Down on the Farm

Scott Pask's perfectly rendered farmhouse kitchen in Pig Farm transports us smack into the center of the anguished world of pig farming, where Tom (a believably burly John Ellison Conlee) struggles to raise his massive herd with G-men from the Environmental Protection Agency breathing down his neck. Though Tom's herd of pigs produces more waste than he can manage, he is forbidden from disposing of it the only way he knows how—by dumping it in the river. From the outset, the plot seems promising: privately owned farms, whose organic goods are so in vogue at the moment, are pitted against a government bureaucracy charged with keeping the environment clean. But Pig Farm fails to respect its central characters enough to live up to its potential. The play seems to want us well-fed city folk to laugh at these people, not with them, as they hoot and holler, knee-deep in their own mess.

Adding to the supposed hilarity, the dialogue sounds like the lyrics a drunken nanny would sing or silly rhymes Dr. Seuss might pen. Tom's just dying to make the government happy so it will lay off him for a while, but he can't get a moment's rest because his wife, Tina (Katie Finneran), wants to make a baby. Between them, bits of dialogue repeat and repeat, again cluing us in to the sameness of life on the farm.

Onomatopoeia and alliteration abound: most often, the sibilant "s" (screeching, squirling, snurfling) is punctuated by the hard phonetic stops of "t's": Tina, Teddy, Tom, and Tim. If the actors hadn't been directed to play each scene for laughs, perhaps the rhythms and inflections might have acquired a Pinteresque simplicity, but as is, they sound like staged folksiness.

Tim, the juvenile delinquent free on a work release and in the couple's care, has been entrusted to tally the pigs and is just dying to be taken seriously. When he and Tina get frisky after another of Tom's drunken rages, Tim is sure that he's a man and that whatever he feels for Tina must be love. Tim wants to escape with Tina to the open road, a place as romantic and unreal as Shangri-la, but Tina, weary and still in love with her basically good husband, knows better. Tim is a good boy, she says maternally, though not enough of a man to replace the one she's already got.

The farmhouse is an anxious place, and the characters are frenzied much of the time, often delivering lines at a rapid, spitfire pace and at full scream. Finneran often strains uncomfortably, her voice ill at ease with yelling. Logan Marshall-Green, the poorly cast Tim, is not only much too physically mature to play a nearly 18-year-old delinquent but sacrifices any kind of pathos his character might express for cheap laughs.

The only one who can totally get away with his quirkier-than-real-life antics is Denis O'Hare, who plays the wiseass EPA agent, Teddy. Full of odd inflections and a wonderfully overdrawn tendency to flash his gun, Teddy is the smarmy G-man who makes Tom play nice. With a scheme or three up his sleeve, Teddy is the bad face of a presumably right-minded agency, and he raises the show's entertainment value immensely.

That said, one actor cannot keep an entire production afloat; although the players are mostly able, playwright Greg Kotis, who scored big with Urinetown, doesn't work hard enough to make us invest in them. Pig Farm ends up being the kind of play you write if you don't actually know any farmers; their struggles to bring food to the none-too-thankful tables of America can be played for cheap laughs because they are so far outside our sphere of empathy. The production is billed as a dark comedy, but most of the time it ends up being slapstick.

Mad Monarch

The peerless Alvin Epstein leads a colorful cast in the Actors' Shakespeare Project's King Lear, originally co-produced with the Boston University School of Theater. Lear is a role, like The Tempest's Prospero and Endgame's Hamm, that rewards a mature actor's years of experience and practice. Epstein brings to the role more experience than most and dazzles with a tour de force performance. His Lear is whimsical and cocky, small in stature but unflinchingly charismatic. When he goes mad, he is shaken to the bone, and his withered body is no less a victim than his mind. Epstein's voice contains both Lear's regal baritone and his shrill, foolish falsetto, not to mention all the angry, confused, and betrayed tones in between.

When we think of Lear, we think of the heath because it is there that the fragile, old man Lear has become loses himself completely, with the storm's howling wind a representation from nature of his ravaged mind. The heath is a barren, cold place—as much a mental space as a physical one—where we must confront hubris, folly, and the consequences they produce.

The stage at the Annex at La MaMa ETC, a cavernous, barn-like space, is covered with shredded rubber that, from any seat in the house, looks like wood chips or compost from a forest floor. Walking on this textured material keeps the actors from being completely grounded; they wobble or tilt and seem to strain to find their footing. It's a brilliant touch that adds to the play's emotional landscape.

A simple area rug and several chairs represent the king's palace in the first scene. Although the action at the play's beginning is all pomp and circumstance as Lear haughtily divides his kingdom among his three daughters, the bare, rough set design suggests that the mental decay we are about to witness has already, to some extent, begun. Perhaps this devolution into madness, this return to nature, has been encroaching for some time.

Chandeliers—the set's small touch of civility—hang from the ceiling, as do large tin basins that are pierced through with taut cable wires. When they are bowed or plucked, the reverberations from these wire-basin contraptions fill the hollow space with deep, eerie groaning. Bill Barclay's sound and music design are first rate; the reverberations are accented with large gongs and drums whose echoes mix and meld into a cacophonous din as jarring as anything in Lear's own mind. Though the sounds often obscure the actors' lines, making it difficult to catch every word, they also fill the space, and us, with the sense of doom that this unstoppable march toward death should evoke.

The play is performed in the round—we are Lear's court—and certain actors play to and with the audience when appropriate. Benjamin Evett is a lusty Edmund, a character too modern to be all bad. His schemes for land and title mix the cunning of the biblical Jacob, the prototypical second son, with the bravado of a Wall Street power broker. And he's a delight to watch all the way.

Ken Cheeseman as the Fool provides the evening's other standout performance. His lanky, beanpole body doubles and sways with every word; visually he's the buffoon he should be, though his words are as straight and true as any dagger. Dressing him in a baseball cap that simply says "fool" may have been a bit over the top, but Cheeseman uses this and all his props for every inch they're worth.

Michael Fordan Walker (Cornwall) and Gabriel Levy (France) were the only real sore spots in the cast. Both seemed tongue-tied at times and too eager to stress the rhyme scheme in certain verses. But they are minor enough characters that their lapses can be forgiven.

This season, like most, is chock-full of Shakespeare, but Epstein's performance and Patrick Swanson's vigorous staging set this production apart. Toward the end of the first act, the Fool asks Lear, "Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?" Epstein adds depth to the seemingly simply reply, "Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing," when he pauses before the final "nothing," as if he were about to give a different answer and thinks better of it at the last minute. His last "nothing" suggests that here, as in the production as a whole, there is a whole lot of something packed into every word.

Self Quest

Vivid dreamscapes, often disturbing and completely mesmerizing, have been faithfully rendered in Anthony Cerrato's fantasia Under the Sign of the Hourglass…, which was inspired by the fantastical short stories of Bruno Schulz. The Polish writer's story collection Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass deals largely with a young man's desire to know himself through memories of his childhood and the frustration that that quest ultimately brings. Searching is a key element of Schulz's work (he published two story collections during the 30's) and of this piece: Joseph, the young man, searches frantically for "the Book," an ur-text of sorts that seems to contain all that he wants to know. The Book is illusive, to be sure, but is also at once powerful and fragile.

In one late scene, Joseph tears apart a book in rage, perhaps because he now understands that "the Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older," as his frenzied father, Jacob, has warned him. Joseph's search is one that may well last until he is dead; the penultimate scene, a dark exchange between Joseph and his father, involves a ghoulish revelation that seems to evoke both life and death.

Every visual stimulus in this surrealist fantasia—from petticoats and lamps to drapes and book spines—works together to present a harmonious palette of oatmeal, gray, and birch brown that is accented with a shocking, violent red. Before our minds grasp the general narrative, our eyes recognize the hauntingly resonant color schemes that separate this place from our waking life. Annie Simon (costumes), Owen Hughes (lights), and Cerrato (set design) display a triumph of theatrical collaboration that communicates the texture of Joseph's psychological journey (or descent).

The ensemble cast deserves just as much praise. As a group, the members make a deceptively physical performance seem easy; they tumble and fall gracefully like acrobats. In several scenes, the cast performs in a kind of precise unison, turning their sounds and movements into an agitated soundscape. The performance begins with all seven characters draped on top of one another on a long bench. Slowly they awaken and regard us and one another, only to collapse back into sleep or unconsciousness at several points during the evening.

Rob Skolits (the mad, frenzied father) and Stephanie Taylor (the coolly distant mother) evoke the kind of unspoken gender warfare that seems to bubble beneath the surface of Schulz's work. Paulina and Polda (Cady Zuckerman and Sarah Politis), along with the family's tyrannical maid, Adela (the arresting Vivian Smith), are all coquettish, sensual women who tease the men without having to say a word. Mother's red hair and Adela's red lips (not to mention her lusciously full cleavage) do all the talking. Actual sex is a non-subject, but the agony of desire is present in nearly every scene. John Okabayashi rounds out the fine cast as several smaller characters, including the gentleman caller Schloma, who crumples Joseph's drawings without warning.

Words like "fantasia" and "surrealist" might repel the casual theatergoer, but they shouldn't. Even for those not familiar with Schulz's fiction (which I wasn't, until I had to write this review), it is possible to empathize with the distress that searching fruitlessly brings and the innate desire to know where we've come from, despite the show's lack of a clear narrative. The desire to know gives Joseph forward momentum, although he is taunted, teased, and discouraged at every turn.

Seeing this show, I was reminded of another play, Spring Awakening, that is beginning its run at the Atlantic Theater and that I saw only a few days before. Like Hourglass, that play also reimagines texts conceived at another time and supposedly for another historical moment. Frank Wedekind, writing during the turn of the 20th century, exposes the consequences of societal sexual repression. Director Michael Mayer and songwriter Duncan Sheik dramatize the angst that the show's young protagonists feel, with pop-rock ballads and American Idol vocals.

In both cases, we see bits of ourselves onstage, and, because of the excellent stagecraft, we can sometimes bridge the gap between "us" and "them" that both the fourth wall and time have created.

I Spy

"Avant-garde" and "risky" were the adjectives used in the press packet to describe The Terrorist, probably because "underdeveloped" and "ill-conceived," while more accurate, would come off as harsh. The Terrorist, an attempt at a noirish thriller and farce that is neither, is a tell-don't-show diatribe about the nation's state of affairs. Frank (George Tynan Crowley), a mealy-mouthed basement tinkerer, is developing some sort of thing—it looks like old wires and duct tape in a wooden box—that will help with the United States's anti-terrorist mission. Only problem is—as we're told about 700 times—it's kind of hard to tell the difference between terrorism and anti-terrorism when you start to try.

Frank's female companion (I'll call her that, because there isn't enough backstory or story-story to call her much else), Claire (Miriam Tabb), is a whimpering, doe-eyed young thing who communicates in pouts and shrill screams. Tabb isn't given much to work with, but manages to squeeze a few meager chuckles out of the role just by being strange.

Claire seems to want Frank in part because of the excitement he brings to her humdrum life. Or at least that's what she says. I doubted her, though, because Frank, with his rumpled clothes and hair, his loner's paranoia, and his inability to return a simple hug, seems to have the appeal of a street bum.

Frank's paranoia (and Claire's thrills) is derived from the attention of a pathetically unbelievable government agent, Paula, flatly played by Alice Connorton. Paula is the Big Brother in the bushes watching Frank's and Claire's every move. Connorton's best attempts at farcical menace hardly raised an eyebrow, and I found myself thinking that if her real-world counterparts at the Department of Homeland Security or, say, Guantánamo Bay were as ineffectual as this, we'd all be in a lot less trouble.

Perhaps Paula has dispatched Roger to watch Claire, his employee, or perhaps she hasn't. Who needs a story line, it's avant-garde! All we know for certain is that Roger, who looks like a kindly old gentleman, is keeping an eye on Claire's every move.

Director David Willinger seems to have been very excited by the cabaret setup of the Laurie Beechman Theater and has set a considerable bit of the action among the tables and chairs. We see Paula stalk Claire and Frank watch Paula. Roger watches Claire while Paula watches him. Because the world this play seems to conjure has no real through line to the one waiting for us outside, I was less than eager to be such an unwilling participant so much of the time.

Rather, I would have liked to sit in the dark and continue to ask my questions: If The Terrorist is a farce, why wasn't I laughing more? And if it's a farce that is meant to illuminate our present situation, why are its situations so unrecognizable? And while we're at it: why are three of the four actors so old? And why is the fourth black? Are these the results of Off-Off-Broadway's available resources, or were the casting decisions meant to communicate something about the nearly late, almost great baby boomer generation?

My questions remain unanswered. The good news is that for every bad play, there is the promise of a good one on the horizon. Sure, the Unofficial Yale Cabaret is finishing up its first season with a lemon, but there's always next time.

Things Unsaid

Samuel Adamson's highly regarded first play, Clocks and Whistles, has been given its American debut thanks to the Origin Theater Company's trans-Atlantic mission statement. It concerns a group of friends—twenty-somethings in late-90's London—who need and want each other, partly because of the sense of ownership that affection breeds. It's also about how their inability to directly communicate emotion is their most enduring quality. As frustrating as this muted, muddled kind of existence might be to watch, we understand that the language of half-truths, things unsaid, and innuendo is precisely the point: this play is as far from American melodrama as one can get.

Each cast member performs admirably in a tale of ambiguous sexual identity and the obsessive power of affection. As the bisexual lothario poet, Trevor (Jerzy Gwiazdowski) is particularly magnetic; Meghan Andrews—quite skilled at adopting Anne's highbred Sloane accent—is also in good form. Special kudos to Zachary Williamson for filling set changes with a totally engrossing soundtrack. Talya Klein's direction acknowledges the play's subtext and manages to use the Cashama theater's tiny space efficiently. And yet it's been hard for me to uncover why I found the whole thing so completely tedious.

I think I've hit upon the reason: this is a play completely dependent upon a culture that I know only through its (completely unreliable) stereotypes. For instance, the Brits are famously known for their stiff upper lips, their discomfort with all things blatantly emotional or overblown.

And it was through the haze of this stereotype that I understood poor Henry's plight: he is a gay man stumbling halfheartedly out of the closet and is completely infatuated with Trevor, but also dependent upon his heterosexual friend Anne. When Anne appropriates Trevor for the sexual commodity he is, Henry (David Mawhinney) is left feeling maligned and ignored. He reaches for both of them, but cannot remake a relationship with Trevor until his relationship with Anne dissolves and Trevor acknowledges the risky life he leads. The climax—Trevor's acknowledgement that he cannot donate blood because he is a health risk—gives the play its raison d'être; all this love and lust comes with a heavy price.

I didn't actually recognize, or empathize with, Henry's longing because I knew it first and foremost as an expression of British reserve. Perhaps it's that investigation of another culture—even one as easily accessible as contemporary London—and the way its members regard each other that keeps Clocks and Whistles from satisfying a gut feeling for something completely knowable.

Whether this reaction of mine has been aided and abetted by the play's age—it premiered in 1996 in London—cannot really be known. What I do know is that I regarded it almost anthropologically, like a case study of people I would never actually hang out with. And at two hours and 15 minutes, this case study goes on a little long.

Clocks and whistles are alarms of sorts: end of the work shift, watch out for that train, good morning, sunshine! They alert us to time's passing and to specific moments that we have deemed important. The proliferation of AIDS plays—or even plays that generally address the culture of sexually transmitted diseases—acts as an alarm of sorts. We are reminded that certain lifestyles, certain choices even, are risky and may carry irreversible consequences. For this reason, Clocks and Whistles was, and is, an important piece to see. It's too bad that watching this production has to be such a ho-hum affair.

Space to Grieve

Lee Blessing's Two Rooms explores grief, not by dramatizing volatile moments but through the mundane, repetitive act of waiting. Sure, there are emotional climaxes in this play, but they feel somehow muted by all the waiting that Lainie (Katie Tuminelly) has to do. She is waiting for news of her husband, Michael (Derek Lucci), an American University in Beirut professor who was taken hostage by Lebanese vigilantes during what was to be his last semester abroad. Lainie empties Michael's office in an attempt to exist in a space like the one he might be in. She sits on a small rug on the bare floor talking to her memory of him. Blessing's stage directions collapse the two rooms—Michael's office and his actual holding cell—into one; when Lainie and Michael share the stage, it is as if their separate rooms have been layered on top of one another, and the space between them seems less so.

Lighting designer Bryan Keller handles the stage and staging well; subtle tonal shifts throughout the play evoke the spaces clearly. These are intimate scenes of longing and grief as Lainie and Michael speak letters to each other and gather strength from their imagined conversations.

Lainie's grief is valuable, though, to those who can either profit from it or be damaged by it. The media cannot help but seek out and publish Lainie's dramatic response to her husband's absence, while the State Department cannot allow a desperate women to jeopardize its covert operations or intelligence gathering abroad.

Lainie must negotiate the largely self-serving interests of both the State Department (represented by Ellen, the woman assigned to her case) and the media (exemplified by Walker, a zealous reporter). Though some of his exits were a bit abrupt, Jacob Knoll's Walker is generally engaging and open, someone we immediately want to trust and listen to. Someone we don't mind Lainie listening to as well.

Perhaps director Kara-Lynn Vaeni's decision to make Ellen (Emily Zeck) insensitive was second nature: who wants to sympathize with a government agent? But the production would benefit from a more nuanced portrait of this character, perhaps by an actor who can better juggle Ellen's obligation within the governmental bureaucracy and her exhaustion in the face of that obligation. As it is, Zeck comes off like a finicky schoolmarm better suited for a second-grade classroom than a midlevel State Department position.

The predictable struggles for Lainie's trust by Ellen and Walker are mediated, most of all, by Lucci's voice. It's a strange thing when one actor's voice—the medium through which he must present this character—becomes itself a powerful character in a production. When the play starts, we see Michael sitting alone in the bare room, talking to Lainie about everything and anything. Lucci's voice is somnolent and soothing, a perfect vehicle for Blessing's surprisingly poetic metaphors. I found myself wanting to get back to that cell, wanting to hear more from the man who talks his way through such a harrowing experience.

This is Checkpoint Productions's first show, and it's competently produced, thanks in part to the preponderance of Yale School of Drama alumni. Once they get a few more shows under their belts, this may be a group to keep watching.

The Play's the Thing

Bethany Larsen's Maybe He's Just Not That Into You and Nick Moore and Susannah Pearse's Decisive highlight a group of six, 10-minute plays produced by the Milk Can Theater Company and collectively called The Hamlet Plays. Half of the short pieces are set in the modern day and are about actors talking about acting, while the other three present conversations among characters from the play. In Larsen's chick-lit toned piece, Ophelia laments the demise of her relationship with Hamlet to Ibsen's Nora and Oscar Wilde's Salome. Both women are headstrong and self-confident, and they console Ophelia as though they were the supporting cast on Sex and the City. Tongue placed firmly in cheek, Larsen writes self-conscious characters who know they are characters and who can talk about life after the final curtain call. Nora is collecting alimony from Torvald, and Salome is a hit at her belly-dancing class. These women are engaged in a purely fictional process of feminist-lite literary revision, remaking the story into "her-story." Thanks to Larsen's deft use of modern pop-psych dialogue, it's a fun process to watch.

Three members of the Post-Hamlet Support Group welcome Alex, a surfer dude with treacherous motives, in Decisive, a crowd-pleasing musical that plays the Prince of Denmark's tragic flaw for comic effect. Rachel (Jennifer Stackpole), Joe (Reza Jacobs), and Richard (Jared Dembowski) are actors who cannot cope with life after Hamlet. Each has acted the lead role (Rachel was in an all-female version of the play) and meet to reminisce about the good old days. When Alex arrives, they regard him snobbily but come around after he presses them to relive the moment they found out they were cast.

We soon learn that Alex hasn't actually played Hamlet but has been turned down for the parts that were offered to Joe and Rachel; his father was denied Richard's role in London in 1964. After his father's ghost visits him, Hamlet is famously indecisive. His inability to take action against his Uncle Claudius is fueled by his thoroughly modern self-obsession and soliloquizing introspection. And so Alex's decision to seek out and ultimately destroy these former competitors, which results from his decisive and direct nature, gets at why he probably wasn't right for the part in the first place.

Larsen, Moore, and Pearse make good theater because they mine the textual and thematic treasure chest of the Bard's best-loved play. They successfully communicate interesting stories in a short amount of time by giving us characters whose sense of self is either fueled by or in comical opposition to those selves we find in Shakespeare's text.

The Lamp's Lit attempts to show us scenes that Shakespeare didn't, and while adding to what most people regard as a pretty decent play is a bit presumptuous, it does manage to present a sympathetic portrait of the traitorous queen. Roya Shanks gives one of the show's best performances as Gertrude, pacing about the royal chamber, awaiting her son's return. TJ Morton is a disappointingly stiff Ghost who elicits his wife's help to kill Claudius; casting an actor who at least looks like a grave, wronged king might have helped.

Cheryl Davis's dialogue is at its best when Gertrude has to respond to both the Ghost and her impatient husband, Claudius, who wants her to come back to bed. The piece is ultimately not as finely conceived as Maybe or Decisive, but it does go out on an intellectually stimulating limb.

I found the other three pieces—The Player King Musical, Baloney, and The Match—boring and hardly worth mentioning. None of them offered characters worth caring about, which is saying a lot when their approximate run time is only 10 minutes each. The Player King Musical is a clichéd meet-and-mate, and Baloney is a poor attempt at philosophy, choked by obvious metaphors. Better actors could squeeze some value out of The Match, about longtime friends competing for the lead role as you know who, but as is, it's flatfooted and melodramatic.

None of the plays were made better by Michel Ostaszewki's distractingly colorful backdrop. The versatile scaffolding worked well and should have been paired with a simple black background that would have made the small space seem less cluttered.

At the end of the show, audiences were encouraged to vote for The Hamlet Plays in the Innovative Theater Awards's online balloting. In this case, it's too bad we can't select the show's individual plays for these Off-Off-Broadway awards. When the pieces are grouped together this way, the bad ones distract too much from the good.

Dirty Work

The wounded characters in Elizabeth Meriwether's finely crafted The Mistakes Madeline Made reveal themselves to each other and to us via startling emotional juxtapositions; quietly disquieting confessions of pathos and loss are scattered among their oddball interactions. Every element of this production—from the actors' empathetic performances to Evan Cabnet's nuanced, physical direction and Lauren Halpern's wonderfully realized set—coheres into a successful whole. Edna (Laura Heisler), a recent college graduate reeling internally from the loss of her older brother, has just landed the worst job imaginable: she is the assistant to an anal, preternaturally cheerful office manager named Beth (Colleen Werthmann). The office that Beth oversees—a space that approaches a Martha Stewart-level of organization and polish—exists solely to handle the affairs of an über-rich family whom we never meet, but whose specter of uptight, forced WASPish happiness haunts every moment of the play. Madeline opens as Beth assigns Edna the thrilling task of finding George, one of the family's sons, a second pair of New Balance sneakers because he enjoys wearing the pair he already owns so much.

Werthmann—flexing some of the same muscles she developed as the naïvely pleasant mother of the reincarnated title character in Christopher Durang's Mrs. Witherspoon last winter—has a masterful sense of comic timing. Her Beth is a personality we recognize instantly, perhaps from a childhood ballet class or a community service bake sale, a person so intent on happiness at all costs that we watch and wait for her veneer to crack under pressure.

Wilson (Ian Brennan), meanwhile, is the only office assistant under Beth's command who enjoys a small amount of autonomy. A socially awkward graduate student whose dissertation is in a permanent state of incompletion, he communicates in fits and starts, words rushing from his mouth and then jerking to a halt, like the linguistic equivalent of a turbocharged car constantly forced to stop at red lights. He has so much to say, and we see him finally finding someone to say it all to. Brennan accentuates Wilson's speech with singularly impressive sounds—sounds that imitate the copy machine and that represent his emotional responses to situations ("dong!" means something like happiness)—so that his talking becomes a whimsically unique cacophony.

Soon Edna begins to steal Handi Wipes from the new shipment that has just arrived and enlists Wilson to hide them around the office; their scheming escalates into "The Handi Wipe Caper," an act of sabotage that knocks Beth and her controlled environment off-kilter just long enough to allow a dramatically redemptive moment for all three of them.

We have come to recognize this kind of small-minded, corporate banality before, as in the comic strip Dilbert and the TV series The Office. It exists here not for its own comedic sake—though the writing and performances are all strong enough that it could—but as a counterbalance to the emotional detritus that Edna can no longer mask.

Heisler offers a commandingly downtrodden performance that not only holds its own against Brennan's emotional exuberance but also presents her character's depression as something that is at once childishly antagonistic and spiritually desolate. In a particularly haunting exchange, Edna meets up with yet another date (Brian Henderson hams it up as three iterations of the same would-be writer—Drake, Jake, and Blake—that Edna pursues) and admits, "You remind me of my dead brother. I'm trying to [expletive] him back to life."

As Beth fights to keep the office clean and tidy, Edna fights, equally hard, to pollute it with her bodily stench and her rebellious nature. Unable to stop reliving the week that she and her brother Buddy (Thomas Sadoski nicely portrays the war reporter as slovenly, erratic, and shell shocked) spent together after he returned from Iraq, she succumbs to his ablutophobia (fear of bathing) and confronts people with the force of her stench.

Halpern externalizes this relationship by placing a white ceramic bathtub for Buddy to lounge in center stage; only Edna can see the tub, a kind of gleaming sarcophagus, and the human remains it holds. Though we sense that Edna is not doomed, her inability to bathe is as much a response to Buddy's death as it is a protest against the entrapments of her office environment.

Last December, an issue of New York magazine identified 27 bright young things who might "justly be famous by the year 2010." With offerings like The Mistakes Madeline Made, Elizabeth Meriwether, who was listed among the 27, is well on her way.

Superhero Send-Up

Technical glitches and lagging scene changes didn't completely stop the cast of Adventures of Caveman Robot from bringing the fun to Brooklyn's Brick Theater. This production—a live-action, video-projection mash-up based on a comic book series created by Jason Robert Bell and Shoshanna Weinberger—is at once an homage to the genre that birthed Superman and the Green Lantern and a send-up of some of its more conspicuous narrative conventions. Oh, and did I mention it's a musical?

A rampant spree of "glorious larceny" has plagued the city of Monumenta (a geographical stepchild of Sin City and Metropolis), and delightfully bonkers villains have made the streets unsafe. The superhero who has managed to keep the evil in check is a lovable "metal Neanderthal" of questionable intelligence called Caveman Robot.

Victims of their own single-minded psychosis and hubris, the villains are often the ones who steal the show. And this one has plenty of gems, including the Colonel, a Nazi commander who bitterly inhabits the body of a penguin (puppetry by Robin Reed); Ape Lincoln (Ian W. Hill), a speechifying transplant from a Planet-of-the-Apes-style alternative universe; his screeching mate and fly girl Monkey Todd Lincoln; and Mr. Tense, a guy wound up so tight that bullets bounce off his body.

Besides the clunking robot, some of the heroes they match up against are the tea-drinking faux-Brit Professor Tuttlewell and his bleeding-heart, genius niece Megan, and the requisite Everyman, Loser Pete, whose maturation from do-nothing to Caveman Robot sidekick loosely frames the oftentimes nonsensical plot.

None of the cast members (most of whom admirably portray several characters) seem to be trained singers, and their off-key renditions of Debby Schwartz and Jeff Lewonczyk's tongue-in-cheek songs are endearing in their earnestness. Hope Cantrelli as Megan Tuttlewell performs a second-act showstopper with her grrrl-power rock ballad "His Robot Queen." And Ian W. Hill manages to rap a simian-themed version of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address that helps make this one of the highest-lowbrow or lowest-highbrow shows I've seen in a while.

It's kind of a shame that a production jam-packed with this much silly appeal relies so heavily on poorly integrated, prerecorded video projections to help convey the back story. I recognize the impulse to create a theatrical equivalent to the action movie's spinning newspaper; its bold headlines fill the screen while an ominous voice-over establishes context and propels new dangers into our superhero's path.

But the constant shifts between what should be consistently high-energy antics and the more sterile onscreen news bulletins and monologues make the production lag. Ditto for Mater Vox, the sentient computer program that responds to the Tuttlewells' every voice command. If I've suspended my disbelief enough to watch a guy stomp around in a silver cardboard box—the peerless Bell gives a physically herculean performance as the title character—there is no need to disrupt the magic.

As it stands now, Adventures of Caveman Robot is a flawed but passionate show, one that audiences with a slightly higher tolerance for shows that aren't Broadway-slick will walk away from laughing.

At the Local Bodega

The fourth edition of Seven.11 Convenience Theatre—a grouping of seven "brown"-centric, 11-minute plays that all take place in a convenience store—is a mixed bag with a few flatfooted non-dramas amid the generally well-executed short pieces. Nearly all of the Kraine Theater's 99 seats were full, and the production—committed to producing shows by and about the South Asian, Asian-American, and, to a lesser extent, general minority experience—has just been extended due to popular demand. Perhaps it's not that theater is dead, just that audiences—even "typical" theatergoing audiences—are tried of the same old same old.

When Inspector Shankar Ladoo Prasad (Sean T. Krishnan), the magnifying glass-wielding detective in "Who Killed Mr. Naidu First?"—a musical whodunit featuring clever lyrics, and the evening's best production—burst into a lyrical rendition of a Bollywood tune, the audience roared with laughter and clapped with recognition. The Clue-inspired murder mystery pits local customers with names as evocative as Mrs. LotuslLeaf (Alicia Ying), Ms. Lychee Martini (Meetu Chilana), and Professor Pappadum (John Wu) against the detective, all of them wondering who did in the happy convenience-store owner (Andrew Guilarte).

As good as "Mr. Naidu" is, Desipina & Company, with its seemingly strong financial and audience support base, should be a bit more exacting in its search for enticing short plays. Regrettably, "Jaffna Mangoes" and "Homecoming," the evening's worst pieces, begin the show. In the former, the casting barely rises above the kind of stereotyping this production should be working to undermine, and the story, if it can be called that, lives up to its slice-of-life characterization so well that nothing interesting actually happens. Once Bill Caleo's "racist, angry white man" leaves the store, the three brown men (Krishnan, Guilarte, and Jerold E. Solomon) can go back to their kindhearted joking. The play should portray the relationships, struggles, and identities of these men without pitting them against a two-dimensional, motivation-less white scapegoat.

In "Homecoming," Tessa (Chilana), a shrill and utterly annoying young woman, happens upon an old flame working in a local convenience store. Her emotional outburst materializes out of thin air before we're finally told that she's coping with her father's recent death. Dean (Caleo) doesn't share her desire to rehash the past, or her lexicon of years-old tidbits. As we watch them emotionally wound each other in an all too common display of the private in a public space, we wonder why the convenience store conveniently stays customer-free for the duration of their fight. Of all the short plays, "Homecoming" fails to make the production's unifying location a believable setting for its action.

"Undone" is an underdeveloped tween drama about Fizza (Chilana), who is planning to run away from her parents' strict house and an enforced marriage. The plot twist of sorts—a past relationship between Fizza's buddy Jill (Alicia Ying) and the store clerk (John Wu)—almost works, but it ultimately gets drowned by a girl-power rant that should be more subtly handled. Similarly, the production's other musical, "Bombay Screams," showcases excellent singing by Guilarte, Caleo, Chilana, and Solomon, but the lyrics don't rise above Rent-style sermonizing about Gen X multi-culti angst. Both shows have potential but need further development to sharpen the characters and keep them from thematically predictable places.

The production's strongest shows, by far, are "Who Killed Mr. Naidu First?," "The Old New World," and "Kung Fu Hustle." Dude (Wu) and his advice-spitting wingman Bro (Solomon) steal the show in the jocular "Kung Fu Hustle," about a shy geek attempting to seduce a new girl with a black belt in karate (Ying) by lying about his martial arts skills. It's a recognizable and very pleasing get-the-girl story that, aside from being snappily written and well acted, lets the characters exist in terms that contain, but are ultimately larger than, their racial identities.

"The Old New World" is a futuristic look at the race to annex the unoccupied United States of America by the world's three superpowers: China, India, and Brazil. The plot, which ends with a satisfying twist that I won't spoil here, lightheartedly imagines the implications of a worldwide shift in economic and political power. The story's use of the convenience store, the site of a futuristic expedition, is imaginative, giving the actors material that seems to put their energy to good use.

Despite the production's artistic unevenness, Desipina & Company seems to understand something many larger, mainstream companies have yet to figure out: minority audiences are starving for theater that attempts to dramatize their stories. Such theater uses those audiences' cultural markers as points of reference and also casts a veritable rainbow of actors who act outside of the narrow sliver of roles we are used to seeing them play.

With its resounding level of support, Seven.11 Convenience Theatre will probably be around for several more years. In that time, it should not only continue promoting the dramatization of untold brown stories but also use its newly acquired cultural cachet to promote the very best in theater, regardless of color.

Reach for the Moon

Though the story line seems like the kind of thing you would find in an after-school special, good casting and a wonderful cast rapport save the Vital Theater Company's Full Bloom from being a too maudlin production. When I saw the show, the cast seemed to have gelled wonderfully. Confident in their characters and extremely comfortable with each other, they existed together for the sole purpose of creating onstage that moment in a woman's life when, because she is no longer just a girl, her physicality becomes the most important part of her self. Phoebe (Jennifer Blood), the blooming protagonist, is a 15-year-old student suddenly experiencing the mixed messages and implications of her newly developed body. A highly literate, precocious young character, Phoebe reminds us of other Great Young New Yorkers, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Oskar Schell or Kay Thompson's Eloise. But unlike those children, Phoebe has one foot in the world of adults, and she finds that boy-girl friendships are tinged with sexual undertones while parents are almost always the enemy.

The play is influenced, or perhaps haunted, by J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and references to it abound. In the novel, Holden Caulfield's younger sister is named Phoebe, and we wonder if our protagonist—who is named after that character—is inheriting the emotional distress that the book's minor character may have to one day face. The Great Young New Yorker par excellence, Holden holds sway over this play's Phoebe because she is concerned that he may never leave the sanitarium. Holden's inability to decode the language of the adult world prefigures Phoebe's, and we watch this talented child retreat inward because of the sudden emphasis on her physical attributes.

The Greek mythological moon goddess Artemis—Phoebe is one of her lesser known names—serves as Phoebe's other namesake and a continual point of reference. Sitting on her fire escape and watching the moon is the closest thing to an escape that Phoebe can muster. Out there she is free from the judgment and speculation that her newly developed body elicits. Out there she meets Jesse, a new kid from Minneapolis who seems to want to be her only genuine friend.

Jesse, affectionately played by William Jackson Harper, is just as much an outsider as Phoebe is, and the two form an attachment that proves important for the young girl. Phoebe has attracted the attention of the cutest boy in school, but she can talk about birds and books with Jesse. Ironically, in a play about the hardships young women face, we'd be hard pressed to find better male characters than the ones we watch here.

Jim (an endearing Jason Furlani), Phoebe's longtime next-door neighbor, is a fireman and father figure with a heart of gold. Full Bloom does not shy away from the awkwardness that Phoebe's sexual development causes between her and Jim; at one point she is mistaken for his girlfriend, and he must learn to redraw the physical and emotional boundaries between them. We're not sure what will become of these relationships, but we feel that Phoebe is safe with Jesse and Jim, safe from some of the pressures she may not be able to control on her own.

But Phoebe isn't the only one struggling here: her mother (believably played by Jennifer Dorr White) is reeling from the disintegration of her 20-year marriage; Jim's wife Crystal (a charismatic LeeAnne Hutchison) is a not quite washed-up actress looking to recapture her youth by going under the knife. The world of womanhood—with its constant mirror checks and double checks, its clothing changes and sidelong glances—is a confusing, scary place. Though they try to give Phoebe self-assurance and hope, the older women find themselves dumped, and aging is treated like a disease.

It hardly seems fair to harp on Blood's age when part of Full Bloom's important message is the lengths to which women must go to preserve their looks. It is at times difficult to see Blood as a child, though her well-rehearsed physical awkwardness, and a high-pitched, almost squeaky voice, are testaments to her commitment to the character.

Linda Ames Key's economical staging and the cast's excellent commitment make Full Bloom a vital piece of art and a way to reach out to young girls who are about to become the Phoebes of tomorrow.

Avant-Garde O'Neill

It's quite a thing for a young, relatively unknown theater critic to be confronted with a production that so many of her betters have called great. The weight on my shoulders is to see this production as it has been seen, to understand its avant-gardism as it has been understood. And so I will try to know it through that very notion of weight, of heft and influence. The Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones is a highly theatrical deconstruction of a finely constructed self. The self, in this case, is Brutus Jones, a brute of a Negro who narrowly escapes the criminal life in America only to inflict his racial self-hatred on a group of West Indian islanders by appointing himself their master and overlord. The action begins as Jones's smarmy little No. 2, a Cockney ne'er-do-well named Smithers (Ari Fliakos), informs him that the natives are planning a revolt. Jones flees into the Great Forest—a heart of darkness if there ever was one—and, when confronted with the ghosts of sins past, devolves into a whimpering jungle primitive.

More and more often, the theater is becoming a nice, if tepid, color-blind space, where cross-cultural fusion is an unspoken exercise in political correctness rather than an elemental component of a show's message. But because this production self-consciously reveals our culture's image of the black man, race is an all too relevant matter. The Emperor Jones, written by a white Eugene O'Neill, premiered downtown in 1920 and was heralded by a black W.E.B. DuBois as a "work that must be done."

Eighty-odd years later, a white Elizabeth Le Compte directs a white, female Kate Valk as Jones. Valk is a convincing minstrel. Her high-pitched vocal undulations and coal-hued blackface are startling reminders that, from start to finish, this can still be a challenging, confrontational piece of theater. Casting Valk, Le Compte has daringly violated a fundamental Jim Crow rule by pairing a white woman with a black man; as we stare at Valk-as-Jones, the discomfort of this pairing is always with us.

Jones and Smithers are outfitted in dingy, Kabuki-esque kimonos and, without warning, perform synchronized dances, set to an 80's discothèque beat, that draw on vaudeville, minstrelsy, and stylized Noh movements. When Jones is haunted in the woods by a menacing witch doctor, Smithers, bare-chested and stomping, walks onstage like a sumo wrestler who must use the weight of himself to overcome, or at least intimidate, his opponent. It is as though the East that enchanted 19th-century America—Commodore Perry's ships arrived in Japan only nine years before the start of the Civil War—has been reappropriated to help destabilize the loaded Western dichotomy between black and white.

The stage and staging bear the weight of Artaud's "theater of cruelty" (glaring bright lights line the sides and back of the stage) and Brechtian alienation (television sets offer scratchy hints at scenery and distorted reproductions of character images) quite well. The tech crew is constantly in full view, and Valk and Fliakos speak into microphones that amplify their voices over syncopated bass notes and electro-clash noise. There is no escaping the trappings of theater; in this production it is neither a comfort nor an escape but a space that carefully dismantles the construct of the American Negro.

And yet I find myself wondering if what I have seen isn't somehow a closed system: to whom is this esoteric deconstruction aimed if not the largely white and largely upper-middle-class audiences that make up the theatergoing public? Make no mistake, this is a challenge issued out of respect, for both LeCompte's production and the weight of social and political aggravation that the theater should, and must, bear. I left the theater wondering, Where is the shifting weight in cultural authority—in both art making and art appreciation—that a work this challenging can help usher in? That is, where are the consistent representations of authentic marginalized voices onstage? And, perhaps more important, where in the crowd of theatergoing audiences are the throngs of faces that those voices represent?

I sincerely hope that this important exercise in alienation, discomfort, and even revolt has been more than just theater for theater's sake.

Predator and Prey

Terry Schreiber's stripped-down new production of Paula Vogel's 1998 Pulitzer-Prize winner, How I Learned to Drive, is a taut exercise in the dramatization of adolescent sexual curiosity and confusion. It resides in that uncomfortable space where the line between predation and complicity cannot easily be drawn. Vogel names the three ensemble players Male, Female, and Teenage Greek Chorus, and it is through that lens of classic Greek tragedy that Schreiber allows this story to unfold. It is at once Li'l Bit's cathartic coming-of-age tale and the airing of our culture's secret collective shame. Hal Tine's stark, plain set is almost a character in itself. The stage is simply a raised wooden circle, painted white, with three equidistant carved strips running the length of it. Those strips extend up at an angle onto the black back wall and become the familiar yellow and white lines of a highway. In certain scenes, twinkling lights dance underneath the strips, reminding us of the distant streetlights that dot a highway.

Visual ties to the routine of driving—from the steering-wheel-like stage to the painted back wall—are always with us. And for good reason: How I Learned to Drive communicates via extended metaphor. Mundane human actions like driving and, in one scene, fishing become the coded or even ritualized language through which complex human interactions are better understood.

"This is as much a story about star-crossed lovers as Romeo and Juliet," said Schreiber, Drive's director, in the discussion that followed the performance I saw. Our narrator and guide in this love story is Li'l Bit (Erika Sheffer), an earnest woman who evokes her troubling past for us. We begin when she is a world-weary 17-year-old and, for the most part, travel straight back to her first encounter with her Uncle Peck when she was 11.

Sheffer's forthrightness allows this journey to be introspective, even challenging, without ever turning into a ghastly horror show. In short, though she must tell us of her uncle's long-nurtured sexual attraction to her, we always feel safe because her present self oversees what we know and when. Each scene pushes further into the past, and layers of history—the stolen moments, gestures, and promises—between Li'l Bit and Uncle Peck accumulate until the picture of their doomed liaison is complete.

The artistic progeny of Lolita's Humbert Humbert, Uncle Peck (Jess Draper) is a sympathetic predator who wants to control his niece as much as he wants her to control the wheel of his '57 Chevy Spirit. A veteran, Peck nurses old wounds first with alcohol and then through secret weekly conversations with Li'l Bit. She is his therapy and his escape, the nymphet who will perhaps save him from himself.

Draper's pitch-perfect performance is eerily candescent; he captures the soft, slow movement of a man whose Southern drawl rests on the air like a patient fishing line on water. In Peck we see the father Li'l Bit has never had, the boyfriend she is too awkward to seek out, and the nurturing companion she desperately needs. It is not until she is outside the increasingly claustrophobic space of that round stage—at 18 she accepts a scholarship to college—that she understands what a violation their relationship has been.

Trey Gibbons (Male Greek Chorus), Kira Sternbach (Teenage Greek Chorus), and Samantha J. Phillips (Female Greek Chorus) round out this exceptional cast. They all work overtime as the ignorant and crude family members, the unquestioning strangers who allow pedophilia to occur under their noses.

Phillips's monologue as Aunt Mary, Peck's quietly tolerant wife, gives a much-needed voice to those who too often do nothing. During that crucial scene, we better understand Peck's multifaceted nature: yes, he is a sexual predator, but he is also a dependable townsperson and a selfless husband. Instead of speaking out against him, she waits for the day Li'l Bit will go to college, so she can simply have her husband back.

But, by the play's end, we know the damage is already done. Peck is destroyed and Li'l Bit must drive on alone, checking the ghostly figures in her rearview mirror almost as often as she does the road ahead.

Born Again

What would you do if you woke up naked and alone inside the belly of a cow? Jason Pizzarello's InsideOut—a 45-minute multimedia performance that dramatizes the answer to that question—is a whimsical take on the agony of the human condition. Artists from Beckett to the Beatles have long attempted to depict the frustrating absurdity of not knowing why we are here or where we're going, but as far as I know, none have done so like this. While InsideOut doesn't break new ground on the topics of loneliness and insecurity, it does manage to represent the same old struggles in a fairly novel way.

A young man wakes up gasping for air. We see portions of his naked, blood-doused body projected in extreme close-up on a translucent screen. The eye of the camera blinks at random, and for a few moments the man is only an eye and then a gaping mouth and then an entire face. The camera pans out finally and continues to train its eye on him from different angles; as we watch him, we too are disoriented, trying to make a coherent picture of this man and his surroundings. He is scared and seemingly alone.

And then, from nowhere, a voice answers his, and he is no longer alone. A woman, it seems, shares his predicament and calls out to him from another space. Her picture, as tightly focused as his, appears on the screen. We can see them both, huddled meekly in their spaces, though they cannot see each other. Their conversation flitters from the logical and speculative to the hysterical and hopeless. They are in no way connected to themselves or to each other except that they search for answers to questions they don't fully know.

The woman is variously crafty, playful, and vindictive; she seems at times to be unwilling to help the frightened man. She is more accustomed to her surroundings, but cannot (or will not) answer all the questions he has for her. As we follow their conversation, we learn bits and pieces of their history, their relationship to each other. He is Harold, and she is Dana. They are siblings. They are dead. Or at least they think they are. Their hosts, the cows, have agreed to take them in.

Dana seems resigned to their odd fate because at least it is something she knows. What if the space outside the cow's belly is worse? But Harold is not so sure. In the performance piece's climactic moment, he decides to punch his way out. By now the pair of video images is being projected on the white plaster sides of two life-sized cows. The screen that has shielded them from us is pulled away at the moment that Dana reveals their whereabouts to her brother. As Harold breaks through the cow's side, we see his naked body being "born" as though from a womb.

The visual effect is dazzling for a show as seemingly low budget as this one is. Kudos to video designer Lindsey Bostwick and director Aaron Rhyne for faithfully recreating the images that must have seemed so otherworldly in Pizzarello's mind.

Instinctively, Dana follows her brother, and they are both free from the cows that bore them. Free, that is, until the gasping for breath and the screaming begin again. This time it is Dana who has just woken up disoriented and alone. Several seconds after their escape, Dana and Harold are seemingly confined again, doomed to die and be born forever. Perhaps the idea of "death" here is simply this cycle's state of non-being...within a cow.

Devil's Work

In his first epistle—fifth chapter, eighth verse—the apostle Peter warns Christians to "be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walks about seeking whom he may devour." A funny little man with a pitchfork and bright red tights this is definitely not.

Adapted from C.S. Lewis's epistolary novel of the same name, The Screwtape Letters is a fictionalized, but biblically motivated, firsthand look at the inner workings of hell. As a spiritual and philosophical warning about the devil's trickery, Lewis's work is fascinating and instructive, giving causality and consequence to our daily travails. But as a piece of theater, the production unfortunately does not pass muster.

Screwtape (Max McLean) is the undersecretary of the Department of Temptation, an underworld bureaucratic office assigned to keep nonbelievers from knowing God at all, and believers from turning their decision of faith into any kind of lasting devotion, charity, or repentance. With the constant stenographical assistance of a buxom young demoness, Toadpipe (Jenny Savage), Screwtape fires missives to a flailing young apprentice, Wormwood, who must thwart the maturation of faith in an unnamed young Christian man.

Lewis—whose religious insights are far more cryptic in his famous, mythological Narnia series than they are here—was writing during the Second World War. But references to contemporary history do not keep his biblically sound insights about the devil's workings from being as cogent today as when they were written. As a Christian, I was struck by the time and care that Screwtape, this master tempter and a cog in the bureaucracy of hell, invests in the life of one man.

Screwtape encourages Wormwood to wreak havoc in various areas in the young Christian's life, including the continual and recurring arguments he has with his mother, in which both of them assume innocence and superiority; society's distorted female ideal, which can only lead to marital disappointment; anxieties about the future that keep him from enjoying the present; and, most insidiously, the claustrophobic pride that accompanies his identification as a believer in the first place. It seems that every good thing—filial affection, romantic love, the passage of time, and even the presence of faith itself—is in danger of being distorted and damaged, thereby clouding God's loving attempts to make us better people.

McLean's Screwtape is charismatic enough, which is a good thing, because the entire production consists of his talking directly to the audience. We simply watch his impassioned dictation for the better part of two hours. With only a handful of lines, Savage must resort to nonsensical and thematically disjointed dance numbers in between writing letters. The decision to keep her moving comes, no doubt, from the director's anxiety about how little there is to actually watch.

Better to have spent less money on the elaborately furnished set and put it toward hiring more actors, who could have pantomimed the spiritual warfare Screwtape so explicitly describes. We suspend our disbelief in order to see hell unfold before us, but we are not granted a view of ourselves, weakly cursing our circumstances, wondering at the meaning of it all—or of the angels whose intersession counteracts the likes of Wormwood, Screwtape, and the whole bunch.

Because the production is little more than a dramatized reading of Lewis's book, it can only succeed in preaching to the converted—audiences who will forgive its lack of theatricality because of its spiritual richness.

Rules of Engagement

"What I really resent," sneers Carl, the brutish, Arabic-spouting interrogator, "is what you force us to become." And therein lies the transference of guilt and responsibility that, for many in power today, seems to sanction some, if not all, of the unspeakable acts that are part of the American war on terror. Yussef El Guindi's Back of the Throat is a provocative and harrowing critique of that act of transference, centering on the confrontation between two presumed government agents and a young Middle-Eastern immigrant, Khaled (Adel Akhtar), whom they suspect had an integral part in the 9/11 attacks. In order for the production to expose the (il)logic of Abu Ghraib and wiretapping, it requires its antagonists—Carl (Jamie Effros) and his Southern sophisticate partner, Bartlett (Jason Guy)—to self-consciously convey the bureaucratic tedium of privacy invasion and torture.

Much of the dialogue between Carl and Bartlett deals with interrogation tactics and their justification. El Guindi mines corporate-speak, often to comic effect: If a subject screams for longer than ten consecutive seconds or if his vital organs are pummeled directly, the methods used against him are not warranted, but if those narrow guidelines are followed….

In Khaled, a bookish introvert, we hear the voice of the unjustly accused. The production succeeds at being simultaneously provocative and entertaining in large part because of Akhtar's strong, deeply resonant performance; his Khaled is immediately likable, eliciting our empathy and concern.

Downstairs at the Flea is a long, narrow theater space that frames the action like a diorama or a letterboxed film. Audiences sit snuggly in one of only two equally long rows, with the actors merely feet away from them. A short wall, against which Khaled is repeatedly thrown and pushed, separates the stage from the rows of chairs. This kind of intimate space also works to communicate the production's immediacy. We are voyeurs, passive and silent, watching as this man, as much a citizen as any of us, has his rights systematically stripped from him.

Although the Flea's artistic director, Jim Simpson, who directed this production, efficiently works flashbacks into the narrative, using every bit of the space to its fullest potential, I wish he could have coaxed as strong a performance from his other actors as he does with Akhtar. Jamie Effros is believable enough and does fine as the more physically intimidating agent. Jason Guy's Bartlett, however, is incongruously slapstick, at times almost a sadistic, Southern Inspector Clouseau.

Bandar Albuliwi dutifully plays Asfoor, a dead Arab man connected to 9/11, with whom Khaled may or may not have had a relationship. And Erin Roth plays three separate women who give accounts of their interactions with Khaled. While her librarian is adequate, she does best as the spurned girlfriend; her over-the-top stripper is funny, but the laughs are cheap and keep the character from fully being the voice of ordinary American fear and distrust. Perhaps the fault lies with El Guindi's script, which, for all its critical strengths, artistically relies too heavily on cartoonish caricatures.

In the play's final scene, Asfoor speaks of the dominance of the English language, which does not have the "back of the throat" sound that Arabic does. He describes his desire to learn English so he can participate in the most basic sense, and how his anger grew when that participation was denied him. Back of the Throat is an excellent addition to the dialogue we must have about the war on terror and the investigation of that war's effects on us.

Connect the Dots

We crave narrative so much we see it everywhere, from the stars to the dirt. We seek out the stories of things because stories assure us that those things really do matter. And when no story exists, no matter; our imaginations connect the dots into whatever picture or pattern we desire. And so when the affable bunch of theater misfits behind Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind declare they're going to cram 30—30!—plays into 60 minutes of over-caffeinated, adrenaline-fueled downtown entertainment, the mind exclaims, "So many stories! So little time!" When they add that the audience plays an important part in picking the order in which those plays are performed—shout out a number when you hear the prompt "Curtain"—the mind simply reels.

But two minutes is hardly enough time to get the whole story, so we're invited to connect those dots and see patterns of ourselves in the dialogue, monologue, and dance. We see ourselves failing to connect, and then goofily managing to, in the wordless dance piece "Wind Up." We see our prejudices hammed up and spelled out in "Housekeeper," a biting deconstruction of liberal biases. We see and can laugh at our stubbornness and folly in the well-played "Smoldering in the Silence of an Apology."

We see our insecurities heightened into sharp, self-conscious relief during "Do-It-Yourself," a confessional between two minority actors (Yolanda Kae Wilkinson and Desiree Burch) who make a plaything of the divide between real and fake as they discuss the six new company members, almost all of whom are white. Yes, the mind says, I recognize that kind of non-PC, self-involved talk; despite the limitations of race and gender, I recognize the jealousy and the fear of encroachment, and the need to protect what's mine. I recognize it so much that I'd like the backstory, or at least the rest of the story.

But no. They've yelled "Curtain," and it's time to move on. And move on we do.

Too Much Light is the New York imprint of an improv-short play genre mash-up that began in Chicago in 1988. It requires patrons to determine their own ticket prices with the roll of a die and promises to get audience members involved in the process. Once the hour is done, someone from the audience is asked to role the die to determine how many new plays will be added to the menu the following week. Cast members collaborate, writing and fine-tuning as many as six new plays for the next show, a feat that explains the palpable energy level in the room.

On the night I saw the show, one of the most compelling plays, "East of Eden," consisted of two actors (Justin Tolley and Sarah Levy) who speak, respectively, as the narrator of a Genesis-inspired creation story and a modern-day woman. Their back-and-forth seems like the fractured dialogue between two people trapped at opposite ends of history; the male in an impersonal tone decreeing that this is how it is, while the female intimately meanders her way through a relationship.

All the while, the actors use Scotch tape to enclose an apple that has been cut in two in a square maze of lines and restrictions. Once they were done, they stopped and looked at what they had made and saw that it was pretty good. They sat in the middle of the box and taped together the apple. What exactly did it mean? Forgiveness? Resilience? The reimagination of generations-old wounds and the mending of that original rupture?

But I didn't have time to think it out. The actors yelled "Curtain" and thankfully managed to snatch me back out of myself. Back out into the space where narratives are being flirted with and discarded, like so much Scotch tape on the floor of a black stage.

Her Tormented Selves

The Classical Theater of Harlem has faithfully mounted Adrienne Kennedy's 1964 Obie Award winner, Funnyhouse of a Negro. Directed by Billie Allen, who starred in the original Off-Broadway version, the current production unearths the stark racial torment characteristic of the 60's civil rights era. There is immense value in this kind of artistic faithfulness; by witnessing Negro Sarah's descent into madness, we are jolted by the depiction of her barefaced self-hatred and mental torment. She is a light-skinned black woman who feels betrayed by her complexion, tainted because she is almost light enough to be considered a member of the majority race. Almost, but not quite.

One could argue that if Sarah had been wholly and unmistakably black, she would have at least been afforded membership in a community that gathered strength and pride in the civil rights struggle. Sarah goes mad because she exists in the non-space between mutually antagonist races at a historical moment when that antagonism comes to a head.

In the one-hour play, which is like a tension-filled snapshot of madness, Negro Sarah is tormented by "herselves," whiteface black ghosts of a crucified Christ (Lincoln Brown), the Duchess of Hapsburg (Monica Stith), Queen Victoria Regina (Trish McCall), and the martyred African nationalist Patrice Lumumba (Willie E. Teacher).

That we cannot completely trust the stories Sarah tells—she is mad, after all—only intensifies the play's sense of distress. Sarah raves that she was violently conceived when her father raped her mother in a moment of rage. Her confusing and confounding narrative speaks to the inheritance of madness: after the rape her mother went mad and her hair began to fall out, while Sarah's father was troubled because he could not live up to his own mother's expectation that he would save the black race.

At several points during the play, Sarah refers to a complexion-based value system that has her struggling between opposite poles. "My mother," she coos, "looked like a white woman, hair as straight as any white woman's. I am yellow, but he is black, the darkest one of us all." The Duchess of Hapsburg and Queen Victoria Regina are the two herselves who represent Sarah's self-loathing the most. They are porcelain images of royalty and femininity who play out the young woman's visions of sexual desire.

Suzette Azariah Gunn is an exceptional Negro Sarah because she believably and admirably maintains what must be an exhausting level of anxiety throughout the play. She allows that anxiety to color the other emotions Sarah displays, including a kind of fraught anger at Patrice Lumumba and a worshipful deference toward Queen Victoria Regina. The actors playing herselves complement Gunn's performance with an automaton otherworldliness, especially Monica Stith as the Duchess of Hapsburg.

In keeping well within the visual and narrative boundaries established by Kennedy's script, the current production does not deconstruct or comment upon the original play but re-presents it like a thing unearthed from a time capsule. The fight for civil rights feels a bit different compared with 40 years ago; we've survived identity politics and are experiencing a shift from race- to class-based struggles for equality. I wonder if there is room for this play to recreate itself and, in so doing, speak to the nuanced versions of himselves and herselves that lurk about in the minds of the distressed today.

Escape From the Psycho Ward

From the moment Randle Patrick McMurphy bursts into Nurse Ratched's ward, all jovial and sassy because he's been committed here rather than sentenced to prison, you just know there's going to be trouble. The psychiatric ward, dedicated to the rehabilitation of "the weak," operates on a set of unspoken, unwritten rules that McMurphy, a poster child for the anti-establishment, thinks he can ignore. But as this time-honored classic unfolds, McMurphy's protest against the passive-aggressive bullying that Nurse Ratched has perfected on her charges is no match for her arsenal of literally mind-altering medical procedures. But for all his antics and aggression, McMurphy isn't really the protagonist here. He's a vehicle of change, a sacrificial lamb of sorts for Chief Bromden, who, during the course of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is brought out of his deaf/mute shell and escapes the ward under the cover of night. Physically, Chief Bromden is a hulking figure, but mentally he's a child haunted by conversations with his father, who, we later learn, became a "small man" when he sold the family land. Bromden, who has inherited this curse of mental smallness and fragility, is shoved and bullied by staff aides and generally ignored by everyone else.

The attention McMurphy shows Bromden pays dividends and awakens the man from a waking dream. It is Bromden who lifts the box filled with electrical wiring when McMurphy could not, and it is Bromden who casts the final vote to allow the men to watch baseball on TV. McMurphy exemplifies for him, and for all the men to a lesser degree, what it looks like when freedom takes the form of all-out rebellion. When Nurse Ratched plays her ace and has McMurphy lobotomized, we understand that McMurphy's tale is a cautionary one. Not all of the patients will ever muster the courage to leave, but at least they understand that leaving—and living—is a viable option.

The Charlie Pineapple Theater Company, making plays in Brooklyn's Williamsburg, far, far from Broadway's madding crowd, does a commendable job with this production. At a little over three hours, it could be shorter and probably will be, once the fairly good ensemble cast gels a bit more. George Stonefish is a well-cast Chief Bromden, making the disparity between his physical and mental presence believable.

Among the crazies, Michael Snow is Dale Harding, the voluntary admit and president of the Patients Council who is hiding from his sexuality. Snow plays Harding compassionately, steeling him against the pain of living with a razor-sharp wit and a finely attuned self-consciousness. Brian Leider and Christopher Franklin, as the stuttering Billy Bibbit and the amped-up Cheswick, are also a treat to watch. Both commit wonderfully to their characters and give the at times lagging production some of its much-needed energy.

In order for Cuckoo's Nest to work, the leads must communicate their utter hatred for each other with every breath. Nurse Ratched, a pent-up dominatrix in disguise if there ever was one, is a mistress of order and protocol. Sadly, Cidele Curo's performance leaves much to be desired—she neither projects strength nor that just-under-the-surface lust for strength that can electrify the clash between her and her charges. And as McMurphy, Jerry Broome seems to be acting under the influence, or perhaps the weight, of Jack Nicholson's performance in the hard to forget 1975 film. That said, there are worse things than a rehashing of that performance, but much of the ensemble work deserves a fresh and fully realized McMurphy to guide them.

Overall, this is one loony bin we shouldn't mind being locked up in for a few hours, just as long as we, like Chief Bromden, can escape once the going gets rough.

Separate Lives, Common Affliction

In response to the cheeky list "123 Reasons to Love New York Right Now" that New York magazine published on Dec. 26, Gawker.com, a media blog popular with the Google generation, published its own snarkier, hipper version. No. 81 on the Gawker list made me gasp; it read, "Because nobody uses condoms anymore." After Rent and the AIDS quilt, Magic Johnson and those ubiquitous red ribbons, has the generation weaned on sex education classes lost its collective concern about HIV and AIDS so thoroughly that we no longer care to take even the most basic sexual precaution?

Sadly, the numbers continue to paint a grim picture. Young people between 15 and 24 account for half of all new HIV infections worldwide, with more than 6,000 in this age bracket getting the disease every day. In the United States, the rate of AIDS diagnosis for African-American women is a staggering 25 times the rate for white women; HIV/AIDS is the No. 1 cause of death for African-American women between 25 and 34. And all this after more than a decade of AIDS awareness.

These are some of the facts I was compelled to seek out after seeing Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter in their two-woman play, In the Continuum. The production, minimally staged and beautifully acted, tells the story of two women, one African and one African-American, who, though they live on opposite sides of the planet, are fighting remarkably similar struggles.

Abigail, a Zimbabwean, is seemingly a success story. She is an on-air reporter for the local news station and has a young child by her equally successful and desirable husband, Stanford. Abigail knows that Stanford is cheating on her, but hopes that the child she carries will bring him back to her arms. When she goes to the crowded clinic for a checkup, Abigail is told by an unsympathetic and distracted nurse that she has the disease. What's worse, though he may beat her and send her back to her village a shamed woman, Abigail must break the news to Stanford and convince him to come in for testing.

Meanwhile, Nia, a Los Angeles teenager who is in and out of foster homes, has snuck out to a club with her best friend. She waits there for her boyfriend, Darnell, a local basketball hero, with several people hoping to ride his coattails out of the ghetto. After shots are fired at the club, Nia finds herself in a clinic, only to learn that she is pregnant with Darnell's child and HIV-positive.

From here, both Abigail and Nia must interact with the women who surround them, including a former high school friend turned sex worker and a social-climbing acquaintance for Abigail, and a painfully out-of-touch social worker and a gold-digging cousin for Nia. Each of these meetings propels Abigail and Nia closer to the play's dramatic climax: the moment of confrontation and exposure. Abigail and Nia must decide whether to face public shame and "out" the men who gave them this disease or continue to submit to the weight of secrecy.

It is then, at that moment of choosing, that the fictional wall dividing Abigail's world from Nia's breaks down and the two women momentarily acknowledge each other onstage. Their cultural particulars fall away and they know a moment of solidarity and understanding that, though strictly expressionist, represents so much of what they do not have access to. Neither woman ends up telling her secret, and in not doing so, both reveal to us how much more solidarity and understanding these characters need—from each other, from the people they know, from us.

That Gurira and Salter play every character in this 90-minute piece, often simultaneously onstage and deftly transitioning among them, is a theatrical triumph that must be seen to be believed. Watching them weave together the stories of these wildly different yet tragically similar women is akin to watching expertly trained and obviously gifted dancers, each moving independently, both moving as one.

Despite the lax attitudes that have prompted some to declare this a post-AIDS cultural moment, the numbers do not lie. And plays like In the Continuum succeed not only as art but as reminders that, in terms of this disease and its effect on specific communities, the worst of times are not behind us.