A Theater of Diversity: Nicu's Spoon Launches New Season With Lost Formicans

"I need a wheelchair," Stephanie Barton-Farcas once heard a casting director say during a panel discussion on casting diverse actors.

"You personally need a wheelchair?" she queried. "Or do you need an actor in a wheelchair to play a role for you?

"They're not called wheelchairs," she corrected him. "They're called human beings."

Since 2001, Barton-Farcas's theater company, Nicu's Spoon, has worked to de-objectify its diverse base of performers to create a dynamic and proficient group of artists. With a proven commitment to working for social change in theater by populating it—both onstage and backstage—with performers of all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, and abilities, Nicu's Spoon has produced risky and thought-provoking productions, earning kudos from both audiences and critics.

And now, following its production of Constance Congdon's quirky and poignant comedy Tales of the Lost Formicans (which opened March 28), the company will move into a new home—an entire floor at 38 West 38th Street that is, by design, fully accessible to anyone.

Formicans kicks off a season dedicated to investigating disability issues onstage. A creative reimagining of Shakespeare's Richard III will premiere in the new venue this summer, followed by Kosher Harry, an absurdist comedy animated by both hearing and deaf artists. (Previous seasons have focused on the lives of female refugees and the multiracial casting of classic dramas; next season will address women and identity.)

Congdon's play focuses on the breakdown of communication within a family, powerfully underscoring the destruction of community on a more global level. When a woman discovers that her husband has been cheating on her, she leaves her life in New York to move back to her childhood home in suburban Colorado. With her angst-ridden teenage son in tow, she arrives home to help care for her aging father, whose health is decaying rapidly from Alzheimer's.

As the father moves in and out of lucidity, the family must confront a world in which their most vital anchor is drifting away. And when a group of aliens arrives, they provide an objective and almost anthropological perspective on the sometimes twisted ways in which human beings cope with life and death.

With Formicans, Brett Maughan makes his mainstage directing debut in New York after helming several readings for the company, and he has uncovered plenty of incendiary topics to probe within the script. "It's a question that doesn't go away for us," he says. "What do we do now that our community and families are falling apart?"

The company's namesake is an abandoned boy whom Barton-Farcas took care of in Romania in the 1990s. Although Nicu was 5 years old, he couldn't walk, talk, or feed himself. "They told me he was deaf, autistic, and retarded," Barton-Farcas remembers. "I got angry and said, 'I'll take him.' "

Six hard-fought months later, he could both walk and talk, and Barton-Farcas was captivated as she watched him bounce sunlight off of his spoon, the first utensil he was able to use and the tool that brought him back to life both physically and emotionally. Although he would die from HIV complications five years later, he was able to enjoy his brief life to the fullest.

"Nicu's spoon became the symbol for all the impossible things that were suddenly possible," Barton-Farcas says. A theater company was born—and christened.

Through Nicu's Spoon, Barton-Farcas makes the impossible possible for many of New York's disabled performers, and she is thoroughly committed to casting actors of all physical abilities. Last Fall, Nicu's Spoon offered an opportunity to a disabled actor in last fall's production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, in which Darren Fudenske, who is deaf-mute, appeared onstage in his first speaking role. His presence intensified the level of denial in a family that—in this production—couldn't bear to acknowledge that their own son and brother was disabled.

Although Barton-Farcas concedes that "it's exploitative when you have a token disabled person" in a production, she quickly points to Nicu's Spoon's continued commitment to capitalizing on the multiple strengths of its dedicated artists. She stresses that she never casts actors only because they are disabled—she casts them only if they are brilliant artists.

For her part, she draws out the multitaskers and encourages people to contribute in whatever way they can. "I'm a big advocate of, 'Well, you can do it now!' " she says, laughing.

The work is sometimes easier said than done, however, and she admits, "It's challenging when you have to convince them that they're still artists."

But it's a challenge Nicu's Spoon will be able to address on an even larger scale from its new permanent location. Barton-Farcas looks forward to sharing the company's space and resources with other like-minded groups (such as the Brooklyn-based New York Deaf Theater) that might not otherwise have the means to put on a production in Manhattan. Free from the added physical and financial stress of loading in and out of various venues, she is eager to focus her energy on answering the needs of the community, including facilitating audition classes for disabled actors.

As she looks to the future, Barton-Farcas cites this year's Oscar nominees (the most diverse pool to date) as an example of how the entertainment industry is slowly evolving to embrace a broader, more expansive range of artists that reflect the country's diversity.

"The future of theater and film is going to be a meshing of everybody," she predicts. "Our job is to take all of those people and put them onstage."

---

 

For more information, visit the company's Web site: http://www.spoontheater.org.

Brave New Bard

Just when you might think that Shakespeare's play about an exiled wizard has suffered the rough seas of time for too long and is only capable of landing on some remote island of mediocrity, a production like the one currently at the American Globe Theater washes ashore. And as old Gonzalo says in the play about his sea-worn garments, this staging of The Tempest emerges from the waters "new-dyed"—a crisp, vital reminder that Shakespeare still does theater better than anyone who's come along since. Readers are probably familiar with what is often considered the final play written solely by the Bard. Exiled Duke Prospero becomes a sorcerer supreme and the master of an enchanted island and its inhabitants. But when a ship bearing the men who sent Prospero packing sails by the island, the embittered wizard creates a great storm to bring his banishers to his island, where he can exact revenge. When Prospero's daughter, Miranda, falls in love with Ferdinand, son of one of his exilers, the necromancer's heart is moved, and he wonders if revenge is the right path after all.

Globe Artistic Director John Basil's staging and the show’s overall design take full advantage of the text's fantasy elements. If Prospero summons up a storm or causes a sword to fall from someone's hand, perfectly focused lights (by Mark Hankla) and potent sound effects (Scott O'Brien) enhance the illusion. Likewise, Prospero's right-hand fairy Ariel zips on and offstage, accompanied by an appropriately mystical "whoosh."

The best part is that all of these effects occur seamlessly—in the performance I attended, there wasn't a single missed cue. The lavish costumes (by Jim Parks) and angular, layered scenic design (Kevin Lee Allen) are vividly rendered and further strengthen the production's briskness. Someone accustomed to seeing low-budget Off-Off Broadway productions will find these professionally executed design elements quite refreshing.

Every cast member has a profound grasp of the text, which is sadly a rarity in Off-Off Broadway productions of Shakespeare. As Prospero, Richard Fay has a lot of work to do—not to mention thousands of high school English teachers to validate. Even so, he doesn't buckle under the pressure of playing a character so familiar. Instead, he makes each speech and action his own by playing Prospero as a human, and not like the stock wizard character seen in most fantasy fiction.

Other standouts include the buoyant Elizabeth Keefe as Ariel and the implausibly funny Mat Sanders as Trinculo. Most surprising, however, is Uma Incrocci's fresh take on Miranda. She plays Prospero's daughter not only as a believable teenager but also with more dimension than is traditionally seen in this one-note ingénue character.

This staging hasn't added a dramatic new concept to Shakespeare's text, or tried to make it more relevant by setting it in another time period. Instead, the American Globe's production sticks to the text and highlights the dramatic concepts that were already there. The simple but theatrical story of The Tempest still resonates on a variety of levels, especially in the hands of such able artists.

Aliens Amongst Us

When Constance Congdon's play Tales of the Lost Formicans was first produced, at the Humana Festival in 1989, it introduced American audiences to a strange new planet. The play's revival, directed by Brett Maughan for the theater company Nicu's Spoon, takes New Yorkers on a funny, tragic, and insightful return voyage to Congdon's otherworld. On this terra incognita, "wheeled sarcophagi" that look strangely like cars "are used to carry the spirits to the next world"; masturbation is a religious ritual; and the "wobble" of domestic furniture is due to "climate change or some other antropic reality."

However, the anthropologists examining the mystery planet are space aliens, and their brave new world is earth: specifically, the suburbs of the United States. While newly divorced mother Cathy struggles to keep her family together despite her son's teenage rebellion, her father's descent into the oblivion of Alzheimer's disease, and her own loneliness, the aliens, too, try to make sense of her life. Finally, there's the neighborhood conspiracy theorist, who has an explanation for everything except his desire for Cathy.

Formicans is a brilliant play. The language that Congdon invents for her alien characters is specific and often hilarious, full of the kinds of insights that come from refusing to look at anything in the usual way. "Offspring are born without wheels and must acquire their own," observe the aliens, plopped down near skateboarding kids and a Corvette. The characterization of the humans is realistic, often painfully so. When Cathy's father, once a brilliant mechanist, fixes the aliens' equipment, only to find his memory of the incident wiped out by them, Congdon reveals what life must seem like to an Alzheimer's sufferer.

Several strong actors carry this production. The versatile Brian J. Coffey makes Cathy's father appear confused and lucid, gentle and frightening, as occasion demands. Lindsay Goranson provides extra comic relief as Cathy's daffy best friend. As the paranoid yet empathetic neighbor, Michael Hartney nearly steals the show. His crystal-clear physical acting and expressive face make this character an archetype rather than a stock type. As the Head Alien, Jovinna Chan delivers her conclusions in a robotic deadpan with just enough evident confusion to avoid becoming monotonous.

The cast is not uniformly strong, however. Rebecca Challis, as Cathy, struggles to play a character who is much older than her playing age. I found her scenes with her parents more convincing than those with her son, Eric (Nico Phillips). Although listed in the program as a "theatrical guru," Phillips lacks the subtle and three-dimensional acting that his role requires. In the first act, Phillips shouts most of his lines with little expression, making Eric appear a simple bully, not a troubled young man whose aggression masks his vulnerability and fear. In a scene in the second act in which Eric, sleeping rough in an inhospitable city, is confronted by a cop, it did not seem as if the boy was afraid.

The aliens' costumes are simply yet boldly designed by Rien Schlecht, in streamlined black with white wraparound shades. The set, by Maughan and S. Barton-Farcas, is less effective. A hollow wooden box represented a desk, bar, Corvette, and other objects and locations. Its underside was hollow and unfinished, and it is moved or turned throughout the play. This made scene changes lengthy, slowing down the play's momentum. Several times, actors noisily moved this wooden monolith while other actors were talking, making it hard to hear the dialogue or pay attention to the action.

In sum, this production of Formicans has some kinks that need working out, but the play is a modern masterpiece, generally well acted here. Its small, odd, funny, and haunting world is a place well worth visiting.

Imitation of Life

The renaissance of 1980s pop culture has hit a fever pitch in recent years. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are now playing in a movie theater near you. The Transformers are on their way to screens later this year. Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony merchandise is now being bought for the children of adults who grew up with these brands. Clearly, Generations X and Y have a soft spot for the trappings of their youth. Riding on the wave of New Wave nostalgia is The Facts of Life: The Lost Episode, which returns to New York after smaller sold-out runs last year. The original series, centering on a group of girls (Blair, Tootie, Natalie, and Jo) and their middle-aged housemother (Mrs. Garrett) at a private school in Westchester County, dealt with serious issues in its nine-year run. But their PG-13 escapades are tame compared with writer Jamie Morris's funny, but not fully fleshed out, fictionalized episode, which would be rated R for raunchy.

A budget crisis is forcing the Eastland school board to close the dorm housing the four girls and to demote Mrs. Garrett from housemother to assistant cook in the cafeteria. The only way to keep the group from splitting up is to raise the funds needed to balance the budget. How are four adventuresome teens and their feisty confidante going to earn so much so quickly? Why, by engaging in the world's oldest profession!

Women-only private schools can inspire erotically charged fantasies on their own. When the ladies are played by lads (as is the case here), sex is even more in the forefront of the viewer's thoughts. The characterizations range from subtly hilarious impersonations (Brooks Braselman's joyful Natalie) to comically out-there takes (Jaquay Thomas's hysterical Tootie and Jamie Morris's game Mrs. Garrett). As tomboy Jo, mullet-topped Charlie Logan speaks in a butch baritone and gives an amusingly sincere performance.

Christopher Kenney's Blair is the least similar to the original television character. In this production, Blair is portrayed as a libidinous hoochie, whereas in the show she was an "anything but" girl, due to the strong religious beliefs of TV actress Lisa Whelchel. However, Kenney is the most believable as a slutty teenager with a heart of gold, and he makes one bodacious blonde.

The script is focused more on sending up these beloved characters and getting them into naughty situations than on plot development and settling on its structure. It takes a lot of exposition to get the ladies to setting up a whorehouse, and the story machinations are a little mechanized. A simpler setup would've allowed more playtime with the characters.

During the earlier scene changes, the audio from old commercials played, which was an excellent solution to the ongoing problem of dead time during the changes. Yet it wasn't continued throughout the whole show, perhaps because of the overabundance of scenes. With the commercials giving the show the feel of a sitcom, the musical numbers that popped up later seemed to be coming out of left field.

This production would've been more successful if it had stuck to the conventions of a sitcom or a musical rather than trying to be a hybrid piece. Of course, it's difficult for a writer (Morris) and a director (Kenney) to get the proper perspective when they are also the show's stars. An outsider would've been able to look at the show as a whole, thus shaping it while allowing Morris and Kenney to focus on their dance steps and costume changes.

There is money to be made in peddling the past—just ask the guys who created the Ninja Turtles. Sadly, an interest in doing something innovative is never the reason for recycling old entertainment. If the creators of The Facts of Life: The Lost Episode had put more creativity and inspiration into their endeavor, perhaps this episode would've been as special as the "special episodes" it emulates.

Visits and Visitations

Popular psychology holds that there are five stages to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Stewart Lombardi, the lead character in Martin Casella's new play, Scituate, at TBG Arts Center, is stuck in a stage somewhere between one and four, and he can think of only one solution: staying in bed. The premise of an immobile character mourning the death of his lover from AIDS sounds at least static, if not completely depressing. Throw in the backdrop of Scituate, a seaside summer-getaway town on Cape Cod, and it's sentimental enough for a Lifetime Original Movie. But even when cushioned between down pillows, Chad Hoeppner's Stewart remains a surprisingly active and charmingly funny guide through the world of loss. He doesn't reject life; he just prefers the one in his bedroom, where he can be alone with his visions of the recently deceased Robbie (Matthew Mabe). Hoeppner and Mabe bring their love story to life so vividly that it's no wonder Stewart won't budge.

In addition to these dreams, flashbacks, and visitations, Stewart's room bustles with visits from his real-life friends and family. If his bedded life denies classification as one of the stages of grief, his loved ones provide pure examples of some of those steps as they try to get him back to his normal life. Using anger as his primary tool, the fiery leader of the mission to move Stewart is his wealthy father, played by a dynamic Damian Buzzerio. Stewart's mom, meanwhile, sweetly accepts, while his therapist and two couples of friends bargain.

Casella provides the cast with great moments of comedic bickering, and Laurence Lau and Stefanie Zadravec take full advantage of these opportunities as Stewart's married friends. Buzzerio's dead-on Boston accent is the perfect complement to his threats to have his bodyguards pull his son out of bed, and his wife (Holly Barron) serves as a sweet foil to Buzzerio's tough love, naïvely accepting her son's wishes with smart comic timing.

Hoeppner's subtle shifts from romantic scenes from the past to present scenes of stubborn resistance hold the show together. And thanks to clever directing by David Hilder and seamless lighting transitions from Graham Kindred and Traci Klainer, the story maintains a lively and engaging pace.

But as Casella's script moves away from the safe harbor of its quirky characters and sharp one-liners, it drifts out toward the dangerous waters of cliché. He feeds the audience standard fights about a woman wanting a baby and marriage and a man who won't commit, while ensuring that every character gets his/her monologue explaining how death has affected him/her in the past. The formula comes full circle as Stewart and his mother share a heart-to-heart and a hug in the closing scene.

With Stewart's flashbacks and visions, the play raises some potentially interesting questions about the difference between reality and memory, but those questions fall prey to similarly tidy conclusions. Robbie first appears as a ghost or an angel, yet in later scenes he appears as Stewart's memory, leaving the audience wondering whether all of these scenes are in his imagination. But then Casella neatly answers questions about the line between the supernatural and memories with a séance, the modern-day writer's deus ex machina.

Although his comic writing and quickly moving script keep Scituate from digressing into a sentimental lament about death, Casella seems almost fearful of leaving his audience with any sense of unease. Look to Scituate for a comforting and amusing story about dealing with loss and sharing love with friends, families, and romantic partners. As for revelations, maybe the most helpful message the show will leave you with is that you're not the only one who doesn't want to get out of bed some mornings.

Singing Wilde

Countless musicals open on and off Broadway each year, and while a few make lasting impressions, others play out small respectable runs and live on only in the memories of the audiences who embraced them. Of course, there are often original-cast recordings to fall back on, but the ambitious company Musicals Tonight! goes even further, producing simple yet faithful revivals of long-forgotten musicals. Its latest foray, Ernest in Love—an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest that ran for 111 performances at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1960—is a lively and entertaining romp of falsified identity and misdirected love. Briskly directed by Thomas Mills, this production delivers a handful of marvelous performances—it's also an intriguing study of how musicalization can both enhance and weaken an exemplary play.

Set in and around London in 1895, the story centers on two young bachelors, Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, who invent names (and sometimes friends and family members) to allow them to carry on their romantic adventures in and out of town. Jack is smitten with Algernon's cousin Gwendolen, who claims to love him because she believes his name is Ernest; her mother Lady Bracknell blocks the way with questions about his cloudy parentage (as a baby, Jack was discovered in a handbag). Algernon becomes attached to Cecily, Jack's young ward, who is also convinced that she loves a man named Ernest.

Wilde deftly spins the plot with tart and delightfully smart language. Anne Croswell's book and lyrics follow Wilde's script quite faithfully, and Lee Pockriss's jaunty, lyrical music mirrors the operetta-influenced style of the late 19th century.

The songs that come off best bring out the larger-than-life qualities of Wilde's delicious characters. When Lady Bracknell scolds Jack about his dubious upbringing, she attacks him while clucking a patter song: "A handbag/a handbag/is not a proper mother/not a proper mother/not a proper mother!" With a nod to the gossiping ladies in The Music Man, Croswell and Pockriss heighten the hyperbolic drama of this overbearing mother while endearing her to the audience through song.

They also succeed with "My Very First Impression," a caustic, delightful duet for Gwendolen and Cecily's first meeting, in which they express mutual undying devotion until they realize they are both (ostensibly) in love with the same man. Here, the songwriters deploy Wilde's satire at its finest, exposing the duplicity and vanity that lie just behind the facade of good manners.

Ernest in Love also rewards its supporting characters (who are rather neglected in the play) with meaty material, and Cecily's tutor Miss Prism and Dr. Chausuble enjoy a sprightly intellectual flirtation in "Metaphorically Speaking." Still lower on the social ladder, the servants Effie and Lane sing the spirited "You Can't Make Love," in which they celebrate their freedom to enjoy conjugal bliss while criticizing the more corseted romantic choreography of the wealthy.

It's only when the writers bow to the most blatant—and limiting—conventions of musical theater that Wilde himself might have sneered. An early—and overlong—duet between Jack and Gwendolen finds them both obsessing about what to wear for what they both assume will be the moment of their engagement. As he agonizes about his cravat, she worries about her hat (obviously, the rhymes are begging for song), but here the extended melodies rob the language of its wit. Wilde's adroit language requires one's complete attention, but in many of the musical passages, one can drift a bit. The cheesy "everybody sing" finale also feels distinctly un-Wildean, but perhaps appropriately musical theater-ized.

The cast rises to the occasion to portray even the silliest moments with, well, earnest dedication. As the sparring and swooning Gwendolen and Cecily, Lauren Molina and Melissa Bohon present razor-sharp and exquisite character studies. Molina finds remarkably fresh readings of some of Gwendolen's most famous lines—her reactions to the subject of Jack's name are especially engaging. Her performance is precise and delicate throughout, and she is matched by the sharp comic timing of Bohon, who makes a delightfully buoyant and winsome Cecily.

Blake Hackler is charming as the straight-laced Jack, and Deborah Jean Templin winningly pours forth Lady Bracknell's dour barbs and sour expressions. Only Nick Dalton misses the mark as Algernon; he's appropriately peevish, but his overt narcissism makes Algy appear less lovably rakish than awkwardly lecherous.

In this spare production, the actors hold scripts to remind us that this is not a fully staged revival, but they certainly aren't fully dependent on them. Colorful placards and simple set pieces announce scene changes, and the costumes are striking, if not lavish.

Musicals Tonight! is an invaluable gift for dedicated musical theater enthusiasts. Like taking a real-time, live-action record off the shelf, Ernest in Love is a glance back at the musical landscape of 1960, a year in which, producer Mel Miller reminds us, The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway and The Fantasticks began its epic Off-Broadway run. The actress who played Gwendolen in the original production of Ernest in Love was in the audience the night I attended—yet another reminder of the powerful connection between musicals past and present.

Home Team

Five Story Walkup is a swift, accessible collection of short plays and monologues by seasoned pros. The show's program says it's about "the places we call home," but these seven works are bound together more by a general plainspoken sincerity than by theme. Web Cam Woman is a first-person narrative monologue about an "ordinary woman" who has struck a Faustian bargain with the Internet, trading her privacy for the opportunity to be her own boss as an at-home Web cam exhibitionist for pay. But playwright Laura Shaine lets the onstage action tell another story. The way the Web cam woman (Cynthia Mace) creeps along the walls of her apartment like a POW evading searchlights gives the lie to her ostensible liberation.

It seems that the anonymous men who pay to watch her are the real bosses here. Shaine lays on the feminist allegory a bit thick, but Mace makes the clash between the woman's plainness and her seamy occupation (admittedly, all there in the text) almost dazzling.

A Glorious Night is the strangest and most experimental of the evening's plays. Harry (David Randolph Irving), a jittery bachelor either preparing for or enduring a potentially hot date, speaks to the woman across the fourth wall. Nothing too radical there, except that Harry's anxious banter includes what sounds like his raw, unedited thoughts. It's as if Irving were performing an internal and verbal monologue all at once.

Whether brushing his teeth or using the toilet, Harry describes his actions in an excruciating singsong. Playwright Daniel Frederick Levin seems to be dramatizing (or reproducing from experience) the tense play-by-play that runs through a person's mind during even the most casual encounters. It's all pretty slight, but too short to be fatally so.

Quincy Long's Aux Cops is the resident hardboiled New York piece. Imagine Steven Adly Guirgis (Our Lady of 121st Street) writing a scene in an outer-borough police squad room. A high-strung candidate for detective (Thomas Eckermann) sweats through an interview with a superior (Daniel Gallant) intent on measuring the exact length and flexibility of his temper.

In this hilarious piece, Long gets some lyrical mileage out of absurd procedural jargon and Dragnet-like cadences that somehow sound just right. Gallant conducts this friendly/testy interrogation with the stony composure of Sterling Hayden droning through Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film The Killing. Eckermann sweats and balks epically, but never broadly. Aux Cops feels like the propulsive start of a larger work about jaded flatfoots in the NYPD's far-flung outposts.

Arguably, the simplest work in this showcase is bird feeder. Clay McLeod Chapman writes and performs this monologue about a secret love affair between two young boys that ended in suicide and left one of the lovers carrying their secret as if it were a heart-shaped albatross. The narrative builds slowly and sometimes feels a little obvious along the way, but it ends on a haunting note. Fadeouts don't get any more resonant.

Gallant, who directs the entire showcase, also wrote the segment Tripartite, about two brothers with a romantic interest in the same woman. The dialogue suggests a Shakespearean romantic comedy modernized by a crack TV writer.

The playful, allusive banter between the brothers, Oscar (Irving) and Ryan (Eckermann), and Renee (Kayla Lian), the castrating mystery woman who threatens to come between them, is light and airy. Perhaps too light and airy at times. Heaven knows, this play's Oedipal themes (the brothers' offstage "Mom" looms just as imposingly as Renee does) and Cane and Abel tensions don't need any further trite underscoring, but Gallant doesn't provide much dramatic tension.

Neil LaBute's monologue, Love at Twenty, takes a piercing snapshot of a 20-year-old woman discovering the treachery of adult relationships head on. She's in love with her married college professor, who has sold her a lot of absurd romantic promises that she, of course, believed wholeheartedly. As the woman, Kira Sternbach makes this naïveté believable and touchingly familiar.

In the closer, Blue Monologue, John Guare offers a slice of biography and local history, a stirring testament to his love for his parents, the borough of Queens, and the art of playwriting. Eloquent and lovely.

Five Story Walkup contains vivid sketches that won't leave an indelible mark on the soul for years to come, but they do entertain and provoke. In other words, go.

High Art

There's an interesting quote by a photojournalist named Jacon A. Riis, who once said, "I'd look at one of my stonecutters hammering away at a rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow, it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before." This quote perfectly sums up the life of Clovis (Annie McGovern), a passionate painter from the 19th century, who suffered an emotional breakdown after a lifetime of being hammered away at by a society that did not treat women as equals. Heather McDonald's feminist drama Dream of a Common Language spotlights Clovis and other female painters like her, who struggled to earn respect in an industry dominated by men.

Dream of a Common Language is not always an easy play to follow, because the dialogue does not sound authentic and natural. The characters often speak slowly into the distance, as if every word they have to say is an important piece of profound, life-altering advice. When the cook, Dolores (Kelli Lynn Harrison), recounts memories from her past, the lights change and beautiful, melodramatic music composed by Chip Barrow and John D. Ivy and performed by Barrow and Zsaz Rutowski fills the theater, even when the speech is not deserving of such a dramatic score.

These stylistic elements do not always work in terms of enlightening us to the true natures of the characters. But they do not detract either, since the characters are all artists, highly emotional and explosive artists at that, who are not fluent in the art of small talk. Clovis's husband, Victor (Kerry Waterson), in particular loves words too much to waste them on pleasantries. But Clovis is guilty of this too, only acknowledging her son, Mylo (played by child actor David Kahn), when his comments refer to her paintings.

The story opens in Clovis's spacious backyard garden, where she frequently retreats to reflect on her past. McGovern plays Clovis with a whimsical, airy nature, expertly constructing a multidimensional character that is both jaded by life and able to see the world with all the wonder and splendor of a young child.

Victor shows considerably less dimension. He has been so conditioned to think of women as inferior that he does not realize how shattering his comments are to his already fragile wife. His ignorance feels unjustified, because there is no evidence of the weaker-sex stereotype in the women he surrounds himself with.

One of his best friends is a strong-willed and determined painter named Pola (Suzanne Barbetta), one of the few women to be admitted into his arts academy. It is she who finally pulls Victor aside to lecture him on how little things can make a big difference, citing as an example the way he often refers to her paintings as "illustrations."

But his biggest offense is to throw a dinner party for fellow painters and colleagues while banishing his wife and Pola to the backyard garden. Shunned from the table, the women invite Dolores to join them in opening a few bottles of wine as they throw their own, liberating, no-boys-allowed party. Before Pola's arrival, Victor had complained that Clovis does not smile anymore, but when we see her in the garden, surrounded by friends who support and believe in her, she is flushed, radiant, and giggly.

McDonald keeps the driving reason for Clovis's breakdown a secret until the end of the play, but suffice it to say that despite all of Victor's best intentions to repair his relationship, it is hard to root for his success. McDonald has created a wonderful, free-spirited character in Clovis, making it hard to forgive the person who plays a significant role in delivering the hundred and first blow that finally breaks her.

Man and Superman

Over the past 60 years, the role of American comic books has morphed from a means of escapist fantasy to a mirror reflecting grim reality. Instead of providing a primary-colored version of the world populated by clearly defined heroes, graphic novels now mimic the murky shades and morality of modern times. Story lines about secret identities and megalomaniacal geniuses have been swapped for plots about the Superhuman Registration Act and multiple universes. What's a lover of fun and spandex to do? Vampire Cowboys Theater Company finds the balance between light and dark in its jubilantly nerdy new show, Men of Steel. With this origin story that riffs on familiar genre archetypes, the "VC comics universe" makes excellent use of the talents of the company's own dynamic duo (writer Qui Nguyen and director Robert Ross Parker) in a kinetic, hilarious production.

Our story begins with good gal Liberty Lady's battle with and takedown of Captain Justice, her partner in (fighting) crime. From there, we are guided backward in time by the narrator, Maelstrom, through the early days of the Captain. As a child, Justice was a scrawny kid named Jason whom Maelstrom (then known as Malcolm) protected from schoolyard bullies.

Though the details of their lives change wildly—Jason agrees to take part in a government experiment to gain superpowers and gets married, while Malcolm grieves over the murder of his parents and lives alone—their mutual desire to fight the good fight leads them to the same occupation. But it's the reason that they fight, as well as the consequences of their personal lives, that shapes the way they approach their work and causes trouble for Jason/Justice.

Besides the main narrative, there are stories about other super-heroes, super-villains, and super-wannabes that weave themselves into the fabric of the tale. Bryant, who can feel no pain, allows himself to be a whipping boy for paying strangers. Los Hermanos Manos ("the Hand Brothers") step up as Bushwick, Brooklyn's own crime fighters because the big guys only battle baddies in high-profile areas. Yet amid all of this heaviness is a fantastically silly low-rent "cartoon" of Captain Justice and Liberty Lady, starring Lego men and a sometimes visible pair of hands.

Playwright Qui Nguyen's script is a mix of wisecracking asides and melodramatic dialogue that takes the most fun and the most self-indulgent aspects of the genre's writing and blows them up to match the life-sized world onstage. Director Robert Ross Parker has his actors strike ironic comic-panel poses now and again but smartly doesn't stick to freeze-frame blocking. Marius Hanford's fight choreography was a little too "safe" at times in the second preview performance I saw, but it will undoubtedly become more fluid and impressive with each night. (For an audience member, it's preferable to notice someone pulling a punch than to be concerned about potential injury.)

Fortunately, the actors have already found their groove. It's tough to sell a line when you're wearing a bright, skin-tight costume, but the eight-person cast of Equity and non-Equity performers do so with panache. Each member of the ensemble finds the humanity and super-humanity in his or her roles and, when required, can tell a joke and dodge a fist with ease.

Two men who did double duty in minor roles—Tom Myers and Paco Tolson—brought a lot to their characters. Myers managed to be heartbreaking and funny as the dim and indestructible Bryant. As Anderson, a frat boy turned cop, the actor never fell for the stereotype, instead making the audience's sympathies shift for and against him. Tolson made for a giddily inept bad guy as The Mole. When playing Damon (one-half of Los Hermanos Manos), he came off as a well-meaning kid lacking in street smarts but with a healthy dose of self-confidence, rather than just another dumb urban kid in the 'hood.

The widespread popularity of TV's Heroes shows that the market for these kinds of good versus evil stories is larger than the traditional teenage boy/aging boy fan base of old. Similarly, Vampire Cowboys's Men of Steel is not just for comic geeks. This production has fighting, sex appeal, pathos, jokes, and a double dose of Abba on the soundtrack. Truly, it caters to the geek in all of us.

Faux Shakespeare in Love

In William Goldman's novel The Princess Bride, the author claims not to have written the book. Instead, he maintains that he has merely abridged the work of another author into what he calls the "good parts" version. In his editorial wisdom, he leaves out the serious parts and focuses only on the action stuff. If one were to decide to write a "good parts" version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, it might come out looking something like Ryan J-W Smith's Sweet Love Adieu. Except that no one dies. And there is a wacky mistaken-identity scene involving cross-dressing.

Now playing at Theater Row's Lion Theater, Sweet Love Adieu is a new comedy written in rhyming verse. Like Shakespeare, Smith knows a good story line when he hears it, borrows liberally, and makes it his own. The language is modern, but elements of the plot are as old as Elizabethan England, Renaissance Italy, even ancient Greece.

In this story is William, a lovestruck youth, whose friends chide him for his devotion to Hannah, who promptly dumps him. He is immediately back in love again when he catches the eye of the lovely Anne. Unfortunately, Anne is also being pursued by the powerful but undesirable…

Is any of this sounding familiar? I hope so. It's all there, from a masquerade to a balcony scene to a potion provided by a friar. This is a comedy, though, so we do not have all those messy deaths and sad endings. Smith does add a few flourishes (mostly comedic touches, like the cross-dressing and the bombastic comic relief of Lord Edmund), and many of them can also be seen in, say, Twelfth Night or The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The Oberon Theater Ensemble is running Sweet Love Adieu in repertory with <a href= http://offoffonline.com/reviews.php?id=975 Merry Wives. )

As Anne, Amanda McCroskery is pleasant enough, but Marcel Simoneau's William is utterly captivating. Kenneth Cavett's Lord Edmund is humorously diabolical and diabolically humorous. Amanda Nichols, Eve Udesky, Tom Lapke, and Walter Brandes (watch for him in drag!) provide delightful support as the young lovers' respective entourages.

Ashley Springer's Sidney is droll as the beleaguered servant, and Dyanne Court has too small a role as Anne's mother. Charlie Moss, however, threatens to steal the whole play every time he appears either as a surprisingly self-aware Chorus, scheming Magistrate, or Friar with a propensity to take the Lord's name in vain. Director Don Harvey has brought together the 10-person cast into such a strong ensemble that one just has to mention them all by name. Harvey also finds the right tone for the piece, neither too joking nor too sincere.

Smith is no Shakespeare, but that cannot be held against him, for who is? His verse conveys the story in clear language, updating everything from poetic imagery about fate to bawdy jokes and scatological references. Using a modern vocabulary (the average person uses a fraction of the number of words that Shakespeare did), he avoids the pitfalls of embarrassing colloquialisms and groan-worthy topical references that plague many such plays. What he has done is to create a cute little love story out of bits and pieces with which we are already familiar. His ambitions are perhaps a bit modest, but he is correspondingly successful in his achievements.

Sharon Huizinga's lights help create more diverse worlds than what the Lion's small stage allows. The dominant feature of Ace Eure's set is a large red bench center stage, which functions as everything from balcony to bier. Smaller benches line either side of the stage, where actors sit and watch when not in the scene. The cast brings all this out at the top of the first act. The whole design is certainly an attempt to recreate the simple stagecraft of Shakespeare's day, also with the sense of traveling players who perform wherever they stop. It also suggests, however, a very modern minimalism and carries with it a strong whiff of what we today call meta-theater.

All the technical aspects add to this feeling of modern/Elizabethan conflation. Of particular note is the extraordinary costume design by Carrmen Wrenn, which uses everyday clothing to create a sort of stylized Elizabethan look. A creatively torn sweater and jeans can stand in for doublet and hose. Yes, even jockstraps function as codpieces. Also, the sound design by Gennaro Marletta III mixes period-style instrumentals with cheesy pop love songs.

The choice of music at intermission is indicative of the production's feel as a whole. Indeed, any show that features Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You" definitely earns my seal of approval.

All in the Family

Samm-Art Williams, whose 1980 Tony-nominated play Home is now a classic of African-American theater, returns to playwriting after a decades-long absence with The Waiting Room, a saucy comedy of manners about racial identity and its fault lines. Over the course of one day, one person after the next in a hospital waiting room in a rural community in North Carolina discovers startling news about whom they are related to. Williams teases out the comic possibilities from this increasingly implausible premise while making a none too subtle statement about the dubious basis for all color and class distinctions. Add freewheeling banter, waggish humor, and sexual capers, and you have the frothy results.

The Waiting Room opens with the declaration by Riley Innes (Michael Chenevert), whose father has been hospitalized following a heart attack, that a waiting room is "the most vicious truth serum ever known to man." The serum is delivered by Riley's garrulous Uncle Patrick (Ed Wheeler), who prides himself on being a truth teller.

Patrick's first victim is Rachael (Messeret Stroman), a young mother who has brought her baby in for tests: he blurts out to her that her birth mother is, in fact, her mother's sister. The Innis family's secret, divulged in the first act's closing seconds, will startle few audience members, but it allows Williams in the second act to dramatize the angst and reappraisals that the disclosure triggers. By the conclusion, everyone's comfortable notions of family and identity have been upended, leading Riley to declare with justifiable exasperation, "Do any of us in this entire country know who we really are?"

Williams has a fine-tuned ear for the black vernacular, especially as it applies to "cattin' around," as Patrick's sister describes his behavior with the voluptuous Cookie (Ebony Jo-Ann), an aging country woman whose sister is in the hospital. "Lots of sparks left in this old furnace," says Cookie, who slathers herself with motor oil to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The six black cast members deliver uniformly strong performances. Wheeler brings great brio to the role of Patrick, the twice-divorced, silver-tongued tobacco farmer and proud Republican. Chenevert nails the more complicated role of Riley, who is forced to examine his deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a middle-class black man in the American South. Jo-Ann endows Cookie with just the right mix of vim and emotionality.

By contrast, the two white cast members, Ron Millke and David Cochrane, come off as stiff and uncomfortable in their roles as Gordon MacInnes and his son. This failure is not entirely their fault, since their characters seem the least developed and most implausible. Gordon proudly wears a Confederate flag T-shirt even as he voices beliefs and values alien to a conservative Southerner, while his son, Riley's old schoolmate, remains a cipher.

A play that unfolds in a hospital waiting room runs the danger of being static, but director Charles Weldon, through skillful blocking of the actors and precise timing with the laugh lines, maintains a snappy pace.

The design team does serviceable work. Almost all the action takes place in the room, which George Corrin has made suitably institutional. The costumes, lighting, and sound unobtrusively contribute to the aura of realism.

The Waiting Room, just like Home in its original 1979 incarnation, has been staged by the Negro Ensemble Company, the august 40-year-old theater troupe that in its early life provided one of the few outlets for black theater artists. This new production marks a welcome homecoming to the theater for Williams. I hope he sticks around this time.

Meeting Cute, Online

Have online personal ads become passé? There was a time when nearly everyone seemed to be trying for luck on dating Web sites. Yet now it appears the trend has begun to nosedive. People are steadily logging off these sites, no longer convinced that the Internet is the best way to meet Mr. or Ms. Right. Even Match.com seems to recognize that online dating is waning in popularity and is trying to entice singles back with its new slogan, "It's O.K. to look." The characters in stirring are wary of the online dating stigma, but they can't help logging on to look for love anyway. On the surface, their taste in music (Mogwai, Devendra Banhart), the clothes they wear (vintage Converse high-top sneakers and thrift store jackets, ballerina flats, and leggings), and their place of residence (Brooklyn's Williamsburg) advertise that they are too cool for personal ads. Nevertheless, these lonely hipsters are registered on Match, Jdate, and Nerve.com, risking potential humiliation for a chance to meet that special someone.

Shalimar Productions's performance of stirring memorably captures the search for connection through modes of technology that keep people separated from one another. The play originally enjoyed sold-out runs at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival and the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is now being restaged at the InterArt Annex for a limited time.

The seven lovelorn Brooklynites are James and Sasha, whose long-distance relationship thrived on titillating e-mails but soured once they moved in together; Sasha's ex-boyfriend Ryan, who generates sparks with Daniel based on their mutual love for the same books and bands; Daniel's friend Joy, who lovingly derides her neighborhood on her widely read blog; and romantic Laura and darkly charming Trip, who quickly fall in love without having ever met.

The script, by Charles Forbes and Shoshona Currier (also Shalimar Productions's artistic director), adeptly captures the online dating world, specifically the carefully cultivated personas men and woman create to woo each other in cyberspace. The play is based on and heavily influenced by Currier's research on actual online personal ads, which is why the characters' ads are so hilarious in the way they mirror real-life dating profiles.

All of the hipsters are well versed in the rules of writing profiles, such as "start with a hook" and "supply a narrative." The play is most exuberant in its recounting of these rules and the difficulty of cramming one's sprawling personality into neat categorizations like "favorite sex scene" or "five items you can't live without."

The affable and talented cast members play well off of one another, whether harmonizing slightly off-key to a Smiths song, chanting their personal ads in overlapping dialogue, or lustfully circling and even chasing each other around the stage in an entertaining visual demonstration of the online mating dance, where they woo one another by e-mail and instant messenging.

All give wonderfully real performances, but Jen Taher's sardonic yet vulnerable Joy is a standout, especially when skewering the wannabe artistic pretensions of Jersey City denizens or talking about meeting a cute guy in a bar and desperately trying to reconnect with him via his MySpace page. Rachel Plotkin infuses Laura with a lovable goofiness, and the character's dreamy notions of romance are both funny and surprising.

Kim Gainer's Sasha shows great dramatic range as she struggles with her excitement and guilt over meeting someone new on the Web as her boyfriend withdraws into his own world. And while Matt Bridges is appealing as James, his recounting of the Pygmalion myth and musings on binary codes feel odd and out of place. You feel too acutely that the playwrights are using him as a mouthpiece to express their ideas about love and disconnection, causing James to seem less three-dimensional than the others.

The stage in which the characters interact off- and online is intentionally sparse, with props and sound used inventively to signify setting in terms of physical space and cyberspace. Desk chairs indicate that characters are communicating via laptop, while bar stools under Christmas lights show they are interacting face to face.

The characters giddily fall for each other online but fear meeting in the real world, worried that the illusion will be broken (as it often is). Some of them meet and some do not. Yet the play is not about what happens when two people finally see each other; instead it celebrates the basic human need to connect, to be cherished, to be understood. And no matter what future advances in communications technology occur, in the end we will always seek a beating heart over a blinking cursor.

Following three of the performances, there will be speed dating sessions for single theatergoers and cast members (two are for straight singles, the other for gay singles). So after watching the play's characters reflect on finding love in New York City, audience members will have the chance to do the same—but in person.

Boys Will Be Girls Will Be Boys

I suppose there is a goodly amount of academic ink to be spilt on the topic of Shakespearean performance by an all-male cast in the 21st century. You could bandy about words like "postmodern" and "deconstruction" or approach it from a gender studies/queer-theory angle to examine patriarchal hegemony. Good Lord, As You Like It is a treasure trove of self-reflexive homoeroticism! But after seeing poortom productions's staging of one of Shakespeare's best-loved comedies, all such speculation can be resolved with one overarching theme: men in dresses are funny.

The young company's inaugural season is now officially under way at HERE Arts Center with this, its first production. Just like Edward Hall's Propeller troupe (which currently can be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), poortom has taken a novel approach by doing Shakespeare the way Shakespeare did, with no girls allowed. In doing so, it has become New York's only all-male Shakespeare company, drawing the attention of high-profile Tony winners and Royal Shakespeare Company members, who sit on the company's artistic advisory board.

The intent of poortom Artistic Director Joe Plummer and As You Like It director Moritz von Stuelpnagel is, however, more than just going all Monty Python on us. For this production, their vision includes moving past lowbrow thrills and exploring the fantasticality and absurdity inherent in the play.

As You Like It certainly offers plenty of opportunities for those explorations. This gender-confusing classic concerns Rosalind (Erik Gratton), daughter of the good, banished duke, and her cousin Celia (the aforementioned Plummer), daughter of the bad, usurping duke. Rosalind, in a short space of time, enjoys the bliss of love at first sight with noble Orlando (Dan Amboyer) and endures the pains of banishment by her tempestuous uncle. With good-hearted Celia tagging along, Rosalind goes off in search of her father in the Forest of Arden. The forest, of course, is where the fun begins.

In order to survive in the wilderness, Rosalind disguises herself as a young man. Chaos ensues not only because she courts an unsuspecting Orlando in this costume but because, in this production (as in the Elizabethan original), the girl plays a boy while in reality being played by a boy. Such logic can make the head spin, but Gratton's performance also makes the heart leap. Every time he (she?) and Plummer take the stage, magic happens—a magic not only due to the sheer theatricality of the casting conceit. These two have crafted performances that rely on stereotypical hallmarks of feminine (or femme-y) acting (hand-wringing, giggling) but also are founded upon truth and heart.

It does not hurt that under the dresses are accomplished actors who masterfully navigate prose and blank verse with nuance, clarity, and speed. Such a wonder is so effervescent and contagious that by the end of the play, with not one but four weddings, the sublime silliness wins one over to the joy of the situation.

If the romantic comedy comes across well, the rest of von Stuelpnagel's production could use a little more depth. Rarely does one feel the evil of oppression, the pain of banishment, and the cold of the wild that lie at the dark heart of this play. The exception, of course, is that classic melancholic, Jaques (Greg Hildreth). He ends the play's first half with a solitary moment not found in Shakespeare's original. If only there were more such instances of pain throughout this production.

On the technical side, Wilson Chin and Kanae Heike's set achieves a marvelous coup de théâtre in switching from court to forest: a little change of carpet goes a long way. Additionally, Lauren Phillips's lights and Amy C. Bradshaw's costumes help delineate space and character in simple but effective ways. The songs by Malcolm Gets manage to be emotionally evocative while pulling off Shakespeare's rhyme scheme smoothly.

In the end, if the production sacrifices any of Shakespeare's poignancy, it makes up for it with its crowd-pleasing buoyancy. Four men wear dresses in the show. All will make you laugh, but any production of As You Like It lives or dies by its Rosalind. Fortunately, with a performance that explores all the joys, fears, and foibles of love, Gratton rises to the occasion.

Dirty Deeds

The streets of New York are littered with aspiring actresses, running from audition to audition and answering casting calls of all kinds. And it is also a sad truth that many directors take advantage of the innocent hopefuls who meet them with stars in their eyes. Such a scenario provides the backdrop, but not the complete spine, of director Jessica Davis-Irons's befuddling production of The Director, from an overly ambitious script by Barbara Cassidy. Sadie (a very dedicated Lauren Shannon) frantically emerges as the show begins, rifling through a cache of cassette tapes. She is looking for one with the voice of The Director on it.

Though never seen, this titular character is a well-known filmmaker with a history of luring women with a lie about wanting to cast them in his movie. Of course, after he has his way with them, he moves on. Sadie, surprisingly, seems to have found herself in the position of becoming one of these naïve victims—and she will not stand for it.

Cassidy aims to accomplish a lot in The Director, but her play is so compressed (running little more than an hour) that she leaves many of her threads still unspooling by the end. She seems to want to say something about the power struggle between the sexes, and the abuses committed by men and women alike. Sadie tries to subvert The Director's advances by placing an advertisement in BackStage magazine to track down other women conned by him and then interview them. This provides opportunities for the cast members—who are from the Bats, the resident acting company of the Flea Theater, which is mounting this production—to share their stories in monologue form for the audience.

Cassidy doesn't state whether The Director has sex with all of these women, or merely leads them on, but it is apparent that the women all feel a sense of betrayal. For that matter, it is also never clear what Sadie's endgame is, and it does not really matter. Her efforts subvert their intended effect, as her life begins to unravel even further.

With such an enticing premise, The Director gets off to a very intriguing start. But no sooner has the play lifted off than it touches ground again. Both Cassidy's structure and Davis-Irons' blocking decisions contribute to the early burnout. The individual interviews begin too early in the play's action and occur sporadically. Some consistency among these "interview monologues" might have made The Director feel more cohesive.

An even more curious decision is a long, early scene in which Sadie and her friends watch an interview subject talk about The Director while they simply smoke and chug on malt liquor for minutes on end. Such inertia is a dramatist's nightmare, so I am unsure why Cassidy included it and allowed it to run on as long as it does.

At the very least, Davis-Irons could have involved the audience members more by showing them what Sadie sees, yet all they can see is the back of a television set. The result is boring and estranges the audience from the action very early on. Later scenes move at a much faster clip, and it's enough to give you whiplash. This is odd, given that Dustin O'Neill created video installations to accompany the interview monologues. Couldn't he have also come up with visuals for this scene as well?

Moreover, Davis-Irons's inability to reconcile Cassidy's multiple threads causes the production to meander. Sadie's crusade against The Director ultimately makes her a "director" of sorts too, but Cassidy never delves further into her need for power and control. The Director might have worked better as a revenge play, but instead it focuses on Snake (Donal Brophy), Sadie's jealous boyfriend, whose violence escalates in a predictably unsettling fashion. But it's not clear if this is the play's main plot or an accidental distraction. Both Brophy and Shannon are to be commended, though, for demonstrating an enviable amount of energy and fierceness in their roles.

Of all the Bats, Catherine Gowl grounds the show in her supporting role of Milton, a dry-humored woman who is one of The Director's conquests. Though Sadie is the one who hunts Milton down, it is Milton who develops strong, potentially romantic feelings, later on. Unfortunately, this development goes nowhere, and the next scene with both actresses features them merely as friends. Havilah Brewster also stands out as an aggressive interviewee; she throws her sinewy frame right into the audience's face.

These women tell similar stories: they answered The Director's call, openly flirted with him, then became outraged when he moved on to another woman. There is a very clear question here: Who is using whom? I am still waiting for the answer.

Songbirds

If you're going to go back to the 1960's, you have to go all the way, and that is exactly what writer/co-composer/lyricist William Electric Black and co-composer Valerie Ghent have done with Betty & the Belrays, a delightful, toe-tapping, finger-snapping musical about a white girl group trying to get signed to a black record label. Designer Christina Fikaris has created a colorful, eye-catching set that instantly establishes the 60's mood. The walls of this intimate theater space are adorned with paintings of bright pink lips and musical notes, while the ceiling is decorated with dozens of glittering records dangling by a string above the audience members' heads.

It is in this setting that we first meet Betty Belarosky, played by singing powerhouse Nicole Patullo. Patullo has fun with her lyrics, singing each song with conviction regardless of whether it is a playful, waddle-like-a-duck dance or a somber ballad about segregation. A recent high school graduate, Betty is at a crucial point in her life where most girls either go to work or get married. Reluctantly, she sets out to apply for the most coveted job a young girl could have at that time: telephone operator.

While standing on line to be interviewed, she meets Connie (Cara S. Liander), who is distraught over a recent breakup, and Zipgun (Vanessa Burke), a switchblade-carrying tomboy straight out of reform school. Desperate not to spend the rest of her life answering phones, Betty convinces Zipgun and Connie to abandon the interview and join her in auditioning for a girl group. Both girls are interested, until they learn the audition is for a black record label.

Because this production is family-friendly, the weighty racial issues it addresses are handled with kid gloves. Betty, Connie, and Zipgun's devotion to civil rights is not in the same category as Martin Luther King Jr.'s, but they do recognize that segregation is a serious and disturbing issue that too often goes ignored.

Betty is not even aware that segregation exists until she meets Sam the Beat (Levern Williams), a local D.J. from the other side of the tracks who opens her eyes to the ignorance surrounding her. He sends Betty and her friends to meet a talent scout for the black record label named Loretta Jones (Verna Hampton), a feisty woman who teaches the girls how to sing with soul and spirit.

Jones delivers the ultimate wake-up call, belting out an inspiring solo number, "Lord, How I Love My Ironing Board," to open the girls' eyes to the harsh realities plaguing her community. Hampton is a strong and passionate singer; as her notes go higher and the song reaches its booming climax, you can feel her righteous anger simmering beneath the humorous lyrics.

Deceiving surface value is a recurrent theme in this play, as it was during the era it examines, a time when girl groups inundated the nation with their music but never with their faces. Because of racial tensions, singers chose to keep their race a secret, fearing alienation from a huge portion of their audience if their identity was revealed.

But despite the turbulent era the story is set in, Betty & the Belrays is an undeniably upbeat production. All of the songs, even the ones about racial tensions, are set to infectious and familiar beats reminiscent of the girl group period (the Ronettes, the Shirelles) of the early '60s. Everyone seems to be having a fun time, whether it's the actors dancing in the aisles to a song about spreading peanut butter ("Go to the shelf, grab that jar. Stand on your toes if it's up too far!") or the onstage band members laughing as they play the show's silly melodies.

With energy like this, it is easy to understand Sam the Beat's advice to Betty early in her singing career. "The only thing that crosses the color line," he tells her when she first visits his studio, "is music."

Desperate Housewives

With any Shakespeare play, it's always a puzzle deciding what do with those legions of extra "guys." In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Lion Theater, director Brad Fryman has cleverly solved the problem of these companions and hangers-on: he's turned them into a guitar-strumming, Hawaiian print shirt wearing, West Coast-style knit hat sporting, rock 'n' roll entourage, and it made perfect sense. Long after the evening was over, I was still thinking that he had it pegged exactly: they're groupies, of course. What else? But the entire production is not nearly so well executed. In fact, much of this light comedy comes off flat. In the play, Falstaff (described on the Oberon Theater Ensemble's Web site as a rock 'n' roll producer past his prime) decides to simultaneously pursue two married women, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford of Windsor, with an eye toward their pocketbooks. The women are infuriated by his love letters and collude to exact revenge upon him.

In the process, Mistress Ford hopes to teach her jealous husband a lesson, and two of Falstaff's disgruntled cronies decide to tell the husbands that he is courting their wives. Meanwhile, Mistress Page's daughter, Anne, is pursued by several men, although the one she wants does not have the blessing of either of her parents.

Having solved the groupies problem, the Oberon took on the next hurdle, the big one in any contemporary Shakespeare production: the language—both for the actors who have to wrestle with it and the director who must convince a potentially skeptical audience that a seemingly foreign tongue has meaning to them. Overall, the actors have a good handle on the words; some of them are clearly experienced with Shakespeare and give able performances, particularly Fryman as Falstaff, Walter Brandes as Master Ford, and Kate Ross as Mistress Page.

Beyond that, this production seems to be trying really hard to convince us that Merry Wives is not a scary play. "But those thee's and thou's I find need better translation. So welcome all to Windsor … Windsor 2006," sings Bardolph, played by Mickey Zetts, who is also the show's composer/lyricist.

But having the wives sport boots and jeans doesn't automatically translate the text for modern ears. The production succeeds at not being intimidating, but it never gels. In particular, the dialogue is sometimes emphasized (or not) in odd places. At one point, one of the men jumps up to declare that Mistress Quickly—a busy flirt/personal assistant type with hipster glasses and a hot pink skirt—is the "prize," suggesting a plot complication that never materializes. Emphasis in key places might have helped to decode the plot a bit more.

Though the production is peppered with good comic ideas—like running accent gags, and Mistress Ford getting kissed by every man in Windsor—good ideas they remain. The play and individual gags are executed too slowly to be funny in practice. And while Zetts's lyrics sometimes serve the play well—particularly as an inexpensive set change ("Another field/Near Frogmore/A totally different field than before")—such songs as "Cuckold" seem unnecessary and slow the action down even more.

The music's relatively laid-back tempo doesn't help the production's pace either. That isn't to say that there is no way this could have worked—if the world of Windsor had seemed a bit sad and stagnant, a bit of slowness might have made sense. But the faces of the merry wives brim with laughter, and the press release from Oberon, which is also producing <a href= http://offoffonline.com/reviews.php?id=974 Sweet Love Adieu in repertory with Merry Wives, says the group was looking for something joyful and celebratory to do.

Although Fryman gives a strong, ribald performance as Falstaff, it would have been wise if he had chosen between acting and directing. The production could have used another set of eyes on it, from start to finish. In fact, one of the show's problems is that Falstaff comes off like the victim of a vicious trick, as opposed to his own folly. Watching his reaction, I felt more sorry for him than anything else. It could be that the lack of comedic pacing offers a little too much time to think, or perhaps a world like Windsor can't be as easily transplanted to today as the show's creators had hoped.

By the end, the wives' machinations seem more cruel than merry. And when, at the play's end, Zetts sings that "Windsor's like any place you ever knew," it seemed a little forced. The only contemporary women I can think of who have so much time on their hands are in sitcoms and evening soaps. Where else could a woman be so desperately bored that she spends her time seeking revenge on a conniving fortune seeker whom she has already found out, rather than just ignoring him?

Mad Scientist of the South Seas

As Carl Sagan once observed, science affects our everyday lives in countless ways, yet very few people understand it. The result is a world in which the cloning of Dolly the sheep can horrify people who don't think twice about their car emissions' effect on the ozone layer. This world seems very far away from that of 1896, when H.G. Wells wrote his science-fiction horror classic The Island of Dr. Moreau, but in Radiotheatre's new staging, the tale is a fable for today. Chilling and thought-provoking, Moreau is also a superbly crafted, fast-paced, and perfectly scored piece of live "radio drama." Catch the abridged version, now playing at the Red Room Theater as part of the Frigid Festival. It's well worth seeing twice—once now and again in October and November at Radiotheatre's H.G. Wells Science Fiction Theater Festival at 59E59 Theaters.

In this adaptation, written and directed by Dan Bianchi, wholesome young American missionary and shipwreck survivor John Prentice (Aaron Mathias) washes up on the shore of an obscure island in the South Seas. He is revived by Montgomery (William Greville), an exile from San Francisco, and taken to meet Montgomery's friend and mentor, the English eccentric Dr. Moreau (Cash Tilton).

Prentice also meets the folks whom Moreau calls "the natives"—strange creatures, not entirely human, who turn out to be the products of Moreau's experiments in the extreme acceleration of evolution in nonhuman animals. Still mostly animal, they fear their creator Moreau and his "house of pain" and so follow the rules he has laid down, in which they are periodically instructed by the horn-headed Sayer of the Laws (Greville).

The actors deal admirably with the challenge of playing humans, animals, and everything in between. In particular, Elizabeth Burke portrays both Prentice's prim but gutsy fiancée and the fierce but loving islander Lota as a sharply specific pair of opposites. Robert Nguyen howls, screeches, and barks his way through his lines as Moreau's bestial henchman Mungo, and, as Moreau himself, Tilton is alternately affable and maniacal.

As Prentice, Mathias exhales some of his lines as if he's actually been running through a forest, exhausted and terrified. Wes Shippee juggles the sound and his role, the beast-man Oren, with aplomb. Patrick O'Connor's narration is clear and passionate but does not overwhelm the characters.

Originally on a mission to bring the doctrines of his church to South Seas islanders, Prentice quickly becomes confused. Should he flee Moreau's island or must he save its "natives" from their devilish god? Is his ambition to change the people of non-Christian nations into people more like himself (which seems as hubristic as Moreau's diabolical project)?

Radiotheatre tells this engrossing story in its usual style. Actors stand in front of microphones, reading from their scripts with great skill in the characterization. A complex score of sound effects and music creates background, mood, and suspense. From the heartbeat-like drums to the shrieks and yowls of the islanders to the South Seas waves, Bianchi's sound design conjures up sets and action to rival the most expensive Broadway mega-musical or a blockbuster enhanced with computer-generated imagery. And it's all in each auditor's theater of the mind.

A worthy follow-up to the same company's character-driven, chilling The Haunting of 85 West 4th Street, this is a must-see show. Or rather, a must-hear and must imagine for yourself show.

Paradise City

New York and Los Angeles have engaged in a scrappy rivalry for years. As the entertainment capitals of their respective coasts, they are the nexuses of the theater (NYC) and film (LA) industries, and are always dipping into each other's talent pools. Yet despite the surface differences, meteorological and otherwise, they share a common underbelly. Both attract scores of unconventional people who reject or are rejected by their hometowns. These cities are shaped by their large population turnover—by people coming to pursue their dreams, and people fleeing from the harsh realities involved in that pursuit.

A nonstop emigration from sorrow is the focus of Los Angeles, a dark, fish-out-of-water story by Julian Sheppard. The narrow, subterranean black-box stage of Downstairs @ The Flea is the perfect venue for this lurid, sex- and drug-filled tour of the fringes of the movie trade. Playwright Adam Rapp puts down the pen for a turn in the director's chair for this chilling mood piece.

Twenty-something Audrey reluctantly agrees to move with her boyfriend from Seattle to Los Angeles. What is supposed to be a "fresh start"—and an escape from the banalities (and some vaguely referred to problems) of Javatown—results in a jettisoned, skill-less Audrey fending for herself in an itty-bitty apartment.

Living in a big city without friends or money would be a tough situation for anyone. Unfortunately, Audrey is also coping with speed addiction, daddy issues, no ambition other than to be loved, and a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder. As she sinks lower and lower, unable to save herself or be saved, two thoughts comes to the perceptive viewer's mind: Has she gone through this before? How many times will she go through this again?

Onstage for the entire hour and 40 minutes, Katherine Waterston, in a fierce and vulnerable performance as Audrey, sheds the "daughter of Sam Waterston" label that is invariably attached to her name. The Flea's current crop of Bats (its resident acting company), who play the users and abusers that wander in and out of Audrey's life, create vivid portrayals without stealing focus from the main character.

The background characters come off as mostly remembered figures from a dream. Though the events play in chronological fashion, they seem to be told as a series of hallucinated flashbacks "narrated" by a growly female singer in a clingy black dress who comes on during scene changes. Amelia Zirin-Brown's sexy vocals about nonsensical things were backed by a pianist and drummer; the music's grunge-era sound provides an apt soundtrack for Seattle-expatriate Audrey's addled head.

The Flea's use of bright orange chairs and blue hand props, which are undoubtedly a concession to the eyes of elderly audiences in an all-black space, also contributed to the trippy environs. Rapp's staging, encompassing the full length and width of the playing space (even using the front of the seating section as a nightclub's bar), completes the pixilated picture.

Sheppard's script was slightly hampered by its protagonist. Sometimes the repetitiveness of Audrey's behavior and the low lighting had a numbing effect, making one question the length of the show. Also, an intervention and a father-daughter scene, while probably true to the story and accurately scripted, seemed a little tired.

It would've been interesting if the playwright had explored the idea of Audrey being trapped in a cycle of destructive behavior in different cities. Perhaps the scenes could be tampered with so that not all of the memories read as truthful ones. These are notions that could have vaulted a good show into great status.

During the curtain call, Waterston had difficulty getting out of character after 100 minutes in Audrey's skin. Los Angeles is also hard to shed. Days afterward, her performance and bits of dialogue linger like club smoke in the fibers of your coat—and make you glad that you're living in New York.

Spoken Tribute

Forget a séance. The best way to resurrect a writer—as prodigiously argued by the respectfully rendered and intelligently incarnated new theater piece Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell—is to let his words speak for themselves. A relentless storyteller, explosive performer, and inveterate writer, Gray took his own life in 2004, two years after a car accident threatened his health and mired him in an unshakable depression. After his untimely death, his widow, Kathleen Russo, teamed with Lucy Sexton, a director known for her work at P.S. 122, to construct a collage of Gray's work for an intimate performance on what would have been his 65th birthday.

The benefit—culled from both Gray's published writing and his personal journals, letters, and informal scribbles—was met with unbridled enthusiasm, and Russo and Sexton decided to present the work to a wider audience. The Minetta Lane Theater is now home to what can only be called the Spalding Gray event—a heartwarming and heartbreaking evening of theater performed by five dynamic performers. More than a simple "greatest hits" collection, Stories Left to Tell is both eulogy and meditation—a loosely and gracefully constructed testament to Gray's eventful life and artistic legacy.

The five actors take on various aspects of Gray's experience—Love (Kathleen Chalfant), Adventure (Hazelle Goodman), Journals (Ain Gordon), Family (Frank Wood), and Career (Fisher Stevens at this performance; guest stars will rotate throughout the show's run). Perched atop, around, and among stacks of black-and-white composition notebooks (a Spalding Gray trademark prop), the actors seem to literally spring from his writing like animated figures in a pop-up book. Set designer David Korins takes this idea even further with his backdrop—a tapestry of handwritten pages that enigmatically absorb and deflect Ben Stanton's evocative lighting design. Lest we forget, Gray's writing holds this production firmly in place.

The performers take turns reading from Gray's work, and while they only intermittently respond to one another, they always listen attentively. Chronologically, the production is anchored by Gordon, who sits behind a table and reads directly, and intimately, into a microphone. This was Gray's classic oration style, and it's here that we return to connect with his most emotionally bare musings and observations.

Not that the rest of his writing isn't suffused with intimate details. Gordon is mirrored by Stevens, who plants himself behind a microphone to spin career-driven stories that are both darkly sardonic and richly humorous. The other actors are more mobile, as Chalfant touchingly reveals amorous epiphanies, Wood keenly renders fond—and fatal—family memories, and Goodman blazes her way through Gray's most intrepid encounters.

Together, the excerpts form a complex weaving of genre and subject that creates a stirring representation of an entire life span—wit, sadness, and grief move fluidly into one another like Christmas lights on a string (to borrow from Gray's reflection on the love he finds in his once broken but newly complete family):

"No, there was a new kind of love going around in this new family. It was so different from the one on one, the only love I'd known before. This love alternated like a chain of broken circuit Christmas lights. I loved Marissa for the way she loved her brother. I loved my son Forrest for the way he loved his mom, and turned her into a mother before I could, leaving me to know and love her for the woman she is."

That such an intimate and poignant discovery can coexist with a ribald tale of stage flatulence is testament to the breadth of Gray's observation and ingenuity. Whether slapstick or stirring, his writing has an immediacy and truthfulness that makes you want to grab a pen and take notes.

And this reactive appreciation is exactly what Russo and Sexton would wish; unlike many posthumous productions, Stories Left to Tell doesn't try to cram its material into a tidy box. Instead, this is an invitation to share in Gray's process of uncovering the drama of the everyday.

After a funeral, guests often return to a cozy living room where they reminisce about their lost loved one. This involuntary reflex serves to bring the deceased back to life, so much so that the person's presence fills the room. In the case of Spalding Gray, this audience seems exhilarated at the opportunity to convene with an old friend—welcomed into the warm glow of one man's life, learning, and legacy.

Iron Curtain Call

Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu had been an ardent underground agitator against the Romanian fascist regime in his youth, only to become one of the most unflinchingly hard-line dictators during the Cold War. When the Romanian people revolted against his draconian rule in December 1989, they faced a confusing instability in leadership. To this day, the chaotic and bloody violence surrounding the Romanian Revolution is shrouded in conflicting reports and controversy about what happened. Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, now playing at the Hudson Guild Theater, is a whirligig exploration of dramatic forms that confronts the anarchic hope and despair of this historical moment and its immediate aftermath. Churchill and a group of acting students actually went to Bucharest three months after the revolutionary turmoil to gather evidence for the play and witness the effects of the uprising firsthand. Mad Forest offers a hodgepodge of documentary truths and surrealist fictions to represent a bizarre political situation where the line between truth and fiction continues to be a dizzying blur.

The first portion of the show is a fast-paced series of vignettes that capture an agitated day in the life of the Romanian workers: short sketches about waiting in breadlines, classroom propaganda, domestic tensions that arise from severe economic depression, and the struggle to carry on a normal existence in the face of a mounting political catastrophe. While Churchill's Brechtian alienation effects force the audience to think instead of responding viscerally to the characters, some scenes were so brief or disorienting that they seemed to lack any coherence or depth before the next one followed on its predecessor's coattails.

The second, and most successful, portion of the play depicts the actual weeklong skirmishes and sieges of the revolution through the voices of soldiers and workers, each speaking toward the audience in a collective monologue. We are left to connect their individual stories into a historical narrative ourselves, ending with a powerfully elegiac anthem and a gathering street vigil for the slain.

After the intermission, the show changes shape yet again to present an allegorical dialogue between a hungry vampire and a starving dog, complex symbols of the political bloodshed, parasitic relationships, and desperation that the Romanian people had to deal with in the atmosphere of their newfound (but ultimately foundationless) freedom.

The play's last section depicts a more traditional, domestic drama about how two families from different classes cope with the fact that the widespread economic shortages and political Balkanization won't be fixed overnight. The last scene is a wedding reception that transforms into a brawl, only to shift back, somewhat less believably, into a celebration containing folk dances, much as Romania's own fate swung precipitously between celebrations and violence at this time. But, if this scene's plot is not believable, it raises fascinating political questions about how much one can believe any historical representation, what use that representation has been put to, and what forces are behind the scenes doing the plotting.

The large cast was uniformly adequate, though Megan Ketch stood out in her sympathetic if brief portrayal of a poor young flower seller, while Matthew Gray delivered a strong performance as an arrogant officer who was nevertheless disarmingly compassionate beneath his tough exterior. Adam Belvo also showed multiple talents taking on a diversity of roles ranging from a priest, a grandfather, and a vampire to an old aunt, a painter, and a soldier.

Director Julia Beardsley O'Brien struggled with the difficult task of assembling this diverse and, at times, collage-like text into a dramatically effective whole. Though the play has a firecracker-fast pace in many sections, some scenes felt static and overly long, since once we absorbed their political point we were ready to move on to the next one.

Set design (by Neil Becker) and blocking were conservative, considering the postmodern delirium of forms—political and dramaturgical—that the play both depicts and challenges through its ironies. A few innovative stage techniques, such as a two-tier set during a scene where a teacher faced the audience on a platform while her students faced the audience from below, proved the most interesting. Here, for a rare moment, the production managed to find a parallel to the text's investigation of narrative disjunctions in both theatrical structures and the theater of war.

Mad Forest is a radical study of how revolutions often come disappointingly full circle, as one tyrant may be disposed only to be replaced by another. Although the play is presented in a turbulent variety of voices and formats, this production too often seemed stodgy and monotonous.