Last Writes

The Funeralogues, Stacy Mayer’s tragicomic solo show, is less about death than it is about how different people lament the dead differently. The show, which Mayer conceived with writer Robert Charles Gompers, lifts quotes from various peoples' eulogies, famous and little-known, real and fictional. And by virtue of being performed in a real place of worship (the Upper East Side’s All Souls Chapel), Funeralogues feels like an actual service. I know I left feeling lifted. Early on in the show and periodically throughout, Mayer acts out a fictionalized version of herself in order to trace her curiosity with death and the traditions attached to it. She recalls, in the voice and mindset of a five-year-old, a funeral she held for a Barbie doll as a child. She explains that she has crashed many a funeral and adopts the guise of various mourners she has met over the years. Mayer even performs her own hypothetical, idealized eulogy, in which she has lived a perfect, philanthropic existence.

Director Molly Marinik keeps the tone of Funeralogues on an even keel so that as Mayer’s vignettes veer off into more serious territory, the material never feels too manipulative or morose. The material certainly does, though, shift to the more serious side. Mayer portrays an elderly woman who has attended the funeral of thirteen siblings. She recites text from a member of The Casualty Assistance Calling Operations, eulogizing soldiers killed in Afghanistan (it falls on him to console the soldiers’ grieving parents). She quotes from a eulogy written for a deceased fireman by a Midwestern teacher. Mayer even remembers a prayer that her own grandfather distributed in life, later read at his funeral by the actress’s mother.

Perhaps one of the most moving and dramatically impressive moments of the Funeralogues occurs when Mayer takes on the role of an African-American man who read from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy for the several little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. Mayer’s diverse skills are on display throughout her show – she can play young, old, male, female, humor, grief, all with equal conviction.

The Funeralogues is structurally sound. Marinik has Mayer’s character speak with the other characters before inhabiting them. And it is to her and Marinik’s credit that every shift of character and scenario is done gracefully; the audience never suffers from whiplash on this clever ride. A show that could have easily felt bipolar instead feels amazingly coherent.

Marinik’s physical staging is also to be commended. The All Souls Chapel is a small performance space not ideally suited to theatrics. However, the director’s blocking kept Mayer moving around enough so that she never seems glued to the lectern in the center. As a result, the audience never gets a chance to feel restless and Marinik solves the problem of tricky sight lines. I very rarely had to lean around the woman seated in front of me to catch what Mayer was doing.

Additionally, several of the technical members of the Funeralogues crew are crucial to the experience. Lutin Tanner’s lighting goes a long way to helping Mayer achieve the play’s necessary funereal feel. Jim Lahti, the pianist, also does deft work.

More than anything, though, Funeralogues is Mayer’s show. Though this is a major showcase for the talent, she knows better than to ham it up. The actress has the talent and the timing, but she also has that something extra that separates the good from the extraordinary. There is an extra inimitable spark that makes her unendingly watchable for the duration of the show; she endears herself to the audience from the first moment she walks up to the lectern and has them in her thrall in each scenario until the play’s end.

The play itself is not perfect; I do not think that it would suffer by shaving off several later anecdotes Either way, the conclusion of The Funeralogues, which provides a bit of a twist, is certainly earned. The show is a meditation on life, love and death. And its star, Stacy Mayer, is the sweetest angel one could ever want to lead them to the pearly gates.

A Woman's Work

Pioneering artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life spanned nearly a century. The mid-Westerner’s best-known paintings accomplished the feat of merging abstract and real images in conjuring the images of such inanimate objects as flowers, rocks, and animal bones, in addition to landscapes. After bringing her distinctly American style to Europe, she eventually settled in New Mexico later in her long life. It is at his point in her life that we meet O’Keeffe in Retrospective. This work was created as part of the InGenius workshop series at the Manhattan Theatre Source in the Village. Joan Tewkesbury, the beautiful mind behind the Robert Altman film Nashville, has written and directed this look at the personal gains and losses incurred by an artist.

Tandy Cronyn plays O’Keeffe, who spends much of the play talking to the ghost of her late husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Sam Tsoutsouvas), as she labors on an essay to write for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 retrospective on the man. Though these conversations, which often delve into heated arguments, are among the more enjoyable parts of the play, Tewkesbury saddles Cronyn with the unenviable task of carrying Retrospective largely through a series of monologues in which O’Keeffe bemoans what she has seen and done.

Retrospective is perhaps best suited for students of art and art history. Much of the show is reliant on some basic outside knowledge of the painter’s life and her work. A lot of the play centers on recollections and accusations between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, as they recall various affairs. For the art newcomer, however, this play can feel a little foreign, and even redundant as one tries to make sense of the leads’ marriage using context clues. To add to the confusion, occasional peripheral characters appear and re-appear with no real cause, adding to the disjointed feel of the play.

Cronyn does much to make Retrospective work. She makes every bit of O’Keeffe’s struggles – the woman’s body, sight, and creativity are all failing her – palpable. The entrance of a younger character, Frank (Michael Wolfe), a young potter who courts O’Keeffe despite the fact that he happens to be married, is a smart choice in that it helps break up the play and allows the audience to see a less guarded side of O’Keeffe. Personally, I wish that Tewkesbury had pushed this subplot further; both it and the character of Frank have more potential, and it could have shown further evidence of the artist’s vulnerability.

As the two men who alternate in O’Keefe’s life, both Tsoutsouvas and Wolfe are dynamic presences. I fully believed in Tsoutsouvas’ scenes with Cronyn that the two shared a history, and an intimacy, that she could feel long after his death. The actor also carefully measures Stieglitz’s volatile temper. Wolfe impresses as well, though since he has less to work with, I was left to wonder what the actor could do with a more enhanced role.

Ultimately though, Retrospective is a mixed bag, full of good intentions, excellent actors, and potential. With some further honing, Tewkesbury can make good on its promise.

Winter of 69

Breakups are a serious state of affairs, and usually both parties bear some responsibility for the end of the relationship. The couple that reaches a tipping point in <I<Stay Over, directed by Matt Morillo at the Theater for the New City, can blame their problems on a single source: a middling script that has no identity of its own. Though they’ve been together in the neighborhood of a decade, Mark (Tom Pilutik) and Michelle (Lori Faiella) can’t seem to move forward in their relationship, so the two have gone on a break for several months. During this time, Michelle has allowed Mark one opportunity to stray with one girl. Michelle returns to Mark’s apartment, #69, on a severe wintry night to reconcile.

First, though, she wants to hear the details of his dalliance, punishing him for something she had given him permission to do. It’s not much later that we learn Michelle, too, has strayed in her time apart from Mark, and the fact that he doesn’t put her through a similar line of questioning makes Michelle not only a hypocrite but also just plain cruel.

I have a feeling that audience sympathy in Stay Over will fall along gender lines. One reason for this is that both a male and a female pitched in on the writing. Morillo (of last year’s relationship comedy All Aboard the Marriage Hearse) and Maria Micheles adapted Micheles’ own Sleepover, a more dramatic version of a New York love triangle, and yet Stay Over still feels as though it is in draft form. It is hard to root for any single character, almost as though the writers were friends of the couple, too afraid to commit to taking a side.

Early on, Michelle comes off as the affronted party, having been betrayed after what may have just been a test of Mark, and Faiella goes a long way toward making the audience share her anguish, especially as the character appears more vindictive than wronged. Pilutik’s performance, meanwhile, is both age- and character-appropriate. He makes Mark, an actor, seem rational, moderately narcissistic, and possessive of a healthy sexual appetite, rather than merely a hedonistic cad. This makes it harder to hate him, and easier to care about the two of them.

Perhaps these hard-working actors would be helped if Micheles and Morillo gave at least a little background about the characters’ pasts. The script leaves many questions unanswered (what finally pushed Michelle to let Mark cheat? What had kept them together for all the years prior to that?), but watching the two actors at work, I found myself investing in what these two had and hoping to find out more about what made them work as a couple and what complicated the matter.

At least for a while. Then Lilly (JessAnn Smith) enters the play as the other woman, and Stay Over began taking crazy turns, some of which I even mean literally. Lilly, it turns out, not only had an affair with Mark, but also has a surprising connection to Michelle. The dynamics of the triangle that ensues is funny and unpredictable only to those who have never seen an episode of Three’s Company. Each character tries to outsmart the others as though this were some twisted episode of Survivor in which the winner gets to be in a relationship, but Lilly, Mark and Michelle increasingly appear to care only about themselves, making the audience care less and less about who might end up with whom.

Part of the reason for this is because Lilly doesn’t quite fit in. Faiella and Pilutik look and act like people in their early thirties, suggesting a believable balance of experience and confusion when it comes to relationships. Lilly, on the other hand, is supposed to be in her early twenties, but Smith’s vocal intonations suggest someone even younger, weakening this pivotal triangle. It is bad enough that she doesn’t seem to post a viable threat to Michelle, but she actually comes off as jailbait for Mark. A dance Lilly performs late in Stay Over (choreographed by the actress herself) comes off more clumsy than seductive.

Morillo’s staging also leaves something to be desired. The downstairs theater at TNC is a small space, but I spent roughly two-thirds of the show contorting myself in an attempt to see the action onstage around the people seated in the rows in front of me. Perhaps Morillo could have blocked more of the action upstage to allow his audience to see more given the confines of the venue.

As hard as Faiella and Pilutik may try, without further repairs, Stay Over is currently one affair not worth remembering.

Such Sweet Sorrow

Filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh’s works are often exercises in endurance. His works cover the quotidian, the everyday lives of everyday people, with a healthy mix of social observation thrown in for good measure. He rarely adds even a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down. And yet his catalog of work is so rich, every minute is worth sitting through, which is why theater companies time and again excavate his shows to perform. This is also largely the reason why Horse Trade Theater Group and Black Door Theatre Company have chosen to revive Leigh’s 1979 play Ecstasy. While the blueprint with which the companies work is an excellent, insightful play, the individuals involved in this current production, directed by Sara Laudonia at the Red Room, deserve much of the credit for revisiting this work so successfully.

Jean (Mary Monahan) is the fulcrum upon which Ecstasy pivots. The show looks at only two nights in her life, but it clear that Jean wants more for her life and doubts that she will ever have the resolve to seek it out. In one sense, not much happens. She has an affair with Roy (Josh Marcantel), a volatile married man whose wife, Val (Lore Davis), later arrives to wreak havoc. She shares tea with her friend Dawn (Gina LeMoine) and discusses her humdrum life.

There is more talking later, as Jean takes Dawn, Dawn’s husband, Mick (Brandon McCluskey), and Len (Stephen Heskett), an old friend who has recently moved back to town, back to her small London flat following a night of drinking. They have arrived under the pretense of fixing Jean’s bed (Val broke it during her melee), but the unspoken motivation also seems to be to pair Len up with Jean. The drinking continues, as the characters smoke, sing, dance, and reminisce.

There is a lot of talking in Ecstasy, and Laudonia’s production achieves an incredibly intimate effect. Though its size and poor acoustics sometimes make The Red Room a difficult venue in which to perform, it is perfect for this show. The audience has the perfect fly-on-the-wall perspective to watch Jean and her friends. Additionally, the music that sometimes creeps through the theater walls only adds to the lack of privacy and need to escape that Jean must feel in her solitary existence. (Ecstasy would benefit, though, from an intermission before the play’s long, last scene).

Monahan is extraordinary as Jean, anchoring the show with the character’s combination of regret, indifference, and surrender. Pay attention to her in the character’s “in-between” moments, when Jean is quietly reacting to another character’s comment or thinking of what to say or do next. This is a performance in which the wheels are clearly always turning.

The lead actress is matched by each of her peers. LeMoine proves Dawn to be a loyal friend and nimbly talks a blue streak, while balancing the additional challenge of looking progressively more inebriated. Heskett makes Len, a bumbling man, warm and charming, and McCluskey continually breathes life into the show with his energized comical delivery. Davis’ and Marcantel’s work is also solid. Page Clements is credited as the dialect coach for Ecstasy, though I have no idea which actors required such training; the English and Irish accents employed in this show sounded universally authentic to me.

Laudonia’s attentive, crisp direction has breathed new life into Leigh’s play. She has found a way to make the bleak lives originally depicted three decades earlier just as relevant today as they were then. A production like this makes a life of dissatisfaction seem somehow quite satisfying.

Trevor and Judy and Tony and Sarah

New House Under Construction is a puzzling play, perhaps because it feels like several different plays in one. Alan Hruska has built his plot around four characters comprising two couples. However, the members of each couple, and what each character wants, undergo as many revolutions as the set of the title. It’s enough to give the audience a case of whiplash. It doesn’t help matters much that the playwright’s characters play an odd game of give-and-take with the audience of 59E59 Theaters. Almost from start to finish, Hruska has every character exposit startling amounts of his or her history through their dialogue, spelling out major details from their lives. But they withhold important kernels of information that would be beneficial to the development of the play, giving the audience no real reason to connect to anyone in the show.

For instance, why are Trevor (Anthony Crane) and Tony (Kevin Isola) lifelong rivals? And if so, why are they still in close contact? Information like this would go a long way toward explaining why Trevor is building a new house for the man. Trevor, who appears to be the play’s lead, or at least its most sympathetic character, is a short story writer who moonlights as an architect. Though married to Judy (Nancy Lemenager), Trevor years ago dated Sarah (Shannon Koob), who is now married to Tony.

Hruska may play mum on that subject, but he doles out plenty of other tidbits. Judy admits to Sarah that she has sexual feelings for her, and is interested in pursuing them. Judy tells Trevor that she used to see Tony, and still has feelings for him. Tony reveals to Trevor that at age nineteen, Sarah aborted the child she had conceived with Trevor. (This particular unveiled secret holds a lot of dramatic potential that remains unrealized.)

Both couples swap partners, and in the space of one of Hruska’s overused scene changes, an entire year has passed. But it isn’t that Hruska, who also directs the play, hasn’t given his audience time to catch their breath. Rather, the problem is that the audience is never breathless in the first place. The revelations come so quickly and so early that they are rendered meaningless.

Perhaps sensing that Construction needed additional shaping, Hruska then introduces a fifth character to shift the entire play in a new direction. Sam Coppola is Manny, an analyst for, ultimately, all four of his fellow characters. It is unclear what Hruska tries to accomplish with the addition of this therapist, aside from creative laziness. Giving each character a sounding board allows them to soliloquize everything that is on their mind, thus merely stating what is going on inside their heads instead of playing those emotions.

Construction makes yet another tonal shift rather late in the game, when Sarah and Trevor are and always have been married, and Judy and Tony are currently married for the second-go-round. Sarah and Tony are trying to adopt a baby, and Judy and Tony find themselves in a position to assist them. These scenes are a case of too little too late, but are also a source of confusion. Have we entered an alternate reality? Is this a dream? Is everything that preceded it a figment of one character’s imagination? Instead of adding up to a creative aggregate, Hruska’s creative manipulations only serve to fragment the play.

The five performances go a long way toward strengthening Construction. Crane makes Trevor as full-bodied a character as he can with his limited material. I genuinely cared for him; I felt sorry for him when he felt deprived, and was happy when his character seemed to be so. Both Koob and Lemenager are stuck playing conceits. Neither Judy nor Sarah is a person one might encounter in the real world; they merely exist and say things to move the play forward. However, both actresses imbue their characters with nuance and credibility where they can to suggest the possibility that these women might actually possess emotions like desire and regret.

Isola has a more challenging job, since Tony is such a dolt. He’s a substance-abusing womanizer who doesn’t care who he hurts with his brutal words. Unlike the other three leads, Tony possesses no sympathy factor. Despite the many changes affecting his character, he remains unfazed and unchanged. There never seems to be anything lurking beneath the surface. Coppola, on the other hand, plays Manny, and, later, a representative from the adoption agency, taking straightforward characters and adding layers of compassion and understanding.

Hruska would have done good to turn a more objective eye to his play and do a more aggressive editing job. The scribe creates many scenes, some of which last as long as a scene change, thus fragmenting the play to an extreme degree. Additionally, the major changes in tone contribute further to an overall episodic feel. Construction plays like an experiment that escaped from a theatrical lab still in rough form. (Though Kenneth Foy’s set is certainly a sturdy thing of beauty.)

Construction’s varying relationships require some quick mental mathematics on the behalf of the audience, but I’m not sure that they are rewarded for their hard work in the end. Hruska’s play gives plenty of answers, but it has yet to define what the questions are.

Everybody's Talking

Amy Patrice Golden is a luminous and immensely talented actress. Her look is a distinct – not to mention distinguished – combination of both Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett and erstwhile adult actress Traci Lords, which is appropriate; Golden possesses a deep reservoir of talent with just a hint of a naughty side. This makes Golden perfectly cast as Pink, the narrator and subject of Kristen Kosmas’ The Scandal!, a fascinating look at depression, suicide, and small-town life presented by the Horse Trade Theater Group and The Management in the East Village’s Red Room. Director Courtney Sale guides this show as a smart and stirring character study with a winning combination of humor and pathos.

Pink’s world is essentially a cocoon, in which she knows little about herself and even less about others. Her friends are not necessarily the best influences on her decisions. Her mother is aloof and judgmental, choosing to ignore the absence of Pink’s father, who has killed himself. His specter continues to haunt Pink, who treads around the darker edges of life.

Pink explains fairly early in this one-woman show that she has designs to drown herself at the age of 33 by weighing herself down with rocks in the river, Virginia Woolf-style. However, even the best-laid, most maudlin plans go awry. The scandal of the title is an entirely different event altogether.

Golden spends Scandal! accounting for what led to the event Pink describes. She meets Radio, a mysterious stranger. Her attraction to him leads to a complicated relationship that forces Pink to re-evaluate her beliefs about herself and her dealings with others. The thoughts that the character weighs may be dark, but her account is certainly illuminating.

It is unclear whether it was a choice on the part of Kosmas, Golden, or Sale, but Golden cleverly refrains from mimicking the different vocal styles of each character she portrays. While this choice is occasionally confusing (it can be hard to remember who is who), it turns Scandal into something more than the typical one-actor show. Golden isn’t playing multiple characters; she instead plays Pink, and all other characters the audience sees are played as Pink’s interpretation of them, filtering them through her own limited subjective sensibilities.

Take, for example, when Pink encounters Radio. Instead of merely recounting their conversation, she repeats their dialogue for the audience. Then, Pink summarizes the encounter with her own skewed recollection of events, allowing audience members to observe both the gross and the net capture of the encounter. Strokes like this are not difficult to create, and yet they add an enormous amount of character dimension to the play.

Golden masters these transitions brilliantly, etching in those character dimensions. Her performance is not only heartfelt, it is also extremely well-disciplined, navigating Kosmas’ shifts in events and tone carefully. She holds the audience in her thrall with a tautly focused performance. And her delivery is pure poetry; I only wish that her perfect cadences were not always drowned out by Jennifer Hudson, The Cars and the other musical artists being blasted by the KGB Bar directly beneath the Red Room.

Nonetheless, Golden gives a performance to remember in Scandal. Contrary to its own name, Kosmas has fashioned a play that should be remembered not for anything sensational, but for its substance. It is a careful, soulful journey through one woman’s mind with a star who proves that any choice of hers, even silence, can be Golden.

You Must Remember This

Who wouldn’t want to be able to change one’s past and make for one’s self a better future? Kip, the protagonist of Bob Stewart’s A Memory Play, tries to do just that, but, in an odd twist, his changing the past would result in him having no future at all. That may sound more confusing than Stewart’s premise turns out to be. Kip (Trey Albright), the thirty-nine-year-old struggling playwright who narrates Memory, explains that he is using his writing skills to re-fashion the day his parents wed. He expounds that because of the lifetime of cruelty and lies their marriage has inflicted on each other and on their four children, Kip’s memory play would intervene and see to it that his parents never did marry.

Kip relates to the audience how his father, Steve(Artie Ray), a libidinous military man, and his mother, Judy(Susan Izatt), a secretive Southern belle, stole away to a motel room one day in 1947 to negotiate their impulsive marriage. Izatt and Ray act out the events of the day, and Kip occasionally breaks the action to alter something one of them says or does. He explains that seemingly innocuous matters that the two discussed at the time, like whether or not they should wait to have sex until marriage, were warning signs of greater potholes that lay ahead in the rocky road of matrimony. However, the disagreements that Stewart presents never seem as severe as Kip makes them out to be.

Memory emerged from an initial run at the Midtown International Theater Festival in 2000, and its current incarnation at the Workshop Theater suggests that it may still be a work in progress. The show runs a little more than one hour, but there is enough potential for material to comprise a two-hour-plus show. What director Gary Levinson’s staging cannot quite do is show Kip’s audience what these larger problems are, and how troubles snowballed into major domestic problems.

As it stands now, Memory involves little more than having Kip continually interrupt his parents’ dialogue and repeatedly assert how wrong they are together. Levinson needs to be able to find a way to better entwine Kip’s narration on stage right with his parents’ interaction on stage left. The fallout of Kip’s parents’ marriage wouldn’t need to be the focus of the show, but the more future problems the audience can witness, the more urgent Kip’s need to revise his own personal history would feel. Kip is also said to be one of four children; it would have been helpful to hear from or see something about the opinion of the other siblings.

I also found some of Stewart’s toying with dramatic conventions a little cloying. Kip reads aloud a textbook definition of what a memory play is, to humorous effect. But to have him explain later on that a quick change of his t-shirt signifies the passage of time is both lazy and insulting to the audience.

Albright, though, is a great asset to the show in a performance brimming with energy, humor, and most importantly, compassion. A lot of the burden of Memory falls on the actor; Kip must earn our trust that he has good, heartfelt reasons for not wanting his parents to wed, and Albright does that with a deeply human, relatable performance that cuts through the show’s stagier matters. He also plays several minor characters in the 1947-set scenes, including a gay baker and a minister, with aplomb.

Izatt and Ray are also both quite talented, but Stewart’s play reduces them to playing conceits, rather than characters. As Kip re-positions their characters, they have to keep changing, and as a result, what is required of them is something more akin to an improv exercise than a performance with consistent through-lines.

Stewart’s somewhat self-referential idea about the power the writer has as a creative force is a fascinating one, rife with dramatic potential (it is also at the center of Ian McEwan’s Atonement). But Stewart never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Now, according to the script and press notes, Memory is the first part of an intended Marriage Variations trilogy, in which context the play might appear in a different light. In its current version, for all of its talking, Memory doesn’t say quite enough.

Bros Before Blows

The five men that reunite in The Most Damaging Wound could have fallen prey to any number of clichés found in tales of male bonding, with tales of sexual braggadocio and drunken heart-to-hearts leading up to a night of epiphany that Changes their Lives Forever. The remarkable thing about Blair Singer’s fantastic new play is just how adroitly he maneuvers around all of them and charts his own original course, helped enormously by the camaraderie of his perfectly-cast ensemble. Wound is a knowing play, with a keen understanding of the nuances of how male friendship develops and morphs over time. While they may differ from female relationships, they nonetheless require attention or face the threat of erosion, something Singer’s characters confront in the play. Fresh from their college days at Syracuse roughly fifteen years earlier, this quintet of friends gathers at an Upper East Side restaurant soon to be opened by GG (Michael Solomon) to celebrate the birth of Kenny’s (Ken Matthews) first son by burning a time capsule from the undergrad days, inspired by Robert Bly’s Iron John. Alan, (Michael Szeles), a pharmaceutical lobbyist, has traveled up from Washington, DC; Dicky (Chris Thorn), has come down from Boston; and Bo (Bard Goodrich), hails from the New York area.

Director Mark Armstrong immediately eliminates any distance between audience and actors in Manhattan Theatre Source’s confined performance space (April Bartlett’s set is perfect for their spare stage). Among other things, Wound is to be praised for the director's sense of economy in storytelling. None of Singer’s characters tell us anything for the sake of lazy exposition, and we never learn much about any character.

Take, for example, the specter of father figures that hangs over several of the characters. Singer provides enough information for us to know that Ken had an abusive father of some sort, that both Dick and GG’s fathers have provided for their sons’ varied career paths, and that Bo’s father is slowly losing a battle to an aggressive form of cancer. These references are subtle enough to shade in the characters without overpowering them. For every time I had a question about a character’s history, I found myself feeling grateful that Singer refrained from spoon-feeding me too much information.

Singer also provides the perfect conduit to introduce us to these men in the form of Christine (Megan Mcquillan), Alan’s mistress. Her entrance into the play is welcome not only because it ups the dynamic but also because it shifts the prism through which the audience sees this male quintet. She is an outsider, but also possesses a more intimate knowledge of Alan, which allows her to fit right into this group. Through her, we learn more about each character’s past, and their connections to each other. Bo, for example, was a gay musician known on the northeast college circuit before going sober. His closest friend was the hard-partying Dick, whose inability to quit his old ways is one reason for their current estrangement. Ken’s discovery of Christine, meanwhile, rocks what he considers to be the foundation of his strong friendship with Alan.

Armstrong’s keen eye supports every one of Singer’s directives in this unequal quadrangle. Watch how carefully he blocks each scene so that Solomon’s body language reinforces GG’s feelings of being an outsider. (The actor does very nimble work to convey what it is to belong to a group of friends, but only on its periphery.) And pay attention to the look in Matthews’ eyes when Alan is talking. Much like the playwright, Armstrong too is deliberate with the details of his staging. There is something going on at all times in every area of the small stage. Every prop and accessory, from a wayward cell phone to the ring on a character’s finger, is there for a reason.

Furthermore, his actors know what to do to make every moment count in Wound. Often, when actors are without dialogue, they either lose character or refuse to cede the spotlight to a co-star out of ego. These actors know how to fill the spaces between bigger moments; one can look at any character who is not currently the centerpiece of the action and see them furthering their storyline in non-verbal ways. This completes the tableau and allows all events to unfold in an organic way, a skill often absent elsewhere.

As a result, Wound works as a showpiece for each of its stellar stars. Matthews leads the pack with a carefully measured performance of fear and loyalty that leaves the actor emotionally bare; I marvel at his ability to define precisely the right magnitude of emotion for Ken without toppling the play by being too heavy. Thorn has a trickier role. It looks easy to play a fun-loving guy; it doesn’t look like work. But he provides a lot of dimension to show the pathos behind the partying in one heck of a performance. And Szeles’ and Goodrich’s best work is in the scenes with their counterparts.

Mcquillan, too, is a real gift. Her performance is as much of a clarion call as that of her male counterparts, with her confident presence and syrupy voice. It is seductive but also unmistakable real, making it easy to see how Alan and all other men might fall for her. She is able to make us believe that she has led an entire life offstage – one that she would be eager to toss aside for a life with Alan. In just an hour and a half, Singer fashions an entire world for each of these characters, which, problems and all, looks mighty inviting. I certainly left this show longing to have been friends with each of them.

Equal parts diverting and riveting, always deeply human, The Most Damaging Wound is easily one of the best plays of the year.

Flux's Angel Eaters Trilogy Takes Wing

Most Off-Off-Broadway companies know the difficulties of mounting any show -- eking out a workable budget, finding the right performance space, coordinating schedules. How difficult must it then be to produce three shows at once? The Flux Theatre Ensemble knows this firsthand as it concludes its 2008 season with playwright Johnna Adams' ambitious tri-part Angel Eaters cycle.

The trilogy follows three generations in the life of family with an odd gift: the ability to reanimate. It turns out that there are Carriers, who are capable of transmitting the angel eater curse, and Eaters, who can both transmit and wield the curse. Young 1930s Oklahoman Joann (Marni Schulenberg) finds this gift oddly thwarted. When she attempts to raise the dead by eating off of their body, she strips them of their good essence, resurrecting a violent demon version of lost ones, including her own recently deceased father. The choices Joann and her family make trickle down into the play's two subsequent chapters, Rattlers and 8 Little Antichrists, which take place in the 1970s and 2028, respectively.

"I was at a cousin's wedding and started listening to a family story told by several aunts," Adams explained about the genesis for her complicated play, "and I started thinking about my parents' generation as humans." A second family story involving uncles who worked as snake wranglers inspired Rattlers. Adams also explained that a love of southwestern gothic style and such creative works as AeschylusÃ' Oresteia and Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno" helped fuel this opus.

She first introduced it to the Flux ensemble at their annual August retreat in 2007. "The whole company was really excited about her voice," said Heather Cohn, Managing Director and a Flux founding member. As the work evolved, the company decided last December that it would be the final work in their upcoming "Season of Transformation."

"This is the longest that Flux has spent developing a play with a playwright," Cohn said of the year-and-a-half long process. Adams admits that she went through upwards of fifteen drafts of Antichrists alone, though the shows themselves were cast back in February.

Both Angel Eaters and Rattlers, the company said, stand largely on their own, while Antichrists depends a little bit more on its predecessors. Though the three plays ultimately fit together, they also stand on their own as distinct arcs, and unlike other repertory efforts, each play in The Angel Eaters Trilogy features three distinct casts and directors. "There are three different directors with three different visions," explained Jason Paradine, another Flux Founding Member who also plays Osley, Joann's grown nephew, in Rattlers. "However, they all met together at the beginning of the process for several months of production meetings to talk about how the arcs fit together."

In order to bridge the three shows, the same design team worked on all three productions, which "guaranteed continuity," according to Cohn, though not without some challenges. While casts and directors came and went based on their specific schedules, the technicians were not so lucky. "The sound and light designers [Asa Wember and Jennifer Rathbone] were at the tech tables the entire week before we opened, and even the directors lost sight of that," said Paradine.

Additionally, Flux members insist that the actors link each of the three shows together. "The little details emerge," Cohn said. "They make the connections stick out more."

The three Angel Eaters plays run on alternating nights, but all three run in one day-long Saturday marathon, a la Tom Stoppard's Tony-winning Coast of Utopia trilogy. "The marathon days are exciting," Cohn said. "They have a different kind of energy." They also provide cost-effectiveness in the form of a $40 package deal to catch all three shows together on Saturdays.

Cohn, who works the door, often hears the audience reaction following performances. "People will come to see just one of the shows and then decide to come back and see the other two." Paradine, for his part, finds the process of putting on these shows to be the most gratifying element. "It's exhilarating to completely immerse ourselves in such a neat community-building opportunity."

What's next for The Angel Eaters Trilogy? Another incarnation of Rattlers is already being produced at the Stage Theatre in Fullerton, California. According to its creator, the trilogy might expand even further. "I might re-visit it further down the road," Adams said. "It's still alive in my head, and I'm not done yet. It might become a quintology!"

The Angel Eaters Trilogy is currently playing at the Wings Theatre.

Rome If You Want To

18th century essayist and poet Joseph Addison’s best-remembered work is the 1712 play Cato: a Tragedy, a work so classic and resonant George Washington himself purportedly used speeches from it to inspire troops, commissioning a production during the American Revolution. The play, addressing such subjects as the importance of freedom, the corruption of tyrannical rule, and valor in battle, made for a logical choice. It makes for an equally logical choice for Jim Simpson to mount the show at The Flea, timed for a polarizing presidential election. And while Cato may be three centuries old, and set before the Common Era, his production makes this tale completely accessible.

Addison himself dabbled in politics, having served as Under-Secretary of State for the Whig party, and his experience informed his writing. Cato occurs in the year 46 B.C. in the city of Utica, in Numidia, where the title character Cato (André De Shields) is the last Roman holdout against Julius Caesar, whose mighty army approaches to battle his mightiest remaining foe. Cato surrounds himself with two advisors, the peaceful Lucius (Brian O'Neill) and the violent, untrustworthy Sempronius (Anthony Cochrane). Sempronius, however, has his own ideas about how to use the Numidian army for personal benefit.

The plot isn’t only political, of course; Addison’s web also has its romantic entanglements. Cato’s sons Marcus (Jake Green) and Portius (Ross Cowan) both pine for Lucia (Holly Chou), Lucius’ daughter, while Cato's daughter Marcia (Carly Zien) has her own admirer in Juba (Eric Lockley), a Numidian prince.

Simpson’s bare-bones approach, with Zack Tinkelman’s unadorned set, Claudia Brown’s muted costume design, and all actors offstage sitting on benches where they can be seen, allows his audience to focus on the plot at hand. I also appreciated Simpson’s choice of color-blind casting, though I can see how it might confuse some audience members. Cato is white, though De Shields is African-American, with white children.

Nonetheless, the seasoned cast overcomes this minor obstacle. De Shields is quite the commanding presence as the stoic leader. The title character is strength incarnate. Cato does everything right – he lives by a code of honor, dignity and strength. It is easy for such a man to feel, well, like something more than a man, but De Shields digs beneath Addison’s language to portray a man with real heart and human connection. It helps, perhaps, that De Shields, a veteran of such shows as Ain’t Misbehavin’ and The Wiz is also a musician and choreographer. His sense of movement and rhythm is integral to Cato. De Shields’ every step, gesticulation and voice modulation are carefully measured and perfectly justified, setting the tone for the whole show.

While the tone is spot-on, I did have some quibbles with Simpson’s pacing, particularly at the production’s end. As the plot unfurls and and events escalate, the show languishes, slowing right when it should heat up. Several scenes drop in when by this time, they should proceed at a more clipped pace to maximize dramatic effect.

Fortunately, the rest of the cast follows De Shields’ lead. Cochrane, for example, convincingly allows the seeds of betrayal to take root as Cato unfolds. Many of the most successful scenes in the show are enacted by Cato’s younger actors, a large number of whom are members of the Bats, the Flea’s repertory troupe. They have a professional grasp of Addison’s language, and find the urgency in the character’s lives so that their portrayals feel fresh and relevant. Lockley’s and Zien’s scenes together, in particular, suggest a very humanistic element as they fumble back and forth with the trappings of misunderstood young love. Cowan and Green are also effective in their scenes together.

Simpson’s production of Cato brings history to vivid life. I can only hope that whatever changes the incoming new administration brings, we only have to re-live Addison’s lessons on the stage.

The Forget-Me-Nots

Questions abound in Lee Blessing’s overly existential play A Body of Water. Why don’t the two adults who awake together in bed recognize themselves, or each other? Who is the woman who shows up at their house with bagels? Why does her story about their identities keep changing? Which, if any of them, are true? Beyond all of the questions, though, one central mystery dominates the play: What is Blessing trying to accomplish here? The playwright creates quite a challenge from the outset of this Primary Stages show, in that none of his three characters are reliable. Though it takes a while, we learn the names of our mystery pair: Moss (Michael Cristofer) and Avis (Christine Lahti). They have no memory of anything in their lives – not the lake house in which they find neither themselves nor the reason why they may have possibly woken up naked together in bed. The two attempt many different methods of discovery, including Avis examining Moss’s genitals with a pair of kitchen tongs, all to no avail.

After an overlong period of time, a younger woman named Wren (Laura Odeh) arrives, breakfast in hand. After a lot of dancing around the subject, Moss and Avis cop to their total memory loss, of which Wren is actually well aware. She admits that she is their legal defender, assigned to them following the mysterious murder of their eleven-year-old daughter. A new question arises. Is their amnesia a cognitive reaction to this trauma, or is it selective? Wren’s job is to jog their memory enough to prove their innocence, or to determine if Moss and Avis are indeed lying to cover their tracks.

Explaining away Moss and Avis’ odd behavior as a result of retrograde amnesia makes sense, but in a disappointing, derivative way, since many writers have employed this as a theatricality. Just when we think Blessing has set the story straight, though, he throws another curveball. Wren discounts her entire first story and claims to be the couple’s grown daughter. Weary of a lifetime of dealing with two parents locked in a perpetual Groundhog Day-style daily forgetfulness, she claims to toy with them, either to make fun of her condition for her own amusement or to shock them into remembering their life.

Body is comprised of five scenes, taking place over the course of three days. In each of these scenes, Wren’s explanations of who she is and who Moss and Avis are to her change, sometimes oscillating back and forth into old explanations. Blessing’s point, if there is one lurking underneath this play, is that his audience will never really know the truth, but that makes for a hollow show. If we know nothing about all three characters, and are never told the truth about their past or their connections to each other, why is worth any investment on our part?

Blessing also backs himself into a dramatic corner with all of his characters’ exposition. True or false, all of Wren’s talking and Moss and Avis’ questions add up to a lot of redundant talking. Body cannot show, so it tells, adding up to little more than a lecture. Director Maria Mileaf finds no artful way to advance Blessing’s non-linear plot (indeed, her blocking throughout the show has these characters merely moving around in circles), and the result is a static show.

Mileaf has assembled a checkered cast to shape Blessing’s caricatures into something more human. Between the two of them, Cristofer and Lahti have won an Emmy, a Pulitzer, an Oscar and a Tony; together, the duo locates the emotional undercurrent of Body and deftly figures out a rhythm for these two characters who know each other and yet at the same time do not.

Odeh has a more difficult role. Wren, as written, suggests an impatient, petulant girl, but we do not know if this is her real personality or a persona she adopts to goad Moss and Avis, nor what her agenda is in any of the situations she describes to Moss and Avis. Odeh registers a commanding presence during her scenes, but she has been given an impossible character to realize.

What Body lacks is some kind of edge. Blessing has chosen an interesting topic – does our memory shape who we are? – but he needs to attach it to a gripping story that makes the audience care what a play’s characters remember and forget (take, for example, the film Memento, which addressed a slightly different type of amnesia in riveting form). Despite the many mysteries posed and red herrings thrown about, Body is a static show. It is hard to create food for thought when there is no meat provided.

A Wonderful Aroma

To love lowbrow humor – specifically, in the world of theater – is to love Jacob Sterling, the deluded D-list theatrical celebrity brought so lovingly to life by the gifted veteran actor David Pittu in What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling. Of course, the lead character is a legend only in his own mind, but while this Atlantic Stage 2 show that may feature a talent-free hack, Smell itself is nothing short of terrific. Pittu is paired with a fellow comic genius, Peter Bartlett, who plays Leonard Swagg. Swagg is the host of “Composers and Lyricists of Tomorrow” (CLOT), which one imagines is a very seldom-seen show dedicated to the die-hard troubadours of the stage. But Sterling is essentially talent-challenged; like many locals, he lives for the theater, but has very little to contribute to the art form.

Ultimately, Sterling’s career has been one long case of arrested development. The sycophantic Swagg alternately praises Sterling as both an up-and-comer and also as a has-been, though his act never was and likely never will be, making him the celebrity equivalent of an Oreo cookie without the center filling. Yet Pittu’s performance prevents him Sterling from being a blowhard. His earnestness makes Sterling eminently likeable.

Sterling’s explanations – er, excuses – as to why he never enjoyed a more fruitful life in the limelight hit at the key strength of Smell: its knowing references to the world of musical theater. Sterling refers to the “two international crises” that stalled his career during the 1980s: AIDS and the British invasion of the American musical theater. Lines like these make it clear that Pittu understands its core audience of musical lovers. More importantly, the show’s lead demonstrates the right instinct by approaching the role with sympathy instead of cynicism. The actor – a two-time Tony nominee – modulates his arch sense of humor. Sterling’s life is one of self-delusion: he thinks his emotions are genuine, his ideas are original, and his bad luck is due to external circumstances rather than his own dearth of talent.

Pittu wrote the script and lyrics for Smell, while Randy Redd composed the music for the numbers in this show within a show. The miracle of this duo is that the songs work on two levels. First, they function as a mockery of commercial theater; but they are also substantial show tunes that stand on their own.

Take, for example, Sterling’s senior thesis musical, an adaptation of the Goldie Hawn comedy Private Benjamin, which includes the song “He Died Inside of Me.” Or Mademoiselle Death, a musical re-enactment of the French action thriller La Femme Nikita. These ideas sound silly and implausible, at first, until one realizes that the existence of such film-to-stage productions as Legally Blonde, The Wedding Singer and the forthcoming 9 to 5musical are more topical than implausible. Additionally, these songs are catchy and irreverent enough to blend right into what can currently be heard in theaters both on and off the Great White Way.

Similarly, Sterling composes a musical called Real Tough Cookie in tribute to pop star Pat Benatar, following a template set on the Great White Way by All Shook Up, Good Vibrations, Mamma Mia and the upcoming Rock of Ages, a musical devoted in part to…Pat Benatar. This is what makes Smell so subversive: Pittu takes seemingly innocuous material and holds it up as a mirror to real life and exposes a lot of the clichés and hypocrisy that currently exist onstage.

Co-directors Pittu and Neil Pepe (artistic director of the Atlantic Theatre Company) do a wonderful job moving Smell along; it ends long before anyone has a chance to want it to do so. Pittu’s fellow cast members play a large role in this enjoyable distraction. Bartlett is outstanding as the overly ebullient talk show host, played with more than a nodding wink to James Lipton of Inside the Actor’s Studio. Then, close to the show’s end, a trio of young performers join the cast to sing an extended medley from Sterling’s upcoming Broadway debut, the fictitious Shopping Out Loud: Brandon Goodman, Matt Schock and Heléne Yorke, all of whom acquit themselves quite well.

It is rare to find a show that blends old-time heart with new-school skepticism the way that Smell does. Talented as the show’s fictitious star may or may not be, it is a testament that it is spirit which keeps the stage alive.

Some Like It Hot

Little more than hot air connects the quartet of monologues that comprise Norman Lasca’s A Great Place to Be From. As a severe heat wave makes its way across Midwestern America, four individuals share stories both devastatingly honest and comical about Important Moments in their lives; events that led them to a major change or epiphany. However, these four monologues remain fundamentally disconnected thematically, leading one to wonder if Lasca created these vignettes as anything more than a showcase for his diverse work. As it currently stands at the Kraine Theater, where Place kicks of the Babel Theater Project’s new season and runs until September 27 under Geordie Broadwater’s sometimes overly restrained direction, the play still feels like a work-in-progress.

Contrary to his show’s title, Lasca takes his audience to some rather ugly locales in the human psyche. His inaugural monologue, “Stars in the City,” finds Paul (Matthew Johnson) detailing sex with his girlfriend while bemoaning the waning emotional intimacy between them. “Transfusion,” for another example, explores the lengths to which D (Jacques Roy) will go to save an animal. There is also “Phantom Limb,” in which housewife Anne (Kim Martin-Cotten) nurtures a long-simmering fetish.

These emotional crises are rife with dramatic potential, but Lasca undercuts his own work by making it too literal. He should be showing his points onstage, not telling them to his audience. This is more difficult to do in monologue form with just one actor and his or her dialogue on stage, but he can still let some ideas emerge on their own rather than feel compelled to make them all explicit.

His actors are certainly good enough to depend on. Roy delivers a sterling performance as a disaffected hospital orderly who resorts to extreme measures to save the life of his pet dog; he immerses himself completely in Lasca’s arch dialogue and makes every image easy to conjure up. Andrew Zimmerman, too, shines in “Battle of Bunker Hill,” as a disenchanted grocery store employee going off on a tear about his overly patriotic boss. These are two performers who know how to pick up incomplete material and hoist it above their shoulders.

Johnson, on the other hand, cannot do the same thing in “City.” Despite the amount of information Lasca has his character share with the audience, we know very little about Paul and his girlfriend. Whereas Roy and Zimmerman are able to hint at what their experiences with their dog and boss, respectively, mean to them, Johnson’s monologue feels more like recitative. His line readings all follow the same delivery pattern, punctuated with a grunt, and so we never if we can take his lines at face value or need to read between them. I wish Broadwater had done more to flesh out this performance.

Also, “Phantom” feels distinct – and, it should be stated, long – enough to warrant a production of its own rather than being attached to Place on some sort of theatrical rider bill. It feels like a shame to shoehorn this monologue in, since Lasca again has the good fortune to see his work enacted by a real pro. Martin-Cotten is so at ease onstage with just herself and awkward material – involving a kinky use for a leather sling that has escalating emotional effects on its user – that I could have sworn I was watching a real person’s confession. Martin-Cotton uses the slightest gestures and glances to convey a host of conflicting emotions, from arousal to shame to denial.

All the same, the whole of these four monologues add up to less than the sum of their parts. I certainly hope Lasca continues to work through the three monologues that serve as the evening’s first act (at close to an hour-and-a-half, “Phantom” gets the second act to itself). He can certainly delve deeper into the darker aspects of these situations. His places do not have to be neat and tidy to be considered great, but they should be more completely explored.

Are You In or Out?

Anti-social behavior reaches new heights – or is it lows – in Larry Kunofsky’s new comedy, What to Do When You Hate All Your Friends, directed by Jacob Krueger at Theatre Row’s Lion Theatre Hate is an intriguing serio-comic offering about the perils and pluses of the people we allow into our lives. It stars new discovery Todd D’Amour as Matt, a ruffian who – you guessed it – hates all of his friends. Violently, in fact: if anyone ever makes the mistake of touching him, he responds by punching something. Matt is not the only character in Hate with some rather odd peccadilloes. He encounters Celia (Carrie Keranen), a snob who utters Tourette’s-similar outbursts when sexually aroused. Celia heads a very elite organization called the Friends, an elaborate social network that ranks its own members and constantly shuffles them up and down the spectrum. In one of several roles, the marvelous Susan Louise O’Connor plays Holly, another dominant member of the Friends (although the entire cast is uniformly wonderful, Kunofsky undercuts the effectiveness of the Friends by not having a larger ensemble to fill it out – the group appears too elite for its own good).

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Enid (Amy Staats), a non-Friend who narrates Hate. Kunofsky has constructed a meta sensibility for his play: as Enid speaks to the audience, the other characters (Josh Lefkowitz rounds out the quintet as Matt’s nerdy friend Garrett) can hear her and sometimes even interrupt. Unfortunately, this conceit never quite takes off. It is one thing to break the fourth wall and address the audience, but for asides to never truly land aside of the characters seems like a fruitless gimmick. Additionally, Niluka Hotaling’s set pieces feel a tad crammed into the Lion stage. At times it is difficult to discern exactly where a scene is supposed to take place, and whether different scenes are meant to appear within earshot of one another.

On the other hand, there is plenty that does pay off in Hate, chief among them the odd – and oddly endearing – lengths to which both Celia and Matt go to push others away. D’Amour demonstrates a terrific penchant for comedic physicality, but it is his vocal delivery, from pipes that sound deep but never hollow, that sells the role the most. A lengthy scene in the play’s second act puts these actors to the test in a scene that marries slapstick humor with sentimentality.

The other three actors work overtime. In addition to playing Garrett, Lefkowitz fills in several other small roles, as does O’Connor. But nothing compares to the latter performer, who turns Hate into a one-woman textbook class not only in creating multiple characters, but also in how to switch back and forth between them with no confusion. This is a skill that requires major concentration and discipline, but O’Connor is such a pro that she seems completely at ease in doing so.

Staats dazzles as Enid, converting a role that could have been merely a device into a three-dimensional performance. Where Matt and Celia channel their inner problems into conflict with others, Enid is a sweeter soul. She’s a character that may in fact strike the closest to home for many audience members, for Enid is one of those people on the periphery, someone who never really belongs but is always eager to help out, only to get shot down with no adequate explanation. It’s during her delivery of narration late in the show that Staats’ performance crystallizes into something greater than the sum of its parts, turning Hate from relationship comedy into a more sensible observation about human behavior.

Kunofsky provides many examples to buttress Enid’s narration, but Hate does not quite make this final leap. The show is quirky but unbalanced; the playwright never separates the difference between trivial friendships and meaningful ones. “Friend” is a label that gets tossed around but has many different meanings, all of which get conflated into one for dramatic purpose here.

And yet there remains very little to hate about Hate. Kunofsky may not get everything just right, but he certainly puts forth great effort. And that’s what really counts in a friend, right?

Really Hot for Teacher

I don’t think Peter Howard actually exists, but I have sat through enough awkward lectures to know that the bumbling science professor portrayed by Mitch Montgomery is certainly a lived-in specimen. Howard is the protagonist and, more importantly, hero, of FringeNYC entry Triumph of the Underdog, co-created and –written by Montgomery with Morgan Allen and directed by Barbara Williams. The audience assembled for Underdog at Pace University’s Schaeberle Studio Theatre also doubles as the guest audience for a presentation by Howard on science fiction. Howard is apparently a has-been whose two novels and numerous warnings about cosmic dangers have gone unheeded. And Montgomery’s performance is rife with the uneasy tics of a man uncomfortable with others and himself. Howard, recently let go from his job as an NYU professor, stutters, laughs at his own unfunny jokes, condescends to his audience and gets increasingly miffed at his projectionist over some rather minor grievances.

Then, all of a sudden, his prophecy about the sun comes true and it falls on Howard to save the day, redeem himself and save the world. Montgomery taps into a deep reservoir of energy to keep Howard a man in manic motion, running back and forth across the stage, chugging Red Bulls and communicating with his ex-colleague via radio and cell phone. It is no small feat to command the stage for an hour and a half by one’s self, but the star also manages to keep his audience drawn in throughout as well.

Knowledge of science and science fiction is not necessary to enjoy Underdog, but it sure helps. Montgomery drops a lot of references to the sci-fi canon, but doesn’t always exercise restraint – why name-check Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek once when he can do it multiple times? The result is that the material can, at times, feel derivative. But leave it to Montgomery also to rein his audience back in with a performance so creative, so comical, and so consistent that it can truly be called out of this world.

Triumph of the Underdog is part of the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival.

Mother Courage

Performer Christen Clifford holds little back in BabyLove, her one-woman show at The Green Room at 45 Bleecker in which she chronicles the physical and emotional changes she underwent before, during, and following the birth of her first child. The show, which runs slightly over an hour but leaves you wanting much more, is to be praised for both its humor and its honesty. This highly enjoyable extended monologue (which began as a piece penned by Clifford for Nerve.com) chronicles the full journey of changes that its creator and star went through. Clifford begins the show in a fairly explicit manner by describing her attempts at conception, but her in-your-face presentation style is never off-putting. In fact, she achieves the opposite, creating a show that is always intimate and engaging, as she segues from talking about her younger days of sexual adventurousness to counting the myriad ways childbirth has changed her outlook on sex, love, maturity, and her relationship with her husband.

Talking to her audience as though they were her girlfriends, Clifford discusses the fears and expectations that come along with impending first-time motherhood. Will she always love her child unconditionally? Will her child love her in return? Would she actually prefer to have a son over a daughter?

The show, directed and partially developed by Julie Kramer, is candid and confessional. BabyLove offers a warts-and-all look at maternity and motherhood, and Kramer's assured hand ensures that though the play's tone gradually becomes more serious, it does so in measured, artful doses. Clifford discusses her changing body and supplies a detailed account of her entire childbirth experience. She also conveys the ways she grew disenchanted with her vagina and the way her sex life with her husband waned and then morphed into something new. (In one hilarious anecdote, Clifford describes how an attempt to multi-task intimacy and baby-rearing turned into an inadvertent threesome).

Sex does not totally dominate BabyLove, however. The show also features a fair amount of material on women’s health in general. For example, Clifford discusses the perils of simultaneous breast-feeding and masturbation, as well as the importance of Kegel exercises. Clifford continually revs the energy up by using water guns to over-exaggerate her breasts when nursing, pantomiming the act of breast-feeding, and even giving away prizes to a select few audience members.

What is most important about BabyLove is its refreshing confessionalism. We still live in a society where women who enjoy their sex lives, and even more brazenly, enjoy publicly discussing them, are considered somewhat taboo. Clifford bucks those conventions in a way that is entirely human and universal, never strictly sensational. She is who she is and makes no apologies for that, whether being tough or vulnerable, sassy or sentimental. I doubt there was single audience member – female or male – who did not find a kernel of truth in something she had to share. Chances are they found many.

Clifford is nothing short of a revelation. The actress’s ability to rebound between moments funny, tender and potentially embarrassing is astonishing, and the pace, timing, and tone with which she does it is nothing short of balletic. Clifford commands the stage from start to finish (though choreographer Julie Atlas Muz should be given credit as well for giving BabyLove some shape). This is a primary case of a performer being completely at ease – with her audience, wither her material, but most of all, with herself – and should not be missed.

It's All Relative

Death hovers over Make it So from start to finish. Edward Miller’s fractured Southern family drama conjures up the works of such luminaries as Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, but pedestrian, under-stuffed plotting and an unpolished production directed by Sharon Fogarty sadly prevent it from hitting such a stride at the Theater for the New City. Walter Morgan is the unseen patriarch of a blended black family in Memphis. The problem is, his five children born from two wives, Mary and Bertha (Beverly Bonner) never blended together successfully. They reunite following the death of Mary, Walter’s first wife, with whom he fathered eldest son Lester (Leonard Dozier), a publishing executive who has returned from Manhattan.

Lester’s half-siblings Charlotte (Althea Alexis) and Justin (Nnamudi Amobi), both grown adults, still live with their surly mother, Bertha, as she nurses their father. Death, it seems, is imminent for him as well; Walter is in the last stages of ALS (better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Bertha has gone through a string of hospice nurses, of whom Jasmine Crothers (Kelly Jo Reid) is the most recent.

Miller spends the better part of the first act introducing his characters and setting up their relationships with one another, rather than setting up conflicts to escalate. As a result, one has no idea where the play is supposed to go (and one wonders if Make It So could use some further structural tinkering). With little ado, Lester and Jasmine become a smitten couple, and Lester seeks out one of his AWOL younger blood siblings.

Said brother Anthony (Milan Conner) has lost touch with the family due to his mother Bertha's and Walter’s apparent shared disapproval of his gay lifestyle. Furthering the distance between them is the fact that Anthony works as a drag performer at a nearby club (in a humorous touch, the club is called Verfangen Mit Hosen Unten, which translates to “caught with one’s pants down”) run by his partner, Tyler (Adam R. Deremer).

Miller should introduce Anthony far earlier into the play. He is a more significant character than Charlotte and Justin. Additionally, the storyline involving Belinda (Georgia Sothern), the floozy who carries on with Justin, is an overly throwaway storyline. It runs too comical in comparison to the rest of the show. As a result, the waiting game Make It So plays until Anthony’s entrance registers as little more than expository filler.

The same can be said for Bertha, whose monstrous ways and vindictive resentment do not truly surface until the second act. Bertha has problems with all of Walter’s children from his first marriage, but really goes off the deep end when she sees them taking off with Jasmine and Tyler, both of whom are white. This opens the play up to all sorts of racial, sexual and socioeconomic issues, but Miller sidesteps them in favor of redundant sitcom-level clichés involving the same fighting family members again and again.

Little is learned from one scene before the audience witnesses it rehashed again five to ten minutes later. As the fighting wages on, Bertha emerges as increasingly bitter, with Miller saving a touching breakdown scene for far too late in the play. But this keeps her two-dimensionally unlikable for far too long, and it renders the show dramatically inert right when it should be percolating the most.

It is possible that in later performances Make It So will be less clunky. As it is, though, some of Fogarty’s cast seems to still be going through the motions. Some of Bonner’s line readings felt a little off, and at times Dozier and Amobi felt as though they were still merely trying to remember lines they had memorized. Alexis, on the other hand, demonstrated much more potential than these cast mates; it is a shame that Miller could not make Charlotte a more substantial presence. As it stands, she merely exists to welcome her siblings home with a hug. Additionally, having cast actors who appear to be in their mid-to-late twenties to play characters roughly ten years their senior undercuts the state of arrested development in which we should find these overgrown children.

There are some bright lights among the ensemble. Conner and Deremer are easily the best thing about Make It So. Conner is quite sympathetic as the ostracized son, and Deremer offers a sense of genuine sweetness lacking from the Morgan family. Together, the two share the play’s purest relationship. Reid and Sothern also do fine work in their more skeletal roles.

That’s the biggest problem with all of Make It So: it needs more meat on it. As it stands now, this meal is just too lean for its own good.

Method Man

The Wings Theatre is by no means an ideal performance space. Tucked away in a basement on one of the Western-most blocks of Greenwich Village, the theatre is small, with tiny, rickety chairs and an absence of air conditioning. During the performance I saw, there were occasional problems with sound quality, theatergoers were sweating and several audience members continually talked to themselves. None of this mattered, though, as the lights came up on The Rarest of Birds. The 2008-2009 theatre season has just begun, but star Omar Prince delivers a turn that must be remembered at the end of the season as one of its best.

Prince plays late film legend Montgomery Clift in this one-man show, conceived, directed and written by the talented John Lisbon Wood. Clift, the tortured artist with an unfettered commitment to realism who was unfairly locked into comparison with Marlon Brando as one of two dominant actors to emerge during the 1950s’ Method acting era, experienced far more misfortunes than did his counterpart: drug addiction, a crippling lack of sexual confidence, a disfiguring car accident, and an untimely early death.

Rarest – the title comes from a reference made to Clift in a review – puts Clift’s entire life on display, both private and public. Wood sets it in 1962, as the star’s life and luck are already headed on their last lap, on the 1962 set of Freud, the unsuccessful John Huston film. The director has locked Clift alone in a dressing room to sober up and calm down. Clift, in between drinking, pill-popping, and shooting up, turns this time-out into a de facto therapy session with an absent Sigmund Freud, effectively addressing the audience with details of his life and work.

Wood structures this show in a non-linear way, to better mirror the inner workings of Clift’s mind. For instance, Clift talks about working on the late 1950s film Lonelyhearts long before he ever details his problems with earlier films like A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity. The effect can be frustrating for those wanting a strictly chronological interpretation of Clift’s filmography, but his fractured reflections become easy to adjust to.

What is clear is how meticulously researched Rarest is. Wood’s play is comprehensive but too interesting to be merely encyclopedic. He provides anecdotal references to his early work in Red River and The Search; his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor borne from A Place in the Sun; skirmishes with Frank Sinatra on From Here to Eternity and the many battles he had with studio brass, directors, and writers to improve scripts. Clift claims here that his dialogue upgrades in The Heiress are what won Olivia de Havilland an Oscar for the film. (Despite four acting nods of his own, Clift never won an Academy Award).

Wood also chronicles the actor’s deepening chemical dependency and health issues including colitis and dysentery. Perhaps the play’s greatest strength comes when it addresses Clift’s clandestine gay relationships. The actor’s self-doubt about his sexual prowess led to a lifetime of promiscuity and disappointment.

Prince’s performance is so specific, so physically detailed and emotionally bare, it stands as a textbook example of Method acting on par with Clift’s work itself. He makes Clift’s desperation and pain palpable through a series of carefully modulated tics: his inebriated swagger, the glazed look in his eyes, the way he treats his body with equal parts interest and repulsion. Prince makes Clift seem very much like a child who never came close to feeling comfortable with himself. His performance is what constantly drives Rarest and elevates what could have been mere exposition to a real performance.

Rarest is a fitting tribute to one of the all-time greats this craft has ever known. At the performance I saw, a technical glitch caused Prince’s curtain call to be cut short, which is a shame. A performance this dedicated deserves all the recognition it can get.

Ain't Theft Grand

The entrance to the Sargent Theatre at the American Theatre of Actors warns of “approximated nudity,” a promise of ideas both low-brow and winningly entertaining. And the show featuring such adornments, Heist, lives up to just that dichotomous expectation. Heist is written by Paul Cohen, who proved extremely adroit at mature narrative with this season’s Cherubina. This time, however, the premise is more puerile. A group of thieves – Blowfish (Amanda Boekelheide), Seahorse (Jeff Clarke) and The Sturgeon (Rachel Jablin) – have conspired to lift a jewelry store. They have meticulously researched and blueprinted the entire operation. One thing standing in their way, however, is that famous New York dilemma: location, location, location.

The store in question is located behind a small Off-Off-Broadway theatre mounting a one-woman show. This radically feminist show within the show has a very specific theme: clitoral explosions. As a result, the three thieves must sync their dynamite blasts with the orgasms of the star of this performance piece, Ophelia (Tracy Weller). The idea is that as Ophelia experiences orgasm, the applause and laughter generated by her performance will drown out the sound of the ensuing explosions next door.

But there is a major problem: the edgy show is a bust. The bungling burglars must work to make the show a hit just to ensure that their own larceny goes off without a hitch, causing Ophelia to get entangled with both Seahorse and a renegade named Jaguar (Christopher Ryan Richards). Some of these scenes felt shoehorned in, as staged, and the fact that Richards – and only Richards – played two roles (the second of which is an overzealous Off-Off-Broadway critic) confused the action.

Heist is a clever amalgam of genres, though it is in general too light to work as a truly successful heist show, full as it is of betrayals and red herrings. However, a lot of Cohen’s comedic dialogue remains smart (even the double entendres), and he also provides much insider theatre lingo. The jewel store plot itself is actually the lesser part of Heist; the more arresting scenes star Weller on stage, appearing in front of a backdrop made to resemble female genitalia (designed by Kris Thor). In a major credit to Cohen, what should be merely a stunt works, providing constant humor without feeling gratuitous. Neither does a group of vagina-shaped puppets that dominate several scenes in the latter half of the play.

What weighs the show down then? Thor’s stilted direction. Though Cohen’s spunky plot escalates appropriately, Thor never really hoists the action of Heist to a higher level as the plot progresses. The last few scenes move along at a clip the same length as the early scenes do, when they should have more momentum; by this time, more is at stake and the characters are desperate.

Additionally, the five members that round out Thor’s ensemble are inconsistent. Weller stands out in a potentially embarrassing role. She could have fallen flat on her face as Ophelia, self-satisfied and sex-obsessed, but pulls it off. The other women in the show, Boekelheide and Jablin, have less enticing characters. I wish I knew a bit more about the background of the three robbers. How did they meet? Who recruited whom? Boekelheide plays a more interesting part – Blowfish has rougher edges than The Sturgeon – and is more interesting to watch than Jablin, who is saddled with a largely redundant role. Neither, however, captivate during their scenes in the planning stage nor in the show’s more climactic moments.

Clarke’s scenes with Boekelheide and Jablin could also use a little polishing. He demonstrates better chemistry with Weller than with Seahorse’s criminal cohorts. Richards, however, was the most intriguing performer of the bunch. The actor was able to bounce back and forth between two very divergent character types and was not afraid to fall on his face in doing so.

That same spirit carries Heist itself a long way. Cohen’s desire to merge the silly with the suspenseful takes the show very far, but despite a lot of promise, the show remains a few shades short of arresting.

An Epic Battle

Don’t Worry, Be Jewish, a musical now playing at the Promise Theater, features nothing less than a battle royale between good and evil for the souls of its young protagonists. Good ultimately triumphs – no surprise there – but the bigger revelation is the amount of talent on display on this show, presented by the Children’s Talent Development Fund. CTDF is a non-profit founded five years ago by Marina Lerner as an outlet and training ground for talented youngsters – specifically, youngsters who were first generation American offspring of former Soviet residents. CTDF provides rehearsal space and brings in professional coaches, directors, designers and choreographers to help these children hone their abilities.

Eventually, Lerner partnered with fellow parent and creative type Mark Kleyner to create “Our Talented Program,” one of the few current Russian children’s television programs. Kleyner has written, along with musicians and lyricists Alexander Butov and Brian Starr and translator Julia Burke, Jewish. The show follows the lives of Chaim (Nathan Kay) and Sherianna (Kristina Biddle), brought together as their siblings wed at a seemingly high-profile wedding (with reporters and stylists on hand).

Jewish takes on fable form as, in a magically realistic way, King Solomon (Tyler Hall and Mitchell Sapoff in alternating performances) and the Devil himself (Tyler Hall and Kaitlin Novak share the role) arrive to tempt the young children down different paths. As a result, the two must discover exactly what it means to be Jewish, and whether or not each wishes to reclaim the faith under which they have been raised.

Kleyner’s script could stand to be more fleshed out; it is not always clear, particularly in the beginning, who is who and whether the appearance of King Solomon and the Devil occur in real time or if they are figments of Chaim and Sherianna’s minds. But more importantly, Jewish is an outstanding vehicle for its cast, who are as richly talented as they are light on years. Kay ably carries the show in his leading role, and Biddle’s gorgeous voice calls out to Broadway.

The entire supporting cast is on par with the two leads. Novak, who portrayed the Devil in the performance I saw, is a natural singer-dancer, and relishes his time in the spotlight. Natalya Chamruk, Elina Rakhlin and Simona Meynekhdrun fully inhabit their small roles of photographers and stylists (particularly Rakhlin, as the dim bulb of the set). Sapoff wisely uses grandiose gestures for his role as the wise king, and Elan David Kvitko, one of the older actors in the show, was also a poised presence as a photographer – I wish he had been utilized more in the show.

Butov’s and Starr’s songs are also credible, including the title song, “Sunshine and Rain,” and “What Would Life Be Without Magic.” All of these songs find a catchy way to appeal to its young audience while still entwining aspects of the Jewish culture. Accordingly, orchestrator Alexander Ratmansky is also to be commended, as is choreographer Jessica Redish and lighting designers Michael and Stanislav Nemoy.

Jewish certainly aims high, requesting its young cast to enact very heavy themes – it does not get much weightier than questioning one’s faith. But Kleyner, who directs this solid show in addition to creating it, does an incredible job with his entire ensemble, instilling exactly what one might expect from the playhouse in which Jewish is performed: the Promise Theater.