Everything is Disappearing

The haunting leitmotif of British playwright Jez Butterworth’s dark and compelling new play, Parlour Song, which is receiving its world premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company, is of things disappearing from a man’s home. “It starts small” -- the sole words of the play’s prelude -- with a pocket watch, an old set of golf clubs, other household items and things scavenged from garage sales, but progresses to include early, significant gifts exchanged between the man and his wife. That trajectory of loss tracks the dwindling of the couple’s 11-year-old marriage. Ned (Chris Bauer) and Joy (Emily Mortimer) find themselves in their early 40s living in a cookie-cutter house in a new subdivision in suburban England, alienated from their own past, from the natural environment, and from each other.

Ned, fleshy and emotional, is devoted to Joy but terrified that she has drifted away from him, while Joy, skinny and brittle, is the quintessence of opaque detachment, unable or unwilling to respond to Ned’s tentative overtures. Into their lives walks their next-door neighbor, Dale (Jonathan Cake), brawny, self-confident and restless.

What catapults this domestic drama into a work of far greater force and scope is Butterworth’s savage wit, his vivid imagery and his mastery of stagecraft and story-telling.

Parlour Song nimbly zigzags from realism to the netherworld of sleepwalking and nightmares. The petty household thievery triggers a nightmare for Ned so terrifying that he refuses to sleep; only in the play’s final moments do we learn the lineaments of that nightmare and its counterpart in Joy’s mind.

The play gains further resonance from the connections that Butterworth draws between his characters’ unhappiness and a world in which nature is in retreat, history holds no value, and sex and Youtube substitute for intimacy and culture.

Ned, a demolitions expert, sits at home watching over and over again video clips of buildings that he and his crew have sent tumbling. He has a project on deck to blow up the town’s Arndale Centre, the community's shopping center, to make way for the New Arndale Centre. When pressed by his wife for a valid reason for tearing down the old building, Ned nonchalantly reminds Joy that there was a forest five years ago where their house now stands. “It was here for a 1,000 years. Now it’s gone. We’re here. Everything has its time.”

Butterworth is adept at capturing the oblique, coded conversations that take place between close friends or family members. Joy, Ned and Dale rarely say outright what they think or feel. Joy carefully praises the roast duck that Ned has prepared for her, while her tone of voice and diffident, little bites communicate something quite different about the dinner – and their relationship.

Parlour Song marks the most recent collaboration between the 39-year-old Butterworth and the Atlantic Theater Company and its artistic director, Neil Pepe. Under Pepe's sure-footed direction, the three-member cast is outstanding. If there is a flaw in Butterworth’s play, it is the implausibility of the love affair between the schlumpy Ned and the gazelle-like Joy and the odd friendship that Ned and Dale strike up. Yet, the three actors’ personal chemistry wash away any doubts about these relationships.

Chris Bauer brings great emotionality as well as comic finesse to the role of Ned. Emily Mortimer is equally convincing as the suburban housewife come unhinged by depression. And Jonathan Cake, coming off a startlingly similar role as lady-killer Iachimo in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the Lincoln Center this fall, is magnetic as the cocky yet amiable Dale.

The design team likewise does impeccable work. Of particular note are Kenneth Posner’s sharp and lucid lighting, Robert Brill’s suitably sterile set, Dustin O’Neill’s evocative projections of catch phrases and video on the house façade at back, and Obadiah Eaves’ bold sound.

The events of Parlour Song occur during an uncommon six-week drought. It’s not giving up too much of the plot to reveal that its satisying ending features a rain shower. But in keeping with the play’s dark tenor, the water offers tenuous relief.

A Family Affair

With the outbreak of ethnic violence in Iraq and now Kenya, Swedish playwright Lars Noren’s War, which examines the devastation of ethnic cleansing through the prism of one family’s experience, is timely. Yet relevance and social purpose do not always equal satisfying theater. Noren, whose work is widely produced and celebrated in Europe but rarely seen in the United States, was scheduled to direct this Rattlestick Theater’s production, but when illness prevented him, director Anders Cato and dramaturge Ulrika Josephsson, fellow Swedes, stepped in with mixed results.

Cato and Josephsson can’t seem to decide if they are staging a naturalistic drama or Brechtian social theater, with the actors and production team pulling in competing directions. Instead of stinging our conscience, this schematic play tests our patience, especially at 100 minutes with no intermission.

After two years in a prison camp in an unnamed land (presumably Bosnia) during an outbreak of ethnic conflict, a man (Laith Nakli) presumed dead returns home to his wife and two daughters, who have settled into a daily life marked by scarcity, rape and cruelty. The man, blinded by torturers, also proves blind to the changes that have occurred in his absence.

In the zeal to depict the brutalizing impact of war, all gentleness has been blasted from the play. In moments that don’t always ring true, one member of the family lashes out at another with vile obscenities, while every embrace contains an undercurrent of suppressed violence.

Making War memorable despite its flaws, Nakli is mesmerizing as the brutish father who is intent on reconciling with his family, even if it means imposing his will on them, and on regaining his place as head of the household despite his impairment. He burns with intensity while never shedding the empty gaze of sightless eyes.

Cato fails to elicit any consistency of style from the rest of the multi-racial cast. Alok Tewari, as Uncle Ivan, is the only actor to deliver a naturalistic performance. Flora Diaz, who is not up to the daunting challenge of believably portraying a 12-year-old, plays Semira as a high-strung, whiny child who twitches and fidgets constantly. Her unlikely older sister is the boyish Ngozi Anyanwu, whose brash Beenina has the demeanor of an urban American youth. Rosalyn Coleman, a star of August Wilson plays on Broadway, is disappointing in the pivotal role of the mother. Always angry and sullen, she never demonstrates the emotions that bind her character to her daughters, the father, or his brother.

Noren deftly exploits the theatrical possibilities inherent in one character’s inability to see the others – from mistaken identities to deliberate deceptions. But War, translated with occasional awkwardness by Marita Lindholm Gochman, would have benefited from some modulation of tone (a short episode about the family dog’s untimely death hints at how dark humor might have been effectively deployed) and a plot with more unanticipated turns.

Scenic designer Van Satvoord evokes this war-torn wasteland with a colorless, austere set containing a handful of threadbare household objects. Costume designer Meghan E. Healey does serviceable work with flashes of ingenuity, such as the bright yellow bra straps visible underneath Beenina’s shabby clothes.

Lighting designer Ed McCarthy curiously ignores the play’s opportunities for innovative lighting. The lighting remains largely unchanged, whether the family is sitting out in the hot or inside their dwelling without electricity during the evening. Indeed, in one key scene, when the blind man asks his brother if it is morning or night, the audience is at a loss to know the correct answer.

The use of a multiracial cast and the decision not to name Bosnia may have been intended to widen the play’s significance to all genocide in our age. Instead, these tactics backfire by robbing the play of the specificity of time, place and culture that might have given it the resonance of authentic history – and the power to move its audience.

High Art, Domestic Strife

The famous artist who has incredible charisma and an outsized ego, a master at his craft while a failure as a human being. That familiar type is the fascinating main character in Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy's play The Shape of Metal, which opened at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2003 and is now receiving a belated U.S. premiere at 59E59 Theaters. But in this case, the he is a she. Nell Jeffrey, played with terrific verve by esteemed stage actor Roberta Maxwell, is an ailing 82-year-old sculptor whose work is being put on permanent display in a national museum—and a self-described "bit of a beast" when it comes to "niceties" like people's feelings. The play, directed by Broadway stage veteran Brian Murray, turns on the confrontation that Nell has with her middle-aged daughter Judith, who visits seeking answers about the long-ago disappearance of Grace, her mentally unstable sibling. Grace, who appears only in flashbacks and dream sequences, vanished 30 years earlier after her mother quashed her romance with a mechanic from the nearby village.

The Shape of Metal works as a suspense drama complete with a buried family secret that, when revealed, is both surprising and plausible (no small feat). But what makes the play noteworthy is the richness of its three female characters, particularly the formidable Nell, and the combustible, dueling emotions that fuel their clashes with each other. If the characterizations have a flaw, it is that these women are revealed only through their interactions with each other, making for some gaps.

The quality of acting in The Shape of Metal is outstanding. Julia Gibson endows the levelheaded Judith with both heart and intelligence as she ricochets from frustration and rage to concern and empathy with her mother. Molly Ward brings Grace to life with luminescent power.

But it is Maxwell who steals the spotlight as the hard-charging and acerbic artist. Nell berates new artists for their acceptance of mediocrity and recoils from the slightest sign of failure in herself and others. With shades of Lear, she grandly predicts her impending death while scorning the indignities of aging, including memory loss. In her exchanges with Judith, she is, by turns, self-righteous and pensive. Maxwell brings such zest to the part that she doesn't convincingly convey Nell's physical and mental impairments. Her rapid half-step shuffle, for instance, seems more jig than feebleness.

Murray decided to keep the play's Irish setting, though nothing in the plot demands it in the way that the work of fellow Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel and Conor McPherson does. It's an unfortunate decision since all three actresses, particularly Gibson, slip in and out of convincing Irish accents.

Set designer Lex Liang pulls off the illusion of a massive, garage-like artist's studio on a stage that is diminutive even by Off-Off-Broadway standards. In fact, the entire design team is top-notch, doing work that is in service to the play's needs and never flamboyant.

The Shape of Metal, which refers to Nell's favored material for sculpting, offers grist for reflection on the relationship between art and life, the nature of modernity, and the claims and limits of family. Nell, who spends a lifetime trying to create finished objects, ultimately comes to understand that failure is human, that perfect form is never attainable. The Shape of Metal is a case study for such a life philosophy. Far from perfect, it is yet a work worthy of attention and regard.

Three Sisters

Three sisters reunite in a coastal town in the north of England during a snowstorm for the funeral of their long-widowed mother. This formulaic scenario snaps to vibrant, singular life in Third Encore Company's incisive production of British playwright Shelagh Stephenson's dark comedy The Memory of Water, which won Britain's Olivier Award in 2000. The play's title refers to how an element, once introduced in water, will make its presence felt long after it is gone—a none too subtle reference to the mother's lingering influence on her daughters' lives.

The way we remember our past and how those narratives color and influence the present is the overarching theme. Every permutation of memory is folded into the work: displaced memories, appropriated memories, false memories, the absence of memories, the oblivion of Alzheimer's disease, and post-brain-trauma amnesia.

Teresa, Mary, and Catherine have little in common with each other; even their recollections of their family past are starkly at odds. With the snowstorm pinning them inside on the eve of the funeral, they pass the time in their mother's bedroom arguing and sorting through her old clothes and their old memories. As whiskey, marijuana, and grief break down their defenses, raw unhappiness, age-old resentments, and long-held secrets rise to the surface, forcing each sister to look at herself and her relationships with men in a cold, unforgiving light. Thanks to Stephenson's biting wit and gallows humor and to Ellen Lichtensteiger's careful direction, the play develops an emotional punch but is never dour.

Teresa (Abby Overton), who runs a health supplements business with her husband Frank, is the prim and hyper-organized oldest daughter who has shouldered the burden of caring for their dying mother. Mary (Karen Sternberg), smart and brittle, is a psychiatrist who has been carrying on a long affair with a suave celebrity doctor (Todd Reichart) who refuses to leave his wife. Catherine (Zoe Frazier) is their immature and attention-seeking younger sister who binges on men, drugs, and clothing.

They are the progeny of Vi (Victoria Bundonis), a refined, ultra-feminine woman of working-class roots who has clawed her way to middle-class respectability. Vi, wearing a green taffeta cocktail dress, makes cameo appearances in Mary's revealing dreams.

Stephenson's gift for dialogue is manifest in the play's moments of emotional revelation. In these dreams, for example, Vi finally has her say. She scolds Mary, "You invent these versions of me, and I don't recognize myself" and then tells her how she sees it: "I'm proud of you, and you're ashamed of me."

Stephenson is also particularly fine in recreating the lacerating arguments that unhappy couples can have in private. It's hard not to flinch as Teresa and Frank, in one exchange, shred the comforting stories they have told each other about their love and marriage.

The five-person cast, on the whole, gives convincing and sympathetic portrayals of these imperfect characters. Only Frazier, as the youngest daughter Catherine, seems unable to move beyond caricature, though in all fairness her character is the shallowest of the bunch.

The mother's genteel Victorian bedroom is meticulously created by Tim McMath. Jessica Cloutier pithily captures each character's personality in his or her clothing, though she goes over the top with Catherine's zany outfits. David Roy's eerie lighting and Katherine Miller's low-buzzing sounds evoke the off-kilter reality of the dream sequences. Where the design team stumbles is in creating a compelling illusion of a raging storm outside, depriving the play of a resonant symbol.

The Memory of Water was Stephenson's first stage play, and she's written four more since. It's whetted my appetite to see more of her work.

All in the Family

Samm-Art Williams, whose 1980 Tony-nominated play Home is now a classic of African-American theater, returns to playwriting after a decades-long absence with The Waiting Room, a saucy comedy of manners about racial identity and its fault lines. Over the course of one day, one person after the next in a hospital waiting room in a rural community in North Carolina discovers startling news about whom they are related to. Williams teases out the comic possibilities from this increasingly implausible premise while making a none too subtle statement about the dubious basis for all color and class distinctions. Add freewheeling banter, waggish humor, and sexual capers, and you have the frothy results.

The Waiting Room opens with the declaration by Riley Innes (Michael Chenevert), whose father has been hospitalized following a heart attack, that a waiting room is "the most vicious truth serum ever known to man." The serum is delivered by Riley's garrulous Uncle Patrick (Ed Wheeler), who prides himself on being a truth teller.

Patrick's first victim is Rachael (Messeret Stroman), a young mother who has brought her baby in for tests: he blurts out to her that her birth mother is, in fact, her mother's sister. The Innis family's secret, divulged in the first act's closing seconds, will startle few audience members, but it allows Williams in the second act to dramatize the angst and reappraisals that the disclosure triggers. By the conclusion, everyone's comfortable notions of family and identity have been upended, leading Riley to declare with justifiable exasperation, "Do any of us in this entire country know who we really are?"

Williams has a fine-tuned ear for the black vernacular, especially as it applies to "cattin' around," as Patrick's sister describes his behavior with the voluptuous Cookie (Ebony Jo-Ann), an aging country woman whose sister is in the hospital. "Lots of sparks left in this old furnace," says Cookie, who slathers herself with motor oil to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The six black cast members deliver uniformly strong performances. Wheeler brings great brio to the role of Patrick, the twice-divorced, silver-tongued tobacco farmer and proud Republican. Chenevert nails the more complicated role of Riley, who is forced to examine his deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a middle-class black man in the American South. Jo-Ann endows Cookie with just the right mix of vim and emotionality.

By contrast, the two white cast members, Ron Millke and David Cochrane, come off as stiff and uncomfortable in their roles as Gordon MacInnes and his son. This failure is not entirely their fault, since their characters seem the least developed and most implausible. Gordon proudly wears a Confederate flag T-shirt even as he voices beliefs and values alien to a conservative Southerner, while his son, Riley's old schoolmate, remains a cipher.

A play that unfolds in a hospital waiting room runs the danger of being static, but director Charles Weldon, through skillful blocking of the actors and precise timing with the laugh lines, maintains a snappy pace.

The design team does serviceable work. Almost all the action takes place in the room, which George Corrin has made suitably institutional. The costumes, lighting, and sound unobtrusively contribute to the aura of realism.

The Waiting Room, just like Home in its original 1979 incarnation, has been staged by the Negro Ensemble Company, the august 40-year-old theater troupe that in its early life provided one of the few outlets for black theater artists. This new production marks a welcome homecoming to the theater for Williams. I hope he sticks around this time.

Out of the Past

The attempt to expiate guilt about dark events in our past is a theme as old as Oedipus Rex. In Anna Ziegler's absorbing new play, BFF, the latest production of Women's Expressive Theater, a young woman undermines a budding romance to try to atone for her cruelty toward a childhood friend. "BFF" (Best Friends Forever) is the promise that Eliza (Laura Heisler) and Lauren (Sasha Eden) made to each other. But as Lauren rushes headlong into adolescence—starting her period, going out with a boy, and discovering her sexuality—she grows apart from Eliza, who is grieving over the death of her father and is slower to reach these thresholds. The growing disconnect between the two girls culminates in a harrowing "breakup" scene that is the play's dramatic zenith.

Ziegler shows a keen sense for the language and behavior of preteen girls in her gripping depiction of the rupture of this intense friendship, and these two talented actresses shuck years off their age without resorting to clichés in their performances.

In the second narrative thread, which takes place more than a decade later, Lauren gingerly comes out of her shell when she meets Seth (Jeremy Webb), a droll and self-effacing man who is smitten with her. But in sabotaging the possibility of intimacy or happiness, Lauren says her name is Eliza and keeps her real identity and life a secret from Seth even as they grow more involved. While far less engrossing, this tale has its memorably quirky scenes, including an unorthodox marriage proposal and a funny and heartfelt "final" voice-mail message that Seth leaves for Eliza.

The play ricochets back and forth between the two story lines in bite-size scenes, a structure that enables Ziegler to weave in echoes and counterpoints. This setup also allows the playwright to withhold key details in an organic way, since we don't know what burdens the adult Lauren bears until late in the play, when we are deep into the story of her friendship with Eliza. The play's inspired final scene—which goes back the furthest in time—adds even more shades of meaning.

The simple, all-white set consists of two chairs and two rectangular blocks. Yet set designer Robin Vest, lighting designer Clifton Taylor, and projection designer Kevin R. Frech conjure numerous distinct settings by projecting images onto the framing exterior of the building and inserting panels, showing the walls of various rooms, into the window at back. Sara Jean Tosetti's costumes precisely convey each character's age and personality while never calling attention to themselves.

Director Josh Hecht never allows the play's pacing to slacken and coaxes natural and convincing performances from his cast. Webb's restless body movements and flickering gaze convey Seth's endearing self-consciousness. Eden pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of playing Lauren at two ages. Heisler, though, is the standout as the intense and troubled Eliza.

Ziegler sometimes gets carried away in her zeal to shoehorn in lofty metaphors and a leitmotif about the shifting nature of time in the play's dialogue, endangering the realism that is so crucial to the play's power. She does much better when she lets her characters fumble and stumble their way to maturity. While no eyes are gouged out at the end, as in Oedipus, this is no easy journey.

Friends

RiddleLikeLove (With a Side of Ketchup) is the ungainly title of a slender, affecting tale about the childhood friendship between an aspiring actress and a hearing-disabled girl named Elizabeth who dies young. It's a one-woman autobiographical show that lasts a fleeting 50 minutes, and Julie Fitzpatrick, who wrote the play with director Douglas Anderson, captures Elizabeth with uncanny clarity. The ketchup in question is the girls' favorite snack, and many of their exchanges take place at a neighborhood Friendly's, with a plate of it between them. The play contains within it the story of its own creation. In the first scene, Julie, on her way home from an ego-deflating audition, opens a letter containing an invitation from Elizabeth's aunt to do a show at her small-town Vermont theater (where, in fact, this play premiered). Later that night, as a reluctant Julie stares at a photo of Elizabeth, her friend first comes to life with her singular, ear-grating address, "Do it, Jooollleee!" After Elizabeth suggests that the play be about her, Julie slowly finds a foothold in the story, with Elizabeth as her muse and cheerleader.

Julie is as tentative and self-deprecating as the lip-reading Elizabeth is plucky and confident. Each character's personality is vividly embodied in idiosyncratic habits and gestures. For instance, Julie finds opening her mail so unnerving that she carries piles of it around, unopened in her bag. Or Elizabeth's kiss: "She'd grab my cheeks, purse her lips out, clamp her eyes shut, and wait for my lips to meet hers." Fitzpatrick segues seamlessly between the two characters through deft shifts in voice and carriage.

Interwoven in the play are six classic ballads, sung by Fitzpatrick in a sweet, clear voice with Anderson beautifully accompanying her on the piano. The songs might seem saccharine in another context, but they assume resonance from the stories Julie tells, which frame them. Thus when Julie sings Bette Midler's "The Wind Beneath My Wings," the audience can't help but visualize Elizabeth with her ear pressed against a tape cassette playing the song and later realizing a dream when she dances to the song at the prom with a popular boy from her class.

The snug stage is divided into small quadrants: a diner banquette with ketchup bottle in one, an armchair in Julie's rundown sublet across from that, the piano and microphone at back, and an open space at front. Under Anderson's expert direction, Fitzpatrick moves easily among the four sets and the different psychic spaces they occupy, with help from Evan Purcell's subtle lighting. (A deaf interpreter sits at front off to one side, signing for deaf audience members.)

As Julie tells Elizabeth's story, regrets surface. But in memory, it is as if Elizabeth forgives her friend's inattention: "You should wear a watch and you should look at it when it's on your wrist … because lateness is rude, Jjjooolleee—OK—don't get defensive. I love you, Jooollleee—here, have some ketchup."

Such is this play's generous spirit—and its pull.

Touched by Tragedy

Two one-act plays featured in a double bill at the Kraine Theater view recent terrorist attacks—the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings—through the prism of individual lives touched by tragedy. This approach yields rich and complex character studies in the Spanish drama Ana 3/11 and a superficial and poorly crafted play in its American counterpart, A River Apart. In acclaimed Spanish playwright Paloma Pedrero's Ana 3/11, which has been produced in Spain, London, and Cuba and at the 2006 New York International Fringe Festival, three women named Ana await word about the same man, Angel Vera Garcia, who is trapped in the train bombings. His possible death ricochets through their lives, cracking open secrets and prompting searing personal reckonings.

In its examination of the cramped lives of women in a society dominated by men, the play takes its cues from Spanish classical theater works such as Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba. To echo that theme, scenic designer David Ogel rings the stage with men's suit jackets hanging on coat hooks.

Ana 3/11, tautly directed by Anjali Vashi and translated by Phyllis Zatlin, consists of three linked vignettes, although all three Anas remain onstage at all times. In the first, Angel's lover (Ana de los Riscos) frantically tries to contact him, pouring out her anxiety, anguish, and frustration into the messages she leaves on his cellphone. In the following vignette, Angel's cellphone rings insistently in his bag, which his wife (Catherine Eaton) has with her as she waits at the hospital. In the final scene, which does not interlock with the prior two and never reaches full climax, Angel's aged and partially senile mother (Charlotte Hampden) recalls her own husband's extramarital affairs even as she has premonitions of her son's death.

While each actress delivers strong performances, Eaton is especially affecting as the strong-willed wife who forces herself to deal directly with the betrayal from which she has long averted her eyes.

In A River Apart, television writer Michelle Schiefen sets out to show how Sept. 11 briefly brought the city's residents together. The play, which has the same director and design team as Ana 3/11, depicts six neighbors, neatly divided by class, race, and age, who congregate on the roof of their Brooklyn apartment building after the second tower is hit but before the towers' fall: the building's super, an all-American corporate guy, a young Jewish woman from Connecticut, a college film student of Iranian descent, a middle-aged white mother, and a 75-year-old Mexican woman.

The personal connection to the attacks is much more tenuous than in Ana 3/11. Nevertheless, everyone frets anxiously about the difficulty of contacting family members because the cellphone circuits are overloaded and the phones in the apartment building aren't working. Demonstrating their instant camaraderie, the six lend each other their cellphones.

This new solicitude and self-involvement are grating in contrast to the indifference that the characters show toward the lives cut short across the river. The one exception is the elderly Rosa (Rhoda Pauley), who says, "Oh God, all the mothers with children up there."

The need for verisimilitude is great when your audience has experienced firsthand the events being dramatized onstage. Yet Schiefen gets the details wrong. The snippets of radio reports—when the super (Matt Alford) periodically unplugs his headphones—don't sound like the charged and agitated live coverage of those first hours. No mention is made of the people jumping to their deaths—an unforgettable element of that interval before the towers collapsed. The burning towers themselves—which you'd think would be a transfixing sight—command very little attention. A family member who was in Midtown that morning is said to have reached and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour.

The six cast members struggle valiantly to bring their characters to life, but this shallow play defeats them.

While the personal focus of each work in 11 is a valid choice, it's disappointing that neither playwright saw the need to grapple with the larger meaning of this new age of terrorism at home. All we get are emotional tirades against the terrorists. Any personal reflections, however raw and provisional, about the causes and consequences of these attacks might have helped place these individual lives—and these plays—into the broader flow of history.

Under Siege

Following his release from prison in Czechoslovakia in 1985, Vaclav Havel took just four days to write Largo Desolato, his semi-autobiographical play about a dissident philosopher paralyzed by his fear of being imprisoned once again and by the outsized expectations of his countrymen awaiting his next words. While communist totalitarianism may be a thing of the past, and Havel would go on to become his country's president for 13 years, his play remains deeply resonant for our own age of anxiety, surveillance, and liberty challenged.

The Tyna Collective's trenchant production, in a fine translation by fellow Czech Tom Stoppard, is part of a six-week, 16-play festival of Havel's work timed to coincide with the playwright's 70th birthday and a brief residency at Columbia University. Director Eva Burgess teases out the play's black humor while never losing sight of its seriousness of purpose. To the play's obvious debts to the theater of the absurd, Burgess adds touches of Brechtian artifice, such as the seating of the actors in the front row when they are not onstage.

The play unfolds on David Evans Morris's fanciful set, which consists of a spare living room with four stand-alone doorways at back leading out to the entryway, the balcony (denoted by a plant and a painting of a blue sky), the bathroom, and the rest of the apartment.

Professor Leopold Nettles, author of Ontology of the Human Self and Phenomenology of Responsibility, has retreated to his apartment, suffering from writer's block and quaking at each ring of the doorbell. Nettles is not even able to articulate his own state of alienation, instead parroting the description offered by a concerned friend. When "they"—a bumbling duo of secret police—finally do arrive and offer him "a once in a lifetime chance for a fresh start" if he will disown his former identity, the offer appeals to him since he no longer recognizes himself in the husk of a man he has become.

Largo Desolato, with its minimalist plot and masterfully orchestrated repetition of scenes, dialogue, and situations, calls for a formal rigor in its execution. Burgess delivers by guiding her cast toward tight, disciplined performances and by coaxing a clean and uncluttered aesthetic from her design team.

In the demanding lead role, Erik Kever Ryle achingly communicates Nettles's growing despair and impotence while also conveying the charisma and sparkling intelligence that would have garnered him such attention in the first place.

The rest of the cast is uniformly stellar. Joshua Briggs and Jon Okabayashi are hilarious as the sneezing, daft detective and his even more clueless partner. Another delightful comic duo are Janet Ward and Skyler Sullivan, with mirroring performances as the tall and short Sidneys from the local paper mill, who declare themselves fans of Nettles and bear down on him to fulfill his obligations to ordinary people like themselves.

Martin Lopez's simply cut, vivid costumes, Juliet Chia's full, steady lighting, and Ken Hashimoto's striking musical punctuation hew tightly to the overall style.

During this fraught moment in our own country's history, it is fitting to revisit the lifework of a distinguished playwright who so seamlessly wedded politics and morality. There may be no better introduction to Havel's work than this incisive staging of a work that's considered to be one of his greatest plays.

Lost

You've got to admire New York Theater Experiment for its ambition. Engaging its cast in improvisatory workshops, the company, for its latest production, explored how a group of Catholic schoolgirls might cope if they were suddenly stranded on an uninhabited island without food, shelter, or adult supervision. Its touchstone was Lord of the Flies, William Golding's novel in which a group of British schoolboys quickly descend into barbarism under those circumstances. The actors, working from a plot outline and character descriptions supplied by playwrights Laura Gale and Joseph Schultz, developed detailed character histories and then improvised scenes to generate the script. In the dark play that grew out of this collaboration, the nine teenage girls turn catty, selfish, and ultimately savage when left to their own devices after their plane crashes on the shores of a tropical island in the Pacific.

This unorthodox creative process no doubt gave the hard-working ensemble an uncommon personal investment in their roles. But it failed to produce characters with the depth, complexity, and psychological realism that would make us care about their fates. Fallen also falls prey to its own intensity. An unrelenting stew of power games, violence, sexual tension, and suicide, it wilts under its own heat. The addition of a few lighter or quieter moments might have brought some welcome temperature control.

Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, when the United States was absorbed in the Cold War. The two oldest girls, symbolizing liberal democracy and totalitarianism, do battle in the play, just as the two oldest boys do in the novel. The self-assured and sometimes imperious Becky (Meghan Love) initially becomes the group's leader when she musters the support of more girls than her conniving rival Hilary (Dana Berger) gets. But when Becky becomes the target of the group's growing frustration and despair, Hilary exploits shifting alliances and Becky's own neuroses to supplant her.

Standing out among this young cast of varying levels of talent, Berger plays the ruthless Hilary with relish as she coldly manipulates friendships to advance her own interests. Love finds appropriate notes of gentleness and steel in her portrayal of Becky. Shelly Stover, in the role of the plucky, sharp-tongued Julie B., demonstrates remarkable stage presence, though her character, like several others in the ensemble, does not always strike true to life.

The show's design is rudimentary, even by Off-Off-Broadway standards. Given D. Craig M. Napoliello's minimalist set, the lighting and sound must bear a much greater burden in conjuring a sense of place. Sound designer Ben Warner creates a compelling interlay of inner voices and ocean sounds in a crucial suicide scene, but otherwise he does merely serviceable work. Anjeanette Stokes's lighting neither conveys time of day nor distinguishes beach scenes from cave scenes. In one pivotal episode, the lights do not help create the illusion of a forest fire either.

Fallen mostly sticks to strict dramatic realism—with the nastiest violence effectively conducted within earshot offstage. The production gains resonance on those rare occasions when Schultz, serving double duty as director, deploys more obvious stagecraft. A case in point is the opening vignettes in which the entire cast freezes in a sequence of stark dramatic poses intended to convey the plane crash's aftermath. Unfortunately, these moments of dramatic liftoff only serve to underscore the long stretches in between.

Meeting Her Fate

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (A Rave Fable), Caridad Svich's unorthodox retelling of the Iphigenia myth, has received a stylish restaging by the experimental theater company One Year Lease. In bringing playwright Caridad Svich's demanding play—with its many characters and multimedia components—to visceral life, directors Ianthe Demos and Danny Bernardy create a tone poem for our blitzed-out, hyperkinetic, media-saturated age. But this production cannot escape the kitchen-sink syndrome that plagues the work itself: like the play's extra-long name, it tries to pack in so much that meaning and depth are sometimes derailed in the process.

In the Greek myth, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to propitiate the goddess Artemis, who had immobilized the Greek ships in a windless sea on their way to Troy. Agamemnon sends for Iphigenia on the pretense that she is to wed the warrior Achilles. When Iphigenia learns her fate, she at first begs for her life, but then changes her mind, resolving to die.

Inspired by Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis, veteran playwright Svich transplants the myth to a modern netherworld of sex, death, and trance-inducing music, where she reimagines Iphigenia (Brina Stinehelfer) as the daughter of a dictator in an unnamed Latin American country. A news anchor (Nick Flint) reports that the death of the general's daughter would arouse the grief and sympathy he needs to win an upcoming election.

Iphigenia rebels by running off to a rave party, where she hooks up inexplicably with the androgynous rock star Achilles. Along the way, she encounters Violeta Imperial, a soothsaying chicken vendor who was tortured by her father's henchmen, and a chorus consisting of the shades of three of the Mexican factory girls raped and killed in the borderlands (played by masked male actors in drag).

One Year Lease, which has a reputation for high production values, does not disappoint. The rave party in the industrial wasteland at the city's outskirts is vividly rendered by set designer James Hunting with cinderblocks, sawdust, and metal steps and hanging rods. On three onstage TV screens, video engineer Brian Michael Thomas projects hyper-paced news clips and live streaming video that offer counterpoint and comment on the action.

Mike Riggs's inventive lighting, Kay Lee's exuberant costumes (Iphigenia's designer ball gown with its scooped-out miniskirt front is exquisite), and sound engineer David Chessman's pulsating techno music all add to the heady atmospherics of what the rave party's DJ describes as "this synthetic, hard-core fantasy we call a new century."

While sensory overload is the norm, the directors and their production team also appreciate the power of stillness. Thus they add a fascinating silent tableau of Iphigenia and her parents at the dinner table as a prelude. In some of the concluding scenes, after Iphigenia embraces her fate, the torrent of words, lights, and images tapers off and a still, softly lit landscape emerges where the TV screens reflect only the action itself onstage.

The cast deserves credit for maintaining its focus and poise amid the swirl. Stinehelfer captures the conflicting mix of naïveté, petulance, and fear that pulls Iphigenia in different directions. Susannah Malone is powerful both as the alcoholic, withholding mother and the apparition Violeta. The three male actors, playing multiple characters, are suitably creepy as the Mexican Fresa girls, while also excelling in their roles as Achilles (Danny Bernardy), the intrepid news anchor (Nick Flint), and the callous general (Gregory Waller).

One Year Lease, whose mission is to revive classic texts, took the cast and four designers to Greece for three weeks of rehearsal to soak up the country's culture and atmosphere. It's hard, given how far the work strays from the classical story, to assess what impact that strategy had on the results.

But one thing is clear: despite its excesses and occasional incoherence, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart makes for an absorbing night of theater.

Sins of the Fathers

Call him the Iago of Long Island. Marc Palmieri's disquieting new play, Levittown, features one of the most compelling modern villains to grace the New York stage this year. But don't look for a black hat; this guy is smartly dressed in a business suit and tie. Richard Briggs (masterfully played by Curzon Dobell) builds up his ego by asserting his will over his two adult children and tearing them down when they bridle at his control. Now living alone, Richard abandoned his wife and two young kids for another woman, although in his narcissism he has convinced himself that it was his kids who abandoned him.

Dobell's uptight demeanor makes it hard to read his character, leaving his kids—and us—in a state of arrested anxiety. Like a snake in the grass, Richard releases his coiled-up anger in sudden spasms.

Nimbly directed by George Demas, Levittown is a well-crafted domestic drama about family secrets and how the sins of the past are borne by later generations of a middle-class family. The play intends to subvert the myth of domestic happiness incarnated in the cookie-cutter houses built in Long Island's Levittown for G.I.'s returning from World War II.

The play's first scenes are schematic as Palmieri dutifully lays out his themes and introduces the characters. Home after dropping out of yet another college, Richard's older son, Kevin (Brian Barnhart), is poised to unearth his grandfather's old wartime secret—the root of all the hurt and betrayal that follows—among the boxes in the room where he will be sleeping. "What do I need school and degrees for?" Kevin asks in a typically blunt line. "What I really should learn about is right here in this house. Up there in those boxes!"

Kevin has sought to maintain a relationship with his father, while his younger sister, Colleen (Margo Passalaqua), has been estranged from him for five years. In the play's most riveting scene, Colleen decides at her brother's urging to visit her father so he can meet her new fiancé.

The grandfather's living room, designed by Kate Aronsson-Brown, is redolent of 1970's suburbia, with its faux-wood furnishings, overstuffed couch and armchair, and family photos on the walls. She uses essentially the same set for the dad's house, save for flipping the wall at back—a bit of stagecraft that involves more than a little awkward shoving to pull off.

The cast is mostly outstanding. In addition to Dobell's commanding performance as the father, Barnhart stands out in his finely grained portrayal of the self-effacing, quietly troubled brother. Michael Laurence, in a smaller role as the straight-talking firefighter cousin Joey, ignites every scene he is in with his incandescent energy; his wisecracks provide some refreshing levity. Cecelia Riddett does her best in the shallow role of the ditzy mother who spouts new-age beliefs.

Passalaqua delivers a convincing performance in her pivotal scene with her father, but elsewhere she doesn't comfortably inhabit the skin of this battered, psychologically frail young woman. Demas has elicited a sympathetic performance from Joe Viviani as the grandfather, making it hard to believe that he was traumatized by his wartime past and became a withdrawn and withholding father.

Palmieri has tried in his play to create two parallel stories of troubled fathers and children. Yet the intricate tale of how the grandfather comes to terms with his past is ultimately eclipsed by the awful magnetism of the conflict between Richard and his children. It may not have been what the playwright intended, but we have little reason to complain, because in that showdown, Levittown harnesses a level of dramatic energy that makes for a truly exhilarating theatrical experience.

Give Me Shelter

The single mother of an autistic 13-year-old boy collapses from a deadly brain aneurysm in front of her son and her startled sisters and their husbands. Who is to care for the orphaned boy? That is the agonizing question that drives Darci Picoult's intense and carefully wrought drama, Jayson With a Y, a production of the New Group's low-budget "naked" division at the Lion Theater on Theater Row.

The play, directed by Sheryl Kaller, sharpens the dilemma to a fine point. The mother's death comes without warning. One sister, Kyle (Marin Hinkle), is eight months pregnant with her first child. The other, Lynette (Maryann Plunkett), and her husband have plans to leave shortly for a year in Paris. Both women are justifiably reluctant to make the dramatic life changes that taking in their nephew would entail.

The action takes place mostly in Lynette's Manhattan loft apartment during the first days after the death when grief distorts judgment and sets nerves on edge. The strain of deciding what to do with Jason produces a hairline fracture that threatens to shatter the bond between the sisters and the very foundation of both marriages.

Making the drama so convincing is Picoult's precise rendering of the minor details of domestic life—the small tensions, anxieties, and conflicts that suffuse daily living. She also has a knack for mimicking the ellipses and half-sentences of conversation among siblings and longtime couples even as she sets out the leitmotifs that will give the play deeper resonance and a sense of unity.

Among the able cast, Plunkett, who won a Tony for best actress in 1987 for her role in the musical Me and My Girl, is a standout. She brings a fierce emotional energy to her role as the wavering Lynette.

Miles Purinton, a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School, delivers a high-voltage, spot-on performance as the volatile and solitary Jayson, a bright kid who is unable to engage in normal social interactions and erupts in rage when his daily routine is disturbed. Purinton's performance, helped along by Picoult's fine drawing of the character, captures the antipathy and sympathy that Jayson elicits in equal measure.

Picoult is best with female characters. Both husbands are one-dimensional and not very likable. Lynette's husband (Daniel Oreskes) refuses to engage Jayson beyond macho bantering, while Kyle's punctilious husband (Marin Hinkle) tries to argue her out of any sense of duty to the boy. Alysia Reiner is exquisite in the small but key role of Jayson's mother, but it's jarring to see her reappear, with little change in appearance, later in the play as the presiding minister at the mother's funeral and as the director of a residence for children with special needs.

Working with a small black-box stage, set designer Adrian W. Jones conceived a two-room setup that niftily accommodates the play's numerous locations.

Kaller follows Picoult's instructions to overlap the end of each scene with the beginning of the next. Russell H. Champa and Justin Partier's lighting and Shane Rettig's sound smooth the transitions. The strategy creates some weird juxtapositions, but it keeps the dramatic momentum at full tilt despite the multiple scene changes.

The play, 90 minutes without an intermission, builds to a satisfying and not implausible conclusion. It is worth the journey.

Dirty Socks

The 1995 Joe Eszterhas film Showgirls offers a big fat target for parody. Harvey Finklestein's Sock Puppet Showgirls, which is playing Saturday nights at the Ace of Clubs on Great Jones Street, takes up the mission with antic glee—and a dirty mind. The show is a fresh rendition of the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival crowd-pleaser. This raunchy puppet comedy's five puppeteers enthusiastically riff off the movie's basic plot about a young drifter named Nomi Malone who hitchhikes to Las Vegas to become a dancer and claws her way up the slippery pole from lap dancer to Vegas showgirl.

This is downtown theater with all of its coarseness and raw energy. Reinterpreted as a sock puppet, Nomi (played in the movie by Elizabeth Berkeley) has a mane of frizzy blond hair, false eyelashes, and anatomically correct breasts. Her gold-hearted friend, Molly, has been aptly reincarnated as the innocent Lamb Chop.

Encapsulating the essence of the movie character, Nomi erupts periodically in a temper tantrum, screaming, "I am not a whore!" in response to the snide and not unjustified remarks of people she meets.

The movie is rife with scenes and dialogue calling out to be lampooned. The best takeoffs in the puppet show occur when Nomi pole-dances before four ogling Sesame Street muppets waving cash and when Nomi and her mop-haired lover Zack have sex in the pool to the tune of the Captain and Tennille's "Do That to Me One More Time."

The show is stuffed with juvenile gags and lowbrow humor featuring the whimsical puppets with fabulous hair and occasionally a human hand to hold a cigarette or a French fry.

The show's bare-bones puppet theater has no backdrop. Crude cardboard cutouts denote key design elements, including the casinos of Las Vegas, the erupting volcano in the "Goddess" show in which Nomi gains a starring role, the bookend mileage signs for Las Vegas and Los Angeles (the film's producers were thinking optimistically about a sequel), and the staircase down which Nomi pushes her rival, Crystal.

While familiarity with Showgirls is recommended, the evening is not devoid of entertainment if you are not acquainted with this camp classic. The show clocks in at a spry 55 minutes, which is about as long as this sort of humor can sustain itself—and as long as most people can tolerate the uncomfortable fold-up chairs provided in this basement club with a bar.

A word to the wise: avoid the front row, where you will find yourself dodging spray-can Silly String and water-gun spray. Otherwise, have a few drinks and enjoy the pleasant buzz that this show provides.

Are You Scared Yet?

"Sometimes the scariest monster in the world is the guy sitting next to you in the dark," says a character in the first of four unsettling one-acts by emerging playwrights in Dread Awakening. The two scariest plays of the evening exploit that idea to nerve-jarring effect. In the first, Bloody Mary by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a teenager scares his girlfriend out of her wits as they drive down a deserted road at night. In the other, Sleep Mask by Eric Sanders, a black facemask becomes the device that drives a woman to hysterical fear of her husband. Each play keeps us on tenterhooks with hard-to-predict plot lines and quicksilver shifts of mood and tempo.

The four plays together demonstrate how solid writing and acting are the essential ingredients of all good theater, including the theater of horror. The temptation to indulge in special effects must have been great, but the design team for the four dramas, which each have different directors, is notable for its restraint and nuance. The 45th Street Theater's cavernous black box provides a fitting backdrop.

Bloody Mary, nimbly directed by Pat Diamond, begins in the dark with the disembodied voice of a man saying "Bloody Mary" over and over. Our fears are temporarily allayed when the stage lights switch on to reveal Ben (the handsome and chipper Jedadiah Schultz) reciting the phrase as his ditsy girlfriend (Christianna Nelson) applies lipstick. "How many was that?" Ben asks, explaining how, following the child's game, he is trying to conjure a blood-soaked Mary.

The allusions to classic horror movies come at us fast and furious. The pair, both horror movie buffs, are off to Shadow Lake to film a "mockumentary" about the slaughter of camp counselors on the site of an Indian burial ground. Even the night drive, as Ben tells Amy, mirrors the opening sequence from the Twilight Zone movie. But Aguirre-Sacasa, who writes for Marvel Comics, recycles these clichés in such a playful and ironic way that the audience is kept guessing—and exhilarated—right through to the 49th and final recitation of Bloody Mary's name.

Likewise Sleep Mask keeps us debating whether what we are watching is truly appalling or just a bizarre misunderstanding with the potential for tragic consequences. Annie (Jenny Gammello) awakens from a nightmare to find her husband James (Joe Plummer) next to her wearing a skin-tight leather mask. Uncertain whether she is awake or still dreaming, she demands that he remove the mask. He refuses, insisting that it's a sleep mask to keep his skin soft and wrinkle-free. The play, directed by Amanda Charlton, veers from black comedy to horror and back.

The other two plays fall short in different ways. A love triangle works itself out in a predictable, though disturbing, fashion in Treesfall by Justin Swain. Director Jessica Davis-Irons has encouraged flat, high-contrast performances from her actors, but more ambiguity and shading might have given the story more power.

Directed by Arin Arbus, Pearls, the shortest and slightest of the four plays, is a monologue delivered by a creepy dentist (Robert Funaro), who plays out sexual fantasies on a lovely client as she lies etherized before him. Playwright Clay McLeod Chapman slowly reels viewers into his tale, keeping us in suspense about its meaning and then embarking on a devilish flight of fancy about sexual arousal via a woman's teeth. The play is over, however, before it has set off much more than a frisson of revulsion in the audience.

Whatever its small flaws, the evening fulfills its title's promise. These four plays awaken our dread.

Then and Now

Norman & Beatrice: A Marriage in Two Acts makes an extraordinary demand on its two actors: they play an elderly man with dementia and his loving wife in 2001 and return after the intermission to play the same characters as newlyweds in 1947. Directed by David Travis, this traditional new play by Barbara Hammond, featuring veteran actors Graeme Malcolm and Jane Nichols, soars in the first act but stumbles badly when it leaps back in time in Act II. The opening act captures the texture and rhythm of lived experience shaped into a satisfying dramatic arc. According to the program notes, Hammond wrote it after a visit to her parents' home in the months before her father died. Set in the kitchen of the couple's modest, small-town Wisconsin home (the splendid set design is by Luke Hegel-Cantarella), the 40-minute act is a closely observed, poignant rendition of the havoc that Alzheimer's disease inflicts on the victim's sense of self and history, and the vigilance and patience required of the caregiver.

Norman, the former mayor of his small town, inhabits a confused, anxious mental state in which fantasy and reality blur, the familiar often turns strange and disconcerting, and the past devours the present. Malcolm astutely conveys Norman's fractured reality while never losing touch with the old man's humanity. Beatrice, meanwhile, spryly maintains the thread of a "normal" conversation, patiently filling in the pieces of himself that Norman has forgotten. Nichols's matter-of-fact Beatrice takes her new circumstances in stride without self-pity.

The scene is not maudlin or depressing. The enduring bond between Norman and Beatrice leavens the sadness of this final chapter. "We should get married," remarks Norman at one point. "We are married," Beatrice reminds him. "We are?” replies Norman. "Holy Toledo! I'm a lucky guy."

This first act stood alone as a one-act play for five years, until, Hammond says in the program notes, she was inspired to write a prelude after she unearthed a short film of her parents' wedding. Set in the same kitchen, stripped of the accretions of a half-century of living, this second act finds Beatrice pregnant with her first child and Norman setting out on his political career.

The second act, a pale derivative of the first, has the feel of a writing exercise. In it, Hammond shoehorns in one snippet of dialogue after another that we heard previously in the first act, but the echoes rarely achieve resonance. Instead, we discover that the non sequiturs that Norman utters in the throes of dementia are the remnants of surprisingly banal conversation.

Perhaps trying not to present too idyllic a view of the young couple, Hammond veers too far in the opposite direction. The misunderstandings and personality differences that come to light make it hard to believe that this man and woman got married in the first place, let alone stayed together for more than 50 years. It doesn't help matters that Malcolm and Nichols are mature actors. Nichols has the toughest time. In a drama that strives for realism, it seems unfair to ask an actress probably closing in on age 60 to play a 21-year-old woman.

Ultimately, it's a shame that the intricate story of a marriage that we glimpse in the first act must remain buried there.

Once Upon a Time

In recent decades, literary scholars have fastened on fairy tales as a key to unlocking the mysteries of the national psyche. Fairy Tale Monologues: Fables With Attitude, in a sometimes wickedly funny and subversive production staged by Point of You Productions, takes this premise and runs with it, reimagining these age-old stories as miniature psychodramas and endowing the inhabitants of Fairyland with modern identities and motives.

Directed by Jeff Love, the play consists of 10 segments, each running roughly eight minutes. One by one, in no apparent order, fancifully dressed fairy-tale characters, including King Midas, Tom Thumb, Snow White, and Goldilocks, take their turn on the stage, which is sparsely adorned with a signpost and a rectangular box, and tell the audience their stories.

The press release promises that the fairy-tale characters will "tell you what really happens when their story ends. Is it truly 'Happily Ever After'?" But writer Paul Weissman does more: he relays each tale's aftermath but also reimagines the tale itself as well as the events preceding it. With few plot links between the tales, each monologue succeeds or fails on its own merits, which makes for an uneven evening.

In the funniest sketch (the only one that's not a monologue), Hansel and Gretel, two wide-eyed, doughy German children dressed in lederhosen, explain where they were last night to their stepmother (whom we neither hear nor see). Gretel's attempt to present a plausible alibi is undermined at each turn by Hansel's interjections about candy-cane houses and witches, propelling the girl to concoct in exasperation the fairy tale's twists and turns. Triumph swiftly turns to frenzied denials when their stepmother informs them that she's just been on the phone with Rapunzel's mom, who presented a different version of events. Love and Alyssa Mann offer precisely synchronized, pitch-perfect portrayals of the not so innocent kinder.

The other standout monologue of the evening is delivered by the Big Bad Wolf, played by the brawny Gerard J. Savoy with just the right combination of piqued pride and smarminess. The wolf argues half-convincingly to the audience that he's gotten "a bad rap." A construction contractor and father of "a couple of litters," the wolf recounts how he was unfairly exiled for burning down the houses of the three pigs (for whom he cannot conceal his contempt) and later found companionship with Granny until Little Red Riding Hood—a self-absorbed teenage grandchild—enters the picture.

Weissman and his actors get off some good laughs, with Goldilocks as a masquerading, gender-bending bandit (Love); Tinkerbell (Marlise Garde) and Snow White (Melanie Kuchinski Rodriguez) as spurned lovers; and King Midas as the amoral, gold-mongering ruler who does not see any tragedy in his golden touch.

But when Weissman tries to go deeper and become serious, he ironically becomes shallower. The change in mood is jarring for the audience and is not justified by stories that genuinely tug at the heart. Weissman, as actor, falters in his earnest portrayal of Pinocchio as a young man who mistakenly thought he could win his detached father's love by becoming human. Even more of a drag on the evening is David Holt's Tom Thumb, who loses his uniqueness when he grows up—and grows ordinary in stature.

The final monologue should rightfully be delivered by the commitment-phobic dreamboat, Prince Charming (Johnny Blaze Leavitt), given how it neatly circles back to the opening, when Snow White confesses how she is in jail for poisoning the prince in a fit of jealousy. Instead, the evening concludes with an unfortunate thud, courtesy of Sleeping Beauty (Cassandra Cooke), who awakens from a long sleep as an iPod-toting, tiara-wearing jogger who fondly remembers her prior life as a nasty, self-absorbed princess.

Despite its ups and downs, Fairytale Monologues shows that children's fairy tales can be the source of great humor, and an artful mirror of the human condition.

Holiday Treat

Only a Scrooge would not be infected with the spirit of Christmas after seeing the delightful musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol that Personal Space Theatrics is presenting for a fourth season. Dickens's hoary tale of crippled Tiny Tim and the old miser who learns the true value of Christmas may appear to cry out for parody or some other form of radical reinvention. But in his beautifully crafted, faithful rendition of the classic, director Stephen Wargo demonstrates the value of close attention to the original story and its emotional nuances.

Wargo keeps the action moving at a sprightly clip through dramatic vignettes spliced with rousing song-and-dance sequences and snatches of narration told by the 23-member company in Greek chorus fashion. The actors spread out through the two aisles and a midpoint landing in the audience section (part of an extended stage), allowing for more inventive choreography, by Ann Robideaux, in the relatively confined space.

Leading the topnotch cast, which includes three able child actors, is Robert Ian Mackenzie, whose bushy eyebrows and craggy features make him the perfect embodiment of Ebenezer Scrooge even before the first "Humbug!" bursts from his lips.

Nicholas Alexiy Moran as Bob Cratchit and Michael Poignand as Fred infuse their leaner roles with warm humanity. Also worthy of special mention are Michael Salonia and Kathleen Hinders as the roguish Mr. Fezziwig, under whom Scrooge apprenticed as a young man, and his saucy wife.

The spare set by David Esler consists of tall lantern posts that serve double duty as coat racks, garlands draped on the walls, a large slab of black construction board, and 10 large black cubes. Bringing it all to life is the work of lighting designer Timothy Swiss and sound designer Chris Rummel, who both work in bold strokes.

Costume designer Jessa-Raye Court does yeoman's work outfitting the large cast in period costumes (at a low budget). But it is in her depiction of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future that she gets to flex her creative muscle. For two of the spirits, she uses gold paper masks, which give them an appropriately otherworldly cast.

A good example of the able teamwork of the production's designers is Marley's Ghost, who is dimly lit by a green spotlight and whose frayed finery gives off puffs of dust as he moves.

Expertly arranged by Dianne Adams McDowell, the musical sequences are embedded so organically in the drama that the transitions in and out of song are virtually invisible. Matt Vinson, the musical director, provides spirited accompaniment on piano.

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol opens and closes with a medley of Christmas carols and hymns, both traditional and obscure. The full company belts out these tunes in a manner as resonant and uplifting as any church choir's.

You'll leave the theater in high spirits, humming under your breath and thinking better of the world than it probably deserves for the rest of your day or night.

Deadly Puzzle

Imagine a series of books, like Ukrainian nesting dolls, whose parallel plots lead the reader further and further back in time. And then imagine that the characters depicted in those books are real people who discover the books and are unnerved to read about themselves, as well as others leading parallel lives. That is the original premise of Canadian playwright Jayson McDonald's Jigsaw, an enjoyable mystery receiving its U.S. debut at the Wings Theater. Alas, the play, which McDonald also directed, staggers under this complex structure while recycling one too many horror genre clich

No Holds Barred

Isobel, the ghost of a 7-year-old Portuguese child, hovers over a chain of loosely linked vignettes that depict people in extremis in the Alternate Theatre's gripping production of Canadian playwright Judith Thompson's 1990 drama A Lion in the Streets. Thompson's themes could be ripped from The Jerry Springer Show: infidelity, assisted suicide, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, sex and the disabled. Thompson fearlessly puts her foot to the pedal and doesn't let up. In the process, her characters scream in rage, keen in despair, and attack one another physically and verbally.

In less capable hands, all this would quickly devolve into melodrama or farce. But Thompson brings such intelligence, empathy, and humor to the task that the results are often revelatory. Helped by a talented cast of young actors who juggle multiple parts, she convinces us that we are watching real people act out their primal urges, even as the unfolding events become less and less realistic.

Thus a well-heeled mother (Tracy Weller) calls a meeting of parents to hysterically blast the working-class day care provider (Amanda Boekelheide) for feeding their kids sugary foods. A man (James Ryan Caldwell) tracks down a boyhood friend (Nathan Blew) in a quest to rip out his memory of their homosexual encounter. A severely disabled woman (Boekelheide) rises from her wheelchair and performs an erotic dance with her fantasy lover (Blew) before a straitlaced reporter. A soccer mom in sweatpants (a riveting Rachel Schwartz), humiliated by her husband's public declaration of an affair, begins a striptease for him in front of his lover and their friends in a desperate ploy to win him back.

To pull off the play's whipsaw swings in mood requires a talented design team, and the group that Canadian director Kareem Fahmy has assembled rises to the task. Of particular note is the work of Andrew Lu on lighting and Andrew Papadeas's sound and music. To pack the biggest emotional punch, Fahmy has smartly coached his actors to play their roles to the hilt without ever crossing over to caricature.

It's not surprising that a play as ambitious as Lion in the Streets is imperfect. The first act is much stronger than the second, and at two hours and 40 minutes, the play is a half-hour too long. Tania Molina, a big-boned woman, has the thankless task of portraying the child Isobel, who speaks broken English and has little of interest to contribute. The play's conclusion