Bad Behavior

When you think of a storyteller, what kind of person do you imagine? A grandparent in a rocking chair by the fire? The flashy office raconteur who's the life of every corporate party? How about when you imagine a comedian? Is it always a stand-up comic in front of a microphone? Or think of an actor in a play. Does that person always play made-up characters and read from a script? Sara Barron is all of these things, and none of them. In People Are Unappealing, her solo-performance piece playing at the People's Improv Theater, Barron spends an hour making the audience laugh by recounting—with quirky and sardonic wit—five stories that feature her as a character.

The first opens with a young Sara discovering her parents in the middle of an intimate moment. This opener quickly sets the tone for the evening: we're in for brash and bawdy humor, delivered with good-natured self-deprecation. Young Sara becomes teenaged Sara, and her early childhood shock turns into adolescent awkwardness. She gets through it with the help of her best male friend, from whom she's been inseparable for years. Eventually, the two friends grow up and apart; he moves to Los Angeles and falls in with a crowd of déclassé minor celebrities like 'N Sync's Lance Bass and Tara Reid.

Story No. 2 involves an adult Sara sharing an apartment with a friend on the Upper West Side. It's a luxury building, and their upstairs neighbor is a Famous TV Star (she never tells us his name). She and her roommate become friendly with Mr. Famous TV Man, and one night, after the three have a few beers together, her roommate urges her to get out "the porn." Now, the show is bawdy but not terribly explicit: "the porn" refers to an embarrassingly lame erotic story written by a 12-year-old Sara. The two women like to read it now and giggle over how silly and bad it is. However, their fun forever changes their friendly relationship with Mr. Famous TV Man.

In the third story, an adult Sara is randomly offered a job at the downtown bar Coyote Ugly, where she meets a woman who dreams of being famous and on television. The woman decides the surest route to fame and TV exposure is to audition for a Jerry Springer Show episode on amateur strippers. Because she's quite good and quite attractive, the woman wins a callback audition and takes Sara with her. Ultimately, she is awarded only first runner-up, which is not enough to get her on TV. But Sara's open-mouthed, gaping reaction to her friend's performance is deemed to be TV-worthy. Jealous over Sara's resulting appearance on Jerry Springer, the woman refuses to continue their friendship.

Sara's next work-related debacle takes place in a restaurant owned by a Food Network celebrity chef (another name changed to protect the "innocent"). She's offered the opportunity to wait tables at a private dinner for her favorite rock band, coyly referred to as "R.E. Lem." The band's lead singer, "Ichael Ipe," had been a hero to her, until this night.

The final story involves NYC's most overexposed "celebutante": Paris Hilton (I'm not sure why her identity wasn't carefully guarded). After being regaled with tales of Paris's bad behavior by a mutual friend, Sara is able to spend an evening on the town with Hilton. It ends badly.

Obviously, it's no coincidence that all of the encounters Sara has with fame and famous people are disastrous. These unpleasant celebs and desperate hangers-on are the "unappealing people" in the show's title. She ends the evening with a rant against them, in a bid for solidarity with the audience, and states that celebrities are no better than regular people; they just have "better advertising."

In all, People Are Unappealing is an entertaining way to spend an hour. Barron understands what's funny and makes the most of it, getting big laughs in all the right places. Other than a stool holding a few props, there's no set. Well-timed images projected on the theater's rear wall function as props and help to underscore her comic timing.

Barron is a vivacious performer, dancing around the empty stage during the musical interludes between scenes. She's mastered the material: her delivery is confident but not overly rehearsed. Best of all, she's absolutely believable as both a character in the tales and the narrator of them. You can never quite tell if she's working from a script or if her stories are completely true. But they're so engaging that you find yourself hoping that they are, and not minding if they're not.

Who Gets the Heart?

Hard-hitting and resolute, The God Committee is definitely an issue play. Mark St. Germain's exceedingly well-detailed work takes its audience into the world of organ transplant assignment, a world that's full, it is easy to see, of necessary evils. At the Lamb's Theater, Beowulf Boritt's set is designed to perfectly replicate a conference room where seven protagonists convene to vote on which patients are prime candidates to receive an organ donation. It is St. Patrick's Day, and while there is plenty of revelry outside of the hospital, the mood inside is dire. There are three candidates for a new heart: a 68-year-old woman and community leader, who is also a former nurse; a curmudgeonly failed poet; and the reckless son of a billionaire who has promised a $50 million windfall to the hospital. Whether the third patient tests positive for cocaine use will be a key factor in determining who gets the heart.

Director Kevin Moriarty has taken an interesting approach: the audience is divided in half with the production occurring in the middle. This fly-on-the-wall technique forces the two sides to face each other as they watch the action, thus making everyone feel complicit in the action at hand. What would you do? St. Germain asks.

While the plot of God Committee is accessible, meat-and-potatoes entertainment, what makes the show truly riveting is how well the piece works as a character study. The terrific Larry Keith stars as Dr. Jack Klee, who presides over the committee despite (and perhaps clouded by) a cancer diagnosis. He had been replaced during a medical leave of absence by a curt, no-nonsense doctor, Alex Gorman (Peter Jay Fernandez), who rubs everyone the wrong way, particularly psychiatrist Ann Ross (Amy Van Nostrand) and Keira Banks (Maha Chehlaoui), a young resident serving as a proxy for the doctor bringing the heart in question to New York. Ross suffers from her own, more personal tragedy—her only daughter's recent death by drug overdose.

The other members of this important board are a disabled social worker, Dominick Piero (Ron Orbach); a sage nurse Nella Larkin (Brenda Thomas); and a priest Charles Dunbar (Michael Mulheren). Dunbar has been assigned by the hospital board to observe the committee. Even though he cannot vote, he is a former litigator who knows how to provoke people into doing what he wants while they think they are acting on their own. And given that these characters spend the 75 minutes trying to out-persuade each other, his skills go a very long way. Every seemingly innocent question and polite interjection is actually a well-thought-out ploy to make one of the other board members change his or her mind.

It is fascinating to watch the fireworks ensue in Moriarty's taut production. Virtually every person has his or her own agenda to fight for, and these characters often clash. St. Germain is to be commended for creating such three-dimensional people—Gorman, for example, may be despicable, but he often makes the most ethical and fiscal sense. Klee and Piero, on the other hand, while far more sympathetic, each have their own personal prejudices. Van Nostrand in particular gives a heart-wrenching performance, as Ross constantly suffers from parental guilt and self-blame.

St. Germain is a master of verisimilitude. All the conversations sound as if lifted straight from real life. But while his dialogue is utterly believable, I wish he hadn't made Ross so vocal when it came to her feelings—some of her suffering should have remained implicit, adding to the character's subtext.

The only weak link in this sturdy chain is Chehlaoui. Yes, Banks's idealistic nature should stand her in stark contrast to her more pragmatic colleagues, but as a performer, her vocal intonations sound too shrill and artificial. It is an especially uneven matchup in any scene with Keith or Mulheren, two theatrical heavyweights who make every word and gesture count, and so naturally convince us that they are coming up with their lines and behavior right then in the moment.

What a treat it is to watch such pros at play. As they inhabit these characters, we never feel they are acting. Moriarty and St. Germain have given audiences access to two very different worlds of people working at the top of their craft—the doctors who make these unimaginably difficult decisions and the performers who bring them so vividly to life.

No Getting Over That Rainbow

Actress. Singer. Dancer. Child star. Addict. At least some of those words describe many entertainers who emerge from Hollywood, but there is one to whom all of them apply: Judy Garland, the small woman with an enormous voice who managed to survive the fall of the studio system only to fall prey to her own demons. Garland's life and career have provided fodder for many performers in the years since her death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1969 (most definitively by Judy Davis in the TV film My Life and Shadows), and even the average fan knows the details of her life story. As a result, Billy Van Zandt's The Property Known as Garland offers very little new about its subject.

But what the show does reveal is an astounding amount of acting depth never before displayed by its star, B-movie actress Adrienne Barbeau. Barbeau, who originated the role of Rizzo in the original Broadway cast of Grease and later starred in the TV series Maude, smartly opts not to mimic Garland directly. Instead, she captivates the audience with her savvy, incandescent interpretation of Garland, whose every intonation and mannerism have already been imitated many times to the point of parody.

Property takes place backstage during what was to be Garland's final performance, on March 25, 1969, at the Falkoner Centre in Copenhagen. With one hour to go before show time, her stagehand Ed (a game Kerby Joe Grubb) urges Garland to prepare for her performance. She then sends him on a wild goose chase for food. If he doesn't return with exactly what she wants, she says, she will not go on but will still get paid for showing up. Garland, of course, has no intention of performing.

With Ed gone, Garland begins conversing with (and occasionally implicating) the audience as she tells her life story. She talks about her mistreatment by MGM and her domineering mother, her marriages, and the many other celebrities whose careers ran parallel to her own, referring to them all as drunks. All the while, she constantly refills her glass of Blue Nun.

Garland is such a reliable narrator of her own life that the timing of the play makes little sense. She is always in control and lucid, so one never grasps the desperation or drug dependency that may have resulted in her death only months later. Van Zandt hasn't created a character but a history-spouting plot device.

It's Barbeau who picks up the pieces. Director Glenn Casale moves the 75-minute play along at fast clip, which makes for quite an emotional and physical workout for the petite actress. But she is more than up to the challenge. Barbeau proves to be quite a powerhouse, conveying a life's worth of anger, pathos, and self-deprecating humor. The show may rest on a lazy narrative conceit on Van Zandt's part—it makes it easy for Garland to simply recount the events of her life, cutting down on any dramatic effect. But Barbeau, like Garland herself, is a ball of energy, and she completely justifies every gesture and nuance in the performance.

Even though the cadences in her voice are more reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn than Garland, the point is the same. Garland was a product of the studio system, and even after she went out on her own, she could not escape the elocution and theatrical mannerisms she was trained at a young age to use. Barbeau successfully peels back the layers and makes Garland multidimensional, showing how the person and performer became forever entwined.

Several times throughout Property, excerpts of the real Garland singing are played, and the audience feels the pain and the passion in one of the greatest voices in recording history. But this production should have been able to portray the artist's ups and downs through its own resources. Drawing on the great Garland to add to the play's resonance may appear on the surface to be Van Zandt's tribute to the lady, but he's really just cheating.

Reach for the Moon

Though the story line seems like the kind of thing you would find in an after-school special, good casting and a wonderful cast rapport save the Vital Theater Company's Full Bloom from being a too maudlin production. When I saw the show, the cast seemed to have gelled wonderfully. Confident in their characters and extremely comfortable with each other, they existed together for the sole purpose of creating onstage that moment in a woman's life when, because she is no longer just a girl, her physicality becomes the most important part of her self. Phoebe (Jennifer Blood), the blooming protagonist, is a 15-year-old student suddenly experiencing the mixed messages and implications of her newly developed body. A highly literate, precocious young character, Phoebe reminds us of other Great Young New Yorkers, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Oskar Schell or Kay Thompson's Eloise. But unlike those children, Phoebe has one foot in the world of adults, and she finds that boy-girl friendships are tinged with sexual undertones while parents are almost always the enemy.

The play is influenced, or perhaps haunted, by J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and references to it abound. In the novel, Holden Caulfield's younger sister is named Phoebe, and we wonder if our protagonist—who is named after that character—is inheriting the emotional distress that the book's minor character may have to one day face. The Great Young New Yorker par excellence, Holden holds sway over this play's Phoebe because she is concerned that he may never leave the sanitarium. Holden's inability to decode the language of the adult world prefigures Phoebe's, and we watch this talented child retreat inward because of the sudden emphasis on her physical attributes.

The Greek mythological moon goddess Artemis—Phoebe is one of her lesser known names—serves as Phoebe's other namesake and a continual point of reference. Sitting on her fire escape and watching the moon is the closest thing to an escape that Phoebe can muster. Out there she is free from the judgment and speculation that her newly developed body elicits. Out there she meets Jesse, a new kid from Minneapolis who seems to want to be her only genuine friend.

Jesse, affectionately played by William Jackson Harper, is just as much an outsider as Phoebe is, and the two form an attachment that proves important for the young girl. Phoebe has attracted the attention of the cutest boy in school, but she can talk about birds and books with Jesse. Ironically, in a play about the hardships young women face, we'd be hard pressed to find better male characters than the ones we watch here.

Jim (an endearing Jason Furlani), Phoebe's longtime next-door neighbor, is a fireman and father figure with a heart of gold. Full Bloom does not shy away from the awkwardness that Phoebe's sexual development causes between her and Jim; at one point she is mistaken for his girlfriend, and he must learn to redraw the physical and emotional boundaries between them. We're not sure what will become of these relationships, but we feel that Phoebe is safe with Jesse and Jim, safe from some of the pressures she may not be able to control on her own.

But Phoebe isn't the only one struggling here: her mother (believably played by Jennifer Dorr White) is reeling from the disintegration of her 20-year marriage; Jim's wife Crystal (a charismatic LeeAnne Hutchison) is a not quite washed-up actress looking to recapture her youth by going under the knife. The world of womanhood—with its constant mirror checks and double checks, its clothing changes and sidelong glances—is a confusing, scary place. Though they try to give Phoebe self-assurance and hope, the older women find themselves dumped, and aging is treated like a disease.

It hardly seems fair to harp on Blood's age when part of Full Bloom's important message is the lengths to which women must go to preserve their looks. It is at times difficult to see Blood as a child, though her well-rehearsed physical awkwardness, and a high-pitched, almost squeaky voice, are testaments to her commitment to the character.

Linda Ames Key's economical staging and the cast's excellent commitment make Full Bloom a vital piece of art and a way to reach out to young girls who are about to become the Phoebes of tomorrow.

Chance Encounters

Travels, Tours and One-Night Stands is a theatrical pastiche that uses dance, dialogue, and live music to convey the joys and troubles of journeying through the world. But traveler beware: sexy though they may initially appear, one-night stands abroad are never a good substitute for a fulfilling relationship at home, and a series of skits with no plot, no conflict, and no real characters makes for a lackluster effort. Duane Boutte, Kim Ima, Onni Johnson, and Chris Wild begin the show as a quartet of strangers crammed into a cramped train somewhere in France. In an amusing skit, the uptight Boutte leans over, around, underneath, and on top of the other passengers in his attempts to get better reception on his cell phone as he conducts a rather loud conversation in French. Meanwhile, a more sensitive and friendly Wild breaks bread with Johnson and Ima.

When night falls, the passengers begin resting their heads on each other's shoulders, kicking up their legs on each other's laps, and innocently curling up next to each other. Boutte's ringing cell phone inevitably wakens them. Wild produces an accordion from his backpack and begins playing a Russian folk song. Initially upset with Wild for (ironically) disturbing his phone call, Boutte eventually takes up the accordion, and they all join together in a sing-along.

And so begins a series of scenes, each one creating a different backdrop for the actors to create different characters with different relationships to each other.

The cast members find themselves in Africa, captivated by natives performing tribal dances. Each of the four takes a turn as the dancing native while the others observe. Then the quartet is in a nameless place, struggling to set up a tent. And after that, they find themselves in India listening to live music being performed.

Wherever these four adventurers go, the set remains bare. Two boxes on wheels serve as luggage, a train, a perch, and a bench. Furthermore, the boxes contain all the effects used in the show, including a tent and a clothesline. The boxes even manage to house a cast member or two when necessary. The clever set designer, Gian Marco Lo Forte, deserves credit for creating the malleable and functional furniture.

But with only a few props at their disposal, the onus is on the cast to create a believable world around them, and to bring the audience into that world with them. While they succeed at the former task, they fail at the latter, leaving the audience asking too many questions.

Where is the forest in which these people are setting up their tent? What are their relationships to each other in each different scene? On the train through France, all four marvel at the sights passing by outside the train windows, but what are those sights? The audience watches while these four people watch, but watching isn't a very exciting action to observe.

More watching occurs later in the piece, as the cast members ogle a slide show of random locations projected onto the side of their tent. Other people's slide shows are always tedious to sit through, whether in a living room or here, in a theater. It does not help that each of the slides initially appears blurry, then slowly comes into focus. Also adding to the show's lagging effect are the scene transitions, drawn out for lengthy minutes as lights slowly fade out while the performers stand completely still.

Aside from poor conceptual choices, director/choreographer Kim Ima created dance moves that are not really choreographed and hardly seem to be dance moves at all. She also gives her cast far too much room to improvise. With conflict entirely absent from every skit except the first, scenes drag on without purpose. The cast members' improvisations are repetitive, their movements too natural to provide any real entertainment. Boutte, Wild, Ima, and Johnson never really flesh out who their characters are supposed to be, where they are, and what they are doing there.

At an hour and 15 minutes, the running time of Travels, Tours and One-Night Stands could be easily cut in half without losing any content. Or perhaps the cast could do a better job of filling the given time by creating more complete characters and giving them purposes and reactions to the foreign worlds to which they travel. Otherwise, I'd suggest passing on the one-night stands and waiting for a real relationship.

Civil Unrest

The Civil War rages again in Doris Baizley's Shiloh Rules. On the eve of the Battle of Shiloh, one of the war's bloodiest battles, six women prepare in different ways: they organize their medical supplies, bemoan lost lovers, or sell Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. In fact, though, this isn't the real Battle of Shiloh. In Flying Fig Theater's spirited production, these women are preparing for a re-enactment. Shiloh Rules pits North against the South once more, this time against a backdrop of contemporary America. Representing the North are Clara (Kate Weiman) and Meg (Janine Kyanko). Clara is a seasoned re-enactment professional who has earned the title "the Angel of Antietam." Meg, her young protégée, is volunteering to earn extra credit as a nursing student.

For the South, there is Lucygale (Judie Lewis Ockler) and Cecilia (Cordis Heard). The former is a thrill-seeking FedEx tracker, while the latter is a "re-enactor" so engrossed in the world of the Civil War that no one has ever learned her real name or what she does for a living.

Meanwhile, Park Ranger Wilson (Samarra) stands to lose both her job and her dignity as an African-American in a re-enactment where some of the "soldiers" openly celebrate a society that made slaves of her race. And the Widow Beckwith (Gwen Eyster) gleefully imposes modern-day commerce on a historical event; selling food and equipment to both sides, she is a self-professed "Civil War re-enactment profiteer."

As the battle's action takes place offstage, the women dart on and off the field for various reasons. Those from the North portray nurses and "tend" to the soldiers' false wounds. The ladies from the South, however, are not allowed to actively participate in the battle and are forced to sneak around in Confederate soldiers' uniforms while they steal supplies from the Northerners. In both cases, the chief motivating factor is a race for the "Best Female Re-Enactor Award," which holds great prestige on the re-enactment circuit. Before long, the re-enactment gets out of hand: mock battles sprout up in parking lots, around port-a-potties, and at the park's visitor center. As the stakes (and potential for property damage) rise, the park rangers are called on to stop the re-enactment before someone gets hurt.

Directed by Flying Fig co-founder Michaela Goldhaber, Shiloh makes excellent use of the Gene Frankel Theater's space. The second act makes you believe the fighting is indeed occurring just outside the theater doors in the lobby. Onstage, where several locations and times of day need to be distinguished quickly, set and lighting designer Scott Boyd's choice to simplify the playing area with only a few elevated platforms is perfectly effective.

The cast, however, is the major reason for this production's success. Legendary screenwriting teacher Robert McKee once said you find out the true nature of a character when you force him or her to make decisions under pressure. Here, all six actresses carve out their characters vibrantly as individuals, yet each represents a demographic without generalizing.

Weiman's reserved Clara successfully builds to an amusing emotional breakdown after the organized re-enactment she prepared for so diligently deteriorates into chaos. Ockler's Lucygale pinpoints the comedy in her character's high-stakes situation by admirably exploiting a craving for excitement that is absent in the modern, workaday world.

As Cecilia, Heard gives an authentic portrayal of a 19th-century war refugee; her character could pass for Scarlett O'Hara's tough older sister. Kyanko's character, a squeamish Ivy Leaguer, gets accustomed to the "horrors of the battlefield," and when she is called on to treat an actual backfire wound without modern medical supplies, she plays the scene with joyful abandon.

Samarra's park ranger watches the proceedings with fresh eyes and continually provides a satisfying reality check to the absurd goings-on. Beckwith, meanwhile, is expertly played by Eyster as a no-nonsense entrepreneur. She takes puckish delight in exacerbating conflict between the other characters, both in the re-enacted battle and in the world of the play.

Alisha Engle's costume design further explores the contrast between past and present in the play and goes beyond antique costume rentals. There is a wonderful disclosure at the end, when we see the characters in their "civilian clothes" for the first time. Clara's subdued peach suit and Meg's college shirt tell us immediately who these characters were all along. In fact, Lucygale's Superman shirt might be a little wink. We're finally seeing their secret identities.

Unfortunately, three or four of the "wrap-up" scenes are likely to induce watch glancing. The battle's buildup and climax are fulfilling, but the dwindling action after that could use a boost or perhaps even a few cuts to get the play to its conclusion without fizzling out.

That said, Shiloh Rules remains a sturdy and whimsical piece. The comedy takes a backseat to the action and pacing as the play charges ahead with pointed social commentary and sardonic characterization. It is a proper salute to historical re-enactments, that quirkiest and most theatrical of American pastimes. This very easily could have been Steel Magnolias on a battlefield, but instead Shiloh plays by its own rules.

Moth to the Flame

Love is devastation, destruction, disease. Love—real love—destroys one's life, tears human beings apart, and makes small differences in relationships seem irrevocable. Love, especially male love, is a death wish: it is the trapeze artist's desire to fall, the bullfighter's secret wish to be gored, the fighter pilot's dream of a glorious crash. One asks: Who was the greater lover, Prometheus or the vulture? But a great love, a true lover, is both. Love is the fire that chars the heart, excoriates it, even as it illuminates what is left of the body's ash for a brief instant. When one is in love, every bed is a bed of nails.

Such are the meditations provoked by Sam Shepard's unforgivingly dark drama A Lie of the Mind, now playing as part of the Michael Chekhov Theater Company's Sam Shepard Festival, an ambitious project in which the company plans to produce all 45 of Shepard's plays between now and December 2007. While some of Shepard's plays may be spunkier, more spontaneous, or more surreal, A Lie, which took the 1986 Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, is certainly the most brutal, bleak, and uncanny work in Shepard's oeuvre—and that's saying a lot.

Jake, a bad boy with tattoos and cowboy boots, wakes up from a stupor in Nowhere, Calif., to remember that he beat Beth, his wife, to a bloody pulp. Jake's brother, Frankie, visits Beth's parents' house in Montana to see if she is dead or alive. Meanwhile, Jake, in the midst of a nervous breakdown (as much from guilt over the incident with Beth as from trauma over killing his father many years ago), moves back in with his mother, who still requires someone to baby.

Beth's father, Baylor, goes out hunting for deer but accidentally shoots Frankie in the leg. Frankie is then trapped by a blizzard in the house of in-laws who hate him—all except Beth, that is, who falls in love with him as she slowly recovers from her brain injury. Mike, Beth's older and overprotective brother, goes on a vigilante rampage when he finds Jake has come back for her. Jake is still impossibly in love with Beth and cannot bear to repeat the past, whether with her or with his father, although he must, and does. In the end, the characters must choose to either annihilate their pasts wholesale or stagger on in their own foolish footsteps forever.

The acting is more than sufficient all around, with Thomas Francis Murphy as Baylor giving a standout performance. He absolutely nails the jingoistic Montana backwoodsman who both hates and is co-dependent on his wife—down to his twitching caterpillar eyebrows and the slow, smoky warble of his voice. You are entirely convinced when he declares, "Hunting isn't no damned hobby—hunting is a way of life, an art." He gives the kind of performance where you wonder how much Murphy is acting and how much he is this character, until you glance at the headshot in which he has slicked-back hair and well-plucked eyebrows, and wears a suit jacket.

Susan Capra, playing Baylor's wife Meg, also utterly convinces as the goodhearted, put-upon, naïve country hausfrau. Likewise, Frieda Lipp, playing Jake's more cosmopolitan and Californian mother Lorainne, displays a widow's bitterness that balances between vulnerability and stoicism, grief and an insanely giddy hopefulness.

Anna Podolak, playing the brain-injured Beth, has the most difficult role in the play, since the character has to start with screams, stutters, and baby talk and then become an articulate seductress over the course of two hours. While Podolak is adequate in the role, a little more rehearsal time might have helped.

The spare set design by director Kathy Curtiss utilizes the small black-box space well—it is minimal without being merely suggestive. Like the play itself, everything counts.

When in love, one inevitably faces the choice of whether to destroy what one is or be destroyed by it. As James Baldwin once said, "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." One must either keep repeating oneself in the "rut" of a love or choose to destroy one's own history to break free from its illusions.

Like the many possible definitions of "lie" in the play's title, the play itself resonates with a variety of meanings: love as sex, love as deception, love as violence, love as one's place, and love as a ditch one can't climb out of—the more you try to scramble out, the more the dirt crumbles beneath you as you fall back in. This wonderfully stark production offers a powerful voice that demonstrates all of these bleak possibilities.

Good Housekeeping

In 1913, English novelist Rebecca West expressed frustration over being labeled a feminist, saying, "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat." Although women's rights have come a long way since West's time, Doris Baizley's thought-provoking play Mrs. California provides a potent reminder of where they were in 1955, after millions of men, back home from fighting overseas, had forced millions of women out of the work force and back into their homes.

Mrs. California opens in a kitchen, though it is an unusual one equipped with four stoves, refrigerators, counters, and tables that face out into the audience. Soon we learn it is not a kitchen at all but a television studio in the process of filming a contest that pits four Californian housewives against one another to compete for the title of Best Homemaker.

Mrs. San Francisco (Kristen Vaughan) is a beautiful, composed woman who speaks in soft, muted tones and demonstrates a flare for creating artistic meals. Mrs. San Bernardino (India Myone McDonald) is a ruthless competitor who often sneaks on the set at night to sample the other contestants' desserts with her fingers. Mrs. Modesto (Matilda Downey) is adorably different, with thick-rimmed glasses and unruly curly hair. Unlike the others, her smiles never look forced.

The fourth contestant is Dot (Heather E. Cunningham), a former member of WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services) who was sharp enough to instantly decode an enemy message that helped save an entire naval convoy from destruction. Dot's best friend and neighbor, Babs (Elizabeth Burke), a talented electrician who once wired fighter jets, accompanies her to the homemaker competition, hoping to reawaken the ambitious, feisty girl she knew during wartime.

To Babs's surprise and disappointment, Dot, like the other contestants, has completely embraced her role as homemaker. She loves setting the table, baking chocolate cake, ironing her husband's shirts, and sewing creative apron patterns. Unfortunately, these activities are not as fun to watch onstage and tend to slow the story's pace when performed in long sequences set to classical music. But they are effective when presented in contrast to the moments where routine is broken and life shines through.

The play is strongest when we catch a glimpse of the complex personalities that lie beneath the judge-charming caricatures these women have created for themselves. Cunningham believably fleshes out Dot's seemingly mindless character through the slow revealing of hidden facets you wouldn't have guessed she possessed. A climactic speech about her "proudest moment" is stirring and strong, especially in the stunned moment when she trembles with the realization that her mother, aunts, and grandmother fought for equality, and here she stands, a competent woman who saved hundreds of soldiers' lives, struggling to earn respect by ironing a shirt. Within her lies a fiery, determined spirit that has been too easily and thoroughly suppressed.

It should be noted that Mrs. California is not denouncing housewives or discouraging marriage and child rearing. In fact, the play's other powerful monologue is spoken by the contest's winner, whose genuine love for her home and family is portrayed as commendable.

While the ideas in this play are focused on the women, the moral is universal: individuals need to look inside themselves the way Dot has, to find who they are outside of the imposed expectations of society and the media. The molds may have changed, but whether young women are encouraged to become happy homemakers, American Idols, or skinny supermodels, it is important to see plays like Mrs. California. They remind us of where we've been, so that in the future we will know for certain where we do not want to go.

Notes on Camp

"A work can come close to Camp, but not make it," Susan Sontag wrote, "because it succeeds." Much of the confusion about defining the camp sensibility is from conflating high camp with low. Low camp's modus operandi is the ironic fetishization of sincere and passionate items of kitsch. High camp, on the other hand, proceeds by means of pastiche and travesty—by warping and reassembling the detritus of forgotten or marginalized cultural forms into textures and spectacles that delight in the extravagance of beautiful failures.

However, all camp depends on theatrically dissolving content into style. Not "mere" style but sheer style. No true camp sensibility would ever disparage style, since camp is an inherently aesthetic outlook on life. A taste, in fact, and one that subverts moral ends to the playful, aesthetic means of perpetual fabulousness, which is perpetually a pose.

Which leads to a question: Is Measure for Pleasure, the new play written by David Grimm now playing at the Public Theater, too good, too knowing, and ultimately too earnest to be camp? On the surface—where genuine camp delights to remain—it would seem to be the very apotheosis of theatrical high camp: a romp through Restoration comedy by way of gay sex farce. There's more leopard print and hot pink brocade, cross-dressing, and dildos sprouting cupid's wings than one can shake a very large (slap) stick at. Plus, a set design (by Alexander Dodge) of rococo columns bedizened with vaginas and phalluses in relief.

But look again, and there is something deeper than just dirty puns and frilly outfits going on. There is a kind of poetry. And I don't mean the smooth alexandrine couplets that are ubiquitous throughout the play. No, the real poetry is in the tenderness of the play's devastating wisdom.

The aptly named Grimm, with help from director Peter Dubois, has conceived of a theater that—like the theaters of Joe Orton, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde before him—both is and is not camp. Like his forebears, Grimm offers a drama that recognizes the painful failure of life through the pleasant, if savage, ironies of its own sumptuous theatrical success.

Captain Dick Dashwood (Saxon Palmer) duels with Will Blunt (Michael Stuhlbarg), the servant of Sir Peter Lustforth (Wayne Knight), over Blunt's telling Hermione Goode (Emily Swallow) that Dashwood is a rake. Both, however, are secretly getting serviced from Molly Tawdry (Euan Morton), but only Blunt knows that Molly is a transvestite prostitute rather than Hermione's lady-in-waiting.

The real fun with secret identities begins, though, when Lustforth and Dashwood dress up for their vast ritualistic orgies in the underground cave of the Hellfire Club, based—loosely (what, or who, isn't in this play?)—on an actual 18th-century secret society. Who shows up at the festivities but a masked Lady Vanity Lustforth (Suzanne Bertish) and Hermione's would-be ward, Dame Stickle (Susan Blommaert). The whole comedic charade, of course, ties up into perfectly paired couples that each tie the knot, including one homosexual marriage.

Knight, famous for his role as Newman from Seinfeld, exhibits wonderful comic timing and a flair for bawdy verse. Just as much in abundance as these gifts is his physical skill at screwball high jinks as he cavorts about stage huffing and humping as the old, fat, and lecherous Sir Peter.

Bertish, playing his periwig-wearing and death-pale powdered wife Lady Vanity, has the commanding hauteur to deliver such withering statements as "My life is a Greek tragedy—to be blest with such a face and watch men suffer." The phrase doesn't wither her rivals so much as point out her own desiccated visage, which, in Sir Peter's words, "resembles [his] blue, wrinkled balls."

But it is Euan Morton, playing Molly in her several incarnations, who stands out among this marvelously talented cast. In the guise of a very gay man, he delights with the kind of hyperactive lapdog bitchiness of the echt-homosexual character Jack from Will and Grace. Morton also plays a crotchety country doctor for nearly half the play, as well as the prostitute "Molly," since the nonstop schemes of the plot require him to layer character upon character. Just watching Morton slip into new personas and then teasingly break character for an aside is as delightful as trying on expensive suits at Barney's and Bergdorf Goodman that one can't afford.

Speaking of clothes, "style consultant" B.H. Barry and costume designer Anita Yavich's lavish period dress with subtly updated details affirms Oscar Wilde's camp dictum to live by: "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."

The stylish ironic excess of this production make it a high-camp extravaganza, but the meaningful humanity of Grimm's wit make the play much more than that: high art, as well.

Shylock Revisited

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a complex play. It's both an emotionally charged social drama and a romance, balancing Shylock's bitter rage against Bassanio's lovesick joy. Add the religious intolerance—Christian versus Jew—that's so troubling to modern audiences, and it's easy to see why the work isn't performed as often as Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, this is the first production of Merchant that the American Globe Theater has mounted, after 17 seasons of presenting Shakespeare and other classics. In the show's program notes, director John Basil takes a decisive stand with his particular interpretation. While racism and anti-Semitism existed in Elizabethan times, this production suggests that Shylock is a negative figure because he's greedy and vengeful, not because Shakespeare wanted to justify a 16th-century stereotype.

Neither Antonio—the merchant of the play's title—nor Shylock is an innocent victim: each freely admits his persecution of the other. Shylock giggles gleefully when he suggests that the price for failing to repay a loan is a pound of Antonio's flesh. Meanwhile, Antonio's kinsmen are downright vicious in their verbal attacks on Shylock.

But when, at the play's end, Shylock does not accept payment in double for his loan and insists on Antonio's death, he becomes a villain, more so than at any other point in the play. The anti-Semitism of the text is still shocking to hear, but this production doesn't turn it into a major "issue." It's simply a plot detail, treated with an appropriate amount of gravity.

What is apparent from the tactful handling of this controversial play is the great affection the company has for Shakespeare. They approach the material with a technique that involves incorporating "the playwright's idiosyncratic use of punctuation, syntax, capitalization, etc." By doing a close reading of the text, the performers attempt to gather information about how Shakespeare may have intended a line to be delivered (the Bard didn't write the kind of detailed stage directions commonly found in modern plays).

The result is a highly physical, strongly emotional, easy-to-grasp performance that remains true to the play's language and setting. It seemed as if every performer understood every line he or she was saying, and exactly why it was being said—a rare occurrence in many contemporary productions of Shakespeare.

The principal actors were very fine: all seemed at ease with their characters both physically and emotionally. The story's key plot lines—Shylock and the merchant, Portia and her caskets—were deftly handled. But the best indication of Basil's respect for Shakespearean drama came during a scene near the play's conclusion. Featuring Lorenzo (Jon Hoche) and Jessica (Sarah Price), the short garden scene does little to advance the plot and involves only supporting characters. A lesser team would have rushed through it (or would have cut it from the show altogether), or would have cast less-experienced actors in these secondary roles. Instead, making full use of the entire stage, the actors and director took the time to joyfully explore the language and express the beauty of this flirtatious love scene.

Still, the success of the play's smaller moments, like this one (or any time the hilarious Mat Sanders was onstage as Launcelot Gobbo), in no way minimized the wonderful work of David Dean Hastings as Bassanio and Richard Fey as Antonio. The two actors brought out the subtleties in their characters by showing their relationship with each other as fraternal and affectionate. Elizabeth Keefe was a dignified and clever Portia who became a believable young male lawyer by not overselling the performance. Rainard Rachele's Shylock was both unlikable and pitiable: he gave the audience insight into a complex, unhappy man.

If this production was able to emphasize only one area of design, a good choice was the focus on costuming. Colorful and well crafted, the costumes lent a richness and depth to the simple, functional set and lighting. Given the modest budgets available to small companies, costume designer Shima Ushiba made the most of simple materials.

Nestled in a third-floor theater on West 46th Street, the American Globe Theater has been quietly producing classic plays for nearly two decades. Its version of The Merchant of Venice is the best production of Shakespeare I've seen Off-Off-Broadway. If all of its shows, whether Shakespeare or not, are of the same quality, this company deserves to keep producing for many decades to come.

No Sure Thing

The best early Sam Shepard plays snort and kick like blood stallions—their energy feels raw, almost random; their plots are as screwy as their characters. Many later Shepard plays domesticate the horseplay—and horsepower—of his earlier imagery into well-made structures whose force increases with greater craft and control. Among living playwrights, only Shepard's early mentor, Edward Albee, can vie for how prolifically and profoundly he has remade the American stage. The Michael Chekhov Theater Company, founded by Michael Horn, is attempting the herculean task of presenting all 45 of Shepard's plays, within its inaugural year, in its new black-box space, the Little, Big Theater. Its efforts aren't as hopeless and slapdash as they may sound—most Shepard plays require minimal sets, and the company has been planning and rehearsing for two years already.

Among Shepard's 45 plays, however, a few don't measure up to his own uniquely high standards. Simpatico, written in 1994 when Shepard returned to the stage from his work in film, has too many spices stirred into the pot: its dramatic kick fizzles. The ingredients don't add up. Rather, we're given red herring soup. By the end, the expected wallop of revelation goes sour in the mouth.

Carter, a wealthy businessman in the horse-racing industry, visits his old pal Vinnie, a down-and-out loner who holds pictures and letters from Carter's sordid past. In the opening scene, Carter (Peter Picard) is desperate to protect his reputation, while Vinnie (Tom Pavey) grows increasingly manic attempting to re-establish a lost friendship.

Powerful undercurrents of jealousy and guilt seethe, since the two also share history with Rosie, who long ago eloped with Carter even though she was married to Vinnie at the time. The tension is as tight as a new-strung guitar string—the slightest movement from the actors playing Vinnie or Carter makes a visual and visceral music. Vinnie convinces Carter to go talk to his new girlfriend, Cecilia, who Vinnie claims is pressing charges against him, and Carter agrees once he suspects that Vinnie gave her some of the scandalous pictures.

From here, though, the plot never untangles itself to achieve the same taut level of suspense. The mystery of what the pictures and letters are about is never fully revealed. On the one hand, it is said that Carter, Vinnie, and Simms, a since-reformed fall guy in their scheme, once doctored the mouth tattoos on two racehorses. On the other hand, it is suggested that the photos show Simms in graphic sexual positions with the horses. Exactly how these two stories connect, though, left me befuddled.

Moreover, any—or all—of the characters may be compulsive liars. Since nobody can be trusted, the audience has no hope of figuring out the "real" motivations and events that compel the characters, and the initial force of the plot dissipates.

The play's subtext about each character's futile search for identity thus becomes as contradictory as Matlock putting an epistemologist on the stand who says that none of us can ever reconstruct the past through mere artifacts or identify its causal chains, if there are any. Such limits to knowledge may be true enough for relativist history professors to be mindful of, but without the ability to discover significant clues—without the hope that there is some truth, the gripping mystery of a dramatic plot dies.

Regardless, the fine acting and crisp direction (by Ann Bowen) of the production make it, if not entirely compelling, at least a worthwhile evening of theater. Picard skillfully transforms Carter from a smooth, glad-handing businessman into a shaking alcoholic schlub. Likewise, Pavey's riveting depiction of Vinnie's tissue of lies deconstructs his character like crumbling onion skins so that nothing remains of it by the end.

Gary Lamadore, playing Simms, is convincingly hermetic as he alternates between wry, worldly understatement and overblown confession. Alison Costine similarly manages to conceal the true nature of her character, Cecilia; at first appearing ditzy, she later hints that this may be a deceptive act.

Though the portrayal of these deeply flawed characters displays nuance and force, it cannot overcome the deep flaw in the play's structure. Shepard implicitly acknowledges going against the grain of the detective genre by referencing classic film noir. In fact, Simms sighs and says "wise decision" when Vinnie tells him he stopped going to the movies—they don't make 'em that way anymore.

For all the fascinating unraveling of ultimate motives, the audience becomes confused and frustrated from never hitting the pay dirt of sudden illumination. Instead, the last image of a cell phone ringing unanswered seems emblematic of the unanswered questions that audience members must confront as they leave. Perhaps Shepard intended the play to show the messy cloud of questions we must confront in real life. If so, the play may find few who are "simpatico" in its audiences.

Bushwhacking

Recently, President George W. Bush's approval rating plummeted to 32 percent, leaving 68 percent of Americans still puzzling over exactly what went wrong during that immensely troubled, highly contested election of 2004. Joshua Rosenblum's lively, witty musical Bush is Bad, prescriptively subtitled "The Musical Cure for the Blue-State Blues," is a delicious tonic for disgruntled Democrats and their sympathizers, put forth by three winning performers with a multiplicity of talents and personalities. With such a blatant title, it's unlikely that any fervent Bush supporters will find their way into the Triad Theater. But be forewarned that our current president (often referred to as "the chimp") does not, shall we say, come off very well here. Neither do his supporters, as the opening number ("How Can 59 Million People Be So Dumb?") announces. But if you revel in any chance to poke fun at the man in the White House, Bush is Bad is the show for you.

Rosenblum's material often has all the subtlety of a Saturday Night Live skit, but he has managed to stretch his political parodies into 22 impressive musical numbers. In a show billed for its comedy, the expectation for laughter is precariously high, and Rosenblum's writing rarely disappoints. Although several songs might arguably run on a bit too long to sustain their jokes, they are all, more or less, humorous. Director Gary Slavin also keeps the pace moving at a healthy clip, and his simple choreography works efficiently on the small stage.

Although he is the central target, Bush is certainly not the only victim of Rosenblum's barbs. There's "Crazy Ann Coulter," "Poor Jack Abramoff," and the mocking "Good Conservative Values" (exposing the hypocrisy of the religious right). The melodies, while not memorable, are serviceable for material in which lyrics, above all, are the thing. But Rosenblum also proves himself adept at parody, penning lyrics for a sumptuous German art song ("Das Busch ist Schlecht"), a hilarious Andrew Lloyd Webber send-up ("Scooter Libby Superstar"), and a Kurt Weill-ian torch song ("Sure, You Betcha, Georgie").

Kate Baldwin, Neal Mayer, and Tom Treadwell form a tight ensemble (pay attention to their precise three-part harmonies), and each has a moment or two to steal the spotlight. Whether masquerading as Ann Coulter or Laura Bush, the crystal-voiced Baldwin scores with her steady comic assurance. Treadwell, the most recent addition to the cast, makes a convincing Dick Cheney, as well as the man Cheney recently shot (in the disturbingly funny "Mr Whittington Regrets"). And Mayer, a gifted song-and-dance man, capitalizes on every bit of his stage time. He offers a snappy take on "The Gay Agenda" and delivers one of the evening's highlights in "I'm Losing You, Karl." (Anyone who remembers the 2004 presidential debates will appreciate Mayer's spot-on impersonation of Bush as he strains to hear cues through an audio transmitter.)

Even if you're not quite up to date on the current political scene, the cast offers brief explanatory segues before each song to clear up any confusion. And it's to Rosenblum's credit that, rather than stay content with dated material (the show has been running some months now), he continues to change music and lyrics to incorporate current events. At the show's conclusion, we were treated to some new material (in the works) that referenced the recent controversy over whether a Dubai-owned company would take control of New York City ports.

Rosenblum's mission, it would seem, extends beyond simple entertainment into full-fledged political activism. "The 'I' Word," for example, lists Web sites that work toward the impeachment of Bush. And as he gleefully shared the news of the updated 32 percent approval rating with the audience at the show's conclusion, it was clear that Rosenblum is in this for the long haul.

To watch Bush is Bad is to witness the power of the First Amendment, musical style. And although it's as yet unclear whether the show will run until, well, the end of Bush's run (or drum up sufficient forces for impeachment), the packed crowd at the show I attended (undoubtedly a fraction of the 68 percent) seemed delighted at the opportunity to, at least for the moment, laugh their blues away.

Right-Hand Man

An ambiguous (or open-ended) finale for a play works when audience members know just enough about the situation at hand and the characters onstage that they can formulate some ideas as to what's taken place and what's to come. In Pygmalion, for example, the reader is not sure if the flower-seller-turned-lady Eliza Doolittle will remain with her misogynistic mentor Henry Higgins or marry the love-struck (but bland) Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Yet enough is discovered about the personalities of these three that her future could merit a discussion. If that information were not as clear, it would not matter what happened to Eliza because the reader would not care enough about her or the other characters to suppose a guess. Indeed, the reader would be angry that George Bernard Shaw did not even bother to provide a conclusion after doing so little work with the characterization.

In Hard Right, David Barth's new play "set on the eve of the age of terror," a mysterious agent with unclear intentions disrupts what ought to be a quiet meet-the-folks evening for college student Henry, his girlfriend Greta, and Henry's parents, Barbara and Phil. It's not too much of a spoiler to say that the agent's objective is never spelled out. However, the author has dropped enough clues as to the nature of the family, the agent (Bob), and his mission that the observant theatergoer will be intrigued by this twisted, cautionary tale.

Being observant is, after all, the first running theme in this intense, intermission-less production. Well-to-do couple Barbara and Phil start things off by pacing around their tastefully decorated living room, waiting for sundown so they can break their Yom Kippur fast. They are also waiting for Henry, who's coming home from college with Greta so she can get to know his parents. As Barbara and Phil talk about trying to be more spiritual while also counting down the minutes until they can eat, two FedEx packages are left at the door. One is for their son, and one is for them; the latter is a letter from Henry's college (vaguely referred to as "State") informing them that a representative from the school will be stopping by the house to discuss certain changes in policy that affect scholars like Henry.

The son then appears, a tousle-haired, surfer-type blond (without the surfer speech) made hungry and paranoid by pot and booze, accompanied by his nose-ringed but more or less clean-cut girlfriend. As parents and girlfriend cautiously try to interact without upsetting the moody Henry, there is a knock at the door. Behind it is Bob, who introduces himself as the school representative. He is a tall man dressed in a bright blue windbreaker, khakis, and new white shoes. Observant (or maybe just suspicious) audience members may recognize this apparel as the kind that one wears when you don't want your face to be remembered later.

At first, Bob asks Henry gently probing questions, which Henry answers flippantly. Like many young college students, Henry has no major, no direction, and generally mistrusts the government (yet has only front-page news facts to support his mistrust). Bob responds negatively to Henry's ambiguity, and their surface cordiality quickly falls away.

To describe more of the plot points would take away the shock and surprise that's integral to the story. It should be said, however, that playwright David Barth does an excellent job of scripting the beginning of the show in such a way that when things turn dark, early foreshadowing allows the change in tone to occur without it being either predictable or unbelievable. The cast, as well, adopts a naturalistic style that sells the earlier moments very well. (The only thing that they didn't do so convincingly was portray "members of the tribe"; mother and son especially were a bit too Aryan-looking for this Jewish reviewer's eyes.)

And it certainly doesn't hurt the suspension of disbelief when actors are working on a set as beautifully designed and executed as this one, created by Mark Cruzan. Tasteful pieces, art that brightens walls without pulling focus, and a fully furnished room are all evidence of a designer's touch. It makes for a nice change from the poorly planned sets, decorated with scavenged card tables and mismatched chairs, that are the hallmark of amateur set dressers (and many Off-Off-Broadway productions).

In the end, the audience and the characters never get a read on Bob's true intentions. He represents the kind of nameless, faceless terror that always lurks in the world—a terror that gets a new name and face for every president and democracy-threatening crisis. All we can see are the bright blue windbreaker, the khakis, and the new white shoes. All we know is that we don't know what he's capable of, and when he'll strike.

Old-Testament Decadents

The story of Lot (Genesis, verses 18-19) is filled with fascinating themes and ambiguities. While the destruction of the city of Sodom is often cited as an example of God's vengeance upon homosexuals, this may come more from misinterpretations than scholarly Biblical exegesis. Unfortunately, the new dance theater piece Sodom's Wife fails to illuminate much that is troubling about the Biblical text and focuses on gently spoofing the traditional interpretation. The basic story may be familiar: God is about to wipe out the wicked—though not necessarily homosexual—cities of the plains, Sodom and Gomorrah, but Abraham bargains with him to save his nephew, Lot, who has recently moved there. Two angels come to visit Lot and tell him that he needs to take his family out of town before God smites it with fire and brimstone.

The townsfolk surround Lot's house and demand that he hand over the angels to them—for the purpose, in traditional interpretations, of a homosexual gang rape. Lot offers the men his two virgin daughters instead, but the men are not satisfied. The angels, however, come out and blind the townsfolk. At dawn the next day, Lot and his family leave. Despite a warning, Lot's wife looks back at the city, and she is transformed into a pillar of salt. Lot escapes with his daughters to a cave, where they get their father drunk and trick him into having sex with them in order to carry on the family line.

In Sodom's Wife, the narrator, a prissy drag queen (Michael Shattner) in a sequined, butterfly-shaped top, introduces vignettes with treacly jingles. A few supporting characters—a madame, a prostitute, a junkie, and a satyr-like clown—are added to help flesh out the story line, while the angels of the original story appear as women playing sexless, almost robotic space aliens from a planet near Vulcan.

Director Erin Brindley seems to have wanted to contrast the simple, homespun look of Lot and his family with this queer assortment of decadent creatures. The problem, however, is that the actors playing the native Sodomites are too wooden to capture the all-out extravagance necessary for a campy fantasia. And while Charles Hendricks, as Lot, has the most glowing stage presence, he sometimes declaims his lines.

The play alternates between spoken scenes with more traditional theatrical blocking and movement sequences sometimes punctuated with music. The spoken scenes were developed over many months through improv exercises with the actors, and they lack the linguistic verve of incisive playwriting. Their structure is loosely that of a memory play while Lot's wife is suspended in her moment of looking back. By the time Shattner announces, "And—another memory," I thought I heard a groan in the audience.

The movement sequences, on the other hand, are overwrought and underdeveloped: characters play games of red light-green light, pantomime a tree (several times), wrestle on the ground to mimic sex, or perform simple dance steps. The least-clichéd movement scene, though, is when the characters re-enact different ways that Sodom may have been destroyed—as the methods of destruction become more absurd, the characters' actions grow sillier. The characters seem to be having fun for once, and the audience does, too.

The final destruction scene, though, is theatrically underwhelming: a few lights flicker, the angels walk around "zapping" the citizens of Sodom, and Lot's family climbs on steps around the stage's periphery. This feels far from fire and brimstone.

The playbill mentions that the original concept, ironically planned before Hurricane Katrina, was to change the setting to New Orleans. Perhaps the collaborators of Ripple Productions scrapped this idea because they didn't want to court controversy or seem unduly tactless or timely.

Nonetheless, if a company were to properly stage this mythical spectacle of sex and violence, it would do well to have a more daring and decadent spirit. Chintzy bead necklaces, a miniature Mardi Gras float, candy coins tossed at the audience, and video projections of actual news footage might have given the play the edge Ripple was seeking.

Live, It's Greek Tragedy

Should plays teach, or should they entertain? In many ways, this question gets to central issue in Stages of Learning's production of Euripides's The Trojan Women. The company undertakes the difficult task of staging a Greek tragedy while formulating a message about contemporary media and their relation to calamity. What results is a brave, if heavy-handed, tale of woe that speaks to our society's desensitization to tragedy. Euripides had a didactic purpose in mind when writing the play. The Greeks had been involved in the pillaging of the island of Milos, a Greek ally, for its refusal to participate in the Athenians' larger struggle against Sparta. Euripides wanted to call attention to the slaughter of Milos's citizens.

Stages of Learning's production takes this ancient tale, about the fate of the women of Troy after the city falls to the Greeks, and offers a smattering of parodies about modern media. Hecuba (the inconsolable Trojan queen), the chorus, and the invading Greeks appear in scenes involving talk shows, press conferences, Internet voting, commercials, and 24-hour news shows. For example, the opening prologue with the deities Poseidon, Athena, and Apollo is presented as a kind of talk show. Similarly, Talthybius is not only a Greek messenger to the Trojan women but also a Bill O'Reilly-style TV anchorman.

Though humorous at times, these takeoffs mostly seem too separate from the original play. The original and the modern in this adaptation are not organically combined, and the effect is a long, clunky mishmash of conflicting styles.

One of the problems in modernizing a Greek tragedy is that the form has a very specific structure. It was, after all, a highly stylized religious rite in honor of Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine. Like many rituals, it is repetitive, and for an audience accustomed to the more plot-driven style of TV and movies, it can be monotonous.

In this production, the long, tortured monologues, (especially those of Hecuba, but also the opening prologue where Poseidon pontificates at length on Trojan history) could have been made more interesting by action-driven theatrical techniques. Instead, Poseidon stares out at the audience, speaks grandly to Athena and Apollo, and occasionally shakes his trident to emphasize a point. The multiple scenes where Hecuba laments her lost city suffer from the same problem. There is too little action and too many words, and the words are all in the same tone of grief. At this performance, the audience became noticeably, and quickly, tired.

One way the production attempts to counteract such potential weariness is through the addition of two extra, lighthearted scenes not in the original. These scenes take the form of commercials for a particular product. (Think Trojans. You get the idea.) Though humorous, they do little to further the plot, and they do much to make what is already a long hour-and-a-half show longer still.

Most of the back story about the Peloponnesian War is delivered by the chorus of Trojan women in the traditional style of stasimon, a kind of song and dance ritual that in Greek tragedy is slow in both movement and tempo. In this production, the stasimon is particularly lento and melancholy, whereas the scenes that satirize the media are generally upbeat, fast, and funny. In this way, the production points out the difference between what Hecuba experiences and what the audience sees when watching the tragedy through the lens of mass media. The way the news portrays tragic events seems almost fun.

Jennifer Shirley, as Hecuba, is appropriately grief struck while at the same time displaying a proud, matronly manner befitting a former queen. T. Scott Lilly as Talthybius is emblematic of the production as whole: as the quintessential Greek messenger, he is emotionless and detached, but as a parody of an anchorman, he is filled with gusto and mirth. When the two collide, the actor seems confused. In one instance, as the messenger, Talthybius relays the news about who will become slave to what Greek master; then, as the anchorman, he shoves a microphone into the soon-to-be enslaved women's faces. He then stands there, dumbly, not knowing if he is a conduit of the news or the news himself.

The polished set design by Amanda Embry effectively evokes opulence in a state of ruin. Doric columns line the sides of the stage, with one large column knocked over in the middle of the floor.

Euripides was the least popular of the major Greek tragedians. Some believe this was because many of his plays were mostly intended to raise awareness about issues instead of entertaining audiences. So is the purpose of theater to entertain or to educate? As far as pure entertainment is concerned, Stages of Learning has something to learn, based on this production. But in offering a different take on Greek tragedy in terms of our media's treatment of horrific events, The Trojan Women has much to teach.

Gracefully Unhinged

The listing for Pennybacker on offoffonline.com reads, "Pennybacker is f*cking unhinged. Pennybacker is a cab flying off a bridge into the East River. Pennybacker is named for the greatest regional manager of a video rental store that ever lived, Adam Pennybacker, whose golden locks danced lyrically in the Virginia wind as he ran tapes to and from the new release wall. As such, Pennybacker is out to rearrange your alphabet, fool!" With such a cryptic and tantalizing description, this critic felt that his life would forever be lacking somehow if this—event? experience?—passed by uninvestigated.

Pennybacker is not really a cab flying into the East River. It's an improvisational theater troupe consisting of 10 members. To adequately assess the quality and success of an improv performance like this one, two questions must be asked. Is this group different enough from the limitless number of other comedy teams to add something significant to the genre? And, above all else, is it entertaining?

Whether entertaining or not, improvised comedy has a long history in this country. Professional improv as we know it today was nurtured here in the States, though the earliest forms came from commedia dell'arte players in 16th-century Italy. Such institutions as the Second City, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Saturday Night Live, that mecca of late-night-TV comedy, have inspired many groups like Pennybacker in both Chicago and New York over the past 50 years.

Improv theater troupes act as a doorway into the bawdier and more playful regions of the theatrical experience. Improv doesn't aim to stimulate provocative thoughts in an audience, and it's not a herculean effort to evoke the emotional responses it gets. Nobody wants the doorway to our subconscious funny bone locked up tight until the critical moment of cathartic release. We want it to be f*cking unhinged.

Pennybacker begins very unspectacularly with the entrance of the company's members, who form a semicircle on the stage. A single-word suggestion is requested from the audience to get the ball rolling. On this night, the word happened to be "plunger." From there, the company members casually recounted a few experiences with plungers, including a surprising and delightful insight from Elizabeth Trepowski: "I clean my bathroom every day because it keeps me real." Keeping it real is what Pennybacker does best. With the evening's theme silently agreed upon, the company progressed organically into a series of scenes about toilets.

With their blatantly casual opening—reminiscent of a bathrobe-clad Tracey Ullman's signature sign-off—the company's members add honesty to the outlandish and historically over-the-top tradition of improv. They radiate an air of relaxation that suggests they would be performing even if the audience wasn't present. Though their online synopses and press materials suggest the more erratic energy of a developing company, their craft is polished and professional. The graceful system by which the members tag each other in and out of scenarios is closer to ballet than to SNL. There is no showboating. Each member is devoted to the success of the group as a whole. If a scenario begins to fail, another member quickly steps in to deliver the perfect punch line or redirect the scene entirely.

The scope and variety of ideas presented during this night's performance were impressive and diverse. For an evening that centered exclusively on toilet humor, office etiquette, and under-motivated Harvard students, the gags and situations were always fresh. There was never the feeling of "Didn't we just see this two minutes ago?" that can occur even in the upper echelon of improv.

Of course, Pennybacker is not exempt from the inevitable loss of focus that comes when a company member has gone too far. In one case, Lisa Reinke became trapped in two characters: an American woman who was impersonating a Japanese woman. This led to trouble interacting with other cast members, because some spoke to the American woman while others addressed the hysterically stereotyped Japanese character. After improvising herself into a corner, Reinke burst into laughter until she was "tagged out" by another member. Yet those who might think such a break in focus is unprofessional and not entertaining should remember that SNL cast member Horatio Sans seems to have made a living out of his inability to keep in focus.

In answer to the questions posed above, Pennybacker's uniqueness is subtle but substantial enough to be wildly entertaining. More important, the show is a resounding alternative for those who claim to be bored with more aggressively publicized improv troupes, and it is a fitting successor to the great companies of the improv underground. Once the alphabet of improvised theater has been successfully rearranged, it will probably spell "Pennybacker."

Fractured Fairy Tale

Most girls celebrate their 16th birthday with elaborate parties in expensive restaurants with a few hundred of their closest friends. Others, like Princess in Manhattan Children's Theater's production of Last of the Dragons, get tied to a rock, kidnapped by a dragon, and rescued by a daring prince. Written by Kristin Walter and adapted to the stage by Edith Nesbit, this whimsical tale of a young woman's rite of passage breaks storybook conventions to give us a refreshingly unique spin on arranged royal marriage, menacing dragons, and the seemingly helpless young women they prey on. Lisanne Marie plays the story's teenage heroine, Princess, with a charming mix of bubbly energy and surly tomboy competence. She is a likably spunky young girl who does everything from weightlifting to sword thrusts in preparation for her 16th-birthday sacrifice. Her overly doting Nurse (Chelsea Palano) tucks her into bed, attempting to lull her to sleep with a sock-puppet re-enactment of a dragon slaying. Princess rolls her eyes, clearly tired of hearing members of the castle discuss her possible doom with such enthusiasm. Even her father, the King (Chris Alonzo), is eagerly looking forward to the event.

To put his daughter's mind at ease, he recalls the day he slayed a dragon, slashing at its throat while the humongous beast threatened to overcome him. Princess asks, "Where was Mommy?" Shrugging, the King replies, "She was in the cave crying and wailing, of course." No one in the castle seems worried that Princess will not be saved by the Prince, except for, unfortunately, the Prince (David Demato).

Shadowed by a bumbling Valet (B.J. Thorne), he stumbles onstage in a black, ribbed shirt and stiff beige pants as if ready for a day of tennis and tea parties. Frantically studying a collection of books ranging in titles from Dragon Slaying for Dummies to Men Who Slay Dragons and the Women Who Love Them, he seems grossly unprepared for the fateful battle that awaits him.

Fortunately, Princess is handy with a sword, and in a cute twist of fate, she and the scholarly Prince discover that opposites attract. He is a genuinely nice, albeit nerdy, guy who does not mind marrying a girl who can snap him like a twig. Princess, in turn, appreciates his book smarts and amusing anecdotes about the stars. She suggests that after the townspeople close their shutters and lock their doors, he should untie her from the rock, sneak her a sword, and stand by her side while they fight the dragon together.

In a play where none of the characters are what they are expected to be, it is only fitting for the dragon (Alex Rasovar) to emerge from his cave a disheveled-looking creature in green stockings and a baggy coat adorned with colored handkerchiefs and ribbons. He does not wish to fight to the death; he merely wants to be left alone. His deep sadness is revealed in the way his face lights up when Princess tenderly refers to him as "dear." He is listless and lonely because everyone he's ever known has been slain by a prince, making him the last of the dragons.

Like any fairy tale, The Last of the Dragons contains the obligatory morals and lessons for children, but this production's greatest and most utilized strength is its sophisticated sense of humor. The story successfully executes every aspect of comedy, from visual to physical, and it's best displayed by the wisecracking King, perfectly timed jokes, and biting sarcasm. The actors have a strong, believable chemistry, especially the Nurse and Valet, who are hilarious in their portrayal of goofball sidekicks trying to pretend they do not have a life outside of their duties to Princess and the Prince, though their lovelorn looks and makeup-smeared faces would suggest otherwise.

This is a fitting fairy tale for modern times, with a strong heroine who fights her own battles, a kind prince who earns respect without having to fight for it, and a lonely dragon that would rather have a human friend than feast. The latter is sure to come as a great relief for all the young women in the village, who can now plan their 16th-birthday parties without the added worry of being eaten.

Truth And Dare

Playwrights are called "ahead of their time" once we feel we've safely caught up to their insights and innovations. Thus, even the most far-seeing and radical visionaries often become assimilated into theatrical convention. T.S. Eliot, however, offered a rejoinder to critics who claimed that "dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." "Precisely," Eliot replied. "And they are that which we know." Even so, Frank Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, written in 1891—five years before Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi scandalized audiences with the mere mention of the word "merde"—resists canonical sterilization. The play continues to be so incompatible with acceptable notions of theatrical staging that productions become interesting for the tactics by which directors evade the rawness of the truths Wedekind confronts.

Audiences today still require that his portrayal of child molestation and adolescent rape, S&M, suicide, homosexuality, compulsive masturbation, abortion, and group sex be mollified with theatrical metaphors. Not even our cynical, "pornified" zeitgeist can stomach such unmitigated joy or nihilism. The play, therefore, is about how much the theater itself must mask.

Spring's Awakening concerns a group of teenagers discovering the vitality of their sexual being while realizing the ruinous consequences that it causes when it's suppressed to conform to adulthood's strictures. Robert, a 15-year-old, seduces a 13-year-old girl, Edie, whose mother spoon-feeds her stories about babies being delivered by storks. Edie's mother forces her to get a secret and dangerous abortion even as Edie fails to comprehend that she's pregnant.

Meanwhile, Ian—Robert's best friend—threatens suicide if he doesn't pass the exam for the next grade. Courtney, Edie's slightly older and more sophisticated friend, runs away from abusive parents into the arms of the local theater director, but not before igniting Ian's explosive desires. Robert attempts to defend Ian's actions with a starkly factual essay but gets expelled for obscenity. Moreover, the whole play is set against a backdrop of other boys at the boarding school exploring the full range of their newfound homosexual impulses.

Director Charmain Creagle uses modern dance as a metaphor for erotic fantasy to represent the fragile innocence with which these young characters explore their nascent sexuality. Melissa Coleman, dressed as an androgynous wood nymph with Boy George-esque facial makeup, spryly crouches and slinks around all the nooks and crevices of the stage while watching the action. During monologues, she silently entwines herself around the characters' arms and legs in sinuous and sensuous curls. As dancers, the characters must come to terms with their growing bodies' gravity, just as their characters are coming to terms with their bodies' growing gravitas.

On the other hand, in one of Wedekind's most outrageous scenes, a group of boys challenge each other to a "circle jerk" to see who can hit a coin with his semen. Creagle depicts this with expressionistic gestures—such as throwing fists in the air and biting one's arm—set to punk music. While the gestures were not graphic enough to convey the full force of the scene's violence, the ski masks the boys wore made them vaguely resemble grotesque pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Creagle offers another effective visual corollary to the play's themes by representing the adults' roles in projections on a screen looming over the adolescents' heads. We see only isolated body parts of the adults—mouth, feet, breasts—as if they had become chopped up, flattened into video images, and manipulated to endure the technocratic restrictions of some vast super-ego-in-the-sky. Ironically, these body parts belong to the same actors who play the adolescents. By contrast, the adolescents onstage appear tender, palpable, fluid, and alive: they are, literally, in touch with reality.

The one exception to this is Robert's progressive mother, played live by the young and fetching Hana Nora McGrath. This mother figure is the play's only embodiment of a mature, sexually awakened yet not morbid or moribund adult. McGrath convincingly manages the difficult tensions of her character—between youth and age, innocence and authority, sympathy and instruction. She conveys a luminous aura of sexual suggestiveness as she undoes her stockings while Coleman's wood nymph alternately skitters around her, clasps her back, and, cat-like, plays with her socks.

Inseung Park's set design—large, irregular wooden panels floating in midair that frame the stage, with blossoming tree branches growing downward in back of them—adds an element of delicate spatial tension, as well, by seeming to disembody the very heft of the materials.

Ultimately, Wedekind's play does not intend to merely shock, and this graceful and intelligent production contains a tenderness that refuses to sentimentalize experience. Instead, it offers us the shock of recognizing the underlying vulnerability and innocence of truth and sex, the many veils of which it depicts through a tantalizing dance.

Avant-Garde O'Neill

It's quite a thing for a young, relatively unknown theater critic to be confronted with a production that so many of her betters have called great. The weight on my shoulders is to see this production as it has been seen, to understand its avant-gardism as it has been understood. And so I will try to know it through that very notion of weight, of heft and influence. The Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones is a highly theatrical deconstruction of a finely constructed self. The self, in this case, is Brutus Jones, a brute of a Negro who narrowly escapes the criminal life in America only to inflict his racial self-hatred on a group of West Indian islanders by appointing himself their master and overlord. The action begins as Jones's smarmy little No. 2, a Cockney ne'er-do-well named Smithers (Ari Fliakos), informs him that the natives are planning a revolt. Jones flees into the Great Forest—a heart of darkness if there ever was one—and, when confronted with the ghosts of sins past, devolves into a whimpering jungle primitive.

More and more often, the theater is becoming a nice, if tepid, color-blind space, where cross-cultural fusion is an unspoken exercise in political correctness rather than an elemental component of a show's message. But because this production self-consciously reveals our culture's image of the black man, race is an all too relevant matter. The Emperor Jones, written by a white Eugene O'Neill, premiered downtown in 1920 and was heralded by a black W.E.B. DuBois as a "work that must be done."

Eighty-odd years later, a white Elizabeth Le Compte directs a white, female Kate Valk as Jones. Valk is a convincing minstrel. Her high-pitched vocal undulations and coal-hued blackface are startling reminders that, from start to finish, this can still be a challenging, confrontational piece of theater. Casting Valk, Le Compte has daringly violated a fundamental Jim Crow rule by pairing a white woman with a black man; as we stare at Valk-as-Jones, the discomfort of this pairing is always with us.

Jones and Smithers are outfitted in dingy, Kabuki-esque kimonos and, without warning, perform synchronized dances, set to an 80's discothèque beat, that draw on vaudeville, minstrelsy, and stylized Noh movements. When Jones is haunted in the woods by a menacing witch doctor, Smithers, bare-chested and stomping, walks onstage like a sumo wrestler who must use the weight of himself to overcome, or at least intimidate, his opponent. It is as though the East that enchanted 19th-century America—Commodore Perry's ships arrived in Japan only nine years before the start of the Civil War—has been reappropriated to help destabilize the loaded Western dichotomy between black and white.

The stage and staging bear the weight of Artaud's "theater of cruelty" (glaring bright lights line the sides and back of the stage) and Brechtian alienation (television sets offer scratchy hints at scenery and distorted reproductions of character images) quite well. The tech crew is constantly in full view, and Valk and Fliakos speak into microphones that amplify their voices over syncopated bass notes and electro-clash noise. There is no escaping the trappings of theater; in this production it is neither a comfort nor an escape but a space that carefully dismantles the construct of the American Negro.

And yet I find myself wondering if what I have seen isn't somehow a closed system: to whom is this esoteric deconstruction aimed if not the largely white and largely upper-middle-class audiences that make up the theatergoing public? Make no mistake, this is a challenge issued out of respect, for both LeCompte's production and the weight of social and political aggravation that the theater should, and must, bear. I left the theater wondering, Where is the shifting weight in cultural authority—in both art making and art appreciation—that a work this challenging can help usher in? That is, where are the consistent representations of authentic marginalized voices onstage? And, perhaps more important, where in the crowd of theatergoing audiences are the throngs of faces that those voices represent?

I sincerely hope that this important exercise in alienation, discomfort, and even revolt has been more than just theater for theater's sake.

War of Words

"When a war kills many, we must mourn for them—and if you win the war, you must grieve it." Taken from the Tao Te Ching, this is the epigraph of Ann Nelson's new play, Savages, a dryly didactic but well-intentioned account of the real life of Maj. Littleton Waller, a Marine charged with war crimes in the U.S.-Philippines War of 1902. Nelson shot to fame in 2001 with The Guys, a play based on her own experience ghostwriting eulogies for a New York City fire captain who lost men in the events of 9/11. But where Nelson's persuasive, intense journalistic style brought welcome clarity to The Guys, it inhibits the dramatic development of Savages. If you're not familiar with the war, you're not alone. Relegated to a mere historical hiccup, it doesn't hold much of a place in history books, and Nelson valiantly aims to bring it into our contemporary zeitgeist (while drawing a none-too-subtle parallel to our current situation in Iraq). Nelson spent years researching the Philippines, and it shows—her copious research and expertise is evident throughout the play. But shoehorning so much information into a 90-minute play is not the wisest decision, and what should be a taut drama unfolds as a stiff chapter from a history textbook.

Nelson approaches the war from four viewpoints that each represent a different experience of war. Central to the story is Maj. Waller (James Matthew Ryan), a Virginia-born aristocrat-turned-Marine whose wartime experiences have left him mortally ill and emotionally wounded. He arrives at an apartment in Manila in the midst of his trial, and the other characters are charged with preserving him until the next morning, when his verdict will be delivered. John Hanley (Brett Holland), a young, war-hungry corporal from Oklahoma, keeps watch in Waller's room; Gen. Chaffee (Jim Howard), a brash, middle-aged Army devotee from Ohio, conveys Waller to and from the trial; and Maridol (Julie Danao-Salkin), a young Filipino nurse, is hired to keep Waller comfortable.

The complexity of each character's relationship with the war is arresting on paper, but their interactions soon begin to sag with heavy-handed metaphors and forced instances of cultural collision. As Waller teaches Hanley how to play chess, he explains, "It's all about learning the rules, boy. That's the test of civilized combat. Know the true character of every piece." The comparison between chess and war (and courtroom) becomes all too obvious, all too quickly. And Hanley's limited knowledge of Filipino culture plays out in moments of rather stock ignorance (as he questions Maridol's religious convictions and samples her food) to mostly unsatisfying ends.

The dialogue is so jammed with information that the characters often seem to provide their own footnotes, breaking dramatic flow and cutting themselves off. "I remember when the story hit the paper," Chaffee says, recalling how he heard about Waller's devastating actions. "I called Jake into my office and sat him down—just like the old days out West.... 'Smith,' I say, 'Have you been having any promiscuous killing in Samar for fun?' " These parenthetical asides ("just like the old days out West") serve to educate the audience rather than realistically reveal character. In this way, moments of wrenching conflict arrive unbidden, and without much effect, at the play's conclusion.

Although Ryan makes a concerted effort to be sincere, he, Holland, and Howard have a difficult time bringing believable dimension to rather weakly defined characters. Danao-Salkin, however, gives Savages its humanity. She carefully listens to the men, perceptibly thinking through her words and actions. She even manages to clearly ground a non sequitur emotional eruption late in the show. And her exquisite, raw delivery of a traditional Filipino song as she soothes Waller to sleep is truly haunting, capturing both the sorrow and hope of a people whose home has been ravaged by the effects of war.

Lauren Helpern's simple set fits agreeably into the intimate Lion Theater, but Chris Jorie's direction, while steady, maintains a lethargic tempo. Much of the action plays out in simple conversational style, but Jorie inexplicably (and perhaps suggestively?) places Maridol behind Waller in his bed as she sings. Ensconced by mosquito netting, they present an odd, Pietà-like image.

Although Nelson claims her play is neither "for nor against war," it nonetheless evokes—perhaps due to the strong performance by Danao-Salkin—a decidedly antiwar stance. Maridol is the voice of people whose lives have been uprooted by a country that wishes to both colonize and civilize them—drawing undeniable parallels to our present war. Nelson is a voracious source of facts that have the potential to inspire, instruct, and change society, but a play (Savages, at least) may not be the best forum for her unquestionably expansive skills.