Rites of Secession

When the red states won on Election Day 2004, many people in the country were devastated. Some were particularly unhappy about George W. Bush getting a second term. Others mourned the defeat of John Kerry. Massachusetts natives Nathan Phillips and Joe Schiappa turned their grief into Massholia, a sprawling and unfocused rock musical now playing at the Flamboyan Theater. A gimmicky prologue is set at the first Thanksgiving. This meeting between settlers and Indians is filled with the usual intentionally anachronistic speech and pop culture references that comedians love to put in "old-timey" scenes. The prologue foreshadows the nation's troubles with the settlers' assassination of a benevolent Magical Turkey that lives in the woods. (Even then, we couldn't recognize a good thing when it was right in front of us!)

Cut to Boston on Nov. 3, 2004. Reactionaries have prompted Massachusetts to secede from the union to form Massholia, a new country run by John Kerry. His son, John Kerry Jr., has plans to take over the nation through deadly cranberry gas concealed in a baseball. Junior recruits high school student and "typical Masshole" Robbie Cordeiro to throw the poison baseball at a Red Sox game. Robbie sees this as a chance to show the world his dancing skills, and to impress Jen Leonard, the new girl in school.

Yes, there are many plots, many characters, and many, many scenes in the show. They vastly outnumber the music numbers, which is odd for a musical. It's also a shame, because Brett Warwick's songs range from good to outright catchy and are far superior to those in several Broadway shows one could name. Katie Workum's energetic choreography

Taking Off

First things first: yes, the men of The Full Monty do go the full monty. But in this effervescent, first-rate production of the musical, the joy in the titillation of their final striptease lies less in the moment when they exuberantly bare all and more in the delightful journey taken along the way. Many will argue that composer David Yazbek was robbed of the Tony in 2001 when his score went unnoticed in a year bulldozed by The Producers. This quiet gem of a show played a respectable run but failed to earn the acclaim it surely would have enjoyed in a non-Producers year. Thankfully, Yazbek has brought his jazzy, pop-edged music to a new Broadway show, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the rights to The Full Monty are now available, allowing theatergoers to enjoy its charms once more. The Gallery Players have produced its first New York City revival, and it is truly a must-see.

Based on the British film, this Full Monty takes place in working-class Buffalo, N.Y. Jerry Lukowski, out of work and down on his luck, must earn money to pay child support, or his ex-wife Pam will end their joint custody of their son. One night he and his buddy Dave Bukatinsky witness women screaming for a male stripper in a club, and Jerry is instantly inspired. Why not strip, earn money to pay alimony, and give "real men" a chance to show what they are made of? The "Hot Metal" act is born, and the rest of the show follows the men's auditions, rehearsals, and final performance. It's a simple story, but acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally has written a book that is both hilarious and touching and that lovingly gives each man his own finely drawn story.

Director Matt Schicker deserves accolades for helming such a tight production and, most important, for pulling together a gifted ensemble. Each of the six principals proves himself a triple threat

Fishing for Meaning

Oscar Wilde may have inadvertently offered an explanation for the failures of Nosedive Productions

Dissonance and Loss

One might expect Beacon Productions's There's the Story to be a musical, judging by composer Randy Redd's credits, which include Parade, By Jeeves, and Lucky Stiff. But this cryptic work is a play, impressively written by actor-playwright Timothy McCracken, that marries Redd's compositions, with their unresolved dissonance, to a painful theme of unexplained loss. There's the Story is set in the Hell's Kitchen apartment of Henry (Timothy McCracken) and his irritatingly predictable friend Curtis (Sean Dougherty). The two graduated from music school together and now barely subsist on music writing grants. Curtis works on an electric piano while Henry favors his Steinway. Curtis is prolific but uninspired, while Henry, despite previous triumphs, has become catatonically blocked.

Shadows from Henry's past have crippled his artistic process and confined him to a hermetic life on the couch. He can play the piano only up to a certain point, where he then screams and trembles with frustration.

When Curtis's new girlfriend, Alexandra (Tara Falk), enters the scene, Henry is forced to confront some painful memories. Step by step, note by note, he nears a long-awaited conclusion.

At one point, Henry describes a recital where he once played an improvised piece while on mushrooms: "Messy, but it kind of worked too." In many ways, this also captures McCracken's writing style. There are occasional stretches of drawn-out dialogue, overstated details, and half-baked humor, but in the end, the play's discursive elements combine well into a strangely satisfying whole.

Much of this is owed to director Christopher Grabowski, who skillfully guides McCracken's writing (and acting). Grabowski introduces the audience to Henry through a series of short tableaus depicting Henry's stagnated relationship with his piano: distantly staring at the instrument, caressing it, etc. The show's unlikely mixture of dramatic expressionism and psychological realism justifiably frames Henry's soul-searching struggle.

Grabowski's mastery also lies in the tempo. The play's pace is weighted by slow tension, and each scene is propelled by pivotal revelations or chilling snippets of a developing musical theme. (The music Henry composes on the piano, as well as the play's prerecorded interlude music, was written by Redd.)

McCracken's transforming performance as Henry is compelling to watch, if painful at times. He carefully avoids the clich

Desperate Housewives

One morning a group of 12 brightly dressed, well-groomed housewives ranging in age from 20 to 80 gathered in their friend Germaine's spacious kitchen for a long day of stamp pasting. They greeted each other warmly, complimented each other profusely, and then said to hell with that, your daughter is a whore, your husband is a creep, and your happy life is a sham. This is the premise of Michael Tremblay's groundbreaking 1960's French-Canadian play Les Belles Soeurs, currently playing at Center Stage Theatre.

Germaine, played with hilariously exaggerated enthusiasm by Sarah Beth Jackson, is the lucky winner of one million stamps that, if pasted properly in one million books, can be redeemed for an entire catalog of cutting-edge household appliances. To hurry along this laborious part of winning the prize, Germaine recruits her girlfriends, sisters, and daughter to help paste. Little does she know her trusted workers are secretly stashing hundreds of stamps in their own pocketbooks as payment for their work.

Les Belles Soeurs focuses less on telling a story than on revealing the dark side of wives and mothers during the early 1960's when they were widely perceived to be meek, nurturing caregivers incapable of understanding, let alone speaking, vulgarity. Tremblay wrote this story to counter those stereotypes and show the world what really happens when 15 working-class women gather behind closed doors to "socialize." Unfortunately, in doing so he took society's view of women from one extreme to another.

Not one of the 15 women cluttering this stage is likable or sympathetic. How can they be when Tremblay has erased every ounce of compassion, sensitivity, and kindness from their personalities?

Some hate their husbands, and all hate their children. But the most hatred is directed toward Germaine's youngest sibling Paulette (Christine Mosere), a beloved spoiled child turned middle-aged stripper. When Paulette shows up to help paste stamps, her once doting sister nearly throws her down the stairs, screaming, "Get out of here, you filthy whore!"

On this note, the guests decide to turn their own hostility up a notch. Snide, catty remarks become full-blown fits of screaming topped off with threats of eternal damnation. To add to the ensuing chaos, two elderly lesbian lovers arrive, one of whom has been having an affair with Paulette. Meanwhile, a young girl admits she needs an abortion, and Germaine's feisty older sister, Diane (Stephanie Hepburn), screams that "unwed mothers are depraved sluts who deserve no sympathy because they chose to get knocked up." All the noise wakes up a wheelchair-bound 92-year-old woman, who is promptly silenced with a blow to her head, courtesy of her daughter-in-law.

By the second act, all semblance of a narrative plot disintegrates as the story relies solely on its shock value to engage the audience. When Les Belles Soeurs enjoyed its initial success, French-Canadian viewers were delighted to see housewives and grannies throwing down the dust rags and clenching their fists. They were also thrilled at the controversial subjects the story defiantly threw into the mix, such as lesbianism, prostitution, premarital sex, and abortion. None of these topics are explored in any depth, but the mere mention of them in public, onstage, once caused quite a stir.

Unfortunately for the current production of this play, times have changed. Teens hear about abortion in school, premarital sex is glorified in mainstream media, lesbianism is used for ratings, mothers can be heard using profanity on long lines at the supermarket, women are no longer expected to give up their lives to cook dinner and raise kids, and the idea of women behaving badly is hardly a radical concept. In order to startle a New York audience in 2005 the way it did a French-Canadian one in the 1960's, this story needs to be updated.

That said, it is important to note that there are still more than a few good jolts left in this once electrifying play. It is always entertaining to hear an 80-year-old grandmother curse like a sailor while two frumpy middle-aged wives call each other filthy whores. The years may have dulled the shock this play once gave its audiences, but the 15 women featured in Les Belles Soeurs prove that you are never too old to catfight, and when socially repressed women scratch, they will draw blood.

Love and Prejudice

"You made me love you," croons a girl singer during the big band-heavy preshow music for South Pacific, and this sentiment pervades much of the drama in Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical about love, loss, patriotism, and loyalty on two islands in the South Pacific during World War II. The conflict stems from two romantic relationships that are both challenged by interracial ties, an American taboo. On this island paradise, love is not an easy thing. The Heights Players's production of South Pacific certainly celebrates the energy and vitality of its characters and the sumptuousness of its score, but it falls short of probing the central relationships to a satisfying end. A winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Tony for best musical, South Pacific is one of the best-loved and oft-revived musicals. If you missed your local high school's revival, here is a brief outline of the plot. Ensign Nellie Forbush, a nurse stationed in the South Pacific, becomes smitten with a much older Frenchman, Emile DeBecque, who lives on the island. They fall in love despite differences in age and upbringing (Nellie is fresh out of Little Rock, Ark., while Emile is full of European sophistication). But their budding romance is challenged when Nellie learns of Emile's four mixed-race children, whom he fathered with his late Polynesian wife. Nellie recoils from Emile and must decide whether she will bravely bridge the cultural divide.

Meanwhile, Lt. Joe Cable arrives on the island with orders to spy on the nearby Japanese. His plan is deterred, however, by his love affair with Liat, a young girl on the nearby island of Bali Ha'i. He must examine his own racial prejudices as he considers pursuing a relationship with her, ultimately deciding that he cannot. He enlists the help of the lovelorn Emile, who is familiar with the territory, to join him on his dangerous spy mission.

South Pacific possesses one of the most melodic and soaring show scores ever composed, with classics like "Some Enchanting Evening," "There is Nothin' Like a Dame," "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair," "A Wonderful Guy," "Younger Than Springtime," and "This Nearly Was Mine" packed in from start to finish. Noticeably missing from this production are the lush orchestrations, with a keyboard and minimal percussion providing only sparse and patchy accompaniment.

Tina Throckmorton makes a spunky and likable Nellie, with a bright smile to match her bright, clear voice. Her chemistry with Thomas Urciuoli's Emile, however, fails to ring true. The same can be said for the relationship between Cable (a wooden Constantine Polites) and Liat (a radiant Makie Armstrong).

In its time, South Pacific was progressive and controversial with its theme of interracial love, but the relationships here do not bear out the show's import. Scenes between Nellie and Emile feel rushed, with neither of them seeming to register the weighty choices they are facing.

The evening's strongest performances belong to its supporting players, with standout comic turns by Matthew Woods as the lovably irreverent Luther Billis and Ed Healy as the deliciously dictatorial Captain Brackett. The male ensemble of Seabees also makes a powerful impression, with a strong sound and constant boisterous energy, often carried forth by Chazmond J. Peacock's irrepressible Stewpot.

Faced with a musical of huge proportions, director Thomas N. Tyler has done an admirable job of transporting the action to a very small stage. He has able assistance from Sonia Hernandez's delightful choreography, Fabio Taliercio's brilliant and effective light design, and Gerry Newman's functional set. (And yes, Nellie actually does wash her hair onstage, like Mary Martin in the original production.)

If this South Pacific fails to live up to the emotional weight of its material (especially in its unsatisfying portrayal of the romantic relationships), it still manages to deliver its original message

Late-Night Channel Surfing

Can three misplaced Ohio girls handle the pressures of being part of "the young and the horny"? Will Jerome's brother be able to accept two revelations in one night? And can Arnold Schecter keep Sally in Passaic, N.J., when a Martian prince comes calling? Find out tonight in a late-night-TV channel-surfing pleasure appropriately titled Incredible Sex, a trio of one-act comedies from the Foolish Theatre Company. Channel 1: HBO. Kim, Marge, and Charlene catch up on the previous night's gossip during their sexy vacation to Key West. It's Sex and the City in a steamier setting with a younger group of girlfriends and no towering skyline. The cast of Women in Heat includes a no-holds-barred "Samantha" (Charlene), a very private "Charlotte" (Marge), and the ever-conflicted "Carrie" (a post-coital Kim).

The similarities to Sex and the City are abundant: Charlene's belief that God gave us sex because "you can only tan in daylight, so here's something to do at night"; recaps of raucous romps; and overuse of words like "pussy," "threesome," and "anatomically correct blow-up doll." However, I can't remember the last time the Manhattan-dwelling foursome let the words "Bible camp" slip into their conversations. I guess that's what makes these Ohio girls so darn apologetic about their sexuality. These girls would rather cuddle after sex than get ready for Round Two. Accordingly, an anticlimactic ending leaves the viewer changing the channel rather than staying tuned for scenes from the next episode.

Channel 2: Gay and Lesbian TV Network. The paraplegic Jerome has his brother, Mark, over for a meal to reveal to him that 1) he can cook

Sketched Out

Contemporary political satire can be powerful, exciting, controversial, and, most of all, hilarious. But political satire in the theater can suffer from some innate impediments

Parallel Lives

Mark Finley's new play, The Mermaid, is a story about two people: Judith, a simple and virginal college co-ed who is coming of age in 1962, and Martin, a gay man approaching his midlife crisis in 1998. Finley draws thematic inspiration from classic authors, quoting Shakespeare's Pericles, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, as well as Jean Girandoux's Ondine. And though The Mermaid does not live up to its own lofty expectations, it is nonetheless an enjoyable tale about the far-reaching consequences of the decisions that people make. The play begins in 1962, with Judith practicing her audition piece for her university's upcoming production of Ondine. She is interrupted by Lee, a young gay actor with Broadway aspirations, and Reid, a clueless but charming athlete looking to boost his grade point average so he can stay on the team. Both Judith and Lee soon find themselves smitten with Reid.

Meanwhile, in 1998, Martin shares a drink with his actress friend Amy, who has just finished a rock opera version of Pericles. She is somewhat upset that Martin, an orphan himself, did not enjoy the classic tale of the Prince of Tyre's quest to find his orphaned daughter. Before long, Martin's boyfriend Ken joins the duo. A few years Martin's senior, Ken is ready to settle down and adopt a child, and he has found the perfect one. But Martin wants to try to find his birth mother and come to terms with his insecurities before becoming a father.

And so Judith and Martin stumble forward, making decisions that influence those around them

Disarming the Man

The Milk Can Theatre Company is tackling George Bernard Shaw's multifaceted Arms and the Man, and it's a noble endeavor. Currently being presented in repertory with the world premiere of Anne Phelan's Mushroom in Her Hands, Arms and the Man has the potential to be a sharp, funny satire about love and an important commentary on mankind's obsession with war. However, under ML Kinney's schizophrenic direction, this Arms and the Man sinks under the weight of its underdeveloped concept. Arms and the Man follows the romantic entanglements of Raina Petkoff (Meghan Reilly); her betrothed, Sergius Saranoff (Avery Clark); the heroic soldier Bluntschli (Kirsten Walsh); and Raina's headstrong handmaid, Louka (Sarah Bloom). Misunderstandings and missed connections abound: Raina loves Bluntschli but is engaged to Sergius, who loves Louka. Set against the backdrop of the Bulgarian-Serbian war, Shaw's play has his characters wax philosophical about love, the conventions of war, class struggle, and the responsibilities of man.

It is a difficult play

F. Scott's First Love

"Hip hip tiger tiger tiger!" cheers the Princeton fraternity in The Pursuit of Persephone, a musical inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Prospect Theater's production is an admirable composite of the writer's life and work. It cleverly combines Fitzgerald's youthful antics and a crucial failed romance with thinly veiled autobiographical selections from his fiction, making for a charming night of theater. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise are indisputable classics in the American literary canon, and his work helped shape our conceptions of the "lost generation" of the Roaring '20's. The premise of Persephone is that Fitzgerald's fiction all springs from the pain and loss of his first love, Ginevra King.

The show is effectively framed as a memory. After many years, Older Scott (Daniel Yates) is about to reunite with his college flame, Ginevra (Jessica Grov

Scotch Drag

When Americans think of British entertainment, they invariably think of Merchant-Ivory dramas and Monty Python craziness. But those expecting period costumes or silly walks at Brits Off Broadway's newest production, Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters, will be in for quite a shock. Writer/performer Russell Barr's solo show is set in the seamiest sections of Scotland

Greek Prelude

Last year, the Great Jones Repertory Company presented Seven, seven classic plays in repertory, from a restaging of Andre Serban's 1972 Medea to the world premiere of Ellen Stewart's Antigone. Individually, the pieces succeeded to varying degrees, but taken as a whole, they made a fascinating and beautiful cycle, the kind rarely seen on contemporary stages. Stewart's new staging of Perseus with the Great Jones company very much belongs to this series, serving as a sort of "prequel" to last year's events. (Perseus is the great-grandfather of Clytemnestra, who, as the wife of Agamemnon, is at the center of most of the Seven stories.) Perseus is also clearly related to the company's previous works in its triumphs and tribulations: at moments visually spectacular while at others plodding and uninteresting.

The character of Perseus has always been overshadowed by his greatest accomplishment: slaying the snake-haired Medusa by cutting off her head. Here the audience is given the full story. Perseus is fated to kill his grandfather, King Acrisius. So the king, upon the birth of his grandson (fathered by Zeus, of course), sends him and his mother, Danae, out to sea in a locked chest.

Perseus grows up and slays Medusa as a gift of thanks to King Polydectes for not wedding Danae, a union he had not approved of. Perseus also slays a sea monster, saving the life of Andromeda, the princess of Ethiopia, and the two are wed. As in all Greek mythology, none of these stories occur without angry gods, rivalries, or battles.

The music is what shines the most in this production. Composed by Elizabeth Swados and Michael Sirotta, along with Heather Pauuwe, Yukio Tsuji, and Carlos Valdez, it provides a magnificent, sweeping soundtrack that greatly augments (and, at times, inadvertently overwhelms) the action onstage. The musicians are a pleasure to both listen to and watch.

And no discussion of the piece would be complete without mentioning, with complete awe, the talents of the Storyteller, played by Benjamin Marcantoni. His voice is at once beautiful and frightening, adeptly modulating from a solid tenor to an uncanny and sublime soprano in the same phrase.

Stewart wrote the text, adapting it from and including excerpts by Ovid, Hesiod, Apollodorus, and Pindar. Her staging, which includes many collaborative efforts by much of the cast, crew, and other artists, has characteristically amazing visual moments

Barnyard Satire

It is no small challenge to give a new lease on life to French playwright Edmond Rostand's 1910 allegorical drama Chantecler, even for the title-bestowing rooster who believes that his song can call forth the dawn. The Adhesive Theater Project makes a valiant attempt in its low-budget production at the Teatro LA TEA on the Lower East Side, but the company gets bogged down in the script's honeyed lyricism and the unwieldy menagerie of more than 100 talking birds and animals. Director Cory Einbinder has trimmed about a half-hour from the three-hour play, but it still feels about an hour too long. Part social satire and part barnyard fable, Chantecler is considered a minor play in the oeuvre of Rostand, who achieved international acclaim as the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. The play ran for nearly 100 performances in its first English-language production in 1911, based largely on advance ticket sales generated by the gender-bending casting of the popular stage actress Maude Adams as the rooster. This is its first New York City revival in a new translation by Kay Nolte Smith, who sacrificed natural speech rhythms

Go Ask Alice

The Milk Can Theatre Company clearly likes a challenge. It prides itself on producing works that combine language, emotion, story, and audience to create a unique theatrical experience. It embraces the possibilities of heightened language and emotion, and it believes in works that tell a story and engage the audience. So it is odd that the company would choose Anne Phelan's Mushroom in Her Hands, a rehash of Alice in Wonderland written as a series of disjointed vignettes. According to the playwright's muddy program note, Mushroom in Her Hands is Phelan's speculation about what might have happened between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) and his young muse, Alice Liddell. The play opens promisingly with an intriguingly perverse scene between Dodgson and Alice involving hidden candy and Dodgson's trousers. But the potential of this psychologically fascinating and sordid relationship is quickly squandered in favor of creepy suggestions and awkward flirtation.

There are no transitions in this play. Dodgson quickly disappears and then some lights change and then Alice sniffs something and before you can say "through the looking glass," Alice is in Wonderland. She soon meets up with the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, etc. With each character she meets, Alice learns new and fun facts about her body, her sexuality, and the dark side of desire. Yet for all its early promise and speculation, Phelan's imagination comes up with little more than an amateurish, pseudo-sexual Freudian acid trip.

The cast of four enthusiastically make the best of what they have been given, collectively taking on 15 roles. Under Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's capable direction, the actors are let loose to play. Jessi Gotta perfectly captures the innocence and impudence of 14-year-old Alice. She takes a flat character and gives it dimension while maintaining Alice's precocious na

Out of the Past

If you don't deal with the past, some say, it will sneak up and deal with you. For Aggie, the past appears on a stormy March evening in the form of her younger sister Bella, who abruptly forces Aggie and her lover, Madeline, to sort through their lives in order to press on toward their future. Writer Robin Rice Lichtig's ambitious play, Embracing the Undertoad, wrestles with issues of trust, redemption, family, love, betrayal, and forgiveness, all within the confines of a small apartment bedroom in Wilmington, N.C. The award-winning script was presented as a one-act at the Bailiwick Rep in Chicago, where it won the Lesbian Theatre Initiative. With an occasional affecting metaphor or timely turn of phrase, the full-length production brings interesting relationships and issues to light. But the lack of any satisfying resolution for the characters gives the lengthy spans of dialogue the feeling of being diluted from what was most likely a sharper, more pungent original version.

When Aggie returns home from her waitressing job, her younger girlfriend Madeline immediately recognizes that something is wrong. She questions Aggie until she divulges that her boss's son has been sexually harassing her. As the women plot their revenge, their dialogue reveals the cracks in their five-month-old relationship. Madeline, a young writer, is hard at work on her book, a tome about spelunking and self-discovery. A heavy drinker, she writes all day while Aggie works. Aggie is desperate for her to finish her book so they can reap the monetary rewards and live the life of their dreams, while Madeline maintains that she will not be fully inspired until Aggie tells her the details of her life before they met. Aggie is tight-lipped about her past, and much of the action concerns Madeline's attempts to learn about Aggie's history.

When the telephone rings, Aggie's feeling of foreboding is confirmed when Madeline reports that Bella is on her way to visit. Aggie wants to flee, but Madeline, recognizing a possibility to finally unravel Aggie's past, insists that they stay. When Bella arrives, wind chimes sound, snow falls, and the curtains blow open. As sisters who have lived through tragedy, Bella and Aggie share a mystical, extrasensory bond. Throughout the course of the evening, Bella manages to expose the secrets of both Madeline's and Aggie's versions of truth, and she leaves the two to decide on the future of their relationship.

Lichtig certainly had strong elements with which to work. Madeline is an expert spelunker, which invites intriguing comparisons between venturing into caves and venturing into relationships, both of which bring us through darkness in pursuit of light. Aggie is also a fascinating character, a woman with low self-esteem who pushes aside her own life to live vicariously and feed off of Madeline's talent. The ethereal Bella operates as sage, muse, and prophet, a figure who arrives and departs surrounded by mystery. She leaves us with questions that are never fully answered, but perhaps for Lichtig's purposes, they are questions better left unresolved.

Much of the problem lies in the relationship between Aggie and Madeline. Although both Kate Cox and Deshja Driggs Hall give strong individual performances, there is a lack of chemistry between them that makes it difficult to support and believe in their fight for their relationship. Their dialogue often feels forced and clich

War Profits and Perils

"You can expect this to be the last war, and then we'll absolutely have peace ever after...how can you reject such a monumental responsibility?" That's a rallying cry not so different from slogans tossed around in America today. In fact, it's just one of many promises offered by the fictional society in Kettle Dreams, a surrealistic new drama by Gerald Zipper now playing at the Impact Theatre in Brooklyn. The psychological effects of these promises, and of fighting a war to end all wars, are the theme of the play, which takes on this dark side of the industrialized world with somewhat cloudy results.

Kettle Dreams depicts a world where new wars are beginning all the time, resulting in continuing success for a small factory that makes chemicals used in bomb construction. Arthur (Chris Sorensen) begins work as a young man in the factory, where he quickly befriends its amiable and pragmatic owner, Charley (Ron Leir). When times are hard during his life, Arthur returns to work for Charley just as his father had before him, and eventually he gets drawn far deeper into the industry than he ever intended. Torn between his love for his wife and baby son and his compulsive desire to provide a better life for them, he works harder and harder from one war to the next, until the factory and its kettle of toxic chemicals come to define his existence.

From a political standpoint, this is a play determined to make a statement, but it is seemingly unsure how to go about it. Chronicling the many repercussions of an endless war that is aiming for an increasingly ephemeral peace, Zipper's script raises some major political and moral questions. In dealing with them, he alternately lays out answers with heavy-handed authority or allows them to dissolve away like another gas bubble in the menacing, ever-present chemical vat that dominates the stage. Kettle Dreams swings wildly between styles and moods to make its points but never settles on a single one long enough to reach a satisfying form of expression. With one minute hopelessly sentimental and the next almost Brechtian in its didacticism, the audience is left uncertain where to go with each new turn in conversation.

Faced with a sweeping vision but a text plagued with inconsistencies, director Nonso Christian Ugbode and his cast have a tough time connecting all the dots. There are times when they find the right mixture and produce powerful, surreal moments, such as a fevered meeting between Arthur and representatives of the government he has contracted with to deliver explosives (including a general played with vicious determination by Michael Flood). Then there are moments when the play swings into a new mood, and the actors grope around trying to get ahold of the material again. Clarity and confusion come in about equal amounts, leaving the play tipping up and down between peaks of intense expression and valleys where the action stumbles to a crawl.

Kettle Dreams has its greatest successes when the actors grapple with the unpleasant truths of their roles in the monstrous military-industrial complex depicted onstage. Leir is particularly effective as Charley, the sadly practical factory owner who can't help growing close to his employees, even as they slowly kill themselves stirring kettles of his toxic chemicals.

Beside him, Sorensen has a huge burden to carry as he takes Arthur from the idealistic youth with big dreams to the battered industrialist of his later years, who declares at one point, "This war is fantastic! There's never been another one like it." His performance is particularly plagued by the script's many changes in tone, but the constant humanity and earnestness he brings to the part are commendable. As Arthur's wife Cherise, Erin Cunningham winds up in the middle of many of the play's more saccharin moments, which she handles with sensitivity, though she rarely has a chance to do more than plead.

When all is said and done, this is a dark play of weighty thoughts and weightier conclusions that never quite pulls off what it sets out to do. It offers a whole lot to think about, including some downright sobering political contemplations ("Our customers were the losers in this war

Teenage Shakespeare

When you think of Shakespeare, many things come to mind: lofty language, intricate plot lines, doo-wop. Well, maybe not the latter, but after you see Millennium Talent Group's production of Fools in Love

A Cosmo With Your Cosmos?

It is a skill to deliver complex ideas simply. It is a talent to do so with a sense of humor. Happy Hour at the Event Horizon, Redshift Productions's latest effort, now playing at the Blue Heron Arts Center Studio Theatre, has no lack of skill. With pluck to spare, the show breaks the immense advances of 20th-century physics into bite-sized, easy-to-swallow pieces. Proving they also possess a healthy portion of talent, Happy Hour's creators make these pieces wonderfully fun to chew on. The setting is the Event Horizon, a bar hovering just on the edge of a black hole, where, theoretically, the collapsed star's massive gravitational pull slows time almost to stopping. The barkeeps of this unique establishment are, appropriately enough, Albert Einstein (Josh Wallach), father of the theory of relativity

Pope's in Town!

New York has always loved John Guare. His tragic approach to comedy