Laughter, Meter, and War

A prince swaps places with his manservant in order to avoid marriage to a queen and go in search of his love. Only his love is a stable boy. And the queen is a real ball breaker. And back at home, his older brother, King Tater, has started war with everyone despite the alliances his father made. In Duncan Pflaster's Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants Shakespeare meets Charles Ludlam and the Theater of the Ridiculous meets contemporary politics. The result is a hilarious hour and a half of iambic pentameter, missing manhoods, lost hearts, and political scheming. Like his predecessor Ludlam, Pflaster's work is a pastiche of styles. The rhyme and meter imitates Shakespeare, the epic structure is a nod to Brecht, the utter silliness apes Ludlam and the Theater of the Ridiculous, and the heroic quest structure is similar to that found in all myths. King Kartoffelpuffen has given his kingdom to his oldest son Tater and married his other children off to neighboring kingdoms for peace and political gain. This causes Trevor and Grumbelino, his servant, to switch places, the princess Lana to be separated from her love Geoffrey and blinded in order to marry King Soignee of the Blind Sybarites, and the stable boy, Toby, to kill all the horses and run off. And then there is the pesky Morty, who continually floats across stage to gently remind Trevor that he is going to die. Someday. A lot is going on in the play, but it never feels overwhelmed or crowded, due to its episodic structure. The audience clapped at the end of each episode, making it feel more as if we were watching a series of sketches rather than one unified play.

The verse flows off the actor's tongues as if they were made to speak using rhyming couplets and pentameter. The meter never distracts or obscures what the characters are saying. The ensemble, twelve actors playing 27 roles, is tightly knit. Several had participated in an earlier reading of the show, and there is a real sense of unity and connectedness among them.

Pflaster, as director as well as playwright, makes full use of the bare stage. Entrances and exits come from all sides. It is never unclear where the scene is taking place, despite the lack of scenery.The cast, the director/playwright, and the sound, light, and costume designers come together to paint a descriptive picture at all times.

Its ridiculousness aside, Prince Trevor comes with a message. Pflaster wrote the play because the “re-election of George W. Bush [had angered him].” Echoes of the current president are visible in King Tater, who acts like an insolent little boy in his attempt to grab land and power. The play also makes a case for love of all stripes. Trevor's love for Toby is frowned upon at first, but certain characters warm to it as the play goes on, leading to new acceptances and understandings.

Prince Trevor Amongst the Elephants is a fantastic evening of theater. The play wears its influences well and provides laugh after laugh while jabbing at contemporary politics. Prince Trevor is a good show for anyone who, angered or saddened by the events around them, needs a good laugh.

Couples at War

Because the events of Yom Kippur are mostly confined to the living room of a young couple in Israel--a space whose clashing fabrics indicate both modesty and twenty-something carelessness--its coming-of-age themes about forgiveness, patriotic responsibility and death have the potential to appear especially hefty. Some of its most powerful moments take place when its four main characters cork a bottle of wine after returning from streets mauled by war, react to a blazing alarm or shield their fear of loneliness with raised chins and crossed arms. The play is framed around the Yom Kippur war of 1973, a conflict whose trickling political implications and impact on the collective consciousness of the Israeli can hardly be understated. Watching the play's four young characters become imprinted with the experience of war, an audience member can feel herself wanting Yom Kippur to live up to its stakes and expectations. It's thus a pity that, in the end, its story and writing feel too neatly packaged to make a distinctive impact.

Written by Meri Wallace, the play begins when two American married couples (Yitz, Yael, Ephraim and Sarah) prepare to observe the Jewish holiday in Israel. When a war against Egypt and Syria begins unexpectedly, Yitz is forced to leave pregnant Yael behind as he joins his fellow Israeli soldiers in combat. As Yael begins to raise her baby alone and awaits her husband's return, Ephraim and Sarah battle a distance of their own. Later, through a friendship with a local army captain and an unexpected visit from Yitz's estranged mother, Yael begins to vocalize an internal battle between her loyalty for Israel and her worry for her son's safety.

Wallace's script is heavily grounded in plot, and moves quickly from one scene to the next. Each exchange between characters ends with a definite fade to black, transitioning after some furniture shuffling into the following frame on the storyboard. The dialogue has the same deliberate quality: Her characters communicate in grammatically rounded phrases, many of which feel almost too familiar: "that certainly puts a new spin to the story," says a character after finding out the truth about his friend's love affair. "I was overwhelmed by your beauty," another says to profess his love. "Take this scarf. It will keep you warm," Yael says when Yitz departs for the war. Each bit of dialogue is closely edited, and never hazy in its meaning. When confrontations are expected, Wallace quickly cuts to the chase; in the first meeting between Yael and her neglectful mother-in-law, for example, the scene moves almost instantly from greetings to a full-blown verbal battle.

Arela Rivas does a fine job with the character of Yael, adding a complexity to her lines with her expressive eyes and effortless body movements. When she is hit by loneliness, she trembles and appears prematurely old; when she begins to rediscover her humor, one can see a tomboyish spark behind her close-lipped smile. In a scene between her and Shane Jerome (Yitz), their attraction is believable. Other actors, particularly Aylam Orian's army captain Avi, give noteworthy, appealing and vulnerable performances. Orion Delwaterman, however, as Sarah's husband Ephraim, doesn't bring quite enough magnetism into the play's most morally ambiguous character. His bursts of frustration play as too loud and his concealed attraction for Yael as excessively sheepish, causing a viewer to feel discomfort, rather than curiosity, in his presence.

Although Yom Kippur's unexpectedly open-ended conclusion is an affecting reflection of Yael' s conflict between motherly worry and patriotism, it only comes to stand in revealing contrast to the production's biggest flaw: its lack of unanswered questions. "This is war," its characters say to remind one another of the source of their elevated anxieties, but the extent of their confusion never translates in the dialogue. Each conflict is articulated with little ambiguity.

In an example, Rachel, a fellow new mother and an Israeli, reminds Yael of the glaring differences between American and local lifestyles. She mentions the plentitude of TVs, cars and accessible education in Yael's home country.

"War is part of life for Israelis. But you chose to come," Rachel says, in a line that, while true, both underlines the conflict that lies beneath her and Yael's friendship, and leaves us slightly dissatisfied.

Double Negatives

For a production in which the main characters attack artistic and aesthetic clichés with a vengeance, Elisa Abatsis’ Daguerreotypes sure embraces a lot of them. Despite its attempts to window-dress itself with depth, Daguerreotypes is, basically, a mawkish “you-and-me-against-the-adults” love story between two preciously hip and knowing twenty-somethings; they even have really cool names. We’ve seen this formula already this season (Jason Chimonides’ The Optimist comes instantly to mind); and it’s one that usually reveals more about the playwright than the play itself.

We first see Gemma as a precocious seventeen-year old painter with a penchant for philosophical musings straight out of One Tree Hill: “If this was forever, and if this, maybe, didn’t end, like ever, I would-I mean, that could possibly be a good thing…”. Studying at the Hebron Academy boarding school in Maine, Gemma has an affair with forty-something Professor Frodick (played by the seemingly younger Doug Rossi). If you’ve guessed that his surname will later serve as joke fodder, you’re right. Gemma is infatuated with Frodick. He wants her to consider her art school future while she just wants to run away with him and live on love.

Five years pass. Gemma has art shows with Frodick’s help. Frodick commits suicide. Why? We never find out. He even returns several times as a ghost but still he doesn’t tell us. Where is John Edward when you need him?

Artistically blocked by this trauma, Gemma returns to the small town of Chagrin Falls (yes, it’s a real place), Ohio, to become a photographic assistant to the fifty-something Henry, a sensitive guy who works in the understandably struggling cottage industry of stillborn baby photography. Henry, played a bit too stiffly by Alfred Gingold, is the only character in this play capable of profundity. A true artist but a lousy businessman, he’s fond of whiskey and was a former boyfriend of Gemma’s mother, Darcy Applebaum, a finally sober and now fading B-movie actress. Darcy has returned to Henry’s life and reveals an authentic talent for counseling grieving mothers.

Chase, working in Henry’s studio and apparently relegated to obscurity after losing out on an art school scholarship (to Gemma), minces no words in expressing that he wants his new competition gone! Not really, though, because he’s always been, like, in love with her! Like a sixth grader saddled with a crush he can’t handle, Chase constantly hurls nasty insults Gemma’s way; despite this, and on the urging of Frodick’s ghost, she improbably falls in love with him, too.

It’s only near the end of the play that its title takes on significance. A daguerreotype is an early example of photography in which an image is exposed directly onto an appropriate silver coated surface. Daguerreotypes were popular in the nineteenth century, in part because they produced otherworldly, glowing qualities in their subjects. Each daguerreotype is one-of-a-kind; no negatives exist.

The noble Henry insists on shredding the negatives of the stillborn babies whose mothers change their minds about ordering pictures; Chase wants to keep them on file. What this dripping metaphor means to the play is anyone’s guess and all could be correct. The babies’ photographs are one-of-a-kind, caught in a moment. If unpurchased by their parents, they’re gone forever into the shredder.

Jared Morgenstern as the jumpy and socially inept Chase is the clear standout in this production. Something of a cross between Steve Carell and Adam Sandler, Mr. Morgenstern has the comedic chops to give Chase some substance despite his bad lines. He pulls off some of the funnier bits in the play, and dilutes much of the venom in the childish insults directed at Gemma. Storm Garner, as Gemma, simply lacks the range to deflect all the blows engagingly; Gemma remains a one-dimensional character all the way through.

Ms. Abatsis’ script, predictable and, yes, clichéd in far too many places, feels like juvenilia. Nonetheless, it has some bona fide humor and shows flickers of accomplishment and potential. The playwright only touches on the really interesting stuff of this play—Henry and his need to document these failed births—and defaults to the trite relationship mush. The truth is that Gemma and Chase really aren’t that interesting; we’ve seen them before in countless plays about young adults.

Ms. Abatsis has a keen sense for dialogue which keeps up the play’s momentum. Yet, the unacknowledged irony of the play is that, in the end, Gemma, purportedly so headstrong and independent, ultimately depends on two men, one misguided and then dead, and the other envious, bitter and grasping, to tell her how to live her life.

Daguerreotypes is part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival.

Paradise Lost

During the Vietnam War the island of Penang in Malaysia was a destination for rest and relaxation (R&R) for troops, but in James L. Larocca’s eponymous play it is also the source of a mystery about his hero, Tim Riordan. An offering of the Midtown International Theater Festival, Penang is about many things: the pressures of combat, the need for human connection amid killing fields, and the age-old question of why God permits pain and evil to flourish. It is also about primal fears, and it provides a great deal to chew on. Tim Riordan (Brett Davidson) is a Navy lieutenant whose job is guiding helicopters on and off the deck of his ship in the Mekong Delta. One night in 1968, in the darkness and against the wind, a foolish pilot tries to take off and kills himself and several men on deck, including Tim’s closest friend.

The scene jumps to a hospital room in San Diego, where Tim is being treated by a doctor, Leona Kaufman (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz), after an attempted suicide. Employing a top-notch bedside manner, warm and calm, Kaufman teases out the reason for Tim’s slitting his wrists after his return from R&R in Penang, seemingly in good psychological health. Scenes alternate between hospital and island paradise as she learns what happened in Penang following the copter crash. The mishap that killed Tim’s friend wasn’t the first time he lost a buddy unexpectedly.

In Penang, Tim strikes up a friendship with a U.S. Air Force captain, Richard DeLuca, aka “Luke.” Luke is a stereotypical native of Queens with a thick Sopranos-style accent (he uses the overworked “Fuggedaboudit” as a catch phrase), a snappy delivery, and a yen for pretentious irony, particularly during a turgid anticlerical diatribe. A little goes a long way, and Robert Sabri pushes too hard, tipping the balance from engagingly brash to downright annoying.

For a while, though, the actors convey a believable friendship, as they hire a Malaysian guide named Jimmy Chen (Ben Hersey). Hersey adds color and lightness to the proceedings, until he speaks of the cruelties of the Japanese in World War II and the death of his son. That leads to Tim’s losing control in an existential rant. “They died, that’s all, they just died,” he says. “They died alone, so all alone. They died in hell...”

The friendship, moreover, leads into unexpected territory: a drunken sexual liaison, the limits of which are murky. “I don’t think it was about sex or that kind of stuff at all,” says Tim. “It was about friendship and just being there and caring and helping each other.” Yet one may read in Tim’s succession of intense relationships with his dead friends a suggestion of repressed homosexuality, and he balks at connecting with women in Penang. (The lean Davidson, with the looks of a male model, has an epicene quality that works nicely for the character.) But Sabri’s rough-edged Luke is a bizarre object of affection: Imagine Montgomery Clift drawn to Jerry Lewis.

Director Donya K. Washington has staged the story simply (there are no credits for set or costumes, which is probably why Tim wears anachronistic cargo shorts) with a bed and two metal folding chairs, but at times during the first performance the scenes moved sluggishly. Unusually, a great deal resides on David Schulder's sound design, which starts off with noises of war and segues to classical music, evoking Apocalypse Now. It is near-constant, often muted in the background, and it incorporates both sounds of war and songs like Neil Diamond’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.”

Occasionally, though, the sound undermines the actors, particularly Kullberg-Bendz and Hersey in quieter scenes; they need to project better. It’s a shame, because Kullberg-Bendz is outstanding as the therapist, evoking a lively concern and professionalism. Dave Powers as Luke’s hulking roommate at the Air Force base also provides a deft counterpoint in his sexual brutality to the connection that Luke and Tim make.

Although Penang has a lot of interesting ideas, they don’t meld together perfectly, and some elements seem underdeveloped. Still, Larocca has created characters interesting enough to hold one’s attention, and he’s not afraid to take his plot to dark corners. That’s something to please any serious theatergoer.

On-Key Comedy

It's the High School Musical of the a capella world mixed with the comic sensibility of Will and Grace . Part unabashed schtick and part schmaltz, Perfect Harmony , the Clurman Theater's latest offering about two high school acapella groups preparing for the national championship, is nonetheless thoroughly entertaining. This is in no small part due to clever writing by Andrew Grosso and to the able timing of most of this young and spirited cast, and in particular, to Sean Patrick Dugan and Kathy Searle in their dual roles.

The premise is fairly simple. There are two a capella groups, the uber-victorious Acafellas and the underappreciated Ladies in Red . Each group is comprised of distinct personalities that rub against each other in a desire to determine the direction of the group and the musical numbers to be presented at the national championships.

In the Acafellas , Senior "Pitch" Lassiter A. Jayson III (an appealing Vayu O'Donnell) has an artistic crisis-of-conscience that prompts him to want to expose the "ugly" underneath the "beautiful" in the music in order for it to be truly artistic. This move pits him directly against Philip Fellows V (Benjamin Huber) who is dead set on maintaining their successful formula and winning the national title at all costs, and by any dubious means.

Rounding out the Acafellas is a hunky former quarterback named JB (Scott Janes) who catches the eye of talent scout Kiki Tune (a hilarious Searle); a mute boy who sings, well named Jasper (Clayton Apgar); and Simon Depardieu (Dugan), a nebbishy freshman with a mouth full of canker sores.

The Ladies in Red are led by perfectionist Melody McDaniels (a crisp Dana Acheson) who must keep the nubile Meghan Beans (Amy Rutberg) from turning her conservative choreography into that of a Britney Spears video and/or stealing her boyfriend. Equally, Russian renegade Michaela (Searle) must be prevented from randomly changing the words to the songs-in-progress. Meanwhile, shy Valerie (in a lovely turn by Margie Stokley) is acutely glance-phobic and needs confidence boosting, while Turret's-striken stage manager Kerri Taylor (Nisi Sturgis) constantly blurts out obsenities at inopportune moments.

Musical numbers are woven into the groups' rehearsals and interspersed with monologues from individual a capella group members as well as members of their greater community, including a School Psychologist (Apgar) and a Vocal Therapist (Stugis). The musical performances themselves are certainly less effective than the irony that accompanies them.

Director Andrew Grosso uses the stage fully. The set design by Eliza Brown is simple but effective; and Becky Lasky's costumes (from naughty schoolgirl to icky talent manager to spacesuit and floor length plaid skirts) are tongue-in-cheek and contribute greatly to Perfect Harmony's overall effect of being well-produced.

Rather like Sour Cream & Onion Pringles or cheerleading movies like Bring It On , this show is a guilty pleasure. Its plot is so predictable at times that it almost shouldn't be as fun as it is to watch. And yet the writing is full of tiny, quick verbal surprises and original moments, and the cast is uniformally high energy. Recommended as an summer outing for a young audience.

My Big Fat Freak Wedding

The Wedding Play is a lot like the gigantic cake that occupies a chunk of the stage during the first act: impossible to ignore, very sweet, and a bit too much. There are slices of great laughs and good performances, but digesting the whole course is a lengthy and sometimes tedious endeavor. During the two-hour play, you’re constantly reminded that a.) weddings make people crazy and b.) it’s hard to tell twins apart. By the time intermission rolls around, it’s a bit jarring to realize you’re only halfway done.

The plot centers on the Desario family on the day of daughter Sarah’s wedding. Mom and Dad seem on the verge of either insanity or homicide, while twins/maids-of-honor Clara and Zoe (both Lindsay Wolf) work through budding romances. Murphy’s law ensues with an absent groom, the wrong cake, and a “quintet” that’s actually a punk rock band (offering an amusingly lowbrow original song in the second act by Ryan Dowd).

Amid the chaos, Clara's date, Daniel (Joseph Mathers), has arrived early. It’s their first meeting, as the “couple” has shared an Internet courtship over the last 11 months. Daniel’s sex-crazed friend, Nick (Michael Mraz, bearing a strong resemblance to Sean William Scott of several sex-crazed teen flicks) has tagged along and quickly heats things up with Zoe.

Zoe despises Daniel and tries to derail his relationship with Clara at every turn. This particular conflict drags on and on until a fairly unsurprising twist comes in the second act. It doesn’t help that Zoe’s unabashed wickedness and Clara’s cavity-inducing sweetness are so exaggerated, they grow a bit stale by the end of the show.

With its predictable characters, the only way the play can shock you is by piling on irrational twists and coincidences. By the end, many characters make decisions that betray their established personalities.

The cast acts so hyper (the first act contains lots of running and yelling), it seems like they’ve mainlined Red Bull. Fortunately, both Mathers and Corey Ann Haydu as the bride ground the show with performances that balance comic prowess with restraint. As just about everything has hit the fan, Haydu has a believable breakdown and a scowl that completely deserves the frozen reaction it elicits. And when Daniel faces Clara’s bizarre attempts at seduction – think lots of writhing and a squeaky Marilyn Monroe impression – his contorted face and confused exclamation (“I mean this as kindly, and sweetly as possible. What the [expletive] is wrong with you?”) is like a breath of fresh air.

Mark Souza is also in good form as the narrator and several other roles. With a voice made for action movie trailers, almost everything out of his mouth is hilarious. Unfortunately, quoting a few gems would spoil some of the show’s twists.

Playwright Brian MacInnis Smallwood, who penned last year’s very funny 12th Night of the Living Dead, has a knack for snappy one-liners and quirky comedy. In this sense, The Wedding Play pans out like a sitcom. But most sitcoms wrap in 30 minutes for a reason: there’s only so much quirkiness and perkiness a person can take.

Strange Pacific Overtures

The adulation of World War II veterans as a Band of Brothers doesn’t get much of a boost from Neal Bell’s 2000 play about Marines and sailors on a transport ship heading for Okinawa in 1945. Bell’s introduction to the published play (a portion is included in the playbill) cites the inspiration for this play as Coming Out Under Fire, Gay Men and Women in World War Two, by Allan Berube. A second bookWith the Old Breed, by Eugene B. Sledge, gave him a “nitty-gritty sense of what men living through that kind of combat endured,” he writes. And Bell’s homework shows in his use of period slang: “pogey” for a weak Marine, and “Don’t beat your gums” for “Shut up.” His first scene especially captures the tension and boredom of waiting for something to happen, but pretty quickly the play turns dark and surreal. Don’t look for valor here.

Bell intersperses real action with dreams. At times a scene occurs before the previous one, and it’s not always clear whether the action scenes are real—one between a gay teenage swabbie, Billy (nicely played with eagerness, caution and ennui by Michael Wrynn Doyle), and a married but spurned Marine named Hobie (John Stokvis), has them nuzzling high above the ship while swinging on ropes, as if they were in the rigging of an 18th-century frigate. You may spend time wondering how that is possible on a WWII-era ship rather than listening to the dialogue, until they suddenly fall into a void. And a short time later, two other men, Chotkowski and a sour loner named McGuiness, hear two thuds, as if bodies were hitting the deck.

It’s possible that the double thuds were not Billy and Hobie hitting the deck, but two torpedos that eventually do hit the ship—perhaps it’s within minutes, perhaps time has elapsed; the timeline, however, is disorienting, even on the printed page, since some scenes precede rather than follow the previous ones. Under Jim Petosa's direction it plays like a confused fever dream and tends to be off-putting. Laura J. Eckelman’s evocative lighting doesn't do much to sort the real from the dreams.

The warriors in his grim melodrama include the ship’s captain, Albers, who thinks he hears the voice of his dead son reciting his final bloodstained letter, which details the desecration of Japanese bodies by McGuiness. Albers is convinced someone has hijacked the public address system on the ship, so he pursues a Queeglike inquiry into his hallucination to find the culprit. His aide DeLucca (a fine Alec Strum), balks at the captain’s obsession and is one of the few men who seems solidly heterosexual and a mentally prepared professional warrior. McGuiness (James Smith), a sour, tight-lipped loner who served with the captain’s son, is racked with guilt about an incident of cowardice; his nightmare involves mutilation of the buddy he abandoned, a sweetly dim Southerner named Duane (a likable MacLeod Andrews). But does he carry a torch for Duane? Rounding out the group is Chotkowski, a strapping Marine who struggles to live with his fear of death and doesn’t balk at telling off the unstable Albers.

The actors all play their parts capably, although Malcolm Madera as the captain becomes mostly unintelligible when he yells during his big scene. What one doesn’t get is a feeling that the Marines are part of a unit, that they have some camaraderie and rapport in spite of their friction. (It’s ironic that many in the Potomac Theatre Company are graduates of Middlebury College in Vermont and presumably have worked together before.)

Bell’s inspiration, of course, suggests that the play will yield some insight into gay history, but not much happens beyond establishing that gays have always been in the military. There’s a nod to cross-dressing (and South Pacific), since Billy is rehearsing a drag show with a grass skirt and coconut bra, while on deck the dialogue comes off as bitchier than, say, in From Here to Eternity. But the play is less compelling in the end than the real-life brouhaha that the issue created during the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” debates of the 1990s.

Somewhere in the Pacific plays on a double bill with Sarah Kane's Crave. Because I misunderstood the starting time of Crave, which is 45 minutes long, I was unable to see it.

Mother Courage

Performer Christen Clifford holds little back in BabyLove, her one-woman show at The Green Room at 45 Bleecker in which she chronicles the physical and emotional changes she underwent before, during, and following the birth of her first child. The show, which runs slightly over an hour but leaves you wanting much more, is to be praised for both its humor and its honesty. This highly enjoyable extended monologue (which began as a piece penned by Clifford for Nerve.com) chronicles the full journey of changes that its creator and star went through. Clifford begins the show in a fairly explicit manner by describing her attempts at conception, but her in-your-face presentation style is never off-putting. In fact, she achieves the opposite, creating a show that is always intimate and engaging, as she segues from talking about her younger days of sexual adventurousness to counting the myriad ways childbirth has changed her outlook on sex, love, maturity, and her relationship with her husband.

Talking to her audience as though they were her girlfriends, Clifford discusses the fears and expectations that come along with impending first-time motherhood. Will she always love her child unconditionally? Will her child love her in return? Would she actually prefer to have a son over a daughter?

The show, directed and partially developed by Julie Kramer, is candid and confessional. BabyLove offers a warts-and-all look at maternity and motherhood, and Kramer's assured hand ensures that though the play's tone gradually becomes more serious, it does so in measured, artful doses. Clifford discusses her changing body and supplies a detailed account of her entire childbirth experience. She also conveys the ways she grew disenchanted with her vagina and the way her sex life with her husband waned and then morphed into something new. (In one hilarious anecdote, Clifford describes how an attempt to multi-task intimacy and baby-rearing turned into an inadvertent threesome).

Sex does not totally dominate BabyLove, however. The show also features a fair amount of material on women’s health in general. For example, Clifford discusses the perils of simultaneous breast-feeding and masturbation, as well as the importance of Kegel exercises. Clifford continually revs the energy up by using water guns to over-exaggerate her breasts when nursing, pantomiming the act of breast-feeding, and even giving away prizes to a select few audience members.

What is most important about BabyLove is its refreshing confessionalism. We still live in a society where women who enjoy their sex lives, and even more brazenly, enjoy publicly discussing them, are considered somewhat taboo. Clifford bucks those conventions in a way that is entirely human and universal, never strictly sensational. She is who she is and makes no apologies for that, whether being tough or vulnerable, sassy or sentimental. I doubt there was single audience member – female or male – who did not find a kernel of truth in something she had to share. Chances are they found many.

Clifford is nothing short of a revelation. The actress’s ability to rebound between moments funny, tender and potentially embarrassing is astonishing, and the pace, timing, and tone with which she does it is nothing short of balletic. Clifford commands the stage from start to finish (though choreographer Julie Atlas Muz should be given credit as well for giving BabyLove some shape). This is a primary case of a performer being completely at ease – with her audience, wither her material, but most of all, with herself – and should not be missed.

Footloose

“Zany.” “Madcap.” Hackneyed as those words have become, they’re nonetheless appropriate to describe David Lindsay-Abaire’s 1997 play, A Devil Inside, which is something like Curb Your Enthusiasm meets South Park. The play is currently being presented by the fledgling but gifted Wide Eyed Productions Company. When a script is zany and madcap, even one from a playwright as contemporary and talented as Lindsay-Abaire, it runs the risk of wearing out its audience once they’ve gotten the joke. I’m glad to report that Wide Eyed Productions not only keeps the audience interested throughout the script’s accrued silliness, but the actors appear to be having a genuinely good time doing so.

A Devil Inside is a dark comedy, ultimately pointless, yet fun, filled with characters who make the term “dysfunctional” banal. The plot centers around Gene Slater (Sage Seals), a 21-year old skateboarder whose mother, after several attempts, finally cajoles him into “becoming a man” by avenging what she believes was the murder of his 416-pound father 14 years earlier in the Poconos. The father, having read that he could walk off several pounds per day, had decided to just keep walking until he reached his ideal weight. All that remains of him are his feet, which Mrs. Slater (Kristin Skye Hoffmann), an East Village laundromat owner, has dutifully preserved in a formaldehyde-filled jar.

The cluttered set maximizes the stage area by making itself an interesting jumble of functionality. The action jumps back and forth from the laundromat to an appliance repair shop, so one side of the set features washing machines and the other side is a workbench. The rest of the clever set features a projection screen (showing the inside of a subway car and a bar) for train and tavern scenes. Because, in addition to feet, devils and guns are prominent in the play, what little wall space is left of the set features sketches of devils and a man pointing a gun.

Among the cast standouts is Andrew Harriss as Carl Raymonds. Mr. Harriss reminds me of a particularly deranged Chris Elliott. Carl is a professor of Russian literature, obsessed with Dostoyevsky and with his wife, Lily (Lauren Bahlman), a rock climber whom Carl believes has perished in the Poconos. Lily, having lost a foot in the climb (yes, feet are a huge deal in this play), is actually hiding out in Brad Bradford’s appliance repair shop in the East Village. Carl has coincidentally passed by the shop and has seen Brad, such a “dull” individual that Carl becomes compelled to kill him in Dostoyevskian fashion—that is, for no apparent reason. Carl doesn’t recall that Brad was once a student of his or that Brad had a major crush on him.

Mr. Harriss commands the wacky role of the alcoholic Carl — preoccupied, ranting hysterically and, with a shrug of his shoulders or a grunt, dismissing the advances of the lovelorn Caitlin Boyd (Liz White), a current student who happens to be crushing on him. Harriss stomps around the small stage much like...well, like an insane professor. I actually averted my eyes when he looked my way, concerned that he might ask me a question.

Jake Paque is often hilarious as the brain-injured Brad, who has been whacked over the head by Gene’s flying skateboard after a tragic accident that, as you have probably guessed, coincidentally involved most of the other characters. Brad believes that a devil from a piece of wallpaper has chewed its way through his eye.

Ms. Hoffmann turns in a solid tongue-in-cheek performance as Mrs. Slater, who wears relics of her star-crossed family’s catastrophes (among them, Gene’s skateboard and her brother’s torn baby blanket — the only thing that remained after he was eaten by dogs) on a sash. And Ms. White is thoroughly convincing as the young Caitlin, so hopelessly infatuated with Carl that she unscrupulously helps him attempt to kill Brad.

The plot of A Devil Inside contains more improbable coincidences and relationships than even Larry David could think up. It’s a challenging play for director Justin Ness’ New York debut, but he and a young cast of up-and-comers meet the challenge joyfully, embracing the play’s ridiculousness and upping the ante. It’s best to sit back, suspend your considerable disbelief, and simply let the actors entertain you, because that’s what this troupe does best.

It's All Relative

Death hovers over Make it So from start to finish. Edward Miller’s fractured Southern family drama conjures up the works of such luminaries as Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, but pedestrian, under-stuffed plotting and an unpolished production directed by Sharon Fogarty sadly prevent it from hitting such a stride at the Theater for the New City. Walter Morgan is the unseen patriarch of a blended black family in Memphis. The problem is, his five children born from two wives, Mary and Bertha (Beverly Bonner) never blended together successfully. They reunite following the death of Mary, Walter’s first wife, with whom he fathered eldest son Lester (Leonard Dozier), a publishing executive who has returned from Manhattan.

Lester’s half-siblings Charlotte (Althea Alexis) and Justin (Nnamudi Amobi), both grown adults, still live with their surly mother, Bertha, as she nurses their father. Death, it seems, is imminent for him as well; Walter is in the last stages of ALS (better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Bertha has gone through a string of hospice nurses, of whom Jasmine Crothers (Kelly Jo Reid) is the most recent.

Miller spends the better part of the first act introducing his characters and setting up their relationships with one another, rather than setting up conflicts to escalate. As a result, one has no idea where the play is supposed to go (and one wonders if Make It So could use some further structural tinkering). With little ado, Lester and Jasmine become a smitten couple, and Lester seeks out one of his AWOL younger blood siblings.

Said brother Anthony (Milan Conner) has lost touch with the family due to his mother Bertha's and Walter’s apparent shared disapproval of his gay lifestyle. Furthering the distance between them is the fact that Anthony works as a drag performer at a nearby club (in a humorous touch, the club is called Verfangen Mit Hosen Unten, which translates to “caught with one’s pants down”) run by his partner, Tyler (Adam R. Deremer).

Miller should introduce Anthony far earlier into the play. He is a more significant character than Charlotte and Justin. Additionally, the storyline involving Belinda (Georgia Sothern), the floozy who carries on with Justin, is an overly throwaway storyline. It runs too comical in comparison to the rest of the show. As a result, the waiting game Make It So plays until Anthony’s entrance registers as little more than expository filler.

The same can be said for Bertha, whose monstrous ways and vindictive resentment do not truly surface until the second act. Bertha has problems with all of Walter’s children from his first marriage, but really goes off the deep end when she sees them taking off with Jasmine and Tyler, both of whom are white. This opens the play up to all sorts of racial, sexual and socioeconomic issues, but Miller sidesteps them in favor of redundant sitcom-level clichés involving the same fighting family members again and again.

Little is learned from one scene before the audience witnesses it rehashed again five to ten minutes later. As the fighting wages on, Bertha emerges as increasingly bitter, with Miller saving a touching breakdown scene for far too late in the play. But this keeps her two-dimensionally unlikable for far too long, and it renders the show dramatically inert right when it should be percolating the most.

It is possible that in later performances Make It So will be less clunky. As it is, though, some of Fogarty’s cast seems to still be going through the motions. Some of Bonner’s line readings felt a little off, and at times Dozier and Amobi felt as though they were still merely trying to remember lines they had memorized. Alexis, on the other hand, demonstrated much more potential than these cast mates; it is a shame that Miller could not make Charlotte a more substantial presence. As it stands, she merely exists to welcome her siblings home with a hug. Additionally, having cast actors who appear to be in their mid-to-late twenties to play characters roughly ten years their senior undercuts the state of arrested development in which we should find these overgrown children.

There are some bright lights among the ensemble. Conner and Deremer are easily the best thing about Make It So. Conner is quite sympathetic as the ostracized son, and Deremer offers a sense of genuine sweetness lacking from the Morgan family. Together, the two share the play’s purest relationship. Reid and Sothern also do fine work in their more skeletal roles.

That’s the biggest problem with all of Make It So: it needs more meat on it. As it stands now, this meal is just too lean for its own good.

Method Man

The Wings Theatre is by no means an ideal performance space. Tucked away in a basement on one of the Western-most blocks of Greenwich Village, the theatre is small, with tiny, rickety chairs and an absence of air conditioning. During the performance I saw, there were occasional problems with sound quality, theatergoers were sweating and several audience members continually talked to themselves. None of this mattered, though, as the lights came up on The Rarest of Birds. The 2008-2009 theatre season has just begun, but star Omar Prince delivers a turn that must be remembered at the end of the season as one of its best.

Prince plays late film legend Montgomery Clift in this one-man show, conceived, directed and written by the talented John Lisbon Wood. Clift, the tortured artist with an unfettered commitment to realism who was unfairly locked into comparison with Marlon Brando as one of two dominant actors to emerge during the 1950s’ Method acting era, experienced far more misfortunes than did his counterpart: drug addiction, a crippling lack of sexual confidence, a disfiguring car accident, and an untimely early death.

Rarest – the title comes from a reference made to Clift in a review – puts Clift’s entire life on display, both private and public. Wood sets it in 1962, as the star’s life and luck are already headed on their last lap, on the 1962 set of Freud, the unsuccessful John Huston film. The director has locked Clift alone in a dressing room to sober up and calm down. Clift, in between drinking, pill-popping, and shooting up, turns this time-out into a de facto therapy session with an absent Sigmund Freud, effectively addressing the audience with details of his life and work.

Wood structures this show in a non-linear way, to better mirror the inner workings of Clift’s mind. For instance, Clift talks about working on the late 1950s film Lonelyhearts long before he ever details his problems with earlier films like A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity. The effect can be frustrating for those wanting a strictly chronological interpretation of Clift’s filmography, but his fractured reflections become easy to adjust to.

What is clear is how meticulously researched Rarest is. Wood’s play is comprehensive but too interesting to be merely encyclopedic. He provides anecdotal references to his early work in Red River and The Search; his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor borne from A Place in the Sun; skirmishes with Frank Sinatra on From Here to Eternity and the many battles he had with studio brass, directors, and writers to improve scripts. Clift claims here that his dialogue upgrades in The Heiress are what won Olivia de Havilland an Oscar for the film. (Despite four acting nods of his own, Clift never won an Academy Award).

Wood also chronicles the actor’s deepening chemical dependency and health issues including colitis and dysentery. Perhaps the play’s greatest strength comes when it addresses Clift’s clandestine gay relationships. The actor’s self-doubt about his sexual prowess led to a lifetime of promiscuity and disappointment.

Prince’s performance is so specific, so physically detailed and emotionally bare, it stands as a textbook example of Method acting on par with Clift’s work itself. He makes Clift’s desperation and pain palpable through a series of carefully modulated tics: his inebriated swagger, the glazed look in his eyes, the way he treats his body with equal parts interest and repulsion. Prince makes Clift seem very much like a child who never came close to feeling comfortable with himself. His performance is what constantly drives Rarest and elevates what could have been mere exposition to a real performance.

Rarest is a fitting tribute to one of the all-time greats this craft has ever known. At the performance I saw, a technical glitch caused Prince’s curtain call to be cut short, which is a shame. A performance this dedicated deserves all the recognition it can get.

Ain't Theft Grand

The entrance to the Sargent Theatre at the American Theatre of Actors warns of “approximated nudity,” a promise of ideas both low-brow and winningly entertaining. And the show featuring such adornments, Heist, lives up to just that dichotomous expectation. Heist is written by Paul Cohen, who proved extremely adroit at mature narrative with this season’s Cherubina. This time, however, the premise is more puerile. A group of thieves – Blowfish (Amanda Boekelheide), Seahorse (Jeff Clarke) and The Sturgeon (Rachel Jablin) – have conspired to lift a jewelry store. They have meticulously researched and blueprinted the entire operation. One thing standing in their way, however, is that famous New York dilemma: location, location, location.

The store in question is located behind a small Off-Off-Broadway theatre mounting a one-woman show. This radically feminist show within the show has a very specific theme: clitoral explosions. As a result, the three thieves must sync their dynamite blasts with the orgasms of the star of this performance piece, Ophelia (Tracy Weller). The idea is that as Ophelia experiences orgasm, the applause and laughter generated by her performance will drown out the sound of the ensuing explosions next door.

But there is a major problem: the edgy show is a bust. The bungling burglars must work to make the show a hit just to ensure that their own larceny goes off without a hitch, causing Ophelia to get entangled with both Seahorse and a renegade named Jaguar (Christopher Ryan Richards). Some of these scenes felt shoehorned in, as staged, and the fact that Richards – and only Richards – played two roles (the second of which is an overzealous Off-Off-Broadway critic) confused the action.

Heist is a clever amalgam of genres, though it is in general too light to work as a truly successful heist show, full as it is of betrayals and red herrings. However, a lot of Cohen’s comedic dialogue remains smart (even the double entendres), and he also provides much insider theatre lingo. The jewel store plot itself is actually the lesser part of Heist; the more arresting scenes star Weller on stage, appearing in front of a backdrop made to resemble female genitalia (designed by Kris Thor). In a major credit to Cohen, what should be merely a stunt works, providing constant humor without feeling gratuitous. Neither does a group of vagina-shaped puppets that dominate several scenes in the latter half of the play.

What weighs the show down then? Thor’s stilted direction. Though Cohen’s spunky plot escalates appropriately, Thor never really hoists the action of Heist to a higher level as the plot progresses. The last few scenes move along at a clip the same length as the early scenes do, when they should have more momentum; by this time, more is at stake and the characters are desperate.

Additionally, the five members that round out Thor’s ensemble are inconsistent. Weller stands out in a potentially embarrassing role. She could have fallen flat on her face as Ophelia, self-satisfied and sex-obsessed, but pulls it off. The other women in the show, Boekelheide and Jablin, have less enticing characters. I wish I knew a bit more about the background of the three robbers. How did they meet? Who recruited whom? Boekelheide plays a more interesting part – Blowfish has rougher edges than The Sturgeon – and is more interesting to watch than Jablin, who is saddled with a largely redundant role. Neither, however, captivate during their scenes in the planning stage nor in the show’s more climactic moments.

Clarke’s scenes with Boekelheide and Jablin could also use a little polishing. He demonstrates better chemistry with Weller than with Seahorse’s criminal cohorts. Richards, however, was the most intriguing performer of the bunch. The actor was able to bounce back and forth between two very divergent character types and was not afraid to fall on his face in doing so.

That same spirit carries Heist itself a long way. Cohen’s desire to merge the silly with the suspenseful takes the show very far, but despite a lot of promise, the show remains a few shades short of arresting.

The Kids Aren't Alright

Based loosely on a true story, Jason Stuart’s one-woman play, Washing Machine, presents several perspectives from those involved in the case of five year-old girl Rebecca “Hope” Wagner who, while her mother used a nearby payphone, mysteriously drowned in a washing machine at a Virginia laundromat three years ago. The range of perspectives, verbal or otherwise, include those of the little girl, her mother, a young playmate (theorizing that Rebecca may have been stolen by the fictional “Birdman”), her insecure and painfully self-conscious pubescent brother, the Russian owner of the laundromat, a predictably detached insurance adjuster charged with determining the monetary worth of the girl’s life, and the old man who had used the machine prior to the incident, losing the coins which somehow later activated the machine when the child climbed into it.

Akiko Kosaka’s set is stunning in its simplicity. Most of the play’s action takes place inside a circular plastic structure, replete with patterned holes, resembling the inside of a commercial washing machine. The center of this construction serves as the vortex of character vantage points, all acted ably by the versatile Dana Berger. Plastic bags filled with water hang from the structure and other parts of the stage, representing the attractive nuisance of the machine’s watery recesses for the little girl.

Ben Kato employs a host of innovative lighting techniques to illustrate the characters’ confusion, the machine’s motion, and to help the slight and unimposing Berger transform into a range of personalities. Kato’s lighting works seamlessly with the sound design of Elizabeth Rhodes. Harsh and amplified clicks of the electric machine’s various cycles indicate jerking character shifts. Like the washing machine, the airtight doors of which shut one out (or in this case, in) until a cycle completes, the action moves quickly—a new character appears just as you’re processing the words of the previous one. With some exceptions, lighting and music are generally compatible.

Mr. Stuart is obviously a Who fan. “Pure n’ Easy” and “Getting in Tune” are among the pre-performance house songs. Ms. Berger wears a Who t-shirt throughout the play, and the girl’s mother talks guiltily about wanting to smoke cigarettes and listen to “Baba O’Riley” rather than attend to motherly concerns, even firing off a round of Pete Townshend windmills as she speaks.

“Baba O’Riley”—all five minutes and ten seconds of it—returns at the end of the play, its jumpy and frenetic ending mimicking the confusion inside the washing machine. It’s a somewhat unfortunate choice—the song has been so diluted by its use as the opening theme for CSI-NY that here it unintentionally makes the girl’s struggles resemble a moribund music video. If a Who song must be used, may I suggest the more obscure “In a Hand or a Face,” with its continual refrain: “I am going round and round”?

Under Michael Chamberlin’s taut direction, Ms. Berger deftly shifts characters in the blink of an eye and yanks us, often mesmerized, along with her. Ms. Berger starred in the first production of Washing Machine) last summer at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, and she has clearly honed her rapid transformations down to the nanosecond.

Unlike its characters, Washing Machine doesn’t point fingers. From the brother who dares the girl into the machine, to the mother who disappears, to the laundromat owner who knows that the machine has a mechanical problem, everyone, including society, is complicit in the death of this young girl. The play asks one tough question of its audience, and it's enough: How can we become so irreparably consumed with our own petty issues that we can forever lose track of an innocent child?

Broad Strokes

To analyze the life of an artist seems a foolish, perhaps doomed, endeavor. Words are incapable of characterizing the magic behind the brush stroke, often seeming trivializing and petty, or unfairly sweeping. In A Brush with Georgia O’Keeffe Natalie Mosco’s lyrical script skips through the life of O’Keeffe, but fails to capture the vast beauty of her art. It could even be said that the play, mostly a lengthy monologue, dissolves the mystery of her art by dissection. Jumping quickly from scenes in a long life, Mosco spends considerable time and energy, but only skims the surface of the work and life of O’Keeffe. In performance the show’s title seems painfully apt: we are brushing the surface of something fleeting and impossible to hold. The play opens with the stark solitude of the older O’Keeffe. In the desert, with only wild turkeys and the enormity of her “myth” to keep her company, she muses philosophically about the problematic relationship between the artist’s life and her art: “They won’t understand my art any better if they see how I live: It’s all there on the canvas…Where I was born and where and how I live is unimportant—it’s what I’ve done with where I’ve been that should be of interest.” During the next hour and a half this key notion is disregarded, while Mosco covers the disparate places, the opportunistic people, and the various incarnations of the artist herself. Perhaps it’s appropriate that this survey is an inadequate way of exploring O’Keeffe’s canvases, but this kind of irony has no place in such a sincere production.

After introducing the wise, confident O’Keeffe, Mosco explores her troubled side in scenes from a sanitarium and her childhood. In covering such an eventful life, Mosco unfortunately follows the form of a jumbled timeline. Rather than follow a narrative arc, the show lists accomplishments like a résumé, hitting upon so many events that Mosco speaks with breathless speed. Perhaps some editing, or a narrower focus—fewer scenes, selecting a specific period or piece—would help.

Despite problems with the show’s premise, Mosco’s confidence and clear vision are impressive strengths when it comes to portraying an imporant female artist. She adopts the many incarnations of O’Keeffe, twisting her limbs gracefully to evoke the natural shapes one assumes danced in O’Keeffe’s mind. Still, the show drags and there is not enough movement to make up for such a text-laden script.

Supporting Mosco are two highly capable actors that similarly adapt to the multitude of parts. David Lloyd Walters, playing and representing the men in Georgia’s life, walks a fine line between boorishness and enviable confidence. He exudes the sort of clarity of expression and self-possession that Georgia cannot, highlighting the doubt that plagues and stifles her. Virginia Roncetti has the unenviable task of playing the female non-Georgias—less talented and either fawning or jealous. Even with this material, she is a playful chameleon who is entertaining to watch in all forms. Yet, the characters are often black and white interpretations that force the viewer to strictly adhere to Mosco’s point of view.

This controlling vision is further demonstrated through the use of a projector and screen that offer images of O’Keefe’s paintings and photographs of her and characters in her life. The photographs are wonderful, but the goofy revisions of O’Keeffe’s paintings inexplicably break down the work and set its pieces into motion. The animations are often crude takes on the paintings; stark contrasts to the serious artist portrayed by Mosco. It is an odd decision to modify the final object when we are asked to sympathize so much with the artist’s independent vision.

Unlike the projector, the show’s other backdrop, a strip of blue sky with wispy clouds, is a stunningly simple evocation of space and limitlessness. Though obviously a screen on a stage, when the sky appears it seems to come into the fullness of being with O’Keeffe’s conception of it. In its simplicity, this screen achieves what the collaged details of the projection do not.

Director Robert Kalfin deftly moves the actors around the screens, wisely mining the rare interactions between them for all their comic and tragic worth. Yet, his strict dedication to Mosco’s script cannot help a production that is stilted and lacking nuance.

Unsurprisingly, the play’s initial claims turn out to be true: after hearing the history, the art is not better “seen,” nor is the artist. It is unclear why Mosco, a talented writer and performer, understanding the complications of biography, commits herself so enthusiastically to this straightforward, unenlightening format. To learn more about an artist one should see an exhibit; as Mosco’s character states: look at her work, not at her.

Life and Times

Founded in 1992, The Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America is a major presenter of dramatic material emphasizing Chinese history and the Chinese immigrant experience. Under the leadership of accomplished artistic director Joanna Chan, the theater has produced work important not just to the Asian American community, for which it serves a central role, but to the New York theater community as a whole. As an artist, Chan has written, adapted and directed over fifty productions that have enjoyed presentation across the globe. Chan’s latest play, Forbidden City West, produced by the Yangtze Rep and currently running at Theater for the New City, won’t count among its successes. Part bio-play, part book musical, part variety show, the production fails at achieving any semblance of stylistic unity or dramatic import.

Forbidden City West aims to tell the story of legendary Chinese-American performer Jadin Wong, who headlined at the San Francisco nightclub from which the play takes its title. Photographed on the cover of Life Magazine in 1940 and achieving international success at a time when Chinese-American performers seldom did, Wong came to symbolize the performative exoticism of the Orient for white America. Later in life, she ran a talent agency specializing in Asian-American actors, and in doing so became a mentor to new generations of Asian-American artists.

The real-life Jadin (pronounced jayDEEN) sounds like a compelling, complicated woman, but as portrayed by Debbie Wong (in her youth) and Ji Lian Wang (in her later years), she comes across as startlingly one-note. Wong’s Jadin is consistently spunky, confident, and a bit remorseful; Wang’s is kind, instructive, and a bit remorseful. The curiosity of the elder Jadin developing an accent that she never had in her youth is not nearly so troublesome as the fact that, though the production spans Jadin’s life from childhood well into her eighties, at no point do we see any real depth of character. The problem lies in large part with the script: though it depicts Jadin in a number of what ought to be high stakes situations (delivering her infant brother, parachuting into the black forest during WWII, fighting racism in the performance world), there are depressingly few moments of actual dramatic action. Without conflict or character development, Forbidden City West renders what must have been a fascinating life unnecessarily dull.

Although Forbidden City West bills itself as a musical, its songs (with music by Gregory Frederick and lyrics by Chan) seldom advance the plot. Instead, variety show-like, they provide musical interludes: a tap dance, an Italian aria, a comic karate number. Perhaps the numbers are intended as an homage to the nightclub from which the play takes its title, but even the full-company numbers fail to sparkle with the energy needed to justify their presence.

The play would benefit from a tighter focus on the life of its protagonist, but instead the slow-paced production meanders far and wide. Its scope includes numerous scenes of Jadin’s mother as a young girl (singing in Chinese and reading in English) and of immigrant Chinese men (complaining about the state of their world), which provide context but not much more. A single scene of each might suffice; instead they reappear throughout the production with little new to offer each time. Similarly, the elder Jadin’s relationship with an aspiring writer (he must learn to make his screenplays marketable rather than political) accomplish in four scenes what a cleaner script could accomplish in two.

It’s easy to understand why Chan felt drawn to create a production centered on the life of Jaydin Wong. Forbidden City West serves as a reminder that compelling source material isn’t enough to save a production.

Wrestling the Demon of Art

DADAnewyork's Brunch at the Luthers, the latest work by self-described "activist playwright" Misha Shulman, is a collection of "Dadaist" vignettes that purports "to explain the Western consciousness," whatever that is. According to the press release, said consciousness is "ruled by such surrealistic influences as Bush, Bin Laden, Trump, Hurricane Katrina, and the tragic situation in Africa." Because "what leads to wars is the strict adherence to logic," Shulman hopes to combat war with a Dadaist "assault on logic." Brunch at the Luthers starts somewhat promisingly with a quartet of actors, standing before music stands, chanting nonsense-words and nonsense-phrases in monotonous harmony, fascistically conducted by a man in a wig reminiscent of a signer of the Declaration of Independence or a British barrister. This would be better were the actors not conspicuously reading their lines from highlighted pages, or were the words less pretentious. "Wrestling a demon of art--Don't!" they bark.

In another piece, three women in bureaucratic suits investigate whether blood spilled on a floor is blood or water; how it got there; whose blood, if blood, it is, and whether it matters. Perhaps the terms reference Bin Laden's "your blood is blood and our blood is water" speech. Predictably, they don't discover how the blood -- if it is blood -- was indeed spilled, because they get distracted by semantics. This is the only real insight or intelligible idea that the play offers, but it's hardly original that bureaucracy can be deployed, deliberately or accidentally, to obscure atrocity. This piece is written by Normandy Raven Sherwood, also responsible for the set and costume design. Some of the other earlier vignettes were also authored by people other than Shulman.

Once we get to the main attraction, Shulman's depiction of a brunch party at the Luther household, a sense of deja vu sets in. Mr and Mrs Luther appear very similar to the M. and Mme. Martin (get it? Martin... Luther?) of Romanian Absurdist Eugene Ionesco's masterpiece The Bald Soprano, only much less entertaining.

Mr and Mrs Luther are preparing brunch for an acquaintance, "State Congressman" Mansfield, (a biologically female "undercover feminist" in a man's suit and necktie, identified by the playwright as "a riff on Hillary Clinton"), and Mansfield's "niece or nephew," Harlot Sierra O'Toul.

Ms or Mr O'Toul may or may not be coming to brunch, and is either an "erotic dancer" or an "exotic dancer." That "erotic" entertainment often gets billed as "exotic," or foreign, and vice versa is a good point, that might have been intriguingly explored at greater depth. The arrival of some guests, bearing gift bags containing decoy ducks and decorated with Hanukkah and Christmas imagery, calls into question the religion of the Luthers, and lets the audience know that symbols are to be distrusted and identities are unstable.

As the play meanders forward, cocoa is made, rubber duckies and feathers eaten, diners start quacking like ducks (after Ionesco's humans-turned-rhinoceri) and then O'Toul appears. Like Mansfield, she is a biological woman (apparently), with the poses and voice of a cross between 1950s fictional icons Betty Rizzo and Beebo Brinker. (The) Harlot does a garish, cross-eyed, ungainly "erotic/exotic" dance on an oriental carpet, suggesting the Jazz Age's "Salome dancers" who, while the causes for World War II materialized, capitalized of Jews, Muslims, "the Orient," sexuality, homosexuality, and women. Like King Herod -- arguably another Absurdist character, given his depiction in Wilde's Salome, Mr Luther gets noticeably hot and bothered. Then his wife and the other guests exclude him from the gathering, and the apartment, and form a conga circle themselves.

All of the actors except for Kroos, playing Mr Luther, speak in stiff, wooden voices and use body language that is exaggerated but lacks the discipline and clarity of intentional Expressionist-influenced acting, such as that seen in the work of Stephen Berkoff or, here in New York, Rabbit Hole Ensemble. The blocking is nonsensical: in one scene, actors stand directly in front of others who are talking.

This "activist" play does not shed any light on how "logic" causes wars. That is a shame, because I really wanted to find out how that works. The most infamous wars, it seems, are caused by a regime's own "assault on logic." In order to keep the wholly irrational institution of race-based slavery, pre-Civil-War American politicians had to rape the logic of the European Enlightenment philosophy that informs the Declaration of Independence in order to craft a Constitution where all men are created equal, but some are counted as only three-fifths of a person.

In the pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler crafted an entire belief system based on inherently illogical principles, then ruthlessly silenced or drove out almost everyone who tried to subject it to the cold fire of logic. World War II broke out because, after a good while of this and many millions of deaths, reason needed to be restored. Lastly, the Bush administration has failed to give a consistent logical explanation for having started the present war in Iraq. This is probably because they never had one.

To sum up, Brunch at the Luthers is a piece of self-indulgent pretentious rubbish. However, if you like Dada -- or, rather, Shulman's idea of Dada -- these words should not deter you from seeing it, because reason is oppressive, and language deceptive and meaningless.

Tortured Souls

You pretty much can’t throw a rock in New York without hitting a marquis advertising an Iraq-themed film or play. While Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End echoes a few notes we’ve heard before, it achieves a level of grace and beauty that is rare among current artistic efforts. It is refreshing to have a show that is poetic without being preachy. Three absolutely enthralling actors deliver one roughly 30-minute monologue apiece and their words paint an exceptionally vivid picture of the far reaches of the war. The characters are Lynndie England, the American soldier photographed next to tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, David Kelly, the British weapons inspector who allegedly killed himself after revealing that his government exaggerated the threat of WMDs, and Nerhjas Al Saffarh, a Communist who was tortured along with her children by Saddam Hussein’s secret police. In the play notes, Thompson admits that news accounts of these figures were merely a springboard for her fictionalized imaginings of them.

This format doesn’t work so well with the portrait of England. Perhaps it is because this scandal is so well known and Thompson goes for the easy explanation. Her sketch of England is extremely similar to the popularized caricature of the American soldier: ignorant white trash whose violent impulses are suddenly given free reign.

Although this character may lack a third dimension, actress Teri Lamm smoothly conveys all sides to the Private: cocky soldier, defensive scapegoat, senseless hick, and even scorned lover. On its own, the monologue is an interesting exploration of a person who is just a devilish face and a thumbs-up to many of us. But after being wowed by the other exceptional stories in the play, it pales by comparison.

The play shifts into higher gear with David Kelly. He’s already dying when we meet him. Rocco Sisto offers a wonderfully reserved performance as a soft-spoken scientist. The playwright depicts Kelly as a wise, yet self-consciously cowardly man. He offers poignant deathbed observations (“When we are young, our death is impossible... Part of the... salve of aging, is that our death starts to make a sort of sense”) and equal amounts of justification and condemnation of the lies he agreed to tell. When he speaks of how soldiers murdered an Iraqi family he’d befriended, Sisto makes Kelly so full of shame that he can’t reach an adequate volume. It ends up sounding like he’s telling a bedtime story, which makes his tale all the more horrifying.

The lyricism of Thompson’s work is best showcased in the final monologue, delivered by a phenomenal Heather Raffo. She is a charm-machine with a motherly grin and playful demeanor (her jabs at linguistic differences between English and Arabic are adorable).

However, there is a weathered quality to Raffo’s delivery that hints at something darker. We find the root of this is Al Saffarh’s visit to the eponymous Palace of the End, a former castle transformed into a torture compound by Hussein. Her explanation of the ordeal she endured with her young sons is saturated with pride and pain, but never fear. She smiles as she recalls how her oldest was forced to watch her rape: “His eyes looked into my eyes only. So wise for fifteen.”

Thompson frames Al Saffarh’s entire account through a maternal lens. She makes for a fine domestic counterpoint to the belligerent England, who, in spite of her fatigue-covered baby bump, has no qualms singing out, “Flyin low and feeling mean. Find a family by the stream. Pick ‘em off and hear ‘em scream, Napalm sticks to kids.”

Al Saffarh remembers being pregnant when she was captured. She admits initially thinking that her captors would spare her because their culture would not permit the killing of a pregnant woman or a child. This is not the case. Kelly and England similarly expect for their people to protect them, but receive a harsh awakening as they are destroyed by their own sides. England is portrayed as a scapegoat for the Army and as an unfortunate product of a violent culture, while Kelly is bullied and threatened (and possibly killed, according to some theories) by the British government. It is a fitting touch for a play that demands that you look inward and question your own culpability.

Three's Company

A Perfect Couple, Brooke Behrman's sharp new play, is currently running at the DR2 Theatre under the auspices of WET, where Sasha Eden and Victoria Pettibone produce a single fully mounted production a year. For a theater aiming to improve representation of women in the arts, A Perfect Couple is a perfect choice. The production opens to Emma (Annie McNamara), alone onstage, fixing breakfast in her best friends’ kitchen (designed with elegant simplicity by Neil Patel). When Isaac (James Waterston) stumbles in, Emma plops berries into his mouth; when Amy (Dana Eskelson) enters, she rests her arms on Emma’s shoulders. Under the smart direction of Maria Mileaf, the affectionate intimacy with which the good friends reach for one another is less a form of flirtation than of familiarity.

If McNamara works a bit too hard at playing the quirky, perpetually single city girl, maybe it’s because Emma herself is performing that role for her domesticated friends. As twenty-somethings in Manhattan, the threesome led similar lives. Now, as they reach 40, Amy and Isaac have become engaged and moved upstate. They worry that Emma is lonely and outgrowing her urban life; Emma worries that as they befriend couples and families, she’ll no longer be included. But A Perfect Couple is not simply a story of friends with divergent lives caught in a game of city mouse/ country mouse.

Over the course of the weekend, they find themselves questioning not just how they can maintain relevance in each other’s lives, but how they have fit together throughout their shared history. The title of the play alludes not only to the notion of a perfectly matched pair (which could refer to any coupling of characters), but to “perfect” in the numeric sense of the word: a perfect couple means exactly two.

Their lives, the friends realize, have never been so simple. Amy worries that 15 years ago Emma and Isaac were in love (even if they didn’t know it), and maybe are still (even if they don’t know it). It’s unclear whether she is more distressed by the possibility that her fiancé loves her best friend or that her best friend is closer to her fiancé than to her. So invested are they in one another that extricating the details of who means what to whom proves almost impossible.

In a lesser play, the hinted infidelities would be fully realized. Emma and Isaac would have an affair and someone (anyone) would make out with the cute, considerably younger boy next door (Elan Moss-Bachrach, who nails the easy charm and chillaxed confidence of a male liberal arts grad). What separates A Perfect Couple from less sophisticated scripts a la Sex and the City is its refusal to indulge in easy payoff.

Instead, the would-be trysts remain remote, not only un-acted upon, but nearly unacknowledged. It’s a lovely if risky choice that will frustrate audience members who prefer explicit action to circular discussion fueled by fraught emotional conflict. Tensions arise as much from the course the characters’ lives have taken as from the courses they haven’t. The hesitancy and confusion with which they approach a crucial juncture of their lives is as heartbreaking as it is intelligent.

Coming of age following the sexual revolution of the 60’s and the consciousness-raising of the 70’s, the characters spent their young adulthood enjoying the relaxed gender roles and independence of twenty-something Manhattanites at the end of the 20th century. “We didn’t have anything else to do besides be together,” recalls Amy of their all-day Sunday brunches, "All three of us. We were falling in love."

The play spares audiences an academic lecture on third-wave feminism, instead allowing Amy and Emma to casually compare their lives to their mothers (whom they agree have not ended up well) and the women of their mothers' generation (whose options were perhaps less complicated, if more codified). Yet even as their freewheeling young adulthood has left them uncertain how to transition into a middle-age with traditional adult relationships, they look back on it fondly.

“The three of us were a pair,” says Emma, “For a while.” Times change.

Ex Machina, Into History

Everyone knows that film actors like to go on crusades, especially if they're unlikely to go down in history as brilliant actors. Brigitte Bardot tries to prevent the murder of animals, Charlton Heston campaigned to prevent the prevention of the murder of people, and 1940s screen siren Hedy Lamarr invented Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) to prevent the Nazis from winning World War II, and tried to get the US government to consider using it. Yes, really. If you want to learn the true story of how Lamarr invented FHSS, and what subsequently happened to her creation, Frequency Hopping, written and directed by Elyse Singer, reveals all. Frequency Hopping is especially memorable for its impressive array of new media, by production and media designer Elaine J. McCarthy. This ranges from computer animation projected on scrims, swathing the actors in two-dimensional images and popping them into the landscapes of gigantic 1940s photographs, to the incidental music, which emanates from several large player-pianos, without a human musician in sight. The latter is provided by Eric Singer's LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, programmed by Paul Lehrmann of the Ballet Mecanique Project. Anyone interested in the use of technology in theatre should go see this show: in this regard, it is inspiring and challenging. In the 1950s, on live radio, Lamarr's sometime confidant, revolutionary Hollywood composer George Antheil, reminisces about his involvement with Lamarr. What exactly was its nature? Was Antheil the star's lover, or did they share something more extraordinary? When the two met, Antheil was supplementing his composer's fees by peddling disturbing quackery about "endocrinology" that sounds like eugenics. (He thinks that a certain endocrinological profile makes "men like Wilde and da Vinci" gay.) Lamarr wants to enlarge her breasts using hormones. Once she's gotten a diagnosis out of Antheil, she tells him that really she wants his help with her hobby: "making secret weapons." An exemplar of geek glamour in Angela M. Kahler's elegant, dignified period costumes and J. Janas and R. Greene's naturalistic, historically accurate wigs, Newhouse's Lamarr soon invents FHSS -- and discovers that sexism in Hollywood and Washington is more powerful than the best frequency-jamming apparatus.

Singer's exploration of Lamarr and Antheil's shared belief in the power of their imaginations to harness technology to create beauty and preserve life is truly revolutionary. Such optimism is rare in science fiction, which tends to be dominated by predictions of technological dystopia, and absolutely needs to be explored more thoroughly in our culture. The California-based STAGE award, which recognizes and provides development for plays about science and technology, should help. As the New York Times reported, Frequency Hopping went through a lengthy and, Singer admitted, energy-sapping process of "play development" before STAGE gave it the recognition that in part allows us to see it today.

While Frequency Hopping is interesting, it also frustratingly sounds like a very innovative engineering lecture rather than a human drama. The plethora of technological bells and whistles does not help: rather, it competes with the actors. When Lamarr (Erica Newhouse) and Antheil (Joseph Urla) endearingly play, like children, that they are a torpedo and an airplane, this could have been a moment of great theatricality. Unfortunately, a computer-animated airplane and torpedo appear on the scrims; flight paths zoom around them in glowing loops of dashes, and mock the merely human actors' attempts to suggest machines in flight. In another scene, news footage of Nazis marching in a parade loses its power to frighten by being shown partially in reverse, and to jaunty electronic music, making it seem as if the goose-stepping storm-troopers are actually a troupe of dancers.

These two scenes reveal what is right and wrong with Frequency Hopping. The technology, and the story of a technological breakthrough, is compelling, accessible, and magical. I loved the concept, and wanted to love its execution. However, the scenery-chewing technology -- onstage and in the exposition -- often drowns out the humanity. That is a shame, because it was Lamarr and Antheil's humanity, as well as their scientific curiosity and technical know-how, that inspired them to apply their scientific curiosity to combat the most inhumane technocracy the world has ever known.

Shifty is Nifty

Shifty villains indeed abound in All Kinds of Shifty Villains, Disgraced Productions’s delightful if rather two-dimensional film noir spoof, now playing at the Kraine Theater. So does a silent, affable, rubber-limbed circus clown in a red nose. But is the clown a villain? And are the villains of the noir world – the femme fatale, the ambitious maniac, the cops and robbers – actually a carload of sad clowns? All Kinds of Shifty Villains, scripted by Robert Attenweiler and directed by Rachel Klein, asks these questions, none too seriously. The answers they come up with are more fun than a phone booth full of Maltese Falcons. This is the kind of noir story that opens with a hardboiled, womanizing private eye, Max Quarterhorse, gamely played by Joe Stipek. As the San Francisco fog lifts, Quarterhorse is trying to quit smoking and drinking because, among other reasons, the local police precinct has banned these pastime. The cops don’t want it to "turn into a graveyard” or “a drunk tank.” While they’re worrying about atmosphere and sobriety, a lunatic is planting bombs around the city, a femme fatale has a secret, Quarterhorse’s secretary, “the kid,” desperately wants him to realize that she’s a woman, and a matronly arms dealer’s pair of thuggish sons face an agonizing decision: cereal for breakfast, or whisky?

As deftly directed by Klein, the physical comedy is broad, balletic, and reminiscent of the Marx brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Each member of the ensemble cast has developed a specific body language for his or her character, which makes up for the deliberately cardboard characterizations.

Attenweiler's dialogue is often raucous with whimsical absurdism. "You came here for something," one of the thug brothers accuses Quarterhorse, "and something can turn into prison bars, just as cereal can turn into whisky." Some jokes, however, are tired and predictable. The woman who wants to be kidnapped because it’s the only way to indulge her rope fetish isn’t surprising at first, and gets less interesting the longer the gag (no pun intended) is played out. When Attenweiler gets the absurdities of the noir genre right, he gets them very right. "Max is sure" that a bomb "is on the roof!" one cop shouts at another. “Right!” the other cop replies, “We'll check the rest of the building!"

Lisa Soverino's lighting design aptly creates the dim spaces and chiaroscuro of the films. Emily Taradash's costumes look like Halloween costume knockoffs of classic 1930s-40s attire. The costumes impressively survive what must be the considerable stress of circus-style performance.

Noir is built on suspense, and sometimes this play is too silly and too loosely structured to have any. The action goes on for quite some time after the last bomb threat is neutralized, and the characters are not fully developed enough to incite anxiety as to whether they will find fulfillment as well as safety. This is largely the same kind of trouble that weakens Broadway’s otherwise brilliant and funny vintage-film spoof Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Like its bumbling cops, All Kinds of Shifty Villains doesn’t look into anything too deeply, but is certainly amusing.