Club Scene

Three-year-old Tajmere Clark died an unnatural death on a recent Sunday. While on a drunken rampage, a crazed gunman shot and killed the African-American toddler in her East New York home. When Melvin Van Peebles wrote his 1971 musical Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death: Tunes From Blackness, he must have hoped that things would be different by 2006. No such luck. Two days before the Brooklyn shooting, Van Peebles stood in the back of the club T New York in Midtown. There, the Classical Theater of Harlem is reviving his Broadway musical for a rapacious city where black citizens still die unnaturally every day. Yet in spite of the topical title, the production feels more like a parody of a Fat Albert episode than a social commentary on urban violence and struggle.

The characters are Shaft-era stereotypes, including pimps, prostitutes, bag ladies, drug dealers, and cops. Or, more specifically, "Fatso," "Big Titties," "The Dyke," and "Sweet Daddy," among others. Interestingly, Van Peebles penned Ain't Supposed to Die at the same time he was working on Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which has been called the first "blaxploitation" film. The connection between the two is undeniable.

The production takes place in a nightclub where audience members sit at banquettes surrounding the dance floor, at bistro tables in the middle of the floor, and in a balcony overlooking it. The actors climb over and around the audience and play off of the people seated closest to the center. Two-for-one drink tickets can be purchased at the box office window, so you can sip your Tanqueray and tonic while watching street violence re-enacted near, or sometimes on, your table.

Songs ranging from "Lily Done the Zampoughi Every Time I Pulled Her Coattail" to "Come Raising Your Leg on Me" remind the audience that Van Peebles may have been less concerned with racial equality than with having a good time. (He did perform the hardcore sex scenes in Sweet Sweetback himself.)

Alfred Preisser directs for thrills here, mostly at the expense of the female cast members. Violence against women and forced prostitution is as serious today as it was 35 years ago. Instead of using the vicious and the exploitative to provoke disgust and dialogue, Preisser allows the pole dancing, sexual assaults, beatings, and draggings to continue for so long in so many scenes that one wonders if he is disgusted by these acts or intrigued by them. (Judging by the faces of some men in the audience, it may have been the latter.)

Van Peebles's songs rival Lenny Kravitz's for repetition. Most consist of one line repeated over and over. (The show is touted as a precursor to choreopoem, spoken word, and rap, so three cheers for evolution.) The cast is dedicated and energetic but lacks any real vocal power. The opening song, "It Just Don't Make No Sense," is sung almost entirely off-key. John-Andrew Morrison, as an unemployed man who sings "Mirror Mirror on the Wall," is one of the better vocalists, however.

The singers get no help from the orchestra because this live musical doesn't have one. The score is pre-recorded and played by DJs in a booth overlooking the club floor. Visual aspects make up for aural sloppiness. Some costumes are fun and playful, like the money-hungry pimp in a light-green leisure suit, while others are spot-on realistic, like the homeless woman (played very convincingly by Kimberlee Monroe) who could have easily been lured into the club from Eighth Avenue.

Ain't Supposed to Die ran on Broadway for nearly a year, from 1971 to 1972; racked up Tony and Grammy Award nominations; and laid the foundation for some of the most important styles in African-American music. This revival should have either made the rowdy relic pertinent to today's issues or simply let it die a natural death.

Platonic Kitsch

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is often told as a tragic tale of romance. Orpheus is the plaintive lover whose melodious lamentations for his lost love give him power over beasts and stones. Eventually, his songs gain him admittance to Hades, where he seeks to bring Eurydice back from the dead. Warned that if he looks back at her he will lose her forever, Orpheus cannot help himself. He looks, and she vanishes instantly from his gaze. Plato, however, interpreted the myth of Orpheus as an allegory of image and reality (as Plato was wont to do). In Plato's version, in his Symposium, Orpheus's desire to bring back Eurydice and himself alive from Hades is a sign that he is not willing to heroically die for love. Orpheus is merely a musician, a poet—and, thus, for Plato "shows no spirit." Because he seeks only the fleeting apparition of his love, Orpheus is "sent empty away."

The Medicine Show's revival of V.R. Lang's 1952 play in free verse, Fire Exit: Vaudeville for Eurydice, uses this passage from Plato as an epigraph—our first hint that this is going to be a strange, self-condemning anti-romance and not what it may seem on the surface: a feel-good burlesque with witty references to Greek myths.

Playing off Plato, Lang portrays Orpheus as the successful but essentially empty antihero and Eurydice as the naïve young girl who, having become bitter with cruel experience, is seduced into selling out at tawdry burlesque shows, where men go to ogle skin instead of contemplating high ideas. The mythic characters get updated to 1930's America, and the plot is filled out with a supporting cast.

Orpheus is a hot opera composer and librettist whose career is rapidly taking off; he is surrounded by an avaricious gaggle of gay agents and producers who look as if they're from 1930's Berlin cafe society with their foppish hats and silk cravats. Eurydice, on the other hand, is the simple, homespun nursing-school student whose silly aunts and tacky uncles are aging vaudeville types trying to hook her up with a big break or a bachelor.

Problem is, the play's form wants to revel in the lyrical impulse its theme condemns—high poetry and low show tunes alike. This contradiction irks one not just "theoretically" but in terms of the characters' motivations and the entire play's through line.

We can't quite figure out who Orpheus is or why Eurydice falls for him so hard. Moreover, why—if Orpheus is so empty of true love—does he bother to search for Eurydice for many years when he has plenty of screaming teenybopper fans? And, by the way, is it believable that teenyboppers are ardent opera buffs, or does this represent a descent into opera buffa?

Worse yet, Jon Crefeld, who resembles a more vapid version of Nick Lachey (if that's imaginable), acted as empty and lost as Plato describes his character of Orpheus. Whether his character was supposed to be stiff was difficult to discern—but if so, then why is Orpheus so feted in the play? Crefeld's interpretation of Orpheus exemplified a dim bulb more than the megawatts of genuine star power.

The play's condemnation of pinchbeck theatricality reaches its most absurd level when Eurydice's trio of aging, failed vaudevillian aunts belt out an off-key show tune. The acting and singing is an amateur representation of amateurishness. Again, I became genuinely confused as to whether their songs' grating wheeze was parody or dreadfully unaware self-parody.

The play contained a few entertaining bits, however, such as a scene where the fey producers devour a phallic baguette and dribble spurts of Champagne on themselves. Their drunken frenzy litters the stage with crumbs and suds until they're finally dragged into the wings.

Ironically, Uta Bekaia's costumes—that element of pure theatrical appearance—were unusually apropos in their sheer tackiness. For example, Eurydice's uncles "slap-schticked" their way in plaid suits, white wingtips, baseball caps, and truly horrendous dime-store ties. Eurydice herself cavorted in a stripper's faux-nurse outfit by the end.

These bright points, though, can't keep the piece from collapsing in on its self-contradictions. Lang's attempt at a "free verse" play ultimately fails: we cannot hear the rhythm, which is essentially a prose rhythm, except when the lines become jangly with clichéd rhymes. Moreover, the idea of using poetry and vaudeville to tell a story that casts aspersions on both leaves one little to believe in.

The contempt the play expresses for the tackiness and essential falseness of theater is, oddly, both reinforced and undermined by the production's cheap exuberance. The audience begins to sense there is something disingenuous about the production's sincerity of self-contempt, which lacks both irony and, like Plato's Orpheus, "true spirit."

Space to Grieve

Lee Blessing's Two Rooms explores grief, not by dramatizing volatile moments but through the mundane, repetitive act of waiting. Sure, there are emotional climaxes in this play, but they feel somehow muted by all the waiting that Lainie (Katie Tuminelly) has to do. She is waiting for news of her husband, Michael (Derek Lucci), an American University in Beirut professor who was taken hostage by Lebanese vigilantes during what was to be his last semester abroad. Lainie empties Michael's office in an attempt to exist in a space like the one he might be in. She sits on a small rug on the bare floor talking to her memory of him. Blessing's stage directions collapse the two rooms—Michael's office and his actual holding cell—into one; when Lainie and Michael share the stage, it is as if their separate rooms have been layered on top of one another, and the space between them seems less so.

Lighting designer Bryan Keller handles the stage and staging well; subtle tonal shifts throughout the play evoke the spaces clearly. These are intimate scenes of longing and grief as Lainie and Michael speak letters to each other and gather strength from their imagined conversations.

Lainie's grief is valuable, though, to those who can either profit from it or be damaged by it. The media cannot help but seek out and publish Lainie's dramatic response to her husband's absence, while the State Department cannot allow a desperate women to jeopardize its covert operations or intelligence gathering abroad.

Lainie must negotiate the largely self-serving interests of both the State Department (represented by Ellen, the woman assigned to her case) and the media (exemplified by Walker, a zealous reporter). Though some of his exits were a bit abrupt, Jacob Knoll's Walker is generally engaging and open, someone we immediately want to trust and listen to. Someone we don't mind Lainie listening to as well.

Perhaps director Kara-Lynn Vaeni's decision to make Ellen (Emily Zeck) insensitive was second nature: who wants to sympathize with a government agent? But the production would benefit from a more nuanced portrait of this character, perhaps by an actor who can better juggle Ellen's obligation within the governmental bureaucracy and her exhaustion in the face of that obligation. As it is, Zeck comes off like a finicky schoolmarm better suited for a second-grade classroom than a midlevel State Department position.

The predictable struggles for Lainie's trust by Ellen and Walker are mediated, most of all, by Lucci's voice. It's a strange thing when one actor's voice—the medium through which he must present this character—becomes itself a powerful character in a production. When the play starts, we see Michael sitting alone in the bare room, talking to Lainie about everything and anything. Lucci's voice is somnolent and soothing, a perfect vehicle for Blessing's surprisingly poetic metaphors. I found myself wanting to get back to that cell, wanting to hear more from the man who talks his way through such a harrowing experience.

This is Checkpoint Productions's first show, and it's competently produced, thanks in part to the preponderance of Yale School of Drama alumni. Once they get a few more shows under their belts, this may be a group to keep watching.

Mixed Bag

When this Friday or Saturday night comes around, do your immortal soul a favor and go to church. No, not the big one on Park Avenue. I'm talking about the one that congregates in the downstairs cabaret space at Theater for a New City. This worship service is called Suck Sale...and Other Indulgences, and Evan Laurence presides as the high cleric of indulgent absurdity. Suck Sale is actually a collection of four performance pieces, two scripted and two improvised, that were conceived, written, and directed by Laurence. As the title suggests, he doesn't conceal the fact that this is his own self-indulgent ritual. Whether audiences take part in it or sit in respectful silence is up to them, and probably not even a concern to him. Laurence and his cast are having so much fun that it becomes a downright religious experience.

In the first piece, Suck Sale, Mimi Dieux-Veau invites two vacuum cleaner salesmen into her home under the pretense of deciding who has the best sucking machine. Dieux-Veau, played with disturbing sensibility by Tanya Everett, is a combination of Donna Reed and a tribal priestess. Brian Ferrari and Laurence play the salesmen, and each recounts the startling experiences that have led them into the melancholy life of heaving Hoovers, before the two learn they've been brought together for a different reason. From there the sanity of the situation fractures, as Priestess Mimi uses her ability to control the salesmen's movements like puppets and then actually turns them into Punch and Judy puppets for a while.

The piece gives way to some shtick in The Sybil, in which Laurence takes two suggestions from the audience and improvises a 10-minute scene. He successfully conjures up three characters: a man, his wife, and, well, a hemorrhoid goblin that is setting off firecrackers inside the man's rear end. Each of the characters, amazingly, has separate character arcs, voices, and styles of movement, and Laurence plays the scene until its inevitable conclusion. Unfortunately, this was an early performance in the show's run (opening night, in fact), and the house wasn't as charged as it needed to be for this kind of improv.

The small audience perked up a little for the third piece, Edith the Head Takes Manhattan, in which Laurence plays a disfigured World War II refugee, Edith, who seems to have lost her entire body. Laurence plays this bit in a magnificent giant head puppet that is bigger than his entire body. I am not really clear if this monstrous creation should be considered costuming (designed by Mary-Anne Buyondo, Corinne Darroux, and Josefin Sandling) or props (designed by Kate Odermatt and—who else?—Laurence). But my admiration goes to the appropriate member of the design team, because the puppet was spectacular.

This section is "moderated" by David Slone, who reads from a text that describes Edith's journey from Europe to America. This text is not unlike the Mad-Libs word game; Slone reads a line of text like "When Edith swam across the Atlantic Ocean to America, she swam with..." and the audience decides that Edith swam "with mermaids." Laurence and Slone then would act out that scene. This sketch, unlike The Sybil, had the added pressure involved in completing the text Slone was reading, and unfortunately the giant head gag wore a little thin. Even so, the raw, creative ludicrousness of a gigantic head making love to Albert Einstein is something that demands respect both in its conception and execution.

The fourth and final piece, Four Better or Worse?, is the culmination of Laurence's sermon. Imagine Donald Marguiles's Dinner With Friends, except the two men have fallen in love with each other, and the two women seek spiritual enlightenment by summoning arcane tribal spirits that ultimately possess one and drastically age the other. Did I mention the mind swaps, the time-traveling fetuses, the multidimensional wormholes opened by alien anal probes (so that's what those aliens have been up to all these years!), or a messiah who is upset that his stigmata bleeds onto all of his alms money? Laurence crams every type of humor from the previous pieces into this final explosion of absurdity. It is all very raw and offers the appropriate sensory overload for the show's conclusion.

Aside from the lack of audience enthusiasm for the improvised segments at this particular performance, Suck Sale draws you in with the same morbid curiosity that attends driving past a car crash. Laurence consistently outdoes himself and takes the humor to another level, daring audiences to follow him. Even the lighting design and technical elements by Mi Sun Choi and Heejung Noh seemed to be improvised, and lighting cues that happened just a second too late added to the show's charming slipshod aesthetic.

Charming as Suck Sale is, it was clear the cast was a little nervous about whether the audience "got it." Smaller audiences are inevitably quieter audiences, and the lack of vocal response seemed to affect the timing and overall mood. There is a great wealth of strong material in Laurence's work, but a larger audience might coax out its absurdity better.

Shakespeare and Zombies

Sometime in the future or somewhere in the past, in the place where pop culture and legitimate literature meet, Qui Nguyen's Living Dead in Denmark is born. Under the direction of Robert Ross Parker, the play proves to be a highly entertaining, but ultimately uneven, full-out assault on Shakespeare in the form of B-movie madness and some seriously kick-ass stage combat. It is five years after the apocalypse. Mankind struggles to survive. Toxic waste litters the landscape, and zombies rule the night. A post-apocalyptic battle rages between two camps for supremacy. The human group is led by Hamlet's Fortinbras, and the zombies are ruled by Titania of A Midsummer Night's Dream and her reanimated lover, Hamlet. While Hamlet appears unstoppable with the help of his brain-hungry zombie army, Fortinbras has a secret weapon far more powerful.

Deep in his Danish lair, he has created the perfect fighting machines in the form of Macbeth's Lady Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet's Juliet, and Hamlet's Ophelia. It seems Fortinbras rescued the threesome from their respective suicide attempts, engineering them into an unlikely trio—think Charlie's Angels meets the Three Stooges, with fight moves that would make Buffy the Vampire Slayer jealous. These three unite to battle Hamlet's army of the undead.

Lady M (as she is called) and Juliet, with help from Hamlet's Horatio, convince the reluctant Ophelia to join their cause and save mankind. The estrogen is running high as the girls wield swords, throw knives, and kung-fu their way through a sea of zombie mutants. Everyone has a secret and no one can be trusted as the final battle looms on the horizon. Alliances shift, leading to the ultimate showdown between Fortinbras and Hamlet and forcing our heroine Ophelia to choose between love and duty.

Nguyen, coming off his critically acclaimed and haunting masterpiece Trial by Water at the Culture Project, shows off his silly side with his zombie-cum-Shakespearean parody. Nothing is spared in his assault on pop culture. Everything from Kill Bill and Brokeback Mountain to Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg are gleefully skewered. Fortunately, Nguyen is also merciless in his attack on the Bard, using Shakespeare's own words against him and stripping away the pretense to reveal the often trite plot beneath the multisyllabic lines.

But Nguyen's riotous ability to spoof pop culture is also where the production breaks down. There are just too many inside jokes and clever references for him to sustain plot focus. He ultimately gets off message, abandoning his sharp characters and his inspired story for an unnecessary joke or another extended fight sequence. The production features dozens of scenes, many of which clock in at less than 60 seconds. Nguyen's plot structure, reminiscent of the modern sitcom with its setup, joke, and quick-cut construction, proves to be a challenge for Parker. Much of the play is mechanically boring, and Parker's stale staging becomes all too familiar with each passing scene.

The one exception is Marius Hanford's excellent fight direction. He approaches each of the finely detailed and riveting fight sequences as if he were choreographing a ballet. The result is an exhilarating ride that, although distracting from the plot, cannot be faulted for its precise execution or pure entertainment value.

Parker, however, does deserve credit for guiding his cast to outstanding performances. The entire cast of 10 excels, many in multiple roles, delivering joke after joke with bull's-eye precision. Maureen Sebastian is sexy and smart as the geek-chic Juliet. Melissa Paladino is all testosterone as the butch Lady M but gives Macbeth's take-no-prisoners wife a sensitive edge. Andrea Marie Smith is appropriately needy as Titania and nearly steals the show as she belts out a sexy torch song with her smoky, soaring voice.

Jason Liebman goths it up as the Prince of Denmark, playing him as a misunderstood monster with the soul of a tortured artist and the heart of a bad-boy rock star. As Horatio, Carlo Alban plays the hero full out, saving the girl in a swoon-worthy performance. Jason Schumacher takes on Fortinbras to hilarious effect, drawing on a rogue British accent and plodding about the stage as if he had just waltzed out of a bad James Bond movie.

Living Dead in Denmark revolves around Ophelia, from her rebirth in Fortinbras's lab to her final showdown with her savior and former lover. Amy Kim Waschke triumphantly brings this central character full circle. She imbues Ophelia with equal parts tough-girl bravado and lost confusion as she tries to make sense of the situation unfolding around her. Under Waschke's accomplished guidance, Ophelia's story remains grounded and compelling throughout.

Vampire Cowboys Theater Company's mission is to entertain by first engaging its audiences. It prides itself on keeping them on the edge of their seats, and with Living Dead in Denmark it achieves its goal. But not all audiences were brought up in an era of attention deficit disorder, and sometimes a good story goes a long way, especially one as good as this one. If Nguyen and Parker, Vampire Cowboys's co-artistic directors, had kept their focus more on substance and less on style, Living Dead in Denmark would be "can't miss" instead of just "should see."

Vampire Cowboys Theater Company: Guts, Gore, and Mainstream Appeal

Now that Lestat, the latest vampire musical, has suffered a critical drubbing, a theatergoer could hardly be faulted for being a bit skeptical about a dramatic group whose name evokes those nocturnal, bloodsucking creatures. But the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company (VCTC), a young yet already well-received New York-based theater troupe, is determined to push against any and all expectations, and that includes its name.

Not that its work has much to do with vampires anyway. Co-founders Qui Nguyen and Robert Ross Parker, who met while theater graduate students at Ohio University, invented the name, quite simply, from two things they liked—vampires for Nguyen, cowboys for Parker.

Although they were advised by a mentor to change their name to "something more serious," the name stuck, and Nguyen defends their choice while revealing his company's mission. "We'll earn the respect of other people by the work we do," he says. "If you're going to judge us by the name Vampire Cowboys, then you shouldn't be our audience member anyway. Our first mission is to entertain. We try to make theater that people love."

Over five years have passed since the inception of the Vampire Cowboys, and since then the troupe has incubated transcendent new work and talent while producing a healthy handful of shows, including a sold-out run at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival. Perhaps best known for their potent blend of genres and artistic conventions, the Vampire Cowboys are deeply committed to exploring weighty subject matter through such mediums as stage combat and comic books, music and pop culture.

Vampire Cowboys Theater Company's Poster from Living Dead in Denmark

The group is now presenting what is perhaps its most ambitious work to date, Living Dead in Denmark, a sequel to (and "skewering" of) Hamlet, in which a resurrected Ophelia leads other deceased Shakespearean heroines (including Juliet and Lady Macbeth) to defend Denmark against a herd of zombies.

Sound a bit bizarre? Nguyen, who wrote the play, certainly concurs. "It's a 'zombie Hamlet,' " he attests. "Completely goofy." But before you dismiss it completely, consider that the Vampire Cowboys have been refining this particular piece of theater for years now. Not only that, but beneath the complex fight choreography and visual feast, this play is a treatise on race.

Don't let the surface spontaneity fool you; there is something both steady and studied coursing through the veins of these Vampire Cowboys. And although they presumably want to take you on a wild theatrical adventure, they won't leave you to crash and burn unattended. "Rides aren't fun when you don't feel like the person driving the car knows how to drive," Nguyen points out. "We want to make sure that people feel safe in our hands."

Living Dead in Denmark Publicity Photo

***

At Ohio University, Nguyen was appalled to see students who had dedicated their lives to theater watching dated plays with little connection to their own lives. "I realized," he remembers, "that these 20-year-old kids from Ohio had no clue what theater could be." Inspired to fill the gap, Nguyen and Parker joined forces to "create a show that was about now," and VCTC was born, along with its first theatrical triptych, The Vampire Cowboy Trilogy.

There was a "crazy reaction from everyone at school," Nguyen recalls. "They had never seen anything so immediate." The two brought their concept to New York in 2002, where they expected to be surrounded by similar-minded artists. Scanning the theater scene, however, they were disappointed as they discovered shows that had either a good idea or good craftsmanship, but rarely both.

With money out of their own pockets, they staged their New York premiere, Stained Glass Ugly, in the summer of 2003, and began to generate a healthy fan base. Wisely, they keep a close eye on their audience and have worked to maintain an open relationship with their fans. Their "First Bite" series, in fact, is designed to invite candid audience response. Living Dead in Denmark once ran in the series, and, as with their other shows, Nguyen reports that "the audience was very honest about the things they loved and the things they hated."

It seems wise—and rather unprecedented—to pay such close attention to an audience's reaction, but it's a formula that works for VCTC. "It's all about communicating," Nguyen says. "We're trying to get the audience to get it. We start out very story-based and plot-driven, and then we add the other stuff. We celebrate spectacle on top of it all."

And spectacle, in this case, is anything but gratuitous. Instead of throwing in meaningless binges of special effects, risks are taken to enhance the power of the storytelling. As they take on provocative subjects such as child molestation and race, the Vampire Cowboys are committed to communicating as clearly and effectively as possible.

Most often, the clearest communication happens visually. Parker and Nguyen were both trained as movement artists, although Parker (director of most VCTC ventures) comes from a more Western, European aesthetic, while Nguyen (playwright and frequent fight choreographer) brings more of an American and Eastern sensibility to the group. Their joint embrace of movement, Nguyen explains, helps to "keep the medium very visual."

A Beginner's Guide to Deicide

"It's not locked in tradition, but in how we can get from A to B in the quickest, easiest, and most entertaining way," he says. "It's a very cinematic view, and it keeps it visually exciting for a whole generation of people who were raised on MTV." But he admits that "it is a tightrope in how you implement the visual with the literal."

VCTC definitely attracts a younger demographic (mostly 18- to 30-year-olds)—the very demographic, ironically, that Broadway shows so often attempt—and fail—to entice. Nguyen attributes this appeal, in part, to VCTC's commitment to reach "the geek in all of us." In this sense, VCTC shows are an outlet for anyone who has ever played chess, went to a sci-fi convention, bought a ticket to Spider-Man, or obsessed over Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"I don't think there's anybody who doesn't have a geeky side," Nguyen maintains. "We're appealing to that kind of nerdy side of everyone."

Nguyen and Parker continue to revise their shows right up to the end of the rehearsal process, preserving a freshness that is very immediate. Scripts aren't locked until the last possible moment, and the commitment to collaboration is strong and unrelenting. Nguyen describes the group as an "artistic collective," a community of "consummate professionals" (several designers have worked on Broadway and Off-Broadway shows) who constantly inspire and "push each other to make bold choices." And thanks to the individual strengths of company members, the productions often evolve in unexpected but exciting directions as the creative team adds to the mix the members' talents in puppetry, multimedia, and music composition.

As a theater kid who was "overeducated in the classics," Nguyen is determined to use his background to create theater that is relevant today. Future goals for VCTC include producing more shows and continuing to grow as a theater company. "We don't want to be Broadway, movies, or the next TV series," Nguyen says. "We want to be the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company—a company that makes theater that we hope excites people as much as these other mediums. Live theater and live events are important, and as relevant as anything they can see on a screen."

Managing Director Abby Marcus has also helped with the company's growth. Nguyen calls her "the person who keeps our feet on the ground" financially, and she is helping VCTC work toward becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Still, Nguyen says, "there's no rush. We don't need to be the next big thing tomorrow. We're going to be here for a long time."

He adds, "I think we're very distinct in that we are creating for an audience that is very much us, and we're representing things that are very now and pop-culture mainstream. But there's no pretentiousness. I love so much stuff, and I get to do all that stuff in one show."

Vampire Cowboy Trilogy

***

"Watch your grunts per move," fight director Marius Hanford warns his actors as they proceed through an especially complicated fight sequence. We're in a warmly lighted rehearsal space in Brooklyn's Williamsburg, and one actress sits on the floor, icing a sore muscle, while a slew of grotesque zombie masks sit on a table, staring blankly at the proceedings. Band-Aids, kneepads, and rubber entrails are strewn across the floor, and as Hanford finesses a routine, the other actors sit in rapt attention.

Everyone seems exceptionally keyed into the rehearsal. Even when the performers are given a 10-minute break, nobody actually breaks. Sweating and obviously near exhaustion, they continue to work at perfecting every thrust and jab of their weapons. Certainly, it pays to be precise when daggers are flying near your face, but the performers' interest clearly extends beyond concern for personal safety. As Hanford works to craft movements to fit and flesh out a character, each performer seems to be creating a sense of self out of every unique movement.

Or, alternately, out of a moment of stillness. "There! You see? Here he decides he doesn't need martial arts anymore," Hanford instructs a performer whose character suddenly abandons a fight.

The movements are stylized and vicious, disarming in their precision. The actors burst out laughing in their first attempts to use squibs (small bags filled with stage blood—water, for this rehearsal) to simulate blood spurting.

And here is the evidence of the collaboration Nguyen promised. Parker, the director, chimes in to better define a moment, while Hanford openly considers suggestions from the actors.

When I ask them for an encapsulated definition of a VCTC production, the response becomes yet another exercise in collaboration. "It's a living comic book," offers Marcus. "It defies genre," claims Parker, but then concedes, "It's like a movie, but better."

The 10 actors don't seem particularly concerned about definitions; instead, they're absorbed in the immediate, in the now. After Nguyen, who often directs the fights, jumps up to clarify a pivotal moment, Parker looks at him slyly, wagging one of the rubber entrails at his co-conspirator. "You've got guts, young man," he pronounces. "Guts." And this, perhaps, best sums up what drives the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company.

Living Dead in Denmark runs May 4-21 at Center Stage NY at 48 West 21st Street, fourth floor. Performance times are Thursday-Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $18 and are available at TheaterMania.com. For more information on the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company, visit www.vampirecowboys.com.

Growing Up Ibsen

Ibsen is everywhere. First there was Heddatron at the HERE Arts Center, a hilarious sendup of Ibsen's "well-made play" Hedda Gabler featuring a cast of robots. Then in March, Cate Blanchett and her fellow Aussie actors invaded the Brooklyn Academy of Music, delivering a fascinating production of Hedda Gabler with Blanchett as the craziest Hedda this side of Bellevue. Now, with spring in full bloom, Wakka Wakka Productions brings us The Death of Little Ibsen at the Sanford Meisner Theater, featuring a cast of puppets and an Ibsen who is the craziest of them all. Strange, funny, and completely original, the play is a 50-minute joyride into the bizarre world of Ibsen's mind.

The Death of Little Ibsen fascinatingly and often hilariously deconstructs the famed Norwegian playwright's tumultuous life. The production chronicles Ibsen's life from his birth in 1828 to his death in 1906, and all of the play's characters, with the exception of his mother, are puppets. The title character, Little Ibsen, serves as an embodiment of the inner voice of Ibsen the man. And fortunately for the audience, Ibsen's inner voice is a little crazy.

The show begins with Little Ibsen's birth, a particularly amusing sequence, as he is literally ripped from his mother's womb. From there, Ibsen grows up. He attends grammar school and is accused of plagiarism. He fights with his demanding parents and leaves home. In his early 20's, he meets and falls in love with a servant girl, who seduces him and becomes pregnant.

Ibsen panics and flees to a university, where his radical thinking leads him to launch a newspaper. Soon his first play is published, and he is hailed by the people but reviled by the critics. He marries and has a child, then deserts them (on the back of a pig!) to concentrate on his writing. As the years pass, Ibsen gives up his mistress, returns to his wife and now-grown son, and publishes some of his greatest works.

Ibsen's plays are huge successes, but through it all Little Ibsen succumbs to his own inner voice (Littler Ibsen?). It seems Little Ibsen suffers from irrational bouts of paranoia and a monster-sized inferiority complex that grows worse with each passing success. Ibsen's paranoia takes the form of two devil puppets. These cynical devils mock and disparage him; acting as a chorus, they sing their negative messages in clever rhymes. The devils denounce Ibsen's writing, calling The Master Builder pretentious and sneering at Hedda Gabler. As for his inner-inner voice, it tells Ibsen to just die because he isn't really any good at what he does, and besides, the critics don't like him very much.

The unusual production benefits significantly from Kirjan Waage's brilliant puppet design. One of Wakka Wakka Productions's four members, Waage brings Ibsen and his puppet colleagues to dramatic life. With their oversized features and anatomically correct appendages, the puppets are in some respects grotesque. Little Ibsen is first seen naked with genitalia on display, and later his servant seducer exposes her breasts during a rather hilarious chase sequence.

The design and execution of these peculiar puppets is so convincing that they achieve lifelike realism with their eerily authentic movements and speech. The Little Ibsen puppet, in particular, successfully personifies Ibsen's personality, presenting a man who is at times interesting and amiable and at other times ornery and frightening.

The members of Wakka Wakka do it all—sets, lights, music, costumes. But they are exceptional in their roles as puppeteers and set designers. They manipulate the nearly dozen puppets with expert precision, becoming part of the scenery as they vanish into their puppet roles. David Arkema is particularly effective as Little Ibsen. Dressed in a costume identical to his puppet's, Arkema is flawless at bringing the playwright's neuroses to life.

The set design is inspiring, proving just how much can be achieved with limited resources. Consisting of two boulders, a table, a chair, and a wardrobe, the set pieces are covered in moss and various forest greens. Within this fantastical funhouse, the set comes alive, opening up into secret compartments and serving multiple functions.

What The Death of Little Ibsen gives its audience, albeit with tongue firmly planted in cheek, is the mind behind the man. The play masterfully exposes a truth about the great playwright: most of his plays are actually about him. In deconstructing Ibsen, Wakka Wakka charts his quest to find his true self. As he wrestles with ghosts from his real life as well as those from his writing, he arrives at his final destination—death. It's a fantastic, insightful journey that never fails to entertain.

Fantastic Four

The Astoria Performing Arts Center is a small building tucked away near the Triborough Bridge, where it is being temporarily housed by the Greek Cultural Center in what appears to be the basement of a residence. But for those willing to give their Metrocard a little use, a trip to the end of the N subway line is akin to finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There's no leprechaun involved, however, just the solid quartet that makes up the cast of Forever Plaid, a musical that, despite never playing the Great White Way, has enjoyed nearly 20 years of success at the national and regional tour levels. It is fitting that the Plaids play such an intimate venue as the APAC, since the group never made the big time during its heyday. In an irony to end all ironies, the fictitious band, which continued the quintessential 1950's doo-wop style into the 1960's, died in a car accident—a collision with a group of teen girls on their way to see the Beatles in 1964, just as the Plaids were headed to their first big gig. The show's premise puts the foursome in limbo, hoping that if they can simply perform their concert, they can finally move on.

There isn't much more plot or suspense than that, just a series of delightful performances and character bits. Frederick Hamilton leads these four outstanding multitalents as Frankie, perhaps the most grounded of the group. Shad Olsen is terrific as the lispy Sparky, whose speech impediment gives way to amazing vocal chops time and time again (he also shows off his skills as a pianist during "Heart and Soul"). Ryan J. Ratliff is Smudge, Sparky's childlike half-brother, while Joseph Torello is the nerdy Jinx.

The group gels together quite well on such standards as "Three Coins in the Fountain," "Sixteen Tons/Chain Gang," and "Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing," and the members' zeal for the songs is infectious. They also put their well-honed, joyous harmonies to work on lesser-known songs, including "Perfidia," "Before Love," "Crazy 'Bout Ya Baby," and the particularly tender "No, Not Much." Another highlight is the first-act closing medley of "Caribbean Plaid," in which the Plaids sing the songs of Harry Belafonte; numbers like "Calypso," "Day-O," and "Matilda" bring the audience to its feet.

Flawless as this performance is, there is one minor complaint about the show, and it is a structural one. The second act is barely half the length of the first. While it is wise to ensure that the second act runs shorter than the first, it would have been nice if Forever Plaid had incorporated more songs (the well-paced show flies by), or at least divvied up the numbers with a tad more equality. However, director Brian Swasey (a talented performer himself) makes the most of each number, recreating many of the archetypical dance moves associated with the 1950's crooning groups that Plaid so lovingly pays homage to. (Writer Stuart Ross did the original choreography.) This is a group that is truly in sync.

Only at one point near the show's end does the dialogue overtake the singing, as Hamilton delivers a bittersweet monologue in which he recognizes the heights that the quartet never achieved. While that may be true of the Plaids, the show that features them at APAC is nothing short of a major success. Encore!

Devil's Due

German literature has a rich tradition of drama with epic proportions. There's Wagner's Ring cycle, of course, and Brecht's self-styled "epic theater." Though lesser known, there's also Karl Kraus's play The Last Days of Mankind, which was so long he claimed it could be performed only on Mars, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fifteen-and-a-half-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. But the granddaddy of all of these sprawling Teutonic masterworks, which often are as impossible to watch as they are to stage, is Goethe's Faust. Clocking in at just over six hours, it's a work that is often read (or at least assigned) in college, yet rarely given a full production stateside.

It's not just the length of Faust that intimidates directors and producers; it's the wildly incongruous plot and fantastic stage directions as well. In Part I, which is the more conventional of the two parts by far (and makes sense as a self-contained play), we witness Faust, a lonely man of learning, surrounded by his books, globes, alchemy instruments, and astrolabes. Still, he possesses a desire to overcome his own academic verbiage, ever striving and seeking a transcendent knowledge of experience.

In fact, Faust has just retranslated the first line of Genesis as "In the beginning was the…Deed" when a poodle he found on a nature hike transforms into Mephistopheles, a devil. The poodle, which struck me as silly or bathetic when I read the text years ago, was one of the great surprises of watching a staged production. It is played by an actor in a giant papier-mâché costume and comes off as a wonderfully theatrical element of the ridiculous.

The devil, of course, has come to strike a bargain. Mephistopheles gets Faust's soul if he can find one moment that Faust believes contents him perfectly.

Mephistopheles then whisks Faust away to a rowdy bar to show him a good time; when this doesn't work, he takes Faust to an orgiastic rite of primitive witches (played by absurdly cross-dressing actors). Next, Mephistopheles concocts a plan to get a simple young peasant girl, Gretchen, to fall in love with him. But, as these things are apt to do, the affair ends badly: Gretchen had to kill her mother and her baby. With her suicide, she ascends to heaven, forgiving all, while Faust is still found wanting.

Part II is a crazy roller-coaster ride through several mythological realms, as Mephistopheles now pulls out all the stops to find Faust a transcendent moment. Faust whizzes around through world-historical zeitgeists, from an ancient Egypt of griffins and sphinxes flapping their golden feathers to a future where a mad scientist has created a little man glowing inside a test tube.

One fantastical scene has the man-made "homunculus" riding on the back of the sea god Proteus, who has turned into a dolphin. To stage the scene, actors in costumes hold props representing their characters in action. Nearby, several sea nymphs frolic on the half-shell, reminding me of scenes of mythological mischief from Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle.

In the middle of Part II, there is an hourlong play-within-a-play featuring Helen of Troy. Helen and Faust have a child, and there is a funny scene in which their child, represented by a surprisingly expressive puppet, hops and skitters around the mountainsides.

Suffice it to say, however, that Faust is never satisfied, and the tragedy belongs to Mephistopheles. If the second half of Part II begins to lag with its sheer glut of myth and profusion of characters, one wants to be sure to wait for the finale. Devils dance around with giant masks that make them look like bobblehead dolls, endless streams of silver confetti pour down from the ceiling, and a chorus of angels sings an operatic hymn to life.

In fact, director David Herskovits has inserted many imaginative touches throughout the production, emphasizing the self-consciously theatrical quality of the text, which is often interpreted "poetically." For example, stagehands hilariously prance out onstage to hold a cloth to cover Gretchen when she is changing and, later, to cover the destruction of a violin.

Set designer Carol Bailey has given different scenes radically distinctive styles, from romantic gardens painted on a backcloth, to a small proscenium stage for the miniplay, to plywood cutouts for the mountain crags.

While all of the actors are adequate, David Greenspan, playing a dapper Mephistopheles, has the edge of worldly savoir-faire and insouciant archness necessary to convey the obsessive scheming of a devil who's seen it all. His character shifts from making flip gestures and snide wisecracks to having genuine pathos in his "death" speech. Douglas Langworthy's new translation uses a snappy, vernacular verse that emphasizes the off-the-cuff wit of the original.

If you have the stamina, seek out this rare opportunity to experience a transcendently theatrical staging of an epically proportioned classic.

Royally Lewd

Bloody Mary, Rachel Shukert's comedy about the life of Queen Mary I of England, now playing at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, is, to be blunt, a deluge of profanity and sexual perversion. Mary's reign—as if the monarch's titular nickname isn't indication enough—racked 16th-century England with religious and political turmoil. Hundreds were burned at the stake as Mary sought to redeliver her country to Catholicism. At the Clemente, Shukert has the moxie to drag this troubled period through the anachronistic gutter of our modern, sacrilegious, pornography-soaked culture. The product is a sex comedy of the basest, most violent type.

To be clear, I think this is a good thing. Anyone with a taste for the kind of obscene—and obscenely smart—linguistic excess that made, say, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut such a delight should make time for Third Man Productions's lewd gem. If more history were given the same irreverent treatment, we might feel less alienated from it. We certainly wouldn't be bored by it. Shukert's work is crudity par excellence.

The evening begins with King Henry VIII (Ian Unterman) loudly sodomizing Queen Catherine of Aragon (Kristin Slaysman). When Catherine points out that this particular method has yet to produce an heir, Henry offers unsurely, "This is how they did it back at Eton." A brief anatomy lesson by the queen and a second, more "proper" attempt later—which includes a mid-coital tableau and a suitably cinematic flash of white light—and Mary herself (the excellent Audrey Lynn Weston) emerges meekly upstage, dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl.

What follows hews impressively close both to what we know and what we think we know of Mary's life and times. Henry soon throws Catherine over for Anne Boleyn (played in hilarious drag by James Ryan Caldwell), who bears him the daughter who will later become Queen Elizabeth I (also Caldwell). Henry then throws over Boleyn (who ends up beheaded) for Jane Seymour (whom we do not see here). Seymour finally bears Henry his much-desired son, Edward (Reginald Veneziano). However, in quick succession both Henry and Edward shuffle off their mortal coils, leading to a short squabble over the crown, a political skirmish that Mary eventually wins.

Good comedy doesn't pervert the essence of its subject as much as it points up the absurdity that's already there. From her promiscuous father—Mary's ill health is rumored to have been the result of congenital syphilis contracted during her birth—to her plainly chilly marriage to Phillip II of Spain at the venerable age of 37, the story of Mary's life is already rife with sexual undertones (even leaving aside her intense devotion to Catholicism, a religion of subsumed eroticism if ever there was one). Shukert simply turns these into wildly glaring overtones.

For instance, when young Mary catches her father receiving oral favors from Boleyn, the king stammers that the service is actually a kind of medical procedure. Mary innocently presses:

Mary: Why can't Mummy [do] it for you?

Henry: Because Catholics can't do that, Mary!

Mary: Cardinal Wolsey can. I've seen.

Those times Shukert moves away from such easy vernacular into what I can only call heightened ribaldry—inventive, period-sounding vulgarity, essentially—the wonderful cast rises easily to meet her. When his sixth wife denies the dying Henry one last fling, he rumbles, "Such treason! To deny thy dying husband a final tussle of the flesh? When God alone knows what kind of [female genitalia] he shalt find in heaven! Hearken thus, slattern! Or thy shall au revoir to one's tête as did an ill-fated queen long before thou couched here."

Such pervasive indecency would grow thin without a human, emotional anchor. This is exactly what Weston provides in her turn as Mary. She is the nerd who discovers that even after she's bested the bully—in this case, by strapping him to a pole and torching him—she will always be greeted icily by those people whose acceptance she craves. Weston's sweet insecurity is the necessary counterweight to Bloody Mary's coarseness.

At bottom, this rampant solecism speaks to more than just a gleefully depraved imagination; it's clear and admirable evidence of Shukert's love for the language, even if that love is more fit for the brothel than the nunnery. Oscar Wilde offered that "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Perhaps, but as Bloody Mary shows, sometimes the gutter works just fine.

The Play's the Thing

Bethany Larsen's Maybe He's Just Not That Into You and Nick Moore and Susannah Pearse's Decisive highlight a group of six, 10-minute plays produced by the Milk Can Theater Company and collectively called The Hamlet Plays. Half of the short pieces are set in the modern day and are about actors talking about acting, while the other three present conversations among characters from the play. In Larsen's chick-lit toned piece, Ophelia laments the demise of her relationship with Hamlet to Ibsen's Nora and Oscar Wilde's Salome. Both women are headstrong and self-confident, and they console Ophelia as though they were the supporting cast on Sex and the City. Tongue placed firmly in cheek, Larsen writes self-conscious characters who know they are characters and who can talk about life after the final curtain call. Nora is collecting alimony from Torvald, and Salome is a hit at her belly-dancing class. These women are engaged in a purely fictional process of feminist-lite literary revision, remaking the story into "her-story." Thanks to Larsen's deft use of modern pop-psych dialogue, it's a fun process to watch.

Three members of the Post-Hamlet Support Group welcome Alex, a surfer dude with treacherous motives, in Decisive, a crowd-pleasing musical that plays the Prince of Denmark's tragic flaw for comic effect. Rachel (Jennifer Stackpole), Joe (Reza Jacobs), and Richard (Jared Dembowski) are actors who cannot cope with life after Hamlet. Each has acted the lead role (Rachel was in an all-female version of the play) and meet to reminisce about the good old days. When Alex arrives, they regard him snobbily but come around after he presses them to relive the moment they found out they were cast.

We soon learn that Alex hasn't actually played Hamlet but has been turned down for the parts that were offered to Joe and Rachel; his father was denied Richard's role in London in 1964. After his father's ghost visits him, Hamlet is famously indecisive. His inability to take action against his Uncle Claudius is fueled by his thoroughly modern self-obsession and soliloquizing introspection. And so Alex's decision to seek out and ultimately destroy these former competitors, which results from his decisive and direct nature, gets at why he probably wasn't right for the part in the first place.

Larsen, Moore, and Pearse make good theater because they mine the textual and thematic treasure chest of the Bard's best-loved play. They successfully communicate interesting stories in a short amount of time by giving us characters whose sense of self is either fueled by or in comical opposition to those selves we find in Shakespeare's text.

The Lamp's Lit attempts to show us scenes that Shakespeare didn't, and while adding to what most people regard as a pretty decent play is a bit presumptuous, it does manage to present a sympathetic portrait of the traitorous queen. Roya Shanks gives one of the show's best performances as Gertrude, pacing about the royal chamber, awaiting her son's return. TJ Morton is a disappointingly stiff Ghost who elicits his wife's help to kill Claudius; casting an actor who at least looks like a grave, wronged king might have helped.

Cheryl Davis's dialogue is at its best when Gertrude has to respond to both the Ghost and her impatient husband, Claudius, who wants her to come back to bed. The piece is ultimately not as finely conceived as Maybe or Decisive, but it does go out on an intellectually stimulating limb.

I found the other three pieces—The Player King Musical, Baloney, and The Match—boring and hardly worth mentioning. None of them offered characters worth caring about, which is saying a lot when their approximate run time is only 10 minutes each. The Player King Musical is a clichéd meet-and-mate, and Baloney is a poor attempt at philosophy, choked by obvious metaphors. Better actors could squeeze some value out of The Match, about longtime friends competing for the lead role as you know who, but as is, it's flatfooted and melodramatic.

None of the plays were made better by Michel Ostaszewki's distractingly colorful backdrop. The versatile scaffolding worked well and should have been paired with a simple black background that would have made the small space seem less cluttered.

At the end of the show, audiences were encouraged to vote for The Hamlet Plays in the Innovative Theater Awards's online balloting. In this case, it's too bad we can't select the show's individual plays for these Off-Off-Broadway awards. When the pieces are grouped together this way, the bad ones distract too much from the good.

Hey, Mr. D.J.

Whether you're at an East Williamsburg loft party in Brooklyn or a velvet-roped mega-club in Manhattan's Meatpacking district, the best D.J.s know how to gently coax a crowd into ever-giddier heights of abandon. D.J.s are to songs and lyrics what astute librarians are to books. Their art is one that rides—that surfs—on sensibility, mood, and intuition; they are the tone painters of a vibe's pure gestalt. A great D.J. seems to have a sixth sense to mix songs smoother than a good bartender mixes drinks. The best D.J.s can weave a tapestry of sounds whose narrative arc over the course of a night transcends its individual sonic threads; the worst D.J.s, on the other hand, make you long for the random-shuffle option on your iPod.

Playwright and director Mitchell Polin's new play, Mustard, proceeds in a self-described process of "remixing" classical dramatic source material. That is, Polin "samples" the characters, phrases, themes, and textures of traditional plays, then re-dubs them, scratches them, subjects them to feedback loops and distortions, blends one into another, and creates a multitrack text that includes wholly contemporary rhythms and beats.

As a character in his play states, "Our situation as artists is that we have all this work that was done before we came along. ... I would not present things from the past, but would approach them as materials available to something else ... a collage made from various plays."

The classical text he "samples" in Mustard is that old Ibsen warhorse The Dollhouse. The sample, in this case, is the famous climax in which Nora tragically realizes her independence and walks out on Torvald. Between suspended splices of actual Ibsen dialogue and oblique allusions, Polin orchestrates a multimedia pastiche of musical and meta-theatrical vignettes.

During many scenes, characters make glib philosophical comments on the (non-)action or build up expectations for what is about to happen. Yet even though several characters repeatedly declare that "everything you are about to see has already happened," the play never quite seems to begin.

Insouciant girls in miniskirts and oversized sunglasses lounge around provocatively as if in a glossy fashion magazine. Other girls lisp gibberish nature poems or spout metaphoric nonsense about aliens and galaxies while playing magic tricks with small flashlights. All of this feels like a prelude to some promised "big event" that never materializes.

The play's high points, however, come when a live indie rock band, Tungsten74, jams out everything from 70's pop tunes like My Sharona to eerie Radiohead-like electronica. Meanwhile, a video screen in back of the stage alternately displays abstract rhythmic patterns, time-delayed double exposures of the actors' movements, and an image of the cosmos as an eyedropper's universe of writhing amoebas.

Of the cast members, Michael Burke displays the most stage presence and panache as an androgynous, leather-clad, potty-mouthed cynic who trolls the city's alleyways for sex. Unfortunately, his tirades never go anywhere—they are sterilized, self-contained exhibits in a kind of theatrical test tube. His barely concealed threat to rape the audience is never believable because we've long ago realized the play lacks the bite of real action.

Mustard is quite "experimental" in many ways, yet, like most experiments, it advances a big theory but delivers a small failure. The problem with the play is that while its goal of "de-centering" a text is an interesting—even noble—cause, the piece does not provide an alternative form of coherence to that Aristotelian chestnut about having a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. At least for me, while individual lines or bits of action were enjoyable, the overall impression was murky and ill conceived.

To be fair, the press release warns, "Polin is a director who moved from happenings into theater." In fact, I wished the play retained more of the spirit of a rock concert and of happenings, instead of utilizing the standard, static theatrical division between audience and actors. If a stated goal of the play was to break down the boundaries between life and theater, the audience members needed to be a greater part of the action: they needed to stand up, rock out, move around, intermingle, break-dance, and crowd-surf. They needed to touch and be touched.

The play needed to have the spontaneity of a live D.J. mixing and scratching tracks, responding to its live audience, rousing the wallflowers to blossom. As it was, the audience members slumped in their chairs, politely watched, and timidly crept toward the door before the band finished its last song.

Blood, Love, and Rhetoric

Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's most enduring antiheroes, was famously obsessed with being, or not being—as well he might have been, given the way his world had been turned upside down. But in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard doesn't ask for our sympathy for the moping Prince of Denmark. The focus instead is on two of Hamlet's university friends, who are drawn into the strange events in Elsinore and perpetually bumbling around the edges of the drama, unsure as to what they are supposed to be doing and kept in the dark as dark currents swirl around them. In the Milk Can Theater Company's production of Stoppard's 1966 play, action is the name of the game. Whether it's the titular characters tossing coins (85 heads in a row) or the bawdy, dissolute troupe of tragedians comporting themselves around the scaffolding that serves as a set, the characters are a mass of restless energy. Director Julie Fei-Fan Balzer shows us a northern kingdom where almost everyone is frantically trying to outrun, outfight, outscrew, or outmaneuver his own fate.

The play presents us with two very sympathetic leads. Rosencrantz (Avery Clark) is boyish and playful but with a pensive, melancholy streak; he hides his heartbreak over the inevitability of time passing with games and action. Guildenstern (Walter Brandes) is wiry and warier, brooding over the twosome's situation and how they got into it.

But the show belongs to the troupe of Players, under the direction of their wry and lascivious pitchman, the Player. Accompanied by drumbeats and noisemakers and juggling and swaggering, these Players of the "blood, love, and rhetoric school" fill up the stage. Playing kazoos and wearing codpieces, they offer entertainments both over the top and under the covers, if you catch their drift. Encountering the two courtiers on the road to Elsinore and again within the castle—as well as on later voyages—the Players are a maelstrom propelling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on their way.

Played by Zack Calhoon, the Player is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead's beating heart—the lewd, earthy, and surprisingly wise voice of reason. He and his troupe of fallen tragedians know all the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune has to offer. They—and apparently only they—realize that in their world, they are all just following the path they were set on. As the Player says, "We are tragedians, you see? We follow directions. There is no choice involved. The bad end unhappily, the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means."

Also, and by no means should this be discounted, the Players do the most engaging and enjoyable re-creation of Hamlet's play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, that I have ever seen. Great use of kazoos.

The title of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead being what it is, the fates of the two hapless courtiers from Shakespeare's most famous tragedy should come as no surprise. But it's a testament to this production that when the third act begins to wane and it begins to dawn on the characters (and the audience) that death is how things will end for these two, the effect is heartbreaking.

Just as in Hamlet, Stoppard's play ends as Fortinbras enters to announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. But the playwright does pay his two hapless characters tribute: they are no longer lost in the carnage of a royal bloodbath, and the audience can shed a tear for two innocent souls who followed their paths to unhappy ends.

Dead Zone

Don't let the title fool you; Welcome Home Steve isn't about Steve at all. Craig McNulty's play is about Steve's friends, a motley group with not much in common. Having met in writing school, they've managed to keep in touch for a number of years after graduation, despite the dramatically different lives each has chosen. The play begins with the friends gathering in Sheila's apartment to welcome Steve back from an extended jaunt in Turkey. But when they go to rouse him from his sleep, they find him cold. Steve has overdosed on a tiny portion of the heroin from a six-figure drug deal he was putting together.

While such a premise brims with dramatic promise, McNulty uses his characters as mouthpieces for weak arguments about responsibility and ethics instead of letting the conflicts inherent in his material run a natural course. As a result, his characters seem one-dimensional, which detracts from the script's finer-crafted moments.

Sheila is an ultra-spiritual hippie type; she was also Steve's girlfriend when he was not globetrotting on his various misadventures. Peter is a stoner, not quite busy laboring on his stoner masterpiece while paying the bills working behind the register at a taco shop. Billy is a horror writer living hand-to-mouth, in stark contrast to his Wall Street girlfriend, Holly. John has given up his writing aspirations for an unfulfilling life as a grade-school teacher.

Like filmmaker Kevin Smith, McNulty builds much of his dialogue from arguments over geek-culture standards; the play opens on Peter trying (and failing) to convince Billy of the artistic merit of graphic novels. Instead of eliciting the kind of understated performances Smith gets from his actors in films like Clerks, director Guilherme "Guil" Parreiras gives his actors free rein with the script, resulting in quite a bit of overacting, particularly by Joseph Amato, who plays Peter. While Amato eventually does get some laughs, his wild gesticulations and inconsistent mock-ghetto accents betray an insecurity with the material.

Once Steve is found dead, the play shifts to a more serious tone, and the play begins to lose its credibility. For some reason, nobody even thinks about or discusses calling the police when his body is found. Rather, all the characters agree to let Sheila perform vague and repetitive spiritual rites over the body, which conveniently allows for different characters to be left alone with each other, creating contrived conflicts.

When Peter and Billy decide to sell the heroin, John tries to talk them out of it. But the trio seems to be more concerned with debating the questionable morality of providing drugs to junkies than the legal ramifications of such actions. This, too, feels more contrived than natural, especially because the play never addresses what actually happens to the drugs.

A big twist comes at the end when one character confesses to administering the deadly dose to Steve. This prompts John, who hears the confession, to (finally) call the police, admitting that he was the one who unwittingly killed his friend. It would be a nice twist, except it leaves one wondering: if the evidence of the crime could be so easily faked/destroyed, why not let the blame for Steve's death fall on Steve?

Ken Larson's scenic design stands out, lending the play some much-needed believability. The setting is the living room/kitchen of a Brooklyn apartment, and the stage looks every bit the part. From a toy basketball hoop on the wall to the lived-on couch, the set's distinctive touches give the actors a comfortable world to work in.

But while the production values are very good and the acting is professional, the script still needs work. Should McNulty find a way to color in his sketched characters and craft a more believable story arc, a subsequent rewrite might produce a fine play. As it is, though, Welcome Home Steve seems like a workshop production.

Darkness Falls

One fateful day, a 12-year-old girl left her Bronx apartment to buy a notebook at the store. When she found that she did not have enough money, her third-floor neighbor suggested that she call her mother from her apartment. Naïvely, the girl obliged, and soon found herself knocked out and tied to a bed in the boiler room of their building. Desi Moreno-Penson's terrifying play Devil Land, at Urban Stages, is a reimagining of this real-life incident with a supernatural twist. A green monster that the kidnapped girl, Destiny (Paula Ehrenberg), refers to as the Grinch watches over her from within the rusty yellow boiler, scratching at the metal whenever it appears her captors, Americo (Miguel Sierra) and Beatriz (playwright Desi Moreno-Penson), might harm her.

The stage is set to confine both the characters and audience in an uncomfortably small, inescapable space. The boiler room is dark and dreary, with boards covering the windows, a coiled chain in the corner, and a neatly made, flat gray cot. Before the play starts, we hear ominous music that foreshadows doom with every heavy note.

There is an underlying symbolism in everything that happens in Devil's Land, which can help ease the tension if you focus more on that than the reality of the situation. Destiny is more than just a pigtailed girl in peril; she has clairvoyant powers passed down to her from her Taíno ancestors. The Taínos were Indians who inhabitated the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, and their culture was nearly destroyed under Spanish colonization during the 16th century. Destiny embraces the spirituality that comes with being a member of the clan, never allowing her captors to erode her faith.

Her character represents the enslaved Taínos, who were like innocent children in their trusting of the world and others in it. In this respect, Americo and Beatriz personify those who tortured the Taínos in a violent attempt to change their beliefs. When Destiny asserts that her own spirit cannot be broken, Beatriz decides to kill what she can't convert. The climax involves an internal struggle on Americo's part to go along with this, while Beatriz spirals into a hysterical state, eagerly listing all the gruesome ways she would like to kill the little girl while she lies helplessly on the bed, drugged into a deep sleep.

The three characters who hold this piece together are terrific actors. Sierra has a great moment where he shifts from his realistic portrayal of a man beaten down by life into a fantastical character who moves and talks quite differently. Moreno-Penson is spine-chilling as a mentally unstable, maniacally religious woman capable of snapping at any given moment. And Ehrenberg, an adult actress, is fully convincing as a wide-eyed 12-year-old struggling to make sense of her horrific situation while maintaining a sense of mystery about whether her ability to converse with ghosts and the Grinch is real or a drug-induced delusion.

But at times Devil Land tends to go beyond scary and into the realm of the nightmarishly disturbing. It is hard to find comfort in the fact that a protective green monster is watching over Destiny when we see her chained to the bed, fighting off sexual advances from Americo and physically harmed by Beatriz in a violent scene that ends with a quick fade to black with the lingering sound of a child's terrorized scream.

However, for adults who enjoy a good hair-raising, spine-tingling tale, the technical elements of Devil Land are perfectly crafted, especially the flashes of yellow light and booming thunder that punctuate the story's most frightening moments seconds before we anticipate them happening. With its finely tuned acting, tightly plotted story, and shocking special effect in its final moments, Devil Land has all the ingredients for a petrifying thriller.

Shakespeare in a Bottle

Producing one of Shakespeare's comedies is no easy feat, but producing one well—on a limited budget no less—is an exponentially more difficult task. Yet that is exactly what Developing Arts has achieved with its presentation of Twelfth Night. Director Kelly Barrett does an excellent job of creating a coherent vision for this production—a crucial element in the success of any contemporary Shakespearean revival. The fantastical realm of Illyria, imagined here as the inside of a genie's bottle, is sumptuous with color and texture, and also alive with the bawdy humor that's too often glossed over in less astute productions. The company, directed by Barrett, does not take itself too seriously, sidestepping an all-too-common pitfall in presenting work by the Bard.

For the most part, the cast is terrific at playing the emotions in the verse, ensuring that audience members less familiar with the text will not only be able to follow the device-ridden plot but can enjoy it as well. Rebecca Nyahay charms as the lovelorn Viola, who disguises herself as a man, Cesario, in order to serve the object of her affection, Duke Orsino—played by a sincere if too youthful Mark Kinch. Nyahay radiates girlish excitement, breathing life into verse that's crucial to the exposition. Alternating between a natural femininity and her stylized mannerisms when in character as Cesario, she highlights the comedy inherent in the woman-in-disguise plot device.

Sri Gordon is beguiling as the haughty-turned-lusty Olivia, who spurns Orsino's romantic advances, becoming enamored instead with his messenger, Cesario (Viola in disguise), and, later, with Viola's brother, Sebastian—the endearingly earnest Nick Giello.

If Illyria is a genie's bottle, then Kristin Carter, as Feste, Olivia's clown, casts the spell. Barrett switches Feste's traditional gender and has her costumed as a genie, but she astutely directs Carter by accentuating the wisdom characteristic of a Shakespearean fool. Carter is at once shrewd, flirtatious, and innocently playful. Music features prominently in this comedy, and Carter—who provided the arrangements for her own numbers—is a treat to listen to.

As Sir Toby Belch, Olivia's inebriated, scheming uncle, Bob Manus plays a buffoon extraordinarily well, and Andrew D. Montgomery is a delight as the rich and foppish Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Sir Toby's friend, drinking companion, and witless trickery victim. Though the two are thoroughly enjoyable to watch, the dynamic between the characters would be better presented if Sir Toby's craftiness received slightly more emphasis, and if Sir Andrew was portrayed as a bit more self-important rather than utterly likable.

Wende O'Reilly is vivacious as Olivia's woman Maria, the mischievous mastermind of the plot to trick the steward Malvolio, played with appropriate, masterful pompousness by Hunter Tremayne. Gretchen Howe, as Olivia's servant Fabian, injects liveliness into scenes even with limited dialogue, and does a great job of delivering the explanatory monologue typical of concluding scenes in Shakespeare's comedies. Henri Douvry admirably and effectively performs double duty as a priest and as the sea captain who accompanies Viola.

Barrett's decision to cast two other roles irrespective of traditional gender may prove a slight distraction to those familiar with the play, but it's not enough to upset the magical world she and the cast have fashioned. Antonio, Sebastian's friend, is reimagined here as Antonia and portrayed with an elegance and deft command of language by Valerie Austin, although the recasting may call to mind a romantic intention not present in the text. Taniya Sen and Chris Gilmer fulfill the various supporting roles demanded by Shakespeare with quiet dignity, despite having Sen, a woman, portray Valentine, traditionally one of the gentlemen serving the Duke.

Barrett's genie's bottle concept is an apt choice in the confined space, and set designer Dave Smith economically brings the idea to life. He conjures exotic Middle Eastern locales, with jewel-toned fabrics used to cover the few set pieces, and an impromptu rug consisting of swatches of various textured fabrics. Costume designer Gemma Le contributes to the effect, utilizing rich color and a few well-chosen details (such as tasseled belts) to give the impression of decadence on a limited budget. Though the venue cannot claim versatility in lighting effects, a few small glass chandeliers add detail. The fights are well choreographed by Matt Klan, though at this particular performance it seemed the cast was still becoming comfortable with the production's physical demands.

Despite the aforementioned minor distractions and the limitations of the space, this clever reimagining of one of Shakespeare's most oft-performed comedies works well. Audiences expecting an evening of laughter will not be disappointed.

Searching for Sanctuary

When a play opens on Broadway, it is judged by critics and audiences within its specific cultural moment; reviews can either buttress or deflate a production, but the work's lasting impact is more difficult to predict or measure. As years pass, a playwright's words can become more or less profound, and a play's longevity is often dependent on its reception by regional audiences, as well as the creative ingenuity of the theater companies that choose to rescue it from obscurity. When esteemed playwright Lanford Wilson's play Angels Fall opened on Broadway in 1982, New York Times critic Frank Rich was quick to point out its "ailments." Although Wilson had won the Pulitzer in 1980 for Talley's Folly, his latest effort played a scant 57 performances.

Some 25 years later, Theater Forum has revived Angels Fall in a compelling, intimate production, staging Wilson's play—a study of six individuals stranded in a mission church in New Mexico—where it might have worked best all along: in a church's sanctuary.

Set designer Andrew Seltz has cordoned off a section of the cavernous Church of All Nations to create this intimate sanctuary, where the audience surrounds the playing space on three sides. The tiny mission contains six pews, and the actors, directed with sensitivity by the capable Russell Taylor, move fluidly within the snug space.

The six arrive at the church for various reasons, but they are all detained when the roads are closed due to complications loosely ascribed to a mine explosion with potential nuclear fallout. Wilson has been called an American Chekhov, and Angels Falls is definitely an in-depth Chekhovian character study. In a relatively static environment, there is little overtly physical action but plenty of emotional conflict as the characters interact with one another to locate the sources of sanctuary in their lives beyond the mission. Wilson's script constructs a poetic, almost timeless dramatic landscape.

He populates this landscape with flawed, lovably human characters stricken with a variety of crises, and the well-cast performers turn in fine performances all around. Niles Harris (Jeff Farber), a middle-aged art history professor, has recently abandoned teaching after losing faith in the merits of academic knowledge. He is accompanied by his wife, Vita (Kathryn Barnhardt), his one-time student and now caretaker, who is traveling with him on a trip to Phoenix for mental treatment and rejuvenation. In two exceptional performances, Farber handles Niles's fits of histrionics with humor and ease, while Barnhardt gives a refreshingly layered performance as a young wife determined to stay cheerful even in the face of her husband's explosions.

The warm and compassionate Marion Clay (June Flanagan), although still visibly upset by the recent death of her artist husband, stops in with her young lover, Zappy Zappala (Frankie Ferrara), a haughty professional tennis player, on their way to his next big tournament. Ferrara offers a well-nuanced take on the high-strung, hypochondriac Zappy, while Flanagan brings a warmly compassionate—although sometimes uncomfortably maternal—quality to Marion. Her relationship with Zappy does not immediately come across as a romantic one.

The bright young Navajo doctor Don Tabaha (Andrew Reaves) is torn between staying in New Mexico to minister to the Indian tribes who need his services or taking a high-profile research job, the work to which he feels more suited. The mission's energetic priest, Father Doherty (Tim Moore), makes no secret of his opinion on the matter, goading Don with guilt and even hiding his keys to defer his departure. Reaves is appropriately intense as the conflicted Don, and Moore's Father Doherty is impishly jovial as he mischievously hurls rocks at the low-flying helicopters.

When the helicopters finally announce that the roads are clear, Father Doherty shouts back, "You've given us all our monthly dose of fear, now fly back to White Sands and gloat. Shame. Shame! Don't they love to scare us to death. Don't we love them to do it. Can't you feel the tingling? Isn't fear exciting?"

In our post-9/11 age, the idea of sanctuary perhaps has more immediacy than it did in the early 1980s. And although the characters leave the mission irrefutably changed, to conclude that their problems have been solved would detract from Wilson's eloquent script. Instead, they—and we—have had a moment of communion, in a setting complete with altar and votive candles. This intersection of lives is certainly a theatrical convention, but it's also one of the minor miracles of devastating circumstances. And in this sense, Theater Forum gives us a thoughtful reinvention of Angels Fall, a play whose meaning has become even more potent in our particular cultural moment.

School Daze

A lot is asked of children's entertainment: it must be fun, educational, and clean, and cater to short attention spans. Young people make for tough crowds; they haven't yet mastered the art of feigning interest and will make it known if they're not enjoying themselves. And in New York, those who produce theater for children must contend with not only hard-to-please tykes but also their hyper-involved parents, who scrutinize everything before it's seen or heard by their little ones. The New Acting Company has recently started a monthlong run of Sideways Stories From Wayside School, a play adapted by John Olive from Louis Sachar's beloved stories. Featuring an architecturally questionable school building teeming with strange teachers and quirky kids, these tales make classrooms seem more friendly than usual while slyly teaching social behavior and Morality 101. In the hands of director Stephen Michael Rondel, Sachar's stories have been brought vividly to life in a colorful, engaging production.

The play opens on the class on the 30th floor. Most of the students have been turned into apples by their wicked teacher, Mrs. Gorf; class nerd Myron and best artist BeBe seem to be about to receive the same fate. Through a bit of resourcefulness, they turn their teacher into an apple instead, and the enchantment is broken on their classmates Dameon (who smiles all the time), Rondi (who's a bit of a bully), and LesLie (who is treated like one girl but is played by two girls in identical dress). The students are soon joined by a new teacher, Mrs. Jewls, who is kind, funny, pretty, and smart—the perfect teacher, in their minds. The rest of the show follows their class adventures, dealing with other teachers and their own personal challenges.

The biggest stars of this production are the set and costume designers. Gregg Bellon has created a marvelously loopy classroom by mixing forced perspective, a raked stage (slanting downstage), and bits of traditional classroom pieces (combination desk/chairs and a wide blackboard). Despite an overload of hues and props (books on desks, papers on bulletin boards), the use of perspective directs the audience's eyes up center toward the action. Bellon also employs an oversized puppet mouth above and to the right of the stage for announcements by the school principal, Mr. Kidswater; it's a cute device that makes a normally static voice-over entertaining.

Irina Kruzhilina's costumes combine swatches of brightly patterned material to create an entirely new sartorial language. Her pieces are a mash-up of rural Sunday best, bolts found in the sale bin at a fabric store, and Seussian architecture. It's a credit to Kruzhilina's talents that one can see a pattern (ha-ha) in her designs, when the characters could have been less creatively dressed in old clothes that had a few sequins here or an extra leg sewn on there.

The mostly young cast seemed to be having a good time, and their enthusiasm was matched by the adults playing their teachers and school counselors. Best of the bunch were Maxine Dannatt, as BeBe, and Carrie Heitman, as Mrs. Jewls. Though Dannatt was the youngest in the group, she conveyed the most charm and got the biggest laughs as feisty, "school's fastest drawer" BeBe. Heitman, saddled with the challenge of playing "the perfect teacher," was able to create a very warm, real person; the public school system would be only too lucky to recruit an instructor like this.

Reasonably swift blackouts between scenes and composer Andy Cohen's fun incidental music and sound cues helped move the show along. Rondel's directing kept the events light and fun without being cutesy, and brought fine performances out of his cast. In adapting the books, Olive wisely cut down the classroom size from 30 students to six, and included fun vignettes that also propelled several story threads.

Theater can be a great teaching tool; kids can see real people their own age going through similar challenges and learn how to handle them by example. But Sideways Stories is more than a lesson on good behavior for children. It is also a lesson on how children's theater can be clever without being dull, and amusing without being dumb.

Silence Is Golden

In a time when you can download movies to your cell phone, a retreat into the world of silent film is refreshing. Take Love Is in the Air, the Pig Brooch theater company's quirky staging of a silent movie at the 14th Street Y Theater. An energetic cast of 10 (supported by an orchestra of four) plays out a simple tale of love gone awry against the backdrop of 1920's society. Dustin Helmer plays Hapless Henry, an earnest tramp whose libido follows the elegant and snobbish Aimee LaBlatte (Anna Moore) while his heart should belong to the shy and warm Plain Jane. In the style of Buster Keaton, Harry dashes about the stage in his bowler, avoiding the malevolence of Boffo Mysterioso and Aimee's dapper boyfriend Valentino.

The cause for the hullabaloo is an upcoming New Year's Eve dance, to which Henry hopes to take Aimee. Plain Jane has fallen for Henry in a typically zany love triangle. As Jane, Jennie Smith is sweet in her brown dress and pigeon-toed shoes. The tall and dark Seth Powers has an attractive brooding quality (something like Sawyer on TV's Lost) as Boffo Mysterioso; he brokers a Faustian bargain with Henry, who will go to any length to gain Aimee's affection. And, of course, we know what happens when you sell your soul to the devil.

With a round face and puppy-dog eyes, Helmer wins over your heart as the show's underdog. Petite and blond Anna Moore aptly plays spoiled socialite Aimee, with the best costumes of the bunch: a yellow silk flapper dress for the day, followed by a red beaded number for the New Year's dance.

Overall, the cast is adept and quick, and the high quality of the work begs for equally high production values somewhere Off-Broadway. Helmer created the ambitious piece, and he's well cast as the star in his own show. This production also boasts a fantastic properties manager, who goes unnamed. Giant restaurant menus and baseball-sized diamond rings are some of the creative props employed.

Scene changes are handled by a quartet of clowns billed as Slow Joe, Sleepy Sue, Saucy Seppy, and Stage Manager. The bits are at times entertaining; at other times, tedious. Genevieve Gearhart as Sleepy Sue makes the most of her small role, milking her stage time as best she can.

While the play is almost entirely silent, a ragtime underscore led by pianist Laura Blau keeps the audience's ears perked up. The cast and musicians are all well clad in Prohibition-era attire by Amelia Dombrowski.

Under Paul Peers's direction, the show is both charming and concise, clocking in at under an hour. The concept is muddied, though, by the theater company within a theater company gag. The real Pig Brooch company has concocted the Kiek in de Kök Players, who are the actors, clowns, and musicians from Estonia who decided to make this silent film into a stage play. (Why Estonia? That's never revealed.)

Still, it is interesting to see one genre transformed into another, namely silent film into a stage play. The show doesn't gel entirely, but with lines from the script projected onto the black backdrop and the actors' Chaplin-like pratfalls, Love Is in the Air remains endearing.

Dirty Work

The wounded characters in Elizabeth Meriwether's finely crafted The Mistakes Madeline Made reveal themselves to each other and to us via startling emotional juxtapositions; quietly disquieting confessions of pathos and loss are scattered among their oddball interactions. Every element of this production—from the actors' empathetic performances to Evan Cabnet's nuanced, physical direction and Lauren Halpern's wonderfully realized set—coheres into a successful whole. Edna (Laura Heisler), a recent college graduate reeling internally from the loss of her older brother, has just landed the worst job imaginable: she is the assistant to an anal, preternaturally cheerful office manager named Beth (Colleen Werthmann). The office that Beth oversees—a space that approaches a Martha Stewart-level of organization and polish—exists solely to handle the affairs of an über-rich family whom we never meet, but whose specter of uptight, forced WASPish happiness haunts every moment of the play. Madeline opens as Beth assigns Edna the thrilling task of finding George, one of the family's sons, a second pair of New Balance sneakers because he enjoys wearing the pair he already owns so much.

Werthmann—flexing some of the same muscles she developed as the naïvely pleasant mother of the reincarnated title character in Christopher Durang's Mrs. Witherspoon last winter—has a masterful sense of comic timing. Her Beth is a personality we recognize instantly, perhaps from a childhood ballet class or a community service bake sale, a person so intent on happiness at all costs that we watch and wait for her veneer to crack under pressure.

Wilson (Ian Brennan), meanwhile, is the only office assistant under Beth's command who enjoys a small amount of autonomy. A socially awkward graduate student whose dissertation is in a permanent state of incompletion, he communicates in fits and starts, words rushing from his mouth and then jerking to a halt, like the linguistic equivalent of a turbocharged car constantly forced to stop at red lights. He has so much to say, and we see him finally finding someone to say it all to. Brennan accentuates Wilson's speech with singularly impressive sounds—sounds that imitate the copy machine and that represent his emotional responses to situations ("dong!" means something like happiness)—so that his talking becomes a whimsically unique cacophony.

Soon Edna begins to steal Handi Wipes from the new shipment that has just arrived and enlists Wilson to hide them around the office; their scheming escalates into "The Handi Wipe Caper," an act of sabotage that knocks Beth and her controlled environment off-kilter just long enough to allow a dramatically redemptive moment for all three of them.

We have come to recognize this kind of small-minded, corporate banality before, as in the comic strip Dilbert and the TV series The Office. It exists here not for its own comedic sake—though the writing and performances are all strong enough that it could—but as a counterbalance to the emotional detritus that Edna can no longer mask.

Heisler offers a commandingly downtrodden performance that not only holds its own against Brennan's emotional exuberance but also presents her character's depression as something that is at once childishly antagonistic and spiritually desolate. In a particularly haunting exchange, Edna meets up with yet another date (Brian Henderson hams it up as three iterations of the same would-be writer—Drake, Jake, and Blake—that Edna pursues) and admits, "You remind me of my dead brother. I'm trying to [expletive] him back to life."

As Beth fights to keep the office clean and tidy, Edna fights, equally hard, to pollute it with her bodily stench and her rebellious nature. Unable to stop reliving the week that she and her brother Buddy (Thomas Sadoski nicely portrays the war reporter as slovenly, erratic, and shell shocked) spent together after he returned from Iraq, she succumbs to his ablutophobia (fear of bathing) and confronts people with the force of her stench.

Halpern externalizes this relationship by placing a white ceramic bathtub for Buddy to lounge in center stage; only Edna can see the tub, a kind of gleaming sarcophagus, and the human remains it holds. Though we sense that Edna is not doomed, her inability to bathe is as much a response to Buddy's death as it is a protest against the entrapments of her office environment.

Last December, an issue of New York magazine identified 27 bright young things who might "justly be famous by the year 2010." With offerings like The Mistakes Madeline Made, Elizabeth Meriwether, who was listed among the 27, is well on her way.