Word Play

At the conclusion of On the Verge, one character exclaims, "I have such a yearning for the future! It is boundless! Not annoying. Not annoying at all!" Unfortunately, in the 20% Theater Company's recent revival, Eric Overmyer's script feels boundless in its length and is more than a little annoying. While the story's three Victorian-era ladies press forward on a time-traveling expedition, the plot, weighed down by an overbearing love affair with language, never takes off.

Upon venturing into "Terra Incognita," Mary (Julie Baber), Fanny (Johanna Weller-Fahy), and Alexandra (Nina Louise Morrison) discover objects from the future (such as eggbeaters, Cool Whip, Super Soakers, and car mirrors) and absorb anachronistic knowledge through "osmosis." The actresses have a strong, warm chemistry and offer performances so imaginative that it's too bad they don't have the material to match.

They obviously relish Overmyer's alliterative and verbose dialogue (one muses, "What a succulent word! Dirigible," continuing, "Ineligible dirigible. Incorrigible dirigible. Gerbil in a dirigible."), and they deliver their lines with panache. However, the production's overemphasis on perfect diction often robs its scenes of any resonance. With sharp, choppy speech, the actors spit out their lines so precisely that their performances are more academic than dramatic. The play, which sounds very pleasant, often seems better suited to a book on tape than a stage.

Sometimes with her tongue literally pressed in her cheek, Weller-Fahy seems so excited by the lyricism of her lines that she delivers each one like a scale, rising in pitch and volume. She is much more successful with serious monologues of simpler vocabulary. When Fanny worries about what may happen to her marriage, she says, "The future looms as steady and stable as a table top." The sentence may be plain, but when Weller-Fahy sheds her gleeful demeanor, it provides a touchingly hushed pause outside the show's motor-mouth pace.

As Mary, the longwinded leader, Baber manages to make studied pronunciation sound quite natural. Her breathy excitement and good timing add a cool credibility to even the most ridiculous lines. She is at her best when getting giddy over anthropological smut: thinking about Masai warriors clad only in blouses, flirting with a cannibal, discussing mating rites. Her deep growls and shrieks of pleasure give the stiff, know-it-all Mary some shape.

Morrison steals the show as the adorable Alex. She consistently accents just the right syllable for comic effect and knows the exact moment to add a wide-eyed glance or pursed-lip squeak to quirky remarks like "trousers, ladies, are the future" or "trapezoids of destiny." She also infuses Overmyer's verbal gymnastics with much-needed flexibility. Deconstructing the word "imaginative," for example, she waves her hands, as if pulling the word apart in the air. "Image. Native. Image-native. I am a native of the image. An indigine of the imagination." Combined with one of the script's best turns of phrase, her palpable wonderment lifts the words above sound bite territory and makes a fine scene.

In their travels, the female explorers also find an array of unusual characters, including a yeti, a gas station attendant, and a lounge singer. Cliff Campbell plays every supporting role with a rubbery versatility. In contrast to the women's staccato precision, many of his characters have a sloppy style of speaking. As Nicky Paradise, a singer from the 1950s, his words slide into one another. It is a welcome departure from the women's schoolmarm talk and effectively proves Fanny's earlier prediction: "I've seen the future and it is slang." Although conversation may suffer as time wears on, Campbell makes the loss easy to swallow.

While the play is mostly an aural experience, director Portia Krieger and costume designer Denise Maroney provide some visual delights. The ladies' costumes are an amusing blend of dainty (billowing blouses, hoop skirts) and outdoorsy (large boots, earth-toned jackets), particularly their lacey, shell-lined pith helmets. One other memorable detail is the characters' discovery of "lunar snow." Illuminated by several circles of light (by Scott Needham), the actors sprinkle fistfuls of glitter into the air. As they run their fingers through the sparkling dust, it looks as though they're touching falling snow. The effect is both cosmically beautiful and wickedly inventive.

Unfortunately, these moments are too infrequent to save a show that doesn't have enough substance to justify its two hours and 15 minutes. It's telling that its most poignant point is accidental: in one of Mary's final speeches, she fires off a list of future technologies and tragedies, ending with "Ground Zero." Since the play was published in 1985, the phrase was probably describing where the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, however, the words feel chillingly contemporary. The characters may be downright giddy about what's to come, but in a world where the most familiar point of reference is catastrophe, the future doesn't look too bright.

Three Sisters

Three sisters reunite in a coastal town in the north of England during a snowstorm for the funeral of their long-widowed mother. This formulaic scenario snaps to vibrant, singular life in Third Encore Company's incisive production of British playwright Shelagh Stephenson's dark comedy The Memory of Water, which won Britain's Olivier Award in 2000. The play's title refers to how an element, once introduced in water, will make its presence felt long after it is gone—a none too subtle reference to the mother's lingering influence on her daughters' lives.

The way we remember our past and how those narratives color and influence the present is the overarching theme. Every permutation of memory is folded into the work: displaced memories, appropriated memories, false memories, the absence of memories, the oblivion of Alzheimer's disease, and post-brain-trauma amnesia.

Teresa, Mary, and Catherine have little in common with each other; even their recollections of their family past are starkly at odds. With the snowstorm pinning them inside on the eve of the funeral, they pass the time in their mother's bedroom arguing and sorting through her old clothes and their old memories. As whiskey, marijuana, and grief break down their defenses, raw unhappiness, age-old resentments, and long-held secrets rise to the surface, forcing each sister to look at herself and her relationships with men in a cold, unforgiving light. Thanks to Stephenson's biting wit and gallows humor and to Ellen Lichtensteiger's careful direction, the play develops an emotional punch but is never dour.

Teresa (Abby Overton), who runs a health supplements business with her husband Frank, is the prim and hyper-organized oldest daughter who has shouldered the burden of caring for their dying mother. Mary (Karen Sternberg), smart and brittle, is a psychiatrist who has been carrying on a long affair with a suave celebrity doctor (Todd Reichart) who refuses to leave his wife. Catherine (Zoe Frazier) is their immature and attention-seeking younger sister who binges on men, drugs, and clothing.

They are the progeny of Vi (Victoria Bundonis), a refined, ultra-feminine woman of working-class roots who has clawed her way to middle-class respectability. Vi, wearing a green taffeta cocktail dress, makes cameo appearances in Mary's revealing dreams.

Stephenson's gift for dialogue is manifest in the play's moments of emotional revelation. In these dreams, for example, Vi finally has her say. She scolds Mary, "You invent these versions of me, and I don't recognize myself" and then tells her how she sees it: "I'm proud of you, and you're ashamed of me."

Stephenson is also particularly fine in recreating the lacerating arguments that unhappy couples can have in private. It's hard not to flinch as Teresa and Frank, in one exchange, shred the comforting stories they have told each other about their love and marriage.

The five-person cast, on the whole, gives convincing and sympathetic portrayals of these imperfect characters. Only Frazier, as the youngest daughter Catherine, seems unable to move beyond caricature, though in all fairness her character is the shallowest of the bunch.

The mother's genteel Victorian bedroom is meticulously created by Tim McMath. Jessica Cloutier pithily captures each character's personality in his or her clothing, though she goes over the top with Catherine's zany outfits. David Roy's eerie lighting and Katherine Miller's low-buzzing sounds evoke the off-kilter reality of the dream sequences. Where the design team stumbles is in creating a compelling illusion of a raging storm outside, depriving the play of a resonant symbol.

The Memory of Water was Stephenson's first stage play, and she's written four more since. It's whetted my appetite to see more of her work.

The Possessed

In 1986, renowned British playwright Caryl Churchill teamed up with anthropologist David Lan to write A Mouthful of Birds, a haunting ensemble play that explores the reasons why people become "possessed" by spirits, ideas, and impulses. In this series of interwoven nightmares, a mother kills her baby to neutralize her aggressive husband and a giant, predatory, birdlike creature. A modern transsexual reads about 19th-century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, and that long-dead spirit helps him to free his own body from his alienation from it. An alcoholic is tormented by an unpainted window frame that pours alcohol down her throat. A midlevel executive of a meat export company falls in love with a pig that is headed for his own slaughterhouse.

Breeding Ground Productions's revival at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center's Flamboyan Theater, staged as part of the Spring Fever Festival, showcases some compelling performances by gifted actor-dancers. As the bird spirit, Skyler Sullivan is disturbingly birdlike. He has a bird's crooked, wings-heavy posture down perfectly, and his taut, heavy movements and rasping voice make it clear that this demon is more vulture than nightingale.

Standing out in another nonhuman part is Mark Lindberg as the Pig, whose eyes stare with eerie pathos from behind a simple pink mask that obscures his face's more human features. Lindberg also plays Barbin and Pentheus, the latter a major character in The Bacchae. Euripides's ancient Greek tragedy about destruction by mad women is a major influence on Churchill and Lan's writing. As the infanticidal mother, Debbi Jean seems both mundane and completely mad.

Director-designer-sound-painter Tomi Tsunoda has introduced two innovations into this production, and, sadly, neither appears necessary or helpful. The first is sound painting, a musical technique in which performers without instruments conduct performers with instruments through a program of improvisation by using a complicated sign-language vocabulary of more than 700 gestures developed by New York-based composer Walter Thompson.

In theory, this is a perfect way to illustrate and enhance Churchill and Lan's story, as the audience watches the sound painters (Tsunoda, Jessica Levine, Laura Shiffrin, Joanna Lampert, and Andrew Scoville) control the musicians while the demons control the possessed characters. In practice, it creates some beautiful, often chilling, trance-like music, but as the sound painters stood, knelt, or jumped around at the edges of the thrust stage, they frequently obstructed my view of the actors.

Furthermore, the musicians whom the sound painters ostensibly control are not visible, with the exception of one woman sitting upstage at a laptop with a glowing white Macintosh Apple appliqué on the downstage-facing reverse side of its screen. (The music sounded electronic, and no musicians are credited in the program.) As the play's dialogue is not improvised and is not intended to vary during the show's run, it is not clear why the music needed to be impromptu.

The second directorial interpolation is actually a deletion—of the intermission. Intermissionless plays are fine if, like Churchill's brilliant Far Away, they are 60 minutes long. A 90-minute long intermissionless play, if it is a good one, is also watchable, and there have been many engaging examples, from Salome back in 1892 to this year's tense, rapid-fire Nixon's Nixon.

However, the performance that I saw began at 8:30 and ended well after 10:30, without a break. I have been assured that the play is supposed to run only two hours, but even that may leave spectators feeling exhausted. That the performers are able to manage it is impressive, or maybe they are possessed by some particularly energetic spirits.

If you have the stamina to sit through this show, it is an interesting experiment, if not an entirely successful one, with much in it that is fascinating.

Dark Shadows

The meeting of historical giants has long been a favorite topic of drama. Whether it's a virtual documentary (Frost/Nixon), a more stylized imagining (Copenhagen), or complete balderdash (Travesties, Picasso at the Lapin Agile), something fascinates us about the dramatic tension that occurs when literary, philosophical, or political geniuses collide. Can you imagine, then, the meeting of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, two masters at the dark heart of American literature? That is the question posed by Kraken, Len Jenkin's alternately fascinating and frustrating play, currently at Walkerspace. Based on the pair's true-life friendship, Kraken is a mélange of history, metaphor, and death.

In fact, Death, in the person of a young woman (Heidi Niedermeyer), literally stalks the characters throughout this play. When Melville (Tom Escovar), depressed by his artistic and personal failings, embarks on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she is there. On the way, he visits his old friend Hawthorne (Augustus Truhn), who is serving as American consul in Southport, England. The introduction of Hawthorne prompts Death to leave Melville's side, but she is never very far away. Both authors, who produced such classics as Moby-Dick, "Benito Cereno," The Scarlet Letter, and "Young Goodman Brown," were well acquainted with evil, madness, despair, and other dark matters.

Indeed, for good chunks of Kraken, the darkness is gripping. As Melville grapples with feelings of despair and worthlessness, he longs for the release of a suicide he cannot commit. Hawthorne is wracked with illness, facing the last years of his life watching his artistic output ebb. All this is witnessed by Hawthorne's wife, Sophia (Tracy Liz Miller), who longs to help but is powerless to do anything.

Even more compelling are the characters the men meet in Southport. A phony Russian huckster named Malkovsky (Marc Geller) and his "tattooed princess"/prostitute/wife (Eva Patton) have too many secrets to be merely comic relief. Then there is Father Jeremy (Richardson Jones), a priest devastated by the cruelty he has witnessed, and whose faith is as tenuous as any character in one of Hawthorne's or Melville's works.

In moments like these, Jenkin's writing is top-notch, with some scenes making for remarkable short plays in and of themselves. The trouble, though, is a lack of cohesion among all these threads. One is never quite sure exactly what story is being told. Is it one man's struggle with irrelevance and depression? Or two writers coming to terms with a world that simultaneously influences and disgusts them? Or one woman helpless against death's hold on the two men in her life?

Exacerbating this problem is a series of needlessly complex framing devices: the play begins with a prologue by Death, who reads from Melville's Moby-Dick; then it moves to Southport, November 1856, where Sophia is forced to do some expository heavy lifting. Next, it flashes-forward to Melville in Palestine in December of the same year, reflecting on the voyage he has just finished. Finally, it comes to rest in October at the start of his trip, where the narrative begins in earnest. Hawthorne isn't even onstage yet, and already one's head is spinning.

Director Michael Kimmel has done a remarkable job of trying to make all this come together. For the most part, his staging is crisp, with many quite lovely juxtapositions and stage pictures. The way Sophia sings near-angelic music downstage from Malkovsky's ugly business is a particularly nice counterpoint. Escovar brings a slow-burning intensity to Melville, which is sometimes weighed down by being a little too slow in its burning. Truhn, as Hawthorne, has crafted a subtle and compelling performance that is hard not to watch.

The technical elements, including Ben Kato's sets and lights and Scott O'Brien's original music and sound design, create an almost impressionistic setting. A murky haze, crashing waves, and a relentlessly ticking clock provide a heightened realism that is lovely to be in the midst of. Unfortunately, though, it also reminds one of the script's amorphous shortcomings.

One thing that provides some unity to the play is repeated reference to the titular sea monster. Although the sheer number of allusions to the Kraken becomes a little heavy-handed, it nonetheless remains an impressive image. Like all good metaphors, it is open-ended and could refer to any number of things. Is the Kraken death? Despair? Or is it perhaps the cross of literary fortune that these two giants had to bear, each in his own way?

Italian-American Reconciliation

There's a delightful perversity in the fact that America was founded by people escaping their past, only to have it dragged up again by their curious descendants. For Susan Ferrara, an Italian-American actress, the desire to understand the question "Where do I come from?" turned into the solo show Peasant, now running as an engaging, evolving workshop piece at Chashama. Ferrara tells the story of three Italian sisters who come to the United States as teenagers during World War I. The eldest, Assunta, narrates most of the story, which is trigged by a question from her young granddaughter Susie for a class project. Assunta details the conditions in the town of San Marco; the travails of her husband, Francesco; and their problems with their too eager to assimilate son, who rejects traditional values for the lure of a fast buck. As Ferrara changes perspectives—portraying Assunta, her sisters, Francesco, Susie, and several other characters—the audience gets a full picture of the way that America changes her and her family through two generations.

The language of the piece is lyrical, full of short sentences and repeated evocative phrases. Perhaps because Ferrara is the writer and performer, she is able to deliver this material effectively, avoiding a singsongy or affected delivery. The piece's structure is a little shaky at the start, without a clear idea of the show's protagonist, but the narrative finds its groove as it's taken over by the strong-willed Assunta.

Overall, there is more shaping to be done here with regard to the order and importance of the stories. Fortunately, Ferrara's acting carries the play. Her transitions between characters are fluid and blissfully unmannered. She has a strong command of accents; although at the start the elderly Assunta skewed somewhat Russian to my ears, Ferrara seemed to modify it and ably handled the many dialects of the other characters. She also changed her center of gravity and posture to capture the tale's players. Once the ensemble had been established, there was never any doubt as to which role she was essaying.

The show is performed in a black-box space, with Ferrara wearing a simple layered dress and clutching a white cloth. Yet the dialogue and characterizations paint the stage with scenery and do not leave the audience feeling visually shortchanged or understimulated. Dale Heinen's direction keeps the show moving along with a sense of importance—not an easy task when the subject is someone's personal history and there is no particular urgency or secret involved in its telling.

At the end of the performance, it is not clear whether these people are presented accurately or if Ferrara has taken poetic license with her relatives' histories. But her creations are so lively and soulful that they seem real. While there is a lot of heartache in Peasant, the act of storytelling is a redeeming one: her past becomes our past, and we are the better for it.

Of Tempests and Tempters

Homer's Odyssey is a grim tale of extreme hardship and grief, with a steadily increasing body count. Hilarious, right? In fact, when watching this new adaptation by writer and director Kate Marks, you'll be surprised to find yourself laughing. In Odyssey, produced by the Looking Glass Theater, she tackles the classic with a modern eye, a colloquial tongue, and a comic touch. Yet in treating an epic so lightly, Marks often reduces the original poem to a childish level that is more irritatingly goofy than clever. Still, thanks to her crisp extraction of the text's potentially humorous themes and astoundingly imaginative choreography, these missteps—like those of its title character—are more like unfortunate hiccups in a play that turns out to be an entertaining interpretation and a visual stunner.

Marks limits her adaptation to The Odyssey's most action-packed parts, Books V-XII. Since these sections are told mainly in Odysseus's words, they lack the narrator's hero worship, which fits the play's purpose well by presenting Odysseus as a flawed leader. We see a captain who gets lost, can't give a good pep talk, and manages to always make the wrong decision. Andrew Zimmerman gives Odysseus real depth, offering a solidly dramatic performance in a crowd of comic caricatures. With a gradually weakening posture and an increasingly weary expression, he evolves from a cocky fame junkie to a (literally) washed-up man who at last recognizes his faults.

His severity provides great fodder for the supporting cast. When Odysseus says, "I'm flawed," as if considering a completely foreign concept, one of his few remaining men sarcastically responds, "What a revelation!" Whether they're exploring an island or plotting mutiny, the Greek soldiers' frustration and dumb-jock sensibility make them the perfect screwball companions.

Although the troops blame their captain, the gods aren't making things easy either. After Odysseus allows his men to rape the prophet Cassandra (a wonderfully versatile Libya Pugh, who plays several parts, including Odysseus's wife and one-half of the man-woman Tiresias), Athena (Elena Chang) swears retribution and calls on Poseidon. Nevertheless, she helps the mortal through his trials. In voice and movement, Chang shows smooth restraint as a forgiving god. With her fluid athleticism and Marks's creative blocking, Athena shape-shifts from god to stag to Odysseus's wife.

If there's a fine line between parody and misguided caricature, Marc Santa Maria's Poseidon and Jamie Lea Thompson's Circe walk it carefully. Santa Maria's goggle-clad sea god is a bully with a penchant for wrestling-match taunting. While this shtick could grow thin, his excited buoyancy turns Poseidon's insults into sidesplitting smack-downs.

Circe, a witch, torments Odysseus's men by turning them into pigs. As a company that aims to "explore a female vision," it makes sense that Looking Glass's production makes Circe into a seductress-cum-feminist avenger. Her character initially comes on a little strong with the "men are swine" argument, but Thompson's transitions from sultry slinking to screechy indignation are both terrifying and amusing.

Other characters don't achieve this balance as successfully. Calypso (Sarah Petersiel), a nymph who falls in love with Odysseus, is portrayed as a petulant flower child, while Polyphemus (Anthony Wills Jr.), the Cyclops, is portrayed as, well, a petulant mutant child. Their performances and the script make these characters excessively youthful (Calypso sings loopy melodies, Cyclops speaks in baby talk), and here the play loses itself in overly goofy jokes and gestures. Since both actors show promise in their other parts, it would be nice to see them give these characters more dimensions.

The play's overuse of cultural anachronisms is similarly hit and miss. A large part of the epic tradition is capturing a culture, and Marks's use of contemporary and historical references is fitting. When she hits the mark, it breathes modern air into the classic, such as when the soldiers try to remember why they sacked Troy and one of them proposes "Oil ... olive oil." Unfortunately, most of these asides don't pack such a meaningful punch and come off as bland attempts to gain cheap laughs.

Most of the bumps in the play's dialogue are smoothed out by its graceful choreography. With a black-box theater and a bare-bones set (oil barrels as masts, a second tier, a color-changing curtain), the nimble actors serve as scenery, props, and special effects. Marks's blocking (there was no choreographer) for depicting the sea is simply breathtaking. Clad in whirling blue skirts and tight tank tops, the actors craft several raging storms.

Their most delightful creation is the tide arriving on Calypso's shore. Rushing downstage in two rows, the first line of actors drops lightly into the arms of those behind, leaving a billowing blue skirt and a slight breeze in their wake. Repeated several times, the dance is a beautifully sensual device to show the passage of time.

Significantly, Marks cuts her version short. We don't see Odysseus find his way home. But with fabulous images like these, it's difficult to care if he ever will.

Gangster Musical

In Theater 1010's latest musical, a Salvation Army "broad" is reluctantly attracted to a suave, gray-suited gangster with a taste for dangerous risks; a stern, disapproving superior officer suspects her loyalty; and a crew of crooks struggles to keep their way of life despite some Bible thumpers' best efforts. It sounds like Guys and Dolls, but it isn't.

Happy End was written in 1929, ages before Frank Loesser's Broadway classic, by the Threepenny Opera team of Bertolt Brecht (lyrics) and Kurt Weill (music), along with Elizabeth Hauptmann, author of the original play. The show seems to have inspired Guys and Dolls, but it breaks boundaries in ways Loesser never did.

This edgy, gritty, cynical romp covers some territory that Threepenny did previously, but it is well worth seeing, not least because of Weill's strident, memorable score and the strong, vibrant performances of a multitalented and energetic ensemble under David Fuller's well-paced, visually arresting direction.

Happy End begins in Bill's Beer Hall, a Chicago franchise. The original Bill's, we're told in a rousing drinking song, was in Bilbao, Spain, but became defunct under rather unclear circumstances. Having just threatened the pharmacist Prinzmayer, who owes protection money, a crime gang led by the ruthless Dr. Nakamura, aka "The Governor" (Greg Horton), is plotting Prinzmayer's destruction.

Into the mix saunters Bill Cracker (Joey Piscopo), the gray-suited hero. He has just knocked off Nakamura's top rival, a gangster so creative, he orchestrated a robbery of the Niagara Falls train by turning his gang into a wedding party, with himself as the captivating bride.

This makes Bill a "big shot"—and a liability. Nakamura and the boys plot to frame him for the pharmacy job, but they are foiled by a self-destructively honest Salvation Army officer, Hallelujah Lil (Lorinda Lisitza), who sacrifices everything that's important to her in order to tell the truth and save Bill's life. If only, Brecht and Hauptmann seem to sigh, the rest of humanity could live up to Lil's example.

Of course, they don't. In this script, unlike The Threepenny Opera, Hauptmann and Brecht are more satirical than didactic. Of the innocent Lil's fall from the Salvation Army's grace, Bill observes, "It ain't my fault that Jesus fired you 'cause he's got a dirty mind." The stupid young gangster Baby Face, when told that his alibi is an "intimate dinner party," tells the cops he was at "an inanimate party."

Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold's translation either preserves the original's wordplay or invents some new gems. "Please to keep your organ out of shakedown operation," Nakamura tells his church-organ-hawking associate. "This is serious business." The one weakness is the Asian Nakamura's perpetual confusion of his L's and R's. This leads to a tongue-twisting disaster when he tries to say "revolver," but it soon gets predictable, and, as a racial stereotype, it jars with the piece's overall humanism.

There are many standouts in the strong company. Lisitza acts Lil with confidence, as a worldly, world-weary missionary. This playing against type keeps Lil engaging. Lisitza is also a brilliant singer, a belter with a full soprano voice modulated by moments of sweetness but never weakness.

Other notable performances include Dave Tillistrand as a cross-dressing gangster, who sings in a powerful baritone and gives a bad-drag portrayal of "Madam Goddam," the legendary bawd of Mandalay; Judith Jarosz and Cristiane Young as two surprisingly similar and formidable godmothers, of the crime syndicate and the God syndicate; and Timothy McDonough as Baby Face, whose agile slapstick is almost as hilarious as his facial expressiveness.

As Bill, Piscopo is alternatingly threatening and frightened. His swagger transparently disguises the character's insecurity. He writes the character in his body language, which is always specific, in character, and in the moment. Piscopo also directed the "heist film," a silent-movie rendition of the gang's comical bank heist. The onscreen action is coordinated seamlessly with live action in this clear and inventive multimedia moment.

Set and lighting designer Giles Hogya creates an atmosphere halfway between Berlin cabaret and Chicago dive bar. The stage is crowded with a jumble of simple furniture and theatrical clutter, with a spotlight standing dead center. The hats of the gang's victims hang menacingly on a far wall, and blue lighting washes Lisitza's face with a deathly cold hue during her most chilling songs. The costumes illustrate the characters well, and I especially liked Nakamura's silver cobra-headed sword cane.

Several of the actors double as musicians, with their playing, directed by Michael Harren, well synchronized with the singers. In short, Theater 1010 deserves kudos for bringing the undeservedly obscure Happy End so riotously to life.

She-Man

The Gallery Players, Brooklyn's acclaimed theater company, typically mounts outstanding productions in its intimate venue, but the group wobbles a little with its latest effort, an uneven revival of the gender-bending romantic comedy Victor/Victoria. The show opened on Broadway in the mid-90s and played over 700 performances, thanks no doubt to its venerable star, the incomparable Julie Andrews. And what fun it must have been to see Andrews, the prim and proper ingénue of Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music, transform herself into a drag queen. Or, to put it in the musical's terms, "a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman."

If that sounds confusing, it's because it is, and the charade quickly loses steam, particularly in this sluggish production. The title character (well, the female half) is Victoria, a down on her luck American girl who stumbles into the path of an enterprising showman in a 1930s Paris nightclub. Toddy, who soon reveals that he is gay, takes her under his wing (and into his flat), where she dons the pajamas of his former lover. When the disgruntled rogue arrives to collect his belongings, he mistakes Victoria for a man, and Toddy has a brilliant idea: turn Victoria into "Victor," a talented, irresistible, and all too authentic cross-dressing act.

Feigning a "relationship" and sharing a bed, Toddy and Victoria crop her hair and dress her in a suit to create an enigmatic showman named Victor—taking the town, as they say, by storm. Terse questions about gender authenticity and problematic romantic interludes soon intervene and disrupt the show, most crucially when Victoria falls for King Marchan, who seems to be falling for her, or rather for Victor, as well. Victor/Victoria, like the much more dignified La Cage Aux Folles before it, aims both to celebrate and question how and why we fall in love.

In the hands of Blake Edwards (book) and Leslie Bricusse (lyrics), however, there's little substance to ground us in the plot. Lyrics like "There's no question he's a most attractive guy/The trouble is, so am I!" and "Though I don't even know him/I know him so well" fail to transform this gender subversion into meaningful material. Instead, the show becomes a trifle in which the characters are, for the most part, cartoons.

With its thin plot, Victor/Victoria depends heavily on its production numbers, and Stacy Moscotti Smith has created splashy and often witty choreography to accompany Henry Mancini's brassy, jazzy, ebullient score (played with flair by the small, but terrific, orchestra, led by Justin Hatchimonji).

But although director Matt Schicker has assembled an excellent ensemble of dancers, his leading lady lacks the charisma to infuse this production with electricity. The draw of the award-winning original production was surely its star's ability to channel a certain je ne sais quoi that made her/him irresistible to both men and women. Christine Paterson sings prettily, dances well, and breaks into a stunning smile at all the right cues, but she lacks, at least in this role, the smoldering presence that drives audiences wild. In a pleasant, poised, but rather bland performance, she gets lost in the glitzy swirl of the other dancers, when all eyes should stay involuntarily focused on her.

The other leads don't do much better. Thomas Poarch offers an appealing but wilted take on the King, and John Blaylock's Toddy is a lovably droll, if somewhat hollow, incarnation of Henry Higgins transforming his Eliza Doolittle.

In fact, almost every time the dancing stops, the energy also evaporates, and weak (often nearly inaudible) singing plagues the production throughout. The overambitious and problematic scenery also contributes its share to the problems, with awkward and near-catastrophic set changes that draw focus from the performers.

The exception to all of this is Allison Guinn, whose wise-cracking, fearless take on Marchan's dimwitted girlfriend Norma is a diamond in the rough. Only Guinn takes the production to its appropriately gauche level, and she sells the material for all it's worth. A sure-witted comedian, she scores first with the bawdy "Paris Makes Me," an ode to the city's decadence.

Later, she stops the show with the uproarious nightclub number "Chicago, Illinois." A crass and clumsy kewpie doll, she hurls herself across the stage with unabashed moxie, every twist of her hips and flick of her wrist a specific window into her character. In this production, the show should almost be renamed Norman/Norma.

Tainted with forced innuendo and oversimplified gender banter, Victor/Victoria can best be appreciated as a slight confection and, perhaps, a wispy excuse to dance up a storm. It's refreshing to see the often serious-minded Gallery Players take on a more fun and frivolous project, but here's hoping that their next effort, whether deep or ditzy, will deliver the polished quality of entertainment their audiences have come to expect.

Odd Couple

At the center of Delaney Britt Brewer's An Octopus Love Story is a couple that go together like saltwater and taffy. An uneasy mixture of gay rights agitprop and romantic comedy of the Rock Hudson mold, this offering from Kids With Guns focuses on a love affair between a gay man and a lesbian. At the helm are Kelli Holsopple and Josh Tyson, beguiling as the oddest of odd couples, who manage to sail over the roughest breakers. Jane (Holsopple) is a lesbian receptionist who's not out to her co-workers but is in a serious relationship with another woman. Tyson's Danny, a handsome waiter, is single and gay, as is his friend Alex, a waspish PR man (Michael Cyril Creighton). Alex proposes a protest against the ban on gay marriage in New York that will take the form of a marital union between Danny and Jane, two openly gay people who have no interest in sex (with each other), procreation, or wedded bliss. Their sham alliance will demonstrate the idiocy of the ban, argues Alex—and will incidentally give him a career boost. The skeptical Danny agrees to meet Jane, whose lover, Tosh (Jenny Greer), is Alex's co-worker and helped cook up the scheme.

Once Danny and Jane meet, however, things don't go as planned. In a scene involving a forgotten umbrella and Strange Bedfellows, an old Rock Hudson movie whose title dovetails neatly with Brewer's story, the pair find a lot of common emotional ground. It's a tribute to Brewer's writing and director Mike Klar as much as to Holsopple and Tyson that their scenes together have such a winning chemistry. Especially this crucial sequence, both hilarious and touching, in which they lip-sync Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida's dialogue, then swap their roles.

Brewer's title, incidentally, is drawn from a story Danny tells about Sam, a friend of his who loves ocean life. Sam's pet octopus fell in love with him and climbed out of the tank to snuggle by Sam in his bed until Sam picked up the creature and returned her to the tank. The story sounds like what Mark Twain would call "a stretcher," but the oceanic motif is given a nifty visual parallel by Brian Sidney Bembridge's aquarium-like set, with its occasional dividing curtain of transparent vinyl, and furniture in blue and aquamarine.

Stretching is definitely required, however, to believe in the politically motivated characters. Alex and Tosh are so pretentious, arrogant, and bullying that one wonders how Danny and Jane could tolerate them as friends, let alone be maneuvered into marriage. ("When I see an amazing work of art I weep, triggered by the impact of weighty thought and empathy," rhapsodizes Tosh.) And a bogus reporter (Andrew Dawson) who interviews Danny and Jane is so pushy and unprofessional that the scene doesn't ring true for any of the characters.

Tellingly, the person with the most common sense is Jane's blond bombshell stepmother, Kathy, a former Miss Houston (played with convincing vivacity and warmth by Krista Sutton), who declares, "You know your daddy—he's quite a percolator" when she means "procrastinator."

Gays and lesbians may experience strong emotional bonds, but whether their sexual orientation is malleable is a tricky point. Brewer isn't clear whether Danny and Jane are discovering a corner of bisexuality in themselves or not, and she glosses over the crucial moment. After Danny unexpectedly kisses her, Jane warns him, "I need to know if you crave me. Physically." Danny responds, "That's not how I work." After a brief exchange, she warns him, "I need it all, Danny. Romance. Sex. The whole nine yards." His answer, "It's covered," indicates a major reversal of his declared sexual orientation from a few minutes before, but it is just unconvincing.

Despite the cardboard nature of Brewer's villains, she often writes with deft turns of phrase ("this situation is a real Fabergé egg—cruel in its delicacy") and sharp wit. Her likable characters raise the hope that she will try her hand at an unpolitical romantic comedy.

Whatever and Whatever, Amen

If you've ever wondered how you were supposed to find God among the modern world's bafflements, like BlackBerrys and weight loss programs, then you probably need to go to Church. Not real church on Sunday morning, but playwright/director Young Jean Lee's latest production at P.S. 122. Church is an experimental worship service dedicated to the absurd, navel-gazing thoughts that run through our heads and how to reconcile them with Christian dogma. Lee's stream of consciousness play is funny and heartfelt but—probably on purpose—not always intelligible.

The setup and execution, like the best experimental theater, is simplicity itself: a tastefully restrained pulpit (designed by Eric Dyer) for four "reverends" who conduct a 45-minute service. This service includes song, dance, and a full choir at the end. Each of the four takes a turn giving a testimonial on how he or she came to Christianity, with the Rev. José (Greg Hildreth) handling the bulk of the preaching.

In his sermon, José gives a good example of how abstract and silly Lee's text can be: "The love of Jesus is a little baby goat that comes to you and kisses you and eats sand out of your hand. And the reason why I give it sand is that sand is warm and golden and kissed by the sun. And little baby goats like to eat things like tin cans."

Lee's point might sometimes be lost in the randomness of her text, but overall she seems to be commenting on the self-obsession inherent in modern society and how God doesn't, you know, like that. But sometimes, as in the example above, she is commenting on the randomness itself. As in her previous piece, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Lee shows a tendency to analyze the ways in which people keep talking around things, to themselves and to others. It is on this level that her new work succeeds tremendously: She asks us to consider if people have as much trouble talking to God as they do to each other.

Because of the play's zigzagging logic, Lee has trouble conveying a clear message. At the end of the "sermons," it is clear we are supposed to feel converted and sold on her opinions, but we are never really sure what we are converting to or what we are buying. This ambiguity is likely to ignite a few discussions after audiences see the show, but ultimately it probably won't get any further than a shrug of the shoulders and comments like "Who knows?"

The staging is very casual, and it is believable that this traveling ministry has set up temporary residency at P.S. 122. An apt example of the lack of dynamism in the blocking is when the three female sermonizers prepare for their dance number at the end. Instead of entering kinetically with the music, they clumsily move the podium out of the way and then slowly take off their shoes. The dance itself, choreographed by Fay Driscoll, is a lot of fun but purposely loose to allow the cast members to clinch their eyes tightly, shake their heads, and generally have a good, evangelical time with it.

All four sermonizers—Hildreth, Karinne Keithy, Weena Pauly, and Katie Workum—handle Lee's eccentric material very well. At times they erupt into fiery passion and jubilation, but usually they deliver the peculiar lines to great, deadpan effect. Hildreth's character has the most to say, and he moves through the text's sincerity and senselessness with calculated ease. In particular, his very serious delivery of a monologue about Satan and mummies is engaging and memorable. Likewise, Keithy's dreamlike account of rearranging a nativity scene and fighting villains with a superhuman angel was very entertaining.

Though I am loath to get too deep about it (because I don't really think that's what Lee would prefer), Church is a significantly moving and original piece with a lot to say about the delusions of egomania. It also challenges both cynics and believers to consider if Christianity might be the honest answer we're looking for in our lives. What's more impressive is that Lee takes a cue from our impulse-driven culture and cleverly compresses her new age gospel into a very funny and short program that's easy to download but takes time to decrypt.

On His Mind

The two musicals typically regarded as composer William Finn's best—and most autobiographical—work feature an intriguing alchemy: bright humor with a dark underbelly of despair. One is the legendary Falsettos, a touching examination of modern gay life that riveted audiences in the 1990s. The second is A New Brain, now being revived by the Astoria Performing Arts Center in a vibrant, impassioned production. In one emphatic breath, Finn captures the fantastical experience of a neurotic composer hovering on the brink of death. The intermissionless show follows Gordon Schwinn from the first sensations of a headache, to the hospital, through brain surgery, and into a coma. Within these bounds (and with eccentric characters to spare), Finn manages to capture a captivating slice of humanity and, for the most part, so do director Brian Swasey and his excellent cast.

Weary from composing silly melodies for a kids' TV show featuring Mr. Bungee, a man dressed as a frog, Gordon complains of artistic malaise over lunch with his manager, Rhoda. She encourages him to keep plugging along ("First kids' TV, then next the Broadway shows!" she enthuses), but Gordon suddenly slumps over the table. Rushed to the ER, he begins his journey back to life—and some sense of optimism.

On hand to offer advice, consolation, and sympathy are a kooky group of people who exist in both his real and imaginary life: Rhoda, forever glued to her BlackBerry; his overbearing mother, Mimi; his sailing-addict boyfriend, Roger; a tart and "thin" nurse, Nancy D.; her foil, the "nice" and "fat" nurse, Richard; a doctor; a minister; and a homeless woman with a knack for clairvoyance.

For the most part, the show, with a book co-written by James Lapine, shifts seamlessly from one song to the next. In fact, A New Brain fairly bursts with songs, the majority of them cleverly composed and craftily constructed. Finn excels at finding humor in the lyrical—"Sex is good, but I'd rather be sailing," confides Roger as he sings gorgeously. Finn also rips away surfaces to expose the honest desperation underneath: "I don't ask for hugs—just want money to buy more drugs!" bellows the homeless woman.

Of course, this is all filtered through Gordon's subconscious (and unconscious) imagination, so we're dependent on the central character to usher us through his adventure. As the neurotic Gordon, Joe Pace finds just the right mix of anxiety, narcissism, and self-deprecation—he's instantly likable, sings gloriously, and he watches with charming glee as his imagination spins the characters into increasingly absurd—and revelatory—arrangements. In Pace's controlled and moving performance, we watch a confused man define and redefine himself against his life's despair.

And he doesn't just react to the other characters' histrionics; in the confessional "And They're Off," Gordon recalls how his father gambled away massive sums of money betting on horses. With a wry and wistful look, Gordon remembers not only the pain but also the undeniable excitement of those family days at the races.

Swasey places the ensemble members (who sing backup) onstage with Gordon during this song, and they clutch metal walkers, which they use as percussive instrumentation. It's clever staging, but it distracts from Gordon's story and also underscores one of the production's weaknesses: as the music broadens into Finn's lush harmonies, the cast's powerful vocals often obscure the lyrics at the center of the song. This overexuberance often launches the music to deafening levels, and the group choruses—while undeniably exciting—would benefit from more tightly focused music direction. The cast was also occasionally out of sync (in pitch, in volume, and in rhythm) with the offstage orchestra.

Balance issues aside, the top-tier cast puts forth compelling performances. Justin Birdsong is irresistible as Richard, the nurse who complains of being "Poor, Unsuccessful, and Fat." Fresh out of college, Birdsong is a superb vocalist with a deft and original comedic touch that many actors work years to achieve.

Stephanie Wilberding offers a sharp comic reading of the harried Rhoda, and she winningly flits through the tongue twister "Whenever I Dream," in which she becomes the dummy to Gordon's ventriloquist. Lois S. Hart throws away much of Mimi's caustic comedy, but she delivers an enigmatic and unforgettable rendition of the haunting ballad "The Music Still Plays On," in which Gordon imagines how his mother will react to his death.

Designer Michael P. Kramer has constructed a simple and evocative set—rectangular boxes glow along the back wall (and later illuminate X-rays), and Swasey smoothly incorporates the simple hospital fixtures (sliding curtains, window blinds) into his inventive direction.

Finn certainly has a light touch, but he's painting with deep, rich colors, and the APAC production captures both the humor and depth of A New Brain: a small, everyday opera that just happens to surge into questions of eternity every now and then.

On the Job

I'm still not quite sure what to make of Smoke and Mirrors, but one thing is for certain: I am still thinking about it. With the help of the Bats, the Flea Theater's resident repertory company, the play brings to life one day in the life of corporate America. The setting is Anywhere, U.S.A. Playwright Joseph Goodrich provides no details, instead creating an undefined, universal work setting, where all the action takes place in the break room of an office building over the course of one day. As one scene flows into another, the various characters interact during their many smoke breaks, discussing their latest workplace problems or discoveries.

The seven characters seem to have very different functions, although they are never specified. Anita (Susan Hyon), for example, regularly clashes with the supervisor of her transportation department (who remains offstage) and seems to be on thin ice. Anita is intense and nervous about her situation, but doesn't seem intent on doing much to fix it, making her character a stark contrast to Terry (Jason Dirden).

I wasn't sure what Terry did, but it didn't seem as if much ever worried him. Dirden and Hyon are a stark contrast in acting styles. He is a more reactive, in-the-moment performer and makes the role his own. But Hyon, who carries many of the play's big scenes, delivers monotonous line readings; they sound rote, as though they were coming straight off the page. I wish director Nick Faust had done more to provoke the emergence of a real character from Goodrich's blueprint.

As many herbal cigarettes are smoked, we meet the other characters: Tammi (Aurelia Lavizzio), a security guard, and her supervisor, the creepy Moses (Ben Horner); Estelle (Jocelyn Kuritsky), a largely silent observer who smokes like a chimney but is quick to spray air freshener in her colleagues' direction as they puff away; and Drew (Stas May) and Chad (Parrish Hurley), the group's most intriguing pair. Goodrich never explains what they do, but they always enter the break room in bloodstained lab coats, apparently reeking of an awful odor of some sort. Are they working with animals? Humans? To what end? We never learn, which is both the beauty of Smoke and Mirrors and its undoing.

As we watch the characters interact, the play appears to be headed in one direction. Goodrich seems to be commenting on the perception of corporate workers as mere cogs in a big wheel, depicting how work friendships are little more than tenuous relationships based on superficial bonds. However, around the halfway point, the show moves in a different direction, one that Goodrich probably assumes is deeper and more revelatory than it appears to be to the audience.

Strange events suddenly occur. One character's rant against the American flag is followed by a witch hunt, with Tammie and Moses accusing Anita of sending a threatening, treasonous e-mail to the company. Anita claims no knowledge of the event, and the audience is inclined to agree with her, but we learn little more about the letter's origin before Drew and Chad appear, vomiting onstage as a result of fish tacos they had consumed earlier at lunch.

Are these developments related? Again, Goodrich doesn't clarify, and so not only do these moments appear unlinked, they are never explained. The action only gets odder rather than illuminating by the play's end. This is a shame, because I was perfectly willing to ride the play out to its conclusion.

Faust's production creates a great universe, but Goodrich's plot muddles his messages. If Smoke and Mirrors intended to depict its characters as automatons, I'm not sure what he accomplishes by steering it in a more ominous direction. He is too ambitious in an absurdist way, and raises too many unanswered questions. The piece's title is only half true: I saw a lot of smoke in this play, but very little of myself reflected in it.

Baby Talk

Breeder, beware: Upon viewing Amy Wilson's snappy and entertaining solo show Mother Load, you may start to question every decision you've made as a parent. And that's a good thing. By sharing her personal bouts with compulsive, self-destructive parental perfectionism, Wilson encourages parents, would-be parents, and anyone who has parents to learn to relinquish control and stop sweating the small stuff. This frank, funny, and rather frightening adventure on the front lines of motherhood should be required viewing for the overachiever in all of us.

Wilson wrote Mother Load in response to the myriad voices (some real, some imagined) that surrounded her when she became a mother. An accomplished and educated woman with a college degree and a thriving acting career, she planned to tackle motherhood as she would any important task—with thorough research, careful planning, and hard work.

But as she soon discovered, things don't always work out as planned. A specific birthing schedule should be shredded when your hours of labor climb into the double digits, a screaming baby won't win you any friends at a postnatal exercise class, and overly detailed preschool applications may very well drain every bit of your time (and sanity).

Under the sharp and savvy direction of Julie Kramer, Wilson tells her story chronologically, beginning with issues of conception (the humiliation of infertility clinics) and ending as she sends her first son off to preschool. (She now has two sons and is pregnant with her third child.)

Wilson is brutally honest about her expectations, experiences, and reactions to modern parenthood, in which everyone from your aunt to a well-dressed stranger on the playground feels free to offer unsolicited advice. With so much information available at your fingertips, she points out, "there is no right answer."

Wilson also offers humorous (and all too brief) anecdotes about her husband, who responds to the early stages of labor by eating everything in sight. It would be interesting to hear more about her perceptions about the male approach to parenting, because, as Wilson tells us, there's certainly much more pressure on the mothers—men are more easily forgiven for their transgressions. "It's cute when dads screw up," she wryly surmises.

Horror film-inspired music and lighting effects provide witty and somewhat overwrought commentary on Wilson's supposedly dire parenting mistakes. Although we laugh at the absurdity of her experiences, they underscore the detrimental power of social expectations, which encourage us to live "in a pressure cooker."

A poised and confident actress, Wilson turns in witty portraits of a variety of characters. Especially entertaining is an avowed "lactivist" whom Wilson consults for breast-feeding assistance at a store called "The Breast of Everything." She attacks her subject honestly and with a sparkling sense of humor.

As talented as she is, Wilson is no show-off, and she wisely keeps the show at an intimate level, creating the effect of a conversation between friends. As she speaks to the audience, she wanders around the over-cluttered living room set, folding baby clothes and picking up toys. It's clear that this is a home overrun by the needs and wants of children, and as she clears away the mess, we begin to feel that she's finally finding some space for herself. But her efforts to clean up, we soon realize, reflect her attempts to be a "perfect mom." In Mother Load, at least, a messy, lived-in room is a treasure to behold.

Wrinkle in Time

It is plays like Lisa McGee's Jump! that make you wish theater had a rewind button. This fragmented narrative contains a mosaic of interconnected scenes that eventually merge to form a darkly comedic tale of six strangers who find their lives intersecting in the most unexpected ways. Structured in the same nonlinear style as movies such as Pulp Fiction and Memento, Jump! moves back and forth through time, interweaving a series of ridiculously coincidental moments that all take place in the final hours of New Year's Eve. The story's unconventional storytelling method demands that you pay attention from the very beginning. To ensure that we do, the first line of dialogue is shrieked by a drunken Staten Island woman named Hannah (Meredith Zinner), who screams "Happy New Year!" into a nearly empty bar before darting outside. Only one man, Ross (Jordan Gelber), is there to hear her. He sits alone, drinking beer and nervously cracking the shells off peanuts.

He is soon joined by his skittish friend Johnny (Stephen Plunkett), who stumbles in with an orange gym bag containing a gun. We learn that a string of bad gambling choices has saddled them with a debt too large to pay back. And so they have been strong-armed into being hit men, with their target a man named Pearce (Tim Spears) who apparently owes more money than they do.

But Jump! is a comedy, and so even as tragedy unfolds, the story remains upbeat and witty, with zinging one-liners, zany characters, and top-notch acting to keep it afloat. Plunkett and Gelber make the most of their bumbling hit men shtick, especially in a scene where Ross insists that a tightly wound Johnny play the Madonna CD they found in their hot-wired car. And Ali Marsh, Sarah Grace Wilson, and Zinner are delightfully over the top as three Staten Island barflies, throwing back tequilas, trading snappy remarks, and bonding over their mutual disdain for a former friend, Greta (Bree Elrod), who has mysteriously backed out of their New Year's Eve plans.

It is important to absorb every detail of the women's drunken blathering, as their slurred speech contains important clues to the story's outcome. The second time Hannah shrieks "Happy New Year!" antennas should go up. The phrase now has an entirely different meaning, serving as the moment where past, present, and future are about to converge.

But despite its nonlinear structure, Jump! is not a difficult story to understand. McGee hides her clues the way parents hide Easter eggs, in really obvious places where they know the kids will look. She basically gives us the ending but keeps us guessing about how we are going to get there. As the play nears its climax, the key scenes start to fold into each other, and everything comes together nicely save for one annoying plot point that doesn't seem to fit where we know it belongs. McGee wisely waits until the very last second to show us where it goes.

In this respect, Jump! feels like an interactive experience. When the final piece is revealed to us, those who instantly figure it out will have to laugh at the cleverness of the plotting, whereas those staring blankly at the stage will probably still be piecing it together. Amusingly, when the lights came up and the audience was filing out, a chorus of voices suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, now I get it!," followed by delayed laughter.

Fortunately, Jump! lends itself to a second watching. It is short, quick, intermission-less, and so engrossing that it is over before you know it. And once it is, you'll have trouble resisting the urge to dump the puzzle pieces back on the floor and solve it all over again.

Story of a Life

Star worship is a funny thing. Why do people get so caught up in the lives of the privileged? And how do they choose the ones to lionize? As interesting as icons like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are to so many people, their film careers were short-lived. Dean, in particular, made only three films before he died: East of Eden was the only one to be released before his tragic death in 1955 from a motorcycle accident. Both Rebel Without a Cause, the film that fed his antihero image the most, and Giant were released posthumously. And his two Best Actor nominations—for Eden and Giant—largely stemmed from overriding public sentiment rather than critical fervor.

I went into Jamie...Another Side of Dean expecting some sort of enlightenment about a side of Dean that filmgoers never get to see. The play, written and directed by the ambitious George R. Carr, does not take that route, however, probably because of the overwhelming amount of biographical portraits that have appeared in the half-century since Dean's death. But I'm not convinced that the path Carr has chosen is much more illuminating.

Jamie takes place in a dance studio (the play itself is performed at the PMT Dance Studio) run by Katherine Dunham, the famed modern dance innovator, on the first anniversary of Dean's death. Dean (Mark McCullough Thomas) reappears to Eartha Kitt (Courtney Allen), who was his dance teacher before finding fame on her own. (According to Carr's play, she referred to him as Jamie rather than James.) What follows is a mishmash of scenes suggesting events that may have occurred. These nine scenes are supposed to represent key moments in Dean's life, but they never crystallize to offer a greater understanding of him.

For one thing, it is difficult to make sense of the syntax of these scenes. Since all of them take place on the same dance floor, with the small cast sitting in close proximity to one another, it is difficult to make the temporal jumps back and forth in time, and from one location to another. Further complicating matters is that two of the other actors in the play, Derrick Brenner and Natalia Klimas, play generic characters known as the Guy and the Girl. These are nondescript types who appear throughout Jamie in multiple encounters meant to tempt Dean in various situations.

I suppose these scenes are supposed to represent Dean's never-ending quest for love, but they appear too surreal to provide much insight into the actor's tormented, lovelorn condition. The scenes are awkward and only serve to strip the characters down physically rather than emotionally.

Denise Fiore and Jonathan Holtzman both recur in alternating sequences as Dean's mother and father, respectively, and these scenes make more sense. The scenes set in Dean's hometown of Fairmount, Ind., make clear the heavy impact his mother's death had on him, and Holtzman is particularly effective in bringing to life the torturous relationship Dean had with his father. No choice Dean made was ever rewarded with his approval.

Nonetheless, Carr's production seems to ramble instead of building up to a catharsis point. Each of the scenes feels as though it could benefit from some trimming. Unfortunately, other conditions in this venue didn't help: the lack of climate control in the dance studio made for a stifling atmosphere, and street traffic outside could constantly be heard throughout the show.

Thomas does an admirable job in the lead role. At first, I must admit to being distracted by an odd resemblance between him and Montgomery Clift, the brooding Method icon of the 1950s whom Dean supplanted in popularity. But it takes no time for Thomas to overcome this likeness, and, through a mastery of physical tricks, hunched shoulders, squinting eyes, and tall hair, he truly becomes Dean from the outside in. Brenner also makes a tricky role quite moving; he and Thomas share several intimate encounters onstage, and the two play their mutual attraction and awkwardness quite convincingly.

The women in the cast do not fare quite as well. Fiore's and Klimas's roles simply felt underwritten, but Allen seemed disengaged during her performance. She didn't project enough, rarely made eye contact, and lacked dynamism.

And so does Jamie itself, overall. In this case, a strikingly talented cast and an innovative creator clash, and James Dean's life gets lost in the shuffle.

On the Couch

What to do with so-called "couch plays," which tend to pivot on talk over action and are generally set in a living room? It's a common concern for many directors; they either try to infuse them with movement or avoid them altogether. So the fact that Theater of the Expendable is staging a new play with a setting that never departs from a living room—and has a couch as its focal point—is, in an unlikely way, something of a risk. I'm not sure it's a successful one, but for a short one-act play, it was worth a shot. You do feel as if you're in the title character's living room while watching The Tragedy of John. The Studio Theater in Theater Row is intimate, and the audience, which faces the couch, is in the same physical location as John's (Liam Joynt) beloved TV set. Television seems to be the main activity in his world, and he is already watching it as everyone enters. There's also a well-stocked bar, although John and his poker buddies seem to prefer beer. And this, apparently, is John's life.

In a larger space, playwright Neal Zupancic's slice-of-life piece would have been swallowed whole. As it is, director Corinne Neal has allowed the play's first half to become weighed down with lengthy pauses between lines and Joynt's intentionally blasé, depressed monotone as John. An unspoken catastrophic event two years ago has turned the character into a recluse who won't leave the house.

Despite his crusty, indifferent attitude, for some reason he seems to have a group of people who want to be around him. Maybe he was once incredibly charismatic. Maybe they're hoping he'll start making cookies again, which, according to his best friend, Steve (Nathan Brisby), would be worth the wait.

Or could it be that they're worried about him—that they're loyal to him in response to some past kindness? John has, after all, taken in a down-on-her-luck friend, Amy (Desiree Matthews), although he's nice to her only occasionally. Amy clearly has her sights set on John, but he's not interested.

Meanwhile, Steve brings over his new friend, Julia (Christina Shipp), whom he's crazy about while blissfully oblivious to her cocaine habit. But Julia's more interested in John. Despite the fact that she seems to do everything that John claims to despise about women—she presses him for personal information, coaxes him out of the house, and bakes him cookies (he hates it when women cook for him)—he falls for her almost immediately.

Maybe it's because the play is mostly talk and the setting is so intimate, but some of the later scenes with just two actors have the feel of a well-rehearsed piece for a scene-study class. They're well done but sort of awkwardly out of place. For instance, Matthews's cheery, practical Amy clashes nicely with Shipp's intense, quixotic personality as Julia. But it's hard to tell if they're actually getting along or engaging in a barely masked fight. And Joynt and Shipp's pillow talk scene is sort of charming but almost too intensely earnest compared with the rest of the play.

Brisby and Matthews have a funny argument over sitting in John's spot on the couch. But Brisby's spurts of anger toward the play's end seem too sudden and explosive when set against what is mostly people just hanging out, talking, and watching movies.

It would be easy to say that a play where two beautiful women fling themselves at a man who hasn't left his couch in two years isn't logical, but then we've probably all seen some version of this in real life, though perhaps not as extreme. In fact, though John only occasionally says anything kind or of particular interest, it's partly what he doesn't say (or do), the mystery around him, that gets him so much attention. I certainly wanted to know what landed him on the couch.

Though the awkward pauses never disappear entirely, by the play's second half they are largely overshadowed by the momentum that comes from the characters trying to figure out John's mystery. It was interesting to watch in the way you want to get to the end of a novel, whether good or bad, just to find out what happens, or if anything will happen at all.

The actual ending was sort of a pleasant surprise, with the entire story hinging on a one-liner, which shows some structural cleverness on Zupancic's part. It's a pretty good one-liner, but not everyone may find it worth spending an hour and 20 minutes to get there.

Shrinking Responsibilities

Have you ever seen a movie and knew immediately which year it was made? The film stock used, the actors' clothes and hairstyles, and even certain themes can be as blatant a clue as a time and date stamp flashing in the corner of a home video. Anyone who attends Heiress Productions's first show, Lunch Hour, will not see any braided hair or leisure suits to give away the show's 1980 birth date. Yet its focus is on psychiatrists, fad diets, and extramarital affairs, all hallmarks of its dramatic era. The show may have spoken to the audiences of its time—it originally ran for seven months on Broadway—but, seen through a 21st-century perspective, it comes across as a dated novelty.

While spending a week in their Hamptons vacation home, thirty-something married couple Oliver and Nora can't seem to get along. Nora leaves for a trip to her mother's so Oliver can finish working on his new book on relationships. (He's a marriage counselor.) But his tranquility is interrupted when young, neurotic Carrie knocks on his door.

Her puppy-dog neediness grates on Oliver's nerves, but gradually he warms to her, despite her revelation that Nora is carrying on an affair with Carrie's husband, the rich playboy Peter. Carrie suggests that she and Oliver pretend to have their own affair in order to make their significant others jealous. While such a pretense conflicts with Oliver's professional ethics, Carrie sees it as the only way to get the two marriages back in line. But which pairings really belong together?

The show's first act is dragged down by exposition and doesn't have enough at stake to give it any dramatic tension. Much is made of the fact that Nora's suspicions may be aroused by Carrie's presence in the house with Oliver. Yet Oliver is too asexual and Carrie too harmless to make anyone doubt their motives. It is only in the second act, when Carrie and Oliver start opening up to each other and we see Nora with Peter, that any of these characters reveal a softer side that would elicit any audience concern.

Scenic designer Josh Zangen's expansive, detailed set affords director Maura Farver lots of different spaces for her actors to use. Farver has Oliver doing a lot of cleanup and manipulating of the items onstage; this prop play lent Oliver an ownership of the home, which added to the naturalistic staging. The dual lighting designers (Joel E. Silver and Travis Richardson) effectively established the time of day throughout the show in the outside/inside lighting without dramatically noticeable, or scene-stealing, shifts.

While the acting came off as a little forced in the first act, the cast settled down enough by the end of the show to provide good performances. Morgan Baker, who doesn't appear until the second act, is appealingly smarmy as the lazy, acquisitive Peter. As Nora, Mary Willis White oozes privileged selfishness, which is tempered by her girlishly love-struck self when in Peter's company.

Jeff Pagliano's Oliver journeys from stressed yuppie doctor to something approaching a human being, finally showing he has feelings, although his attachment to Nora is not made clear. Laura Faith plays Carrie as a verbal-tic-less "Annie Hall" in skirts. While Carrie's pursuit of acting is a poor excuse for the theatrical way that writer Jean Kerr has crafted the character, the convention serves its purpose. Kerr does tone down Carrie's dizziness in the latter half of the play, allowing Faith to transition to "human being" as well.

The show's program notes that Heiress Productions was formed to "raise awareness and funds for cancer organizations" by staging shows. Lunch Hour was chosen as the premiere production because, in 1980, it marked the stage debut of Gilda Radner, who passed away nine years later after battling ovarian cancer. It's an interesting move for Heiress to dust off an old piece in the name of fund-raising. One hopes, however, that instead of continuing to revive the past, it might be inspired to produce new stories, or even recent ones, that deal directly with the disease. Wouldn't a play about cancer raise twice as much awareness?

Stroller, Sanctimommies, and Self-Control: Amy Wilson Takes on a Mother Load

Step on the sidewalk these days, and you'll run smack into the new culture of parenthood: strollers clog the sidewalks in Park Slope, flared jeans and halter tops wink from the windows at Baby Gap, and hipster parents teach their kids to rock out to Bob Dylan and the Clash. Or take a trip into cyberspace, where otherwise well-mannered women (and some men) stage vitriolic child-rearing battles on urbanbaby.com.

And then there's the rampant "mommy media." Pick up any magazine, and you'll find clear instructions on the right (and, more often, wrong) ways to raise your children. A recent New York magazine cover story even discussed the deadly ramifications of … praising your kids too much. (The latest issue spotlights "The Hot-Mommy Cult.")

When she first became a mother, Amy Wilson, author and star of the innovative, witty new solo show Mother Load, was ideal prey for the glut of baby expertise. She's a Yale graduate with a successful acting career, including stints in TV, film, and on Broadway. With such demanding, high-profile accomplishments under her belt, she reasoned, how hard could parenting be? And so the educated high achiever and self-described "perfectionist and control freak" set out to master her newest task.

Only this was no ordinary assignment. Unlike the pressures of college or the travails of forging an acting career, "motherhood was the first thing I've taken on where the standards are impossibly higher than anything else," she says.

Amy Wilson (Photo by Sue Barr)

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of (often contradictory) information available, she realized she was not enjoying parenting; instead, she was merely "staggering through."

She quickly became frustrated and disgusted by the high-pressure bubble of urban parenthood, where preschool applications are often filled out before a baby's sex can be determined and a snooty mother (the notorious "sanctimommy") will snidely critique the ineptness of your child's inorganic afternoon snack at the neighborhood park.

Nowadays, there's not only a right way to be a mother, there's even a right way to be pregnant (think Angelina Jolie, perfectly toned with a stylish "bump") and a right way to give birth. And with titles like "The Right Start," "One Step Ahead," and "Leaps and Bounds," kids' catalogs immediately telegraph the desperate need to make the "right" choices to stay ahead of (and in) the game.

But, Wilson claims, "you can choose to ignore it." It's certainly not easy, but in Mother Load she skewers the cutthroat cult of competitive parenting, blending sarcasm and humor to concoct a frank, honest, "in the trenches" account of guerrilla mommyhood, without perfection or apology.

To bring her colorful stories to life, Wilson joined forces with longtime collaborator and childhood friend Julie Kramer, who directed and developed the production. The two theater artists—who previously collaborated on Wilson's show A Cookie Full of Arsenic—first presented Mother Load to a predominantly female audience in their hometown of Scranton, Pa.

The show was a hit, even if the audience couldn't directly relate to the pressures of urban parenting. To build on their success, Wilson and Kramer decided to bring the project to the big city, and they set off to further polish and embellish the material for audiences in New York, their adopted hometown.

Amy Wilson (Photo by Sue Barr)

Although the show takes aim at the particular problems of mothers, Kramer and Wilson also worked to make the themes more universal.

"So many of us can relate to the idea of wanting to do the best possible job that you can do [with anything]," Kramer says. "We all have so many options and opportunities, which is great, but it can also make us crazy."

Wilson agrees, recalling the reaction of her husband's Wall Street co-workers, who instantly connected with her hapless search for elusive perfection.

"This is a show about trying to listen to your inner voice and understanding that you know yourself and can trust yourself," Kramer adds. "You have to accept that there's only so much you can do."

Both Wilson and Kramer cite the trend toward having children at a later age as the reason for motherhood's hyper-professionalization. Having children in your 30s means you've had time to be out in the world pursuing life on your own, Wilson points out. And if you've excelled in your career, you're all the more determined to excel as a parent.

Rather than soberly investigating its topic, Mother Load unearths comedy from the drama of motherhood, according to Kramer, and this distinguishes it from much that is written about contemporary parenting. She also praises the show's dedicated theatricality as an invaluable tool for both communicating and connecting with audiences—Wilson plays various characters and uses her children's toys as props, creating an adult playground that nudges audiences toward whimsical exploration.

But playful props aside, this is theater with a purpose, and Wilson wants mothers to learn to relax and dismiss the critical voices that threaten to overwhelm them. She personally tries to live by a yogi master's mantra, "Be here now." But she knows it isn't easy.

The show, she says, has helped her learn to enjoy being a mom without constantly berating herself. It's a daily battle, of course, but well worth fighting. Now the mother of two young sons (2 and 4) with another baby on the way, she finds that focusing on the task immediately at hand is a good beginning.

"When I sit down to read stories to my kids and don't worry about my Treo, sit-ups, or the perfect healthy dinner, all of the other stuff goes out the window," she says.

Wilson has also created an interactive forum on her Web site, www.motherloadshow.com, where she encourages other mothers to share their stories.

"Women who are mothers often do not feel community on a daily basis," says Kramer. "Motherhood is something that is expected, but not admired or valued."

Fittingly, Wilson describes the audience's reaction as "the laughter of recognition."

"It's cathartic," she says. "People will be laughing, but the mothers will be howling!"

Mother Load runs from April 21 - June 16 at the Sage Theater. For tickets, call 212-279-4200. Visit http://www.motherloadshow.com for more information, including video clips from the show and an interactive forum.

Into the Woods

One of the best theatergoing moments I ever had was at the now closed Empty Space Theater in Seattle, when the actor in the one-man play Underneath the Lintel somehow got the audience to sing a chorus of "We're Here Because We're Here." I wasn't quite sure how he did it, except that he had already sung it several times during the production and by that point it seemed only natural. I always hope to find a little of that experience again. Happily, one moment in Reduxion Theater Company's airy and solidly pleasing rendition of Shakespeare's As You Like It also elicits audience participation—by getting the audience to repeat a line with only gentle urging—even if this moment, unlike the one in Lintel, is light instead of laden with meaning. At this point, I knew we were in good hands.

Director Erin Anderson has corralled her cast into a unified world, divided into two settings and updated to the 1800s. One is in a French duchy, while the other is in the woods of Arden, where those exiled from the duchy flee to live amid shepherds and other country dwellers. At the play's beginning, we are told that Duke Frederick has banished his brother, Duke Senior. His niece, Rosalind (Sarah Schmitz), falls out of favor with Duke Frederick as well, and once banished, she decides to disguise herself as a man for protection while in exile.

Duke Frederick's daughter, Celia (Jessica Angleskhan), flees with Rosalind, her cousin, whom she loves dearly. Shortly before this, Rosalind falls in love with Orlando (Sean Logan), a young gentleman whose brother has denied him his inheritance. Orlando, too, is forced to run away to the woods, where the rest of the story plays out. Multiple romantic capers, identity mishaps, and reunions ensue.

A thoughtful use of double casting, such as using the same actor to play both dukes, suggests that the forest is a parallel world to the court. Though the characters in the woods have supposedly been banished, they do seem to have a pleasant time, picnicking and singing to pass the hours, while in the duke's court there is a capricious ruler and the threat of violence. In fact, this was one of the few productions I've seen where I really understood the need for a fight choreographer. A couple of the swordplay scenes are actually very funny, but the serious undercurrent of violence also serves to raise the stakes. After all, although the play's a comedy, the duke has banished Rosalind on the pain of death.

All of the performances from this solid ensemble—especially David Nelson as the fool, Touchstone—are well executed. Shakespeare's fools have some of the more difficult language to convey to a contemporary audience, but Nelson gives the lines as much clarity as possible while keeping their mirth. My only complaint is that Sarah Schmitz does speed through some of Rosalind's wordier speeches a little unclearly, but at other moments she proves herself a more than capable actress. It's particularly interesting to watch how she offers an emotional approach to the practical, clever Rosalind, as opposed to Jessica Angleskhan's more calculated turn as the less cunning Celia. And Sean Logan hits just the right note as Orlando—motivated not only by lovesickness but also by a sense of scorned entitlement.

Costume designer Jessa-Raye Court has clad the actors in costumes reminiscent of recent Jane Austen films. More than any of the show's other elements, the costumes' pastels and whites hold the play's pastoral world together. For different performances, the show rotates through different theaters within the Producers' Club, so letting the costumes (which are more movable than the set) set the production's easy, genuine tone was clever.

The set pieces—rustic patio furniture, a wooden bench around a tree from which a netting of leaves protrudes, even a swing—are easily moved, however. Though Anderson uses the space as best she can, making use of multiple exits and having the actors physically break the fourth wall at appropriate moments, such a well-mounted production really deserves a bigger stage than the one it had on opening night. It's just too small for the larger cast scenes, when there are more than a few actors onstage. At least one of them seemed to get mashed up next to the theater's fire extinguisher.

Still, the players do an admirable job of tackling the play through to the finish, especially considering the amount of time the script spends winding things down and tying up loose ends. This production is rigorous in its approach to the text—enough for the Shakespeare aficionado—and sufficiently welcoming for those who may be a little less familiar with the play.

Cradle to Grave

Sometimes when reviewing plays, the most difficult part is trying to summarize the plot without giving too much away. But for A Guy Adrift in the Universe, it's really pretty simple: a guy is born, lives, then dies. I'm not being glib or overly succinct. That is really exactly what happens in Larry Kunofksy's play, which is having its world premiere at Four Chairs Theater. The play tracks the life cycle of one nameless person as he navigates the tricky terrain of adolescence, dating, marriage, divorce, raising children, and old age.

We first meet Guy as he sits blinking on the stage, grasping the concept that he has just been born. He encounters various people—the doctor, his mother and father—who less than gently break the news that he cannot return to the safety of the womb. Guy reacts to this news by either telling them to shut up or cursing at them. Eighty minutes later, after similarly caustic conversations with classmates, co-workers, his spouse, kids, and lovers, he shuffles off the stage for the Great Beyond.

Guy's entire lifespan lasts 80 minutes. And except for some amusing instances, it felt as if it was dragging on twice as long. If you're going to sit through the entire lifetime of a character, he should be somewhat likable or endearing in some way.

The playwright communicates Guy's confusion, especially in his early years, by having him repeatedly whine and spew curses. It just seems too simplistic a way to demonstrate how Guy has trouble adjusting to life's inherent weirdness and his own hormones. It's also very tiring to sit through.

The role seems like an actor's dream: the chance to portray a stream of personas and emotions at a breakneck pace. Cory Grant is talented and deftly demonstrates his character's vulnerable side the rare times it is revealed. But shrillness is an essential part of the character, and Grant's choice to shout much of his dialogue further keeps him from being the universal character he is supposed to be.

Not even Guy's deathbed monologue, in which he wistfully thanks the universe for all it has given him (orgasms receive the most appreciation), can redeem him. For me, the play never fully recovers from these dialogue and acting choices.

Still, there is much to recommend. The supporting cast takes on the roles of various characters in Guy's life, and all the performers give engaging performances. Zarah Kravitz as A Woman zestfully tackles roles ranging from Guy's June Cleaver-esque mother to Guy's lover during his middle-aged years (the Freudian implications aren't accidental). Corey Patrick as Another Guy infuses his various characters—including Guy's father, boss, co-worker, and son—with a laid-back geniality.

Sutton Crawford is outstanding as Another Woman, who plays many roles, including a pivotal one as Guy's first girlfriend. The two share a "sex scene" in which they sit together under a blanket and experience the discomforts and delights of losing one's virginity while facing the audience. It's a hilarious scene, and the true comic highlight of the play. Crawford and Grant exhibit great chemistry, and Guy is allowed a monologue about intimacy that gives a hint of what his character could have been if not drawn in such broad, overbearing strokes.

The play is staged at Four Chairs Theaters, and so, fittingly, the stage is spare save for four chairs and a wall adorned with pegs. As characters exit the stage, they leave behind a prop—a bouquet of flowers from a first date, a baby's bottle, a briefcase—by hanging or setting it on the wall. So as Guy's life marches toward its inevitable conclusion, the detritus of the experiences that have marked and defined him are on display. It's a marvelously imaginative stage design to have the set evolve to reveal a man's life over age and time.

A Guy Adrift in the Universe sets about to illustrate life's hardest truth: no matter how much pain and sorrow we endure through the years, we must keep on going because, well, we have no choice. It's a blunt lesson, but made blunter still by Guy, who chooses to absorb this idea with a foul mouth and a tiresome attitude.