Behind Every Man

W.E.B. DuBois as matchmaker? Charles Smith’s Knock Me A Kiss is a wonderfully funny and unexpectedly moving imagining of one of America’s earliest celebrity marriages. Running at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center, the ensemble, under the direction of Chuck Smith, welcomes audiences into the home of renowned scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois as he sets up the “marriage of the century” between his daughter Yolanda and Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. The couple wed in 1928 and the marriage was short-lived as Cullen preferred men and Yolanda was unwilling to live in a loveless marriage. The inimitable Andre DeShields portrays DuBois as a man of contradictions. The public DuBois was forward-thinking and interested in social advancement. In Knock Me A Kiss, DuBois at home is imperious and perhaps just like the other men of his time when it comes to his views on women. Nina, his wife, played by Marie Thomas, is only referred to as “Wife.” Nina is neglected and invisible. Yolande, played by Erin Cherry, eventually becomes another instrument for the advancement of the race; she is reduced to “Daughter!” when she fails to follow her father’s directions. One can see that she marries Countee to receive her father’s approval and dismiss jazz musician and conductor Jimmy Lunceford.

What is subtly illuminated in this production is the sacrifice that mother and daughter make in order to support DuBois' plans. It is fascinating that Countee Cullen, played by Sean Phillips, with all of his poetic talk of friendship and love, seems nonplused at the idea of having a phony marriage as long as it will provide him with the social mobility that he needs. For every cause there is a cost and, in this world, the price is a woman’s happiness.

Morocco Omari’s Jimmy Lunceford is dashing, and it is obvious why any woman would fall for him. What is not as clear from the production is why Lunceford would fall for Yolanda. The program notes describe the historical Yolande DuBois as “self-indulgent, underachieving, [and] uncertain.” Yolande is simultaneously spoiled and idealistic. She unequivocally wants to teach the less fortunate and she unequivocally wants a husband who can send her first class to Paris. Erin Cherry’s Yolande spends most of the first act behaving like a pouting debutante, and the theatrical Yolande comes off as immature and irritating. It is only in the second act, as the play’s unfortunate events unravel, that we catch a glimpse of the Cherry’s depth, and it would be lovely to see more of this earlier in the play.

Otherwise, Knock Me A Kiss is a fantastic night of theater, and I hope that the production can find another home in New York City.

Fjord Wars

If Rosmersholm isn’t the first play that comes to mind when someone mentions Henrik Ibsen, it’s still undeniably by the Norwegian master, and fans will want to see the Pearl Theatre’s first-rate production of this unusual, frequently melodramatic, play. Ibsen’s great works—The Master Builder, A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck—aren’t walks in the park, but they continually feel vital. If Rosmersholm is not in their league, it still has a strong pulse. As usual, Ibsen winds his plot tightly. Johannes Rosmer (Bradford Cover), scion of an aristocratic family, has returned to his estate on the outskirts of a city after a period away following the suicide of his wife, Beata. Staying with him is his foster daughter, Rebecca West (Margot White). His late wife’s brother, Doctor Kroll, pays a visit to persuade Rosmer to join his political party, which recently lost elections to a liberal faction. Kroll is a reactionary who believes that the liberals will ruin the country and must be stopped.

But Rosmer, a former pastor, has undergone a conversion and renounces his aristocratic heritage. “One day I simply admitted it to myself—everything that had been handed down to me—through generation upon generation—was pernicious worthless deception,” he tells Kroll. The patrician now sympathizes with the common man: “I want to ennoble them…By not presuming to tell them what they must think—how they must act. By letting them find their own way to what is true and good.” Kroll is incensed. There are more than a few echoes of 21st-century culture wars in the conflict between Kroll and Rosmer, and they enliven the best parts of Rosmersholm.

It’s one of the marvelous ironies of Ibsen that Kroll’s political rival, the more phlegmatic Peder Mortensgaard (Dominic Cuskern), is equally appalled. Expecting to cash in on Rosmer’s support as a pillar of society, he quickly backtracks when he learns Rosmer has renounced Christianity. “Nobody will give you the time of day if they think you’d turned against the Church,” Mortensgaard says. “They’re all good church-going folk out there. What our movement needs is converts—Church leaders who’ve come round to our way of thinking—men the people respect.”

The parallels in Rosmersholm to the current venomous political climate must surely have drawn director Elinor Renfield to the play, and she’s responded with a well considered production. And veteran Austin Pendleton, making a guest appearance with the Pearl as Kroll, can recognize a juicy part. Apart from some occasional tentativeness on his lines in preview, he makes Kroll a smarmy, self-righteous and baleful figure whose mantra is “who is not with me is against me.”

A brief subplot underlines the liberal vs. conservative clash, as Dan Daily puts in a delightful appearance as Ulrik Brendel, a penniless New Age visionary (dressed deftly in shabby clothes, dirty boots, purple vest, suspenders and a gray, long-haired wig by Niki Hernandez-Adams) who cadges money from Rosmer like a Norwegian Micawber. Rounding out the cast of six is the superstitious housekeeper Mrs. Helseth (Robin Leslie Brown), who yammers on about a white horse in local legend that is the harbinger of death. That white horse is a symptom of the common folks’ superstitions that would probably undermine Rosmer’s hopes for their self-determination.

The melodrama intermittently present in the first half of the play takes over in the second half. (In fact, the late Charles Ludlam wickedly parodied the play’s first scene in The Mystery of Irma Vep for the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.) From Kroll and Mortensgaard’s visits, Rosmer learns that Beata conceived a notion that he and West were having an affair. As she was slowly going insane (possibly from guilt that she was barren), Beata confided her worries to her brother, and in a letter to Mortensgaard implored him not to listen to unfounded rumors about immorality at Rosmersholm.

As Ibsen slowly unveils this melodramatic machinery, West takes center stage, and the plot overheats. It’s not the fault of White, who has the confident deportment of the New Woman of the period and vividly shows her character’s lively mind and opinions, along with a cold calculation. But Cover’s Rosmer, initially a solid, decent man, suddenly seems excessively dewy-eyed, full of scholarly learning but less common sense. Indeed, Harry Feiner’s dappled white backdrop design suggests a bank of clouds wherein Rosmersholm floats, its master’s head figuratively in the clouds.

Rosmer doesn’t see the twists in the plot coming as quickly as an audience member will, although the climax remains a surprise, even if it’s weakened by implausibility. Still, Ibsen completists will want to seize the chance to glimpse this rarity as if it were Halley’s comet coming round for a visit.

Manliness, Manly Mess

Billed as “two plays about men” with all-male casts, BALLS! The Testosterone Plays of Monica Bauer is currently playing a limited run at the WorkShop Theatre Main Stage through December 5. BALLS! is a compelling evening of theater showcasing some wonderful acting and keen writing. The show’s press release describes BALLS! as “two plays about marriage, one gay, and one straight,” but it is really more about the many iterations of what it means to be a man — and a husband — in contemporary society. Various guises of manhood are displayed throughout the show — young, old, gay, straight. This is what makes BALLS! so intriguing. The 30-minute one-act titled Two Men Walked into a Bar that leads off the show starts as three actors enter the stage and literally sound off before the action begins. It is late at night in a seedy bar in Alabama and two Marine veterans (one from Vietnam, the other Iraq) engage in an escalating face off about their respective lives and wives.

The dramatic structure of this piece is very sound, befitting Bauer’s status as a writing fellow at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and former teaching fellow in the graduate playwriting program at Boston University, where she received her MA in playwriting. Each man slowly reveals his own predicament and the particulars surrounding his situation as the liquor flows and time ticks by.

As the Iraq vet, Aaron Gonzalez has a youthful swagger that acts as a mask to his physical and emotional pain. Nick Ruggeri as the seasoned Vietnam vet seethes with anger and resentment. Both actors bring multiple shades to their portrayals.

But Two Men is the more problematic of the two pieces. It is too overwrought, with sheer physicality taking the place of truer emotion. Perhaps this is meant to represent the “testosterone” section of the play’s title, but it ends up ringing a bit false, as the does the murderous subplot in this section (which I won’t give away to avoid spoiling the ending). However, the cast gives it their all and sells the script regardless of the flaws.

The nearly one-hour solo piece, Made for Each Other, that makes up the second half of the show features a tour de force performance by actor John Fico (A.R. Gurney’s Screen Play at The Flea). Billed as “a boy meets boy love story in the shadow of Alzheimer’s,” it chronicles the fall-out from a marriage proposal on the third date between two middle-aged gay men.

Fico is marvelous and captivating on stage by himself, playing four distinct roles, addressing the audience as each individual character, and revealing the bittersweet romance between the two lovers and their individual struggles with their families and sexualities. Made for Each Other recently appeared in the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, where it was nominated for Outstanding Solo Show and Best Actor in a Solo Show. The playwright wrote the piece specifically for Fico — and it shows. He is born to play these parts and dives deep into each character with personal touches and tics that add nuance and subtlety to each portrayal.

My only concern with Made for Each Other is the inclusion of the Alzheimer’s suffering mother as one of the roles. Don’t get me wrong — she is a colorful character and Fico does a wonderful job with her. But she seems out of place in a show called BALLS! that focuses primarily on men and what it means to be a man.

As directed by John Fitzgibbon and evocatively lit by lighting designer David S. Goldstein, BALLS! The Testosterone Plays of Monica Bauer will particularly appeal to theater lovers who revel in the black box experience — an intimate space with little to no scenery that produces theatrical magic with a minimum of fuss and maximum talent. And with John Fico's outstanding solo performance as the highlight, there is certainly a lot of talent onstage in BALLS!

A Lesson in Urban Planning

Leaving Irondale Theatre after viewing the Civilians’ In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards, I felt like I just left a dinner party where I was the only one who didn’t know anything about the major topic of conversation. Therefore I had to sit for several hours and quietly sip my wine, watching jargon fly and faces redden, feeling confused and tired, unable to develop an opinion and needing an aspirin. The difference being, in In the Footprint , they argue to song, and I get no wine. The production’s press release states that “ In the Footprint is inspired by interviews conducted by The Civilians with real-life players in the years-long controversy about the Atlantic Yards Project, which will bring high-rise housing and a basketball arena to the rail yards in downtown Brooklyn.” (For more information on the controversy, go here: wikipedia.org/Atlantic_Yards .) The company attempts to tackle the issue thoroughly and fairly, and more or less does so. However, it fails to stir me: after the final bows, I am not sure what I think about the issue, and more importantly, why I should care.

The style of the play is documentary theater reminiscent of Anna Deveare Smith’s one woman shows, performed by an ensemble of six. The majority of the piece is comprised of monologues taken from interviews conducted by The Civilians over the course of two years. The set is barebones, and extensive video projection is used throughout, not unlike a trumped-up classroom presentation.

Interspersed throughout the play are musical numbers, composed by Michael Friedman in contemporary Broadway style. They don’t appear enough to call the piece a musical (they term it “a play with music”) and are used primarily as tools a la School House Rock, to introduce names of organizations or eminent domain-related terms. The style and music operate to alienate the audience from the material, so that they may analyze it objectively. Because of this, I get no sense of the community the story is about (Prospect Heights), and why I should care about its possible demise. What does Prospect Heights look like? Feel like? Sound like? Certainly not a Broadway musical.

However, there are upsides to this alienation effect. One benefit of being disconnected from the piece is that I get to admire the actors’ work. I love watching talented actors play multiple roles well, and these actors certainly excel at it. I actually didn’t realize there are only six actors in the cast: there were so many varied characters, I thought the ensemble numbered at least eight.

Matthew Dellapina and Donnetta Lavinia Grays deliver particularly standout performances. Their portrayals of community members and activists provide me with a few brief moments of empathy. Grays is one of those actors who can enthrall while doing nothing more than standing still, listening, in character. What a treat to get to watch her do so.

Another treat occurs about two thirds into In the Footprint . Here, the structure of the play breaks and instead of speaking one at a time to the audience, various characters come together and argue with one another face to face. All of the major ideological and racial tensions surface in an explosion of finger pointing and heated words. One realizes how complex this issue really is, stemming from highly contentious issues: gentrification, racial inequality, and real, deep seated anger. For a moment, the play strikes a chord: one understands the situation as indicative of issues bigger than Atlantic Yards and more painful than housing relocation.

In my opinion, that chord is not struck nearly enough. The press release claims that “ In the Footprint is an examination of how the fate of the city and its dwellers is decided in present-day New York and what might be learned from this ongoing epic of politics, money, and the places we call home.” But what might be learned remains unclear to me. Further, I am not moved to care enough about this event to try to figure it out. In the Footprint is an informative piece of theater that teaches us about the Atlantic Yards controversy, but does not show us the neighborhood it affects, its sounds and sights, and its unique flavor that the project is ostensibly destroying. It gives us a situation that is more or less over and leaves us puzzling over what to do with it. If you are particularly interested in and knowledgable about this issue, it may be worth your while. Otherwise, it’s just too much of a headache.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep at 3LD Art & Technology Center

The short answer, given in this adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s eponymous novel, is yes. What this does, or should, mean to us, however, is a different question. Philip K. Dick’s questions about what it is to be human have not lost their urgency, and many of his devices (the mood manipulator, the empathy box) while perhaps amusing in their crude realizations, can be found in every household, briefcase and pocket. The quest for an end to a potentially all-annihilating war is not over, and one could easily replace the designation “android” with one like “Taliban” and find many who would prefer their confinement or annihilation. Rick Deckard (Alex Emanuel), a bounty hunter in a post-nuclear-war world, is faced with hunting down six androids, humanoid robots that are used as slaves on Mars but are forbidden to come to Earth. His pursuit of the six escaped androids leads him into a maze of moral and practical questions about the difference between humans and robots that can remember but not feel empathy, have sex without love, and might be more perfect in terms of beauty and intelligence than their creators. He is suspected by others to be an android himself, particularly due to his ability to kill with little empathy for his prey. In the end he escapes death and resumes life with his wife Iran (Uma Incrocci).

Edward Einhorn’s adaptation (he also directs) stays close to the novel, which is – as so often with adaptations – a blessing and a curse. The dramatic scenes are short but require long expositions to be comprehensible, making the play feel longer than its 90 minutes. The post-apocalyptic world Dick envisioned in 1968 becomes here a postmodern jumble of visual elements from the fifties (the pre-show film snippets of instructions of how to behave in a nuclear attack), music (by Henry Akona, performed live by Michael Midlarsky on cello and Moira Stone, soprano) that seems inspired by Schoenberg and Berg in its haunting dissonances, and costuming that suggests anything from current thrift shop to film noir detective outfits.

That this novel also served as the starting point for the iconic film Bladerunner makes Einhorn’s task no easier, and many lines of dialogue and scenes from Ridley Scott’s film ghosted in my mind while watching this play. But in the end, and particularly thanks to the strong acting by Alex Emanuel as Deckard, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep found its affecting conclusion, and the answer to the question in the title. The need to preserve life is strong, and even an electric sheep’s destruction can be painful. And while this, as one character in the play states, may be an egotistical emotional need, it feeds our hopes and dreams.

Highway to the Anger Zone

In Kim Rosenstock’s new play, Tigers Be Still, it’s not just the big cat of the title that’s on the run – at one point a dog gets loose too. But while these animals run wild, their human counterparts are in varied cases of stasis in this introspective work from a very promising emerging playwright. Sherry (Halley Feiffer), a 24-year-old art therapist, is the connective tissue between these cocooned lives. These include her older sister Grace (Natasha Lyonne), who has retreated home after breaking up with her adulterous fiancé and brought half of his belongings – including his pet dogs – with her. Grace now spends her days in a fugue state, nursing Jack Daniel’s and re-watching Top Gun ad nauseum. The two sisters live with their mother, who has put on so much weight that she hides in her bedroom offstage and refuses to emerge, Gilbert Grape-style.

There are also several men attached to Sherry, including Joseph (Reed Birney), the principal of the high school where Sherry teaches but also the erstwhile prom date of Sherry’s mother, and his teen son, Zack (John Magaro), who becomes Sherry’s teaching assistant but is also in need of some therapy himself in the wake of his mother’s death in a car accident.

Rosenstock’s look at frozen lives is sharp but also painless; there is a plot, of sorts, that includes a tiger on the loose, but Tigers is really a character study. In this way the play calls to mind one of last year’s great triumphs, Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, in which characters’ seeming immobility actually had tons to tell and propelled the story along. Both shows have something else in common in the form of director Sam Gold, a genius at exacting nuance and depth from even the slightest situation.

And Gold does just that in Tigers. Grace, for example, could be a really self-indulgent showboating piece, but Lyonne does the work of dealing with the character’s pain beneath the humor to inject her with true pathos. Magaro, too, navigates the fine line between typical surly youth and emotionally crippled survivor with impressive skill: Zack engenders humor and sympathy as his complicated relationship with Sherry develops. Feiffer, too, is generous throughout the play, taking what could have been an annoyingly quirky leading role – Sherry has never had a job or a boyfriend, but comes armed with human insight – and instead weaving herself into the tapestry of an ensemble.

It’s Birney, though – himself a Circle Mirror grad – who runs away with his too few scenes in Tigers as the show’s most believable character. Rosenstock has made Joseph a character full of secrets, some of which he keeps from us (including a high school inside joke that remains between him and Sherry’s mother only) and some of which he keeps from other characters. A solo scene in which Joseph attempts to cancel his late wife’s yoga magazine subscription is a case study in grief and a textbook example of rich performance.

Tigers isn’t yet a perfect play. It would benefit from a little economy; if Rosenstock could cut down on the number of quick two-hander scenes, the play might feel less meandering as this quartet’s emotional journey continues.

And while it is a great compliment for the play to be a part of the Roundabout Underground series, the black box theater there is dreadful. With Gold’s actors often sitting or laying down, much of the action is quite literally impossible to see if one is not in the front row; a Cirque du Soleil member couldn’t do all of the craning and contorting necessary to see everything on that stage. (Still, what one can see of Dane Laffrey’s costumes and sets are worth it.)

Rosenstock’s play is proof-positive that many things in life are possible. Tigers can be tamed. People can get through grief. And it’s possible to write a smart, sensitive play that is pure joy to sit through.

Darkness Becomes Them

Both playwright Adam Rapp and downtown theater company The Amoralists are known for their in-your-face works. Consider the brute force of Rapp’s Pulitzer finalist, Red Light Winter, or the bravura work done in the extremist acting group’s magnum opus, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side. These are creative forces who have never stopped in the comfortable middle ground. Fortunately, they take us somewhere far beyond in Ghosts in the Cottonwoods. This is Rapp’s first full-length play. Though written a decade and a half ago, it is only now getting its New York stage birth, with Rapp also onboard as director and the Amoralists joining him for the first time as the show’s collective surrogate mother.

Ghosts is a dark, measured play that predicts some of Rapp’s best works, including Winter and this summer’s The Metal Children and skirts some of the tricks that troubled other later works like Bingo With the Indians and Essential Self Defense. Thanks to set designer Alfred Schatz’s excellent tableau, we immediately establish the setting as a sort of Appalachian Gothic (the same image evoked this fall in Soho Rep’s Orange, Hat and Grace). Bean Scully (Sarah Lemp) shares a tough but close bond with her son Pointer (Nick Lawson) in their shack as they await the return of elder son Jeff (James Kautz), who has escaped from prison.

But other visitors will arrive first. William Apps is Newton Yardly, a badly injured bounty hunter who stumbles upon the Scully’s door. Remember that creepy hitchhiker who terrorized the characters early on in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Apps projects the same kind of secret horror onstage, adding the first dose of suspense to this white-knuckle affair. It’s hard to tell, at first, whether he is more of a threat to himself or to Bean and Pointer.

By the time we find out, though, Shirley Judyhouse (Mandy Nicole Moore) has also turned up on this rainy night, with a potentially destructive announcement: she’s carrying Pointer’s baby. The sense of dread, and overall intensity of Rapp’s show, only deepen further when Jeff and a friend of his (Matthew Pilieci) finally arrive.

Rapp has created a world of anomie here – rules, justice,and civility have no need to apply, and his cast treats this material with a seriousness requiring major commitment on their end. They work so well together that it seems wrong to single any of them out, but the work is so strong, I’ll do it anyway. Leading the pack is Lemp as the broken Bean, a woman who has retreated into her own world for reasons both explained and merely suggested. It’s a harrowing portrayal that I imagine left more than just this reviewer breathless by show’s end.

Lawson is uncanny as the son Bean has dragged down into the sinkhole with her, and the nimble way the two of them move and deliver Rapp’s brilliant backwoods idioglossia is impressively eerie. Apps, Kautz and Pilieci all go full throttle in their embodiments of menace, while Moore’s subtle choices add up to haunting effect.

The execution of Ghosts is so perfect that one almost overlooks one puzzling problem with the show. Despite Rapp’s taut direction, it is unclear what the ultimate takeaway of the play is supposed to be. Ordinarily, that would count as a pretty damning charge, but Ghosts is such a solid oak that there is no point in cutting it open to count the rings. The curtain descends long before audience members can catch their breath enough to question what they have just witnessed. That’s more than enough to make this scary sojourn worth the trip.

PTSD, Danish Style: Home Sweet Home at PS122

In the United States, where the field is crowded with plays about the veterans of wars from WWII to Vietnam to Iraq, the bar is set high for plays about those damaged by war. So the Scandinavian American Theatre Company is not in an enviable position in bringing Andreas Garfield’s Home Sweet Home to New York audiences. The play does not overcome this handicap, despite able direction by Christopher Berdal, a set fashioned amusingly from cardboard boxes by Marte Johanne Ekhougen, and an energetic cast of three (Brian Smolin as Kim; Albert Bendix as Carsten, the vet returning from Iraq and Kim’s best friend; and Lisa Pettersson, also its translator, as Iben, Kim’s girlfriend). Kim and Iben have invited to dinner Kim’s childhood friend Carsten, now an early-thirties career officer who just returned from Iraq. Even with their stuff still in boxes and their newly bought house still under construction, they do their best to make the evening special, and Kim, both anxious and excited, cautions Iben not to challenge Carsten’s participation in the Iraq war. Carsten’s arrival (in full dress uniform) and his increasingly erratic behavior over dinner leads to the tragic ending we might expect from a play entitled Home Sweet Home.

The playwright seems most at home with the uncomfortable dynamic of two old friends whose years apart do not easily lead to renewed common interests. Both are performing – posturing, really – for Iben, who for her part jumps at the first opening Carsten gives her to challenge him on his participation in the war. All this raises tensions and hints at traumatic events in Carsten’s past, but Garfield is on less certain ground here and leaves much of Carsten’s experience wrapped in vague suggestions, making it difficult for us to understand the climax of the play.

The extensive use of video projections also makes the play less harrowing than it might be. By filming important scenes rather than finding a way to present them full-bodied in real time on the stage, the writer and director eliminate the element of changeability and spontaneous creation that make theater "theater" and not cinema. This is especially true of the play's climax, which is projected rather than performed. While I can appreciate the narrative efficiency of this move, it removes the heat of immediacy and leaves us, for no aesthetic or intellectual reason, watching the representation of a representation, and thus distanced from its emotional power.

Home Sweet Home takes the horrors of war and their aftermath, both national and personal, and renders them distant by its dominant production device of a cool newsmagazine rendition. The dramatic presentation of the characters, their motives, and their emotions could be much more engaging. That it is an Iraq-war-inspired play originating in Denmark could be of great interest to American audiences. This aspect, however, is not dramatized in this production.

A Place for Remembering

There are many ways to tell a story. One can use language to convey meaning, one can provide images to depict what happened, or one can use the body to elucidate what the physical experience was like. In LOCO7’s new puppet piece at LaMaMa, In Retrospect, all of these elements are used. The piece works as a full sensory experience designed to get at the heart of memory and how it makes us human. The piece is often beautiful and poignant, filled with performative images that an audience member will not soon forget. To attempt to tease out a narrative plot from this piece would be a futile effort. Federico Restrepo, the piece’s co-creator, has written in the program that “this piece investigates how we construct our personal memory box: how we keep our memories fresh and preserve the things that made us who we are.” Indeed, there is the sense in this play that the audience is stepping into the personal memories of the people on stage. We are shown various images to which the three performers react, be they glass balls with photos in them that fall from the sky, a fabric wall of fishes, or an oversized and overstuffed touchtone phone. From the moment we move behind the play’s first image, that of three individuals staring out of their respective apartment windows, we have left the realm of distanced, fourth-wall, representational performance and entered something else entirely, something deeply personal.

Each one of the three performers participates in group performance numbers as well as solo pieces. Primarily, these scenes are constructed of dance and movement sequences accompanied by music. They are unique in that, often, their fellow dancers are puppets or other such material constructions. The creative team was very clever in their construction of all of the puppets and life-size puppet-costumes that they created. Each one introduces a sense of whimsy while still being detailed and expressive enough to evoke real emotion. Every object on stage, from the more traditional marionettes to the large music box from which a dancing doll appears, is as mesmerizing to watch as the dancers themselves.

The dancing is, however, the highlight of the evening’s entertainment, particularly Restrepo’s performance. This theme of memory is, at heart, always deeply tied to the human, thus making the human body the most effective tool in grappling with it. These dance sequences are rarely accompanied by any sort of text, yet they tell a powerful story about what happens when long-lost memories are triggered, how dreams weave into our experiences of the world, and how human interaction is what we long for and crave. Restrepo dances with body puppets of what appear to be him, one from his past childhood and one from his future of old age. Yet this scene also evokes the sense of a man dancing with both his father and his son. This image, however one chooses to read it, is powerful and extraordinarily human.

The play is underscored with beautiful live music. These compositions help to create fluid transitions as well as setting distinct moods for each sequence. The piece also includes several filmic interludes. The back wall, made of blinds, can ingeniously twist to become a projection screen. Despite the ingenuity of making this effect work on stage, these filmed scenes are the weakest elements included in the production. The poetic voiceovers are lovely but they are abstractions on the theme, often alienating the viewer from the live body on stage rather than highlighting that live body’s presence.

All in all, this play is nothing short of a work of art. In less than an hour’s time, it is able to trigger many strong emotions – especially those of love and sadness – through the simplest of theatrical tricks. The piece is hard to sum up in words because it is so special. It is worth experiencing for oneself. It will create a new memory worth storing for years to come in one’s own memory box.

Women on the Verge of Who Knows What

There is something eager and earnest about Tin Lily’s production of Fefu and her Friends . Maria Irene Fornes’ provocative and challenging play explores the private and public dynamics of a group of women, their personal and collective joys and struggles. I am not intimately familiar with this play: Tin Lily’s production was my introduction to it. I gleaned that Fefu and Her Friends is a challenging piece of text with a multitude of plots and subtext, riddled with moments of lyrical unreality. However, in Tin Lily’s production, much of what it is attempting to do and say is lost on me. Despite earnest intentions, the cast and creative team of Tin Lily’s Fefu do not seem to fully understand the play they are producing, and therefore, neither do I. Fefu and her Friends is set on a day in 1935 in Fefu’s home, where a group of women are assembling to plan a fundraising event. The play has an interesting structure: while the first and third acts are basically straightforward, the second act is unique. The first act takes place in Fefu’s living room and introduces us to the eight women and their general relationships to one another. In the second act, four scenes occur at once in four different locations in the theater, or four different “rooms” in Fefu’s house. The audience splits into small groups and moves from room to room, viewing each scene in turn. These scenes are more intimate and revealing. The third act brings us back to Fefu’s living room and the big group, where the intimate revelations of the previous scenes seep into the public space, causing a kind of tragic unraveling.

The lack of clarity in the piece comes through most clearly in individual performances. Tai Verley’s Fefu is muddled and erratic. I feel little empathy for Fefu, because I do not understand her as a character, and I wonder if Verley does, either. Nora Williams, who plays Julia, a woman in a wheelchair with a dark past and prone to hallucinations, leans too far into the character’s meakness and comes off as dull. I am generally more impressed with the supporting actors. Kyle Williams, in particular, is an excellent Paula: humorous, endearingly quirky and uncertain. However, even she goes through moments where it seems as though she is unsure why her character is saying what she is saying. I found myself wishing they, or their director, had spent more time attempting to understand the text and characters.

Tin Lily’s production of Fefu is staged at the Center for Performance Research, a space in Williamsburg that is better equiped for art installations than theater. There is little flexibility in terms of lighting. All instruments are exactly the same: the small, ungelled lights often seen in gallery spaces, and they do little more than light up the room. At several moments, the play slips somewhat jarringly into other realities: hallucinations, dreams, poetry, and lyrical monologues that feel very different from the majority of the text. These moments would have been well served by atmospheric changes: shifts in lighting and sound. Tin Lily Productions attempts this at one or two moments, but the equipment at their disposal proves inadequate, and the moments fall short.

Fefu is not without strengths. Joshua David Bishop’s set is simple and flexible, evoking the art deco style of the period with geometric shapes and the absence of frills. It works well in the space, which is set up in a thrust configuration. The backs of the couch pieces are empty frames that one can see through, so they never block the audiences’ vision. The director, Jillian Johnson, takes care to stage scenes in such a way that the entire audience gets a good set of stage pictures: a noteworthy feat, with a large cast in a small space.

If nothing else, the play presents a truthful portrait of intimacy between women. One of the best scenes is a water fight that takes place on and off stage in Act Three amidst bursts of giggles and shouts, a joyful study in ordered chaos.

The joys of female friendship are perhaps under-portrayed in contemporary American theater, and it is gratifying to see them explored in Tin Lily’s Fefu. However, I think Fornes is saying much more about womens’ lives than this production brings to light. Further, it is unclear to me what this play, written in the 1970’s about a group of women in the 1930’s, has to offer an audience in 2010, and this, in my opinion, is the biggest failing of the production. Tin Lily Productions is an energetic company, no doubt, but it needs to focus its energy and say something clear and specific, if it wants to make any sort of impact.

Eternal But Not

Attention theatergoers: Another play about how hollow life is in these post-post days is now playing at the Vineyard Theatre. It’s drawl, depressing, occasionally funny and ultimately pointless. And it’s two and a half hours long. To the credit of the talented cast and crew of Will Eno’s latest offering, Middletown, those hours go by rather quickly. What happens? A bunch of characters introduce themselves to the audience, say funny things, choke each other, say some more funny things, go to the library, and top it off with saying some funny things. Then comes intermission, which for me consisted of a chat with a fellow spectator, who succinctly summarized what the play is saying: “Some things are eternal, but not.” He nailed it. At this point, the play still seemed like it could be hiding something under its celebrated cloak of mundanity.

Quickly after resuming the action, however, the direction of the piece becomes clear – depressing philosophizing replaces humorous chit-chat. The second act shows each of the rather endearing characters we met in the first act (James Mcmenamin is especially sweet as the prospect-less George Gibbs) deteriorating into depression and death. We end up in a hospital, where all of them converge for one reason or another. The only exception is the delightful librarian, played with sweet, compassionate detachment by Georgia Engel.

The set, costumes (David Zinn) and lighting (Tyler Micoleau) all work coherently to convey the drab simplicity of contemporary life. The acting style also is simple and to the point, and director Ken Russ Schmoll aptly does what the script demands. Mr. Eno is clearly talented, drawing his audience along with little action and bouncy dialogue, swinging the play cleverly back and forth between the realities of Middletown and that of the present moment in the theater.

However, the play makes the mistake of constantly calling attention to its relation to its mythological ancestor, Our Town, and never comes close to living up to that comparison. The one aspect of Eno's adaptation that does draw from Wilder in a way that adds color and depth to the production is the actors' ongoing interaction with the audience. The first act, for example, ends with us watching a theatricalized version of ourselves - actors playing audience members talking about the first half of the play, texting, and wondering what will come next in the second act. "Oh, it's starting," they say, at the end of their five minute dialogue. We watch the lights go down on the actor-audience, and feel the lights come up on us - intermission.

Still, the evening amounts to a sad conclusion, one which is actually far from true: that our day and age is not only far more hollow than the time when Wilder wrote his masterpiece, but also incapable of creating its own stories, instead relying on adapting those of past times.

From the Warhorses Mouth

59 E 59th Theatre, together with Fallout Theatre, presents Personal Enemy, the world premiere of a lost 1953 play by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton. Set in the United States in the year of its writing, the play was rediscovered in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives. Written in the year Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was first produced, it takes a fascinating look at the paranoid world of the McCarthy era and ultimately makes a powerful case as a play for our time as well. On the morning of her birthday, we meet Mrs. Constant (Karen Lewis), attended to by her husband (Tony Turner), daughter (Joanne King), son-in-law (Mar Oosterveen), and son Arnie (Peter Clapp), along with her Polish neighbor Mrs. Slifer (Genevieve Allenbury) and, later on, the Reverend Merrick (Stephen Clarke, who also plays librarian Ward Perry and an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee). On this day, the world is in order; even the pain over the loss of the older son Don in the Korean War has given way to the comfort of hero worship.

However, the domestic idyll is soon shattered, from within and without, when a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass turns up with the dedication “To Arnie, with love from Ward.”

Suspicion about Arnie’s sexuality and Ward’s influence over the son mushrooms into obsessive investigation when it is discovered that Ward (an atheist and former member of the Communist Youth) had given a copy of the same book, with a similar inscription, to the lost son, who, as the family finds out, did not die in Korea but decided to join the small group of American POWs who, though able to return home, elected not to come back.

The confluence of (never explicitly mentioned but much hinted at) homosexuality, communist ideology and atheism leads to a climate, in the Constants’ household and the small-town world around them, where everyone is suspected and suspicious, and the mother’s mantra of “live and let live” turns into “attack everyone in sight.”

John Osborne and Anthony Creighton’s play, written in 1953 but not produced until 1955 (and then in a version severely censored by the Lord Chamberlain), is a long play overloaded with narrative expository detail. But just when I began to tire of the many stories that make up its narrative, Personal Enemy began to grab me again. The corrosive energy of the anti-gay, anti-intellectual attitudes, the viciousness with which anyone thinking differently from the powers-that-be is subjected to attack, the intolerance towards the non-believers (whether in God or in the American way of life) that drives this family to ruin suddenly struck me as the stuff of today’s politics.

David Aula’s brisk staging, an excellent cast of British actors with near flawless American accents, and an interestingly designed space (a scrim invokes the mountains of Korea, allowing for “out of focus” moments that make the set appear deeper than the small stage allows) create a complex world. Sound was used to enhance the set (cars arriving and driving off) and, in several moments on TV, to invoke the early folk-music, Beat generation of the fifties.

The costumes clearly place the play in the fifties, although I felt that the Act 2 dresses of mother and daughter, made from an urban camouflage print fabric, emphasize in a perhaps too obvious manner one of the flaws of this play. Osborne-Creighton have the two women shoulder most of the hard-driven, shrill hatred and intolerance, while the men, with the exception of the Reverend and the Investigative Agent, are the sensitive ones ultimately victimized by a hatred that mirrors, in a single household, the lynch-mob violence of a town and a country.

Expecting a literary curiosity, I was gratified that this production presents a play that is very relevant to today’s political and social debates. It is a play that would benefit from a larger stage, and deserves to be seen by anyone concerned about the obdurate anti-intellectualism, hypocrisy, and intolerance against those who are different that fuels tea- and other parties.

Lost Soul

What do you get when you cross a Chinese folktale with video and dance? In the case of Soul Leaves Her Body, a joint creation of director Peter Flaherty and director/choreographer Jennie MaryTai Liu, the result is an inspired meditation on loss and belonging. The seventy-five minute production is divided into three segments. The first, Ancient Story, a dance theater piece choreographed by Liu, provides an abbreviated telling of the original tale: an overambitious mother fails to recognize the depths of her daughter’s passion. As the daughter, Liu wears a beige dress so light it almost looks like crepe paper. Costume designer Wendy Yang Bailey dresses her suitor (Sean Donovan) and mother (Leslie Cuyjet) with a similar attention to lightness and minimalism; the costumes evoke age and status, while their pale, earthy hues are subtle and soft.

Color is added, instead, by video, designed by Austin Switser. Projected onto giant panels behind the actors, each onstage character has a video counterpart (Wai Ching Who, Rachel Lin, Howah Hung) dressed in a brightly colored, traditional Chinese costume. Set against sharp white backgrounds, their white face paint streaked with pinks and blues, the characters’ introductory video images resemble contemporary fashion shoots. That raises cool questions about how these folk characters function. What, exactly, do they model?

Onstage, the three performers deftly execute minimalist choreography and simple, expository text with a quiet intensity, evocative of the energies that pulse beneath the protagonist’s surface passivity. At times, the choreography and design elements converge to create textured tension, as when, ever so slowly, the young women and her suitor dance past one another. Projected onscreen behind them, two sets of hands exchange an inky note. Brandon Walcott’s sound design underscores the moment with music that sounds like a heartbeat.

The middle portion of the triptych-like production, Contemporary Story, consists almost entirely of film. Written and directed by Flaherty, and set in contemporary Hong Kong, the filmed segment of Soul Leaves Her Body follows three siblings as they struggle to make ends meet – and, tellingly, to find a home. Whereas her siblings (Suetmann Wong and Leslie Ho) play fast and loose, running scams and running away from them, Yan Yan (again, Liu) is more pensive, preferring alone time on the family’s rundown boat to the bustle of the city. Flaherty’s film is heavy on both starling close-ups (the garish pink and green of a mahjong table; the teeth of someone talking on the phone) as well breathtaking panoramic views of the Hong Kong cityscape, bolstering the production’s sense of dislocation.

In the final segment of Soul Leaves Her Body, the stylized performance conventions of the earlier pieces give way to a dramatic exchange more typical of black box realism (Liu and Wai Ching Ho discuss shared cultural histories and lost loves) despite the fact that Improvisation on Ancient Themes, by Xu Xi, is arguably the least realistic scene of any in the production. Exactly how these two women come to speak to each other is never clearly elucidated, though haunting matrilineal powers seem to have something to do with it. Unfortunately, drained of the performative conventions (dance, video, film) which so effectively gird the earlier pieces, this concluding segment falters, and the production’s power gets lost.

Until that point, the production is an exemplar not only of the rich textures created by skillful interdisciplinary collaboration but of the dynamic possibilities ancient stories offer to contemporary artists.

Less Than Perfect

Last month, the a cappella musical In Transit opened Off-Broadway at 59E59. Although flawed, I found the show charming and amusing, as I said in my review for offoffonline. This month another a cappella musical, Perfect Harmony, opened at The Acorn on Theatre Row. It seems that the success of Glee has spawned a burgeoning theater subgenre: shows with singing but without instruments. In the case of Perfect Harmony, I’d have to say, unfortunately, without glee too. I’ll admit upfront that I am a huge Glee fan (aka a “Gleek”). And, to be fair, Perfect Harmony actually came before the hit FOX TV show, premiering at the 2006 New York International Fringe Festival, with an extended run as part of the 2006 Fringe Encore Series. It also enjoyed a sold-out run at The Clurman on Theatre Row in 2008 (see earlier offoffonline review) and most recently spent four weeks out-of-town at the Stoneham Theater in Massachusetts.

Glee and Perfect Harmony share many similar plot points and devices: a high school setting; classic character types (jock, nerd, closeted gay guy, slut, virgin); novel vocal arrangements of popular songs from the past; even the road to a national championship for dueling singing groups. In the case of Perfect Harmony, those competitors from an elite private school are the 17-time champs, The Acafellas, and their less successful female counterparts, The Ladies in Red, now going by their new name, Lady Treble.

But where Glee is indeed gleeful in its depiction of high school misfits brought together by their shared love of music, Perfect Harmony is less so. While there are some funny bits and a few moments of genuine musical magic, Perfect Harmony goes overboard by burdening its characters with not-so-subtle quirks that quickly become tiresome, even annoying: the Type A leader of the girl group constantly spouts malapropisms; the backbone of the boy band is essentially mute; the in-the-shadows, pushover manager of Lady Treble suffers from Tourette’s; the squeaky-voiced Serbian spitfire sings the wrong lyrics to all the songs. You get the idea. All the characterizations are excessive. While many in the audience laughed at these forced eccentricities, many others groaned at their obviousness. Put me in the latter category.

That’s not to say that a show like Perfect Harmony needs to be anything more than what it essentially is: a musical mockumentary, and a campy one at that. As conceived and directed by Andrew Grosso, there is a lot of potential in Perfect Harmony. In particular, some of the vocal arrangements by musical directors Ray Bailey and Adam Wachter of cheesy ’80s tunes are fun and fresh. (I won’t list the musical numbers so as not to let the cat out of the bag for those of you who may want to see the show.) And Perfect Harmony is a ripe parody of such recent saccharine Disney hits as High School Musical and Camp Rock.

But casting actors who can sing instead of singers who can act is the biggest problem with Perfect Harmony. Where the songs should soar (think of the resplendent “Don’t Stop Believin’” from Glee), most fall flat. It is hard to believe that the Acafellas, with their corny choreography and only passable vocals, could have actually won a national singing competition. Lady Treble is even less successful in its singing sections.

Furthermore, in a town as rich with talent as New York, it would benefit the show greatly if the cast were closer in age to high schoolers than graduate students (or older). None of them, aside from Jarid Faubel, who plays goofy athlete JB, and Kelly McCreary, as gotta-dance, Jesus-loving Meghan, even embody teenage mannerisms or body language.

The enthusiastic Faubel and McCreary fare best in a cast that is underserved by a chatty script that should spend more time singing and less time talking. Trimming 15 to 20 minutes of dialogue would greatly help quicken the pace. Trimming some of the weak jokes would help too. At close to an hour and 45 minutes, Perfect Harmony, simply goes on too long, fizzling out with a lackluster finale.

According to the press release, the producers are planning to move the show to another space following the run at the Acorn (which ends next weekend on November 13). My advice would be to find an auditorium with better acoustics or mike the performers to add a little more energy to the songs. Right now the 199-seat space swallows up the voices instead of allowing them room to breathe. A smaller venue might be a better choice as well to bring the audience more into the action. And please cut the obscenity at the end of Kerri’s song at nationals — as the Lady Treble manager with hidden talent, Marie-France Arcilla has the best voice in the cast and that unnecessary curse spoiled her one moment in the spotlight. (Arcilla also does double duty as flamboyant vocal couch Tobi McClintoch, one of the best — and funniest — moments in the entire show.)

With the success of Glee, there is obviously an audience out there for a show like this. And Perfect Harmony already has fans as evidenced by their multiple successful runs, popular website, and Facebook page. I’m not sure if the show is still in development, but with some tweaks and some recasting, plus a bigger, bolder final number, Perfect Harmony could inch closer to perfection. As of now, it still has a long way go.

Visually Creepy

Ghosts, by Henrik Ibsen, produced by the Extant Arts Company Company and adapted by Nemonie Craven, is both creepy and entertaining. The play is directed by Sophie Hunter, who is not at all timid when it comes to mixing multi-media with classic plays. Thank goodness that you can view the ultra-cool set by Flammetta Horvat before the show starts, or you might find yourself distracted by its very unique and disturbing elements: different length wires with working light bulbs attached dangle from the ceiling, hospital I.V. bags hang over numerous potted plants spanning the back of the stage, a transparent cage created out of fish wire maps out the main playing area and three television screens separate the stage in thirds, showing a flurry of images that echo the actors' interior feelings. The play opens with Jacob Engstrand (Chris Haag), a poor working man urging his daughter Regina (Justine Salata), a ward of the Alvings, to come live with him. Things pick up steam when Pastor Manders (Anthony Holds) and Helene (Mrs.) Alving (LeeAnn Hutchinson), two very skilled actors, take the stage. The judgmental Pastor soon learns the err of his ways as horrifying truths about Mrs Alving, Engstrand and her son Oswald's past get revealed. Oswald Alving, expertly played by Paulo Quiros, is home visiting his mother for a mysterious, “indefinite amount of time.” As Oswald comes into the picture later in the play, more shattering secrets get disclosed and “ghosts” seem to be the cause for many people’s torment.

All of the characters in the play have dynamic revealing monologues that are pivotal to the story and possess extreme suspenseful elements. Unusual and identifiable sounds (Asa Wember), TV footage and non-naturalistic staging are used to enhance the suspense and subtext of characters in moments and scenes. But pay attention, because I found myself at times overwhelmed by visual and audio stimulation and missed key plot points. One in particular is a sexually driven scene between Mrs. Alving and the Pastor which is staged with Mrs. Alving slow dancing with the Pastor with video screens playing the couple in pre-filmed romantic embraces. All this is done while Mrs. Alving unveils the truth of her gruesome marriage.

Sometimes tension, sexual or not, is more interesting without explanation. I would have been happy for simpler staging to just allow these talented actors to act. Quiros, as Oswald, does just that and the results are excellent as he expertly plays torment, sexual desire, rage and ill health. The final moment, beautifully played between Mrs. Alving and Oswald, allows the play to end with a “wow!”

Ghosts is a dynamic adaptation, but the multi-media elements at times overpower the actors. Sometimes, less is more.

Expats on Parade

Letter from Algeria, by Michael I. Walker, could be a comedy of manners save for the tragic turn at the end of the play, the subject of the letter in the title. But Walker, a writer with a great facility for witty dialogue filled with literary and pop-culture allusions, reaches for weightier stuff, and that’s a pity. A play that begins as an amusing romp, with a bit of mystery about all four characters thrown in to keep us on our toes, ends with a dirge of a monologue (the letter of the title) and a tragic ending that undermines the amusing manipulations of the first act. Tim (JD Taylor) and Walter (Patrick Murney), two American students on their year abroad in Brussels, Belgium, allow Hugo (Rufus Collins), heir to a waffle fortune, to treat them to expensive gifts, meals and trips to Paris and Amsterdam. Goaded on by Ali (Amanda Jane Cooper), an American acting student who seems to be the mistress of and procurer for the bisexual Hugo, the quartet travels to Hugo’s estate in Algeria, where a fatal misfortune visits Ali and Hugo.

The playwright invites the audience to a game of fast-paced scenes, driven mostly by the excellent, highly energetic Ali, who seduces, flirts, pouts, charms and bullies Walter, an innocent from a strict household (clearly the fish-out-of-water here); Tim, a homosexual with a secret that is never quite revealed; and finally Hugo from one hedonistic adventure to the next. Except nothing in this play is quite as it appears. Ali’s attempts to make Tim and Hugo jealous by sleeping – or pretending to have slept – with Walter fall flat in the face of Tim’s and Hugo’s lack of interest in her. And Hugo’s Algerian Shangri-La is surrounded by hostile natives.

What begins as an amusing farce (even the locale of the first act – a dorm room in Brussels – is funny as the direct opposite of a romantic European place) turns in the end into maudlin melodrama. Walker does not allow us into the lives of his characters – Hugo remains a complete cipher, Tim and Ali’s motivations, beyond their need for money, remain obscure, even the revelation that Walter’s parents have died in a car accident and that he writes letters home to assuage his anguish does not inspire sympathy for a character who otherwise remains a blank. With essential information about the characters withheld, and the pivotal events in the play happening off stage, the play does not earn the emotional weight it claims.

The production of Letter from Algeria, briskly directed by Adam Fitzgerald and beautifully designed by Travis McHale (set and lighting), Amanda Jenks (costumes), Alex Wise (composer), and Ian Wehrle (sound), and expertly acted, could be a triumph if the play did not collapse onto itself.

A New Office Speak

The Memorandum, written by Vaclav Havel and revived by The Actors Company Theater (TACT) after an almost 40 year Off-Broadway respite, is long overdue. If you are the kind of person that enjoys absurd satires in the styles of Ionesco, Pinter and comedy clown routines, then like me you’ll love this play. I can’t get enough of the repetitive patterns, the slamming doors, the lazzis, the Pinter-esque scenes, the constant status changes, and the seemingly appropriate, but actually outlandish office behavior. All this is molded together expertly by director Jenn Thompson. The play is set in a generic corporate office and begins with Gross, the managing director played by James Prendergast, opening an indecipherable office memo written in a complicated and less emotional language called “Ptydepe." This language, unbeknownst to a flabbergasted Gross, has been designated as the new language of the corporation. Gross’s attempts at getting the memo interpreted as well as questioning its purpose bring him only corporate mumble-jumble, and idiocy. The villainous deputy, Ballas, exceptionally played by Mark Alhadeff, carries out his underlying evil plot of sneaking in this new language. Things get especially comic when Ballas bounces of his silent sidekick, Pillar or Mr. P (Jeffrey C. Hawkins).

Kate Levy as Helena and Lynn Wright as Hana, whose eccentricities involve exit lines like, “ See ya later alligator” or constant hair fixing, add to the comic jumble. Almost all of the characters' main concern is to know what's on the lunch menu. Joel Leffert deserves special recognition as Lear, the teacher of “Ptydepe,” because he actually had to learn it, and he did so with skill.

The almost white set with its semi-transparent screens and slick furniture on wheels makes the multiple scene changes speedy. The projections and quirky sound design by Stephen Kunken and what I assume are original music compositions by Joseph Trapanese entertain and mimic the style of play.

At times I did want to see more a of a heated conflict between Gross (Prendergast) and the sneaky Ballas (Alhadeff), especially when Gross has the rug pulled out from under him. But Gross’s constant state of bafflement could have been the point.

Havel’s structure of the play has later scenes mirroring most earlier scenes and moments but with a new point view as roles shift. This becomes quite comical, adding to the satire when each new but familiar scene is recognized. The only characters that seem to have real feelings are Gross and Maria, played by the appealing Nilanjana Bose. Maria is a young poorly treated office assistant who Gross encourages to think for herself. A nice touch is Maria’s final exit, when she wears a yellow hat, symbolically rebelling against the pallet of black and grey office wear by costume designer David Toser.

This Eastern European play by the prominent Vaclav Havel was written during the communist period, so its satiric point had more to do with censoring and communication. Today, we also seem to be finding newer and colder ways to communicate via email, texting, Facebook, Twitter etc., which was the point of “Ptydepe." Thanks TACT for reviving this play after so long.

Talking Hearts

The Storm Theatre Company, together with the Blackfriars Repertory Theatre, presents Paul Claudel’s Noon Divide in an elegant, minimalist production co-directed by Peter Dobbins and Stephen Logan Day. Paul Claudel’s agony-filled ménage-à-quattre is given a competent reading in a theatre located, perhaps appropriately so, in the basement of the Church of Notre Dame on 114th Street. Noon Divide opens with the four characters - Ysé (Kate Chamuris), her husband De Ciz (Brian J. Carter), Mesa (Peter Dobbins, who also co-directs) and Amalric (Chris Kipiniak) - on the deck of an ocean liner on its way to China. Mesa and Amalric both have known and harbored passions for Ysé, while her marriage has lost the spark of passion. Several months later they are in Hong Kong, where De Ciz pursues, with ultimately fatal consequences, his love of money, leaving Ysé behind. Ysé and Mesa engage in a passionate relationship that leads to the birth of a child.

By act three, Ysé has left Mesa and joined Amalric, the earthiest of the three men. China is in the turmoil of the Boxer Uprisings, and Ysé and Amalric have prepared to blow up their house and themselves to avoid death at the hands of the rebellious Chinese. Mesa finds the two. A struggle ensues in which Amalric takes Mesa’s free pass but drowns trying to board the boat to freedom. Mesa and Ysé, in the final moments before the house blows up, come to reconciliation with each other.

Theater always involves translation – from text to stage, author’s intent to director’s concept, casting and scenic realization. In a play that originated in a foreign language and culture, such as this one, additional challenges arise. Will the poetry of Claudel’s writing, his framing of characters as archetypes, and his negotiation of the conflicts among them in long, rhetorical passages translate to a stage in a church basement in 2010? (Incidentally – no translator is credited in the program!).

The production here is respectful. The bare center stage with a starry-sky surround behind the audience allows for more movement than the directors use. The interesting sound design is subtle (too much so – indicating where it could provide substantial texture and even information), and the well-executed lighting provides atmosphere for each of the scenes.

However, rhetorical theater, with its long tradition in French theater, is not the strength of American actors. Chris Kipiniak, only slightly hampered by a too-tight suit that contrasts with his not so comical character, gives Amalric power and vocal presence, and Peter Dobbins as Mesa provides a serious performance that errs only in investing too much in the self-flagellation that Claudel offers as a form of love. Ysé has the thankless role of the Madonna-Whore who becomes the object of the three men’s projections, a character given little agency by its author. She is underplayed by Kate Chamuris, who looks the part, but only in brief moments in Act One gives her the vivacious energy that would explain her desirability to the men who adore and revile her, often in the same sentence.

I don’t know if a case can be made for the production of this play, with its psychologically, morally and even theologically questionable search for the reconciliation of the love of God with the love of the pleasures of the flesh. This production, keeping all the passion above the neck, fails to make the case. Mesa, as Claudel’s stand in, is too tortured (he suggests that Ysé is the cross he crucifies himself on). The middle act – set in a ruined graveyard – provides the most passionate language, but the directors chose not to invest in the physical possibilities of the scene, and as rhetoric it fails to generate the heat that would warm our talked-out hearts in this cool presentation.

A Kitchen Full of Wonders

When is a wisk not a wisk? When it is transformed into a Japanese woman on a journey to learn the secret of how air or fire can be held in paper. When is a pepper shaker not a pepper shaker? When it becomes a young African woman in search of the home of her bridegroom. In Folktalkes of Asia and Africa, Jane Catherine Shaw and her array of kitchen utensils are able to enact such magical thrills. Whole worlds are built on stage through the use of simple household objects. This children’s puppet play at LaMaMa is a delight for audiences of all ages. We meet Ms. Shaw as she is in her kitchen preparing some bread. She decides to tell some stories to pass the time as she waits for her bread to rise. The piece contains three folktales: a story from Burma about a hard-working rice farmer and the goddess of the moon; a Japanese tale about two women who must solve a riddle to please their beloved father-in-law; and an African legend dealing with two sisters who each wish to marry a local chief. All of these narratives are charming in their own rights. They convey simple, endearing and enduring messages through compelling characters in relatable situations. It is refreshing to hear folktales with which many audience members may not already be familiar. The stories are able to be surprising and heartwarming through their unexpected twists and turns.

What makes this play true magic is not the stories themselves, however. What is most remarkable in Shaw’s piece is the way she renders these tales on stage. The play is a puppet play, but there are no classically recognizable marionettes or even sock puppets here. Rather, she creates the entire worlds of all these stories through her interesting narration, marked by unique voices for each character, and her use of various common household objects. With the help of a touch of fabric and a little imagination these kitchen utensils easily and fluidly become whatever character our narrator needs them to be. These basic objects are as believable as any more detailed performative objects might have been in their places.

This play suggests the power of the human imagination. Shaw’s play is a clear reminder to children and adults alike in the audience that our minds can transport us to exciting places if we only imagine them. Folktales of Asia and Africa reminds us that we do not need any sophisticated props of any sort to create whole worlds within our own homes. All we need is a good story to tell, one that we mix with pinch of ingenuity and a dash of imagination. Shaw’s play proves that with these simple ingredients, true performance magic can be created.

Recreational Purposes

Oh what a difference a decade makes. When Reefer Madness: the Musical premiered in New York in October of 2001, its campy send-up of God, patriotism, and starchy clean Protestant values felt ill timed. The new musical, by Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, had just run successfully in Los Angeles for over a year, and so a transfer to New York seemed like a logical step. Then came 9/11. The mood of the country shifted. Mocking America went ever so briefly out of vogue. Reefer Madness opened at The Variety Arts Theater to lukewarm reviews, and then closed quickly. Although the musical subsequently achieved greater successes – several international productions and a TV version soon followed – it didn’t make its way back to New York until now. This time around, Brooklyn’s Gallery Players has mounted Reefer Madness at a prescient moment in American politics. A tangled relationship to the country's cultural history is in the show's roots. Based on the 70’s cult classic film Reefer Madness, itself a re-cutting of the 1938 morality movie Tell Your Children, the musical addresses the evils of cannabis in a small American town. Tell Your Children was created to warn parents against the evils of “marihuana,” but any film in which a few joints drive people completely bonkers has the makings of a stoner comedy. The 70’s version, re-titled Reefer Madness, mocks the extremes of the original film, in which wholesome American teens go from quoting Shakespeare to becoming shiftless murderers and – worse? – engaging in premarital sex.

The musical, however, stakes out a different position for itself in relation to the 1938 original. While it indulges in heaps of campy exaggeration, the show also takes aim at the fear mongering which drives the original film. “We are taking down all the fingerprints/ of jazz musicians and immigrants!” goes a gleeful lyric from the musical’s faux-uplifting finale. Nine years and two wars after the show’s initial New York run, with tensions surrounding race and nationality dominating the current election season, the musical’s sardonic celebration of political scare tactics is utterly timely.

The Gallery Players’ production has a firmer grasp of history than its program notes, copied from Wikipedia (someone get these people a dramaturg!), might first lead audiences to suspect. Still, under the direction of Dev Bondarin, the show’s political undertones don’t develop as seamlessly as they might. Instead, when the production jerks from playful camp to pointed commentary, the shift feels unsupported. Stronger moments include the full company numbers “Listen to Jesus, Jimmy, a gospel riff, and the titular "Reefer Madness" a zombie-ish masquerade. Those numbers more successfully indulge pop culture aesthetics while applying them to the musical’s central warnings about media and messages.

Soule Golden’s costume design in particular does a great job of setting the show’s aesthetic, from monster masks (“Reefer Madness”) to feathery halos and white high heels (“Listen to Jesus”). The chorus’ most basic outfits – girls in bright primary colored dresses, boys in sweater vests and slacks – are pretty terrific too.

The six-person chorus of Reefer Madness is consistently excellent. Period appropriate, enthusiastic yet disciplined, they steal the show – and Joe Barros’ choreography helps them do it. Actors Jose Restrepo and Jaygee Macaougay also deserve special mention for their portrayals of Jack and Mae, the couple who lures the unsuspecting teens to degradation.

Next week voters in California will decide whether to legalize the drug that plays the real villain of Reefer Madness. If critiquing a politics of fear feels as timely as ever, the object of that fear seems to have shifted over the last seventy years. Then again, maybe not. At the opening weekend of Reefer Madness, after the drug leads to murder, false imprisonment, and cannibalism, an audience member was heard whispering to her companion, “that’s what happens if you smoke that reefer.”