Love Is a Crime

Emily Young's The Calamity of Kat Kat and Willie just premiered at the West Side's Medicine Show Theater as part of a repertory double bill with The Insomnia Play, penned by another promising young playwright, Jessica Brickman. Consider that a bonus, though: Calamity alone is worth the price of admission. The show falls under a familiar category, that of the one-last-heist premise. Kat Kat (Miriam Silverman), an English expatriate, returns to her old paramour, Willie (Jeremy Bobb), to score another gig. (The caper itself is never fully explained.) The problem is that she finds Willie's edges have both hardened and softened since she last left him. He has gone straight and now works for "the Man" and is immune to Kat Kat's wily advances. Or, at least, he takes a little bit more coercing than he did before. Kat Kat finds she can still get to Willie, but it will take more work than it used to.

But the heist is truly irrelevant to Calamity, which focuses on the love-hate dynamic of its title characters. Heath Cullens directs this study of a relationship as though under a microscope. Both leads grow increasingly more volatile over the course of the play (a compact 90 minutes, smartly delivered in one act). But are Kat Kat's and Willie's destructive tendencies more sadistic or masochistic? Who do they really hurt more—each other or themselves?

Other characters enter their world but never really penetrate it; both Kat Kat and Willie are bottom dwellers whose bubble has already burst. They have come to accept their status as ne'er-do-wells with little chance to better their lot in life. Mostly, of course, because they do not really want to.

Take, for example, Jonesey (Joe Petrilla), a transient whom a wayward Kat Kat takes in toward the play's second half. Petrilla does smart work here: he plays Jonesey as a predator who never even realizes he has become the prey. He emits equal parts street savvy and youthful naïveté. Silverman embodies a similar duality for the duration of the show. Like a moth to a flame, Kat Kat is a character inexplicably drawn to trouble, regardless of the price she might end up paying for it. To her credit, Silverman makes Kat Kat both appalling and sympathetic.

Bobb is likewise adept at playing a conflicted character. In his case, the reformed Willie gradually falls under Kat Kat's spell, and he loses himself to the inner thug he once thought was a thing of the past. Bobb has to channel a lot of rage, but he does so in a focused way. (Both he and Silverman are to be commended for the way they handle the several violent sexual encounters Young calls for them to play.) Additionally, I never found out whether any of the actors in Calamity were truly British or American; so convincing were their accents that I want the mystery to remain shrouded.

Calamity features one additional actor, Erik Liberman, who plays various expatriates attending the same meetings for expats that Kat Kat goes to. Liberman gets several big "numbers," if you will, scenes of performance art in which he appears as a beatnik. In one scene, Liberman even portrays an elderly woman. It is a great showcase for a clearly promising talent, but I am not so sure it is necessary in Cullens's already rich production. The strange ballad of Kat Kat and Willie is drama enough.

Music as Museum Piece

At the turn of the last century, Erik Satie utilized film segments, wrote absurdly specific performance instructions, used pistols and typewriters as instruments, and wrote egregious repetitions in his surreal musical compositions. Later, other composers like Mauricio Kagel and La Monte Young, whose Composition 1960 included a note to release a butterfly into the room, followed in Satie's footsteps. John Moran's new experimental opera, Zenith 5, now playing at Galapagos Art Space, is very much in the tradition of Satie. Moran treats the theatrical environment as a kind of sculpture garden of sounds. Each actor has a limited repertoire of gestures, like animatronic creatures in a haunted house.

An impresario (Katherine Brook) greets us, announcing in a delighted stage whisper, "There's a mouse in the house," falls down and scrapes her shin, and picks up a phone that beeps off the hook. An American Indian chief (Joseph Keckler) acts like a windup toy and chugs his arms as if he were a train, wades through water, and declares in a plaintive whine, "Hey, I'm Ray Charles." A granny (Erin Markey) snores in a rocking chair, awakens startled, and cackles. Two statues in lotus position (Mina Nishimura and Po Lin Tso) come alive to stampede as banshees, then shatter and collapse.

After the initial novelty of these random acts wears off, we sigh and realize there's no narrative. In place of a story, Moran presents us with an intricate, pointillistic collage of sounds and gestures. We must follow the stripped-down logic of a musical composition as it questions the very definition of music.

Instead of discrete notes, Moran has arranged elaborate sound cues in layered feedback loops. Instead of instruments, he "plays" on the sound board.

Whereas in traditional musical compositions it's not the notes themselves that hold our interest but the way in which they're combined, Moran's sound cues themselves are not that important, consisting of, for example, war whoops, bird chirps, warning dings at a railroad crossing, ticking clocks, chime sounds, and voices counting numbers.

What is important, though, is how these sounds recombine in new relationships as the work unfolds. The organization of such motifs produces rhythms, syncopation, and counterpoint. Moran explores the way that the gestures and sounds can harmonize or create dissonance with each other over time.

As with much theoretical music, however, the piece becomes more interesting as theory and less as music the longer one watches and listens. Both in a program note and in his informal introduction, Moran invites the audience to chat, order a beer, and even wander out of the room. One suspects he intended the piece as ironic Muzak, that ubiquitous, easy-listening programming designed to enhance consumer behavior and worker productivity in corporate spaces.

In many ways, Moran's highly programmed background noise is the opposite of John Cage's Zen-inspired compositions, such as his infamously silent 4' 33'', that challenge their audiences to listen closely to the ambient music of the environment itself. Moran, on the other hand, asks that we tune out occasionally and allow our attention to drift.

Both composers, however, examine not just the inner structure of music but the phenomenology of how we perceive it as well. How we listen, whether focused or bored, can be as important as what we're listening to.

Despite Moran's requests, everyone in the audience sat reverently still while watching and listening during the performance, which lasted a little over an hour. Moran might have had more success provoking his audience to ignore or interact with the performance if he had used Galapagos's front stage, which opens out to the bar, instead of the enclosed backroom, which one is charged $12 to enter.

Another possibility to elicit a freer environment would be to stage the piece at a museum space such as P.S. 1. Unlike theater and music audiences, who often feel they're entrapped (if by nothing other than the price of admission), museum-goers amble through an exhibit devoting a casual glance or an absorbed gaze as their interest dictates before blithely moving on. For example, could anyone be expected to sit through Douglas Gordon's entire 24 Hour Psycho (now at the Museum of Modern Art), which slows down the frames of Hitchcock's film until it takes a day to watch?

In fact, in 1902 Satie invented what he called "furniture music": background music that was meant to seem as peripheral and unexceptional as faded wallpaper. When Satie and his colleagues first performed it in a gallery, however, the patrons fell silent and listened attentively despite Satie's own protests.

Is it any wonder that Moran's work suffers a similar fate, unable to shake off our polite communal gestures of reverence for music as theater? After all, it was another opera composer, Richard Wagner, who insisted that theater audiences should be absolutely quiet during a performance.

I Can't Sleep, Babe

Jessica Brickman's The Insomnia Play has a ring of familiarity to it. Its premise doesn't stretch too far: try as she might, Georgina (Julie Lake) cannot fall asleep. The more she tries, the worse she fails. Insomnia is pretty basic, and while it never exactly knocks on originality's door, it is far from one-note. Performed in repertory with the Babel Theater Project's other show, The Calamity of Kat Kat and Willie, Insomnia runs deeper than one might initially imagine.

Geordie Broadwater, who directs the show, infuses the production with a lingering sense of anxiety. Something lurks in Georgia's subconscious, and that is what keeps her awake during the one night that makes up the action of the show. This dread never abandons the production, despite much levity. Georgina's problem appears fairly normal and quotidian at first; she packs, she performs some exercises, she smokes.

Then, funnier things happen. As her boyfriend George (Ben Vershbow) writhes and moans in his sleep, she shoots him. However, he isn't dead; his noises merely subside to snoring. Stranger still, the Sandman (Drew Battles) enters the action, guiding a sheep named Doris (Diana Buirski). This is when Insomnia enters new, oddball territory, getting more absurd yet always following its own sort of logic. The Sandman constantly makes advances toward Georgina, who turns him down, while Doris constantly flirts with him. George also manifests himself as various figments of Georgina's delusions (or is he?), including Zorro, portraying various warriors fighting for Georgina's affection.

It is precisely that affection that plagues Georgina. These two seem to have found themselves in a rut; they have reached that plateau where infatuation has faded to routine, and Georgina doesn't quite know what to do about it. Lake does a magnificent job showing the effect this ambivalence has on her psyche. Georgina longs for more excitement (represented by the Sandman), but also wants to hold on to the security represented by someone like George.

Insomnia explores the cyclical nature of Georgina's predicament. Every time George rescues her in a fantasy, she doesn't feel safe; she feels too complacent and, almost against her better judgment, starts to fight with him. However, after a while the play wears a little thin. Within a half-hour, we understand the psychology Brickman has laid out for her protagonist; the rest just feels redundant.

What does save Insomnia is its humor. Doris and the Sandman go a long way toward buttressing this production. Far from a normal sheep, Buirski's Doris chews on the padded walls of Emily Carmichael's set (which make the whole bedroom seem like a cell) and even smokes. And Battles is quite wicked as the Sandman. It is a great example of scenery chewing.

Buirski also appears as Vana, Georgina's late mother, who speaks to Georgina as her own id. She tells Georgina all the things Georgina knows to be true about herself, and they are harsh truths. But is Georgina imagining her mother as she tries to get to sleep, or is it a dream?

Brickman and Broadwater keep the audience members on edge, reeling them in without giving too much information, until the end, about what is happening to Georgina. She seems to be at some sort of crossroads, but is it in her mind or in the bedroom? As a result, this play works on two levels: a basic, linear plot level, and a more psychological one. What is eating Georgina? I would never tell. But Insomnia gives plenty of food for thought.

Peeling Off Layers

Why are so many female characters prostitutes? Because behind the salacious subject matter in these characters' lives lies a world of complicated emotions arising from their basic degradation. So, too, is this true of stripper characters. Jennifer Slack-Eaton chronicles some of the lower depths in the life of an exotic dancer in her play Men Eat Mars Bars While Touching Their Penis, directed by Jared Culverhouse of Working Man's Clothes Productions. As is to be expected from Working Man's Clothes, a company with a legacy of edgy, challenging productions full of depth, Mars Bars has plenty to say. The focus is on Ginger (a world-weary Darcie Champagne, perfect in the role), who delivers about a dozen monologues in front of her fellow dancers: Chanel (Victoria Cengia), Roxie (Anne Dyas), Sadie (Amanda Hamilton), and Karma (Katryn Kinser). Together, they recreate some of their worst encounters and most demanding customers.

Truth to tell, none of these vignettes are too revelatory: we've seen and heard a lot about how disgusting this world can be, in various works of film and theater. But what may not be fresh about Mars Bars remains remarkably full, and the synergy of Culverhouse, Slack-Eaton, and, most especially, Champagne creates one harrowing vignette after another. Ginger and company relive their tryouts, their first times dancing, and the customers who lied to them or had particularly quirky fetishes. It is an impressive hat trick. Without ever seeing any of these male characters, the audience has no trouble picturing every last one of them.

Sometimes, though, other cast members portray these males, even if it's just a one-liner, and the supporting actresses' work provides a great deal of dimension as well as humor, particularly from Hamilton. I was also struck by Dyas, who demonstrated a well-defined grasp of nuance in her myriad small parts. With luck, Working Man's Clothes will have a larger role for her in its next production.

Champagne is unafraid to bare all—certainly a lot physically, but even more emotionally, stripping off layer upon layer as Slack-Eaton's scenes get progressively more dramatic and visceral. One of her best moments comes when Champagne wonders aloud what her father thinks of her and her career choice. A more predictable moment comes when Champagne questions whether she really is a whore, a word frequently bandied about here. This is a fairly predictable choice, seemingly almost requisite on Slack-Eaton's part, given the subject matter. But Champagne brings real pathos to her line delivery.

Mars Bars gets a lot of mileage out of its location: Under St. Marks, a small, intimate underground theater in the heart of the East Village, is a perfect choice of venue. It's small enough to seem as though a strip show could actually take place there, and with no escape (in fact, before the show starts, Ginger's stripper cohorts cavort among the audience). Culverhouse really does implicate the audience's members as though they were actual customers, which adds a lot to the show's atmosphere.

Working Man's Clothes has featured an eclectic array of shows in its seasons, with one uniting concept: it shows the less glamorous paths people sometimes travel in life and is unafraid to explore the consequences of these decisions. Mars may be part of the title, but this show and its characters are firmly grounded on planet Earth.

Queens at War

In most accounts, Elizabeth I, as both a historical and a literary personage, is depicted as a decisive, levelheaded leader with a regal bearing—and a nearly mythic chastity. If anything, she sometimes comes off as a bit cold and calculating. Whether in plays from her own day, such as John Lyly's Endymion or Edmund Spencer's epic poem The Fairie Queen, or in movies such as Elizabeth or Shakespeare in Love in our time, she appears as the much-courted virgin monarch, inviolable in her reason and her body alike. That makes Friedrich Schiller's portrayal of Elizabeth as a weak-willed, hysterical, and indecisive woman in his 1801 play, Mary Stuart, now being performed for free in Battery City Park by the New York Classical Theater, an interesting dissenting viewpoint.

Schiller presents Elizabeth, a Protestant, in her conflict with Mary Stuart, the Catholic queen of Scotland, who also claimed divine right and royal lineage to the throne of England. Elizabeth must decide whether to execute her cousin and main rival or set her free, choices that are both fraught with dangers.

If Elizabeth (Patricia Marie Kelley) chooses to execute Mary (Kim Stauffer), who is imprisoned while awaiting her trial for murdering her husband, then she may incur the enmity of Catholic sympathizers, including the powerful French and Spanish.

If she does not, she risks having a rival usurp her position with a deadly plot. The treasonous implications become complicated by a double-dealing courtier (Bryant Mason as the Earl of Leicester), a hotheaded young knight looking to be a hero (James Knight as Mortimer), and a councilor (Don Mayo as Burleigh) who values what's best for the country even when his means of getting it are unscrupulous.

Mary appears as a tragic, nearly saintly figure more concerned with an abstract justice than political expediency, in contrast with Elizabeth, the fickle, headstrong matriarch who wants to have things both ways. Elizabeth's vacillations ultimately prove victorious, but leave her isolated, exiled in her own kingdom.

Kelley's Elizabeth has an appropriately icy edge for this play, but she nonetheless lets us warm to her unsympathetic, worldly character through glimpses of her humor and humanity. Stauffer's Mary, on the other hand, appears sympathetic at first but grows more self-righteous and not-of-this-world as the play goes on. Her religious passion, though, saves her from seeming merely priggish and colors her as a kind of flawed martyr.

Mayo's Burleigh evinces a flippant, haughty spunk that risks stealing the show. Michael Marion, playing Mary's prison warden Paulet, gives a notable and convincing portrayal of a pillar of solid good sense and moral rectitude.

While the production has no set per se, the entire audience must pick up its blankets and move for each scene to a new location in the park. This didn't seem to bother anyone as much as it might sound: chasing the actors around the park made the play more spontaneous and engaging than a traditional interpretation of a tragic period drama would be otherwise.

Director Stephen Burdman chose some beautiful panoramic backdrops, such as a spacious plaza symbolically looking out on the ocean at the Statue of Liberty, flanked by rows of monumental pillars, for the scene in which Elizabeth confronts Mary in person and Mary declares she is Elizabeth's sovereign. Prison scenes are set inside Castle Clinton, while other scenes take advantage of Battery Park's pleasant, tree-filled landscapes.

The play's gloomy political vexations are made much more palatable by the summer weather and scenic views, though the low groan of passing ferry boats or the chucking sounds of an industrial lawn mower going by may cause mild distractions. Nonetheless, the refreshing sea breeze blowing off the ocean and the gaggle of colorful, curious tourists in the background temper the play's pessimistic historical intrigue.

Revolutionary Repartee

With a double bill of military-related dramas (Macbeth and Mother Courage) for this season's Shakespeare in the Park and a remounting of David Hare's provocative riff on the Iraq war, Stuff Happens, scheduled for Sept. 5, the Public Theater is wearing its apprehensions about war quite visibly on its sleeve. It should come as no surprise, then, that its latest production, School of the Americas, a co-production with the LAByrinth Theater Company, continues to mine wartime subject matter. Here, however, the result is less than charged in a disappointingly dry and gratingly didactic production. A rough account of revolutionary Che Guevera's imprisonment in Bolivia in late 1967, School of the Americas is part fiction, part truth. The truth: Che was visited by an idealistic young schoolteacher days before he was brutally shot to death. The fiction: He began to trust this teacher, Julia Cortes, and shared some of his philosophy with her while imprisoned in her schoolhouse, the Bolivian army's makeshift prison.

José Rivera, who earned a name (and an Academy Award nomination) for himself with his film The Motorcycle Diaries, another Guevera-based project, is keen to develop the relationship between Che and Julia as a sort of passing of the torch, a transference of rhetoric from wizened leader to discontented upstart. Julia's school services only a few children, those excused from work or family duties and briefly spared their parents' skepticism toward education. A single woman living with her sickly sister, Julia is devoted to her work, but she still can't help but wonder: Why educate these impoverished children so they can understand how much they lack?

As Che's communist propaganda ricochets through the small, worn schoolroom, Julia challenges his violent methods and his choice to place his ideals over the needs of his family. Unfortunately, these tightly constructed (and constricted, given the limited space of the schoolroom) debates never build to a very sophisticated or satisfying intensity, and they chug along in bouts of rather flat-footed, overly simplistic dialogue. Rivera gives us a wealth of surface facts and historical information, but one never gets the sense that these conversations have enough fire to ignite an inner revolution in either of these characters.

This overabundance of encyclopedic detail also curtails the specific development of character and motivation. It's never fully clear, for example, why Julia elects to visit Che in the first place—clearly, it's more than a need to nourish him with chicken soup. But a later quasi-romantic subplot is abrupt to the point of being awkward, lacking the proper exposition.

And Che, horribly injured and on the brink of death, seems all too relaxed and almost casual in his posture. It doesn't help that the otherwise mellifluous John Ortiz delivers the dying Che's lines with almost Shakespearean clarity and dexterity, even as he battles with frequent asthmatic wheezing. How he can spin propaganda in a silken voice while intermittently gasping for air is a mystery, as is his failure to include any noticeable accent in his characterization of the Argentinean leader.

Patricia Velasquez, making her American stage debut, gives an enticingly passionate, albeit rather one-note, turn as Julia. The supporting characters have better luck with the writing, and Felix Solis delivers a compelling performance as the conflicted Lieutenant Ramos, while Karina Arroyave makes a striking (yet brief) appearance as Julia's sister Lucila.

Designers Andromache Chalfant (sets), Mimi O'Donnell (costumes), and especially David Weiner (lighting) have created a sumptuous Bolivian landscape, appropriately tarnished yet filled with pockets of splendor. Their attention to detail manages to capture both the prosaic (live chickens roam the set in one scene) and the holy (an altogether spellbinding final image, illuminated by candles). Sound designer Robert Kaplowitz's otherwise fine mix of political voice-overs and indigenous music is marred only by an overly long, piercing helicopter cue near the show's end that left most of the audience members covering their ears.

Invariably, it is difficult to write, direct, act, or even watch a play about people professing, over and over again, what they believe and why they believe it. Still, director Mark Wing-Davey has put forth a production that often manages to inform, if not fully inspire. And with a theater arranged to replicate a schoolhouse (complete with three rows of hard wooden benches at the front), education may very well be the goal of this School of the Americas.

Birthing

Critic Walter Benjamin claimed that Kafka's stories only appeared to be allegories. Actually, their significance could never be fully fathomed, never easily explained—or explained away—with a simple correspondence to events in our world. The plurality of meanings in Kafka's stories keeps growing as we question them and as they question themselves. Their endless self-interrogation, in fact, is the process by which meaning's created. They are parables for what is possible. In this sense, The Sewers, the new play produced by Banana Bag & Bodice as part of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater's Incubator series, has a truly Kafkaesque feel to it. One may walk away from the theater a bit confused about what happened or what it might mean, but one relishes this confusion, assured that director Mallory Catlett knew exactly what she was up to.

The Sewers is the most breathtaking and beautifully original play I've seen Off-Off-Broadway this year. Rarely is work this challenging and innovative also so sumptuously entertaining.

Two women (Jessica Jelliffe and Heather Peroni), possibly sisters, form a love triangle with a megalomaniacal playwright and director (played with spectacular force by the actual playwright, Jason Craig). He has banished children from the imaginary village they inhabit, which is all that is left of the world. Both women seem to be androids, as hinted by the electrical cord that unfurls from between their legs. In fact, the only character who doesn't seem like an android is the unspeaking mechanic (Rod Hipskind) who scurries about the bleak room attending them.

When the playwright impregnates both women, a crisis arises. No children can exist in this world, but a double birth seems inevitable. Even after seeing the play and reading the script, though, I must admit I'm not sure what happens during the climactic scene in which the women give birth, but it is an astonishing theatrical moment.

My initial thought was that the women gave birth to the playwright, and the fate of this imaginary world doubled back on itself, as if in an eternal recurrence shaped like a Möbius strip. Perhaps, though, the playwright had been delivered from the womb of his own dark imagination. Or, perhaps, the playwright destroyed the children in a ghastly abortion. Maybe the children remain stillborn, or perhaps they swim like luminescent sea creatures trapped inside their mothers forever. The ambiguity is rich and tantalizing, and opens the play to countless new levels of interpretation.

The Sewers is self-conscious in the way of much postmodern meta-fiction, yet uses its self-consciousness to be genuinely funny rather than glibly ironic. At one point, for example, one of the women interrupts the other's monologue to ask, "What's the metaphor?"

The play is rife with metaphors, but it never digresses for the sake of making them. The metaphors, rather, are ambivalent puzzles that occur in the natural course of the story, the most wondrous metaphor being the set.

The entire stage appears to hover a few feet off the ground. Above, a corrugated tin roof frames a small room that's wallpapered with newsprint and refuse. Fluorescent lights flicker, a clothesline creaks on a pulley system off to one side, slop from a bedpan drips down a subway grate in the floor, cubbyholes pock-mark the walls, and hidden doors reveal a mirror-lined crawl space behind the back walls. The whole ambience conjures an institutionalized Third World prison or a postapocalyptic, postindustrial fallout shelter.

Oddly, the set is both claustrophobic and labyrinthine—it makes you feel that you are floating, yet enclosed; trapped, yet wandering in an endless maze with wormholes and secret passageways. Like the Pantheon, there's a hole in the center of the roof in which, at times, light floods down as if from heaven, giving the actors under it an otherworldly aura. The actors sometimes lean out from the stage to balance directly over the audience, which creates a vertiginous sense of awe. Thus, the setting, drab and cruddy as it is, begins to take on an aspect of the supernatural.

Kudos to set designer Peter Ksander for creating a space so wholly self-contained, so believable in its logic, that it floats in the mind afterward as an eerie alternate universe. Lighting designer Miranda Hardy also deserves generous credit for her haunting evocation of both the divine and scatological. One especially mind-blowing image was sonogram-like light sources attached to the women's bellies that only became visible in the dark.

My favorite scene, which epitomizes the inventiveness of the whole production, is when the playwright takes an exacto knife to rip a hole in the wall. A mysterious stream of greenish light pours in as if a vortex gave birth to the universe just outside the paper-thin walls of the set. The playwright then pulls a microphone out of the void to sing a loony song.

If only all plays could be as pregnant with meanings.

Sins of the Fathers

Call him the Iago of Long Island. Marc Palmieri's disquieting new play, Levittown, features one of the most compelling modern villains to grace the New York stage this year. But don't look for a black hat; this guy is smartly dressed in a business suit and tie. Richard Briggs (masterfully played by Curzon Dobell) builds up his ego by asserting his will over his two adult children and tearing them down when they bridle at his control. Now living alone, Richard abandoned his wife and two young kids for another woman, although in his narcissism he has convinced himself that it was his kids who abandoned him.

Dobell's uptight demeanor makes it hard to read his character, leaving his kids—and us—in a state of arrested anxiety. Like a snake in the grass, Richard releases his coiled-up anger in sudden spasms.

Nimbly directed by George Demas, Levittown is a well-crafted domestic drama about family secrets and how the sins of the past are borne by later generations of a middle-class family. The play intends to subvert the myth of domestic happiness incarnated in the cookie-cutter houses built in Long Island's Levittown for G.I.'s returning from World War II.

The play's first scenes are schematic as Palmieri dutifully lays out his themes and introduces the characters. Home after dropping out of yet another college, Richard's older son, Kevin (Brian Barnhart), is poised to unearth his grandfather's old wartime secret—the root of all the hurt and betrayal that follows—among the boxes in the room where he will be sleeping. "What do I need school and degrees for?" Kevin asks in a typically blunt line. "What I really should learn about is right here in this house. Up there in those boxes!"

Kevin has sought to maintain a relationship with his father, while his younger sister, Colleen (Margo Passalaqua), has been estranged from him for five years. In the play's most riveting scene, Colleen decides at her brother's urging to visit her father so he can meet her new fiancé.

The grandfather's living room, designed by Kate Aronsson-Brown, is redolent of 1970's suburbia, with its faux-wood furnishings, overstuffed couch and armchair, and family photos on the walls. She uses essentially the same set for the dad's house, save for flipping the wall at back—a bit of stagecraft that involves more than a little awkward shoving to pull off.

The cast is mostly outstanding. In addition to Dobell's commanding performance as the father, Barnhart stands out in his finely grained portrayal of the self-effacing, quietly troubled brother. Michael Laurence, in a smaller role as the straight-talking firefighter cousin Joey, ignites every scene he is in with his incandescent energy; his wisecracks provide some refreshing levity. Cecelia Riddett does her best in the shallow role of the ditzy mother who spouts new-age beliefs.

Passalaqua delivers a convincing performance in her pivotal scene with her father, but elsewhere she doesn't comfortably inhabit the skin of this battered, psychologically frail young woman. Demas has elicited a sympathetic performance from Joe Viviani as the grandfather, making it hard to believe that he was traumatized by his wartime past and became a withdrawn and withholding father.

Palmieri has tried in his play to create two parallel stories of troubled fathers and children. Yet the intricate tale of how the grandfather comes to terms with his past is ultimately eclipsed by the awful magnetism of the conflict between Richard and his children. It may not have been what the playwright intended, but we have little reason to complain, because in that showdown, Levittown harnesses a level of dramatic energy that makes for a truly exhilarating theatrical experience.

Down on the Farm

Scott Pask's perfectly rendered farmhouse kitchen in Pig Farm transports us smack into the center of the anguished world of pig farming, where Tom (a believably burly John Ellison Conlee) struggles to raise his massive herd with G-men from the Environmental Protection Agency breathing down his neck. Though Tom's herd of pigs produces more waste than he can manage, he is forbidden from disposing of it the only way he knows how—by dumping it in the river. From the outset, the plot seems promising: privately owned farms, whose organic goods are so in vogue at the moment, are pitted against a government bureaucracy charged with keeping the environment clean. But Pig Farm fails to respect its central characters enough to live up to its potential. The play seems to want us well-fed city folk to laugh at these people, not with them, as they hoot and holler, knee-deep in their own mess.

Adding to the supposed hilarity, the dialogue sounds like the lyrics a drunken nanny would sing or silly rhymes Dr. Seuss might pen. Tom's just dying to make the government happy so it will lay off him for a while, but he can't get a moment's rest because his wife, Tina (Katie Finneran), wants to make a baby. Between them, bits of dialogue repeat and repeat, again cluing us in to the sameness of life on the farm.

Onomatopoeia and alliteration abound: most often, the sibilant "s" (screeching, squirling, snurfling) is punctuated by the hard phonetic stops of "t's": Tina, Teddy, Tom, and Tim. If the actors hadn't been directed to play each scene for laughs, perhaps the rhythms and inflections might have acquired a Pinteresque simplicity, but as is, they sound like staged folksiness.

Tim, the juvenile delinquent free on a work release and in the couple's care, has been entrusted to tally the pigs and is just dying to be taken seriously. When he and Tina get frisky after another of Tom's drunken rages, Tim is sure that he's a man and that whatever he feels for Tina must be love. Tim wants to escape with Tina to the open road, a place as romantic and unreal as Shangri-la, but Tina, weary and still in love with her basically good husband, knows better. Tim is a good boy, she says maternally, though not enough of a man to replace the one she's already got.

The farmhouse is an anxious place, and the characters are frenzied much of the time, often delivering lines at a rapid, spitfire pace and at full scream. Finneran often strains uncomfortably, her voice ill at ease with yelling. Logan Marshall-Green, the poorly cast Tim, is not only much too physically mature to play a nearly 18-year-old delinquent but sacrifices any kind of pathos his character might express for cheap laughs.

The only one who can totally get away with his quirkier-than-real-life antics is Denis O'Hare, who plays the wiseass EPA agent, Teddy. Full of odd inflections and a wonderfully overdrawn tendency to flash his gun, Teddy is the smarmy G-man who makes Tom play nice. With a scheme or three up his sleeve, Teddy is the bad face of a presumably right-minded agency, and he raises the show's entertainment value immensely.

That said, one actor cannot keep an entire production afloat; although the players are mostly able, playwright Greg Kotis, who scored big with Urinetown, doesn't work hard enough to make us invest in them. Pig Farm ends up being the kind of play you write if you don't actually know any farmers; their struggles to bring food to the none-too-thankful tables of America can be played for cheap laughs because they are so far outside our sphere of empathy. The production is billed as a dark comedy, but most of the time it ends up being slapstick.

The Naked and the Dead

Betty Friedan, beware. While baby boomer feminists wore power suits and went by the title "Ms.," the second generation of the women's movement—led by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Camille Paglia, and Madonna—seemed more likely to wear leather corsets and lingerie while going by the title "Mistress." A backlash in the feminist movement resulted from women who, newly able to climb corporate ladders, suddenly found themselves desexualized and bereft of their identity as women. Riding a new wave of "do me" feminists who viewed pinup girls like Betty Page as sources of empowerment, burlesque has experienced a recent renaissance that is still going strong. A lot of guys like it too. Burlesque is a woman's invigorating embrace of her sexual identity, and a way for her to both subvert the male gaze by controlling the seduction fantasy and deconstruct any staid dynamics of the gender wars through humor. In fact, you might think of the tacky humor of burlesque as essentially camp for straight people.

The Orgy of the Dead, the new show produced by Do What Now Media, is a high-concept burlesque show couched in an homage to B-movie monster flicks. One dark and stormy night, a horror story writer, Bob (the delightfully corny Matthew Gray), and his uptight date, Linda (Carolyn Demisch), visit the cemetery for inspiration, only to discover that the ghouls and ghosts of the graveyard have come out to party. Captured by Wolfman (Adam Swiderski) and Mummy (Brandon Beilis), they must watch a procession of girls called up from the grave entertain the Emperor of the Dead (Josh Mertz) with their striptease acts.

These acts are broken up a few times by a parody of a 50's sitcom-cum-lounge-singing act, called "The Wolfman and Mummy Comedy Hour," complete with a booming laugh track that punctuates the intentionally nonexistent punch lines. The irony of the canned laughter and the shtick, however, is so easy and obvious, it can produce some genuine titters from the audience—so long as no one takes anything too seriously.

The show revels in its insouciant bad taste. What little plot there is has been inspired by a film of the same name by Ed Wood, the auteur who is infamous for such impassioned low-budget schlock as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space (but who may be more familiar from Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp in the titular role). For those not familiar with Wood, the plot that surrounds the burlesque is similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, minus Meatloaf.

The burlesque acts themselves featured lovely, lithe, and limber ladies whose choreography was generally faster and more dancelike than the slow and sultry "old school" burlesque that often features more buxom girls, who may be slightly zaftig by today's standards. Jessica Silver, playing a fashion victim, performed the traditional tassel twirl with aplomb, and Jessica Savage was noteworthy for her flexible rendition of an Amazon on the prowl.

While the ladies' moves were well performed, the pace seemed a bit rushed: the faux seduction of burlesque requires a slow tease, and one of the six girls might have been eliminated to give more time to the others to strut and strip their stuff at a more titillating tempo.

In addition, the culminating burlesque act, which featured the Empress of the Dead (Scarlet O'Gasm) as she's about to sacrifice the living flesh of Linda felt, well, a little dead. The beautiful Carolyn Demisch, playing Linda with a glamorous sass and a humorous touch, never takes off her vintage miniskirt-length coat—despite undoing her belt—nor does Ms. O'Gasm have much opportunity to showcase what promised to be her ample burlesque talents.

But these are really just quibbles. In burlesque it's not about how much skin a girl shows but how fabulous her costume is—including her makeup and undergarments. And the girls' outfits, constructed by Jennifer Leigh, were wonderful, down to their glittery lip gloss and their elbow-length satin gloves. One particularly funny getup was worn by Savage's Jungle Girl, who appeared in a silly African mask with tribal spear in hand. The monsters' costumes and the Emperor of the Dead's plaid lounge-lizard suit were appropriately cheesy.

Director Frank Cwiklik and choreographer Michele Schlossberg-Cwiklik showed obvious attention to details, down to the multimedia "advertisements" that greet one upon entering the theater and the cast's choreographed curtain bow. Moreover, the show has a great soundtrack that ranged from disco to doo-wop and included many comedic sound effects.

This burlesque show might have Betty Friedan rolling in her grave, but it'll more likely have you dying for more.

Dangling Conversations

The artwork for the postcard advertising Legitimate Theater Company's evening of one-act plays contains an illustration of an elephant and a sofa. Is it the "elephant in the living room," the problem on everyone's mind that no one talks about? Certainly in both plays, Ian Schoen's Jesus Hector Christ and Caryl Churchill's Heart's Desire, the characters dance around issues and manage to avoid saying anything meaningful about what's causing their problems. The true dialogue exists in their silences and in the words deliberately not chosen. In the first of the two plays, Heart's Desire, Brian (Cash Tilton) and Alice (Mimi Jefferson) wait for Susy, their adult daughter, to return home from a trip abroad. Maisie (Janice Bishop), Susy's aunt, and Lewis (Rich Lovejoy), Susy's brother, join them in waiting. With Maisie's help, Alice prepares a special homecoming lunch while Brian frets and Lewis wanders in and out drunkenly. The entire conversation runs about five minutes. But it takes the family nearly 35 minutes to actually complete the conversation because it is constantly being interrupted.

The action begins with the two women setting the table and Brian appearing in a bright red sweater. Alice takes one look at him and rings a small bell that sits at the table's center. He exits, the scene begins again, and Brian enters in a different outfit. This is also not acceptable: Alice rings the bell and everyone starts over. Finally, after donning a vest that is deemed suitable by his wife, the trio's conversation is allowed to resume. Yet not more than a few moments later, the little bell is rung again; we've advanced the story by only several lines before we return again to the beginning.

The "do over" pattern continues throughout the story, with interruptions varying from a (deliberately) stumbled line to angry spats between family members to the arrival of random, and deadly, intruders. Even after Susy returns home, the play resets itself: sometimes it's Susy at the door, sometimes it's her Australian lover, and sometimes it's a giant chicken.

Churchill's script indicates only that dialogue starts and stops; the ringing appears to be a choice made for this production by director Max Seide. The bell does help to quickly establish the pattern and gives the audience an anchor in an otherwise opaque piece of theater. We quickly determine that someone rings the bell whenever the outcome of the situation is not to his or her liking. But will anything ever be to anyone's liking? Because conversations are constantly being altered and undone, we start to see the futility of the characters' communication. By the end of the play, much of the characters' true personalities have been revealed, but we never definitively know what's going to happen in their lives.

In the second play, Jesus Hector Christ, the opposite is true: we see a situation through to its completion, but we never know what the characters are really feeling. This is mostly because the characters themselves are so conflicted. Best friends Tim (Christopher Norwood) and Clyde (Eric Brown) are young men plugging away in meaningless jobs until Clyde hits a speed bump. His girlfriend Natalie (Brenda Cooney) is pregnant, but the couple is unprepared to have a baby. While Clyde and Natalie argue about whether to have an abortion, Tim does the best he can to support his friend. In the end, the pregnancy is terminated, the relationship between Clyde and Natalie is over, and neither man knows what he's supposed to do with his life.

Written and directed by Ian Schoen, the Legitimate Theater Company's co-artistic director, Jesus Hector Christ is a good example of the naturalistic style often seen in contemporary drama. The play presented a slice of real life, and everything onstage, including props and people, was made to appear as authentic as possible. The characters ran the emotional gamut from sardonic amusement to violent frustration. Schoen's dialogue was especially compelling, capturing quite accurately how awkward, stilted, and occasionally haphazard conversations can be when the subject matter is so difficult.

Both productions had strong casts who made the most of the juicy parts they'd been given, and both shows presented high-quality costumes and scenery. Ultimately, enjoyment of the show comes down to personal preferences. I especially liked the Churchill piece with all its ambiguity, while my companion scratched her head questioningly. She, on the other hand, very much enjoyed the Schoen piece, which I thought was well done but a tad too much like real life for my escapist tendencies. But in coming away from the experience with something to think about, both of us considered the evening a success.

Decisive Dane

Most people go to see Shakespeare because they are enthusiasts familiar with the plays or because they're new to Elizabethan drama and are hoping to learn what it's all about. In general, if you've seen Hamlet before, you're not going for the suspense of the ending. You're going because you love the story. If it's your first time, you'll want to find a good production that's not boring or confusing. Reduxion Theater Company's Hamlet is that production. In about two and a half hours, it brings you the tragedy of the Dane in a way that's simple to follow. Characters are easily distinguishable from one another (even when actors take on multiple roles), and each character's purpose—whether uncle, guard, or gravedigger—is quickly established. Best of all, this Hamlet is refreshingly vital, performed with such energy and flavor that seeing it felt like watching a swashbuckling adventure story.

In his program notes, director Tyler Woods says that his Hamlet "viscerally challenges" the current state of affairs in Denmark and "boldly confronts" his uncle. Neither phrase is traditionally associated with a character best known for speeches on indecision. But Woods makes good on these assertions and delivers a Hamlet who, once he possesses evidence of his father's murder, embarks on a calculated and definitive plan of revenge. This Hamlet isn't weak and doesn't dither.

Credit for the visceral performance must also go to Richard Bolster as Hamlet. His merging of grief and youthful enthusiasm created a vengeful hotheadedness that was tempered only by Hamlet's willingness to bide his time. This was especially apparent with oaths: every "fie!" and " 'sblood!" sounded like an aggravated curse and not a melancholy sigh.

If Hamlet was visceral and bold, then Ophelia (Erin Anderson) was bursting with radiance and vitality. Never meek, never pale, never shy or retiring, Ophelia seemed more country maid than tragic waif. This was a wonderful decision by Woods and Anderson, because finally we see a woman whom Hamlet—especially this one—would want to love. Even when she's in the throes of madness, we recognize a shadow of her former robustness; her decline becomes even sadder because so much has been lost.

Much of the new life infused into this production came from trimming some extraneous, unspoken stage business. For example, during the duel in the last act, Hamlet and Laertes (Sean Logan) started their fight strong and finished quickly, instead of struggling through several rounds of tentative thrusting and dodging of swords. Overall, each scene was paced quickly, and lines were rapidly spoken. There was never time for a point to be belabored or for a scene to become tedious.

The downside to all this energy and action was that the play was no longer an exploration of the text but simply a representation of the story. This is an acceptable and valid interpretation, and one that made for an enjoyable evening. But sometimes I missed hearing Shakespeare's poetry spoken with deliberate grace and relish. The rapid pace also meant that several actors rushed their lines to the point where they were difficult to understand.

The cast contained only seven members, meaning that everyone but Hamlet and Gertrude (Samantha Turvill) took on multiple roles. All did a fine job; Michael Cherry best morphed from one character to another with the subtlest of physical transformations. It also helped that Stephanie Shaw's costumes, all made in beautiful colors and rich fabrics, allowed for quick changes and easy visual differentiation.

While not a flawless production, Reduxion Theater Company's Hamlet was immensely entertaining. A company in its inaugural season, it tackled one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies in a manner more stimulating than many longer-established companies would have dared.

Waiting Game

In his later years, Pablo Picasso found a certain profit in repainting the works of other masters in his own style. The act was the purest form of homage: by filtering a painting through his own hands, Picasso was attempting to possess those elements of the piece that previously had possessed him. Such appropriation, it should be noted, is as much an attempt on the copier's part to reassert the autonomy of his own imagination as it is a gesture of respect. The primal equivalent is the warrior eating the heart of his enemy to absorb his strength. Will Pomerantz, the director of John Griffin's Godot Has Left the Building, now making its New York City premiere at 45 Below, explains in his program notes that he sees Griffin's piece as a "conversation with Samuel Beckett's play," the revolutionary absurdist work Waiting for Godot. Perhaps. I view it more as an exorcism. Though intended as a sequel—What Would Beckett Do Now?—the conceit feels more like a convenient excuse for Griffin to rewrite a play that clearly preoccupies him. He is taking a bite at Godot's heart.

Godot, version 2.0, is set on the same blasted plain as the original and includes the iconic dead tree, but a few upgrades have been made. The formerly empty landscape is now littered with broken computers, empty coffee cups (Starbucks, natch), old newspapers, discarded kitchen appliances, etc.—these being "the refuse of modern society," according to Griffin's opening stage description. (The picturesque set and lights are by Garin Marschall.)

If the ubiquitous dead computers and scattered Starbucks logos aren't enough to indicate that modern business—electronic-age capitalism, basically—is Griffin's idea of the new alienation, we need only look to the updates he's made to Beckett's human refuse. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps from the original, are dead and buried—literally, upstage right (one of Griffin's finer nods to his prequel).

In their place, we have Joe (Edward Griffin), who enters wearing a shirt and tie, and carrying a briefcase. Though barefoot, the fault is absent-mindedness, not poverty. Joe's mercantile mind has been set adrift by the disappearance of everything familiar to him: "I dressed for work, showered and shaved, though not in that particular order, thinking that once I had my coffee I might wake up and realize that I had been dreaming." He's left clinging to a cellphone whose store of numbers is now useless.

His counterpart is Sebastian (Scott David Nogi). Bearded and ragged, and much less perturbed by the surrounding wasteland than Joe, Sebastian is a more direct descendant of Beckett's beloved vagabonds. Even he, however, is wrapped in the remnants of stature: a once fine robe, now tattered, seems to hint at a past in letters, if not academia proper. The impression is reinforced by his pad and pencil—which Nogi wields the way a young Dr. Freud might—and by the fact that he is the first to suggest philosophical games of reason to pass the time.

And, oh, is there time to be passed! The waiting is uploaded from the original in all its lengthy anti-glory. As is the uncertainty on the part of those doing the waiting. A typical exchange:

Joe: How are we to wait if we don't know what we're waiting for? Sebastian: How did the chicken cross the road? Joe: What? Sebastian: It's the same thing. Joe: Oh. [beat] What do we do in the meantime?

The difference between this and a similar conversation in Beckett's play is perhaps Griffin's most cutting comment on the existentialist dilemma as it stands today: Joe and Sebastian don't even have the comfort of a Godot. They are bereft of any single thing on which to concentrate their hopes of salvation, other than the amorphous act of waiting itself.

It's a shame, then, to see the exactness in Griffin's work weakened by our constantly having our attention called to it. The production suffers from over-enunciation. At first, I thought Nogi's and Edward Griffin's energetic articulation was peculiar only to them (indeed, it's not shared by Gabriel Guitierrez as the Artist or Bert Gurin as the Old Man—the revamped Lucky and Pozzo, respectively). But there is little warmth hiding beneath their exceptionally well-aspirated "t's," just as there is little of the messiness of humanity in Griffin's intellectual clarity. As funny as the play often is, it never dips south of the head far enough to touch the despair so present in the original.

Just as Picasso's copies, while informative of the great man's preoccupations, are mostly of middling artistic value, Godot Has Left the Building is excellent as a writing exercise. With luck, Griffin has now managed to free his imagination from Beckett's grip enough to conduct a true conversation, not with the ideas of another playwright but with his own.

Say Ahhh

Many people have a phobia about dentists, those seemingly benign professionals who deal in wholesome smiles. Underneath the mild-mannered exterior, however, there lurks someone who wants to cram large objects down strangers' throats, dangle his hands in their mouths, and ask them to spit and bite on a daily basis, not to mention put them to sleep while prying at their jaws. Furthermore, the waiting rooms are often filled with those handheld toys and games—found nowhere else, it seems—that involve jets of water and small rings and balls. These dentists do traffic in a queer combination of pleasure and pain. Given this, maybe people's fears about them aren't actually irrational after all.

Bite, a sex farce about a group of dentists and their patients who moonlight at an S&M parlor, has been revamped since its trial run last April. While there was plenty of "vamp" in the original show, the new play has been improved. A few holes in the script have been filled, and the actors have had more drilling.

The main premise of the play—besides watching the actors prance around in fetish gear while getting gently slapped, kissed, whipped, and spanked—is that at certain "choice moments" the audience can vote for what it wants the repressed momma's boy, Dr. Greenmeadow, D.M.D., to do in "sticky" ethical and sexual situations. For example, should he make out with the coquettish vixen in a schoolgirl's outfit (Amy Overman), who tells him she's gorged on candy so she can get cavities and therefore see more of him? Many of the outcomes, thankfully, are counterintuitive, and there are some interesting twists.

In the old script, the fun of this chose-your-own-adventure gimmick, as Jessie Marshall's review noted last year, "dissolves into utter futility as it becomes apparent that the audience's 'choices' do not really affect the action in a significant way." The new version, however, has many more significant and tightly plotted deviations—with some choices leading to more deviant outcomes than others. In fact, writer and director Suzanne Bachner's total script, with all variants, has more than 200 pages.

Nevertheless, the choices still feel like digressions from a rather inevitable (if not fully realized) ending. The night I went, the final choice was shrugged aside, and the audience members were allowed to shout out what they wanted to happen to the characters in a rather inconclusive way.

The cast, however, is game for the romping, somewhat unpredictable antics. Robert Brown as Dr. Greenmeadow displays aplomb for generating laughs as the gentle, professional Everyman with a kinky side and questionable sexuality. At one point, thrust hard in a chair by a dominatrix (who may or may not be his hard-boiled receptionist), he almost accidentally tipped backward—only to deftly recover at the last moment, tilting up with a flourishing dance of his eyebrows and, of course, a winning smile. He's one "bottom" who is sure to come out on top.

On the other hand, Jennifer Gill, playing the naïve, white-trash Southern belle who resorts to being a submissive in Purgatory (the upscale S&M parlor) in order to afford expensive dental work, was a bit unconvincing in spite of her natural charm and delight in the frivolity. She never appeared to be in pain—either when her teeth hurt or when she was punished as a sex slave.

The mood of the whole play, in fact, is weirdly more warm and fuzzy than dark and edgy, despite frequent depictions of sexual abuse and more extreme things that are probably inappropriate to mention here. Nothing is really at stake, because no matter how many times we see bondage and beatings (though, oddly, no biting), none of the characters seem at risk of getting hurt. They rather enjoy it all—and when they don't, there's always a "safe word." As the suave, womanizing Dr. Bruce (Justine Plowman)—Greenmeadow's rival at the practice—might say, "It's just how we roll."

The S&M dungeon, as its mistress (Theresa Goehring) informs Dr. Greenmeadow, is a "lair of fetish and fantasy"—essentially a stage for one's "sexual psychodrama": clients are not allowed to have actual sex or get injured. Likewise, the play itself—especially in the second act when all the characters' supposedly darker flipsides come out underground—is merely innocuous psychodrama. The dentist's office, with its insidious sexual undercurrent of genuine freakish menace, contained the greater potential for comedic material.

The play suggests that even in the most humdrum homebody of us there dwells a secret, kinky sex freak just waiting to don a bondage mask or dominate a leather-clad slave who's balled and gagged. While there may be more bark than bite in this production's light take on a dark subject, it's sure to leave you smiling.

Fistful of One-Acts

Tucked away in the tiny loft theater space of Hell's Kitchen is the Ensemble Studio Theater. For such a small venue, EST can certainly claim an enormous amount of activity during June with its annual marathon of one-act plays. This year's marathon boasts three sets of rotating presentations. Series A and B premiered earlier; Series C of Marathon 2006 just opened. Unlike the other two series, which each put on four one-acts, the eclectic Series C includes a fifth, making it even more of a treat. The first of these is Dominica: The Fat, Ugly 'Ho, written by Stephen Adly Guirgis (The Last Days of Judas Iscariot). Adam Rapp, the writer/director who recently caused a stir Off-Broadway with Red Light Winter, directs this cute, fast-moving Upper Upper West Side story, which is actually a riff on Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Rolando (Carlo Alban) tries to win back his high school girlfriend, Mylene (Liza Colon Zayas), after a fight that resulted in her stabbing him in the abdomen with a Bic pen. He does so by arguing with her in the middle of the night as she hovers above on the fire escape, while Rolando's friend Carlos (Dominic Cloon) prompts him while perched behind some garbage pails. All three performers are naturals. I'll assume they are older than high school age, but one would never guess it from their pitch-perfect work.

The next featured one-act has a long title but is a little short on substance: The Night That Roger Went to Visit the Parents of His Old High School Girlfriend, in which college kid Roger (Jack Carpenter) visits the parents of, yes, his ex-girlfriend Kitty, only to be informed by her mother, Marlene, that Kitty has died. Playwright Ann Marie Healy too often shifts back and forth between black humor and sorrow. For example, as Marlene (the terrific Patricia Kalember, best known for TV's Sisters) delivers the bad news to Roger, she does so in a droll, mundane way—then immediately gives way to tears.

This would be understandable in a straight drama, but director Andrew McCarthy (a 1980's Brat Packer) opts for a more off-center presentation style as Roger, Marlene, and Kitty's mostly mute father, Herbert (Daniel Geroll), share conflicting memories of her in a succession of rapid-fire scenes. Had Roger, or its individual scenes, run longer, McCarthy could have allowed the tone to build and take shape.

Detail, Michael Louis Wells's overreaching tale of sibling love and contempt, ends the first act. Wayne (John Leonard Thompson) and Madeleine (Dana Powers Acheson) are a brother and sister involved in a slight tug-of-war as she tries to convince her truant brother to come home for the holidays (he hasn't in years). Both actors are sensational, and director Lou Jacob handles the action admirably, but Wells incorporates too many capital-I issues (their dead father, a big secret on Madeleine's part) to successfully cram into 20 or so minutes. Perhaps a little less exposition would have been sufficient—the duo needs to dwell on only one sticky issue in their past to explain their resulting estrangement.

Edward Allen Baker's Lila on the Wall is where the evening loses some traction. Lila (Julia Leedes) is an ambitious television reporter trying to put together a follow-up story about an appearance of Jesus against a graffiti-laden skid row wall. Carl (Will Janowitz, who plays Finn on The Sopranos), her cameraman, is the yang to her yin—free-spirited, optimistic, spontaneous. He tries to get her to step back and look at her life and career with a broader perspective. Kevin Confoy directs their comic interplay with aplomb, but the one-act never really gets to higher ground. Additionally, Leedes does most of the work here, picking up Janowitz's slack. Most of the other one-acts are substantive enough to envision them becoming full-length works, but Lila feels more limited from the outset.

The final one-act is The Bus to Buenos Aires, written by Curtis Moore and Thomas Mizer, and based on the Spanish story "Las Hermanas de Javier Wiconda." Like Roger, Bus also deals in darker humor, but does so a little more successfully. Paulo (Sebastian La Cause) returns home after one of his three sisters dies. The twist is, he does not know which one has died (the wire he received did not identify her). Paulo has a daydream en route in which he pictures each sister's potential death to help him brace for the mourning to come.

This is the kind of magic realism employed by the best Latin American authors, such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and it works here too, especially as director Carlos Armesto turns these flights of fancy into low-key musical sequences. It's a solid choice to end an evening of works united by one strong thread: a unique vision that strays far left of the middle.

Taxicab Confessions

A taxi driver once told me that to get a feel for New York City, there is nothing better than taking a cab. Unlike riding the subway, a yellow cab puts the lives of eight million people on safe display through the windows, as you look out on the street corners and shop fronts. In La MaMa's studious production of The Lunatics' Ball, we get a sense of the city by looking into cabs instead. Adapted from playwright/poet Claudia Menza's book of the same name, Lunatics' Ball explores the aspect of New York life most familiar to permanent residents: coming and going. Nowhere else in the world do people fret so much about going a mile and a half to the east or six miles south. For this reason, New York City has developed its legendary transit system, which, let's be honest, doesn't always make commuting easier. Menza takes a cue from this unique phenomenon and uses mass transit as a metaphor for the city as a whole.

The play follows cabbie Mario, played with genuine NYC hauteur by Paul Albe, and the many strains of New Yorkers who occupy his backseat. Transvestites, voyeurs, and cowboys seek advice from our shrink in a box, and their peculiar stories also beg the question: Are there any normal people in New York City?

The answer, thankfully, is no. In La MaMa's thoughtful presentation, the wonderful cast fruitfully embodies a long list of New Yorkers, each with a unique reason for coming to the city and even some with pretty good reasons for leaving. Most of these characters, like all New Yorkers, are concerned only with getting to where they have to be in the next 10 minutes—not the next 10 years. Menza and director Harold Dean James play these characters against one another very well, and it's hysterical to see figures like Daniel Clymer's waiter, Josh, get service industry advice from the surly cabbie. "It's all about power," Albe's Mario growls. "For one hour, they got it and you don't."

The urban power struggle comes to a head—in, perhaps, the best single enactment of wish fulfillment I've ever seen—when Joy Kelly's sublimely courageous Chantal stands up to Lynn Eldredge's quixotic Fleur, the former being a past-her-prime lounge singer and the latter a gun-waving subway crazy. This scene climactically exposes the very real frustrations created when the hard-working middle-class commuter shares subway cars and park benches with the deranged and homeless. The scene is played masterfully and unapologetically by Kelly and Eldredge, who each bring humanity to what might have been a stale encounter in the hands of two lesser talents.

Stella Venner also deserves a special commendation—her character is a "listener," and almost a proxy for Menza herself, who absorbs the follies and triumphs of these city folk while never being allowed to comment on it. Venner's presence usually gave the audience and the other actors an alternative point of focus, which went a long way toward breaking up the long sequence of monologues.

Unfortunately, nothing else in the play lives up to that one exchange between Fleur and Chantal, at least in terms of energy and pathos. Two stellar actors notwithstanding, the scene between Clymer's "aw shucks" ranch hand Jimbo and Cezar Williams's vivacious transsexual LaDenise plays exactly like what it is: a random pairing of contrasting stereotypes for comedic effect. Likewise, Clymer's final scene as a burnt-out actor, Kevin, expresses well the difficulty of "making it in the big city" but takes far too many twists to reach its inevitable conclusion. Too often, Menza's characters revert to a dense, heightened language that isn't usually appropriate and is never as convincing as when her more developed characters, like Mario, talk.

The scenic and video design, also by James, is adequate if not a little underwhelming. The effect of using two TV monitors to simulate the cab's windows is effective, until the second and third and fourth time I saw the bright green truck, when the video looped. Otherwise the design elements were all a considerable success. The alternate video for the cab ride to the airport was an especially nice touch.

The characters in Lunatics' Ball are, as cartoonist Scott McCloud says, profoundly isolated in a city of millions—idle chatter is how they navigate the boulevards of life. I think, like Menza, I finally understand what that cabbie meant by what he said to me. It wasn't that I would get a sense of the city by riding in a cab; it was that he got a sense of the city by driving one. The city, in Menza's estimation, is its people. This play is like the people, too: at times long-winded, rough, and eccentric, but, most important, heartfelt.

The Parent Trap

Would-be parents, beware. In her compelling new play, Satellites, Diana Son does not paint a pretty picture of the transition to parenthood. A scant six weeks after a tumultuous C-section, Nina (Sandra Oh) feels that she should be ready to work, but is she really? Sitting alone in her home office, she hears her daughter Hannah crying upstairs, and her conflict is palpable—painful, raw, even "feral," as she describes it. But Nina's life and career must go on, baby or no baby, for reasons both financial and personal: she and her husband Miles (Kevin Carroll) have just moved into a four-story Brooklyn brownstone (a definite fixer-upper); Miles, a dot-com producer, is out of work but under pressure by his nomadic and irresponsible brother Eric (Clarke Thorell) to embark on a sketchy business venture; and her friend and business partner Kit (Johanna Day) is begging her to pick up the slack at their architectural firm.

Directed with fluidity and grace by Michael Greif, Satellites raises important questions about the problematic position of a working mother (to work, or not to work? And at what cost?). Son, whose work first rose to prominence with the widespread success and popularity of her 1998 play Stop Kiss (also produced by the Public Theater and starring Oh), recently became a mother herself, and she has duly investigated the fractious activity of childbearing and its resulting identity crises. But within the tidy span of 90 minutes, she also manages to sharply chronicle the manifold ways the birth of a child affects the extended group of people who surround (or orbit) it. And as Nina and Miles attempt to adjust to both their new roles as parents and their new geographical location, they are also confronted by their own racial identities, and lack thereof.

Although neither Nina, who is Korean, nor Miles, who is African-American, feels particularly connected to his or her own roots, they are determined to forge meaningful connections for their daughter. Nina hires a Korean nanny, Mrs. Chae (Satya Lee), hoping that Hannah might learn to speak Korean, while their move to a predominantly black neighborhood is an attempt to give Hannah another opportunity for self-identification.

Their choices quickly crumble around them, however, illustrating the difficulty of manufacturing a specific cultural experience for, well, anyone. Soon after they move in, a rock is thrown through their front window. Whether or not the act was racially motivated, it threatens their faith in themselves, driving each of them to seek a sense of belonging elsewhere.

Nina, whose own mother is dead, begins to gravitate toward Mrs. Chae, and a look of longing crosses her face as Mrs. Chae sings a familiar Korean lullaby to Hannah. Miles, in turn, strikes up an unwilling relationship with Reggie (Ron Cephas Jones), the "king of the block," whose streetwise wheeling and dealing lands him, oddly enough, at the center of their household renovations. However, both Nina and Miles are just as quick to avoid identifying too closely with their new acquaintances, especially when Nina discovers Mrs. Chae's ignorance and Miles begins to doubt Reggie's honesty.

Clearly, there is much (and sometimes a little too much) going on here, but if Son's script is somewhat overburdened with detail, it's hard to complain about in a production that is so uniformly well acted, conscientiously envisioned, and brimming with smarts. Son's characters are so thoughtfully drawn that even a weaker, quasi-romantic subplot between Kit and Eric becomes intriguing.

On hiatus from her Golden Globe-winning role in TV's Grey's Anatomy, Oh shows her theatrical prowess here, vividly depicting Nina's conflict as she alternates between strength and vulnerability. Carroll adeptly harnesses Miles's uncertainty and fear, while Ron Cephas Jones strikes the perfect balance (equal parts irritating and irresistible) as the swaggering Reggie. Day is a vibrant addition as the smart and snappy Kit, who is turning 40 and wishes Nina would pay more attention to her "baby," their work.

Designer Mark Wendland's set is a Brooklyn brownstone to build a dream on, an unfinished apartment with a gorgeous staircase and a bright, colorful studio. The sets glide swiftly along tracks as they shift us and the characters through different rooms, and Greif gives us glimpses of the actors moving through different spaces as the scenes evolve, underscoring their search for a quiet, stable place to sit down in relative peace.

Satellites is also a study of geography, both that of ourselves and our property—how ownership changes in a neighborhood, for one thing, as well as what (if anything) we have to pass down as human beings. Nina fears that Hannah "will never see herself—she will never see me." Within this Brooklyn brownstone, relationships and expectations across race and class are thwarted and distorted. Although these characters may seem to move in parallel orbits, their lives inevitably intersect, provoking arguments and encounters that are both painful and edifying.

Mad Monarch

The peerless Alvin Epstein leads a colorful cast in the Actors' Shakespeare Project's King Lear, originally co-produced with the Boston University School of Theater. Lear is a role, like The Tempest's Prospero and Endgame's Hamm, that rewards a mature actor's years of experience and practice. Epstein brings to the role more experience than most and dazzles with a tour de force performance. His Lear is whimsical and cocky, small in stature but unflinchingly charismatic. When he goes mad, he is shaken to the bone, and his withered body is no less a victim than his mind. Epstein's voice contains both Lear's regal baritone and his shrill, foolish falsetto, not to mention all the angry, confused, and betrayed tones in between.

When we think of Lear, we think of the heath because it is there that the fragile, old man Lear has become loses himself completely, with the storm's howling wind a representation from nature of his ravaged mind. The heath is a barren, cold place—as much a mental space as a physical one—where we must confront hubris, folly, and the consequences they produce.

The stage at the Annex at La MaMa ETC, a cavernous, barn-like space, is covered with shredded rubber that, from any seat in the house, looks like wood chips or compost from a forest floor. Walking on this textured material keeps the actors from being completely grounded; they wobble or tilt and seem to strain to find their footing. It's a brilliant touch that adds to the play's emotional landscape.

A simple area rug and several chairs represent the king's palace in the first scene. Although the action at the play's beginning is all pomp and circumstance as Lear haughtily divides his kingdom among his three daughters, the bare, rough set design suggests that the mental decay we are about to witness has already, to some extent, begun. Perhaps this devolution into madness, this return to nature, has been encroaching for some time.

Chandeliers—the set's small touch of civility—hang from the ceiling, as do large tin basins that are pierced through with taut cable wires. When they are bowed or plucked, the reverberations from these wire-basin contraptions fill the hollow space with deep, eerie groaning. Bill Barclay's sound and music design are first rate; the reverberations are accented with large gongs and drums whose echoes mix and meld into a cacophonous din as jarring as anything in Lear's own mind. Though the sounds often obscure the actors' lines, making it difficult to catch every word, they also fill the space, and us, with the sense of doom that this unstoppable march toward death should evoke.

The play is performed in the round—we are Lear's court—and certain actors play to and with the audience when appropriate. Benjamin Evett is a lusty Edmund, a character too modern to be all bad. His schemes for land and title mix the cunning of the biblical Jacob, the prototypical second son, with the bravado of a Wall Street power broker. And he's a delight to watch all the way.

Ken Cheeseman as the Fool provides the evening's other standout performance. His lanky, beanpole body doubles and sways with every word; visually he's the buffoon he should be, though his words are as straight and true as any dagger. Dressing him in a baseball cap that simply says "fool" may have been a bit over the top, but Cheeseman uses this and all his props for every inch they're worth.

Michael Fordan Walker (Cornwall) and Gabriel Levy (France) were the only real sore spots in the cast. Both seemed tongue-tied at times and too eager to stress the rhyme scheme in certain verses. But they are minor enough characters that their lapses can be forgiven.

This season, like most, is chock-full of Shakespeare, but Epstein's performance and Patrick Swanson's vigorous staging set this production apart. Toward the end of the first act, the Fool asks Lear, "Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?" Epstein adds depth to the seemingly simply reply, "Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing," when he pauses before the final "nothing," as if he were about to give a different answer and thinks better of it at the last minute. His last "nothing" suggests that here, as in the production as a whole, there is a whole lot of something packed into every word.

Give Me Shelter

The single mother of an autistic 13-year-old boy collapses from a deadly brain aneurysm in front of her son and her startled sisters and their husbands. Who is to care for the orphaned boy? That is the agonizing question that drives Darci Picoult's intense and carefully wrought drama, Jayson With a Y, a production of the New Group's low-budget "naked" division at the Lion Theater on Theater Row.

The play, directed by Sheryl Kaller, sharpens the dilemma to a fine point. The mother's death comes without warning. One sister, Kyle (Marin Hinkle), is eight months pregnant with her first child. The other, Lynette (Maryann Plunkett), and her husband have plans to leave shortly for a year in Paris. Both women are justifiably reluctant to make the dramatic life changes that taking in their nephew would entail.

The action takes place mostly in Lynette's Manhattan loft apartment during the first days after the death when grief distorts judgment and sets nerves on edge. The strain of deciding what to do with Jason produces a hairline fracture that threatens to shatter the bond between the sisters and the very foundation of both marriages.

Making the drama so convincing is Picoult's precise rendering of the minor details of domestic life—the small tensions, anxieties, and conflicts that suffuse daily living. She also has a knack for mimicking the ellipses and half-sentences of conversation among siblings and longtime couples even as she sets out the leitmotifs that will give the play deeper resonance and a sense of unity.

Among the able cast, Plunkett, who won a Tony for best actress in 1987 for her role in the musical Me and My Girl, is a standout. She brings a fierce emotional energy to her role as the wavering Lynette.

Miles Purinton, a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School, delivers a high-voltage, spot-on performance as the volatile and solitary Jayson, a bright kid who is unable to engage in normal social interactions and erupts in rage when his daily routine is disturbed. Purinton's performance, helped along by Picoult's fine drawing of the character, captures the antipathy and sympathy that Jayson elicits in equal measure.

Picoult is best with female characters. Both husbands are one-dimensional and not very likable. Lynette's husband (Daniel Oreskes) refuses to engage Jayson beyond macho bantering, while Kyle's punctilious husband (Marin Hinkle) tries to argue her out of any sense of duty to the boy. Alysia Reiner is exquisite in the small but key role of Jayson's mother, but it's jarring to see her reappear, with little change in appearance, later in the play as the presiding minister at the mother's funeral and as the director of a residence for children with special needs.

Working with a small black-box stage, set designer Adrian W. Jones conceived a two-room setup that niftily accommodates the play's numerous locations.

Kaller follows Picoult's instructions to overlap the end of each scene with the beginning of the next. Russell H. Champa and Justin Partier's lighting and Shane Rettig's sound smooth the transitions. The strategy creates some weird juxtapositions, but it keeps the dramatic momentum at full tilt despite the multiple scene changes.

The play, 90 minutes without an intermission, builds to a satisfying and not implausible conclusion. It is worth the journey.

First Date

With Nerve, playwright Adam Szymkowicz ventures into the minefield that is online dating and emerges with a wickedly entertaining and darkly comic romance. Cyber-dating may be rife with tales of nightmarish encounters with neurotics and sociopaths, Szymkowicz seems to say, but don't sociopaths deserve love, too? Anyone who sees Nerve will be inclined to say yes. Presented by Packawallop Productions and the Hypothetical Theater Company, the play invites its audience to look in on the first date of Susan (Susan Louise O'Connor) and Elliot (Travis York), a soon-to-be couple whose interaction so far has been limited to a series of e-mails. The two drink round after round of beer as they become accustomed to each other's real-life personas, divulge personality quirks, and navigate toward their first kiss and, eventually, couple-hood.

The show's moments of first-date awkwardness will be eerily familiar to anyone who's ever wondered what the person who just bought the last round of drinks could possibly be hiding. "What are your quirks?" Susan inquires, a seemingly innocent icebreaker. But Elliot, with more than just an oddity to hide, is on to her. He retorts, "That's the seemingly harmless way of asking, 'What's wrong with you?' " Elliot, of course, is right, as the ensuing conversation vacillates between witty banter and the disclosure of the singles' darkest, best-left-as-a-surprise character traits.

Director Scott Ebersold demonstrates an intimate knowledge of 21st-century mating rituals as he deftly orchestrates the subtle dance of two people alternating between the impulse to protect themselves and the desire to get to know (and touch) each other. O'Connor and York balance their characters tantalizingly on that fine line between lovably quirky and flat-out scary.

Szymkowicz demonstrates a keen ear for the ways in which dating jitters can translate outright compliments into something accidentally backhanded. "You're clever and smart and good," Elliot begins with the best of intentions, and receives a beaming smile for his efforts. But, to Susan's consternation, he continues, "I'm surprised you're even human!"

Susan forgives the questionable wording, but has Elliot learned his lesson? Not exactly. Much of the character's charm lies in his inability to recognize when he is ahead and should therefore quit talking. York's delivery ensures that Elliot's alternating overeager compliments and thoughtless phrasing are always balanced with a boyish sincerity that's impossible for Susan (or the audience) to begrudge. This unfortunate habit yields a slew of frustrating first-date moments for Susan, but a great deal of twisted amusement for onlookers.

Susan, for her part, isn't an ideal catch, however. O'Connor perfectly captures a combination of capriciousness, vulnerability, and world-weariness that transforms the normally introverted Elliot's unsubtle ardor into something understandable. Delightfully girlish in a flouncy skirt ensemble assembled by costume designer Jessica Watters, O'Connor also slips easily into the naughtier role of temptress. Sure, it's alarming that Susan made room for a knife in her tiny handbag, but how could her date not be seduced when O'Connor says, "A good kiss can't help but hurt you"?

In fact, if there is anything to criticize in this production, it's that the director and cast did not take fuller advantage of the actors' range later in the show. York radiates Elliot's genuineness and foot-in-mouth charm, but he also ably channels an appropriately dominating sexual energy when called upon. O'Connor embodies the wounded coquette, but her passion is equally tangible. As the play draws to its climax, exposing the characters' more disturbing aspects and possibly pushing this couple toward a premature breakup, the production too quickly returns to safe emotional territory without carrying its audience to the furthest boundary of what this dark comedy could achieve. Elliot and Susan are obviously two very passionate people, magnetically drawn to each other. Delving deeper into their darker energies and sexual chemistry in these crucial moments could only serve to underscore all that is irresistible about them and the production itself.

Set designer Nicholas Vaughan distills a typical city bar down to its bare minimum—two high stools, a small table, and a neon sign, but the design's apparent simplicity is deceptive. As the play unfolds, previously unobtrusive stage nooks—playfully illuminated by lighting designer Sarah Jakubasz—are revealed, along with Elliot's and Susan's inner lives. Sound designer Brian Hallas provides a wittily appropriate pop/rock soundtrack familiar to any barfly, peppered with dance-friendly tracks that appeal to Susan's inner diva. Choreography is provided with no small measure of tongue-in-cheek humor by Wendy Seyb.

To "ask somebody to love you takes a lot of nerve," the show's playbill quotes from a Paul Simon song. Elliot and Susan have nerve aplenty. For providing a laughter-filled evening that can make anyone feel better about his or her own dating nightmares, these lovable sociopaths deserve love.