Boo

There are many different ways to scare people: a clap of thunder when you least expect it, flashing strobe lights that disorient your vision, or a single flickering bulb in a dimly lit room threatening to plunge you into darkness. The Exchange’s fright fest of short plays titled, The Scariest, utilizes all of these elements to make you jump and squirm uncomfortably in your seat. Bare bulbs hang from the ceiling; plastic drapings serve as walls and at the end of the long wooden stage stands an ominous red door.

Unfortunately, the goose bumps end here. For a series of pieces titled The Scariest, the stories themselves are not really scary. They are, however, sinister, creepy and not for the faint of heart.

In Gary Sunshine’s The Names of Foods, a man describes burning his infant daughter to death. Dan Dietz’s Lobster Boy asks us to imagine the horror of a young boy as he realizes that he has killed the one person in his life he loved the most. In Kristin Newbom’s Revelations, two children’s jackets are pulled from a box, both of them covered with blood and bullet holes.

These stories and images are certainly dark and horrific, but they tap more into the raw human suffering you hear on the news than the gleefully spine-tingling stories you tell around a campfire.

The idea to produce The Scariest came about when The Exchange commissioned several young playwrights to write short horror stories inspired by the work of classic writers Hans Christian Anderson, WW Jacobs, Nathanial Hawthorne and the Book Of Revelation. But you do not need to know these writers’ works to enjoy or understand the adaptations depicted here. In fact, you are better off not reading the originals since The Exchange’s writers put their own unique spins on the stories.

Nathanial Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, rewritten by Laura Schellhardt as The Apothecary’s Daughter, feels the most in line with the evening of creeps and chills that the title promises to serve. It has just the right mix of spine-tingling terror and campfire humor. The story revolves around a lonely apothecary’s daughter (Mandy Siegfried) whose constant exposure to poisonous plants has turned her own skin so toxic that she can kill a fly by blowing on it.

Another fun piece is Liz Duffy Adams' The Uses Of Fear, a sensory piece that toys with your mind. A disembodied voice delivers the entire monologue in the dark, describing a series of scenarios designed to get your paranoia flowing.

The final piece, Revelations, has a lackluster beginning - a writer (Siegfried) is writing about not being able to write - but later picks up as different characters start jumping into her body to help her out. The characters quickly take over, forcing the writer to pull a disturbing story out of the repressed section of her mind. Finally, a “Cleaner” (Joaquin Torres) has to be called in to get all the characters out, an act that leaves the writer feeling renewed and refreshed.

The Cleaner has a surprisingly comical entrance that is worth withholding for the visual delight it brings. A warm glow fills the room as he unites the characters and audience in song, giving everyone the first uplifting moment they have had all night. It feels as if this man is not only here for the characters, but for the viewer as well. After this evening of macabre works and distressing images you need someone to clear out the shadows and bring in a much needed ray of light.

Strangled In the Heat

No effort was spared in recreating the tropical feel of the Mexican coast in this current incarnation of Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana at T. Schreiber Studios. George Allison’s lush set – which includes a thatched hut, exotic plants and actual rainfall – steamily ushers the audience into a world of lonely people fighting for their psychic lives in the heat of summer at the dilapidated Costa Verde Hotel. As a whole, the cast fares well over the course of this lengthy but well-directed show, which, like many of Williams’ later plays, examines the polarity between man’s bestial desire and his spiritual longing.

The lusty widow Maxine Faulk (a feisty Janet Saia) tends to the Costa Verde and copes with her husband’s recent death with the help of rum-cocos and romps with her hard-bodied houseboys, Pedro and Pancho. Rapacious and practical, it is clear from the start of the play that Maxine is determined to survive.

Perched more precariously on the divide between earthly hunger and spiritual striving is clergyman-on-the-verge Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (the frenetic Derek Roche). An expelled minister turned travel guide, Shannon shows up at the hotel with a hijacked tour group of Baptist music teachers and a bus key that he refuses to surrender. Among the disgruntled traveling party is an irate church chaperone (Pat Patterson) -- prone to spitting out the word “defrocked” at the Reverend -- and her besotted underage prodigy (Alecia Medley,) whom Shannon has recently deflowered.

At any given lull, the Verde's lazy veranda is punctuated by a swarm of beefy and overbearing (remember the play is set in 1940) German tourists who heartily sing, slap and lift each other. Here as elsewhere, costume design by Karen Ann Ledger is precise and colorful.

Last to arrive are Nantucket spinster and gypsy portrait artist Hannah Jelkes (a touching Denise Fiore) and her distinguished grandfather, a 97-year old poet-on-demand (the lovely Peter Judd). This pair of creative hucksters, with a history of parlaying their artistic gifts into world travel on the pay-as-you-go plan, are at the end of their joint financial rope. With empty coffers, they have no choice but to appeal to the Widow Faulk to house them for the evening on credit.

In contrast to Maxine, the demure Hannah (whose exchanges with Shannon constitute much of the second act) would have Shannon return to his original spiritual leanings. At one point she tells him, “I respect a person that has had to howl and fight for his decency and bit of goodness much more than I respect the lucky ones that had theirs handed out to them at birth.” Fiore steals the show with her quiet understatement and deep sense of stillness, especially in this climatic scene.

Roche also does a soulful job throughout the play, especially in his more intense passages. Yet, while one feels Shannon’s spiritual thirst quite specifically in Roche's portrayal, one never quite feels that white-knuckling alcoholic thirst of the Black-Irish-on-the wagon that is intimated in the first act.

Also worth noting is Peter Aguero's fine and humorous performance as Jake Latta, and the plethora of tropical sounds that are provided by Chris Rummel.

For fans of Williams work, this lovingly presented version of The Night Of The Iguana is a must see.

U.S. on the March

George Santayana declared, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That may explain why the revival of this 1973 piece of documentary theater, originally written in response to the Vietnam War, comes as a shock. Although most people may know that the United States took possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, almost no one remembers that after the treaty with Spain, from 1899 to 1902, the United States put down a Filipino independence movement with tactics that were as brutal as anything the Taliban thought up. Among the many astonishing parallels with more recent U.S. interventions is the use of “the water cure” to get information from suspected insurgents. Playwrights Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler took their title from an editorial in The Nation in 1900, a year after United States annexed the former territories of Spain and an election year in which imperialism was hotly debated. In the article, the periodical catalogued the U.S. depredations: “Liberty crushed to earth by the land of liberty...broken promises...trenches full of Filipino dead...smoking heaps where once were happy villages...desolate fields, ruined industries...starving women and children.” Year One covers the run-up to the Spanish-American War and its grisly aftermath, and the characters include some of the most famous Americans of the time.

Drawn from correspondence, speeches, debates, and official documents, the play features a vast array of characters, including generals, political bosses, party leaders, observers, and two Irish stereotypes, Mr. Dooley and Mr. Hennessey, who bring a bit of comic relief while also representing the attitudes of the common man. Among the Imperialists were President William McKinley, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, and patrician Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of the Massachusetts dynasty (“Hooray for dear old Boston/The home of the bean and the cod./Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots/And the Cabots speak only to God”), who was at loggerheads with his senior senator, George Frisbie Hoar, leader of the Anti-Imperialists.

The Anti-Imperialists included ex-Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, who offered President McKinley $20 million to buy the Philippines so he could free the citizens. (Only Twain and Carnegie appear in the play.) Unusually, it was the older generation of former abolitionists who battled to keep the country true to its ideals, while the younger generation, epitomized by Roosevelt, were itching for expansion.

The debate touched on all aspects of American life in unexpected ways, as when eye-patched "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, a Senator from South Carolina, admonishes Lodge and his cohorts: “We inherited our race problem. But you are going out in search of yours. ... Let me ask you then, if the Filipinos are not fit for self-government, how dared you put the southern states into the hands of Negroes, as being fit not only to govern themselves, but also to govern white men?”

The production by Alex Roe employs 11 actors in 43 named roles, including three women, although none of the decision-makers of the period were female. But at two and a half hours, and even with two intermissions and a fascinating subject, the production is taxing. Part of it is the amount of information presented, but some of the actors also spoke haltingly, as if still mastering their characters. Perhaps as they become more comfortable with the huge parts the pace will pick up.

Still, there was confident and sharp work from J.M. McDonough in all his roles, including Carnegie and Tillman; Michael Hardart as the young, irascible, determined Roosevelt; and David Patrick Ford as minor characters and as an impressive singer of the national anthem. Roe utilized the small black box space well. A balcony served as platform for the politicians as well as a ship’s deck for Commodore Dewey (the master of gunboat diplomacy, who had already opened Japan and who sank the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila), and flags and music added visual interest.

A host of moments links the play to our own time, from the descriptions of the burnings and starvation inflicted on the Philippines, to the startling debates between the self-righteous imperialists led by a bull-headed Republican President, to the official reassurances that “The boys will be home by Christmas.” If it sometimes plays more as history lesson than drama, it still has a lot of juice.

Lives Adrift

There is something shamefully exhilarating about watching crazy women teeter at the edge of the deep end. Kristen Kosmas’s new play, Hello Failure , a clever and funny exploration of the ways people cope with loneliness and introspection, gives the audience this kind of detached perspective, allowing one to consider the way it feels looking in versus looking out. While watching others in pain is perversely cathartic, it is hardly comforting. In ways charming, witty, and sad, Hello Failure covers the vast and confusing mental landscapes of seven submariners’ wives. The play follows the women’s intertwining lives as they struggle with a profound existential loneliness that seized their lives with their husbands’ extended departures. They are all disturbingly quirky, and yet often seem like robots attempting to perform scripts that rarely work. At regular meetings the women struggle to define their lives so that they may live in the world with relative success. Sadly, their efforts mostly fail. The women share the stage and their problems throughout, but cannot reach self or joint understanding. Their disjointed experiences give the play its structure, which means that there is little plot development, but the dialogue and the actors are clever enough to sustain the show.

Echoing the disjointed emotional states of the characters, director Ken Rus Schmoll moves his actors around a stage divided to simultaneously present scenes in several locations: a cramped bathroom, a car, and a room in a museum. Through the seamless shifting between breakdowns and near-breakdowns, the audience gets to experience something like living inside a fractured mind. The show revolves around the chatter that occurs when people are waiting, but this idea is neither as simple nor as innocent as it might sound. Occasionally, one longs for something to happen, just as these women do. The fact that nothing changes reinforces the agony of waiting.

At first, the play’s overt means of presenting disjointed beauty can be frustrating (it’s as though the characters are too cognizant of their performances). However, the play takes a welcome turn when we leave indecipherable monologues for the dynamic meeting juxtaposed with Rebecca’s mad dialogue with a vibrant ghost (a masterfully absurd Matthew Maher). As Rebecca, Kosmas assumes the toughest role. Though Rebecca’s madness can seem contrived, her speeches are not without lovely and unique observations, made more touching by Kosmas’s childlike excitement.

That a play about suffering and emotional breakdowns is so funny is a testament to Kosmas’s fantastic and whimsical sense of humor. The playwright has a wonderful way of finding the humor in casual patterns of speech; idioms are distorted by their presence in this alternate reality and grammar is is playfully interrogated. The women occupy a quirky, but devastating other place defined by deceptively barbed chatter, tenuous social connections, and a handbook filled with Soviet-style advice on how to manage the “stages of deployment.”

Amidst such strange surroundings, it would be easy for an actor to lose touch with the audience. Delightfully, all of the actors inhabit their characters with a level of naturalness that is engaging and perfectly in tune with the tone of Kosmas’s script. Indeed, the actors are so well in tune with each other that they can recite the same monologue simultaneously. When Rebecca and Kate (played with aggressive jubilance by Joan Jubett) share the stage and a speech, their different approaches to the same script demonstrate their subjective, unique pains, despite the seemingly obvious similarities between their experiences.

In some moments, the cleverness of the script is distracting, and the show is self-conscious to the point of philosophical detachment. However, the concluding speech, a joint monologue performed in unison by the entire cast and directed at the audience, is a self-conscious, but bold and effective way to tie together some of the previously scattered messages about anguish. Kosmas uses each character’s specific plight to address the feelings of disconnectedness that plague modern life, and unites them at the end to attribute the problem to self-obsession. The final scene suggests that the most healing shift could be away from the self, which might be the only way to ignore troublesome thoughts about how one “fits into the scheme of things.”

Hello Failure initially seems like it will be an absurd fantasy: Rebecca writes a letter to a dead man, a submarine inventor named Horace Hunley, who later makes a magical (and hilarious) appearance in her bathroom. But as much as these women dream, as much as they try to take part in alternate impossible worlds, they are, pitifully, in a world where men cannot fly and submarines sink, where the house does not fall apart even as you do. In such a world, the question arises, how does one cope? Could the answer be so simple and so devastating as one cannot?

Teen Disharmony

Teen angst weighs heavily on the characters in The Gay Barber's Apartment, Larry Traiger's high school soap opera receiving a shoestring production from Half Assiduity Arts.

Disaffected youth have been a staple of plays since Wedekind, who supplied the original for Broadway’s current hit Spring Awakening, which also has oppressed, aimless youth caught in the throes of romance. Traiger’s play is bleaker than the Tony-winner, mixing the anomie-ridden types from This Is Our Youth with hopeless romantic relationships. The protagonists here, the handsome Henry (Alex Hurt, who also directed) and the nebbishy Jonas (Joseph Aniska, who did the lighting), take drugs, and seem to have little prospect of finding their soulmates, if such females exist.

The macho Henry, who occasionally indulges in fight club antics, is obsessed with sexual pleasure rather than a loving relationship. Jonas, who is sleeping with a girl named Mary (Carolina Mesarina), chafes at shopping for prom clothes with her, endures a regimen of abstinence that she imposes, apparently because he doesn't share Mary's opinion of romantic movies, and even receives a pummeling at one point.

The guys gossip about who's sleeping with whom and bet on each other's worst instincts, but their entanglements seem like a tempest in a teapot. Yet Henry and Jonas exult at their success at arriving in the adult world and escaping high school, dominated by a fearsome Dean Hunt (they are presumably attending a private institution). The stern, officious older adult is reminiscent of teen comedies or Saturday morning shows like Saved by the Bell. But Jeff Pucillo, the only Equity member of the cast, brings confidence and polish to the vaguely silly role—in a contrast to the other performances. Hunt enters abruptly into the minds/memories of his former students as a larger-than-life tyrant who bellows at their transgressions. At one point Pucillo jumps through an open window onto a bed, and he descends in a parachute in the niftiest piece of Hurt’s generally ramshackle staging. (In the opening scene, for instance, Jonas is receiving a haircut from the title character and is wearing aviator sunglasses—what barber gives a haircut to someone wearing glasses? What person who cares about his grooming leaves glasses on during a haircut?)

The barber of the title, Venice (J. Stephen Brantley), provides a haven for the youths as well as drugs and a friendly ear, in contrast to the dean. Yet Traiger leaves undeveloped this odd relationship between a 45-year-old gay man and two straight teenagers. It’s apparently not exploitative, but one wonders how they met and why straight adolescents are so comfortable with an older gay man. Without some compelling explanation, the situation remains puzzling and unconvincing.

Unfortunately, on the only preview night, the production was clearly having severe technical problems that may have thrown off the cast. Occasional monologues were intended to be accompanied by lighting changes, signaled with a motion of the actors’ hands. If there was a lighting cue that worked all evening, it must have been an accident. Stretches of awkward silence took the air out of some scenes, and the time shifts among them were difficult to follow: scenes encompass high school as well as college. Still, Pucillo and Hurt managed to deliver solid work amid the chaos.

Chuck Pukanecz’s set was pretty effective for a budget that probably couldn’t buy a Happy Meal. The barber’s apartment didn’t look like that of a gay man; it would have seemed sparse to Mother Teresa. But Pukanecz managed to create a variety of playing areas on a cramped stage, including apartments, one with an adjoining room, and a park. The scene shifts were sometimes clumsy, but his invention was admirable (and a painted drop by “the artist currently known as Walter” suited the space well).

Traiger’s play has some interesting writing, especially a monologue about a Thanksgiving turkey, and the young, personable author himself takes tickets and offers drinks. Likable as he is, this play doesn’t offer much of a meal, let alone trimmings.

After the Storm

If crisis lends itself well to drama, it’s not hard to imagine the variety of plays that might come out of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, from an epic a la Angels in America, for example, that would follow a diverse group of individuals as they respond to the crisis, to a Titanic-style melodrama, perhaps, about a plucky Louisiana debutante and her tragic gang-leader lover. But just two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, with much of the devastated areas still in states of deep disrepair, we’re not yet ready for a sweeping epic. The disaster itself is still too close, the extent of its overreaching effects still too unknown. That uncertainty does not mean, of course, that contemporary playwrights can’t or shouldn’t create new works dealing with the horrors of the hurricane. Playwright Beau Willimon takes a smart approach to the task in his short new drama Lower Ninth, currently playing at the Flea Theater, by maintaining an extremely tight focus on three characters immediately following the storm.

Even the physical landscape of the play is small: Lower Ninth opens with Malcolm (James McDaniel) and E-Z (Gaius Charles) trapped on a rooftop, praying over a body wrapped in garbage bags, and awaiting rescue. Their shingled roof, by set designer Donyale Werle, provides enough levels to create interesting stage pictures without undermining the feeling of entrapment so fundamental to the piece.

E-Z and Malcolm wait out the heat on the roof, stranded with a body and a Bible, and spend much of the play contemplating each. They run through a series of expected tropes (“I’m happy you found God. But I wanna know when God is gonna find us”) that, while not exactly original or enlightening, carry the characters along on their quests for literal and spiritual salvation that make up the backbone of the play.

The actors, all accomplished film and television stars, fit right at home within the play’s focused scope, crafting natural characters with nuanced fears and desperations. Their ease with the material – and one another – allows for the welcome humor and surprising lightness that pervade much of the piece. McDaniel’s Malcolm evokes kind authority as a drug addict turned patriarch to Charles’ E-Z, a matter-of-fact teenager trying hard to act tough, though Charles never quite reaches the levels of anger that E-Z supposedly exudes. In his brief scene as Lowboy, Gbenga Akinnagbe imbues his character with a groundedness that appropriately resists the scene’s potential sentimentality.

Save for a few choice moments, director Daniel Goldstein brings out playfulness in the text. In doing so, he both isolates the play’s scenes of true horror and permits the characters to come across as endearingly sympathetic. In a drama like Lower Ninth, with a focus on an intimate group of characters literally struggling for survival, it’s important that we want, as an audience, to root for them. We do.

Some of the play’s most poignant moments occur not during the scenes themselves but in the interludes between them. Rather than traditional fades to black to distinguish between scenes, Lower Ninth scenes are divided by the actors arranging themselves into new positions beneath dimmed lights, underscored by a single trumpet. The music, composed by Aaron Meicht, lends the play an appropriate Creole feel while making what would otherwise be numerous transitions into their own complete moments. Goldstein does not shy away from holding such moments longer than might seem absolutely necessary, and the results are arrestingly evocative of the endless waiting the characters face. They have no relief from it, and the transitions keep the audience from experiencing that release either.

Audiences, of course, will be able to escape the world once the play ends. It might not leave them with much to talk about, but it will provide them likable characters to watch in an impossibly difficult situation for the brief seventy minutes of the play’s duration. What the future holds for the victims of the storm is, as for their real life counterparts, uncertain.

When a Stranger Doesn't Answer

Sarah Ruhl’s plays, like The Clean House and Eurydice, offer a bizarre combination of absurdism, fantasy, tragedy and realism, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Such is the risk a writer runs with experimental material. Unfortunately, Ruhl’s latest comedy, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, which just opened at Playwrights Horizons, offers many keenly observed bits that add up to little in the aggregate. Cell Phone is a bit like an antidote to McSorley’s, the famed Village ale house that demands its customers choose between light and dark beer; Ruhl attempts to sew together a work that is both dark and light. Jean is a mousy Holocaust Museum employee enjoying the last of her lobster bisque at a café (apparently abandoned by all other customers and any staff) whose reading reverie is interrupted by a constantly ringing cell phone. It turns out the phone’s owner, Gordon (T. Ryder Smith), has died quite suddenly while sitting upright at his table.

Next, Jean decides to start answering phone calls and adopt the phone as if it were her own, plunging her into an odd world full of those closest to Gordon, though none of them knew him too well. This is precisely the point of Ruhl’s play: how estranged individuals have become from one another, even as technology has seemingly made it easier to connect. Jean meets Gordon’s mother, Mrs. Gottlieb (the terrific Kathleen Chalfant); his wife, Hermia (Kelly Maurer); his mistress (Carla Harting); and underdog brother Dwight (David Aaron Baker).

And yet something is missing almost instantly in Cell Phone. Jean’s madcap decision to take Gordon’s phone and immerse herself among the people in his life, including a dangerously enigmatic career, never really jives. Ruhl doesn’t provide any type of “click” moment for everything to make sense, not even according to her own reality-defying sense of logic. As a result, events happen, but the play lacks its own sense of shape. If anything can happen in a work (and in this play, virtually anything does), there is little investment on the part of the audience to ascertain that events turn out a certain way.

This is especially true in a second act that seems to go off the rails, heading in every direction. It opens promisingly, allowing Smith a monologue in which he relives his last hours for the audience in a fascinating monologue, only to disappear again so that Jean can head to South Africa on a covert mission, initiate a chemistry-free romance with Dwight, and ultimately somehow visit heaven. It is not so much that these events defy rationality, but that they deliver no payoff.

In some ways, it appears that Anne Bogart’s smooth, organized direction was at odds with Ruhl’s unruly plot syntax. Bogart’s approach is clean and direct, yet the play meanders. Scene changes take a long time, making each scene very distinct when a play like this should flow more seamlessly from one scene to the next. As a result, Cell Phone feels like a free-flowing play trapped within a rigid structure. There is one smart technical choice: Brian H. Scott is to be praised for his effective lighting design.

Parker is an accomplished stage actress whose prowess has afforded her some enviable casting opportunities, including television’s Angels in America and Weeds and stage productions penned by such playwrights as David Auburn, William Inge and Craig Lucas. Her Jean, though, ranks nowhere near that list, despite a committed performance. Yes, she locates Jean’s insecurities and uses halting speech patterns and hesitant body language to create a woman that isn’t even present in her own life, but merely a shadow. It is a specific and smart performance, as is to be expected, but largely wasted in the overall scheme of the show. Chalfant (fun fact: she starred in the original Broadway cast of Angels) is similarly wasted as a boozy charlatan.

Ruhl is more adept when working with ideas than with people. It is fine to joke around about mortality and play a dead man onstage for laughs, but the rest of the ensemble feel equally lifeless, despite the best intentions of the actors portraying them. I expected Cell Phone to eventually arrive at some conclusion about how every individual leads a complex life, and whether intentionally or not, these lives affect those of others. But this show never makes that point, rendering death as something trivial, whether intentionally or not. Ruhl ultimately subverts her own themes about people being the driving forces in their own lives by creating a play in which things just happen. It’s the theatrical equivalent of an endless ringtone.

Techno Fetish

The publicity materials for (Rus)h, the new multimedia production from James Scruggs and Kristin Marting, present the project as an innovative and boundary-transgressing narrative that is facilitated by an adventurous application of technology. The production itself, however, feels more like an innovative and boundary-transgressing experiment in stage technology that is facilitated by a moderately adventurous narrative. Neither as fragmented nor as transgressive as its marketing materials might lead you to believe, (Rus)h is nevertheless an admirable and mostly successful project that highlights an exciting group of young performers and demonstrates that experiments in multidisciplinary theatre need be neither bloated and ostentatious, nor inaccessible and pretentious. Rus (Luis Vega) is feeling trapped in a once-exciting marriage that has, to his mind, become repetitive and stagnant. He and his wife Sireene (chandra thomas) spend more time talking about flirtations and sexual adventures from earlier in their relationship than they do making new memories. When Rus’s car hits and nearly kills a stranger named Sonny (Lathrop Walker), this sad but pedestrian marital crisis takes a dramatic and disturbing turn. The accident sends Sonny into a coma and Rus, out of both guilt and a strange attraction for the other man, visits him every day in the hospital. As it turns out, Sonny is a thrill-seeking masochist, addicted both to crystal meth and violent encounters. Unable to experience “pleasure” in the normative sense of the word, he may even have leapt in front of Rus’s car in order to feel something. When Sonny wakes from his coma, he sets out to “thank” Rus by drawing him into his world and awakening in him violent desires of his own.

Things spin out of control, predictably enough, though there are enough surprises along the way to keep the audience engaged. The twists and turns of the plot, however, and the specifics of Rus’s “secret desire” serve primarily as a vehicle for Scruggs’s and Martings’s innovative multidisciplinary staging. Dialogue, monologue, dance, video, and puppetry merge almost seamlessly as characters move from memory to fantasy to the present. Rus and Sireene replay their first meeting at a dance club, arguing over the details of the memory even as they remember their initial, mutual attraction. A large panoramic video screen curves around the back of the stage, sometimes providing contextual information, sometimes setting a mood with magnified images of swaying tree leaves, sometimes providing clues to the play’s structure by displaying handwritten questions for the charater. Who is writing these questions: a therapist? a reporter? the police?

Most memorably, two performers carry “video puppets,” portable video screens that serve a number of narrative and psychological functions and also become the production’s most notable display of ingenuity and technique. One moment the screens represent characters’ internal voices, close-ups of mouths shouting or whispering into the ears of the live actors. The next moment, they serve as theatrical x-ray machines, providing a glimpse of an actor/character’s body or revealing the body of a character not on stage, as if x-raying the air itself. These moments require an incredible precision on the part of the dancer-puppeteers who, without looking at the images on their screens must synchoronize the pans and zooms of the video with the movements of their arms in order to enable the illusion that the screens are revealing what is behind them rather than displaying something pre-recorded.

The virtuosity of the designers and the performers, all of whom are first-rate, is a testament to the value of Here Arts Center’s resident artist program, which allows ensembles to work together over a period of time to create new work. The actors bite into their roles with a commitment and enthusiasm that bring life to moments that might otherwise not have worked. When the characters challenge the audience to give them advice or to provide them with drugs, they do so with a longing and an intensity that makes us feel genuinely uncomfortable rather than annoyed by a device we’ve seen countless times. When the ubiquitous Qui Nguyen’s fight choregraphy begins to look awfully similar to the moves we’ve seen from him in a great many other shows, we forgive him because the actors in this case sell those moves so well.

While I have my quibbles and complaints about (Rus)h, the production as a whole held my interest and earned my admiration more than anything I’ve seen in recent months. Both more challenging and more polished than many shows with higher profiles (and higher ticket prices), (Rus)h is a welcome sign that there is still plenty of life, innovation, and bite in New York's downtown theatre scene.

Everything is Disappearing

The haunting leitmotif of British playwright Jez Butterworth’s dark and compelling new play, Parlour Song, which is receiving its world premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company, is of things disappearing from a man’s home. “It starts small” -- the sole words of the play’s prelude -- with a pocket watch, an old set of golf clubs, other household items and things scavenged from garage sales, but progresses to include early, significant gifts exchanged between the man and his wife. That trajectory of loss tracks the dwindling of the couple’s 11-year-old marriage. Ned (Chris Bauer) and Joy (Emily Mortimer) find themselves in their early 40s living in a cookie-cutter house in a new subdivision in suburban England, alienated from their own past, from the natural environment, and from each other.

Ned, fleshy and emotional, is devoted to Joy but terrified that she has drifted away from him, while Joy, skinny and brittle, is the quintessence of opaque detachment, unable or unwilling to respond to Ned’s tentative overtures. Into their lives walks their next-door neighbor, Dale (Jonathan Cake), brawny, self-confident and restless.

What catapults this domestic drama into a work of far greater force and scope is Butterworth’s savage wit, his vivid imagery and his mastery of stagecraft and story-telling.

Parlour Song nimbly zigzags from realism to the netherworld of sleepwalking and nightmares. The petty household thievery triggers a nightmare for Ned so terrifying that he refuses to sleep; only in the play’s final moments do we learn the lineaments of that nightmare and its counterpart in Joy’s mind.

The play gains further resonance from the connections that Butterworth draws between his characters’ unhappiness and a world in which nature is in retreat, history holds no value, and sex and Youtube substitute for intimacy and culture.

Ned, a demolitions expert, sits at home watching over and over again video clips of buildings that he and his crew have sent tumbling. He has a project on deck to blow up the town’s Arndale Centre, the community's shopping center, to make way for the New Arndale Centre. When pressed by his wife for a valid reason for tearing down the old building, Ned nonchalantly reminds Joy that there was a forest five years ago where their house now stands. “It was here for a 1,000 years. Now it’s gone. We’re here. Everything has its time.”

Butterworth is adept at capturing the oblique, coded conversations that take place between close friends or family members. Joy, Ned and Dale rarely say outright what they think or feel. Joy carefully praises the roast duck that Ned has prepared for her, while her tone of voice and diffident, little bites communicate something quite different about the dinner – and their relationship.

Parlour Song marks the most recent collaboration between the 39-year-old Butterworth and the Atlantic Theater Company and its artistic director, Neil Pepe. Under Pepe's sure-footed direction, the three-member cast is outstanding. If there is a flaw in Butterworth’s play, it is the implausibility of the love affair between the schlumpy Ned and the gazelle-like Joy and the odd friendship that Ned and Dale strike up. Yet, the three actors’ personal chemistry wash away any doubts about these relationships.

Chris Bauer brings great emotionality as well as comic finesse to the role of Ned. Emily Mortimer is equally convincing as the suburban housewife come unhinged by depression. And Jonathan Cake, coming off a startlingly similar role as lady-killer Iachimo in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the Lincoln Center this fall, is magnetic as the cocky yet amiable Dale.

The design team likewise does impeccable work. Of particular note are Kenneth Posner’s sharp and lucid lighting, Robert Brill’s suitably sterile set, Dustin O’Neill’s evocative projections of catch phrases and video on the house façade at back, and Obadiah Eaves’ bold sound.

The events of Parlour Song occur during an uncommon six-week drought. It’s not giving up too much of the plot to reveal that its satisying ending features a rain shower. But in keeping with the play’s dark tenor, the water offers tenuous relief.

I Am Woman, Hear Me Rap

“What are you, a feminazi?” Florida comedian Suzanne Willet’s answer, in the form of a solo-performance piece, is a resounding yes. Dressed in black, wielding a riding crop, and speaking in a cartoonish German accent, the title character of The Feminazi is a personification of the misogynist term. It’s a neat tactic of reclamation, if not always a successfully comedic one.

At the Players Theater in the Village through May fourth, The Feminazi flanks its title character with three women, all portrayed by Willet: Fran (“the older woman”), Sarah ("the middle class white female”), and the Virgin Mary(“a Jewish mother”). Each of the characters struggles with a unique feminist issue: maintaining cultural visibility (Fran), balancing family and career (Sarah), questioning how to best raise a child (Virgin Mary). In keeping with the conventions of solo performance, each character lives in a different area of the stage, with shifts in lighting, designed by Janna Mattioli, separating the scenes.

Of the four characters, only the Virgin Mary addresses the audience in direct-confessional style, alternating between motherly boastfulness over her son’s successes and anxious concern over his struggles. Willet imbues the Virgin’s scenes with large doses of sweetly amusing anachronism that grow tiresome over the duration of the performance.

In contrast to the Virgin Mary’s direct address, Sarah and Fran’s scenes are consciously performative musical acts. Sarah’s scenes take place at a series of singer-songwriter open mic nights that span her college days through her arrival at middle age; Fran’ scenes are set at a rally in Florida, where she endeavors to bring visibility to the plight of older women in America through motivational speeches and rap music. Filled with impassioned rage, Fran serves as an interesting counterpoint to Sarah, whose tentative complaints (“I'm a middle class white female/ I smile when I hear crap”) form the heart of her music.

With both women, Willet has given herself a challenge: characters who love to sing their hearts out, despite the fact that the size of their hearts is considerably greater than breadth of their musical abilities. It’s clear that Willet loves these characters, and even at their goofiest – or especially then – treats them with the utmost respect. She belts out Fran’s fiery bad rhymes (“that Coldwater Creek/ Prints that make you freak/ And hey, LL Bean/ Drop the aquamarine”) with abandon. At best, the absurdity of their music, and the painstaking intensity with which they perform it, is itself entertaining. One imagines these are women with YouTube followings.

Of course, YouTube clips last only a few minutes. Even with Sarah’s maturing into motherhood and Fran’s struggles to persevere in the face of adversity, their stories, as told through their music, rarely feel worthy of full-length performance. Nor, unfortunately, does the Feminazi herself, as she goes about her mission instructing the audience in the disenfranchised state of women and purports to suss out and condemn “sexist pigs.”

Along the way, the Feminazi treats audiences to a humorously angry deconstruction of Snow White (“Even if you are small, if you are a white male, you will still be the power structure of the story!”) and a tamely phallic consumption of a banana: techniques as tired, oversimplified and silly as the notion of a feminazi itself.

At just eighty minutes, the production feels long: each of the characters would benefit from more concise scenes. Still, moments of the production are bound to delight. All of the women Willet portrays possess an endearing earnestness and a goofy form of self-expression that make them hard not to like.

Audiences will be particularly engaged in the Feminazi’s scenes, which utilize a lot of audience interaction. Yet ultimately her audience affects her more deeply than she affects it: by the end of the performance, the Feminazi is openly flirting with a male audience member. That abrupt shift feels artificial and unneeded. Instead, it would be a welcome change if Willet allowed the Feminazi to contemplate the space that exists between the wild extremes of man-hating fury and school-girlish crushes: to stop talking about feminazis and start talking about feminism.

F*@#ing 'A

We’ve all been there. A ticking clock on the wall counts the hours that you’ve been trapped in this small room, waiting for some sign. Waiting for the door to open and for your fate to be pronounced. You size up the people around you, who are all either a joke to be ridiculed or a giant to be conquered. Meanwhile, a woman dressed in a black leotard puts her head between her knees, her butt in the air and says “Butter Baby Basket,” over and over again. Okay, so maybe not ALL of us have been there.

But even if you’re not one of the thousands of actors diligently reporting to open calls in New York, you’ll find something in Push Productions’ hilarious Actors are F*@#ing Stupid that addresses humanity’s universal obsession with attention, praise and, most importantly, seeing the other guy fail. Don’t bother to look for characters connecting on any genuine level. As in life, so it goes in the vicious acting community — it’s every narcissistic moron for themselves.

Ian McWethy’s new play surveys the broader landscape of audition culture, by bringing into focus four actors at a volatile try-out for an unnamed MTV movie. The auditions in question are being run by ill-tempered producer Bill Lawrence (think Scott Rudin on steroids) and Doug, a writer/director who takes his dumb teen comedy way too seriously. When the A-list celebrity slated to star in the picture bails, Bill and Doug decide to cut their losses (and their budget) by casting two unknowns in the lead roles. Enter Amy, Jennifer, Johnny, and Steve: four actors, at varying levels of baseness, who will do anything to get the part.

A realistic sense of anxiety saturates McWethy’s characters, and you get the feeling that he’s definitely been through at least a couple of “cattle calls” in his day. The ambling way a polite conversation about agents, day jobs or technique can escalate into a shouting match within minutes is quite funny. More importantly, each character seems to represent a different school of “actor marketing.” There’s the one with rich parents, the one with nothing but looks, the one willing to sleep with any producer in town—you get the picture. You won’t find any Lawrence Olivier’s in this catty crowd. But these different… ahem… viewpoints give the play an unpredictable atmosphere, where potentially any character can pop off at a fellow actor for no more reason than that they’re more marketable.

Director Michael Kimmel and the discreet Ben Kato (who designed both set and lights) keep any signs of their handiwork to a minimum, preferring instead to let McWethy and the splendid cast tell the story. Thankfully, there was no distracting splendor in Kimmel’s practical environment — just a few necessary pieces of furniture. With the exception of at least two awkward scene transitions, the show clicked along without interference.

As actors playing actors, it’s difficult to imagine someone NOT having a good time in this show. Roger Lirtsman, Susan Maris, Heidi Niedermeyer, and Wil Petre all – of course – have an intimate knowledge of the world McWethy is addressing. No doubt, they have all met some pretty similar characters in their careers. While they all nail the humor and subtlety of the piece, Petre’s clueless Johnny is particularly genuine. As manic producer Bill Lawrence, the tremendous Tom Escovar is probably the star of the show and is always appropriately loud, sleazy and sexist. Josh LaCasse almost proves himself worthy of sympathy as Doug, but in the end he delightfully proves to be just another loathsome Hollywood hack. In fact, only Carrie McCrossen’s character deserves any actual compassion here, as the vigilant casting assistant and punching bag.

So, after years of hard research on the acting circuit, McWethy’s thesis-like Actors are F*@#ing Stupid arrives at an honest, obvious and entertaining conclusion. Yes, actors are probably pretty stupid. They work so hard for years just to get a job for one day, selling sneakers or pretending to be a murder victim. But don’t blame them! Producers are stupid, too - they throw billions of dollars at dumb projects that will only make them millions back. Don’t forget about the stupid directors and writers! If they're not on strike to demand more money, they’re egotistically revising history or toying with our emotions. And you know what? We pay top dollar for all of it. That’s the point. Sure, they look dumb, but we’re giving them our money.

I guess we’re the ones who are f*@#ing stupid.

Well-Beaten (Socio)paths

"When a famous person crashes their plane or skis into a tree, everyone cares," muses one of the two nihilist heroines of US Drag, a new play by Louisville Festival playwright Gina Gionfriddo, now playing at Off-Broadway's Beckett Theater. The heroines, cute, dolled-up, unemployed and cynical recent college grads Angela (Tanya Fischer) and Alison (Lisa Joyce), take on New York City, determined to achieve fame, fortune, or, at the very least, their monthly rent on the room they are subletting from socially inept Wall Street broker Ned (Matthew Stadelman). Angela and Alison take a picaresque tour of an absurdist underworld that's definitely recognizable in our own world. Picked up at a bar by wealthy trustafarian and disturbingly obsessed amateur crime historian James (James Martinez), they find out that the police have offered a $10,000 award for a serial attacker’s capture. They turn bounty hunters, and join an awareness-raising group called S.A.F.E., whose leader Evan (Lucas Papaelias) warns people to stay safe by refusing to help strangers, under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, Angela is courted by egotistical and cruelly inventive "creative nonfiction" writer Christopher -- a wannabe Dave Eggers. Alison, disturbed by a dream, decides that she must find a husband immediately, and goes after the character who most should remain single in the interest of public safety.

Gionfriddo explores a popular theme in the contemporary theatre: spoiled, unemployed middle-class beautiful young things behaving amorally (by the author's standards) in the Big Apple. Popularized in Jonathan Larson's cult Broadway musical Rent, the subject also dominates Michael Domitrovich's Artfuckers, currently running Off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth. Gionfriddo adds nothing new to the tradition. Angela and Alison carp about women who buy "thirty-five dollar mascara and drink two lattes a day"; Christopher claims that his "creative nonfiction" is true because his parents abused him "symbolically."

Gionfriddo saves her sharpest barbs for self-proclaimed activists whose activism constitutes mere ego-aggrandizement, bereft of any genuine concern for the victimized or oppressed. James stalks crime victims whose names he finds in the news in order to offer them consolation.

Evan tells S.A.F.E. that apprehending the attacker is not their mission. When the characters watch a didactic, downbeat documentary about refugees, Alison decides it would be far better if the "massacre" were accompanied by music by Nine Inch Nails.

The costumes, by Emily Rebholz, playfully mimic the "trendy" apparel of the New York young, wealthy, and pretentious. Trip Cullman's direction is adequate, though in some scenes characters talk while lined up in a horizontal row, forced into presentational poses, and a transition in which one of the heroines strips and changes costume onstage right next to the exit seems unsupported by thematic, plot, or practical demands.

Sandra Goldmark's set is dominated by several lampshade-covered lights that jut horizontally from the upper reaches of the upstage wall, reminiscent of the furniture-museum set of Moises Kaufman's production of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife. The purpose of these lampshades is not clear, but they look very whimsical when they turn on and off in unison.

Underscoring US Drag is Gionfriddo's conviction that in our society, or perhaps only in Manhattan, empathy is uncommon and unpopular. This is stated — or, rather, overstated — throughout the play. "A good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan," preaches Evan to S.A.F.E. When Angela first meets Christopher, he signs a copy of his book and admits that it will only be worth much when he is dead. "How much?" she asks, comically calculating her potential profit.

"A sociopath lacks the capacity to empathize. The only pain they notice is their own,” someone says, informing the audience unambiguously that most of the characters are sociopaths. This didacticism causes the play to ramble on the same track without ever developing or allowing the audience to puzzle anything out for themselves.

More problematically, Angela and Alison are only vaguely defined characters, with costume changes more complex than their changes in outlook and character. The world they inhabit is interesting, but they are its twin black hole, a vacuous vacuum that sucks all life and energy away.

Producing company The Stage Farm's motto is "we make plays for play-haters." Possibly, then, US Drag will appeal to people who wish to see characters who are stock types, and hear clearly stated messages. If you go to the theatre because you like theatre, because, at its best, it challenges your horizons and you appreciate a challenge, you might find US Drag a bit of a drag.

However, in the real New York City just as in Gionfriddo's version, there are all types of people. If US Drag gets the "theatre-haters" into the Beckett Theatre, Stage Farm will have accomplished the kind of altruistic act that is so sadly absent from Angela and Alison's world.

Bubbling Poetry of the Everyday

Dylan Thomas was right – you actually can hear the dew falling. Listen properly and you will even hear time passing. Sound difficult? It’s not. All you have to do is bring your ears to Theatre 3 for Intimation Theatre Company’s lovely production of Under Milk Wood. Thomas’ “Play for Voices” is an ode to sound. Written for the radio, or simply to be read as opposed to fully staged, the piece takes its listeners, or in this case its wide-eyed viewers, through a night and a day of a sleepy Welsh seaside town. Like a landscape painter, Thomas penned the characters of Llareggub to life, gently leading us from their nighttime dreams to their spring morning routines and all the way back to bed. His language is as bubbly to the ears as it was when he wrote the play more than fifty years ago.

Director Michelle Dean uses the bare set and her company of actors to bring out much of the comic brilliance of Thomas’ script, which could otherwise remain hidden. True to the text, much of the actors’ character building seems to have stemmed from voice work, only then wearing their physicalization over the sound like a cloak. The eccentric locals of Llareggub are given bold life in this production.

The company on the whole is strong, and Dean keeps the tempo of the evening fast-paced and steady. John Mervini provides the most captivating performance, with a commendable comic intensity and commitment to all three of his roles. “Let me shipwreck in your thighs,” he pleads straight-forwardly as Captain Cat to one of the ladies still alive only in his memory. Jesse Tandler is endearing as Willie Nillie, and Betsy Head is charmingly seductive as the singing, scrubbing Polly Garter who laments the various male organs (and the men attached to them) that delighted her senses long ago.

The company has managed to create a delicate balance between character and actor, imagined reality and the plain one of gathering in midtown for a play, between Wales and New York City. The skipping nature of the writing, rapidly hopping from place to place and scene to scene, demands an ability to flow in and out of character. The offstage actors are visible standing in the wings, and at times even hand costume pieces or props to one another as they glide into their next role. Not shying away from acknowledging that we are in the theater provides a richer experience for this play. It is the awareness that the audience is sitting together like a bunch of children being caressed to sleep with a soft lullaby that puts a smile on your face as you walk out of the theater.

The production errs when it does not trust Thomas’ sound waves, and overloads the eye with activity to drown out the Welshman’s ear candy. Thankfully this only happens a couple of times over the course of the evening and so does not mar the experience. Dean does reference directly the fact that the play was written to be read, not physicalized. Voices One and Two, who function as narrators, move around the stage with script in hand, communicating directly with the audience. Nonetheless, a simple way to address the sonic purpose of the play would have been to hear voices in the darkness, which the spectators never get to a chance to do in this production.

The poetry of the everyday, about which Dean talks in her program’s note, is a theme explored more and more these days on New York’s Off and Off Off Broadway stages. It is enlightening to see how this was handled by a poetic great of another place and time. Much like Wim Wenders latest film, Lisbon Story, another inquiry into the humming noises of the everyday, this production finds ways to talk about the nature of sound through a visual medium. It is indeed a promising inaugural production for the Intimation Theatre Company.

Camping Out

After “singing” her opening number, Dina Martina self-deprecatingly tells the audience that she discourages expectations whenever she can. She then asks those assembled if they’re ready to have an “adequate time.” That’s just about what you get with Dina Martina: Off the Charts!. Don’t expect the cerebral. Expect a lot of bawdy cracks about, well, cracks, and other anatomical features. Expect spastic dancing. Expect plastic bag juggling. She’s been described, perhaps charitably, as a “train wreck in heels.” Dina Martina is a niche comic, catering to a devoted and largely middle-aged gay male audience. This Seattle-based drag cornball hallucination has ardent followers in New York, Provincetown and other cities with large gay communities across the country. She tells the audience that she’s so glad to be back in “The Cuttin’ Rooms” that she’s saving up money to buy the club. This provokes warm applause which she immediately deflates by adding, “Yeah, I’m gonna flip it.”

Ms. Martina sports a balloon-decorated gift bag because “balloons are always festive. Except when it’s the Hindenberg.” Dina soon wades into the audience and distributes off-the-wall chachkas: packages of Trivial Pursuit Ketchup, Saved by the Bell collector’s cards and "gummy T-bone steaks." To her credit, the always-amiable Dina never singles out audience members for cruel or rough treatment.

Some in the audience laughed wildly at nearly every gesture she made. Now, Dina Martina is funny. But she isn’t that funny. Specializing in deliberately lame jokes, and flaunting her grotesque appearance and trademark screeching, she’s tossed a fair number of what can only be described as charity laughs from a loyal audience that simply adores her. It’s like seeing Don Rickles in Las Vegas. You know where most of the jokes are heading but you laugh anyway, because you feel like you know him. And because he looks funny.

Much of Dina’s comedy in this installment involves her caterwauling along with former chart hits such as “Rio” by Duran Duran, Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” and even a sappy selection from the soundtrack of the melodramatic 70s film, Ice Castles. When she tires of a track that goes too long, she simply abandons her earnestness with a wave of her hand and starts munching from a bowl of spaghetti. She strings together off-the-cuff jokes with machine-gun timing and gets unbelievable laugh mileage from deliberate mispronunciations of words like “city.”

Only rarely does Dina attempt to elevate this camp extravaganza above ribald entertainment. I wish she had done so more often. After conning the audience into believing she’s starting a theater for at-risk youth, she drops her bomb: “I have to tell you, these kids are just…useless.” She’s at her best when she fails miserably to comprehend the world around her. Suddenly turning her banter to the topic of “global warning,” Dina gets a lecture she’s heard all wrong, concluding in a fit of twisted logic that fish displace the oceans by taking up space and therefore must all be killed. Here’s Dina's take on global ice melts: “All the ice is melting. All of it! Check your drinks—that’s just while you’ve been sitting there!”

Dina Martina is comfort food for the camp appetite. She’s not groundbreaking—anyone who has seen a couple of John Waters films can imagine what Dina Martina is all about. She’s an agreeable offense to the senses, an endearing nightmare, a fun hour of the absurd.

If you’ve never experienced this type of comedy before, or if you’re simply looking to have a few drinks along with a heavy dose of the ridiculous, then Dina Martina: Off the Charts! is just the show for you.

Stripped

Promoting her latest pop conservative book, Ann Coulter asserted that children of single mothers grow up to be "strippers, rapists and murderers.” The suspect validity of that statement aside, her conflation of rape and murder (crimes!) with stripping (not a crime!) went unremarked upon during her interview on Hannity & Colmes last month. Fittingly, That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, the latest from provocative playwright Sheila Callaghan, addresses such incongruities by featuring heroines who are strippers turned murder-rapists. A loopy meditation on rape culture, That Pretty Pretty is sometimes shrewd and sometimes silly. The play makes its points elliptically rather than directly and has a lot of fun with its own conceit: a screenwriter works through his own gendered emotional baggage while harboring under the delusion that he is creating a feminist screenplay. It’s a sneaky device that allows the play’s loosely connected scenes to cover a wide array of styles, excuses textual inconsistencies, and permits plot lines to wholly change course at whim. The mutability of the play’s world will frustrate audience members eager to know the rules from the get-go; better to sit back and enjoy its horrific humor while allowing the play to explain itself.

Callaghan is an inventive playwright most at home in goofy scenes that build toward incisive political statements. In the hands of director Kip Fagan, who understands exactly what Callaghan is getting at, the misogynist fantasy that women (or certain types of women) are criminally sexy and vicious beyond redemption is broad comedy. The production also takes satirical aim at the notion that male artists who perceive themselves as sensitive have a free pass at writing female (and male) characters however they please.

The versatile cast shifts with boundless energy between genres that range from high comedy to kooky melodrama to torture porn and back again. Connecting the diverse styles is the fact that they are all performed in virtual quotation marks, with the threads of every scene threatening to unravel at any moment. That they don't is a credit to Fagen, who trusts Callaghan's script enough that, without losing control of the production, he pushes each scene to its edges of cohesion. Doing so underscores all the fun with an effective sense of unease. It's as quietly unsettling as the play's subject matter is blatantly upsetting.

In addition to its impressively broad, boldly stylized sequences, That Pretty Pretty contains moments of realism. The realistic scenes, which feature screenwriter Owen and his buddy Rodney, help separate the real world (set primarily in a hotel room) with the scenes that exist within Owen's screenplay (set in a hotel room, a posh restaurant, a mud wrestling pit, and a wartime hospital, among other locations) in its various stages of development. That concept is enhanced by Narelle Sission's set design, which depicts a fully rendered, identifiably generic hotel room. Various set pieces (a fancy chandelier, a tarp) drop in and out of that generic space to suggest the play's more outlandish settings.

Inside the hotel room, the Owen/Rodney scenes get the narrative job done, but offer little in the way of dramatic insight or fresh perspectives of gender and power. Callaghan is more in her element in the compellingly outrageous segments that comprise the play's most indelible scenes. Part of the pleasure of the play comes from the sacrilege of seeing vile subject matter treated as light farce, yet there are no cheap laughs in That Pretty Pretty and little is included for shock value alone. Rather than confrontationally attack audiences, the production invites audience members to delight in its squirm-inducing irreverence. The ability to wildly push boundaries without sacrificing its warmth make That Pretty Pretty a welcome piece of powerful theater.

A Difficult Balancing Act

In Carla Cantrelle's romantic drama Looking Up, aerial performer Wendy (Cantrelle) flies through the air with the greatest of ease, to the wonder and amazement of vocationally frustrated bartender Jack (Bryant Mason). For the daring young woman on the trapeze, the really difficult balancing act is love. Cantrelle's aerial ballet, choreographed by Tanya Gagne, is both hair-raisingly risky-looking and graceful. Lurking in the background of the romance are difficult and frightening suggestions. When Jack meets Wendy, he makes a joke about Peter Pan. In that legendary play about of children in flight, which has provided employment to generations of rigging specialists, little Wendy Darling learns that when you grow up, you aren't any longer allowed to fly, so growing up is scary. Will this apply to our Wendy, and her boy who won't clean up? It's a good question, but the play drags a bit in the middle, where Wendy and Jack's lovers tiff seems transparently constructed to supply plot and conform to rom-dram formula. However, by the end, Cantrelle recovers her footing with aplomb, with a humorous yet rivetingly suspenseful test of both Wendy and Jack's trust in each other and their ability to come down to earth, as well as their physical coordination.

The plot is a standard, dependable romantic machine. Tending bar at a club, Jack dares to look up at the evening's performance act -- Wendy -- and is smitten. She comes down to earth, chats with him, and wins the keys to his apartment, ostensibly so that she can take a nap, but they both know that they really want each other. They have pleasant conversation, great sex, and a common interest in rope. (No, not like that -- Jack's grandfather was a New England sailor; before meeting Wendy, who periodically replaces her rigging, Jack's knot-tying knack was unappreciated by the world.)

A period of domestic bliss follows, slowing the plot somewhat. Of course, all is not perfect in Wendy and Jack's lives: he still hates his job and his crackhead boss Skeeter; she is grieving for her recently deceased mentor, Mario, and for her former life in a circus. Both stress over the difficult balancing act of limiting commitment versus unpredictable freedom, in love and work. Then the relationship hits a rocky patch, for apparently random reasons. Jack makes a mistake that is never foreshadowed or even shown, only discussed. Wendy makes a mistake that reveals insecurities that are, again, never foreshadowed, and which could have been avoided with a little communication.

Cantrelle's acting is solid. Directed by Giovanna Sardelli, she navigates the earthbound bits of the play with equal grace and ease. Mason also rises to the difficult challenge of holding up half of a two-hander. Physically and emotionally, Mason's Jack seems more held down by gravity than most earthlings, contextualising his desire for not only his “Tinker Bell,” but the powers she has seemingly wrested from physics and fate.

Aerialism is a beautiful art and, as Cantrelle shows, a wonderful language for the elucidation of the human psyche's invisible leaps and falls, risks and flights of fantasy, transcendence, and love. Bogged down by a plot that, very unlike a trapeze artist, avoids even the appearance of real danger and aesthetic risk, Looking Up nevertheless has some lovely moments, mostly involving Cantrelle's aerial performance. Furthermore, devoted fans of romantic relationship drama may find Looking Up a fresh new take on the genre. I look forward to seeing Cantrelle find or invent a story on which she truly can soar. I am sure that she will soon.

(Re)Writer's Block

Before I saw Walt Stepp’s Mark Twain’s Blues I re-read Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Huck might have said, I’m mighty glad I did. Walt Stepp’s re-imagination of Twain’s most famous work begins with the depressed author preparing for one of the humorous speaking tours that made him an international celebrity. Twain’s excursions were launched to pay off his bills, his expensive house, and debts amassed from misguided investments in various inventions, including a typesetting machine quickly rendered obsolete by superior technology. Stepp imagines that Twain is despondent in large part because he views himself as a caricature and feels particular guilt over the trite ending of his masterpiece.

Against this backdrop, Stepp brings to life the central characters of the book: Huck Finn and the runaway slave, Jim. When we meet them, they are now some twenty years older and wiser, and both have their own ideas about how the novel should have ended. They suddenly appear onstage and berate Twain for selling them out in what many consider a woefully disappointing and manipulative ending to his Great American Novel. Jim, now 50 and Huck, about 32 and with an odd resemblance to Kid Rock, aren’t playing anymore.

You must re-familiarize yourself with the novel to understand and enjoy this play. Unless your memory is unusually strong, high-school recollections of the plot won’t suffice.

The novel ends with the insertion of Tom Sawyer into the action. Tom, knowing that Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, has died and freed him in her will, nonetheless — and strictly for the pursuit of boyish pleasures — withholds this information and helps Huck try to gain freedom for Jim. Tom’s farcical antics, in which Huck often acquiesces, stand, for many chapters, in stark contrast to the very dramatic and life-threatening ordeals endured by Huck and Jim as they rafted down the Mississippi River. Twain’s ending also miraculously ties up loose ends: for instance, we learn that Huck’s drunken and abusive father has conveniently died.

Walt Stepp’s play takes Twain to task for his cop-out ending, but Stepp’s ending is not necessarily a better one. It’s simply different and permits greater psychic freedom and growth for the two main characters. Yet, to understand his creation, one must know where Twain ends and Stepp begins.

The mature Huck and Jim act out a number of altered scenes from the book with Twain himself as their rapt — sometimes skeptical, sometimes humble — audience. Theirs is a more psychologically complex and brutal ending, halting the nauseating innocence in which they believe Twain enshrined their adventures. This time around, Jim won’t stand for being the good-natured and grateful slave, humoring the whims and pranks of a pubescent white boy. Huck won’t let Twain make their raft miss Cairo, Illinois, in the fog, where Jim would have been able to gain freedom.

The text of the play is a combination of Twain’s own words and those of Stepp, who puts many of them into a total of 19 songs, often with dance, all competently performed with the aid of an onstage pianist, by the three men and actress Bonne Kramer, who plays Twain's mother and several of the novel’s female characters. As Huck and Jim sing their accusations at Twain, the author admits, among other things, that he had to finish the book quickly for the money and could not contrive a better ending.

Cathy Smalls' costuming admirably evokes the period. Actor Bill Tatum is a dead ringer for Twain and the staging ably elicits a dressing room in a Southern theater at the turn of the twentieth century. Tom Herman directs with imagination and resourcefulness; for example, he comes up with a nifty onstage trick to simulate canoe rowing. Unfortunately, though, at two hours the play becomes tedious.

Mark Twain’s Blues is, above all else, a labor of love written by someone clearly enthralled by Twain and his canon; it’s often esoteric and concerned with minutiae. The fact that there is little or no historical support for some of Stepp’s assumptions about the reasons for Twain’s state of mind requires the audience to indulge Stepp’s imagination in a way not dissimilar to how Huck indulges Tom’s.

Twain fans will find Mark Twain’s Blues energizing and provocative. General audiences will find it pleasant but ultimately enervating.

Laughter from the Third Floor

There is an inherent challenge in adapting novels to the stage. The novel, particularly when it is published serially or in volumes, is constructed in such a way as to be enjoyed over an extended period of time. An evening at the theater is just that—an evening. N.G. McClernan had a difficult task before her in turning Jane Eyre from a 400 page Victorian novel into a two hour play. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre tells the story of an orphan girl who is sent by her nasty aunt to a horrid school in order to train to be a governess. Jane survives and thrives, eventually taking a position at Thornfield Hall, home of Edward Rochester, his ward Adele, and the mysterious woman locked away on the third floor, who Jane hears laughing from the moment she arrives at the Hall. Ignoring the fact that they are from separate classes, Jane and Edward soon fall in love and decide to marry. On the day of their wedding, important, yet unfortunate information is revealed to Jane that causes her to run away from Edward.

There is a lot that occurs in the story of Jane Eyre and the play struggles to convey the novel's depth and breadth. Watching the play jump from place to place and from past to present makes one wonder if the neoclassicists were somehow right to enforce the unities of time and place so strictly. Several scenes are flashbacks, which are initially confusing, due to actor doubling and the fact that not much is done to suggest that we are leaving the present world of the play and traveling back to Jane's past. Something seems to be missing as the play progresses; there are gaps in the story that are meagerly filled in by exposition, often a monologue that begins with Jane writing in her diary.

The performances of the actors are occasionally stellar. Alice Connorton brings the necessary sternness of demeanor to her role as Alice Fairfax and is downright scary in her role as Aunt Reed. Mary Murphy purses her lips and holds tension in her arms and shoulders, suggesting that her Jane Eyre is both plain and proper. Her enunciation is good, and is believably what a Regency-era governess should sound like. Greg Oliver Bodine falters a bit initially by seeming to inject a bit of postmodern insincerity and sarcasm into his early flirtations with Jane. Bodine strengthens in the end, when his character has lost everything and is in the depths of despair.

Jane Eyre questions the role of women in society. Jane refuses to be a kept woman, and does not return to Rochester until she has secured financial independence. The woman in the attic, named Antoinette in the stage version, represents the domination of men in the nineteenth century. Is she really insane or is her insanity a result of being used as a pawn and her resulting loveless marriage? The production does not portray Antoinette sympathetically. She draws blood after biting her brother's neck, sets fire to Rochester's bed curtains, and tears Jane's wedding veil. The portrayal of Antoinette, a character who should be pitied, seems at odds with the portrayal of Jane, another strong woman, who has been allowed her independence, and therefore will avoid the fate of Antoinette.

It is best for fans of Bronte's novel to stick to the book, as even the best of actors cannot replace the beauty that is to be found in there. McClernan makes a valiant effort in transplanting the sprawling work to the confines of the stage, but in the end, as our high school teachers always said, it's best just to read the book.

Duel Identity

Those looking to be among the first to discover a new, fresh theatrical voice should be sure to head to Chelsea’s Sanford Meisner Theater, where Cherubina, a remarkable amalgam of well-researched historical fact and perfectly crafted narrative, currently heralds the arrival of Paul Cohen. Cherubina, which calls to mind Warren Beatty’s Reds with just a soupcon of Edmund Rostand thrown in, toes the line between humor and sentiment so well, it practically pirouettes over it. Cherubina derives its title from the alter ego of Elisa (Amanda Fulks), a schoolteacher and aspiring poet living in St. Petersburg in 1913, just before the dawn of the Russian Revolution. Down on her luck in the areas of both love and career, Elisa is no stranger to rejection. After Nikolai (Teddy Bergman) denies her submission to his literary magazine, Apollon, Elisa adopts a new persona with the help of her university chum Max (Jimmy Owens): the spirited Cherubina de Gabriak.

Elaborate plotting and the use of a photograph of a former student of Elisa’s leads Nikolai to become obsessed with this enigmatic writer, not only publishing her but creating a celebrity in the process. Nikolai writes letters to Cherubina, and Elisa replies in order to keep up this façade. But the question of how much the content of her letters come from the heart tears more and more at Max, who carries a long-burning torch for Elisa. Max has not only longed for Elisa, he respects her. He pleads with her to come clean, but having tasted success and, more importantly, adoration, she cannot.

Those who think this triangle sounds a tad too rote will be pleased to hear that it is not. Cohen has created one of the rare equilateral love triangles, where all three sides are equally flawed and sympathetic, making this a far more relatable tale than adult audiences often see. Nikolai is the character who initially holds all the power, and yet as Cherubina unfolds, Bergman plays him as both self-absorbed and well-intentioned, a man-child who thinks he has finally connected with someone. He is matched scene for scene by Owens, who creates in Max a lower-class, slightly disabled editor, whose intellect and dignity protect him from ever being seen as an unappealing nebbish.

Perhaps most impressive is Fulks, who subtly imbues her character (some might say, dual characters) with traces of insecurity, virtuousness, self-satisfaction and impetuousness in less than 90 minutes. She underscores a gradual transformation for Elisa both as talented artist and confident woman, and we are able to see how the drastically different Max and Nikolai might both be drawn to her. As a result, one feels equally for all three characters, none of whom ask for too much.

This love story is actually the conduit for Cohen to relay a fascinating, if forgotten, chapter in world history, as the events depicted in Cherubina are historical fact. Max and Nikolai ultimately engaged in a famed duel, which provides the framework for the events of Cohen's play. However, the plot is so accessible it never feels like a lecture, which is also a credit to director Alexis Poledouris, who has paced the play perfectly, never allowing any scene to linger too long but also making sure key moments get their due. That is one of the most impressive aspects about the play; not only is the story enticing, but there is not a wasted moment in it. All of the scenes are dramatically necessary and rich. Cohen’s writing is not only fluid, it is often quite funny.

Cherubina is that rare show that has it all: top-notch writing, outstanding performances, careful direction, and quality production values. The only news greater than to hear that the Meisner was extending the show’s run would be for Cohen to announce that he has another new play ready to premiere.

Restoration Redux

I really wanted to like Biyi Bandele’s Oroonoko. Aphra Behn’s problematic but groundbreaking 1688 tale of slavery and rebellion is one of the earliest English novels, and certainly the first to treat indigenous Africans sympathetically. Oroonoko, a prince of Coramantien (present-day Ghana, though, as Bandele points out in a program note, other elements of the tale suggest that it is set in Nigeria) falls in love with Imoinda, a woman whom the lecherous king (Oroonoko’s grandfather) wants to add to his own harem. After a series of related misadventures, Imoinda and Oroonoko are both sold into slavery and taken to Surinam, where Oroonoko’s royal carriage and innate nobility quickly set him apart. Oroonoko helps the plantation owners defeat outside invaders but then organizes a slave revolt and is eventually killed (after he kills Imoinda to prevent her further disgrace.)

While some claim Behn's Oroonoko as an abolitionist novel, others disagree and assert that her strong royalist sympathies are what drive the plot. Oroonoko, after all, is of royal blood, and it is his nobility rather than his humanity that renders his enslavement perverse. Regardless, the character is seen by many as the quintessential noble savage, seemingly without flaws, innately good and noble, worthy of great admiration but not sophisticated enough to prevent his own tragic fate or that of his beloved.

Working in part from Behn’s novel and in part from Thomas Southern’s 1695 dramatic adaptation, playwright Biyi Bandele intends his version of Oroonoko as an act of reclamation. Born and raised in Nigeria and living now in England, Bandele was commissioned by the RSC to write a new prologue for a production of Southerne’s play but ended up instead writing a whole new adaptation. Bandele’s most important contribution to the story of Oroonoko is to allow his protagonist to make some ill-advised decisions, and to show that he feels pain. Behn’s Oroonoko calmly smoked a pipe while being beaten to death, but Bandele’s Oroonoko bleeds, cries, and falls victim to his pride.

Unfortunately, while seeking both to humanize Oroonoko and to lend some authenticity to the tale’s African-ness, Bandele and director Kate Whoriskey have instead crafted a production that doesn’t quite know what it is or what it wants to say. The humor isn't all that funny, the eroticism not all that sexy, the tragedy not all that moving, the ideas not all that provocative, the poetry not all that elevated, and the danger not all that thrilling. This new Oroonoko, I’m sad to say, makes for a better press release than it does a play.

Whoriskey’s production, mounted by Theatre for a New Audience at the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street, is competently staged and features a number of successful performances. Particularly strong are Albert Jones as Oroonoko, Toi Perkins as Imoinda, and Christen Simon as Lady Onola, Imoinda’s guardian. The lights, costumes, and choreography are all professional and polished, but provide few truly memorable moments. Juwon Ogungbe’s percussion-heavy score, performed live by a small ensemble of musicians, is clearly meant to add momentum and excitement but instead ends up feeling, like so much else in this show, more like a gesture in the direction of a good idea than a fully-realized piece of work. Given all of the bland professionalism on display, it is little surprise that the aspects of the production that stick out most are those that are the least successful, like fight director Rick Sordelet’s strangely ham-fisted stage violence.

The end result is a mediocre production of an ambitious but disappointing play, a play unlikely to find an audience. With Theatre for a New Audience’s sky-high ticket prices (unless you are under 25) and a steadily mounting collection of negative reviews, Bandele’s well-intentioned adaptation of Southerne’s well-intentioned adaptation of Behn’s well-intentioned novel provides little more than, well, good intentions.