Sad Jazz

The title of the new play from Extant Arts Company, Blue Surge, is a takeoff on “Blue Serge,” the name of a musical composition by Duke Ellington. This particular musical selection makes the play’s protagonist, Curt, feel an overwhelming and almost tangible sense of melancholy. The song’s namesake play, written by Rebecca Gilman and directed by Kat Vecchio, is a representation of some of the more unpleasant aspects of small-town life and interpersonal relationships. The play leaves its viewer with the same melancholy that Curt has faced throughout the play. Unfortunately, beyond this feeling of sadness, the piece gives its viewers little else. Rather than depicting a series of characters who are beaten down by life’s tumultuous twists and turns but who ultimately overcome their situations, the piece instead fixates on a more pessimistic view of the human condition. These characters emblematize a vision of the world as a kind of bondage in which each person is born into a certain set of binding obstacles that are nearly impossible to escape.

The play begins in a massage parlor, in which we believe two subsequent men want to solicit sex. Instead, it turns out that they are cops looking to close the place down. The women of the x-rated massage boutique each befriend their respective clients. The majority of the play focuses on these burgeoning relationships, suggesting both the potential for emotional success in light of social and economic failures and the inevitability of disappointment when attempting to link up interpersonally. We see Curt make a strong connection with the young and inexperienced Sandy, one that seems deeper and more emotionally fulfilling than any he has with his longtime fiancée Beth. On the other hand, Doug and Heather enter into what appears to be the more shallow of the two relationships, but it is also the more equal pairing; both of these two people are flawed individuals who decide to emphasize life’s pleasures over its responsibilities.

There is a lot of dialogue and monologuing that seems designed purely to present the audience with character backstory. For example, the play’s second scene takes place in the police station and gives the two men ample opportunity to share information about their lives leading up to the current moment. In general, most of the text is laden with heavy exposition, which diminishes much of the impact of the intermittent poignant phrases. The writing is for the most part satisfactory but the scenes, when put together as a whole, are relatively directionless. Additionally, the performances are fine, but the story is so slight that is hard to determine what, if anything, these people are after. This begs the larger question of the production: why tell this story?

The production elements are fine overall and the theater space is well-utilized with three principal areas designated for the various locales visited. However, the lighting is often poorly timed and the extended transitions between scenes aid in distancing the spectators from any real emotional engagement.

Throughout the play, virtual strangers talk quite candidly, but it is hard to comprehend why. They neither come to any epiphanies due to their social interactions nor do they appear any less disturbed after having divulged their secrets. The individuals presented in this play have all faced terrible situations, yet they all show little of the human capacity to overcome. They seem bound to unpleasant lives because of their parents, their jobs, their significant others, or just their own complacency. It is hard to sympathize with any of these individuals, as they all appear to have the mental capability and wherewithal to potentially escape from their personal prisons.

The play has sporadic meaningful moments, but the overall presentation is disappointing. The performances would need to be grounded in a more cohesive and relevant tale for them to have any long-lasting impact. Theater should not only be about dark confessions. A story needs something beyond just terrible, borderline unbelievable narratives in order to pack a hard-hitting emotional punch.

Blue Surge suggests that life chooses our places within it and that we can do nothing about that. What is to be learned from the experiences of these characters? Do we feel sorry for them? Feel better for ourselves because we are not them? Gilman’s play leaves its spectator asking perhaps too many questions, and not the kinds from which a lesson can be learned. It feels like an extended jazz riff on a theme of melancholy, one whose parts quite never add up.

The Dream Lives On

Every January, we celebrate a holiday in honor of fallen leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Actor-playwright Craig Alan Edwards has gone even further, creating an admirable one-man show that pays loving tribute to the man who literally gave all for his cause. Of course, by now much is known about a figure as accomplished as King, and 306 provides little information that is new to anyone familiar with the man. As a result, the 59E59 production, directed by Cheryl Katz, works better as a dramatic exercise than it does as a fresh biographical sketch.

Edwards depicts King on the last night of his life, in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee (hence the title) on April 3, 1968. King was to attend a rally advocating for sanitation workers. Edwards uses whatever means he can, including a phone call (we only witness King’s side of it) and direct address to tell his audience as much as he can about the man.

We are then privy to such details as King’s poor eating habits, his laziness, his egotism (the size of the crowds that await him matter to the man), and, of course, his seemingly habitual cheating. Edwards has King recite some of his achievements as an activist in the Civil Rights movement, even giving him a humorous aside about Rosa Parks.

There are other details that, while never revelatory, are interesting. For instance, he at various points has aspired to have a career in both baseball and opera. King had an affinity for pigeons. He struggled for his father’s approval. He even longed to marry a white waitress from the North. These facts aren’t exactly shoehorned in in checklist form, but the seams do show.

Edwards’ work, both on the page and the stage, is serviceable and heartfelt. He clearly demonstrates a great respect for his subject. But Katz cannot find anything inherently dramatic about 306. The only tension that exists at all comes from the fate we know awaits King by show’s end, and that’s steeped in history, not this work. (A discovery that one of his belongings has been wiretapped could be more shocking than it currently plays).

The actor also deserves credit for going a long way to approximate King as a figure, rather than mimic him (could that even be possible, given how visually iconic a man King was and is?). He captures the cadences of the man’s famous speaking rhythms, particularly when emulating the reverend’s sermons.

In other moments, particularly ones never witnessed by the public, Edwards excels at finding King’s emotional center. When reenacting a toast Martin Luther King Sr. delivered to his son, Edwards shows a child still desperate for parental approval. And his admission that his marriage to Coretta Scott King is as much about being a public partnership as it is a love bond is not only strikingly human, it also feels very relevant to a modern audience.

Katz’s technical elements are certainly worthy of praise, including Charlie Corcoran’s period set design of the motel room, Jessica Parks’ props, and Jill Nagle’s lighting design. Andy Cohen’s sound work integrates radio outtakes from 1968 to further the effect of taking the audience back in time.

This is an entirely honorable project. It is well-researched and well-intentioned. It’s just never quite as inspiring as its subject.

A Fight for Flight

The title of American Soldiers, Matt Morillo’s newest play, is perhaps misleading. This is not another work about life among troops stationed in the Gulf or in any other line of fire. Instead, and wisely, Morillo has set Soldiers back here on the American home front. It is a decision that makes the play's subject matter, while still somewhat muddled, accessible to audiences. Soldiers takes place fairly close to home – Hicksville, Long Island, to be precise. It follows a couple of important days in the life of the Coletti family, as middle child and eldest daughter Angela returns home to her politician brother, party girl sister and widowed father after returning from the war.

Angela’s tour was not without its scars, most of which are internal and emotional. She lost a fiancé and has her demons with which to contend. This is a concept her father, Carlo Sr., (Stu Richel), understands all too well; he, too, is a veteran, having served in Vietnam. Soldiers doesn’t dwell on what bonds these two, however. What drives the play is Angela’s decision to create a rift in the household by moving to Colorado and uprooting younger sister Marie (Julia Giolzetti), as well as her erstwhile bartender boyfriend, Hutch (Nick Coleman), with her.

Most of Angela’s opposition comes from the two Carlos in her family, her father as well as brother Carlo Jr. (Tom Pilutik). They want her to stay, but for different reasons. Carlo Sr. is worried about the fissure of his family unit. Carlo Jr. has a more self-serving, professional agenda, but it is not a ludicrous one. He is more rational than his reactionary sister.

Soldiers marks a departure for Morillo, who also directs this production at the Theater for the New City. His past works were lighter romantic comedies (Angry Young Women in Low Rise Jeans With High Class Issues, All Aboard the Marriage Hearse). This play feels a bit more substantial, not so much because of the subject matter, but because his scenes of conflict feel less redundant and more motivated.

In his previous plays, Morillo’s characters sometimes talked in circles around each other. They yelled at each other only to do so again later with no additional narrative gain. In Soldiers, however, these characters walk in circles around each other, as they should. They may live or spend massive amounts of time under one roof, but they have carved out their own routines and private lives long ago, and they find it virtually impossible to reconcile their disparate interests (or lack thereof) with one another.

Morillo hits on several subjects rife with dramatic potential – post-traumatic stress disorder, family politics, even local politics – but he spends the majority of the play merely referring to these topics, depending on the audience’s understanding that, yes, bad things happen in war and in households. By the time we meet this family, the most dramatic aspects of their lives have already happened; we’re only privy to the falling action.

Soldiers also lacks a central protagonist for whom to root. Angela’s choices hover somewhere between self-deluded and appropriate, but we’re never sure which way to feel. Is her choice to go west a solid one? How much should we invest in her?

Carlo Sr., meanwhile, only emerges as a principal character in the play’s second act. In the first he seems to be little more than a doddering man with an alcohol problem and frustrations with each of his three children. Is he supposed to be the voice of reason?

It is to the outstanding Richel’s credit that even when Carlo Sr. feels like a minor character, the naturalistic actor plays him with major gravitas. His disappointment and weariness as a struggling patriarch are palpable from the start. Coleman, for his part, is also not to be overlooked. He overcomes a rather thinly-drawn character (why he agrees to trek along to Colorado is never made explicit) with an effortless performance that reeks of machismo-laden inertia.

The remaining trio of actors has a harder time with the material. I’m still not quite sure what Marie wants or where her loyalty lies, and Giolzetti also seems unsure of how make sense of her. Pilutik, a charismatic presence in Morillo’s Stay Over, feels more untethered in Soldiers. He paces around too much, with body language that would be better attuned to a lighter, more comedic work.

Reilly has the toughest time of all, though. She plays Angela with plenty of integrity, but lacks the haunted -- and haunting – attributes necessary to give the character more conviction. The Colettis’ political and religious beliefs should play out as total heresy to Angela. She should be appalled by what she views as total pretension. Her desire to move plays like a sheltered daughter ready to spread her wings when it really is the fight of her life.

Yes, Soldiers needs work, but it is a play already headed in the right direction. With some tightening and an infusion of drama, Soldiers could become a solid, topical work that speaks to exactly where this country is right now.

The Clone Wars

There are some big ideas in Misha Shulman’s The Fake History of George the Last, presented at Theater for the New City and produced in association with the longest lunch theater company. Human cloning, generational repetition, predestination, and inherited violence all converge in this new play from the recent Brooklyn College Playwriting MFA program graduate. The Fake History relates the futuristic story of four generations of clones named George who go through the same family rituals and rites of passage over a 70-year period, discovering in the process the inevitability of the family history passed down to them. The play's intriguing notions, however, become mired in an overstuffed script that reads better on the page than on the stage. The lightening-fast pace of the production also prevents a clear understanding of the action and the characters. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Shulman is the 2009 winner of the Jewish Canadian Playwriting Competition and a 2010 semi-finalist for the P73 Fellowship. He is also a Writer in Residence at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto and a member of Theater for a New City’s Emerging Writers Program. In a body of work that includes 2004’s The Fist, about Israeli Army refuseniks, and last summer’s Apricots, a dark absurdist comedy about Israeli-Palestinian affairs, the theme of violence recurs.

In this absurdist dramedy, the violence is all in the family. When George Senior ultimately reveals the details of cloning himself to his son/duplicate George Junior on his 16th birthday, it sets in motion a seemingly inescapable pattern. Defiant and insistent on their individual choices, the Georges cannot evade their fates, which culminate in murder.

Staged minimally, the most outstanding feature of the set by Czerton Lim is a series of 20 picture frames that flicker to life with images of George’s “ancestors” — an assemblage of portraits of the five cast members in period dress, suggesting the passage of time. Throughout the play, these portraits remain alive, much like the magical paintings of the Harry Potter movies where the subjects speak and move.

Running a brief intermission-less 85 minutes, The Fake History moves quickly, too quickly for audience members to grasp the change from one generation of George to the next. As all the cast members each play at least two nearly identical characters who share the same name, the confusion mounts. This confusion, however, does help blur the generational lines between the Georges, which may be the intention of the director, Meghan Finn, a member of Soho Rep’s writer-director lab and a graduate of the MFA program in Directing at Brooklyn College.

The cast attacks the script with verve and vigor, although the text’s preoccupation with scatology tends to derail the dramatic intensity. Ben Jaeger-Thomas as the Georges Senior, Jared Mezzocchi as the Georges Junior, and Sarah Painter as the Janes/Mothers, are particularly compelling. Mezzocchi, also the video designer of the show, has an especially eerie moment of acting with and against himself in a recording of the aforementioned 16th birthday that accentuates the play’s theme of inherited fate and inevitability.

Although the program notes that lyrics for the musical interludes were adapted from the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, unfortunately these passages are hard to comprehend because of uneven sound design that makes deciphering the words of the songs nearly impossible. This hinders audience members from understanding the connection of the musical score, by the playwright and Kevin Farrell, to the action of the play.

But the big ideas shine through in a production that could ultimately benefit from a bit more polish. Is mankind fated to repeat the sins of the past? Is violence between men inevitable? Is a human clone a unique being or simply a carbon copy of its original? And, by extension, what is the relationship of a father to his son? The Fake History of George the Last does not offer the answers to these questions, but it poses them provocatively.

Home Fires Burning

Family dramas are one of the most tried-and-true storytelling genres. Perhaps that is why Chris Henry’s production of Sean Cullen’s Safe Home adds in a few extra elements – audio-visual effects, a non-linear storytelling approach. But all the tricks in the world cannot disguise the fact that this play still needs a lot of work. It’s not clear exactly why – Home has already endured development readings at Lincoln Center Theater, Primary Stages, and Stanford University (by the American Conservatory Theatre and a workshop production with New York's CAP 21 in 2008). With this much of an investment of both time and effort, one would think the central Hollytree family in the show would be far easier to relate to than this fractured tale allows.

Cullen sets Home in the early 1950s, during the Korean War. Eldest Hollytree son Jimmy (Eric Miller), aka “Lucky” has chosen to serve overseas. Not to spoil anything, since it is revealed during the play’s first scene, but Lucky is less than his name implies – he doesn’t make it back alive. Cullen’s subsequent seven scenes hurtle back and forth between 1951 and 1953 to show some of the fallout of Lucky’s death and some of the events that led him to make his fateful decision.

Except that in the aggregate, many of these scenes feel either incomplete or inconsequential. Lucky is unemployed and lost – his home life does nothing to help him feel grounded. His mother, Ada (Cynthia Mace, a reservoir of anguish), is a negative Nelly prone to antagonizing her family, though it is unclear why. Is she chronically depressed? Disappointed by life? Or was there an earlier specific incident that led her here?

Similarly, patriarch Jim (Michael Cullen)’s hands are always bandaged due to ambiguous work with radiators that perpetually causes them to bleed. He can be as volatile as his wife when angry, but gets provoked by the oddest of occasions, for instance, at the arrival of Claire Baggot (Katy Wright Mead), the girl Lucky left behind. Even if their motivations are questionable, Cullen and Mace are terrific at displaying regret and disappointment

Henry has difficulty finding the human elements beneath Cullen’s out-of-order storytelling structure. The audience never gets a chance to feel either conflict or chemistry in the flashback portrayals of Lucky’s attraction to Claire; the scenes play mostly as filler, with the momentum drained out of them.

Other scenes fail to register appropriately as well. Home misuses Hollytree brother Pat (an excellent Eric Saxvik) in his several scenes. One scene in which Pat tries to open Lucky’s coffin to see if his body is actually inside seems too dragged out. One wishes that Cullen would make good on this character’s potential. Is he doomed to follow Lucky’s path, or does he have more choices than his older brother? Another flashback scene, in which Jim feels threatened by Lucky, seems to short, as if Cullen the playwright needs to provide more background to warrant such paranoia. (Ian Hyland is impressive as John, the youngest Hollytree brother).

Perhaps part of the problem with this production of Home is a case of myopia. Is the playwright too close to his subject? In the program, he explains that Home emerged over a sixteen-year process inspired by his own family. His grandparents, Ada and Jim, lived and raised three sons in Buffalo, and one of his uncles was indeed killed in the Korean War. Before his death, he sent home a lengthy letter “from a cold and lonely outpost in Korea.”

It is likely that Cullen, the playwright, could not separate his family adequately from the work. He introduces issues but doesn’t explore any of them fully. Henry also makes no effort to further elucidate Cullen’s narrative choices, and then makes an additional poor choice: at one point in the show, a character with a cigarette in hand opens up a window onstage and leaves it open for the duration of the show. The freezing cold outside temperature then permeates the theater for the rest of the performance, making it difficult to attend to the play.

All of these factors make Home feel half-baked. There is a potentially moving, relevant story here, but it has yet to be unearthed.

Murder in the First. And Second.

A sheriff department with a sheriff on perpetual vacation. An artist with a penchant for photographing nudes and pastries. A daffy old mayor. A brilliant private eye. The community of Sentinal, Oklahoma, as depicted in Sneaky Snake Productions' Detectives and Victims, currently playing at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, is home to a collection of likable oddballs. Described in publicity materials as "two independent and interlocking plays," Detectives and Victims, which are designed to be seen in any order, play in rotating rep under the title A Brief History of Murder. Like the cult David Lynch TV show Twin Peaks, A Brief History of Murder, by Richard Lovejoy, addresses violent crime in a small town America by coloring a standard detective drama formula with shades of fantasy. As both Victims and Detectives spiral toward their bloody conclusions, the plays take harder turns into the supernatural. With two plays, a twenty member ensemble, a couple of musical numbers, multiple set changes and some very gory costume details, A Brief History of Murder constitutes a highly ambitious project. Under the direction of Ivanna Cullinan, the large cast delivers a consistently fun performance, even as the plays fail to deliver a neatly solved crime.

Neither Victims nor Detectives fully explains the mysteries and murders on its own. It would be enormously exciting and a delightful playwriting feat if, taken in tandem, the two plays worked together to reveal one another's secrets and render the full picture more clear. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen. Neither does the two-part production wholly emphasize varied perspectives. Although Detectives and Victims ostensibly focus on each play's titular characters, there is a lot of overlap between them. The two-part production most often plays less like two pieces of a master puzzle than like an experiment in staging alternate drafts of a singular script.

It's lucky, then, that Lovejoy is a playwright with a gift for writing good dialogue and comedic zingers. "I really can't afford any further library fines," says a Local Avid Reader (Lovejoy, in a brief cameo) upon discovering the town librarian brutally murdered with her heart and eyes ripped out, "I have a son." Indeed, some of the most obviously neat aspects to the double-billed production are the scenes we see twice; recognition of the familiar scenes is fun mostly because the jokes in them are pretty great. Under Cullinan's direction, the stage perspective is flipped in the alternate productions, a nice touch.

Cullinan deserves special credit for keeping each play under control, even as the plays themselves descend into zaniness. Both Victims and Detectives run just over an hour and half; each play begins with a clearly stated premise and identifiable subplots which grow murky as the plays grow more heavily mythological until it becomes clear that the mysteries have spun too far out of control for the scripts to explicate. In the hands of a lesser director, such a realization might cue audience restlessness, but Cullinan reigns the production in so tightly that its descent into carnage signals not only dilution of an otherwise cohesive plot but a joyously maudlin production choice. She also demonstrates an impressive ability to keep an enormous ensemble on the same stylistic page, an especially important quality for a production evocative of genre fiction.

The majority of A Brief History of Murder's characters appear in both Vicitims and Detectives, making the second play audiences see -- whichever play that is -- full of warmly familiar faces. It's crucial to the productions' ability to build suspense that audiences like the characters; we need to care whether they live or die and whether they are good or evil. Happily, we do. As the only obvious predator of the production, Timothy McCown Reynolds delivers a coolly creepy performance. Based on the Norse mythological wolf Fenrus, McCown Reynolds skulks about the playing space. "Historically, until this moment, you never missed a thing. Now," he tells a startled former agent of the KBG, "you rarely miss a thing," with a delivery that makes the observation as devastating as any of the gruesome murders depicted onstage. Other standout performers include Kent Meister as a chillaxed artist whose world unexpectedly crumbles, Jesse Wilson as a debilitatingly nervous rookie cop, and Adam Swiderski as a cagey KGB agent turned nude model.

While the large cast bolsters the productions' boisterous, epic aesthetic, both scripts would benefit from some slimming down of a few superfluities. A vacationing marine and her doting husband who fancy themselves detectives (a comedic duo of Sheila Joon and Salvatore Brienik) are among the few characters to appear in Victims only and their presence adds little to the production; a cancer diagnosis in Detectives is a distracting admission. The nymphish Portal sisters, (Sarah Malinda Engelke, Kathryn Lawson, and Eve Udesky), dressed in confusing shiny gold dresses, possess otherwordly powers of an unexplained sort; their last name is insufficient articulation of their identities or their purpose in the play.

A Brief History of Murder's production team gives the town of Sentinal, Oklahoma a homey feel. Costume designer Jim Hammer dresses the characters in comfy Westernesque clothes that contrast nicely with the play's wonderfully silly nude model scenes. Chris Chappell's original music and sound design adds a nice dynamic, infusing otherwise light scenes with a sense of the ominous. As the production's gore and effects designer, Laura Moss does nice work that celebrates the productions' roots in Grand Guignol theater.

Sneaky Snake Producions is an inventive theater company whose last production, Adventure Quest, also written by Lovejoy, traded on the absurd limitations that make up the worlds of video game quests. A Brief History of Murder draws inspiration from the considerably less limited worlds of ancient mythology. The result is a pair of plays that lose a little in their overexuberance but whose crafted enthusiasm for their material is itself a source of delight.

An Unsavory Burger from Mythical Greece

An elegant young woman poised behind a flowered bedecked lectern, draped in azure, handed patrons programs the way a hostess doles out menus. The opening night meal at Teatro Circulo was not, for example, foie gras, or anything else so proper-- but it was fine. Its taste was a fusion of the great myths and drama of classical Greece flavored with a putrid modern disdain of ourselves. Teaser Cow, a dark comedy written by Clay McLeod Chapman, convinces one of author Tom Robbins assessment of this playwright work. That is, it “races back and forth along the serrated edges of everyday American madness, objectively recording each whimper of anguish, each whisper of skewed desire.” Before “anguish” and “madness,” however, the show begins with a suspiciously catchy jingle accompanied by an all too happy commercial host who is selling hamburgers. From there the play unfolds into a mesh of mythological and urban landscapes that reconcile themselves cleverly, if not gorily, in the ending. The basic plot is familiar: the Minotaur is born of the punishment to King Minos given to him by his father Zeus for not sacrificing him a prized animal. Zeus forces Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife to copulate with a steer and thus conceive the Minotaur, a monstrosity, hidden in a labyrinth lest he ever escape. Teaser Cow follows that same premise with some minor 21st century adjustments.

In Chapman’s version of the myth, the characters are colorful and the majority of the action occurs in a dirty fast food kitchen. King Minos is the CEO of Minos Burgers, whose burgers are extremely tasty, but have a shocking secret. Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, works as a drive through host because her father wants her “to work her way up.” In the process of working “her way up” she has become addicted to ketchup, sucking and chewing on it like tobacco. Theseus, an Athenian burger slinger, is wooing Ariadne and his character, like others, is disgusted by the nature of his work. The origin of the infantile and mute Hysteerion, who has a gigantic bovine head and dons blue baby pajamas, is revealed to the audience slowly. Pasiphaë, the mother of Hysteerion, enjoys her liquor, which allows her to be both comically amusing and tragic.

Surveying the Mediterranean from presumably a high point in Crete, Theseus laments to Ariadne that Crete, Athens, Sparta and Corinth “have all become the same, a Minus Burgers can be found in each city!” This vignette showcases one of the many gripping temporal shifts between present and ancient time. These shifts allow for an interpretation of today’s food industry, which makes a thinly veiled suggestion: the 21st beef industry is every bit the abomination of the ancient Minotaur.

Plot aside, the company of One Year Lease is enjoyable to watch. There is a clear trust expressed between these actors who come from as far as New Zealand, Australia and Greece. If there are stand out moments then one is the whimsical midwifery of Babis Gousias, who enchants the stage with graceful mystery. Unfortunately, there were times when one hoped Gousias would have trusted the natural cadence of his voice more consistently. Christina Lind stood out as a neurotically prude Ariadne, while her mother, Pasiphaë, played by Sarah-Jane Casey, was powerfully feminine and like her on stage husband, her character reached tragic dimensions.

While there is no arguing with taste, Teaser Cow should satisfy most audiences. The plot is cleverly constructed and entertaining but also earnest. It may, however, make you consider more carefully before you order your next burger.

An Odyssey

"Am I awake or asleep?" That uncertainty, voiced by characters throughout the International WOW Company's Auto Da Fe, permeates the production, which works hard to create a dreamlike aesthetic. Nate Lemoine's set design drapes the deep floor and backdrop of the large playing space in blue tarp, with white ladders of varying heights providing definition against the otherwise seamless expanse. Jullian J. Mesri's sound design provides near-constant ambiance setting music; a fog machine provides a lot of fog. Under the direction of International WOW Artistic Director Josh Fox, Auto Da Fe would benefit from a greater sense of dramatic clarity, even as it attempts to stage foggy consciousness and indefinite geography. An Odyssey adaption by Japanese playwright Masataka Matsuda, the International WOW production marks the play's English language premiere. Inernational WOW has over a decade of experience in international collaboration, and its rendering of Auto Da Fe is at its strongest in its use of multiculturalism to evoke life after war. With a 28-member ensemble of diverse ethnicities and nationalities, Auto Da Fe is perhaps among the most genuinely multicultural productions to play Off-Broadway in recent memory; rather than localize this U.S. translation of a Japanese adaption of the Greeks, International WOW integrates multicultural aesthetics to weave a story that approaches timelessness. Piles of empty shoes and rent clothing, which have become near artistic shorthand for human disasters ranging from the dead of Vietnam to the Dirty Wars of Argentina to the Holocaust, are put to good use in this production, effectively invoking a history of global horrors without needing to identify a singular crisis.

The young ensemble executes each movement with a lot of dedication; a greater degree of actorly precision might help avoid the preciousness which plagues the production. Loosely following a soldier called Odyseaus A through a war ravaged landscape, Auto Da Fe relies on scenes and images rather than on linear plot. Most of the ensemble remains onstage for the duration of the production, and Fox clearly has paid a lot of attention to stage pictures created by the large cast. At an intermissionless hour and forty minutes, however, the imagistic production grows tedious even before its penultimate scene overwhelms every other aspect of the production.

As Auto Da Fe nears its end, a small group of soldiers discusses rape as a tactic of war. An angry soldier argues for miscegenation as genocide: by raping and impregnating local women, he says, the soldiers will systematically put an end to the enemy's race. Next, the company's young women and a few young men cue up to to be raped by the soldiers, played by young male theater types doing their self-serious best at performing militaristic aggression. One of the soldiers takes a woman from the front of the line and shoves her toward the rapist, who throws her onto a pile of rags. Were the scene to end there, it might have more powerfully suggested the horrors to come, but this lengthy production is unsatisfied with brief images suggestive of futurity. Like most scenes in the production, the rape sequence goes on much too long, undoing its own power in the process.

Where Auto Da Fe's other overlong sequences tend to start intriguing and become cloying, the rape scene becomes flat out offensive. If it's at all possible to depict a marathon rape sequence theatrically, doing so would require more mighty exactitude than the young Auto Da Fe ensemble possesses. Further weakening the horrors of rape, as the long line of rape victims take turns on the clothing pile, yet another member of the ensemble speaks into a microphone of his mother's sad response to his father's infidelities. Recitation of memory fragments occur throughout the production, so at its least inappropriate, the spoken-word memory of familial strife provides an alternate focus to the rapist; at its most idiotic, it suggests a parallel between adultery and rape.

Auto Da Fe has many beautiful design elements and a hardworking young cast. Within the excess, the production has good moments evocative of the International WOW Company's more successful work. Good intentions undoubtedly went into the making of Auto Da Fe but especially given the horrors of its subject matter, good intentions are insufficient. Military rape is the most graphic aspect of war addressed by the play, and presenting it in the manner used here reveals the WOW Company at its most immature, incapable of evoking the horrors of rape and overpowering the good work that went into other parts of the production.

Nothing Foul Here

Nearly a decade since its initial run, Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out can now be viewed as a period piece, of sorts. Out was a watershed play, addressing homosexuality and ignorance in the world of American sports in the wake of moderately controversial statements made by Mike Piazza and John Rocker. It crystallized a few offhand comments into a work of art. And yet even though it went on to nab the Tony for Best Play and land on the Pulitzer shortlist, Greenberg’s signature piece was not a flawless work. Greenberg’s themes in Out are as abundant as they are passionate, but it runs the risk of feeling like a polemic. Fortunately, director Fabio Taliercio manages to navigate past many of these hurdles in his deeply perceptive production of the show, presented by Brooklyn’s Heights Players. He focuses on the people behind the ideas, and makes the best of an extremely talented ensemble.

Most of the cast play teammates of the fictional Empires, a Yankees-esque team enduring a drought. Darren Lemming (Ugo Chukwu), a cocky (though not arrogant) mixed-race teammate meant to recall the stature of Derek Jeter, outs himself at a press conference. It’s a decision that affects the Empires and several other key individuals. To Greenberg’s credit, many of these consequences are unforeseeable.

Also to Greenberg’s credit is how well he endows several prominent roles. Lemming might appear to be the lead of Out, but there are several other characters drawn with less broad strokes. These include Kippy Sunderstrom (Seth Grugle), the play’s omniscient narrator, widely regarded to be the smartest player in the league. Grugle proves himself to be quite a polished performer in a layered role – he is able to suggest that he is a well-read, open-minded figure and still not quite understand how Lemming, a friend with whom he spends more time than with his wife and children, could keep such an important secret from him. (The actor also deserves extra points for mastering Greenberg’s demanding dialogue with the same nimble skill that Eminem displays when wrapping his tongue around rap lyrics.)

Of course, anyone familiar with earlier incarnations of Out will also remember that it’s the lone non-slugger who nearly steals the whole show. Mason Marzac (Nathan Richard Wagner), is Lemming’s accountant (and eventually more), but he also serves as a surrogate for Greenberg himself. The sheepish number cruncher becomes a fan of the great American pastime for the first time, ascribing the sport as a symbol of democracy.

Mason is a clever invention on Greenberg’s part – he explains baseball for those (given theater audiences, many) unfamiliar with the details of the sport, and acts as a cheerleader for those audience members that are already fans. Marzac is the jewel in this show’s crown, and Wagner shines. He nails Marzac’s several impassioned monologues in a turn that is as enthusiastic as it is completely endearing.

It’s the fourth pivotal character, though, that both Greenberg and this production have some trouble pinning down. The Empires recruit Shane Mungitt (Craig Peterson), a prejudiced hick, to be their relief pitcher. He saves the team but becomes a divisive presence when he speaks out publicly about his racist and homophobic beliefs.

Mungitt is a tricky character to play. Is he merely uneducated, socially awkward, or is there something more sociopathic toward him? A first act scene in which Lemming and Sunderstrom try to engage him plays awkwardly, and doesn’t do justice to Mungitt. As the play escalates, however, and Mungitt emerges as a more fully formed character, Peterson acquits himself better, giving greater insight into the pitcher’s malevolence.

Taliercio is a skilled and patient storyteller, and his production manages to undercut some of Greenberg’s other flaws. First of all, it’s a boon to have a cast that more closely resembles the actual age of a pro baseball team than the original production had; it lends the characters’ immature, sometimes misguided reactions added authenticity. Additionally, Lemming’s motivation for coming out is never clear in the text. He is a self-described loner, does not have a surging libido, and is not currently attached to anyone, so why bother, aside from the fact that it is necessary to ignite Greenberg’s plot? Chukwu goes a very long way to unmasking the man, suggesting a solitude and an intelligence that have been quietly eroding him from the inside.

There are several other players to be applauded here: Mike Basile provides necessary comic relief as the bullet-headed Toddy Koovitz, while Doua Moua is terrific as Takeshi Kawabata, the Japanese ball player who refuses to learn English in order to keep his game pure – Greenberg provides him, too, with a special monologue that the actor makes the most of. Bryant Wingfield also nails his scenes as Davey Battle, an opponent of the Empires but friend to Lemming.

I also commend Carl Tallent's moveable set, which, among other locales, serves as press box, clubhouse, and locker room. That last setting brings to mind the show’s most polarizing element, which is the nudity in the shower scenes. It’s far from gratuitous – these scenes allow the audience to either share or dismiss the players’ discomfort following Lemming’s coming out. What I do wish is that Greenberg had crafted an earlier scene showing how this was a nonissue prior to the announcement. Also, eliminating one of the production’s two intermissions might help allay the play’s few momentary lulls (it currently runs just shy of three hours).

Out still manages to make the most of its source material, though, and then some, in this intelligent production full of all-stars. They should be full of pride.

Old Wives' Tales

Playwright Barbara Wiechmann’s Aunt Leaf takes place in the Hudson River Valley in the early 1900s. Though much is made of that region in the production’s press materials, the setting could be just about anywhere with a forest and a river. Aunt Leaf is the story of a quiet 11-year-old named Annabelle Wood, whose decrepit Great Aunt Leaf (described at one point as “a gassy pile of blinking black rags”) comes to stay for the summer. Young Annabelle, the only person in the large house who has any meaningful contact with the bedridden and unhappy Aunt Leaf, rapidly internalizes her aunt’s hopeful declarations that “people come back” and that “living things are made of stories.” Aunt Leaf explains that she has heard her long-deceased husband whistling one night on the lawn.

Encouraging each others’ fecund imaginations, Annabelle dutifully reports to her aunt the snapping of twigs, the barking of dogs, the rustling of leaves and other assorted natural activity, the two of them imbuing each event with otherworldly significance. Everything that happens becomes a symbol or omen. Soon, Annabelle’s vivid imagination gets the better of her and she begins inventing entirely new activity, nourishing Aunt Leaf’s myth and offering the old woman small glimpses of nostalgic happiness.

Actors Alan Benditt, Pal Bernstein and Rachael Richman do a fine job of storytelling; all three play Aunt Leaf, Annabelle and other assorted minor characters. For effect, they continually repeat and overlap each other’s sometimes breathtakingly poetic sentences; unfortunately, it’s soon overdone and occasionally annoying. At merely 45 minutes, Aunt Leaf is a somewhat sparse ghost story; when filler appears, it’s fairly obvious: “So Annabelle ran--down the hall, past her sisters, past her mother, past her father, down the stairs, around the landing, out the back door, and into the dark of the lawn and the woods.”

Ultimately, Aunt Leaf is about more than the blurring of reality and imagination. It’s about unremitting loneliness, isolation and, though unmentioned, it’s also about what is likely serious depression. Since the production lists an “Education Outreach Coordinator” (Amy Harris) and has received support from the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America, I suspect that it was vetted by educators to determine that the material is appropriate for “children ages 9 and up.”

Nonetheless, Aunt Leaf strikes me as an adult play and I would hesitate to take an average nine year-old to this production. Much as questions have lingered for at least two centuries as to the suitability for children of the material in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, one must question whether Aunt Leaf is really appropriate for very young people, or at least certain very young people. The program suggests several “Things to Talk About On the Way Home,” apparently for parents and educators. One of them is “Do you think it’s ok to lie?” This seems incongruous. Using Aunt Leaf to teach children about the pitfalls of lying is like explaining the deaths of their pet lizards by making them watch The Seventh Seal.

The set is fittingly dark and creepy. Amelia Dombrowski’s costuming evokes a pastoral world a century old and Sarah Edkins’ spare set design is inventive: a grandfather clock doubles at one point as a coffin. Yet, the most astonishing feature of this production, and the one that permits me to recommend this play, at least to adults and perhaps teenagers, is the beautiful—frequently sublime—projection imagery of Robert Flynt. As the actors tell the story of Annabelle and Aunt Leaf, they and the set are often shrouded in transcendent projections of leaves, or willows, or faces, or stars. These projections add a mysterious, profound dimension to an ordinary, if particularly bleak, ghost story; it’s almost as if the pages of an illustrated storybook are being revealed to us, slowly, one by one.

Video is Not the Killer

Mid-century detective stories provide rich fodder for venues of all stripes, from the commercial glitz of Broadway, where The 39 Steps is about to wrap up a four and half year run ("Alfred Hitchcock meets hilarious" declared its early publicity), to the DIY inventiveness of the New York International Fringe Festival, where Race McCloud, Private Eye) premiered last summer. The most recent production to spoof and celebrate the gumshoe genre is Radio Star, produced by Horse Trade Theater Group and Tanya O'Debra at the Red Room on East Fourth Street, which presents itself as a live broadcast of a 1940's radio drama, with a twist: O'Debra, who also wrote the script, plays each of the parts. As a governing conceit, the stage-performance-as-radio-broadcast yields fun results. The performance space stays unchanged throughout the production, which begins just before O'Debra enters the theater, dressed in a fur stole, and concludes with her exit just under an hour later. As the show's bow-tied Announcer and Soundman, J. Lincoln Hallowell, Jr. creates sound effects the old fashioned way (tap shoes indicate walking, the lid of wood box mimics doors closing) and also via a Mac laptop, which plays music to set ambiance (composed by Andrew Mauriello) and commercials to set time period (the show is purportedly sponsored by "Iron Lung Cigarettes"). Hallowell's presence, like the sounds he cues, goes a long way toward creating the radio show atmosphere in a minimal amount of space, and especially toward supporting O'Debra as she takes on the play's varied, delightfully silly roles.

Perched on a tall chair and reading from a music stand, O'Debra nails each of the gumshoe archetypes. The story revolves around private dick Nick McKittrick, hired by the beautiful, unflappable Fanny Larue to solve the murder of her newly deceased husband. Along the way he encounters a bumbling inventor named Wally, a defensive secretary named Betty Buttons, and a disgusting manservent named Lucifer, among others. As a playwright, O'Debra peppers the script with punning innuendo ("Don't test me! The results will not be positive!") and winking anachronism (snuggies). As an actor under the direction of Peter Cook, she delivers each performance sans irony. It's a smart choice that keeps the pace up and the laughs funny through to the play's cute, final revelation.

Radio Star premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where minimal sets and virtuosic performances help U.S. productions first to get themselves overseas and, once there, to stand out from the pack. Those qualities prove equally useful in The Red Room, a theater sometimes misused by less minimalist productions attempting elaborate set changes in the small playing space. With its intimate house, raised seats, and (yes) red walls, The Red Room makes a perfect home for Radio Star's broadcast-as-theater, fully encapsulating the production. O'Debra's disciplined, vivacious performance fills the space from red wall to red wall.