Great Literary Work Travels

We can instantly access information 24 hours a day on our cell phones about the latest and most exotic places in the world to visit. Our friends and family members share their vacation photos and videos on social media. My younger sister traveled around the world when she graduated from college with her friend from high school, and she inspired me to live in Japan, India, Nepal and Bali. Traveling Papers inspires us to get out and experience the world, or to at least read some great literature about travel. Today we can fly to breathtaking beaches in developing countries, like Costa Rica or Indonesia, and stay at a discounted luxury resort we found online. There are also packaged family cruises to the Bahamas, or one could simply pack their backpack and travel alone through Europe. Our innate curiosity for adventure, exploration and self-discovery can take us to places and cultures we never imagined existed. Creators Barbara Bosch and Martin Tackel take on creating a theatrical journey that reminds us of our innate love for traveling in Traveling Papers.

“Wherever you go, go with all your heart,”—Confucius, and other inspirational quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Blaise Pascal, Henry David Thoreau, and other famous people provide feel-good moments throughout this play. In "The Globetrotter Diaries," photographer Michael Clinton sparks our curiosity to travel to Asia when he shares about being in Nepal and “watching cremations in the tradition of the Hindu religion.” This production is a travel tapestry of literary work from Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Bourdain. By covering the work of so many profound people within 90 minutes, it does not give the audience enough time to connect with the individual stories. These rich tales touch our hearts and minds and speak to us from the past. It is like recalling the first time you read Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." The real brilliance of this production is the weaving of all of these stories throughout time and the deliveries are executed with humor and gratitude.

Watching seven actors in beige safari outfits, who are distinguished by their age, gender, weight and hairstyle, lacks the variety to engage the lens of New York theatergoers, and does not represent a universal connection to travel. These similar characters do not speak for the whole population and there is a clear disconnect when the production aims to show how humankind has a deep desire for exploration. The bare, black stage with only wooden chairs and a stack of vintage trunks and suitcases adds to the visual blandness. A more diverse ensemble could add to each character’s unique point of view and create more entertaining contrast.

In scene 15, you will become immersed into the short story, “The Guiding Miss Gowd” by novelist Edna Ferber, and a suspension of disbelief will set in. It takes place in Rome with British guide Mary Gowd (Gwen Eyster) as she attempts to save "Tweetie" Gregg (Jillian Stevens) from being romantically swept away by Italian officer Signor Caldini (Kyle Doherty). Eyster successfully carries this scene with humor and an inner conflict through the mastery of her eyes and facial expressions. Her eye movements are so skillful that the audience is naturally drawn in and instantly curious about the next character she plays.

The ensemble also features Gwen Arment, John Camera, Peter Husovsky and Macy Idzakovich. As one group of actors perform, the others sit silently in chairs along the walls. The performing actors announce their own actions at times, and it can sound redundant. It would be more entertaining if director Bosch instructed the sitting actors to voice the actions of the performing actors.

Traveling Papers does accomplish igniting the kind of unexpected journeys that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Marcel Proust, Marco Polo, and many others have shared throughout time. The value of this production relies heavily on the past great work of other people. For audience members who are already familiar with these stories, there is a natural cultural context and appreciation. The production would have been stronger with more original content and fewer stories to develop the characters. Traveling Papers is recommended for those who love great literature and the art of travel. Flipping through Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube in search of the next vacation can be stimulating, but live theater strokes an inner yearning to travel outside of what we think we already know.

Traveling Papers runs until June 20 at Theatre Row's The Lion Theatre (410 West 42nd St. between 9th and 10th Aves.) in Manhattan. Evening performances are Wednesday-Saturday at 8 p.m. and matinee performances are Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. There is no performance on Saturday, June 13. Tickets are $17 and can be purchased by visiting Telecharge.com or by calling 212-239-6200.

A Lost Family

Middle-aged hippie housewife and Beatles’ fan Anna (Deborah Offner) is at the center of her dysfunctional family as she tests her Catholic faith and battles with the “awful monkey in [her] head” during the days before Christmas. The “monkey” is actually a belittling teenage version of herself as Anna 2 (Catherine Dupont), who recalls Anna’s past abortion and drug use. Her Jewish atheist husband Henry (Larry Cahn) suffers from dementia and sleeps his days away on the couch as their adopted 18-year-old son Jude (Adam Weppler) smokes marijuana and seeks his own identity.

Playwright Nancy Manocherian explores how this family struggles with loss, identity and being incomplete with the past. Anna “had to pay for [her] father’s suicide” because of her abortion and Henry stopped “being a Jew” when he was bullied as a boy. Jude never met his biological Romanian mother and believes the “cockroach will survive, but [humans are] on a path of entropy.” Even when Anna is confronted with a life-altering situation, her denial does not allow her to take responsibility for her actions. Hey Jude attempts to venture beyond a psychological inquiry into socially impaired family dynamics and leaves the audience craving closure with these characters.

Jude’s challenge to grasp his father’s dementia is authentically performed by Weppler. The dynamics between Jude and his retired father reminded me of my younger cousin who struggled to make sense of his father’s multiple sclerosis. Jude is so eager to understand Henry, but he cannot relate because Jude has never had dementia. Jude does his best to care for his father and wants to bond by attending sporting events together. Henry brings comic relief by wearing an adult diaper on his head and then later returns wearing Anna’s church hat. Even though Henry’s dementia is the elephant in the room, Anna’s lunacy does not give Henry the space to develop as a character. Also, instead of being an insanity trigger for Anna, Anna 2 could be a stronger antagonist for Dupont to portray. Offner effectively conveys her character's extreme complexities and subtle need to control everyone in her life. Director Kira Simring has the challenge of creating sufficient room for all of these characters to breath so they are not overshadowed by Anna’s mental illness. Hey Jude could be mistaken for Hey Anna.

The set design by Peiyi Wong increases this production’s value with an ideal living room outside of New York City in 2007. The light colored walls, shelves, curtains and hardwood floors allow for the decorated Christmas tree to instantly set the holiday tone. Finding Henry asleep on the plush, brown sofa and holding a pillow with the television on is like standing in a neighbor’s living room. This home is a natural representation of many modern households in America. However, the missing wall next to the xylophone is a distracting black hole and when the actors point at cockroaches there are none to be seen. The morning light in the windows by lighting designer Gertjan Houben adds to the ethereal feeling that the audience is waking up with this family, and we get to see how Henry starts his day.

For audience members who did not grow up listening to the Beatles, they might not relate to the Beatles’ nostalgia that Anna shares, or the era that she experienced as a young woman. The generational contrast can be felt when Jude says, “There’s never anything to eat in this house. Unless you’re a vegetarian, and Paul McCartney doesn’t live here.” Likewise, when Henry refers to the song “Rumania, Rumania,” some might not get the cultural reference or know of Yiddish jazz singers, The Barry Sisters, who were popular during the 1950s. Lastly, when Anna sings her version of Shirley Ellis’ “The Clapping Song” from 1965, some might not recognize the original lyrics. If you are not familiar with these songs, they are worth listening to online and reading the lyrics for their stories.

Hey Jude falls short of conveying a clear message and allows a general audience to draw their own conclusions. It is like driving past a fight on the side of the road and later wondering if the police or an ambulance ever came to take anyone to the hospital. We want to know if these characters ever find any peace or if they just continue to cope with their circumstances. The value is seeing aspects of our own family members in these performances. Hey Jude is recommended for those who are not so concerned about a resolution and are entertained by watching a modern family struggle.

Hey Jude runs until June 21 at Urban Stages (259 West 30th St. between 7th and 8th Aves.) in Manhattan. Evening performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., and matinee performances are Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased by visiting thecelltheatre.org or by calling Brown Paper Tickets at 800-838-3006.

A Spoiler in the Room

In her early film career, Bette Davis set herself apart by being willing to play characters who were unsympathetic; her bad women in Of Human Bondage and Jezebel were her tickets to fame and marked her as different from other studio stars. Jesse Eisenberg is equally unafraid to take on characters who are unpleasant—even loathesome. His performance as the cold and arrogant Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network won him an Oscar nomination. In The New Group’s production of his play The Spoils, he plays Ben, whose social graces are in much worse shape, and whose behavior is often repellent.

The actor's first two plays, Asuncion and The Revisionist, proved he was a promising dramatist. In the latter, he co-starred with Vanessa Redgrave, whose participation suggests she can spot talent, and, indeed, Eisenberg has not only written himself a terrific part in The Spoils, but he performs it with élan.

Eisenberg’s Ben lives in a high-flying modernist apartment (luxuriously designed by Derek McLane) purchased for him by his father; he shares it with a roommate he found online, Kalyan (Kunal Nayyar). Kalyan has come to the United States from Nepal to study business and has written a book; he’s not wealthy and probably couldn’t have come without Ben’s help. Ben, however, disdains capitalism and has altruistically offered Kalyan the apartment rent-free, though Kalyan is reluctant to take charity. When Ben runs into an old childhood acquaintance, Ted, who works on Wall Street and has the ability to help Kalyan, he is persuaded to bring Ted over for an introduction to Kalyan, even as he belittles Kalyan’s ambition to work on Wall Street.

The playwright builds the tension gradually in different ways. Ben badmouths Ted, particularly since Ted is about to marry Sarah Newburg (Erin Darke), a girl Ben has had a crush on since their ages were in single digits. He must, nevertheless, bolster Kalyan in his quest to land a Wall Street job even though Ben, a failed filmmaker, is disaffected and resentful of financial success in others. He talks an artistic game but he lacks inspiration. “I wish the world wasn’t a fucked up string of unfair situations that I seem to be embroiled in,” he declares with self-pitying confidence. He is also physically graceless, pushing his body into others’ spaces and sprawling all over the furniture.

Nayyar’s Kalyan is just a tad wishy-washy, manipulatable by Ben; Kalyan is devoted to his benefactor but not spineless. He is dating Reshma (Annapurna Sriram), a doctor who mistrusts Ben and speaks her mind to his face—another source of tension. Ben nonetheless tries to pull off outrageous gambits—claiming a back injury at one point—although Reshma suspects he’s faking. 

Eisenberg has given the rest of the cast solid parts, and director Scott Elliott has chosen his actors wisely. Michael Zegen’s Ted is a likable, decent guy, not threatening or ruthlessly businesslike but with a blandness that wears thin quickly. Sriram’s impassioned Reshma is often at the side of the stage, texting or making cell phone calls, as any doctor might—Elliott cannily attends to the details. Darke is exceptional as Sarah: mature, sensitive, and yet devoted to Ted. In a crucial scene, Ben confesses a cringeworthy, scatological childhood fantasy to her—one that is prepared for earlier when he tells it to Kalyan. (The playwright gets further mileage out of the story in a re-enactment; three times is a charm.)

In the end, though, Eisenberg’s play is less a portrait of a young generation than a character study of someone who hasn’t found his way and denigrates the paths that others have chosen in order to justify his own failure. The questions that roil underneath it are whether success should be judged on ambition or accomplishments, and whether an artist who cannot make money at his art is really worth anything. Ben attempts to concoct a film, based on the story Kalyan has told him, to impress Sarah; when he presents it to her, she sees immediately how bogus he is.

But Eisenberg’s brief coda highlights another crucial question: Can adults be hamstrung by events in their childhood that they barely remember? If so, he intimates, redemption may be possible. Something good that Ben once did may just help him to redefine himself.

Jesse Eisenberg's The Spoils plays through June 28 at the Pershing Square Signature Center (480 W. 42nd St. between 10th and 11th Aves.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and on Sunday, and 8 p.m. on Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, with an additional matinee at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24. Tickets may be purchased by calling (212) 279-4200 or visiting ticketcentral.com.

A Man Unmade

On the night of a performance, the stained glass windows in the Theatre at St. Clement's are shuttered up, and the fans spin drowsily above the darkened rostrum. The only light filters mutely through a grimy window of an abandoned warehouse on stage. The production company that has chosen the modest chapel to stage its newest play is The Private Theatre, which has a self-described penchant for “staging productions in unexpected venues.” So while St. Clement's might masquerade as a place of worship on Sundays, the dim, churchly setting belies the emotional violence of director John Gould Rubin’s production of A Queen for a Day.

An aging “made man” in the Costa crime family, Giovanni “Nino” Cinquimani (a chameleonic David Proval) is faced with a dilemma when he is told to give up his mob boss brother Pasquale “Pat” Cinquimani (Vincent Pastore) as part of a one-day immunity deal also known as "a queen for a day." Nino’s wary lawyer, Sanford Weiss (David Deblinger) urges his client to take the proffer agreement, but Nino’s loyalty to his brother and the crime family, as well as a lover from the past (in one of the more astonishing plot twists of the production) torment his final decision. Mononymously-named actress Portia plays the biting, disdainful federal prosecutor (Patricia Cole) who pushes Nino’s buttons, resolute in her determination to hear damning evidence against Pat Cinquimani.

David Proval’s blustering depiction of a “made” man slowly brought to pieces by his secretive past easily carries the production. Nino's apprehensions balloon as the primary players (Proval, Portia and Deblinger) triangulate about the stage in choreographic strategy. Rubin plays with the script’s alluring tension between masculinity and effete weakness to great effect, and the almost-bare stage is appropriate for the passions that seize the anguished main character. 

Proval and Pastore’s staccatic, shoulder-shrugging gestures and drawling, Italian-Brooklyn accents are immediately reminiscent of that particular brand of Mean Streets machismo and swear-happy dialogue from The Sopranos. Indeed, Proval brings some of his Sopranos character Richie Aprile’s irascibility to Nino, as does the hugely impressive Vincent Pastore, whose Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero was a popular mobster on the HBO show. Even Proval’s respective character histories are striking in their coincidence: Richie Aprile worked for his younger brother, a famed mob boss, as does Nino, who serves as a caporegime under Pat, “the boss of all bosses.” But the presiding influence on this nostalgic play is the Italian-American neighborhood sentimentality that seeps through the mannerisms and the accented confrontations, and it is the result of a series of deliberate choices in the script, written by lawyer-turned-playwright Michael Ricigliano, Jr.

Through Nino, Ricigliano paints a picture of a cohesive Brooklyn community, heavy with Italian-American tradition: “The widows dressed in black for husbands who’d been dead for 30 years. All the old-timers played brisc and raced pigeons… we played stickball all day and parents thought nothing of smacking their neighbors kids like their own.” The famed mafiosi loyalty to blood and crime family kinship are adequately expressed as well: both Nino and Pat have a deep, unfettered love for their mother (who isn’t “crazy” like other Sicilian women), hatred of all things weak, and an ambition for all things "respectable." Consequently, Nino’s eventual breakdown becomes especially pitiful; there is a minute-long scene where the two brothers cry together on stage. Even when the dialogue slips into heavy-handed commentary—the gentrification of north Brooklyn is taken particularly seriously—the performances offset it with careful, nuanced delivery. A lengthy exposition on a Catholic festival’s annual Dance of the Giglio is punctuated beautifully with Proval’s breathy singing voice.

In a splendid cooperation of scenic and lighting design by Andreea Mincic and Isabella F. Byrd, there is a set and light change halfway through this intermission-less drama, but it involves none of your blacking-out, between-scenes music that usually accompanies the scraping of furniture or taps of hurried footsteps across the changing stage. The play ends on an irreverently cinematic note, suitably shocking and Scorsese-esque in its scope. The violence that usually accompanies a tale about mafiosi crime families explodes after an emotional peak, leaving the viewer somewhat distressed as the lights return and the actors take their bow. But genre-lovers will thrive on the conscious nods to wiseguy braggadocio, the darkly humorous jibes at crime culture, and an undeniably potent assembly of old Sopranos stars. Or, if you’ve only watched The Godfather once and think Gotti is a kind of Italian cheese, you get to see a most unusual mob boss sing and weep on stage.

A Queen for a Day is written by Michael Ricigliano, Jr. and directed by John Gould Rubin. It runs through July 26 at Theatre at St. Clement’s (423 West 46 St. between 9th and 10th Aves.). Evening performances are Sunday through Tuesday at 7 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. Matinees are held on Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 and available for purchase by phone at 866-811-4111 and 212-352-3101 or online at http://aqueenforadayplay.com/tickets/.

Elizabethan Girl Power

Being a woman in a man's world is tough. Being a woman in Shakespeare's world? It's even tougher, as evidenced by Titan Theatre Company's latest offering, a production of the Bard's Othello featuring an all-female cast. In this new age of strong female characters—from film (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Hunger Games) to television (Orphan Black and Girls)—never has it been better to be a woman in the 21st Century. So, to see a stage fully comprised of women, and so many different women of shapes, colors and sizes, take on one of the Bard's most masculine works is indeed empowering. Since these differences add another layer to what is an already interestingly layered play; just as in Orphan Black (which recently began its third season on BBC America), we are privy to the many different ways in which women think—and ultimately act.

The start of the play finds Venice at war with Turkey. The titular Othello, general of the Venetian forces (also herein known as "The Moor"), has just married the beautiful and fair Desdemona, much to the dismay of her mother Brabantio, a well-respected senator. Meanwhile, as Othello sets off for Cyprus, her ensign Iago is incensed at being passed over for the promotion of lieutenant, a position given to Cassio. At this, Iago famously proclaims, "I hate The Moor," and this sudden anger and struggle for power sparks a fire within her, setting into motion a web of deceit—one which spins out of her control and ultimately entangles her by the play's tragic end.

While definitely not the first all-female production this critic has come across, to see this device thrust and juxtaposed into the dark underbelly and strong ensemble that has since become Titan's calling card, is a whole other experience altogether. It goes without saying that the entire plot of and within the play, rests on Iago's cunning, and Titan resident company actor Laura Frye (last seen as Regan in the company's production of King Lear earlier this season) takes this on with much aplomb. As she schemes her way into the others’ minds, Frye is both completely charming and deliciously devious, making her an Iago you love to hate.

As for The Moor herself, Othello—played by Los Angeles-based actress Leah Dutchin, one of several actresses making their Titan debut—starts the play as a voice of reason, demonstrating that rare combination of both strength and vulnerability, particularly in scenes with Desdemona. Of their love, Othello describes the purity with which they fell for one another: "She gave me for my pains a world of kisses.” This innocence about love gradually starts to wither and once Iago plants the idea of Desdemona's supposed infidelity into her ear, Dutchin’s Othello becomes all-at-once a torn lover driven mad by jealousy. 

Also driven mad are Cassio and Roderigo, played by Abbey Siegworth and Leah Gabriel, respectively. Siegworth’s Cassio proves to be a formidable counterpart to both Frye’s Iago, as well as Dutchin’s Othello.  Meanwhile, Gabriel is at once hilarious and tragic as the bumbling Roderigo, whose love for Desdemona is never reciprocated. For her part, Emily Trask’s Desdemona is a beautiful, perfect portrayal of a character which represents all that is pure and innocent; she is especially heartbreaking in her scenes with Deanna Gibson’s Emilia, wherein she sings. Her soft, angelic voice makes her violent end all the more tragic.  The rest of the ensemble are just as strong, and it is clear in their onstage presence—particularly in the moments where they get drunk and sing, as well as the more action-packed sequences.

With all the intrigues Iago must manage between all the characters, one is reminded of the Mean Girls' culture: something which Jasmine Nicole’s minimalist scenic design—as well as director Lenny Banovez’s staging, use to their advantage. Every whisper of Iago's deceptive plan is heard by the other actors sitting among the audience, and it is this clever device which raises all sorts of feminist issues, including the all-too-familiar one of "girl-on-girl crime," as so famously put it in the Tina Fey-penned film.  Providing a contrast to the estrogen-level—and interestingly heightening the signature masculinity of the play—are the girls’ costumes. Aside from Desdemona, who is draped in flowy blue fabrics to reflect her calm-as-the-sea vibe, most of the cast are decked out in military gear that would not be amiss in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, a la Hunger Games: Iago’s trenchcoat and Othello’s boots are among the looks most coveted by this critic.  While there is no mention of a hair design credit, it must be said that the hairstyles sported by these ladies of the Shakes are certainly worth mentioning. From Iago’s awesomely complicated-looking braided faux-hawk to Desdemona’s cascading red locks, the girls were killin’ it—literally and metaphorically!         

Exploring feminism through one of the Bard's most masculine plays is not daring, or perhaps even new: but it is vital. Why do women want to bring one another down? Such a question still lingers, even in the so-called progressive times we live in. In watching Othello, a play written 400 years ago, it is remarkable to see just how much has changed—and how much hasn't. Men have power; so do women. Men can just as easily fail to use that power; so do women. And it's clear that just as so many male Iagos have had their say, so too, do women.

Othello ran from April 17 to May 2nd at the Queens Theatre (14 United Nations Avenue South in Corona). For more information on this production, visit www.titantheatrecompany.com or www.queenstheatre.org.

An Unholy Sacrament

From the Ancient Romans, to the German Gothics, to the creators of Grand Guignol, theatre artists have long been experimenting with elements of the grotesque. Simply put, theatre of the grotesque is carnivalesque and tragicomic—a veritable mix of horror, ugliness, irreverence and dark humor. While Isaac Byrne's direction of Sara Florence Fellini's In Vestments has its grotesque aspirations, overall the production's textual and scenographic clutter make for a rather discombobulating experience. Eschewing simplicity for bricolage, In Vestments is a thorny (and sometimes fun) romp through stylistic purgatory.

Byrne creates a few pleasingly grotesque stage images and moments, which are In Vestments' greatest strengths.  The sight of burly, pop-eyed Father Falke (Ted Wold) stomping around like a gargantuan child in double plaster arm casts contributes to the production's darkly humorous vein.  The delightfully gruesome and sacrilegious living crucifix statue (Eric Soto as Joshua) will greatly entertain some audience members (and possibly offend some others).  Pierre Marais' haunting French musical interludes as the devilish Jakomo are oddly beautiful and compelling, even though they contribute to the stylistic confusion of the production. 

Though it has its compelling moments, In Vestments suffers from lack of artistic unity. From the outset, audience members are greeted by ghastly faceless nuns (played by Amy Higgs, Erika Phoebus, and Cait Murphy), who hand them small slips of paper outlining explicit directions to "keep a respectful distance between yourself and members of the opposite sex," and to avoid "lolligagging in aisles." This interactive touch foreshadows some kind of immersivity, as if one will be attending a Catholic mass. Yet the immersive design of the production stops here; while the production is technically "in the round," there is no further crossing of the fourth wall, and no more ambulatory or participatory elements. While In Vestments does present intersting details and moments, its gimmick-oriented myopia inhibits an overall stylistic and philosophical unity.  

Another example of In Vestments' disjointedness is its transitional music, which alters between church organs, chilling chords, and angry contemporary songs. Many of these musical choices are called for directly in Fellini's play text, which is itself the source of the production's stylistic schizophrenia. Playing out over an unforgiving two and half hours, the play's numerous melodramatic narrative threads include heroin addiction, child molestation, suicide, church corruption, neglectful parents, poisoned wine, dismemberment, and plenty of good old fashioned Catholic guilt.  In performance, the interior struggles of Father Nate (Adam Belvo), Father Yves (Samuel Adams) and Father James (Carl Danielsen) coax the viewer towards empathy, but the play switches gears before one can really settle into any genuine care for these characters. Fellini's intensity as Maeve is as unrelenting as her script: her screaming and breaking of objects lacks control, which created a slightly unsafe and affronting audience environment. 

In Vestments comes close to a critique of organized religion, but its message is clouded by excessive and indulgent narratives of drug addiction, sexual and emotional abuse, corruption, and suicide.  While the experimental spirit of the playwright and performers deserve recognition, In Vestments might benefit from a more controlled and deliberate execution.

In Vestments ran to May 30 at West Park Presbyterian Church (165 West 86th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus). For more information, visit www.infinitesighs.com.

Dean Martin at Cafe Verona

Shakespeare's best romances, whether they end in tears or in double weddings, start off fraught with comic possibility, and most stagings of The Two Gentlemen of Verona are intensely aware of that fact. Director Hamilton Clancy and The Drilling Company's production of one of the Bard's earliest plays is properly sensitive to said comedic potential, even in the somewhat chaotic environs of Bryant Park on a weekend afternoon. The play seems particularly popular this season, with an acclaimed production by Fiasco Theater running concurrently with this one. A three-storied stage serves as a set for both Cafe Verona and the Emperor's Court in Milan; Shakespeare's two gentlemen gravitate between the two cities, just as their inconstant affections flit from one girl to the next. 

An ambitious Proteus (Brian Patrick Murphy) woos a particularly fearless Julia (Tori Ernst) in Verona, while his friend Valentine (Andrew Gombas)—Shakespeare’s requisite love-mocker—goes to Milan to seek his fortunes. Both Valentine and Proteus fall hard and fast for Silvia (Kristin Piacentile), and later deal with the oncoming storm of nascent comedic devices dear to the Bard’s heart: lost love letters, cross-dressing women and fickle men. The unsurpassed star of the show is Chewy-Bear Aquino, the winsome little dog that plays Crab; he almost outperforms his master, Launce (Eric Paterniani). 

The comic performances are reliably humorous, with a fantastic Speed (Drew Valins) and near-incoherently accented Launce, played to perfection by Eric Paterniani. Bryant Park on a spring evening is anarchic, and the players strive to hold our attention; Brian Patrick Murphy struts about and gestures like a Mean Streets antihero (Mr. Murphy is involved in Mr. Scorsese’s upcoming Rock N’ Roll project), while Julia and her wonderfully sassy best friend Lucetta (Lauriel Friedman) engage in girlish banter and the odd catfight.

But there’s a reason why The Two Gentlemen of Verona isn’t performed on stage as much as other works in the Bard’s canon. Lines of love and longing that would later become peerless in Shakespeare’s romances are rendered lukewarm here, barring perhaps Valentine’s famous love monologue to Silvia. The words utterly redeem Clancy’s bumbling-in-love Valentine and give him the deep solemnity of a lovelorn, despairing man torn from his betrothed: "What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?"

Shakespeare’s early play depends greatly on the manic expressiveness and movement of its actors (it was performed with restless gusto by a Royal Shakespeare Company revival of Two Gentlemen last year), but Clancy otherwise mutes what might have been rip-roaring situational comedy in favor of schmaltzy music cues and no-fear-Shakespeare every man references (“I am one that am nourished by my/ victuals: Chipotle!” and “stop mewling like a bum on the L train!”). At times, there seemed to be more humor in the glances of passers-by eyeing the makeshift stage with the wary curiosity of watching a street performance and hearing Old English simultaneously. 

But the undisputed strength of this Two Gentlemen production rests on this theme: the easy forgiveness of friends. The neat double wedding that concludes this Elizabethan comedy could just as easily have been a funeral: when Proteus begs Valentine’s forgiveness for trying to steal his girl, there is a moment of unyielding hatred in Gombas’ raised fist, and the audience wonders (as it often does in Shakespeare’s dark comedies) if Valentine will go the way of Vergil’s Aeneas and strike down his mercy-seeking enemy. Instead, he lets his hand fall and embraces his best friend in forgiveness, as does Julia, who has a startlingly pre-feminist line: "it is the lesser blot, modesty finds/women to change their shapes than men their minds."

The set seems deliberately makeshift, with three raised platforms serving as a restaurant, an emperor’s court and an outlaw’s hideout (appropriately called Governor’s Island, in keeping with the production’s New York flavor) but set designer Jennifer Varbalow makes the festive Little Italy habitat quite endearing. The setting itself is unabashedly Italian, and Dean Martin’s lilting voice is a constant refrain between scene changes. Perhaps "That's Amore" too neatly captures the senseless scrappiness of love; it’s one of those songs that play on a loop in your head. So if you're looking for that elusive alliance between Shakespeare and New York City, this season's Bryant Park Shakespeare might just serve you with a decent caper through Little Italy and a few laughs for good measure. 

Presented by Bryant Park Shakespeare, The Drilling Company's production of Two Gentlemen of Verona ran from May 15- 31 at Bryant Park (6th Ave. at 42nd St.) in Manhattan. For more information, call 212-873-9050 or visit www.shakespeareintheparkinglot.com and www.drillingcompany.org.

Messing Around in Italy

Shakespeare’s early play Two Gentlemen of Verona—it may have been his first—isn’t presented very often, although two productions will be running simultaneously this month. Last year the Royal Shakespeare Company put it on the main stage in Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in 44 years. It’s a rarity that, when it does come around, is often roughed up a bit, and that’s usually to the good. Two Gentlemen can be occasionally wordy and sometimes distasteful, even in the staging by Fiasco Theater Company, which specializes in innovative presentations of the Bard and has fielded a crew of six fine performers who enact multiple roles, play instruments, and sing. (By odd coincidence, a second Two Gents will be presented by the Drilling Company in Bryant Park from May 15-31.)

Proteus (Noah Brody) is certainly one of the least likable heroes in the canon. Having vowed his fidelity to Julia (Jessie Austrian), he leaves for Milan, his devotion dissipates, and he woos Silvia (Emily Young), beloved by his best friend Valentine (Zachary Fine). As if his bad behavior weren’t enough, his climactic repentance  strains credibility.

Two Gentlemen is full of plot devices that Shakespeare would develop better in later plays. As in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, there’s a girl who must disguise herself as a boy. Here Julia dons a man’s garb to find Proteus and sets off with her servant Lucetta (Young again). And, as in As You Like It, they end up in a forest. Meanwhile, Valentine is banished by the Duke (Andy Grotelueschen), and he meets up with outlaws, also in the forest. In Milan, Proteus immediately falls for Silvia, a well-born lady. Providing comedy are Speed, the servant to Proteus (Paul L. Coffey, who’s also Silvia’s goofy lothario Thurio), and Launce with his dog, Crab. Yes, if you have seen Two Gents, you’ll remember it’s the one with the dog.

Directors Austrian and Ben Steinfeld have engaged designer Derek McLane to provide whitewashed planks backed by a large black wall on which are pinned letters and white flowers. Indeed, the set echoes the emphasis on words and wordplay that Elizabethans may have enjoyed more than a modern audience will. Young Shakespeare is in love with words, and although the cast handles it skillfully (“O how this spring of love resembleth/The uncertain glory of an April day”), there is also starchy verse and punning that sometimes don’t seem worth the effort. Luckily, Fiasco has judiciously pared much that could have made it unbearable.

Whitney Locher’s breezy summer costumes certainly lift the spirits and provide a distinctive visual style: white linens and lace, with a palette of rose, lilac, oatmeal, and powder blue. The men’s spectators are in luscious combinations: celadon and buff; coral and copper.

The comedy is an unqualified success. Grotelueschen and Fine are delightful. While Launce describes their adventures, Fine reacts with alternate mixtures of guilty looks and puppyish eagerness. He’s so good that perhaps only an animal-rights activist might complain that a real dog wasn’t hired for the job. When Launce discovers Speed asleep on the ground there’s some very funny business with a ball and the panting canine. Grotelueschen is also an authoritative Duke, and the scene in which he leads Valentine into a trap is handled with subtlety. (He adeptly delivers several bawdy jokes that lie hidden on the page.)

But the lovers’ plight is less interesting, and although Brody is a virile, handsome Proteus, the character’s behavior wins him no sympathy as a decent match for Austrian’s spunky Julia. Fiasco has larded the program with quotes from scholars such as Marjorie Garber, W.H. Auden, and Francis Fergusson to explain what Shakespeare intended, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the play remains unsatisfying. Still, this is a thoughtful production and not just for completists. It’s worth a visit. 

Fiasco Theater’s Two Gentlemen of Verona runs through June 7 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. There are no performances on May 13 and 21. Tickets may be purchased by visiting www.tfana.org or calling (866) 811-4111.

All That Jazz

For many Americans, the height of the Jazz Age undoubtedly reached its apex in the Roaring Twenties; particularly, when the Harlem Renaissance had both black and white night owls of the country flocking to the neighborhood's mysterious speakeasies and smoky basement-level dens for some of the best live music New York City had to offer. However, for playwright John Attanas, the very new, percussive sounds of jazz was only just beginning to find its groove, as the country moved into the early 1950s. Such is the world of Attana's newest work, All Gone West.

Set in post-war New York City, we meet Sam Samos (Joseph Robinson), a young and handsome war vet who learns about the fast-paced rhythms of the city—and of course jazz—from his fellow vet and black saxophone player Sonny Green (Jesse Means). Not long after settling in the city, Sam finds himself falling for Mary (Kristen French), a beautiful secretary at City College, whom he encounters one night when she walks into his bar with an older man, Joe (Glen Williamson), a professor at the college with alcoholic tendencies. They hit it off, and after Sam's persistence, Mary gives in and they begin a courtship, leaving Joe to his own devices.

The two lovebirds eventually marry despite their clear differences: Sam, an idealistic modern, is intent on one day opening his own jazz club, while Mary leans towards the conventional, with no high ambitions and generally happy with the lot she is given. These differences start to strain their marriage as Sam finally makes his dream come true, with the help of his friend Willie (Anthony Bosco), a fellow gambler whose questionable connections provides Sam's dream the financial help it needs. His club—christened The Blind Spot—starts off smoothly enough until Sam has trouble booking jazz acts that would draw crowds. He looks to Sonny, who by now has been approached with a record deal, but also has been nursing a drug addiction. As the bills start piling up, Sam desperately attempts to get by with some further help from Willie, as well as the hire of a prostitute (Kristen Booth). Ultimately, their business folds, and the two decide to follow the national pilgrimage West, where better—if only practical—prospects lay ahead.

Told in a magical realist-style, with the two lovers narrating between scenes, West's mood is evocative of the film noir genre that was popular during that era, and particularly called to mind films like Sweet Smell of Success and The Big Sleep. Just as the genre plays with contrasts, so does the thematic through-line of the play itself: the conventional versus the unconventional, new versus old. This is reflective not only in the fact that jazz inherently defies convention, but also in the differences between the characters—in particular, that of the ambitious Sam, and the content Mary. In their respective leading roles, both Robinson and French seem plucked straight out of the period. From the way Robinson's cool vibe to French's spot-on "New Yawk" accent, they embody stars of a bygone era. Cementing these solid performances were the supporting cast. Means' Sonny is confident and cool, yet belies a vulnerability. Another vulnerable portrayal was that of Williamson, whose alcoholic Joe displayed his weaknesses from the very beginning. Both characters each succumbed to their addictions, but their respective arcs are buoyed by the performances of both actors. Finally, Booth, whom perhaps had the most difficult task of the night, portraying multiple characters, also proved to be another strong presence onstage.

Also vital in setting the overall mood of the play was the presentation itself: the set designed by Andrew Diaz was naturally minimal in the modest performance space. Despite these limitations, the audience was nevertheless transported in time. Furnished by a simple brick wall structure, plastered onto which are various vintage posters, featuring advertisements for department store Gimbels and the Aqueduct racetrack. The use of various props—which include a dining table set and other pieces such as vintage glass soda bottles, newspapers and telephones—also help in differentiating between locales and situations. Nicholas Staigerwald's costumes added another dimension dressing the actors in various sartorial styles that were typically in vogue at the time, and worthy of any Modcloth shopper's envy today—particularly, a monochrome polka-dot one-piece bathing suit Mary dons towards the end. Of course, the element that perhaps had the most impact was the live jazz band, which brought to life the era in which the characters lived, and provided a romping soundtrack to the story.

A play about all kinds of losses—from the old to the new; the death of New York and the rise of the East Coast—All Gone West is certainly anything but your average show.

All Gone West ran from March 28 to April 18 at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th St. between 2nd Ave. and Bowery). For more information on this production, visit the show's website: http://allgonewest.org/.

A Visit to the Underworld

There’s a subtle clue on the chairs: the packet of two Saltines. As the audience enters the low-ceilinged basement space, with its molded, convex design, the crackers sit on each chair, along with an odd token—perhaps an old postcard, or an old photograph, or an object such as a miniature sewing machine. To the left of the seating area for Jarring, the peculiar and unsettling solo show written and performed by Tracy Weller, is an L-shaped room with an industrial sink. Trays of dirt sit in the sink as Weller’s character silently uses a mortar and pestle to grind powders and pour them gingerly into clean Mason jars. She pours milk into the dirt.

After preparations, she takes a frayed ledger, clutches it to her bosom, and walks to the front playing space. Smiling with satisfaction, she says, “Good morning.” And then she pulls back the curtain on the space to reveal metal shelves full of Mason jars with powder in them, all neatly aligned. She begins a hasty, breathless lecture: “To begin: CANNING. But not a can. The act of. ‘To can is just the verb. BUT, they are not cans, obviously. There’s an enormous difference.” Her lecture becomes more disjointed and emphatic. The cans, of course, are glass: “the Mason jar, an elusively simple and elegant preservation system.” We are told that the jar was patented by John Landis Mason in November 1858.

The woman goes off on tangents rather easily. “Footnote, yes. There were others with their patents we need to acknowledge. Yes, fine. Kerr with his wide-mouth jars. The Ball Brothers (cutthroat entrepreneurs, latched on like ticks, launched into high-gear mass production). Those Ball boys, of course, were thieves and drunks….” It soon becomes apparent that she is unbalanced, doctrinaire, obsessed with the history of food preservation, jars, and canning. She assumes various identities as she describes the history. She’s dismissive, overeager, pained—in short, the part is a tour de force for Weller, and she makes the most of it.

Soon her lecture is finished; she returns to the sink area; then it begins again. Gradually, though, her demeanor changes. Slowly we are able to piece together what has happened to her in this forgotten basement. Although this solo show is more challenging to follow than many plays, it’s theatrical nonetheless. The plot here takes a back seat to character. At times, it is frustrating to follow her diseased mind—the crackers are descriptive, if you manage to make the connection—and sometimes the repetition is wearying, but Justin and Christopher Swader’s sets and lighting create an unsettling mood, and Joel Bravo’s sound design contributes eerie, distant clanks of metal. They help on this journey to a strange underworld with a lunatic as guide.

The production is the first by Mason Holdings, a company that describes itself as dedicated to preservation of all kinds" and which preserves "stories, people, places and moments and ideas—before they vanish into oblivion." That may sound didactic, but director Kristjan Thor keeps the pace varied. Weller’s obsessed figure apostrophizes to Mason (“Oh, Dr. Mason, you make a very elusive jar!"), and to the imaginary audience (“Our hero’s favorite color? Great question!”), delivers the history of preservation and contamination, and becomes both more distraught and ecstatic. “Ball and Kerr and other smiling wide-mouthed thieves in the night,” she exclaims, “but never another, any, any other, holding and sealed, tending and taking care, our little lives—in a jar! All in a jar! A Mason jar!” 

The drama provides Weller with a wide range of emotions to encompass. The disjointed exclamations, the leaps of imagination and changes of subject, the addresses to the audience and the drifting into reverie, give the experience an unsettling and impressionistic air. Although the plot is simple, there’s lots of information to process. Is there an important point? Perhaps not, but like all good theater, Jarring will leave you haunted by the experience.

The Mason Holdings production of Jarring plays through May 17, with evening performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and on Monday; matinees are Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and may be purchased online at http://jarringnyc.eventbrite.com.

Troubles in Mind

Catholicism and politics are at the forefront of Nate Rufus Edelman’s bittersweet drama The Belle of Belfast, being given a compelling production at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Edelman follows a small Catholic community in the Northern Ireland capital in 1985 as they negotiate the dominant strands of the troubles and how deeply they are ingrained in people’s lives.

The focus is on Father Ben Reilly (Hamish Allan-Headley), a 35-year-old priest, and his relationship to parishioners, two in particular. One is Emma Malloy, an elderly lady with a shaky grasp of sin. Embodied with warmth and earnestness by Patricia Conolly, the befuddled Emma stretches herself trying to find mistakes in her behavior, as Reilly repeatedly assures her that she hasn’t sinned. Her confession of taking a sip of whisky—Bushmills, she says—falls flat after Reilly assures her that a sip of whiskey doesn’t require penance. Then, conscious of the smallest political error, Emma makes a further clarification: it was poteen, not Bushmills. “I would never touch a Protestant whiskey,” she says.

Under director Claudia Weill, the wry humor of these scenes is a welcome contrast to the main event, which involves Emma’s great-niece, Anne (Katy Lydic), a red-haired knockout who has little use for Catholicism, let alone the church. Anne attends confession at her aunt’s instigation with great reluctance and scorn. She swears and makes clear to Reilly that she does drugs, has sex, and generally ignores church teachings. Her drifting moral compass is a result of the killing of both her parents in a bombing. That alone isn’t the most hurtful part—it’s that people regarded her parents as martyrs, although they were innocent bystanders. Anne loathes the politics that elevate her parents to political heroes and override her personal loss.

Reilly feels kinship toward Anne because he was also orphaned. After his parents were killed in a car accident, Reilly was determined to become a priest to make them proud. Unfortunately, Anne knows no boundaries. “Do you have anything to confess?” asks Reilly, and she responds, “No, I just came here to give you a blow job.” It’s the kind of thing an unruly teenager would say, but Lydic looks about 10 years older than the 18-year-old character, and it hampers some of the credibility of the play. However, Allan-Headley as Reilly is a compelling presence: sympathetic, vulnerable and masculine. The actor conveys the cleric's internal struggles, and he has the gift of charisma that makes it clear why Anne falls for Reilly. (All the actors, incidentally, have persuasive Irish accents.) 

John McDermott’s set nicely echoes the compartmentalization of emotions that are hemming in the principals. When the characters are not in the confines of the confessional, there are two primary playing areas. One is the small parish apartment that Reilly shares with Father Dermott Behan (Billy Meleady), a firebrand Sinn Fein partisan who has made peace with abnegation—no sex, but plenty of alcohol—and  expects to find a heaven where he can surf. The other half of the stage shows a concrete dock and a high wall topped by barbed wire, where Anne frequently meets her friend Ciara (Arielle Hoffman) to talk about boys and sex. Both spaces are prisons for their respective characters.

Ultimately, Anne (her nickname provides the title of the play) leads Reilly astray, but not for long, and the aftermath isn’t what one might expect. The doctrinaire Behan, who hears Reilly’s confession, holds fast to the outlook that plagued Belfast in 1985: “I’ve dedicated ma entire existence to a united Catholic Ireland and you have the gall to betray your church and your country…” But Reilly understands that political and religious doctrine can stand in the way of success as a priest. In a lovely coda, Anne and Reilly meet a few years later, and each has moved on from the experience, both physically and mentally. Anne has found happiness. Reilly has found solace. It’s a satisfying close to this poignant tragedy.

Nate Rufus Edelman’s The Belle of Belfast plays through June 7 at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s temporary home at DR2 Theaters (103 East 15th St.) off Union Square. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit www.irishrep.org or call the box office at 212-727-2737.

Middle-Class Morality on the Block

Compared with A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts usually has gotten short shrift as a dramatic document about women’s rights, even though its protagonist, Mrs. Alving, is as modern and self-sufficient as any Ibsen heroine. Richard Eyre’s astonishing adaptation, which runs only 90 minutes without intermission at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, confirms that Ibsen’s 1882 play is as timely as ever. None of the three acts feels foreshortened—it’s a full meal. It is also a magnificent production.

Both Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, who championed the Norwegian playwright’s work in England, kicked Victorian melodrama to the curb, as it were, and introduced politically and socially conscious realism to the stage. At BAM, Eyre makes one feel the full weight of the change.

With only five characters, Ghosts also displays Ibsen’s characteristically tight plotting. Lesley Manville’s Helene Alving has welcomed her son Oswald (Billy Howle) home to Norway after has lived abroad for years. His father has died, and a new orphanage named for him is to be dedicated by Pastor Manders, a family friend, and, it turns out, someone with whom Helene had been in love. Indeed, she had left her husband, Captain Alving, with the intention of taking up with Manders, then a divinity student. Though the spark between them might easily have been fanned into a flame, he persuaded her to return to her home, where she remained as Alving’s seemingly loyal wife, though she eventually sent Oswald away to boarding school. Two additional characters, old Jacob Engstrand, a coarse and brutal carpenter with the idea of opening a “home away from home” for sailors, and his daughter, Regina, who works at the orphanage and loathes her father, are on hand as well.

As Mrs. Alving, Manville, a veteran of gritty realism in many Mike Leigh films, shows a character with personal composure and limited patience for cant. When Will Keen’s straight-laced, judgmental Manders notices pamphlets about feminism and free love on her parlor table, he takes her to task, but she challenges him—has he read them? “One must rely on the views of others,” he says, a response that echoes today in arguments involving morality and the church.

An early contretemps over whether the new orphanage should be insured provides an example of Ibsen’s mordant humor—something that director Eyre doesn’t stint on, in spite of the playwright’s reputation for seriousness. Manders understands the importance of insuring the new building, but he’s afraid that taking out insurance will imply that God can’t be trusted to protect the structure. When Helene finally acquiesces to his foolish view, Manville unveils the character’s frustration in the way she opens a desk drawer and tosses her spectacles and a blotter in. And Keen brings out every bit of Manders’s cluelessness, yet draws sympathy for a man who adheres to his hidebound principles, whose so-called morality has exposed his venality. The ghosts of the title, says Helene to Manders, are “the things that come out of the past…not just the people that haunt us, but what we inherit from our parents: dead ideas, dead customs, dead morals. They hang around us and we can’t get away from them.”

The strong stream of anticlericalism that runs through Ghosts (along with mentions of incest, syphilis, and sexual freedom) made it as big a target for condemnation as A Doll's House, and even today one can feel the earth tremble as Oswald excoriates Manders and his views. Oswald, who has lived in Paris among bohemians, espouses free love and expresses his disdain of Norwegian “worthies” who come to Paris looking for the sexual indulgences that they disapprove of at home. (One feels at times that Ibsen, who lived abroad for more than 20 years and carried on with a much younger woman, is speaking through Oswald.)

Bourgeois morality is also represented by Charlene McKenna’s Regina. She is ready for middle-class morality, and is attracted to Oswald—and vice versa. She wants the orphanage job to support herself and stay away from her father, who’s a drinker and a laborer. Old Jacob, too, schemes for advancement, but he also suspects that society would rather keep him in his place, so he latches on to Manders as an ally. One of the open questions in Eyre’s production concerns whether Manders or Engstrand is responsible for a disaster that upsets everyone’s plans.

The production, from the Almeida Theatre in London, looks terrific. Peter Mumford supplies crucial lighting, at two points a saturated red, and Tim Hatley’s set points up the compartmentalized lives of the people involved. Most important, Manville’s last scene shows that Ibsen still has the power to deliver a kick to the gut. 

Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts runs through May 3 at BAM, Harvey theater. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and matinees are at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets may be obtained by calling 718-636-4100 or at the BAM box office at 651 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

O Most Dread Dane

If you have seen Hamlet several times and are likely to be bored with a straightforward rendering, then perhaps the Classic Stage Company’s new modern-dress production, directed by Austin Pendleton, is the one for you. It’s full of bizarre ideas to a fault.

Where to begin? Well, one of the great revenge tragedies no longer has a hero who kills his enemies. This Hamlet is not directly responsible for the deaths of Laertes or Claudius. In the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, the latter cuts Hamlet with the poisoned rapier, then lays it down on the floor. Hamlet charges him like a bull; they wrestle; and Laertes accidentally rolls on top of his sword and wounds himself on the poisoned tip. As for Claudius, the action of Hamlet stabbing the king is omitted. After Gertrude lies dead, Hamlet hands the king the poisoned cup and commands: “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damnèd Dane/Drink off this potion.” Claudius, berated into suicide, quaffs the drink.

The one person this Hamlet does kill is Polonius, but that’s an accident. Still, weirdness is injected here too. Polonius’s ghost walks out from behind the arras, crosses the stage, and then exits. By comparison, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father—a character who actually has lines—is invisible in this production. Invisible ghosts have been used in tandem with dialogue spoken on tape, but here the Ghost’s words are eliminated as well, as if it were entirely in Hamlet’s imagination (although Francisco, Bernardo, and Marcellus speak of seeing it). And Ophelia’s ghost appears unexpectedly to hover around her own gravesite. So extra-textual ghosts are real, but Shakespeare’s real Ghost doesn’t exist?

If Pendleton has a concept, it appears to be that Hamlet is insane from the get-go, that his imagination is working overtime. That might explain why an uncut, multi-tiered wedding cake sits upstage, some two months after "the funeral meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” Either the clean-up crew has been on strike, or it’s a symbol weighing on Hamlet’s diseased mind.

Still, troublesome ideas can sometimes be overcome by outstanding acting. But Peter Sarsgaard seems determined to sledgehammer the meter of the verse into little pieces. Actors such as John Gielgud, accounted one of the great 20^th-century Hamlets, and directors such as John Barton have advised that if one follows the scansion of Shakespearean verse, it will buoy the actor and the sense will reveal itself. Sarsgaard doesn’t, and he sinks like a stone. He puts in pauses every three words or so. On “a little more than kin…and less than kind,” the delay kills the pun. Moreover, his delivery is so halting throughout that one suspects he hasn’t got the words down. Certainly he’s not letter-perfect in the crucial “To be or not to be,” and lyricism is repeatedly sabotaged.

Gielgud, who directed Richard Burton in the role on Broadway, wrote in Stage Directions that “a Gertrude older than 50 must surely be unconvincing on the stage.” Pendleton has chosen Harris Yulin and Penelope Allen as Claudius and Gertrude. With the Internet at one’s fingertips, it gives nothing away to say that both are in their eighth decade. When Yulin’s skillfully spoken but lethargic Claudius tells Hamlet he wants him to stay at court rather than leave for Wittenberg, you might suspect that it’s because he has his eye on Hamlet as a caregiver.

Pendleton’s casting repeatedly creates inconsistencies. Hamlet’s school chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are considerably younger, and Rosencrantz (Scott Parkinson) doubles as the Gravedigger, even though Jim Broaddus, an actor closer to the right age who is superb in smaller parts such as the Player King, would have been more apt. Glenn Fitzgerald as Laertes has a resonant voice and a presence that make one wish he had more to do. Unfortunately, although Hamlet claims to be “fat and scant of breath,” Sarsgaard is clearly in good shape. It’s Fitzgerald’s Laertes, supposedly an athletic and practiced swordsman, who is carrying a few extra pounds.

Ultimately, it’s Stephen Spinella’s Polonius who feels like the best-rounded character. He’s a dapper, instinctively shrewd courtier with warm feelings for his family. Still, the play isn’t called Polonius—though in the hands of Pendleton and Sarsgaard, it’s not so much Hamlet either. 

The Classic Stage Company production of Hamlet runs through May 10; evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Matinees are at 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $65 and may be purchased by visiting www.classicstage/.org.

Folk Song Flashback

Anyone who wants a nostalgic journey into the history of folk music in America can find it in James O’Neil’s Lonesome Traveler, a generous program of famous songs (and some lesser-known ones) delivered in the personae of their most renowned performers, including Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, and the Kingston Trio. Subtitled A Journey Down the Rivers and Streams of American Folk, the show draws on music from a variety of native sources: gospel and spirituals, blues and folk, workers’ protests songs. Those from the baby boom generation will find much that’s familiar, as well as lesser-known works. 

As you might expect, the standards abound: “This Land Is Your Land,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” “John Henry” and “If I Had a Hammer,” “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” The Kingston Trio sings “Tom Dooley” and their loony calypso hit “Zombie Jamboree.” (Pamela Shaw’s costumes nail the button-down, short-sleeve look for Justin Flagg, Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, and Matty Charles.) Singers from Lead Belly (Anthony Manough) to Odetta (Jennifer Leigh Warren) pop up in the wide-ranging retrospective.

Many of the singers accompany themselves on guitar, banjo, mandolin, and even washboard and spoons. First among them is Flagg, a.k.a. The Lonesome Traveler (all the performers have nicknames listed in the program, such as The Muse, The Activist, The Lady, The Man). The clean-cut Flagg brings energy and an aw-shucks demeanor to his roles: he’s initially Pete Seeger, and later a member of the Kingston Trio and the Limeliters, and he has a strong tenor voice. As the unofficial emcee for the evening, he makes a splendid host.

The musicianship in the Rubicon Theatre Company production can’t be faulted, and Dave Mickey, the multimedia designer, has rounded up iconic projections to accompany the songs: the Dust Bowl, Okies on the road, black churchgoers from early in the 20^th century, the civil rights marches of the 1960s, and a kaleidoscope of historical figures—LBJ, Nixon, Carter, JFK and Jackie in Dallas—and venues, such as the Hungry i, the Village Gate, Café Wha?, and various Newport Folk Festivals.

Mickey’s work is a huge help in locating when and where the singers are, since the script by O’Neil, who has also directed, jumps around in time, sometimes irritatingly. The show almost takes on the aspect of a collage with all the bits and pieces of information offered: mentions of McCarthyism, blacklisting, and cheating songwriters of royalties are thrown out casually. At one point Judy Collins explains that she’s singing a song with the Weavers that she won’t actually cover for another decade, in the 1960s. Later, Joan Baez (Jamie Drake, in a brown wig and a headband) pops up without being identified at all—the audience makeup skewed to older baby boomers, so perhaps it was judged unnecessary because Baez's outfit was recognizable, but one suspects that younger people with a liking for folk music would have appreciated some kind of introduction.

The performers seem to have been directed to continually ingratiate themselves, but at times it makes the tone excessively precious. Sing-alongs—and there are a few—are fine and engaging. But when Flagg announces meta-theatrically that a costume change is going to happen onstage during an instrumental interlude, it’s a postmodern intrusion. And during “Tom Dooley,” Mongiardo-Cooper grins unaccountably—outright jarring during a song about a man who’s going to be hanged, after all. 

But these are quibbles. This is fascinating musical history, the songs are gold, and the singer-actors inhabit their characters well. We’re told that Dylan’s introduction of an electric-guitar set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 occasioned a violent outburst by Pete Seeger, who claimed it was the end of folk music. Seeger was right: an electric-guitar performance of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" by Dylan impersonator Trevor Wheetman is all screeching emotion and scarcely intelligible, compared with the gentle melodies and the clear lyrics of the classic folk songs. Lonesome Traveler makes one long for the time when singers had something to say and wanted lyrics to be understood.

The Rubicon Theatre Company production of Lonesome Traveler plays at 59E59 Theatres through April 19. Evening performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, and Sunday (no evening performance April 19). Matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at 212-279-4200 or visit www.59E59.org.

Small Mouth Sounds

Small Mouth Sounds is an apt title for Bess Wohl’s new play, since the work explores a spiritual retreat where silence is the rule. The six characters on the retreat use mostly facial expressions and gestures to make themselves understood, and director Rachel Chavkin has cast the production at Ars Nova with wonderful faces, worthy of a silent film. They communicate much without words.

There’s Marcia Debonis as Joan, a middle-aged lesbian with an insistently worried look. Her partner, Judy (Sakina Jaffrey), slighter and dark-haired, appears more composed but also troubled. Babak Tafti is a conventionally handsome attendee whom Joan recognizes as a renowned yoga teacher named Rodney, a star of his own videos. Tall, bearded Erik Lochtefeld as Jan is annoyed by the bugs, especially mosquitoes, while Brad Heberlee’s pale Ned wears a kufi cap and is exasperated by rule-breakers, particularly the self-important Rodney. Lastly there is Jessica Almasy as the scattered Alicia, a young woman who arrives late, eats snacks, and uses her cellphone at will, ignoring the rules established by the Teacher, a disembodied voice (Jojo Gonzalez).

In Chavkin's unusual traverse staging, the action takes place between two banks of seats where the audience sits; in addition, there is a dais with chairs at one end where the six participants occasionally gather to listen to the Teacher. The effect is to bring us close to the actors, and though one side of the audience may briefly not see an actor’s face, Chavkin has used the space and the actors skillfully; one never feels that anything crucial has been missed.

Only Heberlee as Ned gets a long monologue. The rest of the communication is in fits and snatches, and occasional whispers, except for the Teacher, who begins the week with a parable about a well frog and a traveling frog; the latter takes the well frog out of his well and shows him the ocean, with disastrous results. Even with minimal dialogue, however, one can deduce a great deal. Alicia is clearly emotionally vulnerable after a disastrous relationship; her whispered cell calls to someone named Ben, who never picks up, affirm it. Joan becomes upset at the mention of cancer and weeps, and she flees the room when the Teacher says, “If you want to avoid pain, it is impossible.” But Wohl nicely upsets one’s expectations of why.

There are rituals involved. The group sleeps together, carrying lanterns, tatami mats and thin blankets to the sleeping area and awkwardly sorts out who sleeps next to whom. Wohl pokes gentle fun at them, but she’s never brutally satiric; one cares about the characters, in spite of whatever burdens have brought them to this pass and their inability to articulate at will. In addition to the parable, the Teacher asks the participants to follow the Asian practice of putting something on paper—in this case, the intention for the weekend; at the end, he instructs them to set it afire.

During the retreat we observe Judy and Joan at loggerheads, and Joan cries in the night. Judy, who is more composed, seems to click with Jan, possibly even romantically, as they “talk” about the bugs and he shows her a picture of his dead son. Rodney makes a play for Alicia, and Ned fumes jealously because he also is attracted to her.

Ned’s monologue is a nice payoff to the Teacher’s initial warning that he would answer questions but he didn’t want to hear their whole life stories. Heberlee negotiates the long litany of his woes with subtlety—he never pushes for the laugh that’s ready to break out in the only extended speech among the group. His kufi cap hides scars from a terrible fall, but he has emotional scars as well. And he’s worried about the fate of the planet—easy enough to satirize, but it grows organically from his experiences.

 

Effective projections by Andrew Schneider—panels of rain falling on leaves, or dawn rising over a lake—give one a sense of place. Wohl’s point is that sincere human connection is the real solution to dealing with life’s tribulations. Only the poignant ending, although emotionally satisfactory, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Left alone on stage, Jan echoes a moment from an early part of the play. It’s meant to tie up a loose thread, but it’s one he cannot possibly have understood, given what Wohl reveals about him. Still, Small Mouth Sounds—a nifty title for a play with so little talk—is a fine new work by a writer with a lot of talent.

Ars Nova presents Small Mouth Sounds through April 25 at 511 West 54th St. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Saturday. Tickets are $35 and may be purchased by visiting www.arsnova.com or calling OvationTix at (866) 811-4111.

 

 

 

Artists on Trial

The lives of great playwrights have proved fodder for dramatists before Doug Wright. Edward Bond put Shakespeare on stage in Bingo (1973), and Christopher Marlowe was the main event in Peter Whelan’s The School of Night (1992) and David Grimm’s Kit Marlowe (2000). David Hare wrote about Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss (1998). 

But  Posterity, Wright’s thoughtful, rich meditation on fame and immortality, art and criticism, may be the first to make hay of Henrik Ibsen. Wright, who has also directed the Atlantic Theater production, has been inspired by a report of the dramatist’s annoyance at sitting for a bust by Norway’s greatest sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, in 1901, shortly before a series of strokes ended Ibsen’s writing career: he died in 1906.

Vigeland’s fame was ahead of him, however—he had conceived of but not found the patrons or funds to build an immense fountain in Kristiania, now Oslo. The conceit of the play is that the contrarian Ibsen, who lived in exile from 1868 to 1891, has been persuaded by the Cultural Ministry to sit for a sculptor. Ibsen has chosen Vigeland, whose work he admires. Vigeland doesn’t want to do it, but the hefty commission and the fame resulting from the sitting will spur donors to the fountain. For his part, Ibsen is disgusted: “It’s an insult,” he says. “Two dozen plays! Apparently that’s insufficient to guarantee me a place in the public’s memory.”

Vigeland (Hamish Linklater, by turns fiery, apologetic and proud) knows his worth, but so does the stern, prickly Ibsen (a booming-voiced John Noble), and the clash of the men provides the real drama, with subsidiary interest from three others. One is Henry Stram’s Sophus Larpent, a dapper agent for Vigeland—and a person who actually lived. The other two are invented by Wright: Dale Soules is Mrs. Bergstrom, a housekeeper to Larpent who loses her job when, in the first scene, Larpent discovers her naked in Vigeland’s studio, posing with Vigeland’s equally unclad assistant, the strapping young Mickey Theis as Anfinn Beck.

The priggish Larpent discharges Mrs. Bergstrom, whom Vigeland then hires. But this is just a prelude to the arrival of Ibsen, costumed beautifully by Susan Hilferty in a black vicuña frock coat and silver-topped walking stick—a notable contrast to the old coat and plain walking sticks the icon needs in the second half. Noble’s Ibsen is vain—and not only about his legacy. When Vigeland mentions the gaggle of young groupies that follow Ibsen, a rare smile creeps across the old sourpuss’s face.

It’s inevitable that the two strong-willed artists clash. They debate art and criticism, propriety and business, with a good deal of name-dropping: Donatello, Phidias, Henry James, Galileo, Shaw. To Wright’s credit, he expects literacy from his audience. When Larpent tries to ingratiate himself with the great man, he says, “I was there on that fateful night at the Kristiania Theater some twenty years ago when your leading lady slammed that fateful door” without naming either Nora or A Doll’s House. “Hundreds of people have made that claim,” Ibsen sniffs. Ibsen’s casual reference to a play he has written about a sculptor who dies in an avalanche is not specified, but it’s John Gabriel Borkman. (In one jarring lapse, though, Wright has Ibsen speak of “brinksmanship,” a Cold War term coined in the 1950s.) Even though there’s scant action, the ideas provide a satisfying meal.

“I’ll represent you as you are,” vows Vigeland.
“That’s a specious promise,” Ibsen responds.
“Why?” asks Vigeland.
“I’ve drawn characters from life,” says Ibsen. “I know what pinching and prodding—what ghastly surgeries—it takes to wedge human beings into the confines of art…. Don’t flatter yourself objective. The eye is selective in what it sees, and tainted by bias.”

The presence of Mrs. Bergstrom, who knows nothing about art but only about survival, and Anfinn, who hopes to make his mark by unseating his teacher, provide nice counterpoint to the high-mindedness. Both Linklater and Noble bring passion to their positions, with only an occasional dry patch. In the second act Ibsen suffers a reversal, and agonizes about some disgraceful behavior in his past. He asks Vigeland to make his bust something “kinder than he was in life.” Both men come across as vividly flawed humans in Wright’s meaty theatrical imagining.

Evening performances of Posterity, which runs through April 5, are at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Sunday and at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. There will be additional 2 p.m. performances on March 25 and April 1, but no 7 p.m. performances on March 29 and April 5. Tickets may be ordered online at Atlantictheater.org, by calling OvationTix at 866-811-4111, or in person at the Linda Gross Theater box office, 336 West 20th St., between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.

Delusions Unto Death

After seeing the Goodman Theatre revival of The Iceman Cometh in Brooklyn, it’s tempting to wonder what Eugene O’Neill would have thought of purveyors of the modern 90-minute intermissionless play. Sloth-ridden pikers, perhaps? O’Neill’s late masterpiece runs four hours and 45 minutes at BAM, and it is surely one of the bleakest plays ever written. Don’t let that put you off, however. Robert Falls’s magnificent production may require a marathon sitting, but it’s worth it. 

The setting is 1912, in a combination saloon and rooming house filled with those who have hit rock bottom. The proprietor is Stephen Ouimette’s cantankerous Harry Hope (O’Neill’s sense of irony is not subtle), and the denizens are a collection of drunks, waking up gradually in the gloom. At first Natasha Katz’s remarkable lighting barely registers; then it slowly reveals the tables of inebriates. 

The group is awaiting Theodore “Hickey” Hickman (Nathan Lane), whose annual arrival for Harry’s birthday party is imminent. Among those on hand are ex-anarchist Larry Slade (Brian Dennehy); Hugo, a Russian-accented anarchist (Lee Wilkof); Ed Mosher (Larry Heumann Jr.), who is Harry’s brother-in-law and worked for the circus; and Joe Mott (John Douglas Thompson), an ex-gambler on the skids who cleans the bar. Other characters include two Boer War veterans from opposing sides and a correspondent in that war; two bartenders; and a trio of self-styled “tarts.”

During the next 48 hours the last vestiges of hope for any of them are stripped away. Before Hickey’s arrival the burnt-out Larry is approached by Don Parritt (Patrick Andrews), a young man whose mother is a firebrand anarchist more devoted to the movement than to him; Don has always looked up to Larry as a father, but now Larry wants Don to take a powder. Someone has sold out the movement, and Don’s mother has been arrested.

When Hickey shows up, he delivers a shock to the group. He’s no longer a drinker. He has faced himself and he has become an evangelist for truth-telling. The Hickey part doesn’t seem tailored to Nathan Lane’s acknowledged comic brilliance, but Lane not only finds comedy where it isn’t apparent, he proves himself a powerful dramatic actor (to be fair, he has done dramatic parts before, but nothing compared to this). The evangelist’s fire and the do-gooder’s brass, the glad-hander’s cheer and optimism—Lane has them all. He jokes around as a salesman must, and yet he also excoriates the others’ “pipe dreams.” You’ll be sick of that phrase by the end of the evening, with “take a hop off the fire escape” a close second—O’Neill overwrites, but he also supplies plenty of humor, and even the repetition, while trying one’s patience, gathers a cumulative, relentless force.

Over the course of the day, Hickey cajoles and browbeats several of the residents to leave the bar and face their demons. “Jimmy Tomorrow” (a fretful, nervous James Cameron), the former Boer correspondent, dresses up in a suit and is forced out to a job interview he has rattled on about. The Boer combatants (John Judd and John Reeger) rival each other to see who will have the gumption to leave and whose courage will falter. Even Harry is propelled onto the street, where he claims a car nearly ran him down. Ouimette, hollow-eyed and haunted, is a portrait of a dead man walking.

 

Brian Dennehy, who also played Hickey for Falls back in 1990, is a formidable presence as Slade, who’s waiting for death. Although the character is meant to be exhausted, Dennehy is occasionally vocally underpowered in conveying that. In fact, the opening scene only jumps into gear when Thompson, whose O’Neill credits include a terrific Emperor Jones, kick-starts the energy. As Mott, the only black man, he dreams of opening “a gambling house for colored men” and exhibits more fiery optimism than some of the others.

 

In the end, however, O’Neill makes clear that the lies these people tell themselves are the only thing keeping them alive. They have only their delusions and alcohol. Even the “tarts” tell themselves they’re not prostitutes (the distinction is lost in the mists of time), but they clearly are.

 

O’Neill’s play is not done often—it has 19 characters, for one thing. But it’s not as daunting as you might expect. If you can get a ticket, summon your stamina and don’t miss it. 

 

BAM presents the Goodman Theatre production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh through March 15. Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets may be purchased by calling BAM ticket services at (718) 6436-4100 or visiting BAM.org. The BAM Harvey Theater is at 651 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

A Chilly Romance

Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale has always presented directors with difficulties, notably that Leontes, the Sicilian king who dominates the first half, becomes insanely jealous of the friendship of his pregnant queen, Hermione, and his best friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia, some nine months after Polixenes has arrived for a visit. Indeed, on the eve of Polixenes’ departure, Leontes determines to kill his friend, who escapes. When Hermione delivers, Leontes orders the death of the newborn. He then learns of her innocence just as her death is reported. 

Michael Sexton’s production for the Pearl Theatre Company is stuffed with ideas, to mixed effect. In a first scene whose meta-theatricality is echoed later, the actors saunter on and tacitly acknowledge the audience before getting down to toasts, card tricks, and pouring Scotch. In short order, Peter Francis James’s well-spoken Leontes begins to voice his suspicions of the infidelity of Hermione (Jolly Abraham). James stands stiffly with his hands in his pockets, seemingly tight with emotion. If James cannot quite make Leontes’ jealousy credible, he suggests one of those people who snap suddenly and inexplicably kill their families. He tries to enlist his chief counselor, Camillo (an authoritative Tom Nelis), to poison Polixenes (Bradford Cover), but Camillo warns Polixenes and joins him in his escape.

Sexton has made judicious cuts, and some of his ideas are nifty. How does one approach Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, Exit, pursued by a bear? It occurs when the courtier Antigonus (Dominic Cuskern) takes Hermione’s infant to the woods to dispose of it. Sexton’s solution is to have a visible attack and a stylish feeding frenzy. As one actor holds up a mounted bear’s head, several other actors, clad in fur coats, move as in a choreographed Noh drama and disembowel Antigonus (red cloths fly into the air).

Still, there's a disconcerting tricksiness to everything. Why does Bradley King (with the director’s blessing, surely) suddenly illuminate the actors as if they were in a 19^th-century melodrama? Or a 1940s film noir? When the Shepherd enters, the lights go up, and his scene starts from the audience for no apparent reason. 

There is also little sense of place. The action begins in a dining room, with formal service and a breakfront displaying dishes on one wall, a poster for a Ballets Russes production on another, and an upright piano against the wall of the inner stage. Designed beautifully by Brett J. Banakis, it nevertheless seems to be a royal hunting lodge rather than a full-time palace. That’s not impossible, but the uncertainty of locale continues throughout. Upended furniture is meant to convey a wilderness where Antigonus leaves the infant and a Shepherd finds her. This requires the Shepherd’s son, called simply Clown (a terrific Adam Green), to enter through the fireplace, which must now assume the role of a hole in the underbrush. The furniture cleared, the scene becomes a more effective grange hall for a potluck in rustic Bohemia. 

But a closet door serves as an antechamber to the court, a prison cell, an actual closet, and later a bizarre exit for the comic rascal Autolycus (Steve Cuiffo). At times one longs for an oral description of the setting akin to those supplied by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “In this same interlude it doth befall/That I, one Snout by name, present a wall/And such a wall as I would have you think/That had in it a crannied hole or chink…”

It has often been difficult to spark interest in the wooing of the grown Perdita (Imani Jade Powers) by Polixenes’ son Florizel (James Udom), and the actors here don’t overcome the problem. But Rachel Botchan as Hermione's lady-in-waiting Paulina, who becomes the conscience of the reformed Leontes, is excellent.

The final scene, in which Hermione’s statue comes to life and is reunited with a repentant Leontes, is written to produce sniffles at a minimum. Here, Hermione appears without "statue" makeup, as if she's just a woman standing still. There's no magic, no wonder or warmth, and the scene is played so lethargically, to a lightly plunked guitar, that the climax dwindles away. It’s a shame that a production that often wrestles interestingly with this tragicomedy should end so weakly.

Evening performances of The Winter's Tale are 7 p.m. on Tuesdays and 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays through March 15. Tickets may be purchased by visiting pearltheatre.org or calling (212) 563-9261.

The Pain of a Folded Life

Rajiv Joseph is perhaps best-known as the author of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which gave the late Robin Williams his only Broadway role. Now an enterprising troupe is staging another Joseph play, Animals Out of Paper, with resources that make the description “shoestring” seem lavish. But the actors, under Merri Milwe’s precise and lovely direction, do justice to a fascinating script. 

The three characters in Joseph’s 2008 drama are all practitioners of origami, the ancient Japanese art of folding paper into objects, mostly animals. The play opens on a reclusive young woman, Ilana (Nairoby Otero), who is an acknowledged American master of the art. As her sudden visitor, Andy (David Beck), reminds her, she has written “the number 2 best-selling origami book in the country,” a collection of essays about folding.

Andy is treasurer of American Origami, a professional society, and his impromptu drop-in is ostensibly to collect dues. Ilana admits him reluctantly, and in spite of her irritation and rudeness, Andy clearly has a liking for Ilana. In fact, he has admired her at a distance at A.O. gatherings, and has even spoken to her, although she doesn’t remember. Andy is also president of a school calculus club where he teaches, and he keeps a list of things to be thankful for in a worn diary. If all that spells “nerd,” it’s true, but Beck manages to combine bashful gaucherie and yearning and self-knowledge without ever seeming weak, effeminate, or just foolish. It’s a beautifully modulated performance.

Beyond his desire to see Ilana, Andy has another motive for his personal call. One of his students, Suresh (Maneesh Sasikumar), is ultra-talented at origami, and Andy wants Ilana to tutor him. She declines because she never teaches. Then he shows her samples of Suresh’s work, and she decides to step outside her comfort zone. Almost immediately she has reason to regret it, because Suresh, who has just turned 18, is arrogant and oblivious to considerate behavior. (If there’s a weakness in the script, it’s that Ilana’s patience in the face of his rudeness strains credibility, and, equally, that Suresh, who carries the weight of adult responsibility in his personal life, is so deliberately offensive to her.) Suresh gets under Ilana’s skin when he cleans up her apartment—she typically has sheets and balls of paper strewn around the floor. It is, however, her typical working atmosphere. Sasikumar, by the way, dances to rap as he cleans up the space, and his movement is one of the offbeat joys of the play.

Joseph is writing about the dangers of being stamped too strongly by one’s past, and the need to welcome new experiences. His view is given eloquent voice by Ilana in a speech in Act II that connects origami to his theme: “Look at this paper. It has no memory, it’s just flat. But fold it, even once, and suddenly it remembers something. And then with each fold, another memory, another experience and they build up to make something complicated. The paper must forget that it was ever flat, ever a simple square. It probably can’t remember it’s still in one piece. … It’s all twisted into something so far from what it used to be.”

The characters in Animals Out of Paper are all marked by their history. Suresh’s mother has recently been killed in a car accident, and he’s trying to be parent to his family, including his father. When Andy takes Ilana out on a date (a scene that’s delicately staged and played), he becomes embarrassed that she knows everything about him—all his secrets were in his diary, including the women who broke his heart. He must woo her without the privacy that anyone else might have. He’s breaking ground where few have had to go before.

It’s at the dinner that Ilana reveals she has an invitation to an origami conference in Nagasaki, and that she intends to take Suresh, her student, rather than Andy. Beck shows Andy’s hurt and manfulness as he tries to recover from his disappointment, but the quiet tragedy of Animals Out of Paper is that, like the folds that cannot be erased in origami, the creases in one’s past prove just as complicated and indelible on the human soul.

Rajiv Joseph's Animals Out of Paper is performed at the McAlpin Hall at the West Park Church (165 W. 86th St.at Amsterdam Avenue). Performances are Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m, and Sundays at 5 p.m. Tickets are $18 for all performances and may be purchased online at SmarTix.com or by calling (212) 868-4444.