Lofty Dreams

One of the American poet Randall Jarrell’s (1914-1965) fears was that he would only be remembered for his famous five-line poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The world has proved him prophetic. Anna Moench has even written an entire play, with five scenes, corresponding to those haunting lines: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”

A ball turret gunner was a crewmember of a B-17 or B-24 bomber who was literally encased, upside down, for up to 12 hours at a time, in a plexiglas shell, and charged with defending the bomber from fighters attacking below.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner centers around a character named...Randall! (Mike James) who actually volunteers to serve as a ball turret gunner. Major characters include his mother (Raquel Cion), who wants young Randall to comprehend the futility and hypocrisy of war, and decline to fight; his sister, Susan, who, penniless, rides in boxcars to escape life at home; and Gene, a fellow crew member from Kansas with a good heart and weak stomach. Azhar Khan, who doubles as Gene and Randall’s deadbeat Dad, is the standout actor among this group, with impressive range and conviction.

The 50-minute play may have too-lofty ambitions. The promotional materials for The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner boast that the play transcends “realism and history.” And, according to Ms. Moench’s statement, the play will “further problematize the ongoing conflicts that continue to define our world” and “deconstruct a war narrative.” While the play (once again, in its own promotional material) attempts to draw a parallel with the current war in Iraq, that correspondence is not at all apparent.

It is arguable whether those goals have been, or can be, met, but suffice it to say that The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is a solid, often dream-like, experimental performance piece.

The play explores the reasons why a person--but, in particular, why Randall -- decides to go to war. The imaginative staging includes an extremely talented seven piece “orchestral/rock hybrid ensemble” and interesting choreography that, among other things, attempts to simulate—not always successfully—battle.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is an entertaining work that needn’t pretend to be more than it is: a story about a young man’s untimely death and the personal forces and dreams that brought it to bear.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC).

Pills and Thrills

Kaboom is a far-fetched rollercoaster of crazy, unbridled Fringe Festival fun. But be warned; it tries its hardest to be offensive and would likely be disappointed if you weren’t. Written by Michael Small, who based much of his premise on the fifteen years he spent working for PEOPLE magazine, Kaboom is both a raunchy comedy and a pop culture commentary with the obligatory jabs at Hollywood’s most jabbable celebrities.

But at the heart of this madcap production is a more straightforward story about a barely competent scam artist named Rodney (Ray Wills) and his thoroughly incompetent stooge, Bobo (Jim Barry). Rodney’s latest ploy is to scam people into buying an extremely potent sex pill that may or may not deliver the advertised effects. His plans are foiled when Bobo accidentally sets fire to their secret warehouse destroying all but six of the pills. In order to recoup his losses before a loan repayment is due, Rodney must recruit an array of gullible individuals to help him build a pyramid scam that will generate $300,000 in one day.

These individuals include a bicycle delivery girl desperately seeking instant Idol like fame (Laura Daniel), a world famous Lithuanian kazoo player (John Di Domenico) a closeted gay television host (Tyler Hollinger), and a new-age yoga teacher (Kristen Cerelli) who spends her days meditating on finding a more endowed husband.

In Act One, a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and mistaken identities set the stage for an explosive confrontation in Act Two. Four characters that Rodney has been scamming in four different ways are all about to confront him at exactly the same time. Chaos and farce ensues. Rodney attempts to sooth one individual’s hysteria while hiding two others under the bed and beneath a pile of laundry.

Kaboom is supplied with a wonderfully animated cast, all of whom seem practiced and comfortable in the art of comedy. They have perfect timing for delivering a punchline and waiting patiently for the hilarity to ripple through the audience.

But most importantly, the actors seem to be having a good time with their roles. The production has an infectious energy, and feels very much at home in the New York Fringe Festival.

Kaboom is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Scrambled Hamlet

Bound in a Nutshell, named after the famous line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the clear early hits of this year’s Fringe Festival. A one-act adaptation of Hamlet, every word is Shakespeare’s own, but those words are juggled in distinctive ways to fuel this new tale, an adaptation by Gregory Wolfe and Moonwork, Inc. Some familiar characters—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Laertes—are missing here, but others are given their words. It’s as if Hamlet were a textual Rubik’s Cube that can be re-organized in new fascinating, ways; Wolfe and his cohorts do so ingeniously. For instance, Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy comes at the end of the play rather than the middle; yet, in this exciting modification, it does not seem at all out of place.

Mr. Wolfe and co-adaptor Gregory Sherman (who also plays the part of Horatio) re-imagine the tragedy of Hamlet in a modern-day dungeon, replete with orange jumpsuits, interrogation rooms, electroshock torture, security cameras and closed circuit television. Hamlet, abused by Claudius’ guards, is being compelled to confess for the murder of Polonius and defend himself against charges of madness.

All of the leading characters have a wealth of Shakespearean credits under their belts and infuse the bard’s words with modern day inflections and nuances which make them easy to understand. Someone wholly unfamiliar with the play could still follow the action and comprehend most of what is happening onstage. Chris Haas, as Hamlet, seemed to have trouble projecting in the first production, but grew quickly comfortable in his role. His athleticism and agility made his confrontations with his captors all the more realistic.

Andrew Sherman’s musical composition and James Wolfe's technical displays are, quite fittingly, ominous and loud. Brant Thomas Murray’s lighting is fierce at times, blinding the characters with appropriately intimidating spotlights.

Mr. Wolfe and his Moonwork production company certainly know their Shakespeare. To have mastered it well enough to selectively craft a separate yet related tale such that it stands on its own demonstrates an impressive command and delight in the text.

This is not the Hamlet you will recall from high school and college; yet, you will remember much of the dialogue, because it’s all here, re-arranged in a new but nonetheless useful and entertaining way.

Bound in a Nutshell is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC).

Life with Pop

With plotlines culled from the animated Popeye cartoon, Sailor Man depicts the curious love triangle between the Sailor Man (Ryan Iverson), the Brute (Scott Peterman), and Olive (Lauren Blumfeld). Yet as conceived by Iverson and Peterman, the scrappy sailor signifies a darker hold on the American psyche than Saturday morning escapism. A live action performance drained of Popeye’s musical score and whimsical sensibility, Sailor Man grapples with the violence at the heart of the sailor’s story. Although publicity materials stress that the project executes would-be cartoon violence through realism and liken the violence and womanizing that form the crux of the story to a Sam Shepard play, under the smooth direction of Peter James Cook, Sailor Man maintains much of the cartoonish style of its source material. Speaking in thirties-esque staccato and dressed in costume designer Arija Weddle’s fat suits and sailor hats, the actors are effectively reminiscent of their cartoon prototypes.

The play differs from the cartoon in its gleefully brutal depiction of the violence at the story’s core. Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum’s extensive fight choreography draws squeals of horror from the audience; fake blood abounds. Fans of Popeye, and anyone who delights in twisted portrayals of childhood icons, will be tickled.

When we first meet the characters, the Sailor Man and the Brute vie for Olive’s hand in marriage – by beating each other senseless. “To the victor go the spoils,” grunts the Brute to Olive, who acquiesces with a bat of her eyelashes. The second segment of the play has the men compete in a formal boxing competition – though their strategies for success defy the rules of organized athletic events.

If the play’s first segment comments on the degradation of courtship rituals and the second on the base aggression behind competitive sports, the third and final segment renders the creators’ intentions most clear: a game to see which man can execute the most amusing “trick” for Olive quickly dissolves into everyone thrashing everyone else. The joke, always, comes when a seemingly cute amusement (a magic trick with a vase of flowers; a coin behind Olive’s ear) ends up a thinly veiled ruse for an expression of violence. The implications are apt.

Sailor Man is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Good Grief

Waiting: A Play in Phases is the sort of production audiences have come to expect from the New York International Fringe Festival: a short show by a group of thoughtful young artists who want to say something important and have fun while they’re at it. In Waiting, the important subject is grief, and Gia Marotta’s script tackles the weighty topic with welcome whimsy. The project involves three thematically linked segments, the first of which, Vigil, features Erin Maya Darke as Clara, a quirky girl in a funeral home, reading aloud amusing facts about death. Darke’s Clara feels familiar, the kind of teenage girl who draws vampires in the margins of her papers and still get’s A’s on them; her pretense of pained dejection does little to hide her earnestness. That balance is a pleasure to watch, although under the direction of Chloe Bass, the monologue tends toward inappropriate preciousness. Marotta’s script is strong enough for audiences to pick up on the tenderness beneath Clara’s quirky, dispassionate recitation of morbid anecdotes; slowing the pace of her smart thoughts turns them into sugary sanctimony.

Similar preciousness gets in the way of The Vist, the play’s final, most complex phase. It tells the story of Elizabeth, a young woman in deep mourning played by a grounded Jennifer Lauren Brown, as she encounters An Unflappable Bureaucratic Woman, played by an energetically stylized if one-note Jamie Klassel, and the Easter Bunny (Joe Kolbow who, dressed in a full bunny suit and converse sneakers, lends the scene its whimsical warmth). The Bunny and the Bureaucrat hope to sell the bereaved woman her grief in an egg (“there is no shame in commodifying the unfathomable”), but the production’s precious tendencies (tearful inward monologues and dramatically pointed references to mourning) interfere with the script’s whimsy while failing to clearly render its interesting conceit.

The well-placed middle phase, Memorial, is the simplest and strongest of the production: Alexandria LaPorte stands in a spotlight, posed in a black and white polka dot dress, while her prerecorded voice recites a long, bubbly MySpace profile. Partway through the recitation, the light dims and LaPorte exits; her disembodied voice continues its exuberant list of interests. The sharp dramatic realization of seeing a dead friend’s social networking page best embodies the production’s aim of understanding grief in the digital age. It will resonate with audiences who have had that eerie, strangely friendly experience.

Waiting is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Another Antigone

“What you’re about to see is an adaptation of an adaptation of a translation,” says a character at the beginning of Rising Phoenix Rep’s terrific new Fringe play Too Much Memory, although arguably he could go still further and call it an adaptation of a translation of an adaptation of a translation: the script, by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson, who also directs, is based on French playwright Jean Anouih’s Antigone, itself an adaptation of the Sophocles classic. Reddin and Gibson have condensed the epic drama into a taught hour and ten minutes, incorporating texts from an array of literary and political sources (Richard Nixon, Tom Hayden, Peter Brook, Anne Carson, Pablo Neruda, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt). Yet the production is not a collage; they’ve sewn the diverse source material into a tightly packed, seamlessly cohesive plot.

Though the play is set in the present, the one-man chorus (professorial Martin Moran) notes that differences exist between “the present” and “contemporary.” The production’s tendency to dig at such compellingly perplexing ideas without dwelling on them for more than half a second is among its strongest assets, and perhaps relates to its perpetual present tense (to say nothing if its contemporary sensibility).

The focused cast lends vulnerability and compassion to each of the tragedy’s furious players, but the real show-down occurs in the scenes that pit Antigone (Laura Heisler) and against Creon (Peter Jay Fernandez). She’s a young, passionate rebel, he’s a distinguished, passionate statesman; both have the courage of their convictions in extraordinary doses. Their scenes are at once intelligent and breathless.

Given that the greatest differences between the two opposed characters are their worldviews and generations, it's interesting that Rising Pheonix chose to present Too Much Memory during a summer in which mainstream media is marveling at youth activism as though it's just discovered it. How far inside or outside a political system must young people go in order to have their passions acknowledged? Antigone’s temperate sister Ismene (Aria Alpert) becomes, in this production, a sort of storyteller in its sole, pointed use of mixed media.

At the outset of the production, the Chorus comments that, budgetary restraints not withstanding, contemporary directors have a host of media available to them in their depictions of classics. “We have that freedom, but” he says, “I think we also have an obligation. To speak up.” Too Much Memory uses a multitude of sources speak up in a voice all its own: adaptation at its richest.

Too Much Memory is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Not Your Mom's Variety Show Or Is It

With its glitzy burlesque, stunning acrobatics, bawdy jokes, and graying audience, Absinthe, the latest offering at South Street Seaport’s Speigelworld tent, makes for a bizarre mish-mash of an extravaganza. If New York’s burgeoning downtown burlesque scene gained an advertising budget that allowed it to attract a Bridge and Tunnel crowd, or if Cirque du Soleil forsook its insistence on aesthete seriousness for a self-effacing sense of humor, the result might look something like Absinthe. But not quite. The contradictions that make up Absinthe – intimate grandeur, grotesque athleticism, upscale striptease – would be highly difficult to replicate under different circumstances. As it is, the set-up often feels strained: the Gazillionare, who plays filthy rich ring leader of the sketchy circus, and his sweetly off-kilter assistant Penny emcee the production while trying hard to elicit interaction from the audience, with no subject off limits. That the audience is mostly white is a source of much banter; that the audience would perhaps look more at home seeing a tepid spectacle a la Disney on Broadway is hinted at through a recurring slew of curious references to The Lion King.

About the most reminiscent absinthe gets of Disney’s family friendly fare, however, occurs in the number On Air (performed by Geneviève and Maxime of Duo Ssens), a romantic trapeze routine set to a recording of Can You Feel the Love Tonight – though their routine is more sensual than any rumored secret still embedded in a Disney movie. Other sexy acrobatic pairings include Strip, featuring Duo Sergio (Sergey Petrov and Sergey Dubovyk), who wear matching cotton briefs while performing acrobatic stunts; if the Big Apple Circus’ Huesca brothers embraced their homoeroticism, their work might look like this. A similarly breathtaking pairing, the misnomer Finale, occurs at the close of the first act, and features a fifties-esque roller routine by The Willers (“roller-skating acrobats” Jean-Pierre and Wanda Poissonnet).

It’s tempting to call Absinthe a cabaret, but, save for a few belted renditions of ballads sung by catsuit-clad Kaye Tuckerman, musical acts are few and far between; accompaniment is always canned. The presence of a band would enhance the show tremendously; watching the production, it’s hard not to long for one.

Instead, the emphasis of Absinthe is squarely on banter and bodies, both of which provide stunning entertainment. The terrifically weird Julie Atlas Muz is especially great in Moon River, a burlesque act involving an enormous rubbery bubble that manages to be reminiscent of both Glinda the Good Witch and a pregnancy ultrasound, but sexy. Really.

This year marks the traveling Spiegelworld’s third summer in New York, and its second featuring the Absinthe variety show. The performance runs an hour and forty-five minutes, and fans who want to make a full night of the event can pair the show with dinner and drinks at Speigelworld’s restaurant and bar (though be warned, pricey drinks match the steep tickets) or catch another production in the Spiegeltent, which houses several shows a night (some produced by Spiegelworld, others by local groups like the New York International Fringe Festival). For a decadent night of bawdy glamor, there is literally nothing like it.

An Interminable Wait

Anais Nin won't be the only one waiting around for what seems an eternity if you go to see this Fringe Festival play at the Connelly Theater in the East Village. Despite valiant efforts on the part of several actors, and good overall production value, Anais Nin Goes To Hell is ultimately bogged down by its script and its 2-hour long length. Part of the problem with the play is its ambition. The press materials state, "David Stallings’ new comedy... explores the question of whether Sartre was right and hell really is other people, or whether we carry around our potential for damnation or salvation within ourselves."

To this end, like Caryl Churchill's Top Girls , Stallings' puts Queen Victoria, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Heloise (a 12th century nun), and Grecian Princess Andromedea together on an purgatorial island, ostensibly to wait for all eternity for their men to arrive.

The endless wait is punctuated by the arrival on the island of 20th century erotica writer and psychoanalyst Anais Nin, and shortly thereafter, by Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.

The result is a talky and touchy-feely existential play that traces topics like sex, feminism and "the love that dare not speak its name" over gaps of many centuries. While this is an interesting premise, it does not succeed in execution. There are only rare moments when the audience is brought to care about a character, as is the case with Joan of Arc (a talented Colleen Piquette).

The script, though heavy-handed in psychoanalytic mirror imagery, is not entirely devoid of humor. In particular, Madalyn McKay as Queen Victoria and Jeremy King as Lord Alfred Douglas help to buoy the show and move the plot along. Shelly Feldman delivers as solid turn as Anais Nin.

Anais Nin Goes to Hell is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

A Lot of Nerve

Susan Bernfield is scared of everything. She fears both the uncertainty of life and the unpredictability of the people in it. In her one-woman show, Tiny Feats of Cowardice, she explains the depth of these fears through a musical collage of thematically arranged monologues. A three-person band accompanies Bernfield onstage playing a soundtrack composed by Rachel Peters. Peters' music underscores the moments in Bernfield’s life that are barely noteworthy to us, but deeply paralyzing to her.

In her opening, Bernfield remarks that the themes have been organized in a very specific, purposeful manner. Unfortunately, the topic of the next piece tends to get lost when the transition becomes too frenzied. This is the type of play where the line between reality and fiction is easily blurred, and though Bernfield is playing a timid character, the actress herself appears to be legitimately nervous. She hurries through many of her sentences and at times can not be heard above the band.

But a one-person show could scare even the bravest of souls, and it is evident that Bernfield is proud of herself just for daring to command that spotlight

She plays a twelve-, twenty-, and thirty-year-old version of herself, switching from one personality to the next in a matter of minutes. Her demeanor does not change dramatically as she moves from child to adulthood, but the actress emotes such a youthful energy that it feels right for her character.

This piece has a fast, friendly energy and Bernfield nicely establishes an intimate, informal rapport with her audience. She does apologize beforehand for a 9-11 monologue, and is right to be uncertain. The monologue feels out of place and derails the spunky, upbeat mood that is the heart of her work.

Though Bernfield admits she is excessive in her fears, she touches on little things that have at one time or another plagued us all, from riding a horse (how does it know where it’s going?), to the finality of sealing an envelope. But Bernfield says it best in one of her final monologues: out of all her many fears, the most daunting one of all is exposing her soul on a stage.

Tiny Feats of Cowardice is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Pretty as a Picture

The aims of a playwright are not so different from those of a painter—both endeavor to present a representation of life that is viewed through the prism of their ideals. In Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, Joel Gross has crafted such a richly imagined portrait of the life of the Queen, a friend, and their lover, that it’s easy to forget one’s history. With exquisite performances from the actors, the viewer is drawn into this fictional microcosm—a portrait in miniature that allows Gross to tell a sweeping tale that covers 20 years of the Queen’s life, leading up to the Revolution. If the ways in which history is bent to the interest of the artist are a bit too perfect, the flawless acting and the grace of the direction make it seem natural. After all, such perfection is expected, and admired, in a work of art. In Gross’s story, Marie is a pawn in the perverse love games of two manipulators: Elisabeth Louise Vigee le Brun, a beautiful young portraitist, and Count Alexis de Ligne, an ironic liberal. At the start of the play, Elisabeth, played with cruel flippancy by Samantha Ives, is seeking to gain royal favor to further her career. The opening scene sketches and nearly fills in her character: a charming, witty, but highly insensitive woman of low birth. The unevenness of the character—sometimes malicious, at other times tearful, gives Ms. Ives occasional trouble, but overall she manages Elisa’s mood swings and her impressive self-importance adroitly.

As Elisa paints she spars with her more-than subject, the Count, whom she mocks for his nobility. Their early flirtations humorously establish the tensions that will later tear them, and France, apart. At this point, however, class is the butt of every joke, and Elisa commands each punch line. Until Marie Antoinette, the 19-year-old Queen of France shows up, occasionally interfering, but also unintentionally fulfilling the painter and the Count’s designs. Though guileless and woefully stupid, the seemingly innocent Queen upsets the relations between the duo, setting in motion a dangerous ménage et trois that imperils them all.

As Marie, Amanda Jones is perfectly regal and excitingly free. In particular, in a scene in which Marie details the horrors of her deflowering by her husband, Louis XVI, Jones is as lovely as a portrait and yet refuses to remain still—she is the buzzing center of energy around which the other characters revolve. And despite her flaws, her girlish infatuations, and her ignorance, Jones’s Marie is quite sympathetic.

In rendering Marie as a hopelessly and helplessly sweet person Gross uses his boldest strokes. By making Marie sympathetic (a trait that emphasizes the wicked guile of those who use her), his queen is the victim. At one point Elisa says Marie was “born to be devoured by the mob.” Her friends who have likewise devoured her are therefore responsible for setting her downfall in motion.

Of course, with such a pathetic Marie at its center, the play gives little credit to what the Queen refers to as “the rabble.” The mob beyond Versailles is given voice through Alexis (an admirably game Jonathan Kells Phillips), who is made out to be an idealistic fool. By extension, the Revolution is represented as chaotic folly. While Marie falls victim to the intriguers, the revolting peasants are lawless monsters who cruelly mock the imprisoned Marie by giving her funeral flowers. Gross reverses the traditional caricature: while Marie is a fleshed out character with a range of emotions (not reduced to one fateful line), the peasantry is a faceless mob making impossible demands and baseless accusations.

Director Robert Kalfin puts the finishing touches on Gross’s portrait by placing his actors within frames onstage, with appropriately dramatic lighting and posturing. The audience’s gaze lingers the exquisite details of court life, specifically the costumes, designed by T. Michael Hall, which are gorgeous representations of the sumptuousness Elisa endeavors to capture on canvas.

In keeping with Gross’s tightly woven narrative, he uses controlling metaphors to emphasize the play’s themes. At its height, the era’s elegance is reflected in an impeccably dressed and mannered (i.e. silent) footman (Hugo Salazar, Jr.) who gracefully introduces characters and scenes. As the terror mounts, the footman becomes increasingly surly until he finally tosses off his powdered wig in anger. Standing in for the disgruntled peasantry, the footman is a simple means of representing the emotions of the lower class.

This representation underscores the focus of the show: the peasants are the unseen and unknown beyond the palace. Far more important to this story are the rises and falls of Marie’s temperament, and status. Though the victimization of Marie, and the opportunism of both Elisa and the playwright, can be frustrating given the historical context, the play is a touching, humorous portrait of the things in its frame.

Beat Down

The revival of Tom O’Neil’s Kerouac opens auspiciously. As a frenetic jazz track plays in the background, we observe the fabled writer of On the Road and other tales of the Beat Generation, typing feverishly at a Royal manual typewriter. The play’s program promises appearances by Jack Kerouac’s fascinating colleagues, partners in crime and fellow travelers, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. This reunion has all the makings of a juicy and captivating spectacle. Unfortunately, even at only an hour long, Kerouac quickly becomes tedious and ultimately fails to satisfy. The play takes place on the evening of Kerouac’s death. Though appearing much younger and far less weathered than the 47-year-old author would have looked in October 1969, actor John William Schiffbauer certainly fits the romantic, idealized part. Handsome, wearing summer loungewear and casual slacks, he resembles the youthful version of the writer in many of the photographs that survive.

As Kerouac retches from cirrhosis of the liver in his final hours, the ghosts of Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and even a prostitute named "Red" appear to him. While Cassady pre-deceased Kerouac by some 20 months, Ginsberg didn’t actually die until 1997, so perhaps these ghosts are more accurately projections of Kerouac’s alcohol-drenched imagination.

Whatever they are, these projections sure do have bones to pick with the dying beatnik and with each other, and Kerouac has some choice words for them as well. Ceaselessly rehashing old and fairly well-documented rows, the characters berate each other for wasting prodigious talents, sleeping with each other’s lovers, being poseurs and posturers, being “full of crap,” and on and on, ad nauseum. Occasionally, the characters are given lines that seem more appropriate for the 1980s or even later. For example, at one point Cassady improbably utters, in something like valley speak, “Oh…my…Gawd!”

Casandera M.J. Lollar’s costume design works well for Schiffbauer but Halleluyah Walcott as Neal Cassady and Adam Thomas Smith as Allen Ginsberg resemble models from a J. Crew catalog, gearing up for a casual Friday at the office. Justin Field’s lighting is appropriately dim, like a jazz club or a lonely room, and Michael Flanagan’s direction is crisp, but neither can compensate for the script’s drawbacks.

Ginsberg, curiously, looks more like an accountant than a wild-haired poet, and is painted, perhaps inadvertently, as an annoyingly schoolmarmish and opportunistic entrepreneur, proudly tuned into the real world of publishing, chastising the other two for dumbly chasing women and alcohol. While Ginsberg was unquestionably a tireless promoter, responsible for much of the attention the Beats received, the reality is that Kerouac devoted as much time as did any of the them to seeking publication; he was relentless in getting On the Road and his earlier The Town and the City published.

Cassady, for his part, comes off primarily as a woman-stealing parasite, a soulless thief and con artist supreme. While he was all of these things, to an extent, and while all the Beats had serious moral failings, they were also complicated and torn individuals. Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty, the hero of On the Road, was far more than a con man, and that simply doesn’t come through in this play. For example, his rambling 16,000 letter to Kerouac actually inspired the latter’s stylistic technique for that groundbreaking work.

Also in the room with the expiring Kerouac are the projections of two freelance writers (Mickey Pizzo and William Gozdziewski), pouring over books, arguing over money and honing Kerouac’s 300-word obituary, due the next morning. One writer wants to play up Kerouac’s “womanizing” and scandals from the past while the other wants to emphasize Kerouac’s humanity and passion for the sacredness of life and sensuality, and experimentation and madness in the name of art. Their presence, while temporarily relieving the constant bickering of the three leads, does little to move the play forward.

There is little doubt that Jack Kerouac was a sour man at the end of his life. Drunk much of the time, bigoted and burned out, he disdained the flourishing hippie movement that he and his Beat compatriots had spawned. Yet, there is ample evidence that his many Beat comrades, particularly Ginsberg, revered him as the flawed but once holy catalyst of their own movement and, indeed, honored his accomplishments intensely, despite his numerous weaknesses, until the very end. They knew he was more than the sum of his parts; this play only gives us unsavory bits.

O’Neil portrays Kerouac best in a short soliloquy he gives Schiffbauer. In this all-too-brief absence of the Ginsberg and Cassady characters pointing fingers at each other, Kerouac poignantly attempts to encapsulate his beliefs, passions and desires.

Here are three of the most important and exciting literary and counter-cultural figures of the 20th century. Yet, they are not at all interesting in Kerouac. O’Neil’s nearly exclusive fixation on the sniping and bitterness seems to have missed much of these men and their real importance. None of the three leads has the necessary depth or immersion in their characters to portray these complex figures; consequently, each seems one-dimensionally acidic—as someone you want to flee from, rather than get to know.

Stuck In a Bank, Stuck in a Life

It's a bank robbery gone wrong. The hostages have freed themselves from the rope that was holding them and are dancing with Heistman's henchmen. A detective is speaking to Heistman, the leader of the robbery, from a bullhorn, telling him the place is surrounded and that there is no escape. Yet, through it all, Heistman has the time to wax poetic on the meaning of happiness and love and fear. El Gato Teatro's Heistman is a beautiful and dense piece of dance theater. The music is pounding and catchy. The costumes are bright and skimpy. The movement is jerky, almost as if the characters are unsure of what they are meant to be doing. Heistman initially directs his henchman, telling them when to go, how to move, but seems to lag behind near the end, following instead of leading. Is this because the game is up? Or because he has found a deeper meaning in all this? The show is short, barely an hour, and leaves many questions. Did Heistman succeed? The detective informs him that he did a good job, but in the end, who is calling the shots, the henchman, the hostages, or Heistman?

Heistman is entertaining at the same time that it is thought-provoking. Anyone can get stuck somewhere, trapped in their own thoughts, trapped in an unfriendly situation. Life often backfires, and it is comforting to know that even if things do not go as planned, there is usually a way out. It's particularly nice if that way out includes catchy music and dance.

Heistman is playing as part of Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory 2008.

In Toronto It's Half the Size

When you open the newspaper in Toronto, you are likely to find the front pages filled with what New Yorkers might call "little things:" a handicapped man who had to pay a fine for using his wife's handicap sticker on his car; an op-ed urging the legalization of prostitution; a state environmental law slowly moving through the initial stages of confirmation by Parliament. Not much talk of war, corruption, lies and greed on the vast scale we're used to in the New York papers. In these same newspapers every July you'll also find listings for the dozens of plays at the Toronto Fringe Festival. The majority of these plays also come from a smaller perspective. They are plays about little things, sometimes about nothing at all. Those plays at the festival that do seem to be in dialogue with world events manage to be so in an understated way, without screaming out their timeliness and relevance in frenetic Big Apple style.

Out of the half dozen plays I caught at the festival, perhaps the most authentic Torontonian experience was sitting at the Pauper's Pub on Bloor Street with a pint of Keith's, watching the charmingly disarming Opera on the Rocks. Out of the midst of the drinkers, a group of four, their eyes glued to the hockey game on the TV screen, break into operatic song. He's open, pass the puck! Go, go, go, down the wing...oh shit." Using the mundane language of hockey spectators, the plain contemporary English of BFF's meeting for martinis on a TGIF, and the small talk of a horny bar fly, the company of talented singers make the most of this overly-dramatic theatrical form. Reminiscent of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's contrasting simplicity of language with grandeur of form, the opera takes the drama we all feel our lives infused with, and turns it into a collective joke. The result is a bar full of happy people laughing to their heart's content. In the funniest and most out-there scene in the opera, we witness a Lavalife date between two people whose online profiles enhance their height by a couple feet, their profession from nobodys to surgeons and even their skin color from one race to another. After the discovery of the mutual lies, the couple unites through their love of the local hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Within minutes he's on top of her on the bar dry humping as they orgasmically release names of Maple Leafs players to the air in operatic fervor.

On the other side of the vernacular spectrum, Pericles Snowdon's Bluebeard uses heightened poetic language, along with seasoned, controlled acting, to tell a grim version of a dark fairy tale. One of the strongest theatrical evenings at the festival, this imperfect British play arrived in Toronto after a run in both London and New York. From its description, Bluebeard seemed to be one of the few plays in the festival that directly addresses world events. Though it was written before the incestuous Austrian family had been revealed to the press and released from its twenty four year underground imprisonment, it is hard to ignore the story's echo in Bluebeard. The female ensemble portrays the story of four girls brought up in an underground dungeon, never allowed out by the girls' mother, Blue. Featuring the best acting I saw in the TFF (stand out performances include Andrea Runge as Piglet and Kat Lanteigne as Rooster), Snowdon's poetic control of the language drives the dark mood of the play along, touching along the way on issues of political subjugation, gender politics, and environmental disasters. The main question of the play, "Isn't it better to be put away somewhere safe than to get sent out to a world without a heart," is spoken too bluntly by the characters, and this thrusts the audience out of the play. In general the play is best when it is doing what the Fringe was created for - exploring new avenues for storytelling in a theatrical setting - and weakest when it follows the traditional path of the dramatic writer - tying up loose ends and providing explanations for characters' behavior, leading up to a culminating event. In David Metheson's production, these moments come across untidy and confusing, and pale in comparison to the rich, playful theatrical world created in the first half of the evening.

However, when watching this year's choice for Best New Play at the Fringe, you can't help but excuse the more interesting playwrights for trying to keep their work within a traditional frame. Rachel Blair's Wake is a well structured yet bland play about three brothers coming together at their father's funeral. The play's greatest strength lies in its oscillation between the present and the past, slowly revealing the memories that make up the emotional content of the brothers' relationship. Blair successfully uses her structure to portray the experience of a wake. And Frank Cox O'Connell gives a memorable performance as the shy Shane. Still, it's hard not to hope for more emotional engagement, as well as theatrical experimentation, from the winner of a major Fringe Festival.

One theatrical event that stood out as an interesting contemporary form was Barry Smith's American Squatter. More a presenter than an actor, Smith uses a projector connected to his laptop to tell the story of how the son of an L.A clean freak ends up squatting in London in "a zen-like state of disarray." Engaging and funny, Smith, a comic journalist from Boulder, Colorado, is in full control of his unique form. His ongoing use of video and photo footage, accompanied by entertaining PowerPoint-like amusement, gives American Squatter a twenty first century zing. In this moment, when the memoir seems to be encroaching upon the novel's status as king of the published word, Smith's theatrical memoir made a lot of sense inside the walls of Toronto's Factory Theater.

In the same space, I caught Balls, a two hander by Rob Salerno. Perhaps in a more American fashion than the vast majority of plays at the festival, the program for this Canadian play spoke directly about its political drive. A male response to The Vagina Monologues, Salerno felt that if the monologue is the appropriate form for women, the male experience is one of duality ("masculinity is not a one man show.") So the two characters play off of each other like boys do, cracking jokes about kicking each other in the nuts, about screwing each other's mothers, even going so far as the off-putting visual of a magazine dedicated to that singular type of sexual perversion, Clown Porn. But Balls does not stay in the mundane for long. Instead it travels to a challenging place for these male prototypes. Early in the play we watch Paul (Salerno) discover that he has testicular cancer. His buddy (Adam Goldhamer) helps him through the chemo, operations and other heavy ordeals, until, and this is where the play takes an unnecessary turn, he discovers that he too is sick with the same disease. "A real man needs only one," the play's T-shirt reads. Similarly, one case of testicular cancer would have been quite enough for the one play. Nonetheless, Salerno's staging is simple and direct, and the play ends with the moving picture of one man alone without his friend.

Balls is typical of many of the Canadian plays at the TFF in that it is on the Canadian Fringe circuit, making its way west from Montreal all the way to British Columbia. It's a summer of low budget stage fun for these little troupes, many of whom are making their first steps on the Canadian stage. The opportunity that the TFF, as well as the other Fringe Fests around the country offers is invaluable to many young theatricians. Also, all box office proceeds go directly to the companies.

The Fringe Fest culture in Canada has a long and wide-spread history, and you definitely feel it standing in the long lines to get into the shows. The festival is well established here, and most of the play-goers I spoke with were long time Fringe viewers who had already seen at least a handful of shows this year alone. The 2008 TFF had just under 150 shows, and sold close to 60,000 tickets. That's an average of almost 400 viewers per run. Unlike the New York Fringe, here every show helps spread the word about other performances in the Festival. Whether it's that helpful community vibe or the strong Fringe history in this country, audiences are sizeable, and in large part supportive.

Many Canadian theater professionals speak more highly of the upcoming Summer Works festival, showcasing new Canadian plays. That festival is juried, and so they say the quality tends to be higher. Acceptance into the Fringe, on the other hand, is by lottery (around one out of four submissions accepted), no jury involved, a system with its obvious pros and cons.

For someone who's been in the loud New York theater scene for close to a decade now, there is something enticing about the subdued quality of plays here (as well as the way they are presented and talked about.) While at moments it feels like they are just chickening out of saying what they have to say about the world, it also makes you look harder to find the meaning of the piece. Granted, often there's not much there to find aside from some cutesy dialogue or a gag, but when done properly it functions as an invitation for the audience to engage in the material in whatever way they choose. Everything doesn't have to be so damn big. Only in the US is a small coffee actually huge. In Toronto, it's half the size.

A Funny Kind of War

One always hopes that enterprising theater companies will unearth lost treasures, as the Mint and the Peccadillo have been doing for several years. The discovery of a 1977 artifact, Easy Outs, or the Adventures of Alphonse on the Lam, is laudable for the risk-taking EndTimes Productions, but unfortunately it’s valuable only as a signpost for the career of Chip Keyes, a performer of stand-up comedy in the 1970s who later went to Hollywood and has made a career of writing for television, notably Perfect Strangers. Nowadays, the f-word is everywhere in stand-up, but Easy Outs is quaintly of its time: It shuns blue language and tries to score comic points in the spirit of the Three Stooges, the Borscht Belt, and classic vaudeville. It’s 1969 and Alphonse (Alessandro Colla) has a low draft lottery number (one of a number of dated elements). Alphonse tells his girlfriend, Genevieve, that he’s leaving for “a small, neutral, peace-loving country.” He doesn’t want to be sent to Vietnam and killed, he says, although he doesn’t really articulate any philosophical opposition to the war. Genevieve (Sarah Scoofs), however, has romantic notions that Alphonse should resist the war, go to prison, and provide her with a reason to write folk songs about his suffering (a topical reference to Joan Baez, whose husband did time).

Once Alphonse reaches his destination, he is drafted into its military—the small, neutral, peace-loving country is at war. There follow various misadventures as the hero escapes from his unit and then assumes the identity of The Wolf, a guerrilla leader, and becomes ever more embroiled in armed struggles with cartoonish characters: a monocled, Nazi-accented sergeant; a money-grubbing monk; hungry, horny soldiers; and various fifth columnists. Director Russell Dobular has cast some game young actors who have backgrounds in improv and stand-up, and some of the gags work even when they lead nowhere, but not nearly enough.

For instance, Alphonse gets mixed up in an assassination plot with three inept (but well-played) revolutionaries: Jessica Ko is Gerta, the Maoist brains behind the dissidents; Sergio Fuenzalida is a vain, brainless guerrilla; and Marek Sapieyevski is Sam, a vaguely Eastern European agent secretly in love with Gerta. Their mantra is “The cause!”; when one of them declaims the phrase, the others immediately shout, “The cause!” It’s classic Three Stooges business, and Keyes’s feeling for this tried-and-true comedy is on target, though it’s overly familiar. Some of the byplay is moderately amusing—Fuenzalida is a cartoon Latino, but endearing in his stereotype.

Still, the whole is wildly uneven. Ray Chao can’t do much with the monk’s irritating mania of free-associating words: “Technically. Technicolor. Technology, technician, polytech, high-tech, Georgia Tech… Tech me out to da ball game!” Chao also adds a touchie-feelie feyness to the character that’s plain creepy. (Dobular also pushes too hard to get humor out of this scene—why should the monk bend over and reach between his legs to receive a payoff from Alphonse? Possibly because nothing else in the scene is funny, and he’s desperate for a laugh.) Keyes gives a similar shtick to The Wolf (Jeremy Pape) who, wounded and delirious, assumes various pop culture personas that stop the play cold. Both are characters that Robin Williams might pull off, but in the hands of anything less than genius they just fall flat.

As Alphonse, however, Alessandro Colla provides a charming, deftly reactive performance. He underscores the character’s naivete and bewilderment as he’s drawn more and more into various tangled webs in the episodic, ever-darkening plot. He’s a bit nebbishy and a bit inept, and yet he’s blessed with a klaxon voice that can he can shade into a gravelly murmur. One can believe he has the charisma to substitute for The Wolf. Adam P. Murphy also delivers a splendid but brief turn as a CIA agent.

EndTimes’s production values are effective but minimal: a raft with a sail, some tables and a bar, and a fountain help set various scenes. In fact, it has the feel of the Fringe Festival come early. Easy Outs is a young man’s play, one that shows a talent not yet fully formed but with an affinity for wordplay and low-comedy hijinks—it’s a small stepping-stone on the way to the sublime silliness of Perfect Strangers.

Out of Nowhere

No wonder TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi have a cult following among improvisation students across the country. These long-form improv masters, veterans of Chicago's famed Second-City and currently playing in a sporadic but open run at the Barrow Street Theater, are wildly gifted and a joy to watch. Creators of "insta-plays from scratch" according to their press kit, the two actors simply begin an entirely improvised 60-minute long play the moment the curtain goes up. The plays do not come from audience suggestions (as is the case with many improv shows) but instead sprout from nowhere but the actors' vivid imaginations.

And what imaginations! The plots of these mini-plays almost defy explanation, as Jagodowski and Pasquesi switch in-and-out of characters and incorporate each other's tiniest suggestions in the moment of the scene and, equally, into the ever-evolving backstory of the play.

On this particular evening, the show began with Anita, a lonely widow, chatting up Ron, the maitre d' at a French restaurant called the Bon Vivant, by telling him she felt she had one more great love left in her life.

Soon on the scene came Marcel, a singing waiter with a soft spot for "sweet Anita," eager to reveal his recent and surprising discovery that the scallop special was not made with real scallops but with shark fin instead.

In the words of the cook who enlightened Marcel about the culinary switcharoo, "Tell me, from a scallop, how many scallops do think you get? One. And how many do you think you can get from a huge shark tail?"

As far-fetched as some of the situations can become, both actors do in-depth character work on stage. Such serious acting work provides a sense of emotional truth that adds continuity and lends credibility to their performances, and is often quite moving.

"Yes, she's searching for love," says Marcel when Ron warns him that Anita is on the prowl. "But who isn't? I am always searching for love. All day, all the time. Aren't you?"

Both actors are verbally dexterious, with advanced degrees in double-entendre and aural nuance. And while their humour veers more towards the absurd and existential than to the blue (a weakness of much improv), the performance I saw did feature a perfectly timed one-liner about pulled pork, jerked chicken and beef strogonoff.

What makes TJ and Dave such an exceptional experience is not only how quickly and subtly their minds work in the real danger of spontaneous live performance, but also the trust and easy camraderie that is evident between the two actors. I highly recommend that you catch them during one of their Barrow Street Theater stints.

Disturbia

Much of the existing coverage on Tony Glazer’s Stain has, unsurprisingly, focused on its shock-worthy dialogue and disturbing themes. Amidst an effectively written story that forces the audience to digest one harrowing twist after another, its politically conservative set of characters elicit uncensored racism, uninhibited sexual conversations between parents and children, and suppressed secrets that, when brought to the surface, are accompanied by verbal abuse. But while the work is tough to watch and occasionally forces an audience member to wonder how much of its allure is due to its degree of shock value, Glazer’s drama offers a beautifully paced, convincingly performed stage experience.

Directed by Scott C. Embler of Vital Theatre Company, Stain opens with a father-and son exchange that immediately reveals both the disconcerting lack of boundaries in its family relationships and a sense of underlying dread. Fifteen-year-old Thomas (played with a haunting sense of awareness by Tobias Segal) is spending weekly father-son time with Arthur (Jim O’Connor), who has divorced his mother a few years prior. As Arthur, sitting on a park bench, unloads his uncensored revulsion towards women and minorities upon his son, gunshots can be heard in the distance. Neither one reacts.

Thomas reveals to his father, with both surprising lack of shame and a suppressed sense of neglect, that his relationship with a much older woman, Carla (Karina Arroyave) has recently ended. Soon after the graffiti-stained brick wall of the park opens up into Thomas’s family’s home, Carla shows up at its door and announces to his mother (Summer Crockett Moore) and grandmother (Joanna Bayless) that she is pregnant. What follows is Thomas’s desperate investigation into the reasons behind his parents’ divorce, setting off a chain of revelations that soon make his impending teen fatherhood seem like the least controversial aspect of the play.

Stain’s structure of a family tragedy in which the audience’s initial impressions are flipped upon each unveiled secret is certainly familiar in theater; Glazer’s use of dark, verbal humor, meanwhile, adds a sense of much-needed buoyancy to his work that reminds one of films like Burr Steers’ Igby Goes Down. Characters in Stain make jabs about the power of Botox, women’s sexual needs and the uncool-factor of the rock band Nickleback; a particularly humorous bit pokes fun at the frustration of voice-activated customer service lines.

It’s Tobias Segal’s performance, however, that brings authentic vulnerability into a story that sometimes feels too deliberate in its execution. While with his parents, Thomas speaks in a hoarse, singsongy voice that reveals a desperate need for affection; while smoking with his friend George (Peter Brensinger) on a makeshift bench, he appears to both escape behind a facade of rebellion and momentarily take control of his social role. Like a real teenager, Segal shows the rehearsed nature of Thomas’s sporadic confidence by fiddling his hands in his pockets or twitching his leg under the table. When he tells his grandmother that feeling the area around him helps him think, or wonders if his father is embarrassed to look at him, his heartbreaking narrative becomes almost tangible.

Joanna Bayless, Summer Crockett Moore and Jim O’Connor also deliver believable, multilayered performances as Thomas’s disjointed family. As his mother Julia, Moore has a particularly challenging narrative to carry, and her decision to internalize much of her character’s moral struggle appears to have been the right one; one can only hope that most actors tackling Julia’s character would find it difficult to recognize themselves in her horrific secret.

IT Awards Nominations Announced

At 8 pm July 21, 2008, the IT Awards (New York Innovative Theatre Awards) announced its 2008 Award Nominees at an event held at "Our Lady of Pompeii" located at 25 Carmine Street in the West Village. The 2008 Nominees were selected from an adjudication pool of over 3,000 artists. Nominees include 127 individual artists, 47 different productions and 40 theater companies.

In spite of the oppressive July weather, the nomination party was well-attended by nominees, their collaborators and other supporters of Off-Off-Broadway theater.

The 2008 IT Awards Ceremony will take place the evening of September 22, 2008. It was announced at the nomination party that the award ceremony will be opened with a performance by Blue Man Group.

A complete list of the IT Award Nominees can be viewed at the official IT Awards website, www.nyitawards.com, along with a description of the Awards' adjudication process. offoffonline congratulates this year's nominees and looks forward to further honoring their achievements in September.

The First Step Is. . .

Life can be shaky at times for everyone. In Bridget Harris' Out of Control, four women with addictive tendencies meet to share and find strength together. However, things get a little out of hand when they invite a guest speaker, Peter, who thinks he understands women completely. Peter begins to date Sweetie, a member of the group who occasionally smokes pot. Their relationship causes conflict between Sweetie and Brenda, Sweetie's co-worker and tutor who has recently joined the Overindulgers Anonymous group. Although everyone in the play is supposedly an “overindulger,” the play glosses over each woman's issue in order to fit everything in. The result is a low energy, superficial show without much explanation or development. The actors do their best with the weak material. Kat Ross is adorable as Sweetie, the kind of dumb yet endearing single mother pothead. Beverley Prentice is strong as Brenda, a lesbian who needs a job and is slightly bitter about the hand fate has dealt her. Danahar Dempsey is swarmy yet charming as Peter, the woman-controlling psychologist. And yet the dialogue that comes out of the characters' mouths is incredibly bland. When discussing their mysterious co-worker Mary, Sweetie says to Brenda, “running away. . . wow, do you think?” The script is full of weak exclamations and careless repetition.

The play never takes the time to fully develop the characters, instead skirting around their issues. Brenda is portrayed as bitter and heartbroken yet time is not spent examining or developing her problems. Sweeties is more of an occasional pot smoker than an actual addict, so what is driving her to hang out with addicts? More time is spent with the problems of other characters, Dolores and Bunny, who are kleptomaniacs and alcoholics respectively, than with Brenda and Sweetie. Yet the time spent with their problems is just to depict them, not to explain or rationalize them. The result is an unfulfilling sketch when a more meaty play is promised.

The weak script is not helped by the weak staging. Many scenes feature the four women sitting in a circle talking. Or Brenda and Sweetie sitting in Sweetie's trailer smoking. The pacing is incredibly low energy, which is unusual for a comedy, and the constant sitting limits action and does not give the audience much to look at.

Out of Control tries to surprise the audience by throwing in a plot twist towards the end. However, anyone paying the least bit of attention could figure out what the twist will be midway through the performance. With its weak storyline and character development, Out of Control proves to be anything but.

Paint It Black

If the Midtown International Theatre Festival (MITF), now in its ninth year, is serious about making its claim as a theater festival worthy of renown, it’s going to have to considerably amp up some of its offerings. What has struck me the most about the two plays I saw this week is how stunningly mediocre they are. The Red Paintball is an innocuous play, a sketch really. In fact, it began as a 10-minute skit and was expanded into a one-hour play. At one hour, it’s too long.

In The Red Paintball, a group of students at a Catholic high school decide to play a prank on their overbearing, self-righteous and hypocritical dean of students, Maxwell Morrison, (Vincent DiGeronimo) by shooting him with a paintball gun as he passes by on his scooter. His inevitable interrogation of this group comprises the bulk of the play.

The character of Maxwell Morrison is descended from a long line of bungling, boobish authority figures that include Mr. Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mr. Vernon from The Breakfast Club and Dean Wormer from Animal House. Mr. DiGeronimo does his best to milk the much-too-long running jokes about his attraction to Luke and his command of the sycophantic Mary (Alyssa Schroeter), to whom he tosses Hershey Kisses when he’s trying to extract information from her. He plays his over-the-top role much like Dana Carvey did as the Church Lady in Saturday Night Live. But even the Church Lady knew when to stop.

Having said that, there are a few talents in this lot. Robbie Simpson shows great physical comedic range as Luke, the resistant object of Morrison’s attention. His wide-eyed faces transmit revulsion and terror far better than do the lines he has been provided. Alexandra Heinen is stereotypically perfect as Norma Spiegel, Morrison’s apathetic but wise secretary who refuses to get worked up about anything. Will Szigethy as Matthew, though, is one of those canned chubby loser characters straight from a Judd Apatow film, and Mary Pasquale as girl-from-the-hood Johanna really needs to work on her gangsta mannerisms and speech.

In the end, The Red Paintball is simply a bore, grinding one joke to death. We have seen all this prattle before, and it’s been done far better. The Red Paintball adds nothing to the genre. It’s the type of play that’s better slotted for the recreation room in the high school basement, or amateur improv night, with an audience of knowing family and friends. The Red Paintball is about as funny as any random episode of Head of the Class, with the same tired, predictable jokes, and appears to have been developed for the same audience.

Who vets plays like The Red Paintball? I don’t fault the novice playwrights as much as I do the MITF itself, for putting this amateurish embarrassment on as a play and then inviting serious criticism. It’s like setting the poor playwrights up as clay pigeons at a skeet shooting range.

According to the play’s program, a full-length musical of this play is in the works. Perhaps The Red Paintball will find its identity as a musical; it’s not very funny as a comedy.

So Many Wives, So Little Time

Most people have trouble keeping up with one significant other. King Solomon had 700 wives, so imagine the straits he must have found himself in. Add to that the fact that several of his wives wouldn't convert to Judaism, ultimately corrupting him and leading to God's wrath on the people of Israel. Ginger Reiter's new musical 700 Wives is a dazzling and bright depiction of King Solomon, his romance with the Queen of Sheba, and his ultimate downfall. However, while the story is engaging, the production often fails to live up to the greatness of its subject. Students of the Old Testament may not appreciate 700 Wives style. It is a campy romp, chockablock with anachronisms (Jessica Simpson and Sarah Jessica Parker as potential wives of Solomon) and one liners. Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, who so bewitched King David with her rooftop bathing, is played as a stereotypical, overbearing Jewish mother by Andriana Pachella. After Solomon marries his 700 wives and things are not going so well, King Hiram of Tyre (a strong Ed Deacy), who originally told Solomon to marry his enemies' daughters and thus put off war, exclaims “did I tell him to eat every cookie in every box?”

Laughs abound, but some things just don't make sense. The characters occasionally use archaisms of English such as “thine” and “increaseth” which, while they imitate older translations of the Bible, don't fit in with the rest of the dialogue and language of the script. Solomon and Sheba's son Menelik is given a head of dreads and a Jamaican accent, even though he is the Ethiopian prince and predates Rastafarianism by several thousand years.

The song and dance numbers are not particularly remarkable. The prerecorded music sounds as if it were a demo tape. Worse still, it occasionally drowns out the vocals of the actors, despite the fact that there are several microphones. The chorus' voices do not blend well; it is possible to hear who is flat and who is straining for the high notes. There is one standout tune, however. The jazzy “Dust to Dust” features a live saxophone (played by Blanche Farrell Smith, who also does standout performance as one of the wives), and is a finger-poppingly catchy song.

Despite its campy nature and feel-good vibe, it is possible to walk away from the show with a relevant contemporary political message. As the story goes, God did not punish Solomon directly for straying, but instead held off punishment until his successor should reign. Echoes of the current situation in Iraq can be seen. The current king has made a mess, and it is left for the next in line to clean up the mess or suffer the consequences of someone else's actions.

700 Wives is ultimately a pretty run-of-the-mill musical dealing with what could be a pretty fascinating myth. Not much is known about the relationship between Solomon and Sheba; there are only thirteen verses in the Old Testament that describe her travels to Jerusalem. 700 Wives does a decent job of expanding the story and, intentionally or not, of connecting it to modern times. Fans of camp and corn will enjoy 700 Wives ; those with a more serious mind towards myth and legend had better stay away.