Love, Leisure, and Philosophy

Waiting in line to get a cheeseburger, holding a cold beer in my hand, I smiled when the woman in front of me said “What a great idea. What a great concept.” I responded, “Yeah, I’m already having a better time than I do at most shows.” Indeed, my favorite moments of Charles Mee’s Fire Island, now playing at the 3LD Arts Center, came before a word of the playwright’s text had been uttered. Surrounded by enormous high-definition video of beautiful island landscapes, milling about the space or sitting on cushions and low-to-the-ground beach chairs next to coolers full of ice, soda, and beer, the audience members chatted and smiled and took in the atmosphere. This friendly, unstructured feeling persisted even once the performance had begun. The food truck left but the coolers of beer and soda remained. In between scenes actors and audience members alike dashed or stretched to grab a cold one. As enjoyable as all of this was, though, about half an hour into it I couldn’t help but wishing that the text itself provided comparable pleasures.

Fire Island is one of Mee’s meditative, conceptual works. A series of episodes—some loosely linked together, others not—finds hyper-articulate men and women of leisure flirting, arguing, having sex, and walking along the beach, all while expounding on and debating the nature(s) of love. This is well-worn ground for the playwright, and those familiar with his other work will recognize passages from more successful plays peppered throughout. Filia vs eros, the history of marriage, the aesthetics of soap operas, differences between the genders: these and other topics emerge as sites for mildly angsty musings as various couples wind their way through the space. Sometimes they stroll; sometimes they chase one another, playfully or otherwise. They shout, they whisper, they caress, they laugh. Through all of this, though, they never seem to be going anywhere. Mee conceives of his island paradise as a landscape outside of time, a place that enables long philosophical conversations about passions and preoccupations.

Some of the scenes play out on the enormous video screens, some occur live in the space. A few, intriguingly, occur both on video and live. The actors are not asked to reproduce their taped performances, but allow the words and emotions and gestures of the live scenes to overlap with and slide up against those they previously recorded. The actors are miked, but we are still able to hear where the voices are coming from when the scenes are played live and the actors are moving through the space. These moments raise a host of issues too academic to pursue here, but it is worth noting that theatre scholars and enthusiasts interested in ongoing debates about “presence” and “liveness” will find much food for thought.

The video projections are stunning and calming, successfully providing a sense of place and time that encourages the audience to sit back and soak in the experience of the production rather than engaging it in more conventional ways. A live band that combines classic rock with Tuvan throat-singing and a hostess who occasionally circulates through the space offering to pour wine for audience members add to the festive, laid-back atmosphere.

I am of a mixed mind about the text itself. It seems specious to complain that the musings and aphorisms about the nature of love often feel clichéd. Indeed, part of Mee’s ongoing project is to explore the fact that philosophers of antiquity can sound clichéd and soap operas profound, and that there may be a fractured and fragmented series of links between the most disparate of sources. To complain that we have heard these questions and thoughts from Mee before also seems beside the point.

Again: recycling, re-imaging, and re-making are precisely the foundation for his often celebrated work. The lack of palpable urgency or passion in conversations about love, sex, suicide, etc. struck me as strange, but it also struck me as at the core of the production: Mee’s Fire Island, as realized by director Kevin Cunningham and his team of technical wizards, is meant to provide a soothing backdrop for fraught conversations and thus allow some perspective on and distance from them.

As I have often enjoyed Mee’s plays, then, what was it that was bothering me about this one?

Another question may provide the answer. Watching the scenes unfold between various couples, I repeatedly asked myself “Who are these people?” Who are these people who have so much time to sit around talking about things they have clearly talked about before? Who are these people who take the breath-taking beauty of their island real estate for granted and not for luxury? Mee has not created characters to people his island; he has created vessels for his own leisurely musings. None of these figures is in any way aware of the privilege that allows them to spend so much time recycling their thoughts and longings. They have no responsibilities and their actions have no consequences. As such, their conflicts fall flat. These characters aren’t in crises or in the throes of passion; the only thing at stake here is whether they will find adequate comfort in one another and whether they will find words eloquent enough, clever enough, trenchant enough to pass the time.

Still, though, the cheeseburger was really good.

Dirty Roses

Most people like roses. Why, then, do so many get annoyed when someone tries to sell them one on the subway? Or on the street corner? Are these items any less genuine than those we might buy in a shop? Doesn’t the subway rose peddler deserve to attempt to earn his living? Perhaps it is the fact that many of these sellers are immigrants, people with no “right” to be here, that makes us avoid and scorn them. Robert Schneider’s one man show Dirt delves deep into the issues of immigration and racism, particularly how such things affect and penetrate those who are its victims. Sad, played earnestly by Christopher John Domig, is an Arab, not Kurd, as he stresses often, immigrant who was smitten with English from the moment he heard the word “Kodak” (as in the film). However, now in America, selling roses on the subway, Sad is disgusted with himself. He believes he has no right to live here, no right to sit on the park benches, and no right to dirty America’s public toilets. What holds Sad back, who is it that makes him believe he has no rights? It is society in general, but it is also he himself. He has absorbed the hatred he feels around and against him, making this hatred his own. It is made most clear in the way he refuses to give his family name and when he screams racial slurs and curses at his unseen roommate.

Sad does not embody the American ideal of the man who pulls himself up from his bootstraps, the man who ultimately triumphs out of great adversity. He’s been fully beaten down by the rules and attitudes of his new country. Despite how much his audience may want him to triumph, despite the hope he may still have, it is clear that the odds of him making it are slim, as he has become his own enemy.

Thematically and structurally, Dirt is a rough play to sit through. The play makes use of a lot of repetition. Sad tells the audience his name and that he is thirty several times, perhaps as a way of remembering who he is, perhaps as a way of fooling us. He shows a picture of his mother multiple times. Each time he shows the picture, more details emerge from the past, details he perhaps does not want us to know. Almost everything out of Sad’s mouth, even the repeated things, is contradicted at some later point. He also ends the play several times, each time saying he must go, blowing out the candle he has lit and moving toward the stage exit. Yet, several times, he returns to begin a new variation on the same theme. The fake endings are clever at first but become tiring after awhile, particularly when it becomes clear that Sad has nothing new or different to say.

Domig is an able, engaging performer. He sits in a chair center stage for much of the play but is able to maintain a high level of energy. It is when he is up and moving, however, that his earnestness and even a shred of hope become evident in his demeanor.

Ultimately, Dirt is an upsetting play. It is an hour and a half of filth and hatred, of watching a man overcome by the scorn and abuse of the world around him. An initial reaction to watching Sad may be “but I’m not like that. . .” until the realization comes that we are all implicit in the hatred, fear, and rejection of those who are not like us, particularly in a post 9/11 society, one currently at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Written over fifteen years ago, Dirt speaks more to our society today than ever before.

Saints and Sinners

Pain—psychological, physical, emotional—dominates Stephen Adly Guirgis’s wrenching new memory play, The Little Flower of East Orange, which examines in detail the love-hate relationship between a son and his mother. But most dominant in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s production for the Public is a performance from Ellen Burstyn so masterly and intense that it is often uncomfortable to watch. The hulking Michael Shannon as the son, Danny, narrates from prison. Shannon, with an unruly mop of brown hair and a frequent squint, has the weary, lived-in appearance of the drunk and drug addict that Danny is. He wants to tell us about his mother, Therese Marie O’Connor, named for the Catholic St. Theresa, known as “the Little Flower.” Therese (Burstyn) has been found at the bottom of a flight of steps in the Cloisters, her wheelchair turned over, and her memory apparently gone. She is in critical condition in a New York hospital, and orderlies and nurses, particularly one named Magnolia (Lisa Colón-Zayas), help keep her alive.

As Danny describes the slow process of discovering what has happened to his mother, we see in flashback scenes of her childhood, showing that Therese was brought up by a deaf father who was a brutal drunk, yet whom she adored.

As Therese recovers, she and Danny spend more time together, and old wounds are opened. Therese, like most mothers, is both nurturer and oppressor, probing into her son’s life with love and ineptitude, and devoted to her Irish Catholic faith. Inevitably and repeatedly they clash. Danny’s attempts to clean himself up at rehab clinics usually end abruptly after Therese pulls a stunt to get him back to her side. And her hope that he’ll reunite with his former girlfriend grates on him until he explodes. Their relationship is so minutely observed and truthful that it is anguishing to watch, and Burstyn, eyes often red and watery during their powerful scenes, conveys a welter of conflicting emotions.

The play's issues are essentially religious ones: devotion, grace, love, and charity. Does Therese’s father have the right to be forgiven for his actions, which caused her to be crippled for life? At what point does Therese’s unbounded forgiveness toward him distort the facts, and which becomes more important, the truth or a lie? And is her choice of forgiveness toward him the right one? Should she, as Danny insists, have sought therapy to face the truth as he sees it?

Guirgis’s portrait of the family relationships is very strong, as is his sense of the issues, but, although Hoffman gives the hospital an effective atmosphere of bustle and urgency, Guirgis’s attempts to introduce humor into them misfire badly. Ajay Naidu’s Dr. Shankar is used effectively to tweak bureaucracy (he has a caring side as well), but Shankar’s repeated mistaking of Magnolia’s name—calling her Mongolia—is a cheap joke. What doctor from India wouldn’t know that Mongolia is a country and think it’s someone’s name? It’s not like there’s a language barrier.

David Zayas’s foul-mouthed hospital orderly Espinosa also presents problems. He’s alternately bullying and kind, but Espinosa’s persistent vulgarity wouldn’t be tolerated in a real hospital for very long, at least not when he’s flinging it in front of the patients. Guirgis apparently thinks that it’s funny to have Espinosa abuse a man who is keeping a vigil over his dying mother, calling the clueless fellow puto, and he even goes so far as to set up the unwitting mark for a tasteless practical joke.

At other moments the writing is inspired: Danny’s self-sacrificing sister Justina (Elizabeth Canavan, at times implacably furious, at others crisply efficient) reports to Danny that their mother has disappeared in a hilarious sequence that combines speaking and stage direction: “Shreek!, shreek!, sob! sob! DANNY!/Shreek, shreek!, wail, wail! MOMMY GONE!” And frequently there are deftly comic lines in keeping with the characters. As Therese hammers Danny with questions, he says, “Let’s just, uh, move on to some other painful, debilitating subject now, if that’s okay.”

The bickering continues after Danny insists on bringing her home to care for her rather than put her in a nursing facility. Even then she’s difficult, as old people are. Ultimately, the play finds peace for Therese and, for Danny, a deeper understanding of his mother’s life. It’s possible, as the title suggests, that even the most flawed among us may attain grace and sainthood. Despite it missteps, Guirgis’s superbly acted play is a full meal for audiences seeking serious drama.

Captivating

Writing a rock musical that focuses on being kidnapped in a war-torn country is just about as daring as breaking into song at gunpoint. The creators of Hostage Song use an appealingly fresh approach. To counter the trembling pleas we see on television, they give the show's captives a voice that is both comic and a little rock n' roll, while presenting most of the action as role-playing and dreaming, rather than suffering. This leads to several touching and unexpectedly humorous moments. It's an impressive achievement based on concept alone. But the show doesn’t venture beyond the conceptual. Stale character development and hit-and-miss writing hold this production back, leaving generic stories and the shell of a good show where an inventive portrait could have been.

Emphasizing transcendence, the show applies a light tone to the dark situation. In the first scene, the captives – Jennifer (Hanna Cheek) and Jim (Paul Thureen) – are playing “I Spy” in their cell. They’re also blindfolded. They pass the time through games, memories, and imagining various scenarios. Clay McLeod Chapman, who wrote the spoken portions of the play, shows real skill here, offering convincing snippets of marriage, parenthood, and budding romance in very short sequences. A scene in which Jim imagines talking to his son (a wonderfully versatile Abe Goldfarb) about girls is funny, warm, and probably five minutes long.

However, give Chapman an extended timeframe and melodramatic flourishes rise up to quash the beautifully simple prose (the old adage of "show, don't tell" comes to mind). When Jennifer remarks how her dead translator's blood remains on her face, the description is grounded in the sensual: "His blood's become brittle. Crackles across my cheeks, my forehead. Whenever I open my mouth, I can feel it crumble along the lining of my lips." Yet, when she slips into talking about what it represents, the metaphorical commentary distances us from a moment that had been so powerfully immediate.

The overdramatic portions are awkward because most of the play relies on restrained emotions. Instead of hammering away at fear or dread, Kyle Jarrow's song lyrics, for instance, tend to focus on staying strong and wishing for the happiness of loved ones. This hopeful tone blends well with Jarrow’s percussive and energetic music. The four-man band – cleverly located behind sliding black panels that reveal and conceal them at the right moments– bounces to the beats. In one fist-pumping anthem, Jennifer sings about her resilience:

"She'd find a way to show the world the Last thing that she needs at night are Lullabies with silly words like Don't be scared now Jenny baby"

Even when addressing the hostages' tragic situation with the music, Jarrow makes the language so nonchalant that it's almost comical. Jim sings about getting beaten and threatened with death, saying "Well, that's at least the gist of it," adding, "it sure doesn't look good." Really, Jim?

By forgoing the natural reactions of fear or anger, the creators face an uphill battle in making Jim and Jennifer seem real. Instead of unique personas that might show us the humanity behind the blindfolds, the characters are more like Jarrow and Chapman's playthings – pieces in a game. Not to say that Cheek and Thureen don’t give it their all: limited by blindfolds, ropes around their hands, and an incredibly restrained approach, they still offer touching performances.

But this does little to add the dimensions and depth that the script lacks. Their backgrounds seemed culled from a warehouse of familiar motifs (a lover coming to your window; eating ice cream as a kid) never telling a truly unique story. Yes, it's good for them to have memories to which the audience can relate, but if Chapman and Jarrow want to show that hostages have something to say other than “help me,” it would’ve been nice to meet people rather than archetypes.

When it hits the mark, however, Hostage Song dredges up perspectives that should prove historically interesting long after our current war has ended. Take, for instance, the issue of terrorism in the YouTube era. In the same monologue, Jim's son talks about being able to watch both porn and his father's decapitation on the Internet. He describes the latter scene with scientific detail: "You can see the flesh separate into little dots. The bleeding seems to seep into the computer screen...A million pixels channel his blood down the front of his jumpsuit."

This is the show's greatest strength: presenting gruesome scenarios in a plain yet poetic style. If only the characters were drawn this well, perhaps appearing to actually be made of flesh and blood, rather than just a series of methodically assembled dots.

Hopelessly Devoted

Duality runs throughout Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: Rome vs. Egypt, sensuality vs. discipline, wife vs. mistress, honor vs. betrayal. Although the play offers a visual feast for designers—two widely different physical worlds need to be shown—a successful production also needs two major performances, and that may be why it’s the least performed of the great tragedies. Darko Tresnjak’s production, in keeping with Theatre for a New Audience’s theme this season of cultural connections among Africa, Europe, and America, features an updating of the period from double-digits A.D. to the late 19th century. Linda Cho’s costumes evoke the Four Feathers era of British rule in North Africa, with tall helmets and khakis for the Romans, albeit with sashes and chevrons in turquoise that look a bit flashy for those stoic folk. The Egyptian court exudes the Alexandria of Constantine Cavafy (whose poem “The God Forsakes Antony” serves as an epigraph in the program): the attendant Alexas wears a black suit and a fez and carries a horsehair whisk, while the eunuch Mardian (a strikingly tall Erik Singer) has the pantalooned appearance of an Arabian Nights character.

As Cleopatra, Laila Robins is a fine queen of the Nile, with pre-Raphaelite curls and feline cheekbones. Her infinite variety encompasses strength, vanity, sensuality, intelligence, and passion, blazingly displayed when she pummels the messenger who reports Antony’s marriage to Caesar’s sister Octavia. But Robins’s Cleopatra also has an amusing self-awareness. When her handmaiden Charmian praises Julius Caesar, irritating the queen, Charmian points out that she is only echoing Cleopatra’s own statements about her late lover. “My salad days, when I was green in judgment,” says the queen in an unusual reading that turns the line into a throwaway joke on herself, yet without any revisionist disdain for her former opinion.

The character of Antony is harder to pull off, because the hero of Julius Caesar hasn’t much opportunity to show nobility. He’s hit the skids. Unfortunately, Marton Csokas hasn't whatever innate charisma might be needed to suggest a formerly exalted general; rather, he comes off as an ordinary enlisted man. He’d be an effective Enobarbus, if John Douglas Thompson’s Enobarbus weren’t already solid enough.

Antony’s big opportunity to show his mettle comes in his return to Rome, yet here Tresnjak, whose touches are often insightful, seems to undercut Antony’s preparedness as a warrior when the triumvirate (Caesar, Lepidus, Antony) faces the rebellious Pompey with only their swords, while Pompey’s men wield rifles. The carousing in the same scene is conflated with a later scene when Octavius and his sister Octavia (Lisa Velten Smith) enter; the result is that here they discover Antony sporting with a wench. It’s amusing, but not a moment that lends Antony luster, since he's caught with his pants down (figuratively).

The character certainly doesn’t need help undermining himself. He lets Cleopatra (Robins, wearing the pants literally, with blouse and boots) persuade him to let her join the disastrous sea battle at Actium. Rather than die by his own hand, he asks Eros (Randy Harrison) to kill him, and after Eros dispatches himself rather than do it, Antony botches his own suicide. On his deathbed he tells Cleopatra that Maecenas is the one to trust in Caesar’s entourage, when it’s Dolabella who proves sympathetic.

Tresnjak contributes several inspired touches. Early on this Cleopatra is pregnant, and delivered of a baby; as a counterpoint, Octavia becomes pregnant after her marriage to Antony and also delivers a child. (It’s a fascinating idea, yet it points up that Antony is more potent in the bedroom than on the battlefield.) And as the messenger cowers before Cleopatra after his first beating, Mardian nods his head from behind her to help him choose the safest answers to her questions.

As usual, Tresnjak gets good work from his young actors (as well as from veteran George Morfogen as even-tempered Lepidus, both a diplomat and a dupe). James Knight is such a virile, principled Pompey that one hopes there’s a Coriolanus in his future, and Michael Rogers as the Clown who brings the asp introduces levity when it's most needed. Only Jeffrey Carlson’s neurotic Octavius proves disappointing, with a habit of putting his hands to his face as if he’s about to do an impression of Jack Benny or Ed Wynn. He's not steely enough for an emperor-to-be. On the whole, though, Tresnjak’s production has so many assets that it would be a shame to miss it.

Curiouser and Curiouser

"Seizures suck," declares Molly, a young woman afflicted with them, to her doctor. "They show up like ghosts." That is why Molly would like to get rid of them, and the doctors can accomplish that, by removing part of her brain.Unfortunately, more than Molly's epilepsy might be lost in that endeavor.

Molly's story is one of several intertwined tales of brain damage, disease, and transformation treated provocatively yet conscientiously by Rabbit Hole Ensemble in their haunting piece A Rope in the Abyss.

Earlier this theatrical season, a character in Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll proposed that humans could build an artificial brain "out of beer cans" if we only knew how a real one works. The same frustration confronts Rabbit Hole's characters, but they explore the problem in greater detail than Stoppard's. Like the titular rope, each of Rabbit Hole's stories begins with familiar people, naturalistically (for the most part) portrayed, then plummets into mysterious places that science has not yet fully explained.

When a person loses their memory or changes personality, are they still "themselves?" Is the real self a "soul" that inhabits the brain? Can love survive in the absence of memory, self, and language? Is it better to fully comprehend one's grief or guilt, or is amnesia, in this context, a blessing? And can humans communicate in a vocabulary made out of different kinds of pickles?

A Rope in the Abyss asks all those questions, and then some, but modestly provides no declarative answers. Focused sharply yet broadly on its subject matter and tautly, unpretentiously, and empathetically constructed, each of the stories is a miniature drama, with lightly sketched characters filled in vividly by the passionate, technically precise acting of the four-actor ensemble.

In keeping with Rabbit Hole's signature aesthetic, there is nearly no set, absolutely basic costumes, no sound effects other than those created by the actors, and special effects consisting merely of the sharp, deliberate use of lighting to create striking chiaroscuro, shadows, and contours that help tell the story.

Playwright and director Edward Elefterion, who very deservedly won the 2007 Midtown International Theatre Festival's award for Outstanding Direction for Nosferatu: The Morning of My Death, works magic again with clear characterisation, painterly tableaux, and brisk pacing.

As Molly, Tatiana Gomberg (the ethereal Mina Harker of The Night of Nosferatu) conveys this bewildered young woman's desperate desire for a cure and subconscious fear of losing her self. Gomberg also shines as catankerous health nut Lorraine, who, after being "dead for two minutes" after a stroke, changes every aspect of her personality, horrifying her slacker son Harold (Dan Ajl Kitrosser). Both of Lorraine's personalities as acted by Gomberg are wholly convincing, and consequently compel the audience to share Harold's confusion.

As Harold and amnesiac murderer Russ, Kitrosser pulls off some tone-changing physical comedy, but also adequately conveys the horror that both characters ultimately experience. The tale of the murderer, narrated in pseudo-Seussian rhyming couplets, is the least successful of the many narratives. Its scientific context is explained less clearly and completely than the other stories.

This is unfortunate because its subject--repressed and recovered memory--is perhaps the most controversial within the medical establishment, with some medical scholars and practitioners declaring that repressed-memory-recovery is a myth and others insisting it is a common occurrence. The whimsical verse poetry perhaps illustrates the character's mind (Russ is an LSD addict, initially) but it is ultimately a case of style substituted for substance.

Overall, however, A Rope in the Abyss constantly intrigues and engages as it winds through many conflicts and lives. That is no easy rope trick.

Kitrosser's interpretation of a third role, haunted Iraq War veteran, is the least patronizing performance of that type that I have seen in a long time, and I have seen several.

The final two members of the ensemble, Nosferatu actors Danny Ashkenasi and Emily Hartford, spin a sad and beautiful love story about Hugh, an opera singer who loses most of his memories to an aneurism and Donna, Hugh's loving but overwhelmed, frustrated, and alienated wife. Yes, you do get to hear Ashkenasi sing opera, and it sounds convincingly operatic.

The moment in which the opera springs forth from the recesses of Hugh's damaged mind is the play's most surreal and mysterious moment. I can't tell you the details, but not because I don't remember them. I do. In fact, A Rope in the Abyss, will remain in my memory, I hope, for a good long time.

Sands of Time

In the preface to his 1960 one-act play The American Dream, Edward Albee famously decried a minority of critics who had deemed the content of his absurdist play “nihilist, immoral, defeatist.” It’s hard to imagine a time when the content of The American Dream threatened some people; nearly 50 years later the play seems quaint and a bit dated. The Cherry Lane Theatre has invited Mr. Albee, who recently turned 80 years old, to direct the current pairing of the The American Dream and the related The Sandbox. The American Dream is nowhere near as shocking today as it might have been a half-century ago, and that absence of shock to a contemporary audience takes some of the teeth out of this production, which is, as Albee insists, tenaciously true to the text.

The story of The American Dream goes like this: “Mommy” has married “Daddy” for his money. Daddy and Mommy have reluctantly permitted “Grandma” to live with them, albeit under the sink. The ageist Mommy keeps the sassy Grandma (think Vicki Lawrence in Mama’s Family) in check by threatening to call the “Van Man” on her and put her out to pasture once and for all.

Grandma, however, has her own ideas. Having won a lot of money in a baking contest, she plans to make a run for it. In the meantime, Daddy and Mommy have forgotten why they have invited Mrs. Barker from the adoption agency to their home. Grandma explains, however: apparently they weren’t happy with the child they “bought” 20 years before and are seeking “satisfaction” by getting a replacement. The replacement is a shallow, damaged young man that Grandma calls “The American Dream.” And, yes, it appears that Mommy and Daddy killed the first child, but this fact is explained so obtusely in the play that it comes nowhere near the “startling tale of murder and morality” that the current press release promises.

Yet, it’s a treat to witness how Albee meant these plays to be seen. Though Albee introduced the notion of the absurd to popular American theater, his direction of The American Dream imbues the characters with a humanity that’s not apparent if one simply reads the play. In the production, we actually feel empathy for the doddering Daddy (played by George Bartenieff) rather than viewing him as the mechanical servant he seems to be in the book. Judith Ivey’s Mommy, obsessed with social status and getting “satisfaction,” is more vulnerable under Albee’s direction. Both Bartenieff and Ivey appear to play their characters as straight as possible.

However, because they do come across as more human in this production, the absurdness of the play and its dialogue sometimes get in the way and result in misfires. For instance, when Mrs. Barker (the excellent Kathleen Butler, whose judicious use of facial expressions saves her character) suddenly yanks her dress off to get more comfortable in the family’s living room, it’s simply incongruous because to that point the production has not felt surreal enough to support that action.

Other aspects of the production were slightly disappointing. Lois Markle as Grandma is a last-minute replacement for Myra Carter, who took ill before the production. Markle was a bit unsure of some of her lines — this might be overlooked in other productions, but Albee's work demands precision timing. At one point, she hesitated quite noticeably. When she finally came through with the correct line I was momentarily tempted to high-five the woman sitting next to me.

In a recent American Theatre interview, Albee opined candidly that the 13-minute The Sandbox is the closest he has ever come to a perfect piece; he states that, had he gone on five minutes longer, he probably would have made a mistake.

In The Sandbox, Mommy and Daddy are back and this time they’re sending Grandma off to her death. They bring her to a beach where they deposit her in a sandbox, and wait, with the help of a cellist, for the moment to arrive. A buff young man performing calisthenics on the beach is revealed to be a somewhat insecure Angel of Death, come to take Grandma away. His exercises mimic the flapping of wings and Nicole Pearce’s lighting is sublime. This is where Albee’s use of the absurd works completely. Albee is right. Even 50 years later The Sandbox remains a nearly perfect piece.

Show for Sale

People often wonder where artists get their material and ideas from, what makes them write a specific line instead of another. With Annie Dorsen's Democracy In America , such mystery is gone. The entire show was available for purchase. In the months preceding its opening, anyone could go online and buy something—text, music, movement—that would ultimately end up in Democracy in America . The result is a collage of ideas and thoughts from individuals across the country. The purchases were varied. David N. bought a “Starring You” credit in the program. Harriette D. bought Rhett Butler's famous line: “Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.” A student at St. Ann's Academy bought the zombie dance from “Thriller” in slow motion. The variety and seeming disconnectedness of each element of the piece was used to illustrate Alexis de Tocqueville's (author of the great book Democracy in America ) question regarding how a nation could be assembled from a large group of individuals.

Initially, connection seemed unlikely. The show started with a word, spoken by the performer Anthony Torn, followed by a movement executed by another performer, Philippa Kaye. A sinking feeling that this show may simply be a parade of words and images from across America appeared. However, that feeling was put to rest as the performers began to gel the purchased fragments together. Kaye and Okwui Okpokwasili do the Thriller dance while singing “Soldier boy, oh my little soldier boy.” A striptease is followed by an ad for the contemporary dance venue Joyce Soho. A little girl recites a rather grown up poem on video while Kaye dances with fans to Ride of the Valkyries .

There is no grand overarching theme that appears among the fragments—the fragments themselves are the theme. Dorsen did not intend for the piece to be a statement on America's culture or politics. However, statements are inevitably made throughout the piece. Two poster sized images of Abu Ghraib hang from the sides of the cube shaped set. One is labeled “theater” and the other “not theater.” The images, while an embarrassing reminder of America's recent missteps, raise the question of just what is theater these days? It could be anything from two people discussing politics loudly in public to a traditional Broadway show. It could also be, for the guards at Abu Ghraib, the act of torturing and photographing prisoners. Yet, by labeling one image theater and the other not, the definition is further blurred.

The visual and performance aspects of the show are effective. The set is simple: a raised square platform with poles on all four corners and a video screen stretched between the rear poles. The three performers each have their strengths: Okpokwasili in singing, Kaye in movement, and Torn in his delivery of the lines. Together, the three meld into a cohesive ensemble when called for, in a way similar to America itself. Individuality remains yet the performers are working as a unit.

Democracy in America offers an accurate portrait of America—comprised of the good, the bad, and the plain embarrassing. As an experiment in form and construction, it works. The decision to let the collected purchases speak for themselves, instead of attempting to manipulate a meaning from them, is an admirable one, as it creates an authentic image of what de Tocqueville described.

Beer Bad

Drunken City takes place during one of those capital-letter “Nights That Changed Everyone’s Lives,” an evening where every character comes to a crossroads and makes a major realization about his or her life. Writer Adam Bock (who recently scored a smash with Manhattan Theatre Club’s The Receptionist) merges Sex and the City-style storytelling with Shakespearean structure to portray a sextet looking for love in both the right and wrong places. His result feels a tad recycled. Marnie (Cassie Beck), Linda (Sue Jean Kim) and Melissa (Maria Dizzia) are three best friends from Long Island who have become engaged at the same time. Melissa, though, has gone on to dump her philandering boyfriend, and envies Marnie, whose fiancée, we learn, is another ex of Melissa’s.

Marnie, meanwhile, has second thoughts of her own about her engagement. Unfortunately, these fears rear their ugly head during her bachelorette party at a downtown Manhattan bar, where Marnie meets Frank (Mike Colter) and sparks fly. Frank is out for a simple night on the town with his friend Eddie (Barrett Foa). It turns out that both also hail from the same Long Island town. When Melissa calls on friend Bob (Alfredo Narcisco) to come into the city and bail Marnie out, the coincidences continue as Bob and Eddie proceed to fall for each other as well.

These coincidences seem both convenient and trite, ridding City of much interest: how much can an audience invest in events that seem utterly foreordained? Director Trip Cullman does a yeoman’s job keeping the show energized and occasionally frenzied, allowing us to view the play’s events through the prism of someone who might have thrown back a few glasses of champagne themself. One major decision, though, to have the stage dramatically tilt to the left or right, hurtling its actors to the floor, during moments of great realization, feels too gimmicky and juvenile (David Korins designed the set).

One also cannot help but feel that Bock spoon-feeds his ideas out to the audience. The notion that City’s characters are getting married for the sake of being married is hardly a new one, and if Bock was unable to plumb any deeper into the topic, he could have arrived at a more artful way of saying so than giving his actors monologues that tell us these things on their own.

The six actors do a lot of heavy lifting. Colter and Foa are both charming, and Kim demonstrates a nimble sense of humor. Narcisco in particular impresses; his character appears late, and yet immediately blends in with the ensemble. He justifies every scene to show someone who is both macho and sensitive, and whose pride has caused him to spend more nights alone than he cares to let on.

It is the two lead women that dominate the action, and both Beck and Dizzia create women that are complex and real, even if City never feels the same way. Beck reminds me of many women her age I have seen. Marnie seems ditzy, but only to mask an insecurity that has caused her to be calculating in life. Dizzia (seen in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice) similarly nails such insecurity in Melissa, though her character manifests such in a more manipulative way, straddling the line between pain and humor perfectly.

But Bock has nowhere to go with the more serious elements of City, so he chooses to eschew them in favor of happy endings and pairings (in fact, the one character who doesn’t end up with a mate is left to skulk off, without any sense of the closure all the other characters get to enjoy). As a result, one leaves City feeling the same lack of balance that his actors do onstage.

Love Child

Rachel looks appalled from the moment she opens the door to Wanda’s cramped Louisiana trailer. She is appalled that the trailer is sweltering, appalled that Wanda’s idea of lunch is a slice of American cheese on white bread, but most of all, appalled that the precious baby she hopes to one day call her daughter is in this trailer park woman’s stomach. The stage is set for Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance, a gripping and heartrending drama that examines the rollercoaster experience of an open adoption and the emotional havoc it wreaks on everyone involved.

There is a lot of dancing in this story. Wanda (Suzie Cho) and her husband, Al (James Michael Farrell) dance around the issue that after four kids they are too poor to support a fifth. Film studio executives Rachel (Maria Riboli) and Richard (John Stanisci) dance around the uncomfortable fact that Al is taking advantage of their situation, especially when he tries to pass off a new Corvette as one of the pre-natal expenses they are obligated to pay.

But at the heart of the story is a dance between two women: Wanda and Rachel, one who always wanted a baby and the other who has more than she ever wanted. Rachel is jittery and appropriately horrified by the conditions her future baby is subjected to.

Riboli is fully believable as a seemingly together woman quickly unraveling in a world far outside her comfort zone. When Wanda offers Rachel a seat at her kitchen table, she slides into it with all the apprehension of easing into an electric chair, fingering her necklace, fanning her face, and wondering whether to cross or uncross her arms.

Wanda’s guard is also up. She has a gracious smile but sharp, distrusting eyes, as if daring Rachel to judge her. Having already raised four children it is awkward for her to have someone looking at the bulge in her belly as if it were a puppy in a window she can’t wait to take home.

Cho and Riboli have a natural chemistry with each other. They fill up the stage with their personalities, drawing you into their world. Watching them, you can feel the scorching sun, taste the cheap, bland food and imagine the neighbor’s wild dogs, which can be heard yapping in the distance.

The Baby Dance is not a sappy, sweet story about the love of a baby changing a person’s life. There are no neat little packages and no promise of a happy ending, even if everything does go as planned. Al taints the entire situation by continuing to use the baby as a bargaining chip and insinuating that he won’t sign away his parental rights until he gets everything he asks for. Richard isn’t sure he wants a baby from such a poor, uneducated family, and at times considers calling the whole thing off just to get these people out of his life.

Anderson’s The Baby Dance is a vivid slice of life, one that shows the complexity of the feelings involved in both adopting a baby and giving one up. The day Wanda goes into labor, harsh words are exchanged, tempers fly, and a happy occasion is marred by everyone’s personal feelings for each other. Somewhere in this mess is an innocent baby coming into a world full of hardship and conflict.

The richer couple spends most of the play being appalled at the poorer one, the poorer couple spends their time distrusting and acting cold towards the richer one, but by the production’s emotionally draining end everyone steps back to look at the situation honestly, and with new eyes. They seem to realize only after it is all over that the one person they are really each appalled with is themself.

One on One Cruelty

It has its way of sucking you in. Starts off in a café, fun little chat with a friend over coffee, why not? Then out into the streets of the East Village, a spring stroll to get hooked up with some good times. But then it starts getting gradually heavier, more uncomfortable, with nasty revelations about your friend coming one after the next, until you’re not sure whether to walk away when she looks you in the eye and asks if you understand her. But the search for heroin continues. Street Limbo Blues suggests that it doesn’t take a particular type of person to become a junkie. Or, as director Taurie Kinoshita writes in the program, “Addiction is a sickness, not a choice.” It all sounds a bit cliché. We’ve been through this lesson in high school, we’ve seen it on TV and read it in the newspapers. We get it. But when has this issue ever made a demand for you to face it, and the way it is treated in this country? The Hawaiian based Cruel Theatre forces its audience to confront this major societal question, through use of some of the ideas of the twentieth century’s greatest theatrical minds.

In Artaudian fashion, the interaction between the performers and their audience is direct. Your best friend (if you’re as lucky as I was you’ll get Brazilian beauty Juju - a lively, convincing performance by Nancy Valeria Rendal) walks in to find you in Café Pick Me Up on Ave. A. She speaks to you about herself, her problems, and then leads you out to find your fix for the night. On this depressing adventure you’ll meet a drug dealer or two and a crew of young junkies. You’ll cringe as your best friend uses her body to try and hook up some angel dust. But, ultimately, the tone of the evening is up to each spectator. Building on Augusto Boal’s concept of the Spect-actor, the actors are trained to play with whatever they get from their intimate audience. This way, each performance (the play lasts one hour and is performed several times every evening to one to three audience members at a time) is guaranteed to be different. Artaud’s disgust with theatre that is dead before the curtain even opens is relieved.

As may be appropriate for a play about drug addiction, it begins fun and quickly goes downhill. The politics of the piece remain unclear until after it is over, when the spect-actors are handed their program. If they are moved enough to read the director’s “Diatribe on the Drug War” then their political conception about it may be challenged. Otherwise, they are likely to leave with the same denial-based distaste for junkies with which they walked into the café. The strongest moment of my evening came on the subway on the way home, when I found out from the program that sixty-eight percent of all crimes committed in the US are drug-related. More than two-thirds of our corrupt privatized prison system thrives on an un-winnable war, one which Kinoshita believes could be fought much more successfully through legalization. Perhaps there is a wiser way to spend the enormous amounts of money that go from our pockets to the prison lords of this country.

The Cruel Theatre lives up to its name, and provides a difficult experience which is likely to sit in your stomach or dreams for some time after. In that sense, their exciting theatricality works to do what they set out to do, and there is much to be learned from their play with the under-used theatrical ideas of the company’s three main influences, Artaud, Boal and Grotowski. Perhaps, if the play itself didn't make you want to get out of there as soon as possible, the political message would have come across more clearly as well. Nonetheless, this is a type of theater that audiences will find hard to ignore, and most likely they will find themselves engaging in the questions the play raises.

Glass Half Empty

A subdued hipster vibe was in effect the evening I attended The Optimist, a new play by Jason Chimonides. The sound system piped in Radiohead, lots of people dressed in black seemed to know each other, and the show started a casual 15 minutes late. And, because the play’s action takes place in a motel room, each audience member received a souvenir Optimist room key card along with the program. Unfortunately, this ultimately silly play made me want to check out early. Directed by Jace Alexander, best known as the director of FX’s Rescue Me, The Optimist is about a pair of “well-bred and intelligent” (from the press release) 20-something fraternal twin brothers, Noel and Declan. The brothers hole up for a weekend in an Econo Lodge in Tallahassee to attend both the funeral of a friend who died in some sort of riding accident, and the wedding of their widower father to the woman with whom he carried on a 30-year adulterous affair. The volatile Noel blames his father for his mother’s death, accusing him of letting her drive when he knew she suffered from post-stroke seizures. On top of all this, Noel’s ex-girlfriend, Nicole, whom he still secretly loves, is in town for the funeral.

Unfortunately, Matt Burns as Noel and Chris Thorn as Declan thoroughly overact their parts, much like extreme, self-obsessed personalities might on, oh, perhaps a cable TV show. Caitlin FitzGerald tries hard as Nicole, but she can’t compete with the oozing macho bluster of both brothers. Her character is ineffectual and easily drowned out for most of the play.

The looming ceremonies stir up a whole lot of emo in the excitable Noel, who constantly stomps around the room, often in his underwear. He angrily glues his father’s secret love letters onto a giant wooden middle finger he plans to hold up at the wedding. He yanks mattresses and box springs from the beds to create a makeshift boxing ring in the room; he wants to fight his father (a former vet and Notre Dame linebacker nicknamed “Hambone”) to relieve his considerable Oedipal angst. Noel blasts Nirvana on his CD player, screams “arrgggghhh” a lot, and bounces off walls. And, just in case the audience can’t fully grasp the psychic pain Noel is in, Chimonides/Alexander make him attempt to eat the share of his friend’s ashes that her family gives to him. This scene proved to be, unintentionally, the funniest of the play. Noel tortures himself relentlessly; the play would have been more appropriately titled The Masochist.

Declan observes all of this with amusement, yet he is equally annoying. Declan is the terminally preppy kid in your dorm who takes one too many bong hits and rambles on about Schopenhauer. While smarmy and self-important, deep down, all Declan really wants to do is drink and get laid. Chris Thorn so consciously acts the role that, like Noel, Declan is more of a caricature than a believable character.

Chimonides unfortunately forgoes a potential powder keg of a conflict by failing to introduce us to the 66 year-old Hambone, by far the most interesting personality in the play, but Hambone is just a sub-plot, after all. In the second act, it becomes apparent that The Optimist is really about the relationship between Noel and Nicole. Nicole explains why she has moved to Nebraska and why she plans to wed a demolitions expert with no soul. She calls Noel an “optimist” because he expects everything to behave in accordance with his laws and truly feels whatever life happens to toss his way—unlike the demolitions expert, come to think of it. Nicole begins to fall for Noel all over again. But, alas, Noel has, during the course of this brief weekend, learned a heck of a lot about himself and so throws a monkey wrench in Nicole’s sudden plans. Oh, and something else pretty major, but not really, happens. That’s about it.

On the positive side, Travis McHale’s set perfectly replicates a double room at an Econo Lodge, right down to the air vents near the ceiling, the exit signs on the back of the door, and even the stucco on the hallway walls.

Mr. Chimonides’ play has one or two clever moments, particularly when Declan ruminates on mortality, but these don’t come frequently enough to save this sometimes-embarrassing play. Just call me a realist.

Madness!

Early in Denis Woychuk’s new rock musical, Attorney for the Damned , a narrator poses the question: “What makes a hero?” The musical, a warped, nonsensical journey through the criminal justice system, doesn’t really try to deal with this question. So, instead, let’s contemplate another question: What makes a good musical? Is it a good book with catchy songs? A heavy moral issue? Spectacle? It’s not an easy question to answer, but I think it’s fair to say that Attorney misses the mark. Even with lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, the show fails to sustain audience interest, as well as its own credibility. Founded on a weak premise (an innocent attorney who had wanted to help "widows, orphans, and the poor," but now defends "perps who like to fuck, then fight”), the production completely devolves into a bizarre farce that, more bizarrely, tries to make a statement.

The plot, though wandering and incoherent, initially focuses on Laura Skyhorse (Allison Johnson), a young defense attorney who tries to assuage her guilty conscience by defending the mentally ill. Skyhorse is part Native American, but it seems that the sole purpose for this background detail is to allow her counterpart, the bitter Assistant District Attorney Vancussy (Juliana Smith), to make racist comments. The ADA’s racism is just one of several jabs Woychuk throws at lawyers. As with the show’s other criticisms, his complaints about the profession are often silly one-liners (e.g.: “where do vampires learn to suck blood? Law school”). Though some of these lines are humorous, their appeal is overshadowed by the show’s meaningless preoccupation with sex.

Woychuk is a former lawyer himself, who for some years defended the criminally insane. The job left him with guilt and inspired much self-analysis, some of which has taken public form: a book, articles, this musical. Yet, no matter how exciting and emotional his cases were, this presentation is a ridiculous romp that rouses confusion, if it rouses anything at all.

The show’s lyrics are among its faults, but though the actors are required to sing such lines as "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven/But my wife turned out to be/Not in love with me,” their performances are the most entertaining parts of the show. In the lead role, Johnson sings with a sweet conviction that matches her character, while Denny Blake and Pat Mattingly, playing the mentally ill, bring a soulful, raspy sound to their numbers. As Vancussy, Smith offers an appropriate contrast—she opts for the pop style and brash belting that go with her pumps.

Even with the cast’s solid performances, the production drags. Part of the problem is the frequently awkward positioning of the actors. They spend so much time serenading the audience that there is no chemistry between them; their relationships are unbelievable and uninteresting. Perhaps, if more scenes featured shared numbers, rather than solos, this would be less of an issue.

As the production drags, the plot plows ahead with a series of extremely unlikely romances. First, the headstrong prosecutor, who happens to be a nymphomaniac, desperately solicits the sexual attention of a psychologist, Dr. Marcus Blake (a peculiarly jubilant Ray Fisher). Another scene features Dr. Blake and Skyhorse testing the doctor’s mind control device in a perverse way. The show ends with the dizzyingly incomprehensible: sex between the ingénue attorney and her recently freed client, a criminally insane man who had cut off his former girlfriend’s finger, in a deserted subway tunnel where the two are hiding from another criminally insane man who is hunting them down and trying to kill them.

At this point, are you thinking about heroes? Are you thinking about the plight of the insane, or the errors of the “justice” system? Or, to put it in the words of Vancussy, who directly asked the audience, “are you still with us?” The delayed and weak response from the audience answered her question perfectly. And how could one be expected to be interested in a show that can hardly stay on one topic long enough to offer insight, that opts for cheesy, glib, and offensive jokes over wit, that somehow, no matter how unlikely, finds sex when its looking for heroes?

For a man who has taken some time to reflect on his past, Woychuk’s musical is full of odd choices: why has he created a show that treats its characters cruelly, and is so explicitly sexual, yet confounded? If the writer and his director want the audience to ponder questions of heroism, to be entertained, or even just to “stay with them,” creating unsympathetic characters and dull songs isn’t the way. Perhaps Attorney for the Damned is not as unredeemable as its characters, but it would take quite a bit of rehab to make things work.

Potty Talk

If all performance toys with the boundaries of public and private space, Ladies & Gents, currently playing at (yes) the public bathrooms by the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, does so with a unique impudence. It’s site specific theater at its cheekiest. Publicity materials bill the Irish play, an Edinburgh Fringe Festival hit, as a “live noir thriller” and indeed, moments of the production are truly frightening. It’s hard to imagine the play’s chills sweeping over its audiences were they seated in a cozy proscenium or black box. In a lesser production, the public-bathrooms-as-theatrical-stage concept would be a cute gimmick. In Ladies & Gents , written and directed by Paul Walker, it is crucial to the performance.

Ladies & Gents is a production ripe with ambiguities. The location feels at once dirty and dank (the cavernous public toilets are dimly lit by Sinead McKenna’s effectively earie light design) yet grandiosely gorgeous (the Bethesda Fountain, not to mention Central Park, rivals any Broadway house in terms of presentational beauty). A period piece (it’s based on a 1957 Dublin tabloid scandal), the play is fortuitously prescient (the scandal centers on tawdry politicians caught with prostitutes). Such dichotomies smoothly support the plot, which deals with double standards of class and gender in a society whose sharp social stratification leads to twin dangers of repressed desire and remorseless fury.

The disciplined ensemble masters naturalism necessary for a thriller that places actors literally a breath away from the audience. At the same time, they never sacrifice an otherworldliness appropriate both to the period of the piece and to the noir genre. The actors’ success is no small feat: the production requires them to run each scene six times over the course of a single evening.

Ladies & Gents embraces variables from the first moments of the production, when audience members are handed colored slips of paper. Black paper indicates beginning the performance in the men’s room; white paper the ladies’ room. After approximately twenty minutes, each scene concludes and audiences switch bathrooms in order to see the other scene. Both of the scenes raise questions which the subsequent scene answers. Still, the order in which audiences view the scenes inherently affects their experience of the production, going so far as to potentially alter how scary the thriller really is.

But the variables welcomed by the performance experiment don’t end with running order. To name a few: how does the seven o’clock performance, with the sun not yet set, differ from the nine o’clock, when the park is empty? How would rain affect the production? Snow? How might theatre-goers whose groups are split by the colored cards perceive the play differently than couples watching the play together? Is a men’s room filled predominantly with women different from a group made up of mostly men?

Although these issues will likely be explored many times over the course of the play’s two-week run, the performance space is small: only the actors will learn the answers first-hand. They will have earned the knowledge. Everyone else will have to be satisfied by a single performance. When that performance is a sharp, polished play staged in public bathroom, it’s hard not to be.

Unadulterated Pleasure

The American Globe Theatre’s presentation of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is as fine a rendering of this gorgeous play as any I have seen. That’s no mean feat for a Shakespearean company that likely operates on a fraction of the budget of more established ones. Yet, now in its 19th season, the American Globe Theatre has managed to become Times Square’s longest running Off-Off Broadway theater. The Winter’s Tale is, above all, the story of one who regretfully makes catastrophic decisions, improbably receives a second chance, and then smartly runs with it. King Leontes of Sicilia, hosting for a long period his boyhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, mistakenly believes that his beloved queen, Hermione, and Polixenes are having an adulterous affair. The delusion sets in motion a chain of events that lead to the estrangement of Polixenes, the imprisonment of Hermione, the death of Leontes’ only son-heir, and the intended murder of his baby girl, Perdita, who Leontes erroneously believes to be the bastard daughter of Polixenes.

Against the better counsel of everyone in his court, Leontes forges ahead, destroys his life and nearly ruins his kingdom. Richard Fay shines as a chastened Leontes finally recognizing the error of his ways; he literally grovels in agony as Paulina, Hermione’s senior lady, rubs salt into his wounds. The powerful final scene tugs at the heart strings appropriately yet never descends into sappiness.

Director John Basil remains for the most part entirely true to the original text, slightly embellishing it for the better on occasion and introducing dances and songs in several scenes. As Leontes, the confident Fay utterly commands his lines: fearsome in one scene, bitter in the next, child-like and confused in another. His descriptions to his counsel, Camillo, of Hermione’s imagined transgressions are animated and comical; at one point he thrusts his nose at Camillo’s to illustrate adulterous behavior he claims to have witnessed. Yet, never do we doubt his tight rein over those who, as much as they suspect their king’s beliefs, must perform his insane bidding on pain of death.

Jim Parks’ period costuming is conservative but clever. He lends Leontes and his lords a bit of a hip flair while still placing them firmly within the time of the play. Kevin Lee Allen’s imaginative set design fully utilizes a modest space: two spiral stairways on either side of the stage lend symmetry and a bit of grandeur to the black box, while the vertical rise offers Leontes the ability to look down on his minions while making forceful, if misguided, pronouncements that will forever alter their lives. Alisa Claire’s choreography of peasant dances is charming, and Mark Hankla’s lighting, particularly when it isolates Leontes, is frequently inspired.

My quibbles with the direction are minor. Christina Shipp as the grown-up Perdita didn’t quite convey the inherent majesty that the natural born daughter of royalty is said to possess, and Paulina, played strongly by Diedra Da Silva, dipped momentarily into farce at a point of the play that demands restraint. Jefferson Slinkard’s employment of a feigned Mexican/Italian/something else accent when he, as a disguised Polixenes, confronts his disaffected son, Florizel, needs work. I detected a slight flagging of energy during the last quarter of the play which happily picked up by the final scenes.

Standouts among the cast are Fay as Leontes, Elizabeth Keefe as Hermione, whose trial speech elicits the pity her plight deserves, Geoffrey Barnes as the simple yet humorous son of a shepherd, and a remarkably agile and appropriately hammy Mat Sanders as the ne’er do well, Autolycus.

The best Shakespeare answers ambiguous questions occasionally posed by the text and Mr. Basil is unafraid to engage those questions. While prior familiarity with the play always helps, do not feel intimidated by unadulterated (pardon the pun) Shakespeare. You will get it, and the American Globe Theatre’s rendition of this great play will pleasantly surprise even the most bard shy. This is currently the best theater bargain in Times Square.

Let There Be Peace

No sex until the war is over. Such is the premise of Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata , translated by Drue Robinson Hagan and produced by the Gallery Players. Lysistrata gathers all the women of Greece together and convinces them to swear an oath that they will not sleep with their husbands until a truce is called to the Peloponnsian War, which had been going on for some twenty years at the time the comedy was written. A common issue with Aristophanes' plays is that his work is very specific to its own time; a lot of references and allusions in his text are lost on a modern audience. Ms. Hagan's translation does a fine job of contemporizing the script, adding a fun flair and rhyming couplets. Yet, one wonders if the ideas of Lysistrata work in our society. Lysistrata is boisterous and spirited. The play opens with all the women, led by Lysistrata (played by an energetic Meagan Prahl) singing a song in which they wish they were born in a more revolutionary and relevant time, in which they wish they were “punk rockers.” While the song does not relate to the plot of the play per se, it sets the stage for what turns out to be a very rambunctious evening. Sound effects are exaggerated: the chorus of older women dump buckets of water on the chorus of old men. The sound is that of a wave crashing against the shoreline; the water that actually emerges from the buckets is a sprinkling of paper confetti. The many fight scenes (choreographed by Maggie MacDonald) are accompanied by “bonks” and “boings” for punches and groin grabs. The women's oath to not have sex is an old school hip hop style call and response chant.

The set design consists of graffiti covered walls featuring lots of peace signs. The male chorus' costumes are grubby old man pajamas and thermals, the female chorus' costumes are brightly colored house dresses and bathrobes. The women's costumes are slinky, sexually suggestive dresses. Myrrhine, whose husband attempts to seduce her (with hilarious results), wears a blue dress so short that it could just be a shirt. Is this really a play that gives power to women or a play that simply gives men something to look at?

Furthermore, does Lysistrata speak to our time? In her director's note, Alexa Polmer states that the play is “one woman's quest to propel the powerless to end a twenty year old war. . .over two millenia later. . . we as a society are faced with a similar question regarding the current war.” While similarities exist - we are currently engaged a war that, at the moment, seems endless - it is unclear whether the translation's addition of contemporary references to the play works. The old men are called the “axis of evil” and references are made to a “homeland security.” Are such references too flip? Hagan has done a great job of making the play clear, and as Aristophanes himself made culture specific jokes, it should be all right for his translator to adapt the jokes to her own time.

Lysistrata is very entertaining, and as comedy should, educates while it entertains. The idea of women denying their husbands sex seems almost quaint in our society, yet the product is still funny. It also does raise the question, how does a country end a seemingly endless war? The play was read worldwide in 2003 as a protest to the impending Iraq war and is still relevant five years later, as that war plods on. With its radical suggestion for a way to end war, the play is important viewing for anyone wondering how we will get out of the war we're currently in.

Galactic Battlestar

Are you anxiously awaiting the return of Battlestar Galactica? Do you consider Joss Whedon a personal hero? Do you ever find yourself wishing plays had more fight scenes, bigger guns, and killer montages? If so, drop your comic book/Guitar Hero controller/X-wing model and run over to Vampire Cowboys' latest production, Fight Girl Battle World. Actually, even if you're not into the sci-fi or fantasy scene – if you simply enjoy a good adventure with smart writing – Fight Girl is probably the most fun show you'll watch this year.

The play focuses on E-V (a sassy Melissa Paladino), a sort of futuristic gladiator on a planet called Battle World who believes she is the last human in the universe. That is, until she receives a surprise visit from General Dan'h (Temar Underwood), the former "Alliance" army leader responsible for annihilating nearly all of her species. Feeling a bit guilty about the genocide, Dan'h has decided to inform E-V that “there is another” (Star Wars references abound here) and wants to help her find the last human male to start procreating ASAP.

The "other" is Adon-Ra (Noshir Dalal), a mass-murderer who's slowly avenging the death of his species. With their names as a dead giveaway, the play cleverly uses Genesis as a springboard. Although I'm pretty sure that lasers, hamster-like aliens with German accents, and giant spaceships aren't included in the Bible, the theme runs throughout the play with a cute tie-in at the end.

Rounding out the gang that's hunting for the other half of humanity is Dan’h’s sexy – yet sexually mysterious – pilot, J'an Jah (Maureen Sebastian) and LC-4 (Paco Tolson), a sarcastic robot with a blue, Peter Brady-style mop. The entire team is delightful, with particularly hilarious turns from Underwood and Tolson.

In a funky pink wig that looks more club kid than space invader, Underwood has the appropriately exaggerated expressions of a comic book character. He also gives Dan'h an over-the-top unplaceable accent that's fantastically campy.

As LC-4, Tolson portrays the ‘bot like a dorky teenage version of Star Wars’s C-3PO. Always quick with a retort or a kazoo-like giggle, his LC-4 is an amusing blend of loveable and annoying.

As with most sci-fi stories, there has to be an omnipotent, generically-named government set out to destroy our heroes. In Fight Girl, this is the United Galactic Alliance. Its leader is literally a puppet monarch: created by puppeteer David Valentine, the Alliance's president looks and moves just like a Muppet (voiced by Jon Hoche). His underlings include Commander G'Bril (Andrea Marie Smith) and Mikah Monoch (a deliciously malicious Elena Chang).

Director Robert Ross Parker and playwright Qui Nguyen infuse every aspect of the show with the rock 'em, sock 'em action associated with comics. While we've seen countless films tackle the genre lately, Parker and Nguyen forego the pricey special effects of blockbusters with some amazingly creative choreography. Stunning scenes convey slow-motion chase sequences, zero gravity, and a particularly clever presentation of a shootout between three spaceships.

The set, developed by Nick Francone, serves as the perfect playground for the athletic ensemble. While one half of the stage contains the interior of a spaceship, the other side contains a sort of puppet theater box that covers the actors from the waist down, allowing for the choreography's many tricks.

Parker and Nguyen's commitment to comics is perfectly depicted in the final battle. In this scene, only two fighters are left to duke it out. To mimic multiple angles and frames at once, several different actors (all clad in the same costume and a glittery ninja mask) portray each character.

The show is indeed part homage to and part parody of sci-fi. Whether it's a training montage set to a Rocky tune or a groovy interpretation of “warp speed,” it never takes itself too seriously. However, beneath all the zaniness, Nguyen gives us a smart critique of our culture's obsession with violence. While satisfying our need to see fancy weaponry and some awesome take-downs, his universe reviles humanity for this very thing.

Kitsch! Nostalgia! & Cultural Imperialism!

The third annual New York Ukulele Festival is upon us. This year, it brings with it a brand new musical about a ragtag band of ukulele players who save the world from a fascist dystopia run by an all-powerful pharmaceutical company. Upon reading this, some of you may have already grabbed your credit cards and datebooks while others may be making a mental note to stay out of the East Village for a couple of weeks. Both are understandable reactions. Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!, written by festival founder Uke Jackson, is an ostensibly activist, anti-corporate kitsch-fest set in a not-too-distant future. Sex is illegal. Monogamy is outlawed. Excessive sadness, happiness, anger, and lust are all medicated away by legislative mandate. Only the “corporate top ten” musical acts are allowed to perform and sell their music. Max (John Forkner), Liz (Lindsay Foreman), and Julie (Meg Cavanaugh) are three spirited young musicians who dream of cracking the top ten and bringing their smiley-faced music to the masses but have little hope of doing so until they meet Pete (Andrew Guilarte), a back-alley ruffian who may or may not have once been one of the top ten himself. Fame and fortune, twists and turns, and a revolution of sorts ensue.

The intentionally cornball, slapstick energy works for a while and the performers bring admirable enthusiasm and comic timing to a show that is clearly a lot of fun to perform. Terry Waldo’s music, performed by the actors and by two onstage musicians (Waldo on piano and John Gill on percussion) is enjoyable in its way, though fourteen songs in an eighty-minute show that’s also chock-full of plot and dialogue make for a rushed and superficial experience that doesn’t embody feel-good nostalgia so much as declare it. The result is rather like being surrounded by shouting, grinning theme-park performers who keep asking “Isn’t this fun?!? Huh?! Huh?!? Isn’t it?!?” without giving you a chance to respond.

Indeed, for a play that purports to deplore the dehumanized superficiality of contemporary culture, Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! presents the audience with a surprisingly one-note idea of what “good music” is. Just as the fictional citizenry of the Corporation are sedated into a chemical contentment, the audience for this show are asked to respond in an almost Pavlovian manner to music that signifies a tiki-bar vision of happy playfulness.

Ironically enough, the vision of authentic, heartfelt, handmade music presented by Jackson’s play relies on nostalgia for an aesthetic almost as artificial as 21st-century top-ten pop. The ukulele and the homegrown Hawaiian music it represented were repackaged, appropriated, and commodified by Tin Pan Alley songwriters and vaudeville producers who smelled “the next big thing.” Having recently annexed Hawaii, the United States quickly plasticized, commercialized, and capitalized on its culture, selling the world a vision of smiling, hip-swaying natives in coconut-shell bras who wanted nothing more than to serve as hotel lobby entertainment for vacationers from the mainland. Ukulele players from Ernest Kai, to Eddie Kamae, to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, to Jake Shimabukuro have shown again and again that their instrument of choice is capable of a great deal more.

It is telling that “ukulele” is mispronounced (from a Hawaiian perspective) throughout the play. Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! can all too easily be read as a celebration of and nostalgia for the willful ignorance of early-American imperialism. It may seem unfair to saddle a such a lighthearted show with that kind of baggage, but wistful evocations of simpler, happier times tend to rely on distortions of history and culture that carry their own dangers and pitfalls. I can’t help but wonder whether, 90 years from now, a sweet and silly show with energetic young performers will mourn for the simpler, happier music of Britney’s first CD.

Women in the Shadows

Despite Susan Sontag’s famous claim that camp sensibility is essentially apolitical because it is purely aesthetic, and that it is about a refusal to identify or engage with extreme emotions, the impulse behind camp has often, if not always, been a reaction to and sympathy with great pain. The politics of camp are a politics of persistent, if sometimes coded, visibility. It is that visibility, that celebration of the artificial, barely disguised codes of gender and sexual difference, which fueled the paradigm-shifting events at the Stonewall Tavern in 1969. Beebo Brinker Chronicles, adapted by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman from a series of novels by Ann Bannon, is not full-on camp, but there is a campiness in its stylization of emotion and its celebration of Bannon’s gloriously over-the-top hardboiled language. Unlike true camp, however, Beebo Brinker Chronicles lets the curtain slip a little so we can see the pain beneath the laughs.

Bannon’s books, first published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are feverish, emotionally charged pulp novels about lesbians struggling against heteronormativity to find sex, love, and a sense of self. These tales of butch and femme, of housewives and barflies, are infused with a sweaty-palmed urgency and sensual turn of phrase that drove them to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in a time when no one could claim that a flirtation with lesbianism was in any way “fashionable.”

The performances, slightly stylized and over-the-top, are remarkable. Three in particular stand out: Autumn Dornfield’s Beth is a frenzied bundle of repressed desire, struggling to maintain dignity as she discovers a new life in Greenwich Village. Beebo herself (Jennn Colella) is a hardened and cynical but still secretly romantic figure who is afraid anyone attracted to as masculine a woman as she must actually want a man. Jack (David Greenspan) is an aging, semi-closeted alcoholic with a taste for younger men. Each of these actors embraces the tone of the production, balancing stylization with passion, and irony with pathos. Greenspan in particular is in his element here. His peculiar, self-aware acting style always brings with it a distinct whiff of metatheatricality, and in Beebo Brinker Chronicles he shines with such wit and precision that the other actors, fine as they are, fade by comparison.

Rachel Hauck’s cleverly efficient set is constructed and painted to evoke the faded glory of fifties-era pulp fiction book covers. Nicole Pearce’s lights and Theresa Squire’s costumes further add to this atmosphere, not so much recreating a time as re-imagining a memory of a fiction. The affectionate nostalgia of the production design compliment nicely the work of the actors and the playwrights. Credit for the cohesion of these various elements must go to director Leigh Silverman.

In the play's opening scenes, the tone is all humor and irony, but as the action progresses it becomes clear that the humor is both a way to mask the great pain that drives the story and a reminder to the audience that things, in many ways, are different now. As recent headlines attest, there can still be good reasons to fear coming out as gay or lesbian, but for much of the audience of Beebo Brinker Chronicles, this show is a chance to celebrate how much has had to change in order for these tales to be rendered as a brightly lit object of nostalgia rather than a guilty, dog-eared pleasure hidden carefully under the mattress.

The Haunting

The faces may change, but the expressions stay the same. Watching Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Governor Spitzer’s press conferences this week, it’s become clear that sometimes forced stoicism and suppressed emotions are a more tragic sight than tears. In Ghosts, it’s the face of Mrs. Alving, the widow of a secretly immoral, but publicly respected man, and on Monday, it was the face of Silda Wall Spitzer as she listened to her husband address his connection to a prostitution ring. The obvious parallels between theater and current events point to the timelessness of Ibsen’s work. Regge Life, the director of Ghosts now at the Pearl Theater, highlights this trait in his notes to the play and presents his production in a simple, stripped down manner that allows the raw emotions and humanity of the 19th century text to shine through its age. Yes, people can actually say the word “syphilis” out loud now. Yes, women sometimes leave the jerks they’ve married (almost hourly if you watch Lifetime). Yet even though the work has lost its shock value, the words and behaviors of the characters still ring true.

As Mrs. Alving, Joanne Camp wears a sunken expression that shows slight hints of mourning and exhaustion. Mrs. Alving’s life of enduring her husband’s adultery, alcoholism, and hypocrisy has taken its toll. Though Camp speaks in a controlled deadpan that suggests fortitude, she’s almost always propping herself up – clutching the top of a chair while she stands, digging each fist into the couch as she sits – as if needing constant support to simply stay upright.

The trickle-down effects of scandal can be devastating. While Mrs. Alving has tried to manage her husband’s mistakes, they still threaten to wreck several lives after his death. The victims include their son, Osvald (John Behlmann), who has inherited insanity-inducing syphilis from his father, and the household’s maid, Regina (Keiana Richard), whose true parentage has been kept hidden from her.

The cast is at its finest when the characters seem as though they’re trying to behave contrary to their thoughts. Whether it’s Mrs. Alving trying to hold herself together as she comes apart or the gradual decay of Osvald’s sunny façade, the actors make the slightest glance or tone revealing.

As Ghosts heavily focuses on keeping up appearances, this approach is appropriate. Although Mrs. Alving hates her husband, she’s erecting an orphanage in his honor (though a hidden agenda accompanies this). For this task, she’s enlisted the help of Pastor Manders, who acts as an advisor on finances, legal matters, and anything else he deems in need of advising (which, it becomes evident, is everything). In one of his many didactic speeches, Pastor Manders says, “there are many occasions in life when one must rely upon the opinions of others.” He then asks, “How else would society continue?”

Manders (Tom Galantich) and Jakob Engstrand (TJ Edwards), the bum whom we initially believe to be Regina’s father, are likely the characters most concerned with social mores, but for different reasons. While the Pastor endlessly preaches the importance of public opinion, Engstrand endlessly exploits it.

As conservatism has become a favorite punching bag for the arts community, the Manders character is ripe for a few jabs. Galantich, however, delivers his indignant declarations with an earnestness that allows them to be amusing to a modern audience, while still being faithful to their historical context. Whether he’s in complete preacher mode, making a fiery case against “illicit relationships” or flabbergasted that Engstrand tricked him into putting falsehoods into the church register (he gives a good gasp or two), his pompous pastor is dead-on.

Although Manders is slow to respect or trust women, he allows Engstrand to manipulate him at every turn, with debilitating results. As Engstrand, Edwards speaks in monologues that, though full of stutters and deferential nods to the ground, are as slick as his greasy hair. He so deftly plays the hustler that he even seems a bit innocent at the play’s beginning. While Regina berates him for his foolishness, her anger doesn’t seem to match the harmless man we first meet. Only as the play progresses does Edwards allow an occasional smile or gleeful aside to show Engstrand’s true self.

When this production treats the theme of the past haunting the present as a subtle, lingering presence, the tension is discomforting and heartbreaking. The mood set by Camp’s slow actions and speech is enhanced by Harry Feiner’s gloomy set and Stephen Petrilli’s foggy lighting of the backdrop. As Mrs. Alving slowly reveals each of her husband’s sins, the fog around the rear stage even seems to spread.

In the second act, everyone’s ghosts come to the forefront. While the consequential raising of volume and tempers isn’t quite as chilling as the whispered secrets and deceitful interactions, the earlier scenes make the climax’s departure from politeness all the more powerful.

After Mrs. Alving and Osvald fiercely argue over a dramatic request, the play returns to its previous hushed tones. The final scene – a mother silently weeping at her son’s side – resonates far more loudly than any shout that came before. It is truly haunting.