The Price of New York Theater

Not only is New York the most expensive city in the United States, but it's getting more expensive to live here. The cost of living in the Big Apple rose a whopping 4.5% from October 2004 to October 2005, 1.6% higher than the national average, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But one statistic that the Labor Department doesn't calculate is the rising cost of producing theater in New York.

So what's causing theater to become so expensive? Is it the gentrification? Competition with big-name, big-budget Broadway musicals? Perhaps it's an abundance of theaters, which means shows draw smaller audiences and ticket prices must go up to cover production costs.

It could be any of those reasons, all of them, or none of them. But regardless of the cause, anyone who has been involved in an Off-Off Broadway production will tell you that the expenses involved in getting a show up and running are becoming nearly prohibitive.

Recently, TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) II theater company performed Charles Busch's The Lady in Question. Busch is an all-purpose entertainer who has earned fame for his acting on the HBO series Oz, a cult following for the movie version of his play Psycho Beach Party, and a Tony nomination for his play The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.

Impressive, then, that an Off-Off Broadway theater company-even one as prominent at TOSOS II-could stage a reading of a current Broadway star's play. What's more impressive is that this reading served merely as a fund-raiser for TOSOS II's next production, Dog Opera by Connie Congdon.

Two plays for the price of one? To find out how TOSOS II had managed to pull off this seemingly impossible feat, I met with company members Christopher Borg (director), Jason Bowcutt (director), Mark Finley (artistic director), and Doric Wilson (founder and general director) to discuss how their recent production came about.

Offoffonline.com: Christopher, Jason, how did you two get involved in TOSOS II?

Jason Bowcutt (JB): We grew up in Utah, in Salt Lake City. We both grew up Mormon. He brought me out of the closet.

Christopher Borg (CB): We were best friends.

JB: We were both into theater. We were both in acting.

CB: We were in a Mormon musical together…

JB: [Laughs.]

CB: ...called Saturday's Warrior.

JB: Saturday's Warrior!

CB: All about keeping the family together from a lot of liberals around, filling your head with garbage!

JB: So we, I got this book of Charles Busch's plays. I gave the book to him. He, we, totally understood...

CB: Connected to the material.

JB: Loved the material!

CB: Thought he was the funniest playwright we'd ever read. At the time we were interested in Charles Ludlum, and that interest got us into the library and led [Jason] to Charles Busch, and we read all the plays we could get our hands on. So the very first play I ever directed was <i>Psycho Beach Party</i>, and that was the first Charles Busch play ever produced in the state of Utah.

JB: And so we've been dying to do this play for a long, long time. Recently, we've become familiar with Charles and he's been very, very sweet to us.

How did you become familiar with him?

CB: Jason is the executive director of the New York IT Awards, the Innovative Theater Awards.

JB: He was the host last season.

CB: Last summer, or spring, we went to the Duplex [Theater] to see [Charles] talk before a screening of [his film] Die Mommie Die!, and Jason said, "Oh, my gosh: Charles, you should be the host of the first IT Awards ceremony." And so we spoke to him, and I kind of weaseled my way into the job of being his assistant for the evening, and it was like a dream come true.

JB: Congdon was an awards presenter, and TOSOS II decided they wanted to do her play Dog Opera with Christopher and [TOSOS II actor] Shay [Gines] in it. So we decided a way to raise funds for that was to put on this reading of The Lady in Question, which is a hard play to actually do. It would cost a lot of money.

CB: We could not afford to produce... it's got a big set and a large cast.

JB: A large cast.

CB: And we approached Charles with the idea, and it's a play that he's kept close to himself because I think he wants to do it again. But he very sweetly said, "Of course you guys can do it for this purpose."

Did you think about money when planning for this show?

Mark Finley (MF):It wasn't, "Well, we can't do this because we don't have the money," because we never have any money.

So how did you come up with the idea to use a production to fund a production?

JB: I don't know if anyone else has done it, but it seemed like a smart idea. I mean, we love both plays.

CB: It's a fund-raiser, and you think about, "How do theater companies do fund-raisers?" Sometimes they have cabarets, sometimes they have auctions or things like that. But I've wanted to do one of Charles's plays, and I don't know when I'll ever get a chance to. And it was like a symbiotic thing. One was our devotion to Charles, his work, and our love of his plays, and a need to make money for the theater company.

All of the actors involved are members of TOSOS. And so it was, I mean, in a way it's kind of wonderful. Charles is, to me, one of the important gay playwrights in New York. And in a way, it's like a gift. He's giving the gift of his celebrity and the fame of his play to support the gay Off-Off Broadway theater company of New York City. And I really think that that's where his heart is, too.

Do you get private donations? Do you write grants? Or is it all kind of thrown together?

MF: It's pretty much box office and personal money. You know, people lending us money.

CB: But it's a noncommercial...you know what? The focus is on the work, it's not on commercialism. And so it means that you have to be creative about finding a way to pay the bills and to pay the rent of the theater, which is getting higher and higher in New York, and it's almost squeezing the small theaters out. But they will survive!

So do you see this being a problem that is going to somehow quell the Off-Off Broadway theater community?

Doric Wilson (DW): Well, it's up to [everybody] to deal with it. Our way of dealing with it is to hope that we can continue to go on doing things [at the club Downstairs at the Monster]. We don't pay rent.

So you rent this place out per performance?

DW: No. We don't pay rent. They get the bar. We get the space. That's the point. When I first did TOSOS originally, we did things at the Spike, which was a bar I helped open. No overhead, no electric bill. No rent whatsoever. Yeah, you have to deal with the ice machine dropping ice and the piano upstairs.

But bottom line, the black boxes were when in the 80's and 90's Off-Off Broadway really became showcases. And what's funny about that is, the minute they became showcases, the agents stopped coming. But in the old days of Off-Off Broadway, agents just came. I didn't have a play of mine in the early days of [legendary cafe/performance space] the Chino or later at TOSOS. Actually, when we did TOSOS, we opened up with a musical revue called Lovers, and there was a very determined young actor who got every agent in New York down to see Lovers, and everybody in the cast got an agent except for him [laughs].

You know, the bottom line is, to get a cast like you saw tonight willing to work for free means there's no work in the city. They shouldn't be available. They really should not be available. And they're going to be available because there is no work left in this city.

What other ways do you guys use to get the funds necessary?

CB: So far, it's been, you know, looking for donations and relying on the generosity of your audience.

JB: And focusing on doing the work and making sure the work is of a quality.… Honestly, sometimes it's like paycheck to paycheck. Show to show. We don't have a big budget.

CB: TOSOS is a noncommercial, not-for-profit organization. It's completely a volunteer effort on everyone's part. And so there isn't really a mechanism in place to draw money from. I don't think there's a big, fat, rich board sitting around pouring money into our mouths.

JB: Big, fat, rich, evil board.

CB: Boards are great!

JB: Boards are great, Chris!

Doric, you have had your plays produced in New York since the inception of Off-Off Broadway. Has producing changed since then?

DW: Yes, yes, yes. Because now you have the black boxes that cost five times more than you could possibly make if you sold out for the week. So that's garbage. And we can't go on doing that. We've had, knock on wood, since TOSOS first opened, we've not had a bad show. And we've not had an unsuccessful show. We've had good audiences for all of them. Lost money on all of them because of the economics.

JB: I don't think that the people in TOSOS are thinking, "In five years, I'll be on Broadway." They're thinking, "I want to continue doing theater I love. I want to continue working on plays that have affected me, that have had effect on the community, the gay community.

MF: We started TOSOS because we wanted to bring out a lot of the seminal gay plays that have fallen out of the canon-that, because they exist, you get, you know, plays that happen now. But you're not going to see a lot of Robert Patrick's work on Broadway. It's not going to happen. And it's such great stuff, and I feel lucky that we can do it.

Any final thoughts on producing Off-Off Broadway?

DW: No, except get out and [expletive] do it.

Note: Dog Opera will open at a date yet to be determined. For more information, go to the TOSOS II website.

Perchance to Dream

"And by a sleep to say we end / the heartache and the thousand natural shocks..." (Hamlet). You would go to sleep too. You would sleep if your husband yelled at you constantly in unintelligible corporate-speak. Or if your stepdaughter said she would cut off your hand in order to gain entrance to public housing. Or if it snowed salt. What would you do then? You would sleep.

With What Then, Rinne Groff has written a truly innovative dramatic farce about marriage, a reflection on dreams, and a frightening premonition of environmental degradation. As the play begins, somewhere in the not-too-distant future, Diane, a middle-aged accountant, quits her job to spend more time at home, asleep on her kitchen countertop. Diane is no narcoleptic; she is instead what her husband Tom calls a "champion" sleeper. In her dreams, she becomes increasingly involved in a somnambulist fantasy about being an architect and creating the perfect housing project, replete with amphitheater, community garden, and velvet people mover.

Tom, the eternal realist, chastises Diane for quitting work and spending all her time sleeping to create her illusionary edifices. Diane reminds him that her new "profession" is just as elusive as his, since the vaguely ominous, environmentally devastating corporation that he works for is more concerned with creating acronyms and circular professional jargon ("You saw the Public Forum for the Public?") than creating actual products.

Meanwhile, Tom's daughter (and Diane's stepdaughter) Sallie, a drug-addled opportunist who would attempt murder for the sake of an apartment, convinces her boyfriend, Bahktiyor (or, to his friends, Tom—let's call him Tom 2), to steal Diane's blood as she sleeps. Sallie plans to use the fluid to pass a blood test so she can be eligible for government-subsidized housing.

While attempting to abscond with the hustled hemoglobin, Tom 2 inadvertently wakes Diane. She shares with him the idea for her marvelous structure. Entranced by her vision, Tom 2 quickly falls in love with her. He abandons Sallie and her scheme and soon becomes Diane's co-conspirator, traveling with her through consciousness and unconsciousness, becoming an architect of dreams and helping her build, as it were, castles in the air.

It's no surprise that they turn to sleep, given the nightmarish scenario that Groff has conjured. Dust storms, government-issued gas masks to be worn in the living room, massive global warming, and dried lakes are just a few of the treats awaiting us in this post-apocalyptic setting.

Two musical numbers add an implausible yet humorous note, though admittedly the first one drags a bit. The first whimsical number, "What Then," comes just after Sallie, in a frenzied tantrum, attempts to kill Tom 2, her now ex-boyfriend. The song is a catchy little ditty that, given its place after such a serious scene, shows the profound range of emotions in the play. The second number, "Sorry for Myself," makes great use of a Fisher-Price children's microphone, highlighting the playfulness that's evident throughout the production.

Director Hal Brooks, after recently ending his Pulitzer-nominated stint as director of Thom Pain, brings a revelatory quality to the play, finishing scenes on twists instead of inevitabilities, imbuing reality with a tinge of the fantastical, and schlocking up the farcical.

Long-time Clubbed Thumb member Meg MacCarthy plays Diane as if she were in a daze, which, given the part, a kind of sleepwalker among the awake, is exactly right. Husband Tom, played by Andrew Dolan, is good but somewhat stiff. Merritt Wever boldly attempts the difficult part of Sallie (who changes drastically throughout the play), though she often seems daunted by the challenge. Piter Marek, as the immigrant boyfriend-cum-dream-builder Bahktiyor, delivers a solid performance, at once playful and tragic, and displaying a great degree of depth.

If what dreams may come are anything as sweet as What Then, then keep dreaming.

Love Lost

Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? This philosophical question is raised in The Black Bird Returns, a dramatic love story playing at the 45th Street Theater at Primary Stages. Co-written by Alexis Kozak and Barbara Panas, the play focuses on former lovers Kat (Panas) and Cliff (David Walters), who quickly move to rekindle their old flame without giving much thought to the feelings of their current partners. This creates an obstacle that the script has trouble overcoming. We know that Kat and Cliff are truly in love with each other, but they convey this in such an unsympathetic manner that it is often hard to root for their happiness.

Kat's boyfriend, Roger (Douglas Lally), feels pushed away to the point where he glumly asks, "How would you rate me, as a B- or a C+?" When Kat hesitates, he probes, "Am I even on the honor roll?" Meanwhile, Cliff treats his trusting, pregnant wife, Amanda (Julie Jenson), like excess baggage. On a date, Kat asks him, "Are you single?" He counters, "Do you need me to be?"

Deep into Act I, in a desperate, melodramatic moment, Cliff confesses to Kat that he is dying of cancer. This would cast him in a softer light if he chose to inform his doting wife as well. Instead, he goes along with her pillow talk about what a good father he will be, never once hinting that he might suddenly and inexplicably drop dead before the birth of their child.

His affair is unmasked when a fateful day arrives and Kat is forced to call an ambulance from his house. When Amanda confronts Kat about her relationship with Cliff, she is coldly dismissed. Here, Amanda earns our heart with her pained, desperate pleas to know more about her husband's secret life, especially regarding his mysterious friend Tom. Kat folds her arms and refuses to tell the grieving widow that Tom is a beloved blackbird they once fed on a mountain.

The blackbird is a meaningful symbol to Kat and Cliff and comes from one of their last happy days together before the romance dwindled. And so, during an outing with Roger, Kat returns to these mountains to find the piece of Cliff she thought she had lost.

At this point, a spiritual moment is set to unfold when a loud, jarring noise suddenly fills the theater. It is an umbrella repeatedly opening and shutting in the tech booth to represent the flapping motion of a blackbird's wings. The sound effect may have the best of intentions behind it, but when amplified by a microphone it sounds less like an approaching bird than a winged dinosaur. It drowns out the low, tearful dialogue uttered by Kat as she tries to maintain the somber mood.

Fortunately, the play is armed with strong acting to hook you where the characters may not. Cliff may have a sleazy nature, but Walters has a sweet, boyish charm that shines through the dialogue. There is such a deep sincerity to his "I love you" that we almost forget he is saying it twice a day to two different women.

Lally is also a magnetic force as Roger, Kat's berated boyfriend. A lingering moment in the play is his crushed expression when Kat hollers at him for innocently cooing at a blackbird. His enthusiasm at spotting the bird sounds so genuine that it hurts to see how quickly it fades at the sound of his girlfriend's sharp voice.

Perhaps the doomed relationship story here is more about Roger and Amanda, the dejected lovers of Kat and Cliff. They know their relationships will always pale in comparison to their partners' first loves, but they both try hard to make things work. In this story they come off as good people who have been deeply hurt and are unloved by those they want badly to please. With luck, the next time the blackbird returns, it will be for them.

American Anomie

Richard Maxwell's plays resemble the paintings of analytic cubism, a style marked by a monochromatic, fractured collage of everyday three-dimensional objects reduced to two-dimensional squares and circles. Likewise, by breaking down and flattening our colorful American idiom into its component parts of straight talk and roundabout prevarication, Maxwell's plays help us observe the essential shape of our concerns and the undercurrent of anomie that belies our speech's animation. As important as analytic cubism was, however, its heyday was deservedly short-lived. The pleasures of such deliberately dull and angular compositions quickly fade because their appeal is almost entirely cerebral. Similarly, Maxwell's work, while an important step, is merely that: a step—it trips up if it stays put. Unfortunately, his current play, The End of Reality, malingers in its deadpan monologues until they finally succumb to the malaise of ambivalence that is their subject.

Five security guards on night watch struggle to relate to one another, and to a silent intruder in their midst, with various methods of coping with their boredom, helplessness, and fear. The images of an institutional lobby, a sterile corridor, and a motionless computer lab are projected by security cameras onto a video monitor. We are in the guard tower of a postmodern Panopticon, but, ironically, it's the guards themselves who are simultaneously anaesthetized and scared out of their wits.

Even if something happened, the guards, unlike police, are not supposed to fight. The florescent lighting imperceptibly flickers. Otherwise, there is a rigid monotony to their existence. The guards talk at—not to—each other about sports, the weather, their weekends. Without such talk, their vulnerability would be too palpable. However, their disconnected speeches, gauche pauses, point-blank stares at the audience, stylized male gestures, nervous repetitions, offbeat slang deconstructed in slow motion, and overwhelming lack of affect—even when describing situations that demand poignancy or paroxysm—betray them: they are faithless and afraid.

When the intruder arrives, it's as if such horror had been half longed for because it gives their lives dramatic moment. It's a kind of solution. They can finally utilize their skills and achieve the purpose of so much waiting. But, then, the conflict with the intruder seems to parody itself—the fight becomes an overly theatrical mockup of kung-fu movies.

Once detained, the intruder sulks in the center of the room: massive, silent, at the mercy of unknown forces—a living symbol of their anxiety. Yet their lives go on around him as usual with macho posturing, flirtations between the sexes, unconvincing sermons from the boss, and minor family crises. Nothing changes. Their situations, however, have been put into absurd relief: the dreadful has already happened, and—like Beckett's clowns—they can't go on, but do.

The play succeeds when it separates its characters' banal speech from their genuine feelings so that the heavy undertones of grief and longing break apart from the clichés they spout so fluidly. For example, the stop-and-go speech of a tough-guy veteran telling a female newcomer about his collection of Jordans and "Lil' Homies" (tiny figurines of urban stereotypes) reveals both his lack of self-awareness and his inner desperation, and it is a moment at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

Too often, though, the characters drone on in monotonous, disjunctive monologues. The characters don't seem to know where they want to go, their speech meanders, and, consequently, the audience begins to lose interest. Ultimately, there is not enough variety or enthusiasm in their dry, uninflected voices to sustain our attention for long swathes of soliloquy. When the characters engage in dialogue, on the other hand, their punctuated rhythms and extended pauses embellish the banal discourse so we can hear their alienation, not unlike the faint, hollow buzz of monitoring devices along the corridors.

The large, black stage engulfs the characters, while the sharp, white canvass backdrops convey the blankness of their yearning.

One shares the characters' uncertainty over whether their story is comically realistic or bleakly absurd. Or a tragedy, perhaps, about how the unserious levity with which we proceed with our lives undercuts the very matters of deadly earnestness that are at stake in them, even though, in the face of such existential nightmares, we have recourse to little else except these exchanges of shopworn trivialities to stave off hopelessness.

In the end, the image of a character who avoids reality by clinging blindly to his faith, talking incessantly of angels and ecstasy, is upstaged by a kneeling woman behind him who has been literally blinded by her fear. She reaches out her hands, imploring, while the personification of their terrors stalks off into the world.

Much like cubist portraits, it's as if Maxwell has put his characters under a strobe light, each threadbare trope of salvation shattered, frozen, and recognized for its inadequacy. Those brief flashes in the remorseless dark, however, are too inadequate even for their own designs.

Ye Gods!

What is satire? According to Wikipedia, it's a style of writing that "exposes the follies of its subject to ridicule...using irony and deadpan humor liberally." M. Stefan Strozier has written The Whales with the intention of turning a mirror onto New York theater and taking it to task for its indulgences, lazy productions, and liberal ideas. But though his views may be fashioned into an often thoughtful, Aristophanes-like satire, its presentation and performance is hampered by indulgent scenes, a lazy production, and half-formed ideas, which destroy the subtle irony and deadpan humor. In the play, the hermaphrodite god Dionysus is displeased with the current state of drama, particularly in the Big Apple. After some brainstorming with her Maenads, Dionysus sends them to find a crazy playwright to write a new show for a dramatic competition. If it is deemed good, the playwright will enjoy great rewards (including an Apple Mac laptop). They find their champion in Harry Alton, a former playwright and currently a homeless schizophrenic who lost his livelihood by writing a play called Hang All the Hippies at High Noon.

After the Maenads visit Harry and his fellow homeless lunatics in dreams, Harry goes about working on a new play for the competition. He meets a starry-eyed NYU drama student named Melissa, who suggests that they get someone to produce a reading of the work. Their plans are thwarted by Joanna Higginbotham, a member of the theatrical establishment whose ideals are the antithesis of Harry's.

Soon they are in the presence of the Whales, who are sent by Dionysus to judge the competition. But instead of a duel between the plays, the Whales call for Joanna and Harry to debate their viewpoints, with each trying to make a case for his or her goals and rules for today's theater.

Sadly, Strozier felt the need to jazz up his honest critique with unnecessary rap duels and dance breaks, and to people his script with tired stereotypes. If a character is presented as schizophrenic, he doesn't need to say things like "I am not crazy, everyone else is crazy" to get the point across. This is especially true in a protagonist; how can the audience believe in a hero who says such unbelievable things?

Instead of playing out the satire in a deadpan fashion, the actors chew up the black-box theater, and too many pregnant pauses kill the show's pacing. Perhaps Strozier would've been better off getting an outside director to exert some discipline over the staging instead of directing it himself. The promotional materials for The Whales boast of its large cast. But when one person is onstage speaking and a dozen other people are also there, carrying out their own objectives, fidgeting, and so on, the words are lost and the number of people is a detriment, not an asset.

It seems the big point that Strozier is making is that there should be better theater, that people shouldn't spend lots of money for lackluster Broadway shows, and that the liberal artistic elite is mostly to blame for the sorry state of the arts. But other than vague suggestions about critics and publishers loosening their stranglehold over their industries and being open to new things, no other ideas (certainly no original ones) are put forward to fix what the playwright says is so broken.

The ability to question institutions and to incite change is an important right to have and to exercise. However, there must be responsibility in carrying it out. The message itself is not only significant; so is the way that it's delivered. This is especially true when engaging in intellectual battles, such as a call for better New York theater. If one cannot bring a superior, or at least equal, product to the table, then it is no longer necessary or relevant. Rather, it is only so much more detritus in an already litter-strewn arts scene.

Once Upon a Time

In recent decades, literary scholars have fastened on fairy tales as a key to unlocking the mysteries of the national psyche. Fairy Tale Monologues: Fables With Attitude, in a sometimes wickedly funny and subversive production staged by Point of You Productions, takes this premise and runs with it, reimagining these age-old stories as miniature psychodramas and endowing the inhabitants of Fairyland with modern identities and motives.

Directed by Jeff Love, the play consists of 10 segments, each running roughly eight minutes. One by one, in no apparent order, fancifully dressed fairy-tale characters, including King Midas, Tom Thumb, Snow White, and Goldilocks, take their turn on the stage, which is sparsely adorned with a signpost and a rectangular box, and tell the audience their stories.

The press release promises that the fairy-tale characters will "tell you what really happens when their story ends. Is it truly 'Happily Ever After'?" But writer Paul Weissman does more: he relays each tale's aftermath but also reimagines the tale itself as well as the events preceding it. With few plot links between the tales, each monologue succeeds or fails on its own merits, which makes for an uneven evening.

In the funniest sketch (the only one that's not a monologue), Hansel and Gretel, two wide-eyed, doughy German children dressed in lederhosen, explain where they were last night to their stepmother (whom we neither hear nor see). Gretel's attempt to present a plausible alibi is undermined at each turn by Hansel's interjections about candy-cane houses and witches, propelling the girl to concoct in exasperation the fairy tale's twists and turns. Triumph swiftly turns to frenzied denials when their stepmother informs them that she's just been on the phone with Rapunzel's mom, who presented a different version of events. Love and Alyssa Mann offer precisely synchronized, pitch-perfect portrayals of the not so innocent kinder.

The other standout monologue of the evening is delivered by the Big Bad Wolf, played by the brawny Gerard J. Savoy with just the right combination of piqued pride and smarminess. The wolf argues half-convincingly to the audience that he's gotten "a bad rap." A construction contractor and father of "a couple of litters," the wolf recounts how he was unfairly exiled for burning down the houses of the three pigs (for whom he cannot conceal his contempt) and later found companionship with Granny until Little Red Riding Hood—a self-absorbed teenage grandchild—enters the picture.

Weissman and his actors get off some good laughs, with Goldilocks as a masquerading, gender-bending bandit (Love); Tinkerbell (Marlise Garde) and Snow White (Melanie Kuchinski Rodriguez) as spurned lovers; and King Midas as the amoral, gold-mongering ruler who does not see any tragedy in his golden touch.

But when Weissman tries to go deeper and become serious, he ironically becomes shallower. The change in mood is jarring for the audience and is not justified by stories that genuinely tug at the heart. Weissman, as actor, falters in his earnest portrayal of Pinocchio as a young man who mistakenly thought he could win his detached father's love by becoming human. Even more of a drag on the evening is David Holt's Tom Thumb, who loses his uniqueness when he grows up—and grows ordinary in stature.

The final monologue should rightfully be delivered by the commitment-phobic dreamboat, Prince Charming (Johnny Blaze Leavitt), given how it neatly circles back to the opening, when Snow White confesses how she is in jail for poisoning the prince in a fit of jealousy. Instead, the evening concludes with an unfortunate thud, courtesy of Sleeping Beauty (Cassandra Cooke), who awakens from a long sleep as an iPod-toting, tiara-wearing jogger who fondly remembers her prior life as a nasty, self-absorbed princess.

Despite its ups and downs, Fairytale Monologues shows that children's fairy tales can be the source of great humor, and an artful mirror of the human condition.

Out of Asia

Written and directed by Rubén Polendo, though clearly credited as a Theater Mitu collaboration, The Myth Cycle: Ahraihsak is an escape into a ritualistic performance that explores the perfections and frailties of human nature. Intelligent and visually striking, this capable production exposes its audience to artistic traditions not commonly encountered in Western theater. The titular myth is that of Ihsak (Darren Pettie), the favored heir of a king. Betrayed by his brother, he goes into exile. While wandering, he meets another king who was wrongly dethroned: Naarah (Jason Lew). Naarah travels with his fiercely protective sister Tarwan (Aysan Çelik), who quickly develops both a strong respect for and an attraction to Ihsak.

Summoned back to his kingdom by his treacherous brother, Ihsak returns home, only to lose everything he values. His actions plunge him into violence and despair, until a brave novice priestess (Jenni-Lynn McMillin) helps him to heal.

Ihsak's devolution from noble warrior to haunted tyrant—and his transformation back—seems derived from the myths and traditions of many cultures. No specific culture or country is cited in the program as source material, and several times throughout the evening I wondered if this story was created by Theater Mitu or was an actual myth. While the play clearly displays South Asian influences, the themes of creation, destruction, hope, and love are universal, and as relevant today as they would have been in any past age.

Strong performances by Pettie, Çelik, Lew, and Corey Sullivan (as the comical Mibi) keep the journey of Ihsak and his companions engaging and emotionally charged throughout the two acts. As Act I came to a close, several short, powerful scenes gave the show's first half a bit more energy than its second, which ends with a gentle message of hope and peace.

Theater Mitu's mission includes a concept it calls "Whole Theater," where theater entertains the senses, the mind, and the emotions. This was instantly apparent when walking into Teatro LA TEA at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center: the air was heavy with incense, and the space separating the performing area from the audience was lined with Oriental rugs. It was clear that the world in this play would be very different from noisy, gritty Delancey Street outside.

Powerful visual elements—puppets, masks, handcrafted props—added to the production's luster. The puppets worked well, from the rod puppet of young Naarah to the brilliant construction of Ahsan the horse, silently and deftly executed by Peggy Trecker. Because the actors performed so seamlessly with their props, the show's deceptively simple "special effects" were quite effective.

Scott Spahr's set of platforms and ramps was spare and elegant. Outlining the central performing area were shallow troughs of dirt, tantalizingly lighted before the show began but, sadly, not used during the production. However, an ingenious use of shiny Plexiglas and well-positioned water for Tarwan's bathing scene more than made up for it.

Miranda Hoffman's costumes were simple and represented a strong sampling of East Asian and Southeast Asian traditional dress. The masterful lighting design by Ryan Mueller made everyone and everything look beautiful.

Jef Evans played his original music in full visibility of the audience. He sat at his small version of a gamelan, surrounded by drums, bells, chimes, and rattles. The songs and vocal performances were perhaps the show's weakest aspect, if only because the acting and technical values were so exceptional. I was continually surprised to hear the songs delivered in English because they seemed so steeped in non-Western elements. The characters did seem to come by their songs organically, and the well-composed music flowed in and out of each scene naturally.

Theater Mitu's production succeeds at being "Whole Theater" because it is definitely the sum of its parts. Not just a vehicle for acting, writing, or visual effects, the play turns into true performance in a way that traditional Western theater seldom achieves. While it is an especially enjoyable evening for a theatergoer interested in ritual and performance, less specialized audiences should not feel intimidated by the title or subject matter. The company does a great job of making the show accessible and entertaining for everyone.

Escape From the Psycho Ward

From the moment Randle Patrick McMurphy bursts into Nurse Ratched's ward, all jovial and sassy because he's been committed here rather than sentenced to prison, you just know there's going to be trouble. The psychiatric ward, dedicated to the rehabilitation of "the weak," operates on a set of unspoken, unwritten rules that McMurphy, a poster child for the anti-establishment, thinks he can ignore. But as this time-honored classic unfolds, McMurphy's protest against the passive-aggressive bullying that Nurse Ratched has perfected on her charges is no match for her arsenal of literally mind-altering medical procedures. But for all his antics and aggression, McMurphy isn't really the protagonist here. He's a vehicle of change, a sacrificial lamb of sorts for Chief Bromden, who, during the course of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is brought out of his deaf/mute shell and escapes the ward under the cover of night. Physically, Chief Bromden is a hulking figure, but mentally he's a child haunted by conversations with his father, who, we later learn, became a "small man" when he sold the family land. Bromden, who has inherited this curse of mental smallness and fragility, is shoved and bullied by staff aides and generally ignored by everyone else.

The attention McMurphy shows Bromden pays dividends and awakens the man from a waking dream. It is Bromden who lifts the box filled with electrical wiring when McMurphy could not, and it is Bromden who casts the final vote to allow the men to watch baseball on TV. McMurphy exemplifies for him, and for all the men to a lesser degree, what it looks like when freedom takes the form of all-out rebellion. When Nurse Ratched plays her ace and has McMurphy lobotomized, we understand that McMurphy's tale is a cautionary one. Not all of the patients will ever muster the courage to leave, but at least they understand that leaving—and living—is a viable option.

The Charlie Pineapple Theater Company, making plays in Brooklyn's Williamsburg, far, far from Broadway's madding crowd, does a commendable job with this production. At a little over three hours, it could be shorter and probably will be, once the fairly good ensemble cast gels a bit more. George Stonefish is a well-cast Chief Bromden, making the disparity between his physical and mental presence believable.

Among the crazies, Michael Snow is Dale Harding, the voluntary admit and president of the Patients Council who is hiding from his sexuality. Snow plays Harding compassionately, steeling him against the pain of living with a razor-sharp wit and a finely attuned self-consciousness. Brian Leider and Christopher Franklin, as the stuttering Billy Bibbit and the amped-up Cheswick, are also a treat to watch. Both commit wonderfully to their characters and give the at times lagging production some of its much-needed energy.

In order for Cuckoo's Nest to work, the leads must communicate their utter hatred for each other with every breath. Nurse Ratched, a pent-up dominatrix in disguise if there ever was one, is a mistress of order and protocol. Sadly, Cidele Curo's performance leaves much to be desired—she neither projects strength nor that just-under-the-surface lust for strength that can electrify the clash between her and her charges. And as McMurphy, Jerry Broome seems to be acting under the influence, or perhaps the weight, of Jack Nicholson's performance in the hard to forget 1975 film. That said, there are worse things than a rehashing of that performance, but much of the ensemble work deserves a fresh and fully realized McMurphy to guide them.

Overall, this is one loony bin we shouldn't mind being locked up in for a few hours, just as long as we, like Chief Bromden, can escape once the going gets rough.

Age Against the Machine

The four vignettes that make up Michael Smith's new piece, Trouble, now playing in the Joe Cino Theater at Theater for the New City, are not unlike the four elements: watery in places, sometimes laboriously sodden, occasionally breezy with offbeat musings, then suddenly fired with bitchy wit. The choppiness is reassuring in a way. With his reviewing for The Village Voice in the 1950's and 60's, Smith is widely considered the man who legitimated Off-Off-Broadway; it's nice to see that he has retained some of the amateurish charm that is the form's hallmark. Running through the center of the four loosely related sections—the way a river runs through manmade borders—is the aging but still formidable Tess Byerson (Kathryn Chilson), New York City's new commissioner of art and culture. Like any aging river, Tess may sport a few more wandering curves than in yesteryear, but she has lost none of the force of her current. She makes this fact clear in the opening scene, set in a Chinese restaurant during a press barrage: "Look at the pictures. Every single one, I'm not just smiling, I'm radiant. I can't fake that."

Self-love, though, is inelegant. Smith's concern here is not with unchecked ego but with the delicacy of ego in its slow dance with time. Glamour inevitably fades; time eventually leads the waltz. What else could justify Tess's very next line: "But then what?" Indeed, what could justify the next, most successful part of the evening, as Tess and her aide, Dickie (Alfred St. John Smith), head out to the studio of artist Sandy Morphol (the brilliant Jimmy Camicia) for a visit as part of her hard-won commissionership?

After spending a tense few minutes in an elevator that doesn't appear to be moving, Tess and Dickie emerge into the "sweatshop," where the Andy Warhol stand-in lords over his models like a god. (The enmity many Caffe Cino veterans hold for Warhol and his posse is the stuff of Off-Off-Broadway legend; I can only think that Smith's affection for the long-defunct coffeehouse helped sharpen his pen to such a gleeful point here.)

So it is that Smith is at his best with a target in his sights, and Morphol's exploitive temple proves to be excellent ground for some of his strongest material. For instance, when Tess discovers that she is being videotaped while models copulate in the background, she is indignant. It's left to Dickie, a fan of Morphol's, to smooth the burgeoning rift:

Tess: I don't do porn. Dickie: But you look divine today. I mean it. This is one of your best days. You're like a love goddess presiding over the orgy. Athena never looked so good. Tess: You're sweet to say so. Now will you get the [expletive] out of my frame?

Such nimble jiu-jitsu is rarer the further from this scene we travel. Like Tess, we begin to feel the wheel of time slowly turning; for an audience member, needless to say, this is more fun as a dramatic theme than as a hard fact. When we get to the final vignette, which takes place between Tess and her previously unseen lover Randy (Dino Roscigno) in a jail following his arrest, whatever comic energy Smith once mustered has dissipated into the cavernous, dark air of the Cino. All that's left is an unfocused attempt at pathos, as Tess realizes she is no longer wanted.

That Smith also directed the piece may have something to do with this dissipation into fuzziness—what he couldn't sharpen as a writer he certainly couldn't improve with staging, if he could see that anything needed improving at all. Still, as anyone who's contemplated the paradox that is King Lear knows, to write about age and aging requires remarkably youthful vigor. With Trouble, Michael Smith shows that he may be technically a little long in the tooth, but when he sets his mind to it, those teeth can still deliver a wicked cut.

Last Years

You have to admire Pierre van der Spuy. Imagine leaving a successful medical career to pursue theater, a courageous act in itself, only to become playwright, director, and star of one of your very first projects. As anyone in theater can attest, to do any one of those three things well is a challenge; to do them simultaneously is nearly impossible. Albeit with dogged effort, van der Spuy falls far short of success with Anton, his four-act investigation of the last four years of Anton Chekhov's life. While densely researched and thoughtfully presented, the script—intended to represent a Chekhovian authorial style—lacks a dramatic arc, and the action flits around, but never fully addresses, van der Spuy's overarching intention.

His purpose, noted in Epilogue II, is to raise awareness and concern for how children are treated in their first five years of life. Referring to a tree's development (as mentioned in the play), he asks, "What are we as a society doing to support those parents with undetected defective inner growth rings to prevent them from passing on their loneliness, their melancholy, their self-destructive behavior, and their fear of intimacy from generation to generation?"

But while the Chekhov represented in Anton is melancholic, regretful, and often emotionally impenetrable, the four episodes offer little evidence to link his emotional state directly to the first five years of his life. His tense relationships with his family do fray and tear apart as his health deteriorates. But just as his consumptive cough never really worsens (even near the end, it's difficult to believe he is close to death), the pace of this lugubrious, bland production, instead of ebbing and flowing, plods steadily and flatly along, offering few epiphanies or transformations.

Chekhov spent most of his last years in Moscow and at his home in Yalta, where the play is set. There he keeps company with his widowed mother, Eugenia (Loyita Chapel); his sister, Masha (Shelley Phillips); and the actress Olga Knipper (Ana Kearin Genske), who starred in many of his plays and later becomes his wife. He certainly has many reasons to be gloomy: his mother is fiercely overprotective and needy, Masha longs for independence but continues to lean on him, Olga openly has affairs and struggles with pregnancy, and Chekhov himself still struggles with his brother Kolia's death from consumption, which occurred when Chekhov was 29.

As a playwright, Chekhov valued the use of subtext and metaphor, and wrote scripts that prioritized character over plot. While van der Spuy's script does, at times, embrace these conventions, his characters lack the depth and poignancy to carry the production forward. Olga, in particular, is so static that Genske herself seems bored by her own performance at times.

Fortunately, Chapel and Phillips bring welcome light to the production. As Chekhov's unlikable mother, Chapel purses her lips with severity, but also allows us to see her irrevocable love for her son. She is particularly remarkable in a beautiful moment when she tells Anton what she remembers about Kolia.

Phillips is luminous as Masha, expertly locating the complicated subtext in what could be a forgettable role. When Olga chides her, "Your lips are smiling, but not your eyes," she's telling the truth—Phillips often wears her smile as a deceptive mask, and reveals subtle layers of character throughout the production.

Rounding out the cast are Kent Langloss, who does a fine job as the omnipresent Dr. Altshuller; Lee Kaplan, who overplays the annoying qualities of visiting author Bunin; Jamison Vaughn, who is too young but still endearing as the elderly servant Mariushka; and Jim Heaphy, who plays the other fictionalized servant, Sergei.

The domestic tension is beguilingly captured by Sarah Phykitt's set, in which ornate rugs and furniture are juxtaposed with family photos to create a believable familial atmosphere. Katie Stults produced a very pleasant collection of costumes, and Jessica Lynn Hinkle's lighting design convincingly evokes the changing seasons. Unfortunately, the direction works to undermine these excellent technical elements—characters enter and exit from inconsistent locations, and in the absence of a coat rack, one character simply throws his coat on the floor.

Anton laments, "Life should be beautiful if you live in a house like this," but looks can be deceiving, and Chekhov's life, as presented here, is far from bucolic. Chekhov longed for theater that was "just as complex and yet as simple" as life itself; people may be simply having a meal, "but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are smashed up."

Unfortunately, we aren't privy to enough creation or destruction to justify this journey, and, like Joe Brooks, who produced, directed, and wrote the now-defunct Broadway musical In My Life earlier this season, van der Spuy falls victim to the lack of perspective that results from being too immersed in one's own project. Still, you can't blame him for trying; as he's probably already discovered, producing theater is often about, if nothing else, dreaming the impossible dream.

The Oddest Couple

While theatergoers flock by the thousands to see the limp Nathan Lane-Matthew Broderick revival of a Neil Simon play, the truly inspired "odd couple" is taking place just a few blocks away on West 43rd Street at Theater Three, where Candy & Dorothy Productions is premiering Candy & Dorothy. In David Johnston's flawless new work, two women who could not have been more different in life, Candy Darling (an Andy Warhol protégée) and Dorothy Day (the Catholic activist), find themselves trapped together in death. In the afterlife, they begin a journey that transcends time and space, soaring well beyond the heavens to create a story that is equal parts funny and poignant.

An occasional actress and "partial transsexual," Candy (Vince Gatton) lived life to the extreme as one of Warhol's many sidekicks. A sometimes Communist and Mao sympathizer, Dorothy (Sloane Shelton) gave her life to helping the less fortunate by working as the compassionate co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. In death, Candy and Dorothy squabble over the present and the hereafter while reflecting upon the past.

Under the guidance of a disembodied voice (the pitch-perfect Brian Fuqua), Candy quickly takes to the afterlife, working her way up heaven's ladder as she becomes a caseworker for the newly arrived. Her first client is Dorothy. On a mission to earn her "wings," Candy attempts to teach Dorothy a lesson about her life on Earth. But her efforts are thwarted as Dorothy stubbornly helps a troubled young woman in New York City.

On Earth, 33-year-old Tamara (Nell Gwynn) is at a crossroads—literally—as she stands on the corner of First Avenue and First Street. Flat broke, stuck in a dull job, and having just had an abortion, Tamara is a mess. Her life is complicated even further when she stumbles into a relationship with a wise bartender named Sid (the very funny Amir Arison). On the verge of consummating her relationship with him, Tamara finds herself the focus of the two very unlikely guardian angels.

The heavenly duo quickly make themselves at home in Tamara's apartment, cleaning up the place, offering advice, and helping Tamara stage a protest rally. Realizing she is seeing dead people, Tamara fears she is losing her mind. Ultimately, Dorothy's otherworldly preoccupation with the living Tamara turns out to be both women's salvation. (Interestingly, Dorothy's real-life daughter was named Tamar.)

Johnston's crisp dialogue crackles with wit. He creates situations of laugh-out-loud hilarity, yet they're mingled with quiet moments of honesty. He also has a profound understanding of what makes human beings tick. Whether we watch his characters share a cup of coffee or are allowed to eavesdrop on the intimate conversation between lovers, Johnston's masterful dialogue resonates with truth.

Kevin Newbury's seamless direction is the ideal complement to Johnston's script. Newbury uses the tight space to full advantage, expertly creating a sense of claustrophobia as Tamara's life implodes. The small stage accommodates nearly a dozen settings with the addition of a simple set piece or well-placed prop.

Newbury also guides his five-person cast to polished, inspired performances. As the tortured Tamara, Gwynn delivers a thoroughly intense and raw portrayal. Brimming with excitement and honesty, she expertly finds comedy in tragedy as she displays her hilarious neuroses. As the humble Day, Shelton gives the character a dry wit and an incredulous smirk. Her deadpan delivery makes even the subtlest jokes crackle, and her natural performance never falters or hits a false note.

But even with a great script, outstanding direction, and magnificent acting, Gatton manages to run away with the show as drag queen Candy Darling. He never resorts to typical drag histrionics—no shrieking, no mincing, no letting his albeit fabulous costumes do the acting. Gatton fully inhabits Darling, disappearing into the role with such conviction and determination that you forget a man is playing a woman. It's the ultimate compliment to Darling, who wanted nothing more than to be accepted as a woman. Gatton honors that wish and Darling's memory with his brilliant rendering.

Candy & Dorothy is a hidden gem. With its combination of subtle emotion and uproarious humor, the play accomplishes the rarest of feats: it transforms you. As it leaves you with smiles and laughter, it also reminds you that a simple act of kindness can truly change one person's life. This production deserves to have a long life, and with the producers trying to move it Off-Broadway, here's hoping it does.

Parent Trapped

The most effective moments of Dutch playwright Alex van Warmerdam's The Northern Quarter, now making its New York premiere at the Sanford Meisner Theater, are the two stage images that bookend the evening. Minutes after lights' rise, the 41-year-old protagonist, Faas, uses a flashlight to follow the winding tendril of a long, red knit scarf—like a man slowly collecting the thread sewn for him by the Fates—until he comes face to face with his personal Klotho, the goddess of spinning: his disturbingly cheerful mother, still blithely crocheting. All roads, we're seemingly told, lead to Mom. The rest of the evening doesn't so much advance from this image as circle its significance, like a dog sniffing around its master. Faas (the excellent Dave Geuriera), under the aegis of both his mother (Heather Hollingsworth) and his rigidly decorous father (Vincent van der Valk), has been held the long years of his life under what amounts to house arrest. He is not allowed outside; he is barred from reading books (when his father relents and gives his son a dictionary, Faas discovers that all but a few paternally approved words have been scratched out); he is even denied a shrimp sandwich on the grounds that wanting one means he is not entirely content at the present moment. Trouble starts when Faas begins to assert to his parents the truth of that accusation.

The uneven charm of van Warmerdam's script, as translated from the original Dutch by director Erwin Maas, is in its particular type of absurdity. It's not a pure blend. Where the absurd argues that the world and those who people it are threatening for being entirely inscrutable, van Warmerdam seems to suggest that the true threat to our well-being is not attempting to go out and crack the code.

It's no surprise, then, that once he lets Faas into the world—where he finds his beloved books and experiments with painting, among other things—the mood noticeably lightens. A warm breath of common sense begins to creep into the dialogue (a duel of philosophy with three quirky construction workers is the high point of this shift in tone), as opposed to simple logic, which, in keeping with the absurd tradition, the parents show time and again to be easily perverted.

Maas's attractive visual sense generally accentuates these various dips and rises (with strong support from costume designer Oana Botez-Ban and light designers Lucrecia Briceno and Tim Cryan). This is a double-edged sword. Where sometimes Maas's staging serves to adeptly underscore a moment's subtext—as he does with the red scarf image—he bludgeons others with obviousness. (I'm thinking particularly of several scenes in which mother and father use their son as a sitting stool, needlessly emphasizing his subjection.)

The cast members bear up well, though. They know the work is, at bottom, a clown show—as pointed up by the many inventive costumes as well as through makeup (the parents, for instance, are powdered and lavishly rouged)—and the actors ratchet up the energy accordingly. Particularly fine work is done by van der Valk and Hollingsworth. However, it's Geuriera's imperturbable Faas who anchors the evening. He wisely refuses to play his unwilling shut-in as a child trapped in a man's body. Instead, he aims at the more interesting challenge of playing a man trapped in a child's life.

That van Warmerdam lacks the teeth for the viciousness of the unadulterated absurd makes his inclusion of a gun and its eventual use all the stranger. Yet from this misstep comes a crowning touch. With his father looking on, Faas steps off the stage and passes through the audience, out into the brisk air beyond the theater doors, from which we can hear real life humming on 11th Avenue. After a long, pained moment, the father offers a simple endorsement: "Goodbye, son."

Medical Miracle

Is there anything left worth believing in? With biting humor at a breakneck pace, Word Monger Productions presents Brian Parks's snarky play Goner, an expertly produced delight guaranteed to make you question your allegiances, whether they be medical, governmental, or cinematic. It's easy enough to poke fun at government these days, but Parks's clever script puts an inept president into the hands of three even more inept surgeons at a hospital. Even if you don't believe in government, you might still have some faith in medicine. But if you pay attention to Goner, you won't for long.

Dr. Hoyt Schermerhorn (Jody Lambert) is the new guy at the hospital, and he struggles to get to know his colleagues. The wiry Dr. Ecorse Southgate (Matt Oberg) is a glockenspiel master who has recently designed Chemotherapy Barbie (yes, she vomits and her hair falls out). And Dr. Warren Wyandotte (David Calvitto), the head of surgery, gazes into his daughter Wixom's mouth to determine if she is pregnant, proclaiming, "What's a father doctor for, if not free gynecology?"

When President Waterford Novi (Bill Coelius) is shot in an assassination attempt, he is transported to the hospital, where the doctors wait until he is stable enough for an operation. The comic buildup to the operation grows in manic intensity, punctuated by the exploits of two FBI agents (Leslie Farrell and Patrick Frederic).

A clever subplot charts the budding romance between newcomer Hoyt and Wixom (Jona Tuck), who works as a lab technician. Pushed by her father to become a doctor, Wixom instead dons a beret and becomes an "artist." She decides to make a documentary about black people (whose oppression she has newly discovered), and her wide-eyed enthusiasm and blatant lack of knowledge indict the warped sense of righteousness taken on by many a filmmaker.

It is to Parks's credit that he manages to extend his critique from medicine and government to the realm of film as well. After all, why dismiss President Bush only to blindly follow Michael Moore? Goner ably questions unqualified loyalty to any one thing, medical or otherwise.

John Clancy has directed a superbly well-oiled production, and the actors move through the show with astonishing vocal dexterity. The high-speed pace calls for veritable linguistic gymnastics, and the actors don't miss a beat, thanks also to the impeccable precision of Eric Southern's lighting. My only complaint was that the hourlong show sometimes skimmed through its substantial material so quickly that several high-quality jokes were either unintelligible or barely touched upon.

As the surgical trio, Calvitto, Lambert, and Oberg make a thrilling comic team, whether they are attempting to operate or harmonizing to a heart monitor. Tuck is very engaging as Wixom, and she offers a surprisingly winning monologue about analyzing stool samples (as a "chef in reverse"). Coelius's unshakable deadpan as the president makes us love to distrust him, and Farrell and Frederic are splendid as the FBI agents and in assorted other roles.

A zippy, absurdist comedy in the tradition of Christopher Durang and Urinetown, Goner played to positive notices at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival, and New Yorkers are now lucky to find it stateside. Apparently there are idiots everywhere, whether you believe in them or not. But wherever you choose to pledge your allegiance, Goner suggests it's much safer to laugh at the idiots than to take them too seriously.

Flow of LAVA

(W)hole, currently playing at the Flea Theater, is a full-length movement piece from the creative minds of the LAVA girls: an all-woman, six-person dance troupe known for its ability to draw on geological themes and phenomena as an inspiration for its dazzling aerobics. LAVA was founded by director and performer Sarah East Johnson, who later recruited Natalie Agee, Diana Greiner, Molly Chanoff, Rebecca Stronger, and Adrienne Truscott to complete the group. They are the cast of (W)hole, a show that shines with astonishing athletic performances and stunning trapeze feats, but dims in trying to convey the weighty ideas and symbolism that lie beneath the stunts. The LAVA girls are not, literally, jumping through hoops merely to jump through hoops. On the contrary, there is a purpose to everything they do. In the (W)hole press release they explain that such stunts as their "handstand duets and balancing acts" are used to represent "magnetic polarity reversal." However, those witnessing the handstand duet onstage without reading this beforehand (there are no explanations within the pages of the playbill) are not likely to understand the handstand's significance to magnetic polarity, let alone its reversal.

Midway through the show, the LAVA girls bring (W)hole to a screeching halt to play interactive games with the audience. One grabs a clipboard and says, "Anyone who has been upside down in the past five days please stand up." Those who stand (a surprising handful) are asked to come onstage. They are then given 17 seconds to join hands and form two circles moving in opposite directions. When this is accomplished, they return to their seats, and more questions of this nature are asked, encouraging those who answered affirmatively to come onstage and form various molecular patterns with others. This game is enjoyable for those who want to participate, and entertaining for those who don't.

The fun wanes when the LAVA girls give everyone in the crowd approximately two minutes to frantically gather their things and find a new seat in another section of the square-shaped theater. Some audience members gamely participated, while others looked reluctant to find another seat when they were comfortable in the one they had. In some cases, those with good seats who didn't move were not-so-playfully pressured to by those in bad seats, who saw this as an opportunity to acquire better ones.

Before the interactive games, the audience is given a quick, short, and complicated tutorial on how lava is formed beneath the earth, and is told that the point of the games is to show how "alike minerals find one another." But these connections, especially for those who are not science-minded, are hazy at best. Also hazy is the reason behind ushers forcing all audience members to remove their shoes and wrap them in plastic bags prior to entering the theater. Was this a prank or did it represent a scientific theory? There is never an explanation.

Without knowing or understanding the message behind the movements and tricks being performed by the LAVA girls, (W)hole can be appreciated only on its purely physical level. Mixing science and circus to create a comprehensive, full-length movement piece is a difficult endeavor, but with some trial and error, these six talented gymnasts should find the perfect balance.

Lords of the Strings

The Rapture Project's title is derived from the fundamentalist Christian belief that when death, destruction, and other inescapable ills appear on the horizon, the end of times will be upon us, and only the truly faithful believers will be "raptured" away before a bloodbath ensues. According to this belief, those who are raptured away will be literally plucked from the Earth and carried up into the heavens. Meanwhile, the nonbelievers will be left to fight out their differences at Armageddon, a historic valley north of Jerusalem. Fortunately, this gloom and doom does not extend beyond The Rapture Project's premise. The play itself is a dynamic, raucous, and fun romp down the road to hell, with a mix of both humans and puppets. The human performers open the show with an a cappella song and dance, later adding a variety of traditional and nontraditional instruments to create a catchy, handclapping rhythm. It is also a stunningly visual extravaganza, with funny marionettes and psychedelic images inspired by a 1960's designer named Jilala.

The play was written and created by its performers, members of a troupe called Great Small Works, all of whom have clearly done their research on the subject of Christian fundamentalism and its current role in American politics. There is a great wealth of information to be found within the story and in the set, which is a giant white wall spanning the length of the stage and covered in religious phrases and Christian iconography from the 1920's. In the center of this wall is a little red curtain that rises to reveal a cast of puppets going about their lives, making choices that will lead them closer to Baghdad and the climactic battle at Armageddon.

Rick, a ministries leader, is a conservatively dressed puppet leading tourists through the Grand Canyon. He is engaged to Carrie, another conservatively dressed puppet who has been seduced by his religious conviction. Their lives intersect with a typical American family: a block of four wholesome-looking puppets, literally joined at the hip, that win a trip to Baghdad. Meanwhile, Bernard, the villainous puppet, stands in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden struggling with his guilt over sending faulty body armor to the soldiers in Iraq.

Unbeknownst to him, one of his employees, a perky puppet dressed entirely in pink and named Wanda, finds her conscience and heads to Baghdad to reveal the truth about the armor. There is also a mysterious security guard puppet that is frequently and suddenly raptured away at the end of his scenes.

In one of the play's most poignant moments, the audience follows this puppet into the heavens to see firsthand what this rapturing is all about. The top of the stage opens to reveal three actors carrying the little puppet among the clouds while humming a whimsical spiritual hymn accompanied by trance-like music.

Despite the use of these colorful puppets and other childlike aspects, this play is more appropriate for adults, as well as anyone curious about the religious beliefs held by many of America's political leaders. Because of the complexity of the information that's being presented, those not familiar with Christian fundamentalism may not understand some of the story's details. But anyone wishing to learn more about the themes can attend one of the production's two talk-back sessions, which feature an impressive list of authors, artists, and scholars who explain the finer points.

Within the context of the play, Great Small Works understands the difference between teaching and preaching, educating its audience from a podium, not a soapbox. The company keeps things light, and even the powerful final battle between good and evil has a silly spin to it: a Satan puppet leads the forces of evil, while renowned writer and activist Susan Sontag embodies all that is good. With elements like these, The Rapture Project has all the right ingredients to feed your mind, tickle your funny bone, and rapture your heart.

Theme and Variations

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and you also shouldn't judge theater by its artwork. But judging by the cover of its program, Woman Seeking...'s production of The Birds and the Bees or the Birds and the Birds promises to be extremely provocative. A naked woman twists her body in extension on the floor; with elbows on the ground, she stares downward in a posture that could indicate a state of arousal, fatigue, despair, or meditation. Her body glistens with a metallic sweat, and the overall effect suggests sex, passion, and conflict. Unfortunately, this collection of nine short plays fails to deliver, with a few exceptions, on its provocative promise. (One of the nine, "Figure of a Father," had its opening postponed until next week.) Grouped loosely around the topic of sex—its repercussions, incarnations, and resulting relationships—The Birds and the Bees is a mixed bag. A lack of satisfying conflict deflates most of the scripts, which often rely on overly simplistic dialogue and relationships. Still, Women Seeking... has assembled a richly talented ensemble and production team that transforms rather pallid material into an enjoyable production.

Rich Orloff's "Last-Minute Adjustments" energetically kicks off the evening, channeling Christopher Durang in a slightly absurdist take on the assembling of a baby (played by an adult man) before he enters the world. Three technicians move through a checklist of materials to ascertain that the baby is ready to be born. When they decide to add a soul, however, the baby balks, because a soul will make him both capable of love and vulnerable to pain. Orloff leaves us wondering, Is the pain worth the love?

"The Scent of Coconuts Had Haunted Her for Days" follows, and Tara Meddaugh's finely wrought script is one of the production's highlights. A quiet meditation on the life of young newlyweds, the short piece examines the fear, dissonance, and lack of communication that can plague a marriage. A woman's fear of having a baby poignantly inverts as she finds herself nurturing a backyard weed garden. Kel Haney's delicate direction moves the action along seamlessly while emphasizing the rich subtext, and Jeff Wise and Nicole Winston are superb as they deliver compelling, complex performances.

Barb Wolfe's "Chef Salad" and Laurie Marvald's "The Phone Call" both focus on mother-daughter relationships. In the first, a daughter reprimands her late-blooming mother for being so publicly outspoken about her sexuality. Christine Mosere and Wynne Anders find the humor in their characters (and look remarkably alike), but their dialogue lacks a clear, dramatic through line. "The Phone Call" is essentially a commercial for the orgasm how-to classes of Dr. Betsy Dodson (who will be giving, perhaps not coincidentally, post-show talkbacks Jan. 11 and 18). The play shamelessly promotes Dodson as the daughter frankly tells her mother about her experiences in Dodson's class.

The next three pieces are largely unremarkable, laden with platitudes and bogged down by exposition as two young girls explore a nascent lesbian relationship ("Breathe"); two cats figure out how to exploit a dog for their own sexual pleasure while the owners are away ("Felicity"); and a young, pregnant girl confides in an elderly high school custodian ("One More Knot").

It's not until the final piece, artistic director Mosere's "Femme," that the production seems to ground itself. The longest play of the evening, "Femme" innovatively explores a young girl's quest to make sense of a kiss she receives from a woman. Through sketches, songs, and confessional dialogue, five actresses function as a Greek chorus of sorts, as the girl struggles to determine her own sexual identity—"who I am versus who I should be." Here, at last, we have the passion promised by the program cover: "Femme" is fiery, provocative, and alive, making the other plays appear relatively bland by comparison.

Although The Birds and the Bees provides uneven entertainment, Woman Seeking... is nonetheless a production company to keep your eye on. As they work to cast a variety of actors (regardless of age or physical type) in their shows, they are pioneering in a healthy direction. But while we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, we almost always do. The Birds and the Bees may not always live up to its promise, but Woman Seeking... will undoubtedly find creative ways to work toward and challenge the ambitious expectations it sets for itself.

Separate Lives, Common Affliction

In response to the cheeky list "123 Reasons to Love New York Right Now" that New York magazine published on Dec. 26, Gawker.com, a media blog popular with the Google generation, published its own snarkier, hipper version. No. 81 on the Gawker list made me gasp; it read, "Because nobody uses condoms anymore." After Rent and the AIDS quilt, Magic Johnson and those ubiquitous red ribbons, has the generation weaned on sex education classes lost its collective concern about HIV and AIDS so thoroughly that we no longer care to take even the most basic sexual precaution?

Sadly, the numbers continue to paint a grim picture. Young people between 15 and 24 account for half of all new HIV infections worldwide, with more than 6,000 in this age bracket getting the disease every day. In the United States, the rate of AIDS diagnosis for African-American women is a staggering 25 times the rate for white women; HIV/AIDS is the No. 1 cause of death for African-American women between 25 and 34. And all this after more than a decade of AIDS awareness.

These are some of the facts I was compelled to seek out after seeing Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter in their two-woman play, In the Continuum. The production, minimally staged and beautifully acted, tells the story of two women, one African and one African-American, who, though they live on opposite sides of the planet, are fighting remarkably similar struggles.

Abigail, a Zimbabwean, is seemingly a success story. She is an on-air reporter for the local news station and has a young child by her equally successful and desirable husband, Stanford. Abigail knows that Stanford is cheating on her, but hopes that the child she carries will bring him back to her arms. When she goes to the crowded clinic for a checkup, Abigail is told by an unsympathetic and distracted nurse that she has the disease. What's worse, though he may beat her and send her back to her village a shamed woman, Abigail must break the news to Stanford and convince him to come in for testing.

Meanwhile, Nia, a Los Angeles teenager who is in and out of foster homes, has snuck out to a club with her best friend. She waits there for her boyfriend, Darnell, a local basketball hero, with several people hoping to ride his coattails out of the ghetto. After shots are fired at the club, Nia finds herself in a clinic, only to learn that she is pregnant with Darnell's child and HIV-positive.

From here, both Abigail and Nia must interact with the women who surround them, including a former high school friend turned sex worker and a social-climbing acquaintance for Abigail, and a painfully out-of-touch social worker and a gold-digging cousin for Nia. Each of these meetings propels Abigail and Nia closer to the play's dramatic climax: the moment of confrontation and exposure. Abigail and Nia must decide whether to face public shame and "out" the men who gave them this disease or continue to submit to the weight of secrecy.

It is then, at that moment of choosing, that the fictional wall dividing Abigail's world from Nia's breaks down and the two women momentarily acknowledge each other onstage. Their cultural particulars fall away and they know a moment of solidarity and understanding that, though strictly expressionist, represents so much of what they do not have access to. Neither woman ends up telling her secret, and in not doing so, both reveal to us how much more solidarity and understanding these characters need—from each other, from the people they know, from us.

That Gurira and Salter play every character in this 90-minute piece, often simultaneously onstage and deftly transitioning among them, is a theatrical triumph that must be seen to be believed. Watching them weave together the stories of these wildly different yet tragically similar women is akin to watching expertly trained and obviously gifted dancers, each moving independently, both moving as one.

Despite the lax attitudes that have prompted some to declare this a post-AIDS cultural moment, the numbers do not lie. And plays like In the Continuum succeed not only as art but as reminders that, in terms of this disease and its effect on specific communities, the worst of times are not behind us.

Flower of Comedy, Root of Evil

When one hears of Machiavelli, the usual image that's conjured is the narrow-eyed portrait of the backroom backstabber, the Renaissance's harbinger of 20th-century spin-doctoring and realpolitik. A cold, clever, nasty genius akin to, say, Henry Kissinger or Karl Rove. What many people don't realize, however, is that during Niccolò Machiavelli's own lifetime he was most renowned for his farcical comedic touch in screwball sex romps like The Mandrake, now revived in a titillating new production at the Manhattan Theater Source. A senile, grumbling old lawyer, Nicia, keeps a beautiful wife, Lucrezia. His one desire is to have a son, but he just isn't up to the job. Callimaco, a gallivanting ne'er-do-well, has eyes for Lucrezia, but she is impossibly virtuous. So he enlists the help of Nicia's henpecking mother-in-law, an avaricious friar, his faithful, sloe-eyed servant, and a faithless fellow traveler who helps him concoct a scheme, which is this: Pretending to be a doctor, he convinces Nicia the only way to solve his problem is to get Lucrezia to eat a mandrake root.

However, there's a caveat, the first person to sleep with Lucrezia will die (a point-blank metaphor of the Renaissance superstition that the sin of adultery leads directly to murder). Delighted, Nicia agrees to capture a passer-by,Callimaco in disguise, of course,with the gang of co-conspirators and willingly arranges his own cuckoldry.

While the characters are the stock figures of commedia dell'arte, they are realized with such panache and precision as to render them into human cartoons. Like good cartoons, they display an exaggerated animation that real people too often lack. Michael Shattner as the dimwitted Nicia is especially hilarious, shouting expletives and shuffling around bent-backed as the play's impotent, crotchety laughingstock.

The production is chock-full of sight gags, little gestural asides, and even physical interactions with the audience, thanks to director Daryl Boling's well-timed blocking and marvelous use of a narrow, unadorned stage. The stage's layout resembles a high school football stadium in miniature, with small rows of bleachers flanking either side so that we watch not only the play itself but a mirroring audience as well. And, judging from the audience members' reactions, the buffoons and rapscallions plodding and plotting before them are recognizable character types we still have with us today.

Vinnie Marano's punchy new translation is completely contemporary and colloquial, with pun-a-minute double entendres, while Ollie Rasini's serviceable folk songs strummed by a troubadour break up the fast-paced scenes of this antic sex farce. One memorable scene has Callimaco (Jeffrey Plunkett), in the guise of the doctor, spouting possible causes of Nicia's erectile dysfunction, first in the Latin of the Vulgate, then in a transparently vulgar Latin, slipping into pig Latin, and then descending into complete nonsense. Meanwhile, Nicia absentmindedly splashes the bottle of urine that the doctor asked to examine, from which Siro, the bumbling servant (Ridley Parson), nearly takes a swig by accident.

Oddly, Machiavelli's send-up of all-consuming cynicism results in a genial outcome for everyone involved: the friar gets paid off, Nicia has a son, Lucrezia realizes her sexual coming of age, Callimaco pulls off the bed trick, and the others get to be in on a good practical joke. In some ways, Machiavelli's vision is like a comedic perversion of Adam Smith's providential "invisible hand" of free-market capitalism, which makes all turn out for the best in a world of cutthroat bankers and butchers bloodymindedly pursuing their own self-interests.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in fact, thought that Machiavelli's famous treatise on the ruthless machinations of statecraft, The Prince, was a satire. But, regardless of whether Machiavelli intended his works to endorse, exploit, or examine the godless pragmatism he witnessed surrounding him, it is clear that this delightfully lighthearted production of The Mandrake aims to gently mock the pretensions and follies of the eternal human comedy.