Don't Speak

When a playwright, a person whose entire career rests on the power of words, argues that communication is futile, it's a bit unnerving. In three of his early (that is, pre-English Patient and pre-Talented Mr. Ripley) plays, Anthony Minghella does just that: a couple struggles with their long-distance relationship over the phone; a courting pair vainly attempts to pack their entire biographies into a rushed stop 'n' chat; and a woman quits speaking, only to discover that silence changes things as little as talking does. The Potomac Theater Project has grouped these three works together for a series called The Politics of Passion. Such a title is quite fitting, as the characters' conversations (or lack thereof) play out more like diplomacy and debate than romantic banter.

The series is a sharp and crisply paced sequence of one-acts. While the cast delivers the dialogue with a fluid precision that feels at once natural and exacting, director Cheryl Faraone adds smooth rhythm and clever blocking to Minghella's motor-mouth monologues. Oddly, the production's strongest point is also its weak spot. In overemphasizing the useless conversations and disconnection between its characters, some of the scenes feel meaningless themselves and fail to leave a lasting impression.

The first play, Hang Up, offers a painfully accurate portrayal of the struggle to maintain a relationship via telephone. It is the most natural of all three scripts, and the performers (MacLeod Andrews and Lauren Turner Kiel) offer touching depictions of love stretched thin. Kiel is amusingly antagonistic, consistently crinkling her nose and finding fault in every comment her boyfriend makes. As the more lighthearted half of the couple, Andrews wears a relaxed expression and delivers lines like "I miss you and I love you and where are you?" like they're breaths of fresh air.

However, their longing and loneliness gradually give way to resentment and mistrust, and their conversation pans out like a dangerous dance in which one person will eventually get hurt. The fading in and out of the background radio heightens awkward silences and moments of confrontation, while Kiel's character slowly descends a ladder (acting as a physical moral pedestal) as she's suddenly put on the defensive. Complementing the fine scene is sound designer Lucas Kavner's perfect opening song selection: the Smiths's "Bigmouth Strikes Again," a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the war of words about to commence.

The second play, an excerpt from Minghella's film Truly, Madly, Deeply, does not enjoy the same spot-on progression. Plucked from the middle of a much longer work and lasting about 10 minutes, the scene doesn't contain much in the way of development, and the characters seem quite aggressively hurled at the audience.

Nina (Julia Proctor) is nervously trying to escape from her date with Mark (Michael Wrynn Doyle). In a desperate ploy to get her to stay, Mark proposes that they share as much as possible about themselves in the time it takes to hop to a nearby statue and back. Watching the budding chemistry between the actors is a treat and makes one wish they had more time together. As Nina and Mark nervously feel each other out, Proctor and Doyle navigate the choppy dialogue with panache and infuse their respective autobiographies with contagious emotion and intrigue. Unfortunately, the scene is so rushed—its breathlessness is only exacerbated by the aerobics—that you miss a lot of the rapid-fire dialogue that's given such care in the other two plays.

While the hopping pair just don't seem to shut up, the main character in Minghella's Cigarettes and Chocolate does so completely. Lent has arrived, and Gemma (Cassidy Freeman) has decided to give up talking. This drives her self-absorbed friends crazy and consequently draws from them lengthy confessions.

The language veers between overly melodramatic (double suicides, monks setting themselves on fire, the plight of the downtrodden, etc.) and exquisitely lyrical (a pregnant friend describes her baby as "like a big sob in my stomach," another friend dismisses his not-so-secret love for Gemma as "an irrelevant passion").

Some of the actors fumble with this delicate balance, while others firmly cradle it to powerful effect. As Gemma's stuffy and selfish boyfriend, Rob, James Matthew Ryan is especially hilarious. As her friend Gail, Laura C. Harris makes an excellent transition from excited effervescence to outright disgust at the prospect of having a baby.

As Gemma sits silently with averted eyes and a woeful expression while her friends spew their secrets, her presence feels extraneous. The production would be stronger if she were more expressive in offering some kind of reaction to their confessions or if the character weren't present at all during those scenes. Perhaps the stumbling block here is that Minghella initially wrote Cigarettes and Chocolate for radio. On the airwaves, Gemma's presence would've been implicit as her friends delivered their tell-all monologues.

Still, nearly two decades after its debut on a BBC radio channel, the script hasn't lost its resonance. The characters' conversations may prove that nothing changes, but, fortunately, the quality of Minghella's play hasn't either.

Teenage Wasteland

Vanity. Bulimia. Teenage decadence. Depressing? No, fabulous! Produced in conjunction with the satirical celebrity-gossip Web site Jossip.com, Métropole Ink's glossy production of The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero warns about the gross excesses of teenage life inspired by Lindsay Lohan and other lawless starlets.

Marissa Kamin's play, much like the films Thirteen and Mean Girls, chronicles the decline of a studious and morally upright high school girl, whose desire to be popular leads her into a vapid existence where she's consumed by sex, drugs, and eating disorders. This production differentiates itself from its cinematic predecessors by integrating humorous headlines from Jossip.com along with real blog entries from teenage girls.

The innocent and nameless lead girl (played by Gillian Jacobs) receives coaching from Superstar, a Paris Hilton-like starlet and the voice of coolness, who convinces Jacobs to binge and purge herself into a size zero dress and, thus, into popularity. Jacobs and her "best friend forever," played by Anna Chlumsky, weather the harsh road toward graduation, which forces some typically difficult decisions on them. Should I have sex with my boyfriend? Which colleges should I apply to? Will it make my rear look smaller if I substitute pills and booze for food?

Throughout, Kamin counterpoints the fictional story with several revealing entries from actual blogs, which are delivered by Chlumsky. Meanwhile, Jacobs’s extracurricular partying and her illness take a toll on her studies. She meets with big disappointments and, ultimately, a real-life tragedy, on which Kamin based the play.

Kamin's script crafts a vivid picture of teenage angst, but it has some trouble reconciling its more satirical moments with its PSA-style melodrama. For instance, the scene in which Jacobs learns how to gag herself to induce vomiting is played for laughs, while the repercussions of this disorder are presented in a serious, cautioning manner. Kamin also laces her script with funny pop-culture references, like a line that suggests celebrity culture is done with the likes of J-Lo and is now "all about the Jessicas"—as in Alba, Biel, and Simpson.

While some current references generated laughs, other quips that mention Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton—seemingly oblivious to the former's death and the latter's recent re-imprisonment—seemed outdated and were met with awkward silences. The play's ending came out of nowhere, though it no doubt was included to emphasize the message that bulimia and vanity are bad while academia and wholesomeness are good.

Ben Rimalower stages the play in broad, alluring strokes. Projections, dance numbers, and a hip soundtrack provided by DJ Brenda Black ratchet up the script's trendiness. Rimalower obviously enjoyed staging the script's more vaudevillian scenes, where Jacobs imagines herself the author of a best-selling memoir or the star of a reality-TV show. These interludes express considerably more energy than the script's less fresh narrative scenes.

Likewise, Wilson Chin's metallic scene design and Ben Stanton's colorful light design suggest a swanky urban nightclub, even when the characters are in a bedroom. Since the two leads evaluate their significance by their ability to get into those kinds of clubs, it is an appropriate location for this satirical docu-dramedy to take place. Rimalower and his design team delayed the opening by a few days to work out some technical kinks, and they clearly took that opportunity to shine up the production's aesthetic aspects.

The exceptional five-person cast is the highlight here. Jacobs, as the angst-ridden heroine, accurately illustrates a high school experience familiar to teenage girls, with humanity and the requisite explosive emotions. Chlumsky particularly excels in her blog entry monologues by assuming various dialects to distinguish between different real-life girls. These roles, along with her B.F.F. character, afford her a fine showcase without devoting an excessive amount of stage time to her.

Kate Reinders's Superstar acts as the glamorous Greek—or chic—chorus in these proceedings, and she does so with lots of peppy vamping and charming pop-culture philosophizing. She previously played Glenda the Good Witch in Wicked, and that association only strengthens her role here as a demented "fairy godmother." Brian J. Smith and Christopher Sloan round out the cast by playing all the necessary male roles. Smith plays it uncouth as Jacobs's flaky boyfriend Jake, and Sloan twinkles in a scene as a female college tour guide.

Inventively staged and well intentioned, The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero achieves the "effortless perfection" its lead character so desires in every aspect except for its slightly uneven script. Regardless, this play serves a noble purpose in showing teenaged girls (and, sadly, too many Americans) that there are more fabulous things than being skinny, popular, and famous.

Domestic Politics

In Aminta de Lara's Golondrina (Swallow), an old Venezuelan man slouches inert in a huge armchair, his face a mystery to the audience. In this death chamber, the man's two daughters, long estranged from each other, face off. In the plaza below the apartment, another confrontation is taking place, as protesters against the policies of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez clash with a small counterdemonstration. Produced by SinTeatro and running at La MaMa's First Floor Theater, the play is co-directed by De Lara and Diana Chery. Its greatest strength is De Lara's clear delineation of the parallels between domestic and political conflict. Unfortunately, its greatest weakness is that this perceptive act of comparison and contrast is executed in such a didactic, unsubtle manner, it does not necessarily translate as drama.

In writing Golondrina, De Lara appears to have prioritized clarity of message over character development and the pleasures of discovery. The sisters are one-dimensional mouthpieces for their social and political positions. Carmen Elena, played by Chery, is a Chavez supporter and has spent a good part of her life placating men who abuse her. "What we need here," she says, defending Chavez, "is a strong hand. Someone with balls." "Just like father," observes her older sister Claudia, a fiercely independent doctor and cafe society dissident played by De Lara.

The script explains its symbolism so blatantly it could be its own Cliffs Notes. Of the godlike paterfamilias, Carmen Elena declares, "I always thought of him as immortal, superhuman, omnipresent." Long after the suggested back story has made the fact obvious, she claims, "You could never say no to him." Demystifying their relationship, Claudia accuses, "We're both full of resentment: you just choose to blame yours on Mother."

Elsewhere, the script again states the obvious: "I don't know what to do. I am feeling stressed." The big revelations are foreshadowed too heavily and melodramatically, and so are entirely predictable. The absence of ambiguity creates an absence of suspense.

Even the political commentary remains too nonspecific to arouse interest. "Nowadays, thinking against the government is a crime," Claudia protests. What government policies in particular do the dissidents oppose? Why have these issues come up? Why does their surfacing frighten the regime? Some lines are simply melodramatic, embarrassingly reminiscent of soap opera: "Why did you start saying things? Things that are better left unsaid" and the frantically delivered "You don't understand! You just don't understand!"

As for the acting, De Lara and Chery embody the characters well, though they never transcend the limited emotional range allowed by the script. Carmen Elena spends a large amount of time shouting at her sister. It is as if De Lara and Chery had forgotten that plays are like music: to make the high notes stand out, you need some lower ones, at least occasionally. About halfway through, this emotionally charged attitude became monotonous.

The action is periodically interrupted for some interesting photos of Venezuelan life, by Carlos Ayesta, shown on hanging screens in short computerized slide shows accompanied by forgettable music, while the actresses either move in trancelike gait or display their internal emotional battles with poses that seem borrowed from silent films. One visual effect, the electronic supertitling of a Venezuelan patriotic song, was hampered by at least two typos in the scrolling lyrics.

The set consists of only the father's chair. It is odd that such a determinedly domestic play—a play about a house in a particular state, which also represents that state—should not have a set that reveals more particulars of the father's home.

Lastly, De Lara's research needs work. Claudia, the doctor, does something to her father's body that would set off alarm bells in the mind of any halfway competent pathologist—after she warns her sister that their father's body will most certainly be examined by law enforcement personnel. If this is consciously self-destructive, then the playwright needs to indicate that in the script.

Something else that the playwright needs to indicate is whether the "English translation" by Francine Jacome, noted in the program (but not on the front cover or on the press release), means that the play we are seeing is Golondrina (Swallow) by Aminta de Lara, translated by Francine Jacome. As a writer, De Lara should know to give her fellow writer, the translator, proper credit.

De Lara, SinTeatro, and La MaMa are to be commended for courageously tackling some difficult and vital subject matters, and bravely without any "I'm not a feminist but..." apology. In Golondrina, there is a play that needs to be seen. At La MaMa, right now, that bird is taking flight, but has not yet found its wings. When it does, I look forward to seeing it soar.

A Night at the Opera

Tom Rowan's The Second Tosca is all about drama—the drama we see onstage when we go to the opera and the drama that we don't see happening backstage in the dressing room. "It's a bunch of egomaniacs jockeying for supremacy," jaded manager Stephen (Carrington Vilmont) tells a young opera groupie. "And that's just the directors and designers." But beneath the drama is a genuine passion for music, and for opera itself. Rowan displays an intimate understanding of the world he writes about, offering a comedic but also serious and respectful look into an industry so intense that everyone, from the cast to the crew, is willing to give his or her life to it—in some instances, literally.

The Ghost of Angelina Rinucci (Eve Gigliotti), a beloved, former Tosca star from opera's golden age who fell to her death onstage at the Opera California house, now haunts the premises, less distraught over losing her life than at never being able to take her final bow. Now, Lisa Duvall (Rachel de Benedet), who scorns her profession's pretentiousness, is stepping in to understudy the Tosca role that Rinucci died playing, on the same stage she died on.

Benedet brings many dimensions to her paradoxical character. Though she is surrounded by adoring people, she always seems lonely—a powerful figure who fills the room with her talent but is known for little else. She's not really a diva, but she knows how to play one onstage. Duvall stands in contrast to the woman she understudies, Gloria Franklin (Vivian Reed), who bursts into a room oozing of importance, snapping her fingers, stomping her feet, thrusting her little white dog at underlings to walk, and letting everyone know a true diva is in the building.

In one of Reed's best monologues, Franklin puts the production's pompous conductor, Aaron Steiner (Mark Light-Orr), in his place for telling her starry-eyed assistant, Darcy (Melissa Picarello), to forget opera and pursue a career in community theater, a critique so stinging the girl actually winces. Darcy runs out of the room in tears, and Franklin charges in like a gun-blazing cowboy, telling her own harrowing back story about a poor young girl facing many obstacles on her road to stardom, and concluding with her thoughts on where Steiner can stick his opinions about a young person's talent.

At first it's unclear whether Franklin will prove to be friend or foe to Duvall, who worships the star as much as the rest of the company does. Nevertheless, Franklin seemed to connect the most with the audience, almost as if she was the devil they know, unlike Duvall, who, in jeans and a tank top, often looked like a misplaced duck in a world of swans. As Franklin, Reed could hardly deliver a monologue without someone from the audience yelling "That's right" or "Hm-mmm."

Rowan's story takes us out of our seats and into this world. When the Ghost of Rinucci sings in her resounding operatic voice, the lights dim and the powerful notes fill your head. In that moment, you're not in an Off Off Broadway theater but in a 4,000-seat opera house.

The set, designed to look like an opera house's backstage, looks gritty and lived in. Even before the characters enter, a great deal of activity appears to have taken place there. There are silk scarves thrown sloppily over hooks, coffee mugs on the makeup counter, long curly wigs plopped atop mannequin heads, and notebooks scattered across the assistant stage manager's workstation.

Like the opera, The Second Tosca is ripe with melodrama, providing juicy subplots involving Duvall's wildcard brother/manager Stephen and the hilariously dorky Juilliard opera groupie Nathaniel (Jeremy Beck), who finds himself being drawn further into his idol's world than he ever could have imagined.

With the show's two-hour, 35-minute running time, it is a credit to director Kevin Newbury's fast pacing that his production never drags or starts to feel long, and it ends with a great note of closure. Ultimately, it's a fun, crowd-pleasing show with special appeal for anyone who's ever been, or wanted to be, backstage at an opera house.

High Notes

In theater, it's rare—and fascinating—for the same characters to turn up in different shows—a bit like a surprise encounter with familiar old friends. This year, Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia focused on a group of 19th-century Russian intellectuals who resurfaced across decades. In a lighter, but no less important, way, composer William Finn has tenderly developed the neurotic extended family that resurfaces throughout his ambitious musical triptych: In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, and Falsettoland. All three productions were performed as individual shows Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons from 1979-1990; in 1992, the final two parts became Acts 1 and 2 of the Broadway musical Falsettos. Just in time for the first National Asian American Theater Festival, the National Asian American Theater Company (NAATCO) has revived its acclaimed production of Falsettoland, which it originally produced in 1998. Finn's seminal show (co-written with James Lapine) investigates such controversial topics as AIDS and homosexuality (especially provocative in the 1980s, when these characters originally appeared), and the grace and wit with which he handles this material give the show a timeless quality. Enlivened with an all-Asian cast, Finn's Jewish-themed musical takes on vibrant new life, and director Alan Muraoka has helmed an effervescent production that cuts to the heart of this poignant show.

Marvin is the conflicted center of Falsettos—he divorces his wife, Trina, when he falls in love with another man, Whizzer. In response, Trina promptly marries Mendel, Marvin's psychiatrist. By the time we reach Falsettoland, Marvin and Whizzer have dissolved their relationship, Mendel and Trina's marriage is a little stale, and Marvin and Trina's precocious son Jason is 12. As Jason's bar mitzvah approaches, Trina and Marvin try to keep their tempers in check, and when Whizzer appears at Jason's baseball game (invited by Jason), he and Marvin decide to try to make things work again. Add to this group Charlotte and Cordelia, the cheerful lesbian couple next door, and you meet one of the most odd and irresistible family units in musical theater.

The plot moves fluidly from song to song with little dialogue, and the brief show has a lovely lyrical quality to it—Finn's music can be both punchy and dreamy, and his often sweeping, impressionistic melodies are routinely interrupted by sharp, vivid epiphanies that wake up the characters. "The Baseball Game" is a particularly exemplary piece of writing. The peppy melody is deceptively simple, but the character development is densely layered—we learn an extraordinary amount about each character from minor asides and interactions (especially within Muraoka's deft staging).

The tragedy of Falsettoland, of course, arrives with Whizzer's AIDS diagnosis—"Something Bad Is Happening," warns Charlotte, who works as a doctor and watches the grave disease destroy the lives of healthy young men. Finn has a sensitive ear (and pen) for the subject of mortality, and he confronts his subject with a refreshing lack of the maudlin or clichéd. In the quartet "Unlikely Lovers," Marvin, Whizzer, Cordelia, and Charlotte ruminate on the stroke of fate that brought them all together, and music director W. Brent Sawyer has uncovered exquisite depths and textures within every crescendo of this moving ballad.

The cast rises to the occasion, and then some. Like Sarah Lambert's efficient set, which clicks into place with the simplicity and precision of Jason's Rubik's Cube, this group of performers is a colorful, interlocking, and delightful puzzle. Especially outstanding are Francis Jue, who achieves superb comic dexterity as the wiry Mendel, and Jason Ma, who uses his silky vocals to gently articulate Marvin's vulnerable qualities. This self-consciousness immediately surfaces whenever Whizzer is nearby, and it's easy to see why—Manu Narayan brings a glorious voice and thrilling sensitivity to a role that would be all too easy to oversimplify.

Ann Sanders (late of Avenue Q) turns in a fierce and fearless performance as the put-upon Trina. The unsung victim of this situation—just imagine planning your son's bar mitzvah with your ex-husband and his male lover in tow—her Trina is never pathetic, never self-pitying. Instead, she wrings the wit out of each circumstance, and in the thunderous ballad "Holding to the Ground," she proclaims her truth: "Life is never what you planned / Life is moments you don't understand." Still, the ties that bind Trina to this makeshift family are everlasting—this may be a dysfunctional group, but it's stuck together like glue.

As I watched this all-Asian cast romp through Finn's material, I wondered, What difference does this make? Sure, the Jewish jokes and references give us an extra wink, but really, one quickly forgets that these Asian actors are anything other than actors. But watching Sanders's vivid performance made me think again; if it weren't for NAATCO, she might never have played this role. The current revival of Les Misérables features several Asian performers, but it's only now that many Asian actors can expand their résumés beyond Flower Drum Song or Miss Saigon.

This powerful production is an important step in recasting and reimagining traditional roles. Finn certainly thinks so—along with Ann Harada (one of those Asian Les Miz stars), he contributed his own money to help fund this production.

Hearts and Minds

Max (Lydia Gaston) is a sweet, hard-working college professor who has known her share of pain and loss. The play that revolves around her, If Truth Be Known, depicts her life at a crucial moment, just as she enters into a relationship with an enigmatic lawyer named Philip (James Patrick Earley). Like its protagonist, the play is honest and has good intentions. But structurally and thematically, Truth comes off like an unfinished draft that one of Max's students might hand in to her. Truth is clearly a labor of love for its playwright, Judi L. Komaki. A third-generation Asian-American and a psychology professor who specializes in workplace discrimination, Komaki has fashioned a play that questions whether love is strong enough to break through one's personal demons.

Presented by Blue Heron Theater at the ArcLight Theater and directed by Christine Simpson, Truth covers a year in which Max, a divorced Japanese-American psychologist, weathers a turbulent relationship with Philip. Both are divorced. He has a daughter from a previous marriage, while Max has no children, and her Norwegian ex-husband Olaf has since remarried. Komaki chose to show mostly the lows in this beginning relationship as Philip, a Vietnam veteran, struggles to commit and occasionally shows symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Max shares her love woes with two relatives: her Aunt Jane (Constance Boardman, but played by Simpson at the performance I saw) and her conservative mother, Mrs. Ota (Bea Soong), who periodically drop in over the course of the year and alternately soothe and antagonize her. Soong is believable in her role, but underutilized. Max's mother serves as a red herring, putting forth issues about history and assimilation that belong in a separate play altogether.

Jane, meanwhile, is a clinical psychology graduate student who works with veterans. Max and Jane also share a deeper bond. They were both engaged to white men whose parents disapproved of them, but Olaf fought for Max whereas Jane's fiancé dumped her after his parents refused to speak to her.

One of the piece's main problems is its excessive transparency. The audience understands the main trouble between Philip and Max from the outset, but Komaki spends the duration of this intermissionless, hour-and-a-half show building up to it. It doesn't take a sleuth to figure out that Philip's problem is that Max's Japanese-American features remind him of the many Vietnamese people he killed years ago during the war.

The problem seems superficial, but if it does represent a deal breaker for Max and Philip, it would be addressed early on in their relationship. If Komaki is to continue working on Truth, I'd suggest a first act in which Max arrives at this conclusion, followed by a second act in which she and Philip try to move beyond his difficulty.

Komaki also underlines the point by having Jane explicitly spell out the real-life problems experienced by Maya Lin, the undergraduate student who unanimously won the contest to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (where Truth takes place), only to face opposition when people discovered she was Asian.

This allusion is welcome, but it comes off as clumsy, and it is but one instance in which Komaki's characters simply explain away various matters, including Japanese internment camps during World War II, the concept of industrial psychology, and even how to mix a proper screwdriver cocktail. (Part of the problem may have been Simpson's filling in as Jane. Though she had a script onstage, she sometimes tried to recite her lines, to halting effect.) Simpson's direction is graceful, but it cannot compensate for the fact that there are too many scenes that do nothing to further the play's action.

Meanwhile, Komaki leaves other matters unanswered. Though Max and Philip are not intimate until we see them, they have clearly known each other for some time and should be beyond the getting to know you stage. What exactly do they talk about when we don't see them? Also, if Mrs. Ota has never visited Washington until the period of the play, why does she suddenly visit multiple times? And how many times does Jane sweep into town? Still, Gaston is a very natural presence as Max and helps glide Truth along with her pleasant demeanor.

The true revelation is Earley, who is sensational in an anguished role. This is especially impressive given that he must recount many of the trying moments in Philip's life rather than acting them out. This is not a role any actor could step into; Philip has to be charismatic yet off-putting, troubled yet calming, confused yet also confident, and Earley manages to communicate all of those shadings. Czerton Lim's set should also be noted, as it perfectly evokes a middle-class apartment.

The truth in all things should be known, and Komaki asks some important, sensitive questions. But she needs to answer them as well.

Post-9/11 Dystopia

Andhow! Theater Company, based in the East Village's spacious Connelly Theater, is well known for the intricate sets and high production values that space allows, and for producing stylistically experimental, heartfelt new plays. Its premiere of Chicago playwright Laura Eason's Area of Rescue is no exception. The moment you see Neal Wilkinson's set, you know this piece takes place in another world. Outside a sumptuous glass and metal mansion, trees without leaves stretch into the proscenium from a yard covered with barren rocks. The mansion's doors slide straight up into invisible sockets in the walls, suggesting architecture on Star Trek's Spaceship Enterprise or maybe Lost in Space. The latter title describes Eason's characters exactly.

In a futuristic dystopia inspired by a post-9/11 "national security" culture, freethinker Gordon (Arthur Aulisi) and his family get lost in their home and their home country, places that, as the play progresses, change beyond recognition. The play opens with Gordon and his 10-year-old daughter, Hetty (Kiki Hernandez), mourning his wife and her mother, Lily, on the day of Lily's funeral. The somber occasion is interrupted by the tactless neighborhood gossip, the widowed Ida Henri (Maria Cellario), and young "serviceman" Ivo (Omar Evans), who is courting Lily's sister Mia (Jackie Chung).

Questions immediately arise. How did Lily die? Whose fault is it? And why are Ida and Ivo so curious about the gruesome details?

Meanwhile, Hetty's world is about to be rocked by another cataclysm: the trees outside the house, already "stripped" of their leaves for reasons of "security," are scheduled to be felled completely to make way for an "area of rescue," a sort of terrorism shelter whose design, Hetty points out, concentrates people in an enclosed space without keeping the terrorists out.

As in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which Area of Rescue is strongly reminiscent of, regime change is inevitable. The destruction of Hetty's trees happens concurrently with increasing threats to Gordon's personal safety and, consequently, to hers.

Eason's dystopian world constantly references issues in contemporary American politics. The government is a theocracy, and all inhabitants wear ID cards color-coded for "religion." Homosexuality is totally taboo. Abortion, even of "dead" fetuses that would be stillborn, is illegal. As a result, orphanages are filled with congenitally disabled children—a situation that happened in reality in Nicolae Ceauşescu's Romania after that dictator's abolition of birth control and abortion.

Gordon's family employs, if that is the right word, an unpaid servant named Alleah—a name that reads like the Jewish name Leah and sounds like the Muslim "Alia." Played by Abby Royle, Alleah must work as a slave for 11 years before being granted citizenship so she can choose to leave the home. Gordon's collusion with slavery complicates his character intriguingly, and that of his daughter, who never questions the morality of Alleah's enslavement.

Directed with a haunting naturalism by Jessica Davis-Irons, Area of Rescue features a few standout performances in a large but cohesive cast. As Hetty, Hernandez, a 10-year-old student making her professional theater debut, is smart and vulnerable, but never precious. If only Dakota Fanning and nearly every child I've seen in a movie lately could take acting lessons from her. Arthur Aulisi invests Gordon with a quiet, cautious anger that eventually boils over at just the wrong (for this character) moment.

As Ivo, Evans is disarmingly friendly, at first, especially to Hetty. That makes him especially noxious later. I didn't quite believe in Mia's attraction to him, as Chung was more passionate in her trumpeting of the regime's maxims than in her declarations of love. But the script does not make clear what Mia likes about this particular serviceman, or whether she is dating him only out of fear. As Ida, the play's other stock villain, Cellario provides comic relief even as she hurts Gordon and his family.

Jill BC Duboff's sometimes trance-like, sometimes ominous, sound design enhances the atmosphere. Becky Lasky's stiff, puritanical, uniform costumes look as if they came out of the theocratic dystopia in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. They constrict the characters' movements and muffle the women's sexuality, forcing everybody to toe the party line.

As topical dystopias go, Area of Rescue is not nearly as innovative or chilling as either The Handmaid's Tale or Caryl Churchill's recent play Far Away. Some of Eason's writing is very heavy-handed. A New York theatergoing audience probably does not need to be convinced that fear of terrorism can create a paranoid "security state" and erode vital civil liberties. I felt that for much of this play, Eason was preaching to the choir.

However, at the most crucial moments, Eason's allegory is not only spot-on but cogently original. When Ivo and Mia talk about the mystery of death and the construction of the local area of rescue, Ivo reminds Mia that she thinks "there isn't an answer." Speaking of, respectively, terrorism and death, Mia responds, "To those things, not to these things."

A regime that knows the answer to the afterlife question but does not know how to stop terrorism is bad news. The brilliance of Area of Rescue lies in Eason's juxtaposition of those two facts to create horrific paradox and irony that transcends the preaching.

The Way They Were

The File on Ryan Carter, a sort of gay variation on The Way We Were, offers more in the way of romantic melodrama than social insight. That's not to say that history isn't evoked: dramatist David Gaard has written a pageant play of mid-20th-century America, marching his two heroes through familiar high points with widely mixed results. Ben Fox (Daniel Koenig) is a Jewish student at a Wisconsin college who belongs to a rabble-rousing left-wing organization, one that later will be condemned as un-American. One night in 1937 he meets Henry Hochauser (Ryan G. Metzger), a basketball star working in a diner to pay for his education. It's a symptom of the schematic writing that the two students fall into a discussion of the Spanish Civil War and an auto workers' strike without ever asking, "What's your major?"

Ben and Henry begin an affair that continues through World War II, postwar Hollywood, and McCarthyism. (It also encompasses Henry's reinvention of himself as Ryan Carter, the host of a successful radio talk show in the late 30s.) However, that's all window dressing to their personal relationship, although Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 "day of infamy" speech, heard in its entirety, dwarfs everything else in its dramatic impact.

If you're drawing on social history, the details have to be right. Gaard nails some of them—the middle class's pleasure in classical music, a reference to gay Hollywood swimming parties. But anachronisms crop up too, notably today's inescapable blue language, which was treated as radioactive back in the 1930s and 40s, when "Nuts!" was considered vulgar. And Gaard's notion that the radio announcement of the Pearl Harbor attack would be followed by a return to regularly scheduled programming is ludicrous.

A lot rests on the two actors, and Koenig struggles with slabs of pretentious sermonizing: "They will scapegoat whoever, whatever Congressman Thomas and his fetid followers want brought to the sacrificial altar." Unfortunately, his strident delivery quickly becomes irritating (Gaard, who also directed, is partly to blame) and undermines one's belief that Ryan could be attracted to Ben.

Metzger's title character has more facets: he's a confident capitalist, a less confident intellectual, and a controlling husband, with varied sexual desires. (Ryan warns Ben, "I'm always going to want my ladies.") The actor has crafted a solid and subtle portrait, using a fleeting smile or sudden wince to convey emotion; he also possesses the ability to make some of Gaard's lines sound poetic. Along with FDR, he's the production's most valuable asset.

Both actors are required to play fearlessly and extensively in the nude, and the director brings out a languorous sensuality in the bedroom scenes. (Designer Michele Reisch, with less time to show off her costumes, has nevertheless created beautifully tailored suits, eye-popping ties, and even a nifty fur-collared topcoat.)

Gaard's intention seems to be to draw parallels between the past and the current state of gay rights—implying that gays had better fight for civil rights or be prepared to leave the country. "It's arrogance to claim beliefs and not stand up for them!" Ben says. "To sit by and do nothing while someone else is fighting for those very beliefs is more than arrogant." But some advice that Ryan gives to Ben (who has written a Broadway flop) applies to Gaard as well: "You might have been more successful if you hadn't laid the politics on so thick."

Gaard's direction doesn't help scenes build tension either. Instead, they just occur, one after another, and the finale comes so abruptly that it rivals the last episode of The Sopranos. Still, theatergoers who want to keep an eye on new talent may find it worthwhile to take a look.

Mommy Dearest

During one scene in The House of Bernarda Alba, a solemn servant sets water and wine on a table as Gregorian chants echo off the home's stone walls. Such overly pious details dominate Manhattan Theater Source's fabulous interpretation of Federico Garcia Lorca's play. Most important, the religious visuals hint at the title character's obsession with keeping up appearances: the house will look holy, even if what happens inside is far from sacred. This backdrop is fitting when Bernarda (Joy Franz) declares an eight-year mourning period on the day of her husband's funeral, essentially turning her home into a convent for her five daughters, aged 20 to 39. Few visitors and no men are allowed inside. As the confining walls close in on the girls, their literal and emotional claustrophobia surfaces in cruelty, jealousy, and near madness. Thanks to a superb cast and direction by Kathleen O'Neill that consistently hits the mark, tension builds slowly and compellingly until sparks of frustration tragically catch fire.

This production particularly emphasizes Lorca's humorous undertones. In Bernarda's personal kingdom, notions of convention and class are warped by her misguided sense of priorities (reputation first, love second). Here, cruel words are delivered comically, while drunks and eccentrics are presented as the heralds of truth and logic.

In a place where things aren't as they appear, it would be inaccurate to label Bernarda a mere dictator. Although it's a startling treat every time Franz steps onstage and barks an order (audience members may feel the need to straighten their posture as her disapproving gaze hovers above), her Bernarda is obviously not heartless. Franz deftly shifts from unmerciful witch to wry wit in a beat, offering a harsh barb one moment and a deadpan one-liner the next. As her crazy mother wanders in the yard, she tells a maid to make sure she stays clear of the well. Not because she might fall in, Bernarda says, but "because that's where the neighbors can see her."

Bernarda's foil is her servant, Poncia (Olivia Lawrence). With Poncia's unabashed hatred for her boss and complete lack of enthusiasm for her work, Lawrence carries every scene with a sharp tongue and an unending supply of sass. Her hilarious anecdotes and sarcastic advice provide a light counterpoint to the play's sad plot.

When the town's best-looking man comes calling for the eldest daughter, Angustias (Stephanie Schmiderer), the other sisters are consumed with envy and bewilderment. They conclude that money is the only reason someone would desire their old, sickly sister. As they fight over the always offstage suitor, Pepe el Romano, the actresses make the girls' desperation palpable.

Martirio, the physically deformed daughter, is perhaps the play's most complex character, and Meredith Napolitano portrays her with a fragile bitterness. Unfortunately, Benita Robledo's performance as Adela, the sister who has an affair with Pepe, fills the young daughter with so much anger that she lacks the naïve, romantic quality that should be her tragic flaw. When Adela's love drives her to extreme measures, the climax doesn't seem justified.

With less stage time, Joy Seligsohn and Cambpell Echols offer stellar supporting performances as an insane grandmother and the seemingly alcoholic daughter Magdalena, respectively. As Lorca disguises the play's most poignant revelations as drunken ramblings or crazy rants, both actresses have a knack for the rhythm and nuances of his imaginative lines.

In one scene, grandmother Maria Josefa, dreaming of children with white hair—a welcome change from the dark house—says, "We'll all be like the waves, one after another. And then we'll sit down and we'll all have white heads and we'll be the foam of the sea. Why isn't there any foam here? Nothing but mourning shawls." Within the seeming nonsense, Maria expresses the desire for freedom that the daughters repress.

Complementing the lush language is a beautiful set. With caked, clay walls and an amazing manipulation of angles (the start of a staircase, the hint of a hallway), designer Ed McNamee maximizes the small space. Rounding out the church imagery is the set, shaped like the tip of a cross—two arched doorways on each side and an indented alcove at the rear—just like the front of a cathedral. As Bernarda spends most of her time in the center, beneath a hanging cross, it gives the appearance of a priest saying Mass.

Before the play began, O'Neill offered two telling explanations. The first was for the freezing temperature: "It should get warmer when the lights come on," she said. The second was for the cramped space: "You're going to feel very close to the actors."

Interestingly, both the cold and the congestion catapulted the audience into Bernarda's chilling prison. If this was intentional, it was brilliant. If not, all directors should be so lucky as to have apologies work this perfectly in their favor.

The Exorcist

There are many reasons why people write and perform in a one-person show: to engage in a very public therapy session, to tell a story that hasn't been heard onstage, and, obviously, to showcase their acting/writing talents. For Bob Brader, his reason was more pressing. He needed to exorcise the demons of his past—specifically, his father, who is the titular evildoer at the center of Brader's Spitting in the Face of the Devil. Growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, Brader was "Little Bob" to his dad's "Big Bob." But the elder Bob's joviality and popularity with his extended family and friends was at odds with the belittling, abusive monster whom his son and wife knew at home. As Brader dispassionately charts his coming of age and realization that his father is the Devil, he relates experiences both charming (when he figures out that he wants to be an actor) and disturbing (his father's way of handling Brader's bedwetting habit). As the truth behind Big Bob's behavior comes out, will Little Bob be able to escape his father's grasp, and his legacy?

Brader employs a linear structure to his storytelling, starting from the news of his father's death and then running through major events of his youth and early adulthood. Though the show runs 90 minutes—a little lengthy for a solo piece—Brader's tale and his energy in telling it keep the audience from growing restless. The set (a black desk and chair on a black stage) and Brader's position (seated behind the desk) never change, but the performer's pauses for a sip of water or coffee work alongside Douglas Shearer's lighting design to note scene shifts and changes in tone.

Brader's impersonations of his mother, father, younger self, and friends are judiciously minimal, evoking the characters without turning into silly impressions. The actor mostly underplays the drama of the story, but the events in his story, coupled with Brader's driving need to tell it, make for compelling theater.

There is catharsis to be found when opening up to the world. While Brader admits to having worked on much of his past in therapy, it's clear from Spitting in the Face of the Devil that this production is not just vanity or exhibitionism but a way to expunge any remaining residue from his gritty past. As for the audience, some might get a voyeuristic thrill from the proceedings, or a feeling that "the grass isn't always greener" (their childhood wasn't so bad after all). But most important, they are part of one man's healing process.

Family Ties

One of the strongest elements of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's comedic three-act play You Can't Take It With You is the heaps of feel-good energy it piles on to its examination of an eccentric family's dynamics. Often family dramas are told through major moments—holidays, weddings, funerals, and milestone birthdays—but not so in this play. We are not meeting its main characters, the Sycamore family, in a momentous time when everything is about to change, but on a day when everything is exactly the same as it's always been and, one hopes, always will be. Director Peter Jensen certainly had his hands full with this staging. You Can't Take It With You is a 19-character play set in a small room where almost all 19 cast members are often onstage at once. The space is further constricted by the Gloria Maddox Theater's tiny size, making a small room feel even smaller. Fortunately, this feeling of tightness lends itself to the overall experience, giving the audience members the sensation that they are sitting in the Sycamore family's living room, just another member of their ever-growing tribe.

Many of the house's residents are visiting or live-in friends rather than members of the family. There is Rheba (Shirine Babb), the sassy maid; Rheba's unemployed boyfriend Donald (Peter Aguero), who acts as the Sycamores' cook; Kolenkhov (Laurence Cantor), a tightly wound Russian dance teacher; Gay Wellington (Kathleen Isbell), a washed-up, drunken actress who crashes on their window seat; and Mr. DePinna (John Mulcahy), who visited the family nine years ago to deliver ice and never left.

After spending a morning with this off-the-wall clan, it is easy to see why. Though admittedly different from your typical American brood, they are completely open-minded and accepting when it comes to strangers in need. They are also joyful, pleasant people content with one another's company and anyone else drawn into their vibrant circle of life.

Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (Peter Judd) is the patriarch of the family, which includes a daughter, Penny (Margot Bercy), a perky woman who has been working on plays ever since a typewriter was accidentally delivered to her door eight years ago; her husband Paul (Jerry Rago), who makes fireworks in the basement; and their two daughters, Essie (Jamie Neumann) and Alice (Jacqueline van Biene). Essie loves to dance and is always practicing around the house, though after several years of lessons she can do little more than bow gracefully. Alice is the black sheep, which in this family means she is really more of a white one. Not only has she found success in a banking job on Wall Street, but her boss's handsome son, Tony (Josh Sienkiewicz), has fallen in love with her.

The play's silly characters, screwball antics, and lighthearted look at the world made it an instant hit when it was first staged in the 1930s, while America was suffering from the Great Depression. At that time, most people had little else than their families, and You Can't Take It With You played an important role in reminding them of the value in that. In 1937 the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and it has since stood the test of time. Though some references and characters are obviously nods to the political climate of the 30s, they are still funny to a contemporary audience, if no longer relevant.

Overall, there is a lot of passion in this play, found not only in its themes but also in its execution. Jensen knows this work and clearly understands the elements that make it special and appealing. He has added his own personal touches to a classic tale, including scene transitions that feature the characters dancing their way offstage, tossing props to each other as they exit. This effectively prepares the stage for the following scene while keeping the actors in character and the audience in the story.

Peter Judd is excellent as Grandpa, particularly as he delivers a hilarious and yet strangely reasonable monologue to an IRS man (Blake Hackler) about the income tax and why he refuses to pay it. He also drives home the story's central themes about living life on your own terms and following your heart, even if the world considers you crazy for doing so.

The combination of these poignant themes, powerful writing, and loving direction sends you from the theater with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, and that is something you can always take with you.

All in the Family

In Crazy Mary, playwright A.R. Gurney steps outside of his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., the setting for many of his plays. Though Lydia (Sigourney Weaver), the protagonist, hails from that city, the play finds both her and her son Skip (Michael Esper) in a Boston sanitarium. The two are there to visit Mary, Lydia's mentally unstable cousin, who has been hidden from society since a disastrous affair with a stable hand came to a head in 1973. Since her divorce from Skip's father, Lydia has desperately tried to cling to her upper-class lifestyle, and she finds an opportunity when her father's death puts her in control of Mary's inheritance. She sees Mary (Kristine Nielsen)—the product of an affair between a Buffalo landowner and a laundress—as a source for her continued affluence. Skip, meanwhile, is striving to break free of the confines of high society. Although he attends Harvard, he is working his way through school and wishes to live as a landscaper, in sharp contrast to his mother's wish that he pursue a business degree.

Ultimately, Crazy Mary, now playing at Playwrights Horizons, is about the lengths people go to for control—of other people's lives as well as their own. When Lydia and Skip meet Mary (Skip has never seen her, and Lydia hasn't visited since she was sent away), she is in a catatonic state. But Skip triggers a reaction in her, and she experiences a kind of awakening. She becomes animated and no longer needs assistance walking and in making decisions. She draws stability and a newfound zest for living from her relationship with Skip, which starts as an emotional one but eventually becomes physical.

Although I feel Gurney overreaches with this incestuous plot point, the relationship between Mary and Skip remains the central force driving the play. Through it, both characters try to release themselves from Lydia's domineering and assert their autonomy. The more time and attention Skip devotes to Mary, the more he brings her to life, even if it is at his peril. Eventually, he cuts classes and then abandons his studies altogether, much to Lydia's dismay.

Esper is a major discovery in Crazy Mary, providing all kinds of depth and nuance to a character much wiser, and more conflicted, than his years suggest. His relationship with Mary is bittersweet; as fulfilling as it is for him, it cannot last. Yet for the first time, he feels he has contributed to someone else's life.

Nielsen (who, like Weaver, is a Gurney regular) is also outstanding—and heartbreaking. Her work here is slightly less madcap than it has been in the playwright's other works, and while Mary's behavior is rather immature, she maintains a certain level of pathos throughout her disappointments. Mary truly falls in love with Skip, but it is Lydia who can determine her happiness. She is the one who can grant Mary's freedom and move her to Buffalo. In the climactic, riveting scene in which Mary beseeches Lydia to do so, all the characters understand the consequences—that to deny Mary's return to Buffalo will crush her spirit and ultimately send her back into catatonia.

The production is a testament to Jim Simpson's solid direction, as well as the performance by Weaver, his wife. Weaver's many stage and screen portrayals have perfected an image of the wealthy WASP wife, but in this piece she shows the cracks in that veneer. Lydia is as vulnerable and desperate a character as her cousin, but she refuses to give up her fight, even long after she has already lost it. Weaver sets the tone for every scene; when she sits, characters move toward her, and when she alters her speaking voice, other characters match her.

The other two performers—Mitchell Greenberg as Mary's opportunistic doctor and Myra Lucretia Taylor as Pearl, Mary's nurse—are dependable in their smaller roles. Taylor, in particular, alternates seamlessly between Pearl's sterner and more broadly comic moments.

The characters in Crazy Mary may face difficult choices, but performances like these make seeing the show no choice at all.

Desperate Housewife

Easily one of the least sympathetic characters in classic literature, Emma Bovary cheats on her husband out of boredom, squanders his fortune, and plots her own tragic ending. Paul Dick has ambitiously adapted Gustave Flaubert's epic late-19th-century novel Madame Bovary, which chronicles the life of the infamous adulteress, into the most unlikely of incarnations—a musical. Despite his efforts, this version fails to capture the incapacitating madness that predicates Emma's astonishing actions. In a troubled and lethargic production, we are left with an impression of the despondent Emma that arouses neither empathy nor intrigue. Dick, who last year created a musical version of Wuthering Heights, obviously has an appetite for dark and twisty literary sources, and he pulls triple duty here, contributing book, music, and lyrics. Together with director Elizabeth Falk, he has created a brooding, melancholy, interminable dramatic affair that never focuses clearly enough on its extravagantly flawed heroine.

Almost immediately after marrying the older, upright, and uptight Dr. Bovary, Emma is restless and ready for a radical change of circumstances: "My life is slipping away," she laments. As she begins to spend time with the youthful, romantic Leon, she is seized by feelings of love inspired by their shared passion for poetry, music, and art. The two become confidants, but Leon leaves for law school before they have a chance to consummate their affair.

When the conniving Rodolphe Boulanger arrives in town, however, he recognizes the dissolute Emma as easy prey, luring her into his affections with slick—and obviously well-honed—acts of seduction. But when a marriage promise (and escape plan) goes awry, Emma finds herself a ruined woman, and she quickly runs into the arms of another man. At the same time, she naïvely purchases more and more gifts for her lovers from the local pharmacy, and the steadily increasing bill threatens her demise. "The Noose Tightens," Dick alerts us in one of the none-too-subtle scene titles.

And subtlety is certainly not de rigueur in this moody production. Characters proclaim their fervent emotion, and then sing about it—at often exhausting length. The stormy, cascading, and often beautiful melodies ebb and flow to reflect emotional grandiosity, but the score ultimately trickles out like one continuous vamp (seamlessly played by talented music director Russell Stern, who sits elegantly behind the onstage piano). Melodies percolate but never coalesce into any thrilling focus; instead of channeling emotion with moving precision, the music diffuses rapture into confusion.

As rendered here, the plot itself is similarly uneven, and the action lurches between lengthy, confessional ballads and clipped, choppy mini-scenes. One particularly baffling series of scenes chronicles Leon's unrequited lust for Emma as he encounters her and her husband in various scenarios. Although the sudden blackouts and fragments are obviously meant to chart Leon's romantic frustration, these structurally problematic devices do little to probe the depths of this odd romantic triangle. Instead, these strange scenes become unwittingly comic and rather ridiculous. In fact, they inspired unsolicited laughter from the audience on the night I attended.

Still, there is much that is rich in this production, primarily in the cast's excellent vocals. Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper and Christopher Vettel offer exceptionally well-sung turns as Dr. Bovary and Boulanger, respectively, and Steven Patterson turns in a delightfully nuanced performance as the shrewd and conniving pharmacist Homais.

In the title role, Lauren Hauser showcases prodigious coloratura tones and a lovely, fragile presence, but her character's madness never reaches an appropriately feverish pitch. In her first big aria (gloriously operatic in tone, if not in dramatic delivery), she complains of the trials of her domestic duties, but as it concludes she weakly pummels a chair—a feeble action that fails to convey her ostensibly harrowed state of mind.

The production looks fantastic, and the designers have surrounded the cast with an appropriately lavish environment to reflect the domestic sphere of 1890s provincial France. Brian Garber's elegant set features walls painted in rich scarlet hues that match the fiery plot, and Noah Marin's costumes capture the dapper style of the Bovarys' social set.

Meghann Babo also contributes exquisite vocals as the Bovarys' servant Felicite, but as she sings the glorious ballad "Rain on the River," director Falk perplexingly keeps the actress hidden in the offstage shadows. It's this misuse of resources and continually misguided focus that doom much of this musical Madame Bovary. Here, with a character as audacious and controversial as any in the theatrical canon (if not more so), Emma Bovary's fire is extinguished in a swirl of tempestuous melody.

Invasive Procedures

There's lots of drug snorting, male sexual banter, and 20-something aimlessness in Anthony Neilson's Penetrator, a 1993 play that the Working Man's Clothes company is reviving in a necessarily assaultive but unfortunately sluggish production. Neilson, a Scot, is part of the British theater movement of the 1990s dubbed "in-yer-face theater." If the 1950s rebellion against the tidy drawing-room dramas of Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan spawned "kitchen-sink drama," then Neilson and his in-yer-face colleagues, notably Mark Ravenhill and the late Sarah Kane, are purveyors of "backed-up-toilet drama."

Like Kane and Ravenhill's works, Penetrator revels in foul language and sordid situations. (More about the movement can be found here.) The play is of interest mainly as a forerunner of slacker portraits like Kenneth Lonergan's landmark American cousin, This Is Our Youth, or Adam Rapp's less successful Finer Noble Gases, in which a character performs full-frontal urination.

In a wordless prologue, we see Woody (superbly played by Cole Wimpee, with a steel-spine posture and unsettling bewilderment in his haunted eyes) hitchhiking on a dark road. The loneliness of the road and Wimpee's sense of paranoia are underlined by Jake Platt's lighting and Adam Smith's ominous score and sound design, which periodically includes voice-overs of Woody's rape fantasies.

Woody, who has been discharged from the military after serving in Iraq, is about to drop in on Max, a grade-school friend who now spends his time playing video games. Designer Ace Eure has distilled slacker land in Max's pad: the shabby furnishings are dominated by a board-and-cinderblock bookcase crammed with everything from well-worn paperbacks to a stuffed effigy of George W. Bush. It fairly screams "arrested adolescence."

Max, played by Michael Mason with a nice balance of determined calm and sardonic humor, is rooming with the beefy Alan (Jared Culverhouse), who is a friend of both, though Alan's most fervent relationship is with his teddy bears. Max teases Alan by threatening the teddies with anal rape, but when Woody arrives, he begins talking about the real thing. He claims he is being pursued by the Penetrators, who have held him in a dark room and sodomized him, using bodies and objects.

Woody also does his own sexual probing, asking why the fastidious and wary Alan hasn't got a girlfriend. Adding to the homoerotic undercurrent among the three is Max's misogyny, fostered by an inability to connect to a woman on a permanent basis.

Director Jeremy Torres's production embraces the rawness of the piece almost wholeheartedly. (Early on, one of the cast members begins to masturbate onstage and is discreetly interrupted; other productions have staged more of an in-yer-hand outcome.) Unfortunately, Torres lets too much air into the proceedings. Alan's precarious position between the old friends results in a lot of searching silences before he speaks; the whole bubbles too slowly before the eruptive climax; and much of the scabrous humor falls flat. Even at 75 minutes, the production lollygags.

But what does it all mean? Neilson wrote the play in response to the first Iraq war; the original characters were Brits. That script has been revised by Bekah Brunstetter (and approved by Neilson) to apply to the current Iraq war, but the political references are negligible and the new focus mainly indicts Americans as puerile and obsessed with proving their manhood.

Unfortunately, that's a stock accusation that isn't accompanied by anything fresh or urgent. In fact, Penetrator succeeds primarily as a paranoid nightmare about the complications of friendship. Still, the muck wallowing and relentless use of f-words, c-words, and other c-words will probably leave audiences eager to find relief in war, global warming, and terrorist plots.

Away With Words

There are many unavoidable conventions in the art of storytelling, especially in the boy-meets-girl genre, also known as romantic comedy. Mark Greenfield's frenetic comedy I.E. in Other Words, featuring a 14-member cast from the Flea Theater's Bats troupe, falls snugly into this category. The play takes a lighthearted look at the innocence of puppy love, focusing its attention on the trials and tribulations of a small-town country boy who leaves his childhood sweetheart behind to chase his dreams in the big city. The traditional themes, stock characters, and emotional undercurrents all apply, but once the play opens, it becomes immediately clear that there is nothing conventional about Greenfield's eccentric writing style and wildly imaginative tale.

I.E. in Other Words opens in the country, with sunlight pouring in the house as the Goodman family gathers around to eat the cucumber sandwiches that their niece Jen (Elizabeth Hoyt) has prepared. A young man named Sam (Teddy Bergman) interrupts their lunch, making suggestive overtures toward Jen while Pop Goodman (Malcolm Madera) threatens him with a shaking cane and Ma Goodman (Mary Jane Schwartz) says, "Something upbeat, contrasting my husband, which indicates that I'm rooting for you Sam in your quest to nail my niece."

The characters often communicate like this, snubbing conventional dialogue while giving us a fill-in-the-blank conversational blueprint to work out on our own. For example, rather than simply tell a dirty joke, a character will say, "Insert some innuendo here." Later, when Sam leaves Jen to move to the city, he asks her to "insert a moving monologue about how expanding our horizons will help us."

But this is not to say that the characters do not speak in actual dialogue. There are many precious one-liners and quick-witted exchanges here, especially since the actors are free from having to plod through trivial matters like obligatory exposition, a back story, and obvious references to the passage of time.

Everything about I.E. in Other Words is different and unique, including its outstanding cast. Greenfield's dialogue does not roll off the tongue easily, and yet the Bats were able to execute it error-free at a rapid-fire pace. Because the cast is so large, there is always something going on in every corner of the stage, whether it was characters whispering sinisterly in a corner or popping up unexpectedly from the wings to chime in on an impromptu musical number.

There is also a wonderful use of lights and staging, especially as the plot makes the transition from the light and breezy world of Localtownsville to the dark and dangerous land of City City. In this transition's first jarring image, snarling individuals lunge at the audience, an exaggeration of what many first-time visitors to a city might expect to see upon arrival. A naïve-looking Sam seems to step off the bus into a black hole, where he is trampled by pedestrians, easily conned by criminals, and harassed by a Bad Cop (Jaime Robert Carriollo), who dislikes tourists asking for directions.

But romantic comedy enthusiasts who think they know how this will end need to think again. From the opening moments to the closing monologue, I.E. in Other Words is as unpredictable as the young love it celebrates. Two childhood sweethearts coming of age and moving in separate directions have a slim chance of making their love last. The play, on the other hand, moves effortlessly from beginning to end without ever losing an ounce of charm.

Greenfield and director Kip Fagan have created a much-needed expansion of a familiar genre. Whereas many romantic comedies can feel like Xerox copies of each other, I.E. in Other Words offers a refreshingly new method of storytelling that stands out as a true original.

Strange Bedfellows

Strong-willed women are very much a part of the American political landscape, and one in particular as the 2008 presidential election approaches. Gotham Stage Company's solid production of Randall David Cook's Fate's Imagination offers both a look into the family life and history of a Hillary Clinton-ish presidential hopeful and some daring speculation on what might have made a woman like Hillary into such a political powerhouse. Cook's unfortunately titled play is about freelance writer Brock, who struggles to find his political identity as the son of a powerful New York senator, his mother Susan. Like Hillary, she has her eye on the White House. Brock's late father was also a senator—and, in another analogy to the Clintons, an adulterer. Late one night, an older woman, Lilah, approaches Brock on the street and says he strikingly resembles a long-lost lover. Then she bluntly asks him, "Do you want to go back to my place and fool around?"

To Brock, this chance encounter could be a novel-worthy "life experience," so he agrees. Soon, the two are involved in a passionate love affair. Unfortunately, it won't do for a presidential candidate's son to be dating a woman 30 years older, so Momma intervenes. Upon confronting Lilah, Susan discovers that Brock's "chance encounter" was anything but—Lilah is actually someone with a grudge and some pretty lurid political ammunition to use against Brock's parents.

Cook's play is tightly structured, with only a few elements that don't work. There is some very good dialogue, like the frank line above, but a few lines seem as if they were forced into the script. For instance, when Lilah and Brock are talking about politics in her apartment, Brock suddenly exclaims, "Words can be more powerful than missiles!" That statement, blurted out so passionately during a quiet moment, hardly seems natural. Also, a scene where Susan speaks to her dead husband on an airplane is difficult to accept as realistic.

Despite the few bad lines, the script's overall voice is hip and relevant. In some of the best scenes, Block addresses the audience through his blog entries, where he speaks casually about both his new relationship and his desire to enlist and join the fighting in Iraq. These scenes are intimately truthful, and actor Jed Orlemann's delivery here is especially compelling.

Director Hayley Finn has wrapped Cook's script in a contemporary package that is an interesting cross between naturalism and high style. As such, the characters move and interact very unaffectedly in the love scenes between Lilah and Brock, while Susan's public appearance speeches are done almost entirely in strobe lights, to simulate camera flashes. Finn uses this dichotomy to great effect throughout, relying on strong design to keep the scenes crisp.

Robin Vest's innovative scenic design is a fairly realistic one-bedroom apartment, with some handy flourishes that facilitate the other scenes. When Susan is on an airplane, a small circular picture frame on the wall next to her lights up to simulate an airplane window. Aided by light designer Lucas Benjaminh Krech's cleverly placed lights, Finn's team manages to establish different locations very well. Lilah collects old photos, and the walls of her apartment are covered with these framed pictures. Vest and projection designer luckydave create some nice effects by projecting small images, like Brock's blog or photos taken of Susan, into the frames.

All three actors are first-rate talents. Donna Mitchell successfully channels Hillary Clinton's spunk and fervor without descending into parody. Her Susan is very grounded, and I was particularly impressed by a very small detail: the dispassionate way in which she spoke to her driver on her cell phone seemed appropriate for a woman of her stature.

As Lilah, Elisabeth Norment has an interesting challenge: she must be both motherly and attractive to Brock. Norment achieves both. Her character is a teacher, and she delivers several monologues about The Odyssey that effectively put the story into a surprising historical perspective.

At the center of this production is Orlemann's Brock. His character aptly serves as an example of his generation—he beams in his blogging scenes but sulks pointedly in a brunch scene with his mother. Brock searches for meaning in the Iraq war and his new love life, and Orlemann portrays his inner struggle with enthusiasm.

Like The Odyssey, Fate's Imagination has a lot to say about power, gender, and war in contemporary society. Even if it isn't perfectly scripted, the material remains challenging and ambitious.

Motel Stories

The Debate Society's latest play, The Eaten Heart, is based on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, in which people fleeing the Black Death tell each other stories. It's sort of like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, except Boccaccio's storytellers breeze through 100 stories in just 10 days. With Eaten Heart, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen have conceived a more contemporary Decameron, set in the 1970s, where multiple characters intermingle in and around a highway motel. The two playwrights have taken Boccaccio's initial idea and converted it into a "shared lucid dream" that functions with its own bizarre logic. Bos and Thureen also play all the characters—among them, a magician who unintentionally shorts out a renaissance festival employee's TV, a man in special "invisibility underpants" who stalks the halls for women, and a jealous husband who checks into the room next to his wife and her lover. Even when the story lines don't cross, we often see two stories staged simultaneously in separate rooms.

Most of these stories offer plots with a fulfilling setup, development, and payoff. In the scene where Bos plays a traveling radio minister's wife, for instance, we are cleverly shown that she is unhappy with her husband and her perpetual life on the road. That way, when a short-shorts-wearing pizza guy (Thureen) shows up to deliver her lunch and then decides to go for a swim, we understand why he would make an impression on her, and why she would be willing to go to such bizarre lengths—like ordering a second pizza—to spend more time with him.

In other cases, however, the story lines are not as satisfying. The story of a girl who seems to be in love with a potted plant ends shockingly, but it's for shock value only.

Director Oliver Butler clearly had numerous challenges in mounting this script: two actors playing 15 roles, multiple stories that are not directly connected to each other, and a motel that must double for a lounge club and then triple for a family's dining room. But Butler's expert staging ties all these separate actions and locales together. At the climax of one story line, a motel room's bed is covered in dirt and then abandoned. In the next scene, the maid removes the soiled linens while she talks to the motel repairman. Ultimately, the bed is moved and becomes a dining room table at the end of the play. You can see Butler's skill at work in these stage transformations and neat transitions, which denote both the passage of time and a change of space.

Butler also wisely chose talented designers whose work nicely supplements the energy and complexity of his staging. Amanda Rehbein's scenic design is versatile and meticulous, with the stage consisting of one full "motel room" and two "half-rooms." The rooms are more or less the same with only small, believable differences, but the concept allows Bos, Thureen, and Butler to create some believable illusions, like having one character interact with another "invisible" character who is in the room's unseen half.

Mike Riggs's admirable lighting design is particularly supportive of the script's more dramatic and quirky elements, like a very realistic lightning storm halfway through the play that knocks out the motel's power, or an overhead spotlight that comes up when Bos is playing a lounge singer, indicating a change in both mood and scenery.

Costume designer Sydney Maresca and sound designer Nathan Leigh deserve commendation as well. With only two performers, Maresca's costumes are crucial in making the characters immediately distinguishable from each other. Thureen's magic bikini briefs, in particular, are hysterical and perfect. Maresca also uses wigs to distinguish the characters: even when Bos is out of her Renaissance-fair outfit, we recognize the character by the large braid in her hair. Leigh's vivid sound design completes the production, with peppy background music on the radio, fake period commercials on the TV, and the sounds of distant characters swimming in the motel's pool.

Bos and Thureen's performances are wide-ranging and always entertaining. In the pizza guy scene, they show they can be goofy yet genuine, and the result is very sweet. In a final scene at a dinner table, they play their characters' humdrum marriage completely naturally. At first, their understatement seems comical and baffling—we wonder how long we can watch these two make superficial small talk over their meal. But as the scene progresses and we learn the truth behind this quiet little dinner, amusement turns to horror. Given the revelation at the end, Bos and Thureen's subdued performance here is chilling.

Although The Eaten Heart is a well-acted play of significant depth, it is the surface aesthetics—the slick staging and the flawless production design—that elevate it above other Off Off Broadway productions. This is the second play, after last year's mesmerizing Snow Hen, in the Debate Society's trilogy based on literature about the Black Death. After two splendid productions of fascinating new plays, I'm eager to see what this company comes up with next.

At Obie Awards, Thrills and a Touch of the Bittersweet

The downtown theaterati were present, and maybe a bit giddy from the cocktail hour, for the 52nd annual Village Voice Obie Awards on Monday, May 21. Each year, The Village Voice's chief theater critic, Michael Feingold, heads up a committee to honor the actors, writers, directors, creative staff, and theater companies who've had an impact on Off and Off Off Broadway over the last season.

Besides the winners of the Lifetime Achievement and Sustained Achievement awards, none of the honorees know they're being feted, which makes the show a guessing game for the attendees. The announcement of each name was preceded by whispers and gasps as the audience learned the award recipient's identity. There are also no categories such as Best Actor in a Play, as the Obies follow the principle that "creativity is not a competition."

Though the mood was undoubtedly positive, there was a bittersweet note to many of the acceptance speeches since the winners' shows had closed before the ceremony. Many people voiced the sentiment "I wish more people had seen it." However, for the winners—many of whom had never before won an award—it was a thrill for the production, and their part in it, to be noticed at all, and they were glad to be part of such a tight-knit community.

Some highlights from the ceremony included:

• Michael Feingold relating a story in which a friend said "the five most wonderful words in the English language: 'Take me to the theater.' "
• Ron Cephas Jones, as the winner of one of the Sustained Excellence in Performance awards, quipped that during his career, he's been "trying to be excellent at sustaining myself as an actor."
• Betsy Aidem said that this recognition was gratifying because she "thought of [herself] as a member of the witness protection program for character actors."
• Andre De Shields serenaded the audience with his "anthem" ("If You Believe" from The Wiz.
• Judith Malina gave an impassioned speech claiming that "the world is in a lousy situation, and we, everyone in this room, is here to make it better!"
• Steve Ben Israel followed Malina's speech with a shtick-y Borscht Belt stand-up act. (It wasn't entirely clear if it was performance art or a guy taking advantage of a microphone and a captive audience.)
• Roslyn Ruff received one of the largest laughs of the night when she referred to "the glaze that comes over your eyes when you don't necessarily connect with someone onstage." (For the record, she said this was not the case with her Seven Guitars cast mates.)

The evening drew to a close, two hours and 45 minutes later, with the presentation of prizes and grants to one playwright and four theater companies. One of the winners, Synapse Productions, drew inspiration from quotes posted on the walls of its office. A quote from Winston Churchill seemed especially appropriate to anyone toiling away in the not so glamorous world of the downtown scene: "If you're going through Hell, keep going."

******

For a list of the 2007 winners, go to http://www.villagevoice.com/obies/index.php

Dim Lights, Big City

Director Jaime Robert Carrillo deserves some credit for scouring American theatrical history and coming up with Hey You, Light Man! Unfortunately, Oliver Hailey's drama, which ran for six weeks early in 1963, doesn't attain the status of a lost classic in this production by the Firebrand Theory Theater Company. For a 45-year-old play written on the threshold of the sexual revolution, Light Man has a few notably modern elements that may on paper have dovetailed with Firebrand's mission: "to stir up public feelings by investigation of controversial issues and dramatizing the infinite mystery of the extraordinary in the ordinary." In its heroine, Lula Roca, recently widowed after a falling sandbag kills her brutish husband, Hailey has drawn a portrait of an abused wife in denial. The character still resonates, but in other respects Hailey's story, which echoes the incipient social rebellion of the period—the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco, the spirited bohemianism of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the loosening sexual mores—works only fitfully.

Matinee idol Ashley Knight (Christopher Lee) is spending his first night living on the set of the comedy in which he stars when Lula (Sari Caine) appears. She has fallen asleep in her seat while waiting for her celebrity-crazed friend Mabel (Sonya Tsuchigane) to return from seeking autographs. Now Lula is locked in the theater and wants to get out to find Mabel.

Ashley, meanwhile, has decided to escape his annoying family and live on the stage, and he suggests that Lula remain with him. All this may sound like a promising setup for a screwball meditation about escapism versus reality, but it's leaden and labored.

Hailey throws in darker complications that are close to unpalatable. Lula has lost three children while on vacation in a national park; she explains rather coolly that one dashed for a waterfall and another for a mountain, and both were killed simultaneously. Her third child, an infant, was snatched by a bear through the car window and killed. "You mustn't grieve over them, Mrs. Boca," advises Ashley, who dislikes children.

In the strait-laced world of 1963, such flippancy may have come off as weirdly wacky, but modern audiences, familiar with parental neglect and spousal abuse, are unlikely to grin. If not for Lee's winning charm and unthreatening demeanor, which wear off gradually, Ashley might instantly strike a creepy chord.

The shoestring production cannot afford the visual details to help an audience suspend disbelief. Stage directions indicate that Act I takes place in "a modern bachelor's apartment, including a kitchenette." For a star vehicle, the eclectic décor, by Carrie Hash and Anita La Scala, looks mismatched: a microwave; a modern, black metal-frame sofa bed; an overstuffed woman's wing chair; and a brass dial telephone that Jean Harlow might have used.

The actors, too, are visually jarring. Gary Ferrar works hard for comedy as Ashley's dimwitted jock son Tube, but he and Lee, in spite of the latter's beard, look like frat brothers rather than parent and child. Tsuchigane tries for a comic-hysterical Mabel, dressed by Amy Pedigo in a whirlwind of gold lamé, fuchsia, leopard skin, and bangles; the actress's energy is laudable, but the effect is tiring. Caine, as Lula, locates her character's sexual awakening (tame for today) but could find more color.

"This is one of those symbolilic plays," says Mabel, describing the grim Act II slum set to which Ashley and Lula flee. Hailey's title is a call-out for theatrical magic to happen, and Lula eventually summons some (helped by lighting designer Adam Hale). But it's too little, and too late.

Going Postal

Ah, spring. When a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of sending dead lizards through the mail. Such is one of the many exchanges between the couple in Hate Mail by Bill Corbett and Kira Obolensky, now playing at the Independent Theater. And you think your love life has problems. Hate Mail chronicles the bizarre relationship of Preston (Jason Cicci) and Dahlia (Danielle Ferland) through a series of letters, notes, telegrams, Internet chats, and the occasional posted reptile (Interfauna?). A.R. Gurney's Love Letters this ain't. Preston and Dahlia start the play out as strangers, but over time they become adversaries, friends, lovers, and back to enemies—all without delivering a single line of dialogue face to face.

The story starts when uptight Midwesterner Preston writes a letter of complaint, requesting a refund from a souvenir shop he had visited while on vacation. The reply, sent from assistant manager Dahlia, succinctly states that the store gives no refunds. Preston tries again but is met with a similar response. Frustrated, he escalates the argument with threats of litigation.

But as the attacks grow more heated, they also become more personal. Imagine Preston's chagrin when Dahlia reveals herself to be a bohemian photographer, working in the shop to support her art. Before long, the plot gets ridiculously complex. Preston gets medicated and joins a commune, while Dahlia swears off art to become a traveling saleswoman. Over the course of the play, they constantly reinvent themselves, turning their lives upside down again and again. Through all this, inexplicably, they find themselves writing to each other on a regular basis.

Corbett and Obolensky have honed their comic writing over the years on some quite impressive projects. He was a staff writer and performer on the cult-classic TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000. She is perhaps most famous for her award-winning play Lobster Alice. Their collaboration here has produced a script that's funny enough but ultimately unremarkable. It would be beside the point to bemoan the plot's contrivances (each character undergoes several personality about-faces; why they maintain their correspondence at times is a bit of a mystery). The big crime here is that while the script provides chuckles throughout, truly big laughs are few and far between.

Director Catherine Zambri has fortunately crafted a fine production, keeping the action taut and lively. How much action is there in a script that consists entirely of correspondence between two people who never share the same stage space at the same time? Surprisingly a lot, thanks to Zambri. Of course, a good portion of credit goes to the almost perfectly cast Cicci and Ferland for accomplishing the superhuman task of engaging an audience in this epistolary format.

Chris Dallos's lighting does wonders to help the audience keep track of time and space, while Maruti Evans's set is simplicity in itself. As you can probably imagine, desks play an important role, but the stunner here is the giant sheet that covers both the back wall and floor with a design of envelopes, stamps, and postcards. Chelsea White's costumes (easily disposable tie for him, bright tops and optional sunglasses for her) suit the characters to a tee, and Andrew Bellware's choice of music features the usual suspects ("Please Mr. Postman," "The Letter").

Ultimately, this production of Hate Mail is stronger than the play itself. No matter how well a talented cast tries to sell a groaner of a joke, it's still a groaner. The script is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, but for a while, the cast and crew might make you forgive that.