcoholic tendencies. They hit it off, and after Sam's persistence, Mary gives in and they begin a courtship, leaving Joe to his own devices.

The two lovebirds eventually marry despite their clear differences: Sam, an idealistic modern, is intent on one day opening his own jazz club, while Mary leans towards the conventional, with no high ambitions and generally happy with the lot she is given. These differences start to strain their marriage as Sam finally makes his dream come true, with the help of his friend Willie (Anthony Bosco), a fellow gambler whose questionable connections provides Sam's dream the financial help it needs. His club—christened The Blind Spot—starts off smoothly enough until Sam has trouble booking jazz acts that would draw crowds. He looks to Sonny, who by now has been approached with a record deal, but also has been nursing a drug addiction. As the bills start piling up, Sam desperately attempts to get by with some further help from Willie, as well as the hire of a prostitute (Kristen Booth). Ultimately, their business folds, and the two decide to follow the national pilgrimage West, where better—if only practical—prospects lay ahead.

Told in a magical realist-style, with the two lovers narrating between scenes, West's mood is evocative of the film noir genre that was popular during that era, and particularly called to mind films like Sweet Smell of Success and The Big Sleep. Just as the genre plays with contrasts, so does the thematic through-line of the play itself: the conventional versus the unconventional, new versus old. This is reflective not only in the fact that jazz inherently defies convention, but also in the differences between the characters—in particular, that of the ambitious Sam, and the content Mary. In their respective leading roles, both Robinson and French seem plucked straight out of the period. From the way Robinson's cool vibe to French's spot-on "New Yawk" accent, they embody stars of a bygone era. Cementing these solid performances were the supporting cast. Means' Sonny is confident and cool, yet belies a vulnerability. Another vulnerable portrayal was that of Williamson, whose alcoholic Joe displayed his weaknesses from the very beginning. Both characters each succumbed to their addictions, but their respective arcs are buoyed by the performances of both actors. Finally, Booth, whom perhaps had the most difficult task of the night, portraying multiple characters, also proved to be another strong presence onstage.

Also vital in setting the overall mood of the play was the presentation itself: the set designed by Andrew Diaz was naturally minimal in the modest performance space. Despite these limitations, the audience was nevertheless transported in time. Furnished by a simple brick wall structure, plastered onto which are various vintage posters, featuring advertisements for department store Gimbels and the Aqueduct racetrack. The use of various props—which include a dining table set and other pieces such as vintage glass soda bottles, newspapers and telephones—also help in differentiating between locales and situations. Nicholas Staigerwald's costumes added another dimension dressing the actors in various sartorial styles that were typically in vogue at the time, and worthy of any Modcloth shopper's envy today—particularly, a monochrome polka-dot one-piece bathing suit Mary dons towards the end. Of course, the element that perhaps had the most impact was the live jazz band, which brought to life the era in which the characters lived, and provided a romping soundtrack to the story.

A play about all kinds of losses—from the old to the new; the death of New York and the rise of the East Coast—All Gone West is certainly anything but your average show.

All Gone West ran from March 28 to April 18 at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th St. between 2nd Ave. and Bowery). For more information on this production, visit the show's website: http://allgonewest.org/.

Troubles in Mind

Catholicism and politics are at the forefront of Nate Rufus Edelman’s bittersweet drama The Belle of Belfast, being given a compelling production at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Edelman follows a small Catholic community in the Northern Ireland capital in 1985 as they negotiate the dominant strands of the troubles and how deeply they are ingrained in people’s lives.

The focus is on Father Ben Reilly (Hamish Allan-Headley), a 35-year-old priest, and his relationship to parishioners, two in particular. One is Emma Malloy, an elderly lady with a shaky grasp of sin. Embodied with warmth and earnestness by Patricia Conolly, the befuddled Emma stretches herself trying to find mistakes in her behavior, as Reilly repeatedly assures her that she hasn’t sinned. Her confession of taking a sip of whisky—Bushmills, she says—falls flat after Reilly assures her that a sip of whiskey doesn’t require penance. Then, conscious of the smallest political error, Emma makes a further clarification: it was poteen, not Bushmills. “I would never touch a Protestant whiskey,” she says.

Under director Claudia Weill, the wry humor of these scenes is a welcome contrast to the main event, which involves Emma’s great-niece, Anne (Katy Lydic), a red-haired knockout who has little use for Catholicism, let alone the church. Anne attends confession at her aunt’s instigation with great reluctance and scorn. She swears and makes clear to Reilly that she does drugs, has sex, and generally ignores church teachings. Her drifting moral compass is a result of the killing of both her parents in a bombing. That alone isn’t the most hurtful part—it’s that people regarded her parents as martyrs, although they were innocent bystanders. Anne loathes the politics that elevate her parents to political heroes and override her personal loss.

Reilly feels kinship toward Anne because he was also orphaned. After his parents were killed in a car accident, Reilly was determined to become a priest to make them proud. Unfortunately, Anne knows no boundaries. “Do you have anything to confess?” asks Reilly, and she responds, “No, I just came here to give you a blow job.” It’s the kind of thing an unruly teenager would say, but Lydic looks about 10 years older than the 18-year-old character, and it hampers some of the credibility of the play. However, Allan-Headley as Reilly is a compelling presence: sympathetic, vulnerable and masculine. The actor conveys the cleric's internal struggles, and he has the gift of charisma that makes it clear why Anne falls for Reilly. (All the actors, incidentally, have persuasive Irish accents.) 

John McDermott’s set nicely echoes the compartmentalization of emotions that are hemming in the principals. When the characters are not in the confines of the confessional, there are two primary playing areas. One is the small parish apartment that Reilly shares with Father Dermott Behan (Billy Meleady), a firebrand Sinn Fein partisan who has made peace with abnegation—no sex, but plenty of alcohol—and  expects to find a heaven where he can surf. The other half of the stage shows a concrete dock and a high wall topped by barbed wire, where Anne frequently meets her friend Ciara (Arielle Hoffman) to talk about boys and sex. Both spaces are prisons for their respective characters.

Ultimately, Anne (her nickname provides the title of the play) leads Reilly astray, but not for long, and the aftermath isn’t what one might expect. The doctrinaire Behan, who hears Reilly’s confession, holds fast to the outlook that plagued Belfast in 1985: “I’ve dedicated ma entire existence to a united Catholic Ireland and you have the gall to betray your church and your country…” But Reilly understands that political and religious doctrine can stand in the way of success as a priest. In a lovely coda, Anne and Reilly meet a few years later, and each has moved on from the experience, both physically and mentally. Anne has found happiness. Reilly has found solace. It’s a satisfying close to this poignant tragedy.

Nate Rufus Edelman’s The Belle of Belfast plays through June 7 at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s temporary home at DR2 Theaters (103 East 15th St.) off Union Square. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit www.irishrep.org or call the box office at 212-727-2737.

Middle-Class Morality on the Block

Compared with A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts usually has gotten short shrift as a dramatic document about women’s rights, even though its protagonist, Mrs. Alving, is as modern and self-sufficient as any Ibsen heroine. Richard Eyre’s astonishing adaptation, which runs only 90 minutes without intermission at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, confirms that Ibsen’s 1882 play is as timely as ever. None of the three acts feels foreshortened—it’s a full meal. It is also a magnificent production.

Both Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, who championed the Norwegian playwright’s work in England, kicked Victorian melodrama to the curb, as it were, and introduced politically and socially conscious realism to the stage. At BAM, Eyre makes one feel the full weight of the change.

With only five characters, Ghosts also displays Ibsen’s characteristically tight plotting. Lesley Manville’s Helene Alving has welcomed her son Oswald (Billy Howle) home to Norway after has lived abroad for years. His father has died, and a new orphanage named for him is to be dedicated by Pastor Manders, a family friend, and, it turns out, someone with whom Helene had been in love. Indeed, she had left her husband, Captain Alving, with the intention of taking up with Manders, then a divinity student. Though the spark between them might easily have been fanned into a flame, he persuaded her to return to her home, where she remained as Alving’s seemingly loyal wife, though she eventually sent Oswald away to boarding school. Two additional characters, old Jacob Engstrand, a coarse and brutal carpenter with the idea of opening a “home away from home” for sailors, and his daughter, Regina, who works at the orphanage and loathes her father, are on hand as well.

As Mrs. Alving, Manville, a veteran of gritty realism in many Mike Leigh films, shows a character with personal composure and limited patience for cant. When Will Keen’s straight-laced, judgmental Manders notices pamphlets about feminism and free love on her parlor table, he takes her to task, but she challenges him—has he read them? “One must rely on the views of others,” he says, a response that echoes today in arguments involving morality and the church.

An early contretemps over whether the new orphanage should be insured provides an example of Ibsen’s mordant humor—something that director Eyre doesn’t stint on, in spite of the playwright’s reputation for seriousness. Manders understands the importance of insuring the new building, but he’s afraid that taking out insurance will imply that God can’t be trusted to protect the structure. When Helene finally acquiesces to his foolish view, Manville unveils the character’s frustration in the way she opens a desk drawer and tosses her spectacles and a blotter in. And Keen brings out every bit of Manders’s cluelessness, yet draws sympathy for a man who adheres to his hidebound principles, whose so-called morality has exposed his venality. The ghosts of the title, says Helene to Manders, are “the things that come out of the past…not just the people that haunt us, but what we inherit from our parents: dead ideas, dead customs, dead morals. They hang around us and we can’t get away from them.”

The strong stream of anticlericalism that runs through Ghosts (along with mentions of incest, syphilis, and sexual freedom) made it as big a target for condemnation as A Doll's House, and even today one can feel the earth tremble as Oswald excoriates Manders and his views. Oswald, who has lived in Paris among bohemians, espouses free love and expresses his disdain of Norwegian “worthies” who come to Paris looking for the sexual indulgences that they disapprove of at home. (One feels at times that Ibsen, who lived abroad for more than 20 years and carried on with a much younger woman, is speaking through Oswald.)

Bourgeois morality is also represented by Charlene McKenna’s Regina. She is ready for middle-class morality, and is attracted to Oswald—and vice versa. She wants the orphanage job to support herself and stay away from her father, who’s a drinker and a laborer. Old Jacob, too, schemes for advancement, but he also suspects that society would rather keep him in his place, so he latches on to Manders as an ally. One of the open questions in Eyre’s production concerns whether Manders or Engstrand is responsible for a disaster that upsets everyone’s plans.

The production, from the Almeida Theatre in London, looks terrific. Peter Mumford supplies crucial lighting, at two points a saturated red, and Tim Hatley’s set points up the compartmentalized lives of the people involved. Most important, Manville’s last scene shows that Ibsen still has the power to deliver a kick to the gut. 

Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts runs through May 3 at BAM, Harvey theater. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and matinees are at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets may be obtained by calling 718-636-4100 or at the BAM box office at 651 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

O Most Dread Dane

If you have seen Hamlet several times and are likely to be bored with a straightforward rendering, then perhaps the Classic Stage Company’s new modern-dress production, directed by Austin Pendleton, is the one for you. It’s full of bizarre ideas to a fault.

Where to begin? Well, one of the great revenge tragedies no longer has a hero who kills his enemies. This Hamlet is not directly responsible for the deaths of Laertes or Claudius. In the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, the latter cuts Hamlet with the poisoned rapier, then lays it down on the floor. Hamlet charges him like a bull; they wrestle; and Laertes accidentally rolls on top of his sword and wounds himself on the poisoned tip. As for Claudius, the action of Hamlet stabbing the king is omitted. After Gertrude lies dead, Hamlet hands the king the poisoned cup and commands: “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damnèd Dane/Drink off this potion.” Claudius, berated into suicide, quaffs the drink.

The one person this Hamlet does kill is Polonius, but that’s an accident. Still, weirdness is injected here too. Polonius’s ghost walks out from behind the arras, crosses the stage, and then exits. By comparison, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father—a character who actually has lines—is invisible in this production. Invisible ghosts have been used in tandem with dialogue spoken on tape, but here the Ghost’s words are eliminated as well, as if it were entirely in Hamlet’s imagination (although Francisco, Bernardo, and Marcellus speak of seeing it). And Ophelia’s ghost appears unexpectedly to hover around her own gravesite. So extra-textual ghosts are real, but Shakespeare’s real Ghost doesn’t exist?

If Pendleton has a concept, it appears to be that Hamlet is insane from the get-go, that his imagination is working overtime. That might explain why an uncut, multi-tiered wedding cake sits upstage, some two months after "the funeral meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” Either the clean-up crew has been on strike, or it’s a symbol weighing on Hamlet’s diseased mind.

Still, troublesome ideas can sometimes be overcome by outstanding acting. But Peter Sarsgaard seems determined to sledgehammer the meter of the verse into little pieces. Actors such as John Gielgud, accounted one of the great 20^th-century Hamlets, and directors such as John Barton have advised that if one follows the scansion of Shakespearean verse, it will buoy the actor and the sense will reveal itself. Sarsgaard doesn’t, and he sinks like a stone. He puts in pauses every three words or so. On “a little more than kin…and less than kind,” the delay kills the pun. Moreover, his delivery is so halting throughout that one suspects he hasn’t got the words down. Certainly he’s not letter-perfect in the crucial “To be or not to be,” and lyricism is repeatedly sabotaged.

Gielgud, who directed Richard Burton in the role on Broadway, wrote in Stage Directions that “a Gertrude older than 50 must surely be unconvincing on the stage.” Pendleton has chosen Harris Yulin and Penelope Allen as Claudius and Gertrude. With the Internet at one’s fingertips, it gives nothing away to say that both are in their eighth decade. When Yulin’s skillfully spoken but lethargic Claudius tells Hamlet he wants him to stay at court rather than leave for Wittenberg, you might suspect that it’s because he has his eye on Hamlet as a caregiver.

Pendleton’s casting repeatedly creates inconsistencies. Hamlet’s school chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are considerably younger, and Rosencrantz (Scott Parkinson) doubles as the Gravedigger, even though Jim Broaddus, an actor closer to the right age who is superb in smaller parts such as the Player King, would have been more apt. Glenn Fitzgerald as Laertes has a resonant voice and a presence that make one wish he had more to do. Unfortunately, although Hamlet claims to be “fat and scant of breath,” Sarsgaard is clearly in good shape. It’s Fitzgerald’s Laertes, supposedly an athletic and practiced swordsman, who is carrying a few extra pounds.

Ultimately, it’s Stephen Spinella’s Polonius who feels like the best-rounded character. He’s a dapper, instinctively shrewd courtier with warm feelings for his family. Still, the play isn’t called Polonius—though in the hands of Pendleton and Sarsgaard, it’s not so much Hamlet either. 

The Classic Stage Company production of Hamlet runs through May 10; evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $65 and may be purchased by visiting www.classicstage/.org.

Delusions Unto Death

After seeing the Goodman Theatre revival of The Iceman Cometh in Brooklyn, it’s tempting to wonder what Eugene O’Neill would have thought of purveyors of the modern 90-minute intermissionless play. Sloth-ridden pikers, perhaps? O’Neill’s late masterpiece runs four hours and 45 minutes at BAM, and it is surely one of the bleakest plays ever written. Don’t let that put you off, however. Robert Falls’s magnificent production may require a marathon sitting, but it’s worth it. 

The setting is 1912, in a combination saloon and rooming house filled with those who have hit rock bottom. The proprietor is Stephen Ouimette’s cantankerous Harry Hope (O’Neill’s sense of irony is not subtle), and the denizens are a collection of drunks, waking up gradually in the gloom. At first Natasha Katz’s remarkable lighting barely registers; then it slowly reveals the tables of inebriates. 

The group is awaiting Theodore “Hickey” Hickman (Nathan Lane), whose annual arrival for Harry’s birthday party is imminent. Among those on hand are ex-anarchist Larry Slade (Brian Dennehy); Hugo, a Russian-accented anarchist (Lee Wilkof); Ed Mosher (Larry Heumann Jr.), who is Harry’s brother-in-law and worked for the circus; and Joe Mott (John Douglas Thompson), an ex-gambler on the skids who cleans the bar. Other characters include two Boer War veterans from opposing sides and a correspondent in that war; two bartenders; and a trio of self-styled “tarts.”

During the next 48 hours the last vestiges of hope for any of them are stripped away. Before Hickey’s arrival the burnt-out Larry is approached by Don Parritt (Patrick Andrews), a young man whose mother is a firebrand anarchist more devoted to the movement than to him; Don has always looked up to Larry as a father, but now Larry wants Don to take a powder. Someone has sold out the movement, and Don’s mother has been arrested.

When Hickey shows up, he delivers a shock to the group. He’s no longer a drinker. He has faced himself and he has become an evangelist for truth-telling. The Hickey part doesn’t seem tailored to Nathan Lane’s acknowledged comic brilliance, but Lane not only finds comedy where it isn’t apparent, he proves himself a powerful dramatic actor (to be fair, he has done dramatic parts before, but nothing compared to this). The evangelist’s fire and the do-gooder’s brass, the glad-hander’s cheer and optimism—Lane has them all. He jokes around as a salesman must, and yet he also excoriates the others’ “pipe dreams.” You’ll be sick of that phrase by the end of the evening, with “take a hop off the fire escape” a close second—O’Neill overwrites, but he also supplies plenty of humor, and even the repetition, while trying one’s patience, gathers a cumulative, relentless force.

Over the course of the day, Hickey cajoles and browbeats several of the residents to leave the bar and face their demons. “Jimmy Tomorrow” (a fretful, nervous James Cameron), the former Boer correspondent, dresses up in a suit and is forced out to a job interview he has rattled on about. The Boer combatants (John Judd and John Reeger) rival each other to see who will have the gumption to leave and whose courage will falter. Even Harry is propelled onto the street, where he claims a car nearly ran him down. Ouimette, hollow-eyed and haunted, is a portrait of a dead man walking.

 

Brian Dennehy, who also played Hickey for Falls back in 1990, is a formidable presence as Slade, who’s waiting for death. Although the character is meant to be exhausted, Dennehy is occasionally vocally underpowered in conveying that. In fact, the opening scene only jumps into gear when Thompson, whose O’Neill credits include a terrific Emperor Jones, kick-starts the energy. As Mott, the only black man, he dreams of opening “a gambling house for colored men” and exhibits more fiery optimism than some of the others.

 

In the end, however, O’Neill makes clear that the lies these people tell themselves are the only thing keeping them alive. They have only their delusions and alcohol. Even the “tarts” tell themselves they’re not prostitutes (the distinction is lost in the mists of time), but they clearly are.

 

O’Neill’s play is not done often—it has 19 characters, for one thing. But it’s not as daunting as you might expect. If you can get a ticket, summon your stamina and don’t miss it. 

 

BAM presents the Goodman Theatre production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh through March 15. Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets may be purchased by calling BAM ticket services at (718) 6436-4100 or visiting BAM.org. The BAM Harvey Theater is at 651 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

A Chilly Romance

Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale has always presented directors with difficulties, notably that Leontes, the Sicilian king who dominates the first half, becomes insanely jealous of the friendship of his pregnant queen, Hermione, and his best friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia, some nine months after Polixenes has arrived for a visit. Indeed, on the eve of Polixenes’ departure, Leontes determines to kill his friend, who escapes. When Hermione delivers, Leontes orders the death of the newborn. He then learns of her innocence just as her death is reported. 

Michael Sexton’s production for the Pearl Theatre Company is stuffed with ideas, to mixed effect. In a first scene whose meta-theatricality is echoed later, the actors saunter on and tacitly acknowledge the audience before getting down to toasts, card tricks, and pouring Scotch. In short order, Peter Francis James’s well-spoken Leontes begins to voice his suspicions of the infidelity of Hermione (Jolly Abraham). James stands stiffly with his hands in his pockets, seemingly tight with emotion. If James cannot quite make Leontes’ jealousy credible, he suggests one of those people who snap suddenly and inexplicably kill their families. He tries to enlist his chief counselor, Camillo (an authoritative Tom Nelis), to poison Polixenes (Bradford Cover), but Camillo warns Polixenes and joins him in his escape.

Sexton has made judicious cuts, and some of his ideas are nifty. How does one approach Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, Exit, pursued by a bear? It occurs when the courtier Antigonus (Dominic Cuskern) takes Hermione’s infant to the woods to dispose of it. Sexton’s solution is to have a visible attack and a stylish feeding frenzy. As one actor holds up a mounted bear’s head, several other actors, clad in fur coats, move as in a choreographed Noh drama and disembowel Antigonus (red cloths fly into the air).

Still, there's a disconcerting tricksiness to everything. Why does Bradley King (with the director’s blessing, surely) suddenly illuminate the actors as if they were in a 19^th-century melodrama? Or a 1940s film noir? When the Shepherd enters, the lights go up, and his scene starts from the audience for no apparent reason. 

There is also little sense of place. The action begins in a dining room, with formal service and a breakfront displaying dishes on one wall, a poster for a Ballets Russes production on another, and an upright piano against the wall of the inner stage. Designed beautifully by Brett J. Banakis, it nevertheless seems to be a royal hunting lodge rather than a full-time palace. That’s not impossible, but the uncertainty of locale continues throughout. Upended furniture is meant to convey a wilderness where Antigonus leaves the infant and a Shepherd finds her. This requires the Shepherd’s son, called simply Clown (a terrific Adam Green), to enter through the fireplace, which must now assume the role of a hole in the underbrush. The furniture cleared, the scene becomes a more effective grange hall for a potluck in rustic Bohemia. 

But a closet door serves as an antechamber to the court, a prison cell, an actual closet, and later a bizarre exit for the comic rascal Autolycus (Steve Cuiffo). At times one longs for an oral description of the setting akin to those supplied by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “In this same interlude it doth befall/That I, one Snout by name, present a wall/And such a wall as I would have you think/That had in it a crannied hole or chink…”

It has often been difficult to spark interest in the wooing of the grown Perdita (Imani Jade Powers) by Polixenes’ son Florizel (James Udom), and the actors here don’t overcome the problem. But Rachel Botchan as Hermione's lady-in-waiting Paulina, who becomes the conscience of the reformed Leontes, is excellent.

The final scene, in which Hermione’s statue comes to life and is reunited with a repentant Leontes, is written to produce sniffles at a minimum. Here, Hermione appears without "statue" makeup, as if she's just a woman standing still. There's no magic, no wonder or warmth, and the scene is played so lethargically, to a lightly plunked guitar, that the climax dwindles away. It’s a shame that a production that often wrestles interestingly with this tragicomedy should end so weakly.

Evening performances of The Winter's Tale are 7 p.m. on Tuesdays and 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays through March 15. Tickets may be purchased by visiting pearltheatre.org or calling (212) 563-9261.

The Pain of a Folded Life

Rajiv Joseph is perhaps best-known as the author of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which gave the late Robin Williams his only Broadway role. Now an enterprising troupe is staging another Joseph play, Animals Out of Paper, with resources that make the description “shoestring” seem lavish. But the actors, under Merri Milwe’s precise and lovely direction, do justice to a fascinating script. 

The three characters in Joseph’s 2008 drama are all practitioners of origami, the ancient Japanese art of folding paper into objects, mostly animals. The play opens on a reclusive young woman, Ilana (Nairoby Otero), who is an acknowledged American master of the art. As her sudden visitor, Andy (David Beck), reminds her, she has written “the number 2 best-selling origami book in the country,” a collection of essays about folding.

Andy is treasurer of American Origami, a professional society, and his impromptu drop-in is ostensibly to collect dues. Ilana admits him reluctantly, and in spite of her irritation and rudeness, Andy clearly has a liking for Ilana. In fact, he has admired her at a distance at A.O. gatherings, and has even spoken to her, although she doesn’t remember. Andy is also president of a school calculus club where he teaches, and he keeps a list of things to be thankful for in a worn diary. If all that spells “nerd,” it’s true, but Beck manages to combine bashful gaucherie and yearning and self-knowledge without ever seeming weak, effeminate, or just foolish. It’s a beautifully modulated performance.

Beyond his desire to see Ilana, Andy has another motive for his personal call. One of his students, Suresh (Maneesh Sasikumar), is ultra-talented at origami, and Andy wants Ilana to tutor him. She declines because she never teaches. Then he shows her samples of Suresh’s work, and she decides to step outside her comfort zone. Almost immediately she has reason to regret it, because Suresh, who has just turned 18, is arrogant and oblivious to considerate behavior. (If there’s a weakness in the script, it’s that Ilana’s patience in the face of his rudeness strains credibility, and, equally, that Suresh, who carries the weight of adult responsibility in his personal life, is so deliberately offensive to her.) Suresh gets under Ilana’s skin when he cleans up her apartment—she typically has sheets and balls of paper strewn around the floor. It is, however, her typical working atmosphere. Sasikumar, by the way, dances to rap as he cleans up the space, and his movement is one of the offbeat joys of the play.

Joseph is writing about the dangers of being stamped too strongly by one’s past, and the need to welcome new experiences. His view is given eloquent voice by Ilana in a speech in Act II that connects origami to his theme: “Look at this paper. It has no memory, it’s just flat. But fold it, even once, and suddenly it remembers something. And then with each fold, another memory, another experience and they build up to make something complicated. The paper must forget that it was ever flat, ever a simple square. It probably can’t remember it’s still in one piece. … It’s all twisted into something so far from what it used to be.”

The characters in Animals Out of Paper are all marked by their history. Suresh’s mother has recently been killed in a car accident, and he’s trying to be parent to his family, including his father. When Andy takes Ilana out on a date (a scene that’s delicately staged and played), he becomes embarrassed that she knows everything about him—all his secrets were in his diary, including the women who broke his heart. He must woo her without the privacy that anyone else might have. He’s breaking ground where few have had to go before.

It’s at the dinner that Ilana reveals she has an invitation to an origami conference in Nagasaki, and that she intends to take Suresh, her student, rather than Andy. Beck shows Andy’s hurt and manfulness as he tries to recover from his disappointment, but the quiet tragedy of Animals Out of Paper is that, like the folds that cannot be erased in origami, the creases in one’s past prove just as complicated and indelible on the human soul.

Rajiv Joseph's Animals Out of Paper is performed at the McAlpin Hall at the West Park Church (165 W. 86th St.at Amsterdam Avenue). Performances are Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m, and Sundays at 5 p.m. Tickets are $18 for all performances and may be purchased online at SmarTix.com or by calling (212) 868-4444.

Ripped From the Headlines

Global power politics is the subject of Tom Dulack’s The Road to Damascus, an intriguing new play set in the near future. The time frame allows Dulack to invest his plot with thinly disguised current reality, or speculation that is not far-fetched: a female broadcaster, Nadia Kirilenko, works for the Pan-Arabya network, clearly modeled on Al-Jazeera, and a new Pope, Augustine, is from Africa.

The drama opens amid the confusion of major bombings in New York City, reported by Nadia. Were they the work of “a fourth-generation ISIS mutant,” the Army of God, or of the group suspected by the British, the Guardians of Mecca? Or perhaps the sect the French are inclined to blame, the Druze Freedom Party? Did the United Arab Emirates fund the terrorist attack?

Everyone expects the U.S. to retaliate against Syria, but Augustine intends to go to Damascus and offer himself as a shield against any bombing. What would the repercussions be if he does go? Will the U.S. or Israel bomb the Syrian capital if the Pope is there?

Although Dulack’s work has the tight construction of an Ibsen play, it feels more reliant on the coincidences of melodrama, although one that is compellingly Machiavellian. Happily, under Michael Parva's swift, precise direction, the actors provide vivid characterizations.

The linchpin is Nadia (Larisa Polonsky), who is having an affair with a State Department employee, Dexter Hobhouse (Rufus Collins). In Dulack's set-up, Nadia not only knows Augustine from his days as an activist in Darfur and Kinshasa, but she is a Chechnyan Muslim. The stunning actress has the looks of a newscaster, and she reveals the character's energy and ambition with persuasive television presence and diction. For his part, Collins has the dutifulness of a man who has sacrificed a personal life to his profession—he has three children, each by a different ex-wife.

The Pope’s right-hand man, Cardinal Medeiros (Robert Verlaque), secretly reports from the Vatican to the U.S. National Security Agency, embodied by Liza Vann’s utterly ruthless Bree Benson. And Benson gives marching orders to Ted Bowles, a State Department functionary who bridles at her overbearing attitude. Hobhouse also has his own contact in the Vatican, Bishop Roberto Guzman (Joris Stuyck), a college friend, who assists him in arranging a meeting with the Pope. But it seems everyone, including the Pope (given tremendous confidence and integrity by Mel Johnson Jr.), has a private agenda that involves using one of the other characters. 

Dulack’s plotting is clear if schematic, and the characters are compelling. But The Road to Damascus provides little enlightenment on the sticking points of  Middle East diplomacy, particularly the Palestinian question. Rather, it examines the assertion of power drenched in cynicism. It relies on its own rat’s nest of cross-purposes, which Dulack delineates effectively.

In spite of the solid craftsmanship, The Road to Damascus often feels like a first-rate TV show with overly familiar  elements. The Benson character is one of those unscrupulous women in power easily recognizable to anyone who watches The Good Wife or How to Get Away with Murder or State of Affairs. The rivalry with her counterpart at State, Joseph Adams’s world-weary, hangdog Bowles, who is Hobhouse’s boss, echoes any number of subplots on seasons of 24 or The West Wing. And Verlaque’s Cardinal Medeiros might have stepped from The Name of the Rose or The Da Vinci Code, or from a Jacobean tragedy (e.g., The Duchess of Malfi).

There may be those who take issue with the grim finale, in which the greatest power exerts its ruthless ability to have its way, though not without foreshadowing. But the climax clearly underlines the irony of the title. On this road to Damascus, positions are immutable, and nobody has a conversion.

Tom Dulack’s The Road to Damascus plays at 59E59 Theaters though March 1. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 3 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets may be obtained by visiting www.59e59.org or calling Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 from noon to 8 p.m.

Life with Father, Irish Style

Hugh Leonard’s Da is a painful coming-of-age story being given an engaging and rare revival by the Irish Repertory Theater in its temporary home at DR2 Theatre off Union Square.

Set in a rural town in Ireland, Leonard’s 1978 Tony winner deals with Charlie, a middle-aged man who has returned to his family home after the death of his father. The memories he has are painful, and it’s clear immediately in Charlotte Moore’s production that Charlie feels some relief at the recently severed tie to his father. But Da isn’t done with his son: his ghost, a boisterous and peremptory Paul O’Brien, shows up to harangue and browbeat Charlie. And Charlie, for his part, feels resentments bubble up in him once again. As the play unfolds, one learns about the origins of their friction, as well as Charlie’s adolescence and working life. He is, in fact, an adoptive son to Da and his Ma (Fiana Toibin).

Clues come early on about how difficult Charlie’s life was, as the family prepares for the arrival of a Mr. Drumm who will interview Charlie for a job. There’s a battle over the shirt that Charlie is supposed to wear. (Adam Petherbridge plays the younger Charlie with a mixture of rebellion and Catholic guilt, while Ciarán O’Reilly shines as the more confident and calmer adult observing his life.) He doesn’t want to wear the one that his mother has patched, and his resistance causes a squabble and earns him a slap. 

After Sean Gormley’s thin-lipped, priggish Mr. Drumm arrives, Da, though warned to speak minimally, launches into praise of Hitler. (Some Irishmen supported Hitler because he was at war with their historical enemy, England.) Drumm, judgmental and bloodless, has nothing but contempt for Da, and he expresses it bluntly. Drumm offers Charlie a job nonetheless, with the warning that he shouldn’t stay in it too long—a warning that Charlie, a budding writer, doesn’t heed for more than a decade. A nice irony is that Drumm, unsusceptible to sentiment, gives Charlie sounder advice than his parents offer: “You’ll amount to nothing until you learn to say no.”

Leonard’s story slips from memory to the present and back, sometimes a bit strangely: older Charlie doesn’t merely watch his younger self in scenes—they converse about what’s going on, with the older self advising the younger. O’Brien’s Da is by turns morose, cheerful, overbearing, and proud, and it’s clear he will never be a figure his son will worship. In spite of the cozy warmth suggested by James Morgan’s crockery-filled parlor, this autobiographical play is also rife with unhappiness, stupidity, and emotional abuse. 

Leonard’s rich language— “Old faces. They’ve turned up like bills you thought you’d never have to pay”—gets full weight from an excellent cast. Although men are the focus, two actresses in smaller parts make the most of their single scenes. Nicola Murphy plays Mary Tate, a reputed good-time girl that Charlie wants but who has more sweetness than he appreciates. Petherbridge is terrific in the scene, alternately bashful and on the make, and Murphy brings true poignancy to poor Mary, initially aloof, then warming to Charlie’s charms. It’s to Leonard’s credit that Charlie, his own stand-in, comes off poorly. As Da’s employer of decades, Kristin Griffith arrives late in the play to deliver a clueless, insulting pittance to the man who has served as her gardener for years, while she eagerly gathers the bounty he has cultivated. Da is ever the apologist for his poor treatment, too proud to claim more than others are willing to give him, and that gripes the older Charlie. It undoubtedly reflects Leonard’s own struggle to find confidence in himself that he is never destined to receive from either father or mother. Yet, as Charlie finally learns, "Love turned upside down is love for all that."

Performances of Da by the Irish Repertory Theatre take place through March 8 at the DR2 Theatre at 103 E. 15th St., off Union Square. Evening curtains are at 7 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays and 8 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees are at 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Body of Words

In an author's note, dramatist Vincent Sessa says that his Body of Words is based on the homecoming of Odysseus. That may not be much help to anyone who knows The Odyssey, since there are only two characters, an older and a younger man, and as the play opens they’ve just completed a bout of sex. Is this a “gay play”? The older man, Norman, says that “being straight is what attracts one straight man to another. In fact, it’s what we see in each other.” If that viewpoint seems odd, it’s apparently common enough to have been used on an episode of the FX network’s animated series Archer, when Archer’s old chum is gay only for him.

The play opens at a sparely furnished beach house (by David L. Arsenault) on the heels of a fourth sexual encounter between Bruch Reed’s Norman and Boyd (Marek Pavlovski), the younger man. Norman has paid Boyd $1,000 for five acts of fellatio. Boyd—he’s purportedly 17, but Pavlovski looks a decade older—resists anything else, but Norman is offering another $500 for the whole nine yards, as it were.

In spite of their intimacy to this point, the men go at each other verbally in a way that seems preposterous but crucial, given the necessity of Sessa’s making some dramatic hay of it all. Boyd’s sudden threats of violence might make any sane person show him the door. They serve only to keep Norman interested. But if Norman and Boyd are so antagonistic before this last sexual encounter, is it because they skipped conversations between the first four? How else to explain the notion that Norman would not have noticed Boyd’s persistent threats of violence? During the play he and Boyd box and grapple intensely, and Boyd repeatedly explodes in a fury. Yet Norman calmly pursues him; perhaps it's an indication of his confidence in the power of words, but it is not credible.

Any relation to Homer beyond the invoked references to his epic is tenuous. Norman claims a varied work history: “Construction. Demolition. An oil rig. A year on the North Sea, about seven months in the Gulf of Mexico. I rebuilt levees. Put in an irrigation system. Counted the caribou on the tundra. Sometimes I just loafed. Beached the beach and the pretty beach girls. I taught native-American children once.” The adventures read as a modern parallel to those of Odysseus that delayed his return from Troy for 10 years. But the references to the “wine-dark sea” and the “rosy-fingered dawn” and even a cutesy “Ithaca Tool & Die Company” feel arbitrary. Those homages (there are also references to O. Henry and Moby-Dick) are meant to lend the story a weight it can’t bear.

At times sexual psychology is in play, as the men discuss whether they are straight or not. Boyd challenges Norman for keeping his clothes on during their sex: “How can you feel anything if you keep your clothes on!” There is a roiling element of pacifist politics as well. Boyd’s father is a military man who neglects his family but Boyd is planning to enlist the following morning, yet he has mixed feelings about his father. Norman, a Bronze Star recipient, says, “A soldier doesn’t die in glory—he dies in the blood that leaves him…” If the point seems muddled, Sessa’s writing at times includes fine isolated passages, notably one about the danger posed by a man running close rather than far back or far ahead.

The pace of director John Michael DiResta’s production is sometimes hasty, but he has gotten committed performances from both actors, who nonetheless have a struggle to make the diffuse story hang together and the characters credible. Reed delivers the more intellectual and literary references confidently, and he looks the part of a former decathlete. Pavlowski is by turns sullen, suspicious, cocky, and confident, and physically could be the wrestler he claims to have been. But the point of it all is unclear: even a classic Greek dramatic twist at the end doesn’t provide elucidation—or catharsis.

Body of Words plays through Jan. 25 at Theater for a New City (155 1st Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets). Evening performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; there is also a Sunday matinee at 3 p.m. Tickets are $5–$18 and may be purchased by visiting www.theaterforthenewcity.net or www.smarttix.com.