Beyond TKTS: A User’s Guide to Cheap Theater Tix

When the Off-Off-Broadway movement exploded onto the New York theater scene in the 1960s, it went with the territory that noncommercial theater would be affordable theater. The reputation stuck: to this day, the affordability of downtown theater is often touted as one of its greatest selling points. Yet, with production costs on the rise, downtown ticket prices are also moving upwards. Even $15-20 tickets can quickly add up for anyone who sees a lot of plays.

The TKTS booths, which provide great same-day discounts to pricey Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, have long been a popular starting point for anyone seeking discount tickets. When the Theatre Development Fund opened its first TKTS booth in 1973, TDF was a newly-formed organization aiming to bolster New York theater revenue by increasing their audience numbers. Today, long lines of tourists and hometown theater lovers alike wait eagerly outside the two booths, now located in Times Square and South Street Seaport, which offer phenomenal discounts of 25-50% to some of New York's most popular Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.

Navigating discount tickets to less prominent productions can be trickier, in part because downtown discount programs tend to be less centralized. There are, however, a plethora of discounted tickets available Off- and Off-Off-Broadway for enterprising (broke) theatergoers. These range from special cheap ticket performance nights held at individual theater companies to more traditional reduced rates for students and seniors, as well as promotional mailing lists and standard rush tickets.

Sundays in particular have become a great night for cheap theater. This season, SoHo Rep instituted the cheapest discount ticket program in town. On Sunday nights, all mainstage productions cost just 99 cents. Interested audience members would do well to purchase the 99 cent tickets in advance, as the performances have been known to sell out fast. Also special this season, The Joyce, founded as a dance theater 25 years ago, currently offers $25 Sunday evening tickets in honor of its anniversary season.

Another great Sunday theater option is New York Theatre Workshop, where regularly priced tickets range from $55 to $75, placing NYTW on the expensive end of the downtown ticket continuum (across the street, Off-Off- stalwart La MaMa has never raised its ticket prices above $20). To keep its programming accessible to all theatergoers, five years ago NYTW instituted CheapTix Sundays, through which all Sunday performances cost $20. These cash-only tickets are available only at the NYTW box office; however, unlike similarly priced rush tickets, CheapTix may be purchased in advance. NYTW Marketing Director Cathy Popowytsch notes that edgier productions, like the Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and The Fury (April Seventh, 1928), currently playing at the Workshop, tend to be especially popular with CheapTix audiences. Sunday performances attract a slightly different demographic than the theater does other nights. "The audience tends to be younger on Sunday evenings," Popowytsch notes, "but we also get many senior citizens."

Students and seniors can also find cheap tickets through a number of rush ticket programs targeted especially at their unique demographics. A comprensive list of student and senior discounts available for current productions is maintained by nytheatre.com at www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/discounts.php. Interested participants should note that, unlike theaters with official cheap ticket nights, these tickets are often sold only on the day of the performance. This is especially true of programs geared toward students. Some venues, such as The Vineyard Theatre, which maintains a $20 student rush program, reserve a limited number of student rush tickets to sell at each performance. Other venues, like Playwrights Horizons, simply turn any unsold tickets into rush tickets an hour before curtain, when student tickets are priced at $15. For student tickets, remember to bring along a student ID.

In recent years, a number of theaters have expanded student rush tickets to include wider demographics. Perhaps in part because twenty-somethings have long realized they could just hold onto their old college ID cards in order to take advantage of student discounts, and partly as a way to bring younger audiences into the theater, several theaters around town offer discounts aimed at young audiences. In addition to its $15 student rush program, for example, Playwrights Horizons runs HOTtix, $20 tickets for twenty-something theatergoers, based on availability an hour before each performance. Other theaters offer rush tickets to all theatergoers regardless of age, including The Public Theater, where Rush Tix are available to the general public an hour before each downtown performance. When planning a last-minute trip to the theater, investigating the production's rush ticket policy is never a bad idea. Because rush tickets are based on availability, they are always something of a gamble, so it's a good idea to arrive early, especially when rushing a particularly popular production. Some savvy rushers find it helpful to phone the theater's box office before setting out.

For anyone willing to sift through email, several mailing lists that compile promotional discounts are enormously useful. The TheaterMania Insiders Club sends regular emails detailing discounts to both commercial and independent theater productions. While the Insiders Club is free of charge, for fees starting at $99, members may join TheaterMania's Gold Club, which offers discounts and occasional comp tickets to Broadway productions. Information on both programs, as well as well as general discount ticket information, is available at TheaterMania.com.

Other good promotional email lists include Ticket Central's Student No Rush Program, which allows students to reserve tickets for preview performances of Ticket Central productions (www.ticketcentral.com/snr_home.asp) and Goldstar (www.goldstar.com) which offers discounts to live performances and events for about the price of a movie. Goldstar weekly emails offer discounts to an incredible array of events, the diversity of which make it unlikely that all of the Goldstar performance discounts will appeal to all Goldstar members. The fantastic deals Goldstar currently offers, including half price tickets to both trippy performance art spectacle Fuerzabruta and Disney on Broadway's sugary Mary Poppins, make the emails well worth perusing each week.

As a slightly longer-term solution, audience members who are particularly fond of the work of downtown theater companies and venues may find it helpful to visit these organizations' websites and sign up for their individual email lists. Many use these lists to offer their fans discounts or even free admission to previews and performances early in the run of a new production.

Signature Theatre, meanwhile, has taken a different approach to discounting tickets. Rather than include promotional offers on mailing lists or offer select discount ticket nights, Signature accepted funding from Time Warner to greatly reduce the cost of all tickets at every performance. What began in 2005 as a program through which, in honor of Signature's 15th anniversary, all tickets cost just $15, has today become the Signature Ticket Initiative, which pledges to keep all tickets to $20 through 2010. While naysayers express concern over the potential effects of corporate sponsorship on art, Signature proudly points to the program's successes. According to audience surveys, the Signature Ticket Initiative has resulted in consistently sold-out houses as well as 30% of audience members identifying as under 35 years old. The surveys also show that half of all audience members have not previously attended a production at Signature, indicating the discounted ticket programs, in addition to benefiting young theatergoers, benefit theaters as well.

At NYTW, Popowytsch concurs. She finds that, rather than detract from full-price ticket sales, the CheapTix program brings in a different audience. "It is helping us get new people through our doors," she says.

Check Please!

The Set-Up, a contemporary play about modern relationships featuring writer and director James Lindenberg, and currently playing at The ArcLight Theater, offers some laughs and some recognizable moments of dating angst but ultimately does not distinguish itself. In this new play, Bill and Doris, a happily married couple (Scott Cunningham and Jennifer Danielle) introduce two of their chronically single thirtysomething friends over dinner: Carolyn, a striking but tense Wall Street attorney (Tara Westwood) and Robert, a laid-back teacher (Lindenberg). While the pair do not seem an obvious match, their friends insist that they were made for each other.

The initial double-date is a disaster and touches nicely on some of the potential faux-pas of a set-up. Carolyn becomes annoyed at Robert's flirting with a young waitress (Tracey Weiner), and Robert is intimidated by the $250 bottle of wine that Carolyn orders and insists on paying for. To top it off, serious chinks in the armor of what seemed to be a solid marriage for Doris and Bill are revealed.

Over the course of the rest of the play, Doris and Bill’s marriage slowly unravels, as fate puts Carolyn and Robert in each others' paths again with unexpected results.

The strength of the play comes from the fact that the erstwhile couple exhibit both honesty and vulnerability in their sometimes very well-written monologues about the trials of being single in the city. Westwood in particular does a nice job in displaying a range of emotional colors. The scenes involving four characters are particularly enjoyable as the pace picks up and real tension becomes evident.

The less successful elements of the play are plot twists that are so neat as to be unbelievable, some patches of less-than-interesting dialogue, and an unnecessary scene involving Carolyn and her father.

Danielle turns in a solid performance as a frustrated wife, while Scott Cunningham’s Connecticut yuppie has a slightly forced overeager quality. In contrast to Carolyn and Robert, the characters of Bill and Doris do not seem three-dimensional, but are instead simple foils for the central love story.

Weiler shines in her cameo as the aggressive and oversexed waitress, and the dance sequence between her and lothario Tony (Major Dodge) is one of the highlights of the show. Dodge does fine work in his multiple roles of Tony and Ted, but misses the boat when playing Carolyn's father.

Overall, audience members will find some amusing moments in this uneven new play delivered by an energetic young cast.

Slowly, With Love

If the best theater takes us to a world we do not know, then Ayub Khan-Din’s Rafta, Rafta... succeeds brilliantly. It is a study of two families, the Dutts and the Patels, both immigrants from India to Britain, and so assimilated that the younger generation speaks with cockney accents. That generation includes Atul Dutt and Vina Patel, whose wedding is being celebrated as the play opens. But because of misunderstandings, immature pranks, and impulsive moments that accumulate to a tipping point, the wedding night hits a major snag. The conflicts and crises in Rafta, Rafta… are generational, social, and sexual, and they are both universally recognizable and particular to the characters. Eeshwar Dutt (Ranjit Chowdhry) arrived in England poor and made his way through life as a factory worker. His son Atul (a slightly baby-faced but handsome Manish Dayal) is a movie projectionist, but he has ambitions, and Eeshwar cannot understand why Atul should expect more from life. “I worked in the factory all my life!” he exclaims, and one senses that he needs validation for his choices by having his son follow in his footsteps. But Atul sees opportunities in the world, and he wants the freedom to seize them.

During the post-wedding party at the Dutts’ home, Eeshwar gets drunk, belittles his son, and humiliates him into an arm-wrestling match that Atul loses. Atul’s younger brother Jai (Satya Babha) and a couple friends sabotage the marriage bed so that it collapses, and, before the night is over, the mood for consummation between optimistic Atul and his devoted Vina (Reshma Shetty) has been destroyed. In Judd Apatow’s hands, say, this crisis could easily be a smutty sex comedy about getting laid, but director Scott Elliott knows this story is far subtler. Shetty and Dayal communicate a love so certain between their likable characters that the rift that grows between them raises the stakes beyond those of any sitcom. It flirts with pain and the human condition, and is the richer for it.

Atul and Vina try to hide the problem but can’t, and pretty soon a forlorn Vina confides the situation to her mother, Lata (Sarita Choudhury). The crisis then exposes the secrets and the fault lines in the parents’ marriages, as Khan-Din skillfully strips away the facades of the Dutts’ and Patels’ unions. Lopa Dutt, played with loving wisdom and forbearance by Sakina Jaffrey, secretly drove away her husband’s best friend, Brijesh, but with good reason: Eeshwar was so attached to Brijesh that the latter accompanied them on their honeymoon. It was a deeper relationship that stood in the way of her own, and it had to end. “With a woman the home comes first,” she says, “not friendship.” She’s not about to let anything come between her son and his new bride, not even Eeshwar.

Lata Patel, meanwhile, has resented her daughter’s closeness to father Laxman (Alok Tewari), and got back at her husband in a Gift of the Magi sort of twist by persuading a young Vina to cut off her long, plaited hair, which Laxman loved. Laxman recognized it was an attack on him, and there has been no physical affection between the Patels since. Vina has resented her mother for the matrimonial chill.

Throughout, Khan-Din (who has based the play on another, called All in Good Time, by Bill Naughton) nimbly shows us a world in which the simple, silly mistakes of ordinary people are compounded through a lack of communication into formidable barriers to happiness. There are minor flaws—a running joke at the end is so overworked it gasps to the finish line—but on the whole <Rafta, Rafta… is a pleasure. (The title is the beginning of an Indian love poem that begins “Slowly, slowly….)

The New Group has mounted the production with great care. It requires a two-level set showing four rooms, and Derek McLane has obliged with a sumptuously colorful and detailed middle-class home for the Dutts. Theresa Squire’s costumes shimmer with color, jewels, spangles, and embroidery.

Elliott’s fine cast has found the emotional truth of the characters, although several still needed to work on technique at a press preview. Occasionally the accented voices became garbled, or they dropped below audibility in a fairly intimate theater. No doubt those problems will be worked out so that this fine play will look and sound even better.

The Value of a Letter

In an age where tabloids exploit the privacies of celebrities to an alarming degree, the question of whether a famous person has the right to have a private life or not is worth considering. What about after he is dead, can his private past become public knowledge? First published 120 years ago, Henry James' novella, The Aspern Papers explored such questions while exploring the lengths people will go to in order to get what they want. Turtle Shell Productions presents an able adaptation (by Martin Zuckerman) of the story, one that fully brings the characters and setting to life. As the play opens, a man, Walter, appears at the secluded Venetian estate of Juliana Bordereau. He is enamored with the garden and begs Juliana's niece, Tita, to convince her aunt to allow him to lease a few rooms in the house and also tend to the garden. Juliana lets him the rooms, but for a dear price. Walter's intentions are not at first made known, but as time goes on (and flowers continue to bloom in the stage garden, as if by magic), he makes his intentions clear, at least to Tita.

Walter is an academic, and is after letters written from the late poet James Aspern to Juliana, in order to complete his biography. Tita, played in a chaste but beguiling manner by Elisabeth Grace Rothan, who has fallen for Walter, allows him to think that she will aid him in his quest. The play is suspenseful; never at any time is one able to predict the outcome. Will Tita win Walter? Will Walter get the papers? And, do we even want him to get them? The entire time, it is uncertain whether we can trust Walter, or whether we can trust any of the characters, as each is so bent on obtaining their desires that it seems they may put aside all reason and invoke any rationale in order to do so.

The intriguing story is aided by the elements of the stage. The lighting, designed by Shaun Suchan, features deep blues and purples, which enhance the blue color of much of the set and furniture. Throughout the play, the originally dead garden is transformed into a living oasis of color. The costumes, by A. Christina Giannini, are exquisite and capture the style of the time. The actors each do a fine job. Carol Lambert, as Juliana, a 150-year-old woman, conveys strength while simultaneously seeming as if she may give out at any moment. Kelly King, as Walter, is charming, while Rothan is convincing as an isolated, slightly desperate spinster.

In the end, who do we side with, the scholar who wants personal information for the sake of academia or the woman who clings to her privacy? As each character has good and bad sides, it is hard to choose, although James makes his point clear enough in the end. The Aspern Papers is an engaging show, proof that literary adaptations are able to lift themselves from the page and become fully alive.

Myself and I

With its large cast, meandering plot, amalgamation of performance styles, and musical numbers accompanied by piano and guitar, Me, Kirk Wood Bromley’s new play at the SoHo Tank, often feels campy – summer campy. It’s a play that would work well at an outdoor ampetheater on a woodsy campus. Under the direction of Alec Duffy, Me is the kind of charmingly weird production that parents would come to see their children in because, well, they pretty much have to. Or do they? Parent-child relationships are at the heart of the production, which press materials call “a theatrical mediation on self-identity,” though it might be more apt (though just as awkward) to describe it as a meditation on the self-conception of conception. And birth. And childrearing. A lot of imaginative thought and diligent research has gone into this ambitious project – dramaturg Joe Pindelski’s program notes on theories of pregnancy and placenta provide particularly useful contextualization – but unfortunately, when rendered onstage, those ideas are seldom cogent.

The production opens to the thirteen-member cast entering the stage dressed as a sort of museum guide team, with small name tags pinned to each of their blazers. Whatever is printed on the nametags is too tiny to read, but that may be the point: in this moment, they all play Me. “The Earth is my Womb” they sing, as they enter the space carrying small black flashlights. The twin themes of environmentalism and gestation form two major components of the play: a series of poetic, post-modern pontifications on the self, and an adaptation of the Chinese Yangtze River Dolphin story, which tells of a mythological woman drowned by her father.

As the white dolphin Baije, Sarah Melinda Engelke brings confident enthusiasm and a clear sense of purpose to what could be a confusing role. Although, for purposes of the story, her identity is not always clear, Engelke lends Baije an otherworldly sparkle that alerts audiences to the character’s power. Her scenes with Drew Cortese and Brenda Withers, who deliver disciplined performances as the myth’s parental figures, are especially strong in the second act, when the characters – and, by extension, the audience – begin to understand their world. It would be helpful if such clarity came sooner.

The carefully calibrated depiction of myth contrasts wildly to the rest of the production, which is packed with unabashedly over-the-top performances (Bob Laine portrays the character “Dad” with the Southernest of Southern accents), cheeky meta-theatricality (cast members frequently offer one another acting suggestions) and dreamscape-like silliness (parents embodied as a giant sponge and hammerhead shark, costumed by the immensely imaginative Karen Flood). Yet, rather than work in tandem with the dolphin myth to create a cohesive whole, the larger-than-life flourishes and adornments of these scenes overwhelm the myth’s stylized simplicity.

Composer John Gideon’s musical numbers help weave together the disparate elements of the production. So do scenes in which the full company comes together as "Me" for poetic exchanges of semi-related dialogue. These scenes are entertaining depictions of the complex, often conflicting concerns of the self. “I wonder if that one guy responded to my email,” says one cast member; another wonders, “are my gestures of need sufficiently aloof?”

A plethora of puns undercut potential preciousness of these scenes, but in a production two and a half hours long, even the cleverest wordplay grows tiresome. Still, fans of Bromley’s work should make sure to see the production, not only for his signature punning, but for the insight that Me provides into the mind of the prolific playwright.

As They Like It

The convoluted stories and colorful casts of Shakespeare’s plays are just begging to be thrown into clever environments — for every “traditional” production, you’ll find one that twists the story into a surprising new incarnation. Twice within the past few years, the pastoral comedy As You Like It, with its feuding families and domestic strife, has resurfaced in an unlikely setting: nineteenth-century Japan. Kenneth Branagh helmed a made-for-TV BBC film version in 2006, which won both accolades and awards. Now, on a slightly smaller stage, the ambitious Prospect Theater Company also vaults to feudal Japan in the new musical Honor, which borrows loosely from the play’s confused couplings and mistaken identities.

The source material is problematic, not because of the writing, but because of Shakespeare’s superhuman ability to thread together disparate themes and moods. With a nod to the elite and a wink at the groundlings, he weds lovely, elevated language and sophisticated ideas with spurts of crass humor and crude behavior.

Unfortunately, this deft mesh of styles forms the central problem with Honor, which struggles to find a cohesive voice. The issue isn’t Shakespeare — it’s the challenge of adapting such resonant material.

It's not that writers Peter Mills (book, music, and lyrics) and Cara Reichel (book and music) haven’t constructed an interesting mix of characters and situations. When the power-hungry Katsunori violently dethrones his older brother, Takehiro, their kingdom is ripped apart. Takehiro and several of his men flee to the nearby forest; his daughter, Hana, fearing for her life under her uncle’s rule, disguises herself as a man and sneaks away with her cousin Kiku in tow. Eventually, Hana and Kiku cross paths (and fall in love, of course) with yet another set of brothers. Yoshiro is desperate to avenge their father’s death at the hands of one of Katsunori’s men, while his older brother, Ichiro, pledges allegiance to the new kingdom.

These characters form the dramatic part of the story, with music to match: eruptive, emotional ballads that echo the big-hearted sentimentality of Les Miserables — with a delicate, guitar-plucked, Asian influence. Animating such one-dimensional characters is also a challenge, and the performers mostly acquit themselves well. Diane Veronica Phelan shows some winning tomboy moxie as the resolute Hana, but she and Vincent Rodriguez III, as the spirited Yoshiro, don’t bring much dimension to these flat characters.

However, this being Shakespeare, there are also less moody plots afoot. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most enjoyable aspects of this comedy are, well, its comic characters. As the court fool, Nobuyuki, David Shih’s unrestrained performance initially sticks out as too over-the-top. But, as he prances and puns his way through the woods — as appointed and begrudging bodyguard to the two young girls—his knowing delivery and impish physicality provide some well-anchored (and much-needed) comic relief. Unfortunately, he suffers a bit from an overlong and overly metaphoric ballad about a “Little Gray Stone” game that circles into oblivion (but does contain the wonderfully cheeky line, “I’m determined to be indeterminate”).

A subplot involving an endearing forest family brings out the production’s best music — Romney Piamonte brings a lovely lyrical voice and superb comic timing to Kuro, a lazy son who has fallen head-over-feet in love with Mitsuko, a neighbor girl played with wide-eyed, dim-witted charm by Jaygee Macapugay. Mitsuko, of course, is smitten with the cross-dressing Hana. Reichel and Mills have penned a fantastic trio for Mitsuko, Kuro, and the elfish Nobuyuki, in which smart lyrics laced with irony convey the humor of their misplaced affections.

Erica Beck Hemminger’s sleek set mixes simple screens with Evan Purcell’s vibrant lighting to create a sumptuous landscape for the performers. Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum has arranged some gripping fight scenes, and choreographer Dax Valdes uses actors holding tree branches and poles of bamboo to inventively depict the forest scenes. Sidney Shannon’s stunning costumes — featuring glossy kimonos in a bouquet of colors — also add to the production’s visual beauty.

However, the design’s cohesiveness only underlines the unevenness of the songs and stories. A confusing structure randomly places an enthusiastic full-cast anthem midway through the first act; not only do the performers emote and belt as if this were the finale, but Reichel also sets up a tableau of characters and relationships that seem unfamiliar and strange this early in the story.

“What does honor mean?” Hana asks as the production begins; as it closes, we don’t have a definitive answer. Still, it’s always a treat to see what the Prospect Theater Company dreams up — recent daring productions have included The Rockae, a hard-rock version of The Bacchae, and West Moon Street, an elegant Oscar Wilde-an comedy of manners. Honor may seem like a work in progress, but it’s definitely a project worth pursuing.

Strange Fascination

The Actors Company Theatre’s (TACT’s) production of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale at the Clurman Theatre at Theatre Row faithfully and utterly brings to life the pathos and deep longing for which Tennessee Williams’ characters are known. TACT received special permission from the Williams estate to produce the play in New York for the first time in more than thirty years. In this tender and affecting tale of unrequited love, John Buchanan, Jr. (Todd Gearhart) is a young, upwardly mobile physician and bacteriologist. He returns on holidays to his family home in Glorious Hill, Mississippi. To describe John’s mother, Mrs. Buchanan (Darrie Lawrence), as doting is to grossly understate her behavior. She hugs her “Little John,” nuzzles him, massages his feet, and never misses an opportunity to “rescue” him from his insecure and eccentric young neighbor, Alma Winemiller, who has, since childhood, secretly and painfully loved John from afar.

Alma desperately desires to experience the wide world beyond Glorious Hill and the puritanical household in which she resides with her minister father and mentally damaged mother. Alma is rigorously controlled by her father, the Reverend Winemiller, who constantly rebukes her for her animated manners, her nervousness and other idiosyncrasies—stammering, sometimes hysterical laughter, and conducting a daily feeding for the local bird population in the town square.

Nicknamed the “Nightingale of the Delta” for her singing appearances at municipal functions, Alma is bursting with energy and love for the world of ideas, yet, with only the social interaction of a set of bristly oddballs at Monday night gatherings, she is suffocating and rapidly becoming a spinster. Alma laments that those who can give the institution of marriage an aspect of transcendence are precisely the ones who somehow remain alone.

The play itself, despite numerous incarnations starting with Williams’ 1941 short story Bobo, remains flawed. Its ending is forced and may appear to some as oddly dismissive of Alma, whose existence so dramatically implodes at the departure of John from her life that she utterly, and perhaps incredulously, reverses her values. An allegorical plot line about a relative who, in financial straits, deliberately burns down his mechanical museum, the Musee Mechanique in New Orleans, and along with it the famous “Mechanical Bird Girl,” never really gets traction and remains unresolved.

Yet, the acting is often stunning and more than compensates for any faults in the text. Mary Bacon is heartbreaking and pitiable as the stifled Alma, settling desperately for a sad and contrived New Year’s Eve fling at a seedy motel with the uncomfortable John. Darrie Lawrence bestows a cunning ruthlessness to Mrs. Buchanan, who will do anything to separate her ambitious son from his weird neighbor. Larry Keith’s Reverend Winemiller is a model of resolute prudishness and arrogance. And, as “Little John,” Todd Gearhart walks an appropriately fine line between a fascination with Alma that approaches one he might hold for a specimen in a laboratory, and true admiration for her unique qualities.

Bill Clarke’s set features a beautiful mesh back screen that imbues a dream-like quality to the characters who pass behind it; the play begins and ends in its murkiness. David Toser’s costuming expertly captures the play’s pre-World War I period and lends a proper formality to the staunch uptightness of virtually all the characters. Lucretia Briceno’s lighting and Darryl Bornstein’s sound so uncannily mimic holiday fireworks that several audience members visibly flinched, startled.

This production successfully provokes the audience to consider just what qualifies a person as “eccentric.” The cast adeptly accentuates the flaws of their characters. Mrs. Buchanan, harboring detailed and precious fantasies about what Little John’s children will look like, is certainly far from “normal.” Yet, her status, self-regard and admitted smugness protect her from being thought of as “odd.” Likewise, Reverend Winemiller, obsessed with social protocol and appearances, protects himself from scrutiny by attacking Alma and appearing to care about his deranged wife. Alma, sadly, has no such armor and would distrust it even if she did.

The fact of the matter is that everyone in this play is eccentric in some way—from the obvious disorder of Mrs. Winemiller to the inability of Little John to tear himself from the ordered and mapped out trajectory which his mother has devised for his life. In its questioning of what eccentricity really is, this is a sure-handed and faithful performance of a lesser-known but nonetheless accomplished play in the Williams canon.

How do you fit twenty five actors on a ten foot stage?

The play opens. We hear some party music, and all the actors filter onto the stage for the final moments of the year. After the party we are left with the hosting couple drunkenly cleaning up the mess, as they talk about their failure to have a child. From that scene we move on through the year, one scene for each month, going through Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July and other such monumental calendar events. In each month we meet another one or two, sometimes more characters with no relation to any of the others we’ve already met. What does it amount to? A cute evening of theatre, which easily brushes off the surface of your consciousness. A Year in the Life of Twenty Five Strangers Living in a City by the Lake, is an attempt by playwright Matthew Fotis to pull some of the non-theater-going masses out of their living rooms and into the public space. From the opening moment, which recalls the atmosphere of the sitcom Friends, this is a play written for a generation who expects its art to reflect the easily digestible content of its more mind-numbing forms of popular entertainment. And Fotis should be commended for trying to lure his generation with what they are looking for, while sprinkling some deeper material into the mix in order to take them beyond the box.

However, in his collage of 20-30-year-old life in Chicago, the playwright makes no real demands of his audience, allowing them too much distance to reflect upon the scenes and characters, without ever pulling them in to engage in the images emotionally. And aside from a few select moments, the material fails to continuously stimulate the mind toward challenging reflection.

That said, it’s a fun evening. Director Shaun Colledge makes good use of the tiny space of the intimate Parker Theatre, into which, in certain moments, he squeezes all of his twenty-five actors. Colledge manipulates his large cast to provide a sense of space when it is needed, or to heighten the claustrophobia of other moments. In one of the funniest scenes, a back room party mess erupts between two intermingled couples, and Colledge nails the comedic setup of the clever moment, which could easily be interpreted as bad drama.

The acting on the whole is good, although it is the scenes where the actors feel most comfortable in which the play flourishes. David Stadler and Michele Rafic are perfectly at home in their scene as a married couple on vacation in Paris. The familiar bickering over whether what will revive the relationship would be another tourist attraction or an afternoon on the bench in the park (guess which gender wants what!), flares into delightful comedy with Stadler and Rafic’s concise exacerbations. Jennifer Bishop and Ben Rosenblatt are endearing as the young couple in love, about to separate as they head to different colleges. Corey Shoemake and Adam Ferguson are funny as the gay meteorologist and the waiter he hits on in an emergency room.

It is interesting to see this bouncy production, with its light touches and easygoing atmosphere, as another attempt of theater artists to find a voice for their art form in this generation. I can’t say that Ten Grand Productions succeeds in taking today’s sensibilities and infusing them with greater depth, but they do offer some sweet little dishes to munch on as theater artists search for the way to reflect our present onstage.

Lost in Time

Dark humor, detachment and fatalistic dialogue make for a trippy road trip to Pennsylvania in Matthew Freeman’s new play When is a Clock?, currently running at the Access Theater. Presented by Blue Coyote Theater Group, Freeman’s script renders played-out family dramas like divorce and adultery in a fresh, almost psychedelic form. After all-around wet noodle Gordon’s wife leaves him, his only clue to discern her whereabouts is a mysterious bookmark from Cornersville, PA. In fractured chronological order, we meet Gordon’s wife, son and co-workers, each of whom contributes to her leaving. When Gordon finally finds his wife and confronts the strange shaman she has shacked up with in Cornersville, he learns a baffling truth about the nature of their relationship.

Hardly a typical play, Freeman’s script is really a collection of monologues broken up by a few two-character scenes. What really works about the monologues is that most of them only make sense in hindsight, as we are often shown half of a conversation without knowing who is being addressed—only later are we shown the monologue in context. It is a simple trick, but an effective one that adds many layers to each performance of each repeated scene, especially when scenes we have watched a few times suddenly swerve or deviate. The language of the text balances poetic flourish with stark pragmatism very uniquely, and as a result the voice of When is a Clock? sounds like nothing else. That said, from the final confrontation on, the play’s cohesion gets a little unstuck, preventing audiences from clearly ascertaining exactly what has happened and, even more important, what it might mean.

Since Freeman’s talky prose vividly describes each environment, Director Kyle Ancowitz and the design team opts instead for high style, which clicks very well with the script. The projections of lonely small town roads, the upright bed that standing actors “lie” in, the overall rigid staging (and re-staging!) of the scenes — everything beefs up the atmosphere of disconnect. The characters move from one location to the next like chess pieces, moving according to some unknown set of rules, alternately addressing the audience or each other. At times they appear through illuminated fabric walls, adding a ghostly quality to their comings and goings.

It was easy to buy Gordon as a disillusioned husband, thanks to Tom Stagg's precise, subdued performance. His runaway wife Browyn, played by Tracey Gilbert, comes across as both sympathetic and irrational — roped into a strange belief system to fill the void left by her husband. The entire cast is pitch-perfect, with especially good performances from Matthey Trumbull as Gordon’s fish-hating boss and David Delgrosso as the overzealous, statistic-spouting cop investigating Browyn’s disappearance.

Despite a let-down ending, When is a Clock? skirts traditional structure and content aptly, leaving in its wake something wholly new. The tone lands somewhere between the films of Todd Solondz and the surreal paintings of Salvator Dali — a bizarre, but still mundane landscape of non-related non-entities, desperately seeking connection.

Crimes of the Heart and the Pen

When the mesmerizing Elena Abril Fiero casts her spell it is nearly impossible to escape entanglement, obsession, something akin to rapture. This near-religious experience is perfectly realized by the cast and artistic crew presenting Mary Fengar Gail’s The Judas Tree , a journey into madness. Gail’s world, in which the beautiful and the macabre live side by side, is stunningly rendered with superb acting, a grim chorus, and subtle lighting effects. It is easy to imagine oneself in Fiero’s sanctuary and to believe in the supreme power of myths, but it is equally easy to focus on the shifts in tone and to emerge from the trance. When her sacrificial practices are removed from the garden haven and scrutinized in a California courtroom, the abominable nature of her crimes is clear, her culpability, less so. Cloaked thickly in metaphor, the story of Dorothea Puente, a California serial killer who murdered nine elderly boarders in her home and buried them in her yard, becomes a mystical tale about the self-proclaimed priestess, Elena Fiero, who sacrifices victims to the Madreguera, a sort of earth goddess. The story is bewitching, but like much art that draws from “true” crime as its inspiration, it often comes dangerously close to fetishizing horror, and worshipping playfully at the cult of the serial killer.

The murders committed by Puente bear scant resemblance to the dramatized sacrifices executed by Fiero. There was nothing romantic about her actions—she killed and then forged her victims’ social security checks to live in luxury—and, unceremoniously, she sits in prison to this day.

Where Puente was obvious and cold, Fiero is complicated and fiery with passion. Gail has imbued the character with the sort of mad, fascinating messianic dreams and visions that bring allusions to Christ, Mayan ritual, and mother goddesses. As Fiero, Roseanne Medina is a vision: absolutely beautiful, she embodies the cunning and the fierceness of the character, while still making her alluring. With her charm and looks, Elena entraps lost souls with the intent of sacrificing them to the Madreguera. These sacrifices yield a heavenly garden of vibrant color. Notably, the set does not literally feature a garden; the flowers are figuratively represented by light that spreads across the floor in a pattern reminiscent of stained glass.

There are many moments in the show where rapturous devotion is faithfully and sympathetically created. It is impressive that Lorca Peress, as director, resists the urge to judge her characters, something that Gail believes society is too quick to do. That burden is placed on the audience, toward which the actors direct their testimony throughout Fiero’s trial. Gail uses the frame of a courtroom drama to launch into her more romantic, sensual story, told through the use of flashbacks and monologues. Representing the most bewitched character, Arturo Salvia, a former detective, performs these monologues in his tortured, transformed state: a tree. Specifically, he has changed into a Judas tree, signifying his betrayal of his former lover, Fiero.

The play’s structure and severe character turns require deft transitioning from the actors and the director. With rare exception, these changes occur gracefully. As Salvia, John Haggerty shifts wonderfully from the stereotypically skeptical detective to a breathlessly emotional tree. His physical morphing and the show’s choreography (by Jennifer Chin) bring to vivid life Gail’s poetic impulses. In an impressive sequence, Silva is digging up the garden, afraid that his worst fears will be realized. To demonstrate the task and its haunting nature, the Chorus Corpus Flora (five talented singers and dancers) acts as the earth being parted (a visual that corresponds with the themes of the play).

While the garden scenes are among the production’s finest moments, it is in the poetic mode that the play loses its footing. Some lines are striking in their spare, raw evocation of natural splendor, with the ability to find exceptional parallels between the world of plants and the world of men. Other times, these connections seem forced, the metaphors over-extended, the puns silly (e.g. “barking up the wrong tree” and “treedom”).

At times this production is alluring portrait of fanaticism, but its shortcomings highlight the impossibility of qualifying insanity, or trying to develop a metaphor to control it. While the show leaves it to the audience to judge, there is no way to understand a character such as Fiero, and it is left with a hauntingly empty feeling about her fate and a bleak sense of the world she leaves behind. Gail’s poetic and occasionally obsessive exploration of this character is compelling, but the perverse nature of this investigation and its presentation are left unexplored.

Reading Between the Lines

The most important advice I can impart to anyone considering attending the Elevator Repair Service’s (ERS’s) daring two-and-a-half hour reading-performance of The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) is to first read or re-read William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or at least its first section, which is what this production comprises. Otherwise, you may feel the overwhelming urge to flee the theater during intermission and hit the bookstore for guidance. Those who have read the novel may remember just how baffling it was; I can recall flinging the book across my college dorm room in frustration. Faithful to the book, this Off-Broadway production jumbles events from 17 separate days over a 20-year span; even those familiar with the story may be unclear about what is happening at any given time. The best solution for this production is to simply give yourself over to the chaos.

The title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life...is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The literal “idiot” in the heavily symbolic The Sound and the Fury is the innocent Benjy Compson, a 33-year old (the age of Jesus at his death) mentally challenged man often referred to by the novel’s other characters as “deef and dumb.” Despite his challenges, he somehow remembers conversations verbatim, though time and events blur with dazzling frequency.

If you think the book was confounding, wait until you see this play. With the exception of cursory descriptions of the Compsons projected on the wall and a family chart in the program, ERS does little to help us decipher the action; indeed it willfully does all it can to confuse the audience even further. Twelve actors each play up to four different roles of the 27 in total, and actors wantonly switch genders and races. There are even two Benjys of different sexes (Susie Sokol-unfortunately sporting what appears to be a George Harrison wig from the ‘60s-and Aaron Landsman). As “scenes” morph into each other, actors pass a paperback of the novel to each other and narrate or read the “lines” of whomever they happen to be representing at the time.

The production magnifies the text and often takes creative license by inserting music, dance (sometimes irritatingly overdone) and other action where it doesn’t occur in the book. The effect is to re-imagine the section as might a particularly whimsical reader. With ERS reading between these lines, the sound and the fury come often. Bickering and dissension in the family often devolve into food fights, smacks and screaming, causing Benjy to inaudibly cry or lash out by throwing things.

David Zinn’s set design impeccably replicates the sitting room of a family with means but in decline, as such a room might have existed in turn of the century Mississippi — replete with period photographs, carpeting, furniture and even a vintage radio. Matt Tierney’s sound design brings this all to a boil with a sometimes ear-splitting cacophony of banjo music, hollering, stomping and general tumult, the amplification and blurring of which bring Benjy to a state of bewilderment and hysteria he cannot express. John Collins’ direction is crisp and the actors are almost flawlessly rehearsed and choreographed, moving seamlessly between scenes and among themselves.

The question remains, though: does ERS break down the barriers between play and novel? Yes and no. I can recommend this production only to literary buffs and those who might nevertheless wish to dabble in its often-excruciating experimentalism.

By boldly presenting the confusion that a reader might feel, combining it with Benjy’s obvious discomposure and highlighting it all with cacophonous sounds and character chaos, ERS succeeds in challenging the audience and embracing the disorganization of what even Faulkner himself characterized as a four-part failure of sorts. And, in presenting the Compsons even more vividly than the book does, the production succeeds in evoking humor that may not flow from the text but seems entirely natural and appropriate nonetheless.

Yet, this same chaos, with interchangeable characters faithfully uttering every single word of text, including phrases such as “Caddy said” or “Jason said” or “T.P said,” as is necessary to keep track of the story’s proceedings, ironically serves to remind the audience just why a novel is a novel and not a play.

Love on the Run

Like Brooklyn’s Gallery Players, the Astoria Performing Arts Center has found a niche in reviving recent Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Previous ventures have included solid productions of A New Brain and Proof, but their latest offering, an energetic revival of the short-lived 1997 musical Triumph of Love, proves that some shows that die in Manhattan are better off left buried on the island. A blithe and breezy adaptation of Marivaux’s 1732 comic adventure, Triumph of Love chronicles the efforts of the brazen Princess Leonide to woo the man she worships from afar. Disguised as a dapper gentleman, with her friend and accomplice Corine in tow, she conspires to penetrate the philosopher Hermocrates’ stately Greco-French garden, which is both sanctuary and prison to her beloved. But when the object of her affection turns out to be Agis, the rightful Prince of Sparta (and inconveniently plotting her own murder), Leonide must figure out how to reveal her affection without losing her heart or her head.

Sound confusing? James Magruder’s scatter-brained plot ties itself in knots that are infuriating rather than intriguing, and the uneven writing—which pairs the elevated rhythms of Shakespeare with the crass comedy of a bawdy commedia dell’arte revue—fails to create a beguiling (or even believable) world. Instead, like the characters, the audience is left running in virtual circles, chasing down any semblance of connection.

But, in defense of APAC, the central problem isn’t the direction (mostly efficient and well-paced) or the acting (which ranges from excellent to strained). Under the confident baton of Jeffrey Campos, the orchestra makes lovely music, Adam Coffia's period costumes are perfectly draped and dazzling, and Michael P. Kramer’s multi-level set is a sumptuous land of fountains and ivy-covered walls. No, the problem here is the show itself, which presents a spectacular hurdle—making palatable entertainment from mostly forgettable songs and an inconsequential story.

In fact, New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the original Broadway production a “flat-footed parade of raunchy double-entendres and double takes that give new meaning to the phrase ‘low comedy.’”

So why revive a show that was so derisively dismissed? It’s pure wishful thinking, and you have to give director Brian Swasey credit for rising to the task. His mad-cap direction is filled with spirit and sass, and he has assembled a cast who give the show their all and then some.

The winning Abby Baum fairly bursts with enthusiasm as the cagey Princess Leonide; her ebullience doesn’t create much dimension, but she sings prettily and gestures determinedly. As the object of her affection, Tripp Pettigrew doesn’t do much besides pace and sputter, but he valiantly strives to match Baum’s vivaciousness.

After arriving in the garden, Corine (Ashley Speigel) joins forces with a jester, Harlequin (Philip Deyesso), and the gardener, Dimas (Justin Birdsong), to try to help Leonide accomplish her goal. Charged with unearthing comedy from the most vulgar and banal of sources, the trio find some humor in the playful vaudevillian romp “Henchmen Are Forgotten.” But Speigel and Deyesso all too often fall into fits of mugging that distract from the other action on stage, falling into the comedy trap of trying much too hard. The always excellent Birdsong is reduced to resurrecting laughs (which he does) from such sexual innuendo-prone words as “tuber.”

The more serious characters fare better. Rational siblings Hermocrates (Richard Rice Alan) and Hesione (Erika Amato) are both seduced by Leonide’s charms—Hermocrates knows Leonide is a woman; Hesione is convinced she is a man. Alan finds some refreshing levity in his sensual awakening, but Amato is hands-down the star of this production. It helps that she has the best song, the heartbreaking ballad “Serenity,” but she articulates every inch of her tightly laced character so persuasively that hers is the fate you lament at the end of the production. Bewitched and bullied by the scheming Leonide, Hesione serves as the emotional anchor in this overwhelmingly silly story. In fact, Amato’s elegant presence and velvety voice are the best reasons to revisit this show.

Ironically, Betty Buckley’s performance as the tortured Hesione was one of the very few praised elements (and the only Tony Award-nomination) in the original Triumph of Love. Jeffrey Stock (music) and Susan Birkenhead (lyrics) not only gave her the sweet “Serenity,” but also the opening (sung) lines of the show. An announcement that beautiful and commanding will certainly grab an audience’s attention long enough to entice them into taking the journey—it seems that it pays to be the sole voice of reason in a land of nonsense.

Tune In

Boys serenade girls on the sidewalk and girls are charmed, rather than alarmed. The handsomest man in the room will approach the strangest girl on the wall and admire her for being different. A skeptical young woman is won over by the offer of taking a ride in a surrey with fringe on top. This is not a world you live in everyday, which makes it all the more appealing to live in for the moment - a special, fleeting moment - which is the feeling, Rogers & Hammerstein’s musical revue, Grand Night For Singing conveys from its onset. Being in the audience for this play is like watching a comedy with people who laugh right before the punch line of every joke. Three familiar notes could inspire a rippling of gasps. Couples would elbow each other whispering, “here it comes,” just as a singer proceeded into a well known chorus. A Grand Night For Singing had the audience’s full attention from the moment it opened, with a spotlight shining down on Michael Harren, the musical director and pianist.

Director David Fuller creates an evening of nostalgia and enchantment with a bit of modern sass thrown in. The revue features some classic Rogers & Hammerstein songs such as, Shall We Dance, and Oh, What A Beautiful Morning and some lesser known gems that audiences may not have heard before, but will likely find themselves humming every day until they surrender to the need to hear them again. The collection of songs are performed by five talented singers: three women, Kerry Conte, Jessica Greeley and Judith Jarosz, and two men, Mishi Schueller and David Tillistrand.

There are thirty-six songs altogether, some silly, comedic numbers, others somber romantic ballads. The tunes are arranged in a nicely thematic order. A song from the musical, Flower Drum Song about two men telling their girlfriends, Don’t Marry Me, slips effortlessly into a spirited version of South Pacific’s catchy song, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair, a zesty little number about a girl emotionally detaching herself from a man who has rattled her confidence.

In an interesting director’s choice, all three female singers team up for I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-a My Hair, giving this old classic a delightful, modern feel. In the past, the song has been performed by one woman – the one that was hurt by the man - with a chorus of female voices echoing her sentiments in the background. But when the song is performed by three women in harmony there is more power behind the words. The three female singers blend into one, strong confident voice. The song is no longer about a single woman’s journey to self realization, it is about three feisty girlfriends getting together to commiserate and say, “who needs him?”

Each song tells its own little story and each little story makes you want to see the larger one it has been plucked from. How does the married man who takes one last enjoyable spin with his tap dancing partners adjust to his new life as a husband? Does the boy ever get together with the girl that he is too afraid to take out for a French fried potato and a T-bone steak? Does the troubled young lover ever learn exactly how one solves a problem like Maria?

A Broadway musical in a small Off Off Broadway space offers a rare treat - great songs, great performances and an affordable price. The only thing missing is the decadent scenery with the large mechanical props that rotate on and off the stage. But the five-actor ensemble of A Grand Night For Singing proves, that with beautiful voices, celebrated music and some charming, upbeat acting - who needs all the rest?

Rock the Cradle

In the “Special Thanks” section to Piper Mckenzie’s rich new production of Babylon, Babylon, writer/director Jeff Lewonczyk thanks (among others) Robert Altman, The Blue Man Group, Herodotus and the writers of the Old Testament. Never before has a piece of information in a playbill so succinctly summarized the content of the show on stage, because Lewonczyk’s opulent Mesopotamian happening, currently running at the Brick Theater, synthesizes the best aspects of those four influences with notable ease. The transformed Brick Theater simulates the ancient Temple of Ishtar in Babylon, where about a dozen devoted female worshippers have come to pay their respects to the goddess of fertility and war – hopefully before the invading Persian army breaches the city walls and makes slaves of all Babylonians. But Ishtar worship isn’t really like any other kind of worship. The ritual involves a female waiting for a male suitor to approach and offer a coin. Then the pair retreat to the “Holy Ground,” where they pay their respects to the fertility aspect of Ishtar’s personality in a quite appropriate manner. Never mind that many of these women make reference to being married; in these different times Ishtar worship seems to trump all other forms of romantic communion.

Lewonczyk’s play occurs all around the audience in real time. As Babylon, Babylon’s 33 cast members mill about, we shift focus between their various conversations. While unique personal reasons have brought these women and men to the Temple of Ishtar on this historic occasion, each story provides subtle distinctions on the themes of sexuality, death and destiny in the ancient world. The High Priestess of the Temple agrees to hide her disguised cousin, the fearful Prince of Babylon, in the Temple until the war is over. Another girl is desperate for her little sister to lose her virginity in the Temple, so it will not be taken by an invading Persian rapist. One female devotee of Ishtar comes back to “worship” several times during the play, very eager please either her goddess or herself. Midway through we meet Enheduana, a recently reincarnated “Seeker of Vengeance” with a grudge against Ishtar and her Temple. Her arrival and actions eventually resolve the play, dragging everything into complete, brutal entropy.

In writing, the piece sounds like very heavy material, but Lewonczyk and his team have created a sort of party atmosphere. For the most part the material plays with dark humor and humanity, tempered occasionally with ominous strains of ancient myths retold or hints of Babylon’s bloody prospects peaking through the Temple door. Often there is music, chanting and reserved dancing when the cast imparts one of the many ancient myths, like Ishtar’s descent into the underworld and my favorite, her battle with warrior-king Gilgamesh. While the lighting and scenic design were both a little sparse for my taste, Julianna Kroboth’s stunning costumes and the overall attitude of the piece created a persuasive atmosphere. Fight director Qui Nguyen’s brawl at the end deserves much respect, simply for the amount of bodies and moving parts involved.

No one in the massive cast stands out as distractingly hammy or bad. While I won’t run down the roll call, there was generally an impressive naturalism at work in the acting. These characters aren’t historical caricatures; they are simply people – desperate, devoted or just seeking distraction. As the High Priestess and circus ringleader, Hope Cartelli displays much aptness to both seduce and devastate. Fred Backus brings a particularly enjoyable jerkiness to Timgiratee, a jilting lover. Lewonczyk himself plays Logios the narrator with much charm. And as I said before, Adam Swiderski and Aaron Baker’s cheesy, super-heroic take on Gilgamesh and Enkidu is most entertaining.

Swiderski, in fact, plays an important triple role in the proceedings. As Gilgamesh, he represents the tragic mythological hero of the old style; as Zuuthusu the doomed old man, Swiderski represents the helplessness and weakness of the Babylonians' present predicament; and as Tom Kazanski, a modern day American soldier stationed in Iraq (just 50 kilometers from the ruins of Babylon), Lewonczyk uses Swiderski to make the final assessment of the region’s destiny. The inclusion of the time-lost (or hallucinating, whatever) soldier could have been an aggravating attempt to shoehorn modern politics into the piece. In Lewonczyk’s hands, though, it is merely a reserved observation: why has there always been war in “The Cradle of Civilization?”

The chatty, flashy, legendary, holy party that is Babylon, Babylon might not answer that question, but it sure has a lot of fun asking it.

Dancing With Wolves

In Chinese Opera there is no scenery other than a table and chair. Stories are told through movement and pantomime. When a new character enters for the first time, it is customary for them to introduce themselves through a poem, and, in the end, everyone recites a valuable lesson. Director and actress Kuang-Yu Fong delivers this disclaimer before Little Red Riding Hood: The Chinese Opera begins. She also tells us that the play will feature a troupe of Beijing and Kun Opera performers who will sing in their native Mandarin but speak in English they only just learned for this show. After delivering this speech, Fong disappears backstage and returns as Little Red.

Little Red Riding Hood: The Chinese Opera, produced by Chinese Theatre Works, re-invents a traditional Western fairy tale in a refreshingly untraditional manner. It features the visual beauty of Chinese Opera with a stunning arrangement of acrobatics and conventional Chinese dance techniques. The Hunter (Hui Zhang) is a martial-arts hero, the Wolf (Zijun Mo) a swift and agile predator and Little Red (Fong), a sweet-faced, sword-wielding warrior.

The fight choreography is fast-paced and dazzling to watch, especially in the theater’s small, intimate space, which is just wide enough to accommodate the actor’s extensive range of movement. Though the floor is made of flat black boards, both Mo and Zhang use it to launch themselves into flips and jumps that reach amazing heights. Zhang manages to twirl several times in the air before landing in a threatening battle stance, his sword poised in an arc above his head.

Wolf is a menacing creature with wide, scowling eyes and a pale white face streaked with thick black stripes. There is a glob of red that starts from his lips and spreads down his chin, giving the impression that he has forgotten to wipe his mouth after his last meal. Upon hearing that Wolf is stalking the roads, Hunter, who has always been afraid of wolves, realizes that now is the time to conquer his fear.

In the meantime, Wolf has set his hungry eyes on Little Red, who skips innocently along the path to her Grandmother’s (Ying Zhang) house. Her Mother (Fanying Meng) has dressed her in a long red cape with flower trim and equipped her with a red-tasseled sword for protection. Referring to Little Red as his “juicy dumpling” Wolf pretends to be a lost and loyal dog to win the girl’s trust. He tricks her into leaving the road to pick flowers, hoping to find an opportunity to eat her in the weeds.

Unfortunately for Wolf, Little Red gives new meaning to the term “fast food.” Every time he is about to pounce on her crouching figure, she springs to her feet in excitement, the tip of her sword accidentally grazing his throat. Wolf decides it will be easier to catch this active young girl unawares at her Grandmother’s house.

With Grandma in peril, Little Red walking naively into a trap, the Hunter prowling the vicinity with his sword, and Wolf bursting in to announce, “I just drop by for dinner,” the scene is set for a climatic confrontation. Mo and Zhang are so dynamic in their own moments that it is easy to imagine the level of spectacular action we will see when their paths cross for this final fight. Both performers deliver on the high expectation.

By the play's end, Hunter learns to conquer his fear, Wolf learns not to eat little girls who are handy with swords, Grandmother learns that it is always good to have a broomstick handy, and Little Red advises us that “A sword means nothing if a person cannot hear a lie from a truth,” wisely adding, “Or tell the difference between a dog and a wolf.”

Nothing Ever Happens on Mars

For years Sci-Fi writers like H. G. Wells and Kim Stanley Robinson have looked to the red planet and tried to dream what it holds in store for the human race. Will its tripod-like inhabitants destroy us? Or will we terraform the barren world to suit our needs and live there? MIT professor Jay Scheib, who conceived PS 122's stimulating, but sometimes incoherent new production Untitled Mars (this title may change), seems to think that folks on Mars will suffer from the same ambition, lust and madness that the rest of us do on Earth. With help from the Budapest theater company Pont Muhely, Scheib transports his chaotic vision of a not-too-distant Martian habitat to the stage. Or is it, as the dialogue sometimes suggests, merely a simulation of a Martian habitat in Utah? This experience, perhaps more akin to performance art than a typical play, is often very vague. There are usually two or three things going on at once and obviously we're not meant to lap up every detail. Regardless, Scheib's characters have obviously adapted negatively to their confined existence away from society. We are immersed in the station psychiatrist's fight to keep her clinic open, a go-getting plumber's real estate venture in the Olympis Mons region, and a repairwoman's struggle to keep hold of her sanity.

Scheib and his team of scenic, light, video and sound designers have woven a persuasive tapestry out of the show's technical elements, a superb effort that is more than worth the price of admission. Here is not a theatrical Mars, nor a minimal one. Scheib's portrait is one of efficiency, borrowing heavily from contemporary technology. At one end of the stage there is a white, cylindrical module that is maybe 15 feet in diameter. This functions as a sort of central command for everything and there is a long window all the way around, so that the audience can see the actors inside. On the other end of the stage is an all white, but otherwise typical conference room. Between the two structures there is a long table and a plethora of projection surfaces. There are video cameras positioned liberally about the stage and at any given moment, one or two of them are projecting onto one of the screens. Amid constant radio chatter and otherworldly sound effects, the cast – sometimes in full spacesuits – moves in and out of these two habitats. Often, the audience must rely on monitors to see what is going on or to try to make out garbled dialogue, which adds to the overall sense of absorption into the piece.

When this sensory cacophony quiets down and only a couple of characters are featured, audience members hungry for rich characterization might find that the human parts of Untitled Mars don't quite measure up to its stylistic sum. Despite a sincere effort from the cast, they are only ciphers carrying out rote motions. None of the characters, like the plumber or the repairwoman, are particularly empathetic; and indeed, this might be the point. The play is clearly about a big idea – the good and bad elements of human nature exported to a new world – but the mode of the piece doesn’t allow us to easily wrangle any cathartic resolution out of its complex texture. Like the members of this habitat’s crew, perhaps this is only an experiment and we aren’t supposed to be able to read any emotions through these pixilated video images. Maybe Scheib is channeling some bleak premonition of man’s future, where the devices around us have choked out our genuine emotions. Or am I giving him too much credit?

Either way, several plot points are lost in the play's detached opaqueness. One crew member transforms into a green Martian, complete with an alligator tail, but we don't know if he is actually transforming, if he is aping a Martian as part of the training simulation or if his transformation is just a metaphorical echo of an earlier remark that claims humans will actually have to, in a manner of speaking, "become" Martians to survive the planet's harsh terrain. Narrative elusiveness and aloofness can sometimes be valuable tools in theater, lending a piece great applicability – but in the case of Untitled Mars, I always felt like I was missing something. If the play had been overtly performance art, with no illusion of a narrative structure or characterization, the story incongruities and lack of character depth wouldn’t have mattered. But since there are characters and there is a definite story being told, the absence of these elements felt detrimental.

This cast is asked to do some pretty strange things — simulate sex both on stage and on camera, dress in space suits and, in some cases, just show up to pre-record a quick video snippet. No matter the nature of the role, every cast member handles the material with unimpeachable naturalism. Natalie Thomas' silent performance as the temporally-confused Mannie largely consists of dance, but she exudes an appropriate and endearing childlike quality. Helio the lower-class Martian is also quite funny in the hands of a deadpan Karl Allen.

Purposely or not, Untitled Mars lacks some heart, but more than makes up for it with its conceptual and technical surefootedness. As they say, sometimes the story being told is not as important as how it is told. In this case it is told with considerable elegance and ingenuity, creating a glum, if unfocused, facsimile of man's destiny on the red planet.

Poe as Comedian

Watching The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether , a dramatic adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, I was struck by the desire to find the original and read it alone, to hide in a corner and allow sinister thoughts to take root in my imagination, consume my mind like ivy, and terrify me. Poe’s skill for evoking suspense, tension, and paranoia is undeniable, and his best works render internal terror palpably on the page. Unfortunately, these talents are not as strongly employed in this theatrical version of The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether . In the story, a foolish Visitor is received for a dinner at an insane asylum in the French countryside. Though the hints of pending doom are anything but subtle, the Visitor persists in his curiosity, leading him to uncover the obvious (and therefore less terrifying) truth about his hosts. That this revelation produces a lackluster climax is one of the major problems with a dramatic retelling.

However, as with Poe’s story, the production begins with promise: foreboding organ music, simultaneously piercing and deep, introduces the show. As credits roll, shadow puppets float into view, and eventually two figures emerge to tell the tale. The puppets, beautifully and intricately designed by Candice Burridge (also the show’s director), are a throwback to a performance mode popular in the mid to late 1800s (Poe’s era).

The shadow puppetry is endearing and funny, but conveys none of the dread that builds so gradually and surreptitiously in Poe’s stories. Still, with the perkily spooky music, written by John Vomit, the light style is enjoyable. The music echoes the creations of Danny Elfman, composer for many of Tim Burton’s films. Indeed, much of the shadow puppetry is reminiscent of Burton’s stop-animation films.

Though it does not add suspense, the shadow theater is the most effective element of the production. The mode allows for the narrative to take center stage, and Poe’s cleverly wandering sentences, packed with the glorious adjectives and exclamations of 19th-century American literature (Capital! Cavalier!), can be focused on. However, when the screen is turned off and the actors appear onstage (a scene change that uses a cleverly v-shaped set designed by Mark Marcante), the charm of the shadow theater dissolves.

As the Visitor, Dan Drogynous is physically as lovely a rendering of Poe’s sensibilities as the puppets: his face is perfectly pinched and sallow, his hair as wilted as a dying flower. However, he struggles to master the tone and pace of Poe’s language, which prevents the audience from becoming enraptured by the tale of the asylum. The Visitor’s curiosity leads him to investigate the asylum’s famous “soothing method,” according to which the keepers of the asylum never contradict the patients, but reinforce their delusions as though real.

Upon entering the asylum, the Visitor meets a diverse group of eccentrics, led by Monsier Maillard. In the role, Zen Masley booms impressively, projecting through a mop of a mustache. He leads a group of perversely strange characters, which include three puppets. The cast is jubilant and frenzied in its madness, but the reason for using puppets is unclear. Certainly it is easier to make a puppet look like a frog or a teapot than it is a man, but there is greater humor in the perception of the madman that he is a teapot, and in the sane man’s perception that he should not contradict him.

For all of his probing, the Visitor is rewarded with a grand show. Costume designer Susan Lasanta Gittens has vividly imagined the gaudy accoutrements described by Poe—beads, feathers, and bad makeup abound, and the characters prance about like children that have raided mother's vanity. Amidst this prancing, the cast trades the spotlight in a series of monologues that would alarm any sane visitor and prompt a hasty retreat. Yet the visitor stays, hypnotized by Maillard. However, screams from within the asylum disrupt the dinner, and arouse the Visitor from his stupor. He again asks questions and uncovers the frightening revelation about Maillard and his cohorts.

In the case of this show, the conceits of storytelling do not necessarily translate well to the stage. It is deflating that the narrator is the character who is ever seeking, and being sought by, the terrible and the bizarre. Since he is telling the story in the past tense, we know that whatever harm or misfortune befell him was not so horrible. With this knowledge, the story becomes, rather than horrific, a satire of treatments for psychosis in the 1800s, as well as a commentary upon social understanding of psychoses. The problem is that Poe’s talents as a comedian and satirist are not as brilliant as his ability to haunt, and this production does little to make the story more compelling.

Grin and Bear It

Paul Rudnick tosses out jokes like confetti in The New Century, an umbrella title for four one-acts that combine two old works with two new ones. The first three plays have main characters who are prototypes for gay heroes: They are resilient in the face of daunting adversity and determined to prevail over their circumstances while holding on to their humanity. In Pride and Joy a Long Island Jewish matron, Helene Nadler, recounts her relationship with her three children, whose sexual preferences are gay but still all over the map. "I am here to tell you, to prove to you, that I am the most accepting, the most tolerant, and the most loving mother of all time," she announces sternly, trying to make a virtue of her discomfort. Helene’s dealings with her offspring provide ample evidence of her claim. Her daughter is a lesbian mother; one of her sons is a male-to-female transsexual who is also lesbian ("Ronnie," she asks, "didn’t you take the long way round?"); and her second son is into leather and excretions.

Linda Lavin is brilliantly nuanced as the well-groomed Jewish mother, gradually losing the battle to maintain her composure and embrace the fringes of sexuality that her children inhabit. "So many people’s children, they hide everything," laments Helene, dropping her mask momentarily. "They live separate, secret lives. They’re like strangers. I love those children."

Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach is a revised version of a 1998 play that was also part of a bill at the Drama Dept. in 2001. (That version didn’t include Mr. Charles’s fantasy about showering in Vietnam with John McCain.) In Nicholas Martin’s sharply paced evening, Peter Bartlett, who played the role in both earlier productions, is yet again the nightly cable show host who was banned from New York City for being "too gay."

"What causes homosexuality?" a viewer wants to know. Mr. Charles responds, "I do. I am so deeply homosexual that, with just a glance, I can actually turn someone gay." Mr. Charles is accompanied by his dim "ward," the hunky Shane (Mike Doyle, a stranger to body fat), who appears in oddball getups—a military man, Robin from Batman, and totally naked, providing a visual aid to a hilarious history of gay theater. Rudnick’s quips for Mr. Charles are worthy of Oscar Wilde: "A gay woman is not simply Paul Bunyan with a cat." And, reminiscing about his life, "Oh, there have been men, and boys, and Wedgewood." But Mr. Charles also knows that effeminate men are a dying breed in a gym-obsessed world. "I am the last of my kind," he says with wistful stoicism. "I shall perish, like the dinosaur. Unless, of course, Steven Spielberg discovers some ancient DNA from Paul Lynde and makes more."

In the monologue Crafty, Barbara (Jane Houdyshell) is a cheery craftswoman who is consumed by her passion. "I intend to create a series of commemorative plaques, saluting the history of American crafts," she says with pride, and recounts the various media each plaque will display, from colored gravel to macaroni collage on Michelob beer bottles. But her mania is also a refuge from the death of her son Hank from AIDS. She balked at accepting his orientation and still speaks in euphemisms about him, with a middle American reticence about intensely personal revelations. Houdyshell makes that inner conflict deeply poignant.

In the last play, The New Century, Rudnick brings all his characters together for a feeble valedictory in a New York City hospital’s nursery area, where Helene is watching over her grandchild. It’s a contrived situation, but the characters have by then provided so much pleasure that it’s easy to accept the improbability.

However, Rudnick raises serious concerns about the world that the infants in this new century will inherit, and he seems to backpedal from the moral authority and humanism that make Mr. Charles, Helene, and Barbara so vibrant. Here, Shane takes center stage and espouses a hedonistic philosophy of shopping and dancing. The last image of the characters boogeying is a silly and weak conclusion to an otherwise deliciously funny evening.

Great Leaps

The word gymnastics tends to bring to mind images of terrycloth headbands, Reagan-era leotards, and Olympic medals. While it is a sport that requires a great amount of athleticism, there is also a performance aspect of gymnastics that is often overlooked in the pining for Olympic glory. Conceived in 1997 as a novel performance event, Aeros combines the athletic ability of gymnastics with the aesthetics of dance. The Aeros company is made up of members of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation. The pieces are choreographed and directed by Daniel Ezralow, David Parsons, and Moses Pendleton, each a well known name in the dance world. The resulting mixture is a highly enthralling and entertaining show that is designed for families and actually is appropriate for all ages. The opening dance, “Iconography,” has sixteen bodies lying on the stage in rows and columns of four. One body stands, walking up and down, back and forth through the aisles created by the prostrate bodies. The figures on the floor sit up, lie down, and turn to the side, all in perfect unison. They are accompanied by a color changing scrim and trance music. The first standing body joins the others in formation while another stands up and begins to walk. The piece explores the body as a form and a shape, rather than as part of a human being.

A few other pieces, “Dresses” and “Handstands” also depict the body as a form divorced from the person inside it. In “Dresses” two performers balance upside down, their white-tights-clad legs high in the air. They move their legs, but the legs no longer seem to be a part of a human. The illusion is busted when the two dancers flip over, revealing their heads and the rest of themselves. The reappearance of the human is a reminder of the ability and strength of the performers.

The movements are at times dizzying. “Handstands” features blacklit bodies wearing white unitards walking across stage on their hands or bent over backwards. They are sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. In either case, the repetitive motion of glowing white heads and footless bodies moving across space is hypnotizing. “Stretch” is similar: pairs of gymnasts perform cartwheels across stage in unison, over and over. The effect was such that at one point I was convinced there was a mirror stretched across the stage, and had to blink my eyes to get rid of the illusion.

As Aeros is a family-oriented show, there were several pieces which appealed more to children than to adults. “Table” and “Mushrooms,” while still demonstrating athletic prowess, were comedic and very silly and elicited a lot of giggles from the younger audience members. The two works featured four men arguing, one at a table and the other over who would get a seat on two giant stools. The fights quickly turned into movements, with two men circling on the stools and two others chasing their legs. In “Table,” the four men leapt from the ground onto the tabletop as though it were no big deal. The spins and jumps dazzled the audience. Another piece, “Rope” featured the patterns made by the twirling glow of dark jump ropes. It was an interesting and unique-looking performance, but the rope twirling did not contain enough novelty for an entire piece.

Child-friendly entertainment is often mind-numbingly dumbed down or simplistic and, more often than not, material that adults would never see on their own. Aeros, like most family shows, is bright and colorful. However, Aeros offers enough intellectual and artistic stimulation for an adult to be entertained while at the same time not boring the kids.

Simon and Juliette

Upon entering the York Theatre, located inside Saint Peter’s Church, theatergoers will find a space that resembles a photo gallery as much as a church or a theater. Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project features photographs shot by child survivors of the Rwandan genocide. The exhibit provides contextualization for Sonja Linden’s play, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda, a fictional account of one such child. Produced by the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, the production opens to a young woman, silhouetted against a background bathed in bright yellow light, loudly and clearly describing the night her family was killed. From there, the play moves to a London refugee center which Simon, her writing teacher, describes as “industrial” and to her bleak hostel bedroom. Both settings, as conceived by light designer Tony Mulanix and set designer Rohit Kapoor, are made up of grays. With the guidance of Simon, Juliette spends the duration of the play learning to speak truth to horror, and, as she does, color is gradually reintroduced to her world.

“It’s the personal story that will make people really understand what went on,” explains Simon, as he urges Juliette to rewrite her historical examination of the genocide as a personal account. By exploring large scale human atrocities through a two-character play, Sonja, who based the play in part on her relationship with a young woman she met while working with Rwandan refugees, is clearly attempting to heed the advice she has her character say. Yet, despite the fully realized, decidedly entertaining performances delivered by both actors, there is not enough in the text to move either character beyond convenient archetype.

The production purports to educate audiences about the Rwandan genocide, but those atrocities take a backseat to the budding friendship between Simon and Juliette, which forms the heart of the story. That Juliette has survived a unique horror has little bearing on the familiar tale of a flawed but kindly mentor guiding a scarred protégé to regain her own voice. With some textual tweaking, Juliette could become a survivor of gang violence or child abuse, and the essence of the story would go unchanged. That may be director Elise Stone’s point – that underneath, we’re really all just the same – but the lack of specificity feels inappropriate and misguided.

Susan Heyward nails the role of Juliette with a spunky sense of self and a bravely upturned chin, while Joseph J. Menino lends Simon a bemused smile and heartfelt confidence in his new friend. Much of the sweet humor created by their relationship is of the cultural misunderstanding variety common to immigrant experiences (he thinks how impressed she must be by his car; she notes that it’s not as nice as her father’s). As they’re relationship grows, Simon becomes conscious of his own ignorance and takes it upon himself to learn about the genocide his pupil survived. Still, his newfound awareness of key dates in Rwandan history hardly constitutes “a lot” as Juliette comments near the end of the play. The problem is emblematic of the entire production; in its attempts to be universal, the production sacrifices a level of detail that might have made it genuinely enlightening.

At best, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document… will serve as a surprisingly upbeat hour and a half that celebrates survival while inspiring audiences to educate themselves further on global human rights atrocities. With cute humor and likable characters, it’s hard to think of another play about genocide as pleasant to watch as this one.

While most of the play focuses on Simon helping Juliette to find the words for her testimony, she helps him with his writing as well. He finds her story so inspirational that the poems he writes about her, we are told, are the first masterful pieces of writing he’s completed in years. It appears that Sonja was likewise touched by her experiences working with refugee populations; I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document… is the playwright’s version of her character’s poems. If she had a teacher like Simon urging her toward specificity, her writing might improve as much her characters’ does.