Small Town's Dark Secrets

Missouri-born Lanford Wilson, a pioneer of the Off-Off Broadway movement in the 1960's, has emerged as one of the theater's most cogent chroniclers of American life. In Book of Days, one of his best works, he combines the moral currency of Arthur Miller with the narrative finesse of Tennessee Williams. Thanks to New World Theatre, a new Off-Off Broadway theater company, New Yorkers have an opportunity to see a well-crafted production of this 1999 drama if they missed the New York City premiere, which was part of the Signature Theater's 2002-2003 season devoted to Wilson's work.

The evening opens with the 12-member cast reciting in choral fashion anodyne phrases about their fictional small town of Dublin, Mo. It is a device that recalls the stage manager of Our Town, but we soon realize that we have wandered far from Thornton Wilder territory.

The play, intelligently directed by Robert A. Zick Jr., unfolds as a series of vignettes. Each is framed by a date and a descriptive phrase

Manhattan Puppetry

Eliza's Window, Natalie Burgess's captivating puppet play with music, illustrates how children's theater can edify even as it entertains. The hourlong play, being staged on Saturday afternoons through August by Paper City Productions in Manhattan Theatre Source's tiny second-story theater near Washington Square Park, is unapologetically moral without coming off as preachy, thanks to its wry humor and generosity of spirit.

The play follows the puppet Eliza, a depressed, wheelchair-bound girl whose well-to-do parents have recently split up, as she gradually learns from a parade of wise animals and spirits that money and what your friends think of you are less important than discovering your own song and appreciating the unique music that others make.

Creator and director Burgess, who spent three years at the Central Park Zoo as a performer, songwriter, and puppeteer, manages also to demystify music and music making for kids. As one of the musicians instructs Eliza about composing a song, "It's as easy as 1-2-3-4."

Eliza's Window can be enjoyed by the entire family. Burgess does not talk kid talk. She rightly assumes that children will stick with a compelling story that is imaginatively rendered and well paced, even if some of the jokes and big words go sailing over their heads en route to the parents in the audience.

The play might not travel well, however, since so much of the story is New York-centric, whether it's the running subplot about Pale Male, the Central Park red-tailed hawk, or Eliza's suggestions that the turtle looking for the "pond of plenty" check out Rockefeller Center, and that the rabbit seeking a garden head to a certain basketball arena.

Every element of the play has been carefully conceived, crafted, and executed, from the whimsical set design and puppets to the engaging songs. Burgess and the three other cast members

I Am Not a Camera

"So overdone, you know what I mean? The photographic image. As memory thread, 'window into the past'

Barnyard Satire

It is no small challenge to give a new lease on life to French playwright Edmond Rostand's 1910 allegorical drama Chantecler, even for the title-bestowing rooster who believes that his song can call forth the dawn. The Adhesive Theater Project makes a valiant attempt in its low-budget production at the Teatro LA TEA on the Lower East Side, but the company gets bogged down in the script's honeyed lyricism and the unwieldy menagerie of more than 100 talking birds and animals. Director Cory Einbinder has trimmed about a half-hour from the three-hour play, but it still feels about an hour too long. Part social satire and part barnyard fable, Chantecler is considered a minor play in the oeuvre of Rostand, who achieved international acclaim as the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. The play ran for nearly 100 performances in its first English-language production in 1911, based largely on advance ticket sales generated by the gender-bending casting of the popular stage actress Maude Adams as the rooster. This is its first New York City revival in a new translation by Kay Nolte Smith, who sacrificed natural speech rhythms

Portrait of the Artist

Deco Diva, the one-woman curtain-raiser in the 59E59 Theater's festival of new British plays, has an unusual credit line: written, performed, and painted by Kara Wilson. Over the span of this hourlong, finely etched portrayal of chic Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, Wilson produces an accomplished copy of one of the artist's most famous oil portraits. It's a gimmick, but one that this veteran Scottish actress employs with panache in her zeal to bring her subject to life. Lempicka makes for a succulent subject, given her penchant for flouting social mores and the intersection of her life with the pivotal historical events of the early 20th century. With her exotic origins, love of luxury, and sexual daring, she embodied the zeitgeist of Paris of the 1920s, when the city was a beacon of personal and artistic freedom.

A Polish-born Russian

Historical Crossroads

Seasoned by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Paris of the 1840s was, not unlike 80 years later, a magnet for artists, intellectuals, and radicals from across Europe. It was a decade when the world was out of balance: a crisis of the old society coincided with a crisis of the new, spawning great political and cultural ferment. Among those drawn to the city in that decade were three lions of 19th-century German history: Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and poet Heinriche Heine. Working in the tradition of such cerebral, history-minded playwrights as Michael Frayne and Tom Stoppard, American literary critic and essayist Jonathan Leaf imagines the interaction of these three men in The Germans in Paris, an intriguing though tendentious play about the dueling of men and their ideas that is based loosely on actual events.

In fact, two actual duels

From Scavenger to Mail-Order Bride

Smoke billows up through lofty ridges of puckered mauve fabric in which garbage nestles in a phantasmagoric rendering of Smokey Mountain, a massive dump on the outskirts of Manila that provided sustenance of sorts to 20,000 Filipino scavengers. At ground level, in complementary colors, are the study and bedroom of a real estate broker's upscale Park Slope apartment. This inventive set by Dan Kuchar depicts the twin poles of Linda Faigao-Hall's The Female Heart, an ambitious new play that follows Adelfa (played with aplomb by Rona Figueroa) in her journey from scavenger to Starbucks employee to college grad to mail-order bride.

While the political message is hammered home where a light tapping would have done the trick, the playwright manages to seed enough compelling details in Adelfa's story to sustain our attention. Director Jamie Roberts's sure-footed blocking plus the work of her talented design team help smooth the play's leaps through time and space.

We learn about Smokey Mountain, which was demolished in 1993 to make way for a never-built housing development, through the clunky device of spot news reporting by an Australian journalist, wittily portrayed by Sean Sutherland, who interviews Adelfa's brother Anghel (Victor Lirio) at the dump in 1992 in the play's opening scene and returns to the site nine years later in the final scene.

In between those expository bookends, Faigao-Hall vividly dramatizes the mercilessness of poverty, the forces that drive immigration, the miscues and incongruities between Filipino and U.S. culture, and how profoundly important the money sent by migrant relatives is for families back home. What she doesn't do as effectively, alas, is create convincing, multidimensional characters, despite the laudable efforts of the cast.

The play's title comes from the Tagalog phrase for a man or woman with a tender heart. Adelfa and her brother share that quality. Through an extended flashback, we learn that Anghel secretly took a job as a dancer in a male sex club to finance his family's escape from Smokey and pay his sister's way through college. But when Anghel falls seriously ill, it is Adelfa's turn to sacrifice in order to pay for his medical care. Adelfa and her mother decide that marriage to a rich American his surname, they happily note, is Golden�is the best choice among unappealing options.

The Female Heart picks up momentum even as the plot grows less plausible when the main action shifts to Brooklyn. Roger Golden (Tim Davis), a good-looking businessman in his 30s, turns out to be controlling and prone to angry eruptions, but penitent and self-reflective at other moments. Adelfa not only accepts her plight, negotiating larger and larger sums of money from Golden as the relationship becomes more confining and brutal, but appears to fall in love with him.

By play's end, things have come full circle. As his sister's letters and phone calls dry up, Anghel recalls the family's final day at the dump, when the three danced with hopeful glee, as the happiest day of his life. "My dear Adelfa, don't send any more things," he writes. "They're just things, Adelfa. Stuff. And it always comes down to this. Someday they'll be garbage."

Growing Up Disabled

At the opening of her solo work Birth Story, Hillary Baack peers out at the audience in the intimate environs of the Barrow Theater and flashes a warm, infectious smile each time she makes eye contact. Having established that connection, she begins to sign words animatedly. "Let me tell you that again in your language," she says with a chuckle, breaking the silence. "I've got three things. Three problems. Three disabilities. Three things to freak you out. Three burdens. Three blessings. Three gifts."

In the lisping cadences of the deaf, Baack tells us how her father realized when she was 6 months old that she was deaf, except for residual hearing in the lower registers. "Let me tell you that story again," she says, beginning to sign for the deaf audience members seated to the right of the stage.

Thus does 25-year-old Baack, an actress making her debut as a playwright, reel us into her world in this modest, autobiographical play that has the feel of an intimate conversation with a stranger.

In a series of vivid anecdotes, Baack tells us about her brush with death as a newborn, how the toes of her left foot fell off due to a blood clot during that episode (thing No. 2), a doctor's misdiagnosis of brain damage when she was 3, and another near-fatal illness in eighth grade that led doctors to discover she had contracted hepatitis B from a tainted blood transfusion (thing No. 3).

You might expect such a harrowing tale to rouse our pity or sympathy, but Baack is so personable and infuses her account with such zest, humor, and rich detail that her story instead creates a strong sense of connectedness to her. We root for her as she grapples with her disabilities and confronts the graceless reactions they often provoke in others.

Director and producer Alex P. Baack, Hillary's husband, has mounted a spare production, keeping the focus squarely on Baack's narrative. The lighting by Stuart Nelson is mostly naturalistic, and Stuart Dance is light-handed with the sound design. The set, by Kyle Nelson, consists of a bare stage with a wicker chair and a small trunk, out of which Baack pulls simple props such as a green bathing cap and goggles, a cloth mannequin, and cheerleading pompoms.

From a corner of the stage, LeTishia Whitney signs those long sections of the play that Baack does not. Besides serving the deaf audience, her expressive translation offers a visual echo of Baack's words.

The hourlong play flags near the end when Baack recounts recent experiences that do not have the same resonance as her coming-of-age stories, and when she drops her jaunty tone for a self-described "rant." But these are minor complaints. It is a pleasure to watch Baack's gradual acceptance and embrace of her "birth story" in this affecting play. We come away with a deeper appreciation of how life is lived in the interstices of what we are given and what we make of it.

Unlikely Pair

Pyretown tells the story of the romance between a divorced mother and a young man in a wheelchair. The play

A Dark Comedy From Ireland

A play about a young man dying of a fatal illness runs the risk of turning mawkish. But Irish playwright Aidan Mathews engages the subject of illness and dying with a refreshing candor and lack of sentiment in Communion, a dark and cerebral comedy of manners that is receiving its American premiere at the Origin Theatre Company. Jordan, whose medical studies were cut short by a brain tumor, has returned to his boyhood home in an upscale Dublin suburb. Lying in a hospital cot in his bedroom, sweet-tempered Jordan is cared for and entertained by his brittle mother, his troubled younger brother Marcus, Marcus

An Amazonian Tale

Federico Restrepo and his Loco 7 Troupe

Communication Breakdown

With a play entitled Electra Speaks (v.2), we are primed to wonder what it is that she has to say. But this smart and mordantly funny drama instead dissects the neuroses and self-protective behavior that can sabotage genuine communication, particularly for women. The inverse of the serial-character solo show so in vogue these days, talented young playwright Laura Camien's new play--a sequel to Volume 1, which I did not see, that can stand alone--has five actors play shifting facets of the same young, single woman in her fitful quest to say what she means and mean what she says. The conceit underscores the play's notion of identity as fluid and opaque.

Even as Electra uses words to deflect, bluff and conceal--anything but communicate--the play, under the astute direction of Emilia Goldstein, itself delights in wordplay (