Story of a Life

The deal made at the outset of Mac Rogers’ Viral is a fairly morbid one: Meredith wants to end her life, and has found a trio of people eager to help her do so in a dignified way. That Rogers treats this subject manner in a straightforward manner instead of undercutting it with humor or playing it for pathos is the first clue that this polished show knows exactly what it is doing. Amy Lynn Stewart is the enigmatic Meredith. We never learn the whats and whys about her, her background, her sorrow, or why she feels the best course of action is to commit suicide, and yet this uncertainty doesn’t matter. In Stewart’s hands, Meredith is a three-dimensional woman. Whatever happened in her past to make her opt to cut short her future is her business. We’re just lucky to witness her in the present.

Colin (Kent Meister) and his roommates must also feel lucky to encounter Meredith. His girlfriend, Geena (Rebecca Comtois) finds her online, on a “painless suicide” site. The two of them, along with Geena’s brother, Jarvis (Matthew Trumbull), are looking to recruit a subject willing to let them record her committing suicide on camera. Though the three, who are also roommates, plan to sell the video, profit is not their chief interest. The three find aesthetic beauty in the willful passing from life to death.

Director Jordana Williams does a tremendous job steering the show from start to finish. There isn’t a wasted moment, and Rogers’ excellent script escalates appropriately. (Viral is playing as part of the FringeNYC Encore Series, after winning the festival’s Outstanding Play Award, Rogers’ third in five years.)

She is also blessed with a sterling cast. Stewart is amazing – even while adjusting to Colin and Geena’s world, her Meredith never fully gives herself away. Meister is terrific as Colin, who is so blinded by his mission that he forgets how to deal with people properly. Comtois radiates insecurity as Geena, and Trumbull engenders sympathy as the ne’er-do-well Jarvis. Additionally, the two demonstrate such chemistry that it is easy to believe they might be siblings. Jonathan Pereira is also spot-on in a late role as a film distributor.

Viral is an honest work that offers plenty to think about. I hope to see it reach more people in another incarnation soon.

Cruel to Be Kind

In plays such as Fat Pig and Reasons to be Pretty and similarly dyspeptic films like In the Company of Men, playwright Neil LaBute has spared no mercy in displaying just how cruel man can be, invading the dark corners of the mind people keep hidden from strangers and shining a bright light upon them. bash, one of LaBute’s earlier works of note (it debuted Off-Broadway a decade ago featuring a searing cast that included Ron Eldard and Calista Flockhart), is perhaps one of his most searing. Director Robert Knopf certainly holds nothing back in Chris Chaberski's and Eastcheap Rep’s current production, running at Tom Noonan’s Paradise Factory.

The show is essentially a triptych of three extended monologues. Though the order has changed in various productions, the first of the three scenes I saw was “Medea Redux.” It features a lone woman, matter-of-factly addressing the audience about a sexual relationship she had with her teacher when she was thirteen years old. The unnamed woman ultimately becomes pregnant from this relationship, but keeps the child and defends this teacher, even though the two eventually become estranged.

Chelsea Lagos plays the woman in a performance that’s part endurance test and part act of deception: her character tells us a lot, and does so in very carefully measured amounts, but what is most important is what she doesn’t tell us. LaBute’s most important character attributes lie in what remains unsaid. It isn’t that his narrators in bash are unreliable, but that what we see is not totally what we get. The playwright wants us to dig in between the lines and come up with our own conclusions, forcing us to turn a mirror on our own dark impulses.

Take, for example, the next monologue, “Iphigenia in Orem,” starring Luke Rosen as Young Man. Rosen, in a wonderfully polished performance, recounts to an unseen party (and really to us) how a practical joke between himself and a work colleague escalated severely. As with Lagos’ Young Woman, circumstances eventually escalate to the point where the Young Man makes a shocking decision. This is shocking not just because of the weight of the decision, but also jarring because his assured delivery doesn’t fit that weight appropriately.

More than most of LaBute’s plays, including his later Wrecks, bash reflects the playwright’s dexterous ear for language and imagery. He knows how to make these long scenes more palatable for his less auditory audience members. Throughout the play, he subverts the major events of each monologue. His characters gloss over heavy subjects effortlessly – sometimes Lagos and Rosen display sweetness or fondness when describing difficult certain choices they have made – and speak in a lilting, lyrical way.

Knopf also demonstrates real style for each monologue. Each scene feels perfectly paced, and make the seemingly impossible possible: he finds a way into each character that not only hooks us in, but makes us care regardless of the information we get from them. We feel the pain, shame, foolishness and regret that these characters have experienced at some point in the stories they share.

And it really does feel like sharing. Throughout the performance, we feel as though we are right there witnessing the acts discussed in the play, rather than simply hearing accounts of past incidents. Nowhere is this more paramount than the second act monologue, “A Gaggle of Saints,” in which Lagos and Rosen play Sue and John, a New England couple who recount a disturbing trip to New York in ways that contradict each other while filling in missing blanks.

Lagos and Rosen are perfectly cast in each of their two roles. They both feel completely honest and lend an enormous amount of credibility to their respective pieces of the show. Additionally, Jessica Fialko’s design deserves mention, particularly the lighting, which becomes a character of its own during the performance.

Perhaps the most alarming about bash may be the same thing that makes it the most successful. Knopf’s production shows that, while cruelty can take many different forms and occur in a variety of different situations, it is something that lives in all of us.

License to Chill

The Antarctic Chronicles may take place deep in the frozen environs of the South Pole, but this one-woman show starring Jessica Manuel in a virtuoso performance radiates nothing but warmth. Chronicles is part of the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival. Manuel explains in the piece, which she wrote herself and is running at the Players Loft, about how a need for change drove the Midwestern-born-and-bred spitfire to seek out a change. Once the novelty subsides, however, she finds life on the other side of the planet still has its pitfalls. She has to perform manual labor, including shoveling snow and turning valves, make sure she hydrates enough so that her urine does not discolor, and eventually becomes estranged from the boyfriend she left behind.

Throughout, though, Manuel keeps the pace moving with exquisite energy and perfect comic timing. Her facial expressions, posture and gestures punctuate the way her spirit gradually diminishes as her year continues.

For a Fringe work, the show is also technically impressive. Paul Linke, the director, seamlessly incorporates clever musical cues and real visual images from Manuel’s year into Chronicles. Highlights include Manuel’s breakfast buffet routine, mapped to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” and a glimpse at a snowy slasher movie.

Manuel’s spirited work is triumphant. There’s no better haven from this late-summer heat wave than to catch the wildly diverting Antarctic Chronicles.

Look Back in Confusion

Lyric, the title character of Michael Puzzo’s Lyric is Waiting, is one of those troublesome women we’ve seen dramatized before: stubborn, feisty, plagued by demons. In the play, currently enjoying a run at the Irish Repertory Theater, Ned (Brit Whittle) tries to make sense of his broken relationship with Lyric, narrating its history by providing Annie Hall-style fragments. Unlike Ms. Hall, however, it’s hard to see what makes a character as aloof and off-putting as Lyric is worth fighting for. To say this show is a tad absurdist is an understatement. The play traces Ned’s struggle to reassemble what went wrong, but it doesn’t take place in his mind. At least, not completely. While some scenes take place in Lyric’s home, the backdrop (beautifully created by Joel Sherry) is that of a forest. Other characters include a librarian, a torch singer and an earlier girlfriend of Ned’s (all played by Kelly McAndrew), and, well, Bigfoot (Joe Masi). Perhaps what is oddest about Lyric is that it doesn’t feel odd at all for Bigfoot to be a character.

Odd is fine, but Lyric is more befuddling than beguiling. Ned looks back on his relationship with Lyric, now that it has ended, though he doesn’t explain exactly why their relationship is over; we have to wait to get answers about that. Director Adam Fitzgerald blocks Ned to pace back and forth between various moments in his past, both with and without Lyric.

As a result, we see when they first meet, under less than romantic circumstances. We also see them a little bit in good times, but mostly through bad. Lyric, as played to bravely unlikeable effect by Lori Prince, is a tumultuous character. She starts fights and causes scenes. Puzzo suggests that these fits are caused by something real, but can never make clear what that is. Why for example, does she continuously start playing the decade-and-a-half old Nirvana song “Rape me?”

Ned, meanwhile, blames himself for Lyric’s self-destructive, volatile shifts. His problem is that he views Lyric as his problem to solve. Whittle does an outstanding job of dramatizing Ned’s inner conflict, of being torn between feelings of responsibility to Lyric but interest in someone else. At times, I thought that Puzzo made Ned too hard on himself, and that Puzzo viewed Lyric in too sympathetic a light.

This is because Lyric remains too ambiguous. Lyric the character can remain a cipher, but the show itself needs to answer more questions than it raises. How much is fantasy, and how much is reality? For example, is Bigfoot a vision? A kind of conscience for Lyric? A concoction of Ned’s own? Or something entirely real? To Masi’s credit, he makes all of these possibilities plausible, with only a smattering of dialogue, but it’s to the show’s discredit that he remains so undefined.

McAndrew is also a strong presence in her litany of roles throughout the show. She helps to lighten the action, if not always providing actual comedic relief from Ned’s wallowing. At times the character feels a little too self-aware of her role in Ned’s narration. She speaks as though she is more informed than he is; she knows she is playing a role in the play, however, the character exhibits no control over the story.

As annoyingly selfish as Lyric is, Prince does a thorough job of playing the prickly woman. She makes it clear that the woman is troubled, even if we never learn what those troubles might be. Whittle also does a great job as the wounded Ned; his performance is searing.

Nonetheless, these four terrific actors can only put so much of a disjointed play together. In Lyric, we intellectually grip that has Ned must say goodbye to Lyric, but our hearts never appreciate just what he has lost.

Summertime Blues

I have no idea whether the three characters in Michael V. Rudez’s play, On the Way Down, now playing at the Access Theater, are based on people he knows or are complete works of fiction. Either way, he seems to understand each of them intimately. And at the end of this harrowing work, we come much closer to doing the same. Much of this, of course, is to the credit of the three actors assembled in Dan Waldron’s haunting production. Lindsay Wolf is the tightly wound Josie. For years, it seems, she and her friends Browning (Steven Todd Smith) and Stevenson (Rocco Chierichella) have made a tradition of vacationing at a Hamptons timeshare, along with Josie’s husband and children.

Though the presence of these friends is supposed to calm Josie, there is an underlying tension in this visit. Josie ribs Stevenson, a Wall Street analyst, for his wanton ways, and there seems to be some kind of mutual resentment between him and Browning, a man with an ambiguous emotional history. Josie herself seems uneasy about something, though it remains unclear for some time what that may be, and who else may be affected by it.

I said that we come closer to knowing these character's by the play's end. Knowing, however, is a bit different from understanding. Rudez’s script is tricky, since so much is unclear at Down's outset. How does one present a play about secrets? There is a difference between keeping information from a character and keeping it from the audience. When is a development merely a development, and when is it a crucial twist?

I respect Rudez’s structure a lot. He tells his story in a little more than an hour, with three solid scenes providing the classic three-act structure. The first scene introduces us to each character, the second raises the stakes, and the third attempts to make sense of everything. It’s a great template, but one that could benefit from further embellishment.

There is room to expand it further. One way to do that would be for Rudez to further shade in the characters’ early history with each other. All three actors do a magnificent job of creating subtext to move their portions of each scene along, but the audience should only be required to do so much guesswork. And since the action in the present hinges on reveals, some more information about the past would be helpful.

Nonetheless, the performances are strong enough to strip Down of a lot of its guesswork. Wolf, in particular, is outstanding in the central role. Her meticulously crafted performance navigates a tricky tightrope in which she must somehow communicate elements of her character through thoughts that are not entirely reliable.

Chierichella’s role may appear to be a bit more stock, but he fills it completely and injects some necessary humor into the show with a presence that is both commanding and affable. Browning, on the other hand, could use some further development. I liked Smith’s choices for the character, but still felt that we needed to be clearer on Browning by play’s end.

Down moves at a fairly tight pace, though there are a few places where Waldron could usher it along a bit more. But the director is to be commended for his staging – he does a lot of deft blocking; each character is exactly where he or she needs to be for purposes that befit the action and the audience. And Jessie Kressen’s beach house set is rather impressive.

Whether or not Down emerges from a very personal place, Waldron’s production is an effective look at lingering melancholy. It is certainly a trip worth taking.

Love Is All Around

Neil Simon remains one of the pre-eminent masters of modern American comedy. Few peers can match his penchant for hysterical character-driven dialogue and the way he can mine humor from even the most mundane of events. Ground Up Productions has revived one of Simon’s earliest, most signature works at the Manhattan Theatre Source, and it is a production of which Simon can be proud. That show would be Barefoot in the Park, about the yin-yang love match between cherubic Corrie Bratter (Kate Middleton) and her straight-laced lawyer husband, Paul (Guy Olivieri). After a whirlwind courtship, the two elope and move into a fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up. Apparently, the climb up to their apartment is quite a schlep, even by New York standards, as several servicemen and Corrie’s mother, Mrs. Banks (Amelia White) attest.

Director Lon Blumgarner lucks out in that the Source’s performance space lends itself perfectly to the Bratter apartment’s claustrophobic feel – the size of the stage is actually about as small as many starter apartments in the city. Blumgarner even goes one better than that by having several of the seats in the audience turn out to be furniture later delivered to the Bratters (not to worry, the seats are replaced by new chairs between the first and second act).

Barefoot looks at the different strokes between Corrie and Paul, which increasingly come to the surface as Corrie deigns to fix up her widowed mother with Victor Velasco (Eric Purcell), the intriguing upstairs neighbor. One of the great strengths of Simon’s original play is that Corrie’s and Paul’s sides both have merit and are both flawed. Since they rushed into marriage heart over head, they have yet to navigate the tricky road of compromise.

Additionally, one of the great strengths of this Ground Up production is that its cast does an impeccable job all around. First and foremost is Middleton, in what I can only hope is a star-making performance. The actress is outstanding, blending just the right amount of perky, petulant, vulnerable, and optimistic. It’s hard not to take your eyes off of her, but to her credit, Middleton sharply cedes the stage as frequently as she commands it, particularly when playing off of Olivieri. He has a trickier part, since Paul is so much more reserved, but the actor masters subtle hints to clue the audience into exactly what his character thinks at all times.

The supporting cast of Barefoot also delivers the material perfectly. White has the show-stopping role, as anyone familiar with the show knows. It is indeed a textbook comedic performance, with one terrific line followed by another (“I feel like I died and went to Heaven…and had to climb my way up”), yet White makes even more of the part, etching in the loneliness and insecurity Mrs. Banks endures. White also has a nice chemistry with her Purcell, who finds a very human chord in Velasco, so that the character never appears too hammy. Brian Lafontaine is also pitch-perfect in several scenes as a telephone repairman; I’d love to see what he can do with a bigger role some time.

I mentioned the furniture move between the first and second act; there is also another intermission between the second and third acts, which I presume is done to allow for costume changes. I wish there was a way to eliminate the second intermission; it does break up the momentum, and the third act is too short to require being broken out. Nonetheless, Stacey Berman’s period costumes deserve praise, as do Travis McHale’s set and lighting design.

This production is a pure joy. Though Barefoot is set in the winter, it unquestionably rates as one of the must-see shows of this summer season.

Everybody Comes to Tony's

From The Iceman Cometh toEverybody Comes to Rick’s, the play that became Casablanca, bars are quite the theatrical place to be. And why not? Between the free-flowing spirits and chance encounters with strangers, one never knows who one might meet, and what one might say when one does. Twins Honey (Rebecca Challis) and Troy (David Tully) experience both the highs and lows of that situation in Brian Dykstra’s Hiding Behind Comets, directed by John Trevellini at Nicu’s Spoon. The two are basically idling through life – no ambition, no real responsibility. The most pressing concern on this given night – for both of them, oddly enough – is when Troy is going to hook up with Honey’s friend Erin (Kiran Malhotra) and how early they can shut down the bar in order to head to a friend’s party.

Then in walks in Cole (Olivre Conant), an older gentleman. At first he seems innocuous enough, though as Comets unfolds, it seems as though Cole has an agenda all his own.

This development is both to Dykstra’s credit and his play’s detriment. The first half of Comets feels like a bit of a trifle, showing the aimless ways of young small-town life, and allows its three very talented younger actors to shine (no disrespect to Conant). As the play’s messages emerge, however, it drastically shifts the whole tone of the performance. The second half of the show, then, takes a drastic detour, shoving these three characters to the back burner as Cole takes center stage.

This shift might have made more sense in earlier incarnations of the play, which ran in two separate acts. Trevellini’s version wisely eschews the intermission, which makes for a better-paced, harder-hitting production, but one that nonetheless feels bipolar at worst and lopsided at best, making the show’s first half feel more like a mere prelude than a legitimate part of the drama.

Comets is a cousin of the various nature-versus-nuture works that have pondered whether a descendant of Hitler could also be capable of the Holocaust. Cole extensively relives the last days of Jonestown, the largest mass suicide in history. One of his chief questions is to ponder whether any living relatives of Jim Jones might be capable of the same atrocities.

Though Conant does a masterful job of escalating his character’s menace, delivering close to an hour's worth of powerful monologues, one problem with a lot of this dialogue is that Cole’s history lesson Jonestown will either feel like too much of a lecture to those unfamiliar with the topic or too redundant to those who remember it. Additionally, as Cole emerges as an obsessive figure who may or may not have a personal connection to Honey and Troy, the play reduces the two of them to passive characters. I watched Challis’s and Tully’s reactions during the latter part of the play, and the two do a tremendous job of remaining in character, perfect examples of active listening.

Yet what each of them does in the play’s early moments should not go unrecognized. Tully appears to be one of those actors who can tap into even the most minute detail; in just a handful of moments, I felt I knew a ton about Troy: his loyalty, his virility, his ability to stand up to adversity. Challis is blessed with juicier material, delivered with relish, particularly as she explains just how deep her connection to her twin brother goes.

Trevellini’s staging is also smart, but also comes with a minor problem. He makes the entire theater take the form of the bar, so the four characters move around the audience at various times. This plunges them right into the action, but it also means that at various points, various audience member’s views of certain characters are obstructed. Steven Wolf’s light design also adds to Comets heavy atmosphere without calling attention to itself.

Still, Honey, Troy, Erin and Cole are among the four more interesting people one is apt to encounter on a night out. Comets is a show worth patronizing.

Food for Thought

There’s never been a family quite as tight as the foursome at the center of Derek Ahonen’s The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side. There is Billy (James Kautz), a would-be revolutionary with a substance-abuse problem; Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore), a young runaway who emerges from an abusive background; Dear (Sarah Lemp), a former lawyer whose utopian ideals make her the de facto “mother” of this group; and the volatile but impassioned Wyatt (Mathew Pilieci). As we find out over the course of stiflingly hot week in the studio apartment they share above the vegan restaurant (from which the show gains its title) in which they work, this quartet is bonded by more than just home, job, and shared philosophies on life. Hearkening back to the communal families that emerged in the 1960s, Billy, Dawn, Dear and Wyatt are more than just a nuclear group – they also share each other. They are involved with each other sexually, and have frolicked together in every possible permutation. Their arrangement works for them, and needs no judging until two outsiders enter the action and throw all of their beliefs into question.

The first of these characters is Billy’s younger brother Evan (Nick Lawson), whose conservative beliefs serve as a stark contrast to the lifestyle his brother and his friends have enjoyed. Though the substance of the play, echoes of free love, fight the power, and antiestablishment come straight from the 1960 and 1970s, the play’s structure stems from an earlier era. The idea of the outsider entering a group and being introduced to a different way of life is a classic – Kaufman and Hart employed the “fish-out-of-water” theme all the time.

What is so remarkable about Pied Pipers, though, is that Evan – the “fish” in this story – isn’t the protagonist with whom we need to identify. It is to Ahonen’s credit just how quickly he and his cast get the audience to identify with the show’s main characters. By the time of Evan’s entrance, we are firmly on the side of these tenants, and though we may find some of their decisions flawed, we want to understand more about where they came from.

Part of the reason why may be that the Amoralists, the production company mounting Pied Pipers, have lived with these characters for a long time. The production, currently staged at P.S. 122, played a previous run at the Gene Frankel Theater in 2007, and everyone involved possesses a palpable love and respect for the play’s characters.

More important, though, is the amount of discipline and trust the actors have among each other. Ahonen’s script calls for his cast to endure many emotional and physical demands (which is why, despite a nearly three-hour running time, Pied Pipers always feels electric and never boring), and they all rise to the challenge with performances that feel full of conviction.

Kautz is extraordinary. He makes Billy a font of disappointment, stripping away the character so we can see how his regret over actions both taken and never taken have led him to drugs and alcohol. I love Moore’s pixie-ish qualities (though think her character’s attraction to Evan felt a little unjustified), and Lemp somehow manages to make her character’s speeches explaining their lifestyle feel authentic, when they could have felt merely didactic. Most astonishing of all, though, is Pilieci’s powerful work, which can best be described as Pacino-esque – full of both vitriol and vulnerability at once.

There are two more names that must be mentioned. The first is Malcolm Madera, another wonderful actor who joins the play’s second act as Donovan, the landlord who has allowed Billy, Dawn, Dear and Wyatt to commune in their apartment for free in return for work at the Pied Pipers. Donovan, a wealthy man with a wife and child hidden off in the suburbs, has supported these characters for his own purposes. As these emerge, Ahonen’s themes and questions come into a focus. I loved the bits Madera employed to show how slick Donovan was, trying to come off as a friend but showing that he was the dominant member of their relationship at all times. As he stomps around their pad, he uses everything he can to show that he, in fact, owns them. Alfred Schatz is also to be praised for his note-perfect set, which effectively becomes a seventh character.

Ahonen’s play is never one-sided. We understand why Dear’s thinking is hopeful but flawed, and why Donovan’s philanthropy is so self-serving. He asks important questions and, while Pied Pipers offers plenty of reasons, leads the audience to arrive at their own answers to them. What is abundantly clear, however, is how important all six of Ahonen’s characters are to him as people. Love stories don’t come any purer than this.

Occupational Hazards

It’s inevitable that some of the more revered works in the theatrical canon will be performed more than lesser-known ones. What theater company that can get its hand on Edward Albee or Sam Shepard work can resist the urge to perform it? It is a blessing, then, when a theater troupe decides to breathe life into a more forgotten work. Such is the case with Project: Theater’s’s current production of The Five Lesbian Brothers’ barbed mid-1990s work, The Secretaries at the 78th Street Theatre LAB. The Five Lesbian Brothers remain a rather well-kept secret from the last twenty years of underground independent theater. Comprised of Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron (she is perhaps the group’s most famous alumni, having scored a Tony nomination for Well), this Obie-winning group emerged in 1989 at the WOW Café.

Hopefully they will remain a secret no more. The Five Lesbian Brothers’ plays subvert such strong ideas as politics and sexism in a darkly comic structure. Both subject and style have been embraced wholeheartedly by director Joe Jung and the rest of Project: Theater’s immensely talented ensemble.

Patty Johnson (Jessi Blue Gormezano) is new to the secretarial pool at Cooney Lumber Mill. While quickly promoted by enigmatic and intimidating boss Susan Curtis (Tara Franklin, creating a perfect ice queen), Patty finds it takes a bit more work to fit in with her three long-standing administrative colleagues, women who seem to know everything about each other’s secrets, and, as Patty quickly learns, hers as well.

One of the great joys of this production of Secretaries is watching this trio both enact and defy automaton stereotypes. Dawn (Karis Danish), Peaches (Laura Dillman) and Ashley (Jenny Schutzman) may address the audience wide-eyed and speak in unison, and they all may subsist on a diet consisting solely of strawberry diet shakes, but each woman has her own freak flag, and the actresses wave them high.

It’s hard not to laugh, for example, at Danish’s mannerisms, some deliberate, some a bit more subtle, but all sustained throughout the show, as Dawn harbors a hysterical same-sex crush on Patty, one that circumvents Susan’s odd requirement of celibacy among her charges. And who can resist laughing as Schutzman, hair apparently drowned in an Aquanet bath so that she resembles something out of a Whitesnake video, makes her character increasingly duplicitous? Meanwhile, it’s worth the wait as Dillman makes Peaches’ deep-seeded insecurities rise to the surface.

Jung moves Secretaries along at a great pace, with scene changes that are done nimbly without calling attention to themselves, and a great attention to detail (including the song choices playing in the background of the secretaries’ local watering hole). Gormezano perfectly embodies the Madonna-whore complex: she has Patty walk a fine line of immersing herself in some of her cohorts’ behavior, including submitting her tampons to Susan for review (yes, the play is edgy, but it works best when its humor is the most pointed), while carrying on an interoffice romance with lumberjack Buzz (a hilarious Brian Frank).

Eventually, Patty catches on to the fact that her colleagues’ hijinks are more than merely wacky, that they might, in fact, involve a more sinister plan. This comes as no surprise to the audience, however, and, if there is any disappointing element with a show as supremely well-executed as Secretaries, the fault can be traced to its source material. The show may be a suspense comedy, but as irreverent as the Five Lesbian Brothers’ work is, it is lacking in the suspense department. There is no great thrill or twist as the show approaches its climax.

Yes, this is a satire about what the women warriors in a male-dominated working world can be driven to, but it never quite reveals what drives them in the first place. One catches on to what the secretaries have up their starched sleeves early on, but there is no reveal as to what motivates them. Nonetheless, this particular production is great fun, and its excellent cast deserves a lot of credit for keeping the ride a fun one.

And I’d be lying if I said this isn’t a show that somehow gets under your skin: I bought a strawberry shake on my way home.

Best Friends…Forever?

Teen roles are among the most challenging to portray. Their problems often look trivial to adult audiences, while their contemporaries feel as though their lives are depicted in too facile a manner (it must be particularly hard to for a teenager to identify with a character being portrayed by a performer whose age is actually a decade or so older). Fear not, though. Director Geordie Broadwater and his Babel Theatre Project company have mounted in Christmas Is Miles Away a production that mines the landscape of teen confusion and disaffection at the Connelly Theatre. This is due in large part to Chloe Moss’ perceptive script.

Moss, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize recipient this year, has an acute understanding of young emotions, those that are deeply felt but whose expression is difficult, and occasionally discouraged by others. In the course of eleven scenes spanning two years, structured in a deliberately meandering style, Moss charts the lives of three semi-bright young things.

Christie (Alex Fast) and Luke (Roger Lirtsman) are two sixteen-year-olds coming of age in Manchester, England, in the winter of 1989. The two are best friends, or, at least, a teenage version of such. As they talk of girls, travel, and other topics just within their purview, their conversations are riddled with the subtle power plays typical of ones looking to undercut the other in the areas in which they are most insecure.

Over time, life happens. Christie’s father passes away, and he begins to date Julie (Emily Landham), while Luke joins the army. Moss’s scenes, usually separated by several months apiece, develop each character’s gradual estrangement from one another, and their feeble attempts to remain connected despite their changing interests and experiences. As Christie pursues his more artistic impulses, Luke enlists in the first Gulf War.

The role of the war, and how it changes Luke, is the one area that I think Moss could have expanded further. Where the playwright does excel beyond many others, however, is her ability to make the disconnect between these mentalities palpable through her use of pauses, silences, clipped dialogue, and things left unsaid but understood; I was reminded of the profundity of Ernest Hemingway’s The End of Something.

The three actors are a major gift to Christmas, locating that precise point in which teenagers can be completely wrapped up in their lives and still emerge as sympathetic. Fast has a bit more material to work with on the page; Moss provides a roadmap of awkwardness and fear for Christie, which Fast navigates perfectly. Lirtsman is required to be a bit more resourceful, using more actorly tools to show Luke’s hidden pockets of worry and volatility to shine through. Lirtsman thrives with such a challenge, however, giving a performance that is as physically specific as it is emotionally colored.

Landham fits into the play nicely, showing how Julie, as a woman, can simultaneously be worth both more currency and less to two male friends at the same time. In Christmas, Moss looks at the different forms of behavior that occur between men still maturing when alone with each other, when alone with women, and when in mixed company, and her insight into such intimacy is incalculable. It is Landham’s role to show the toll these changes in behavior can have on a relationship, and, she, too, delivers a performance of stunning dedication.

Perhaps one of the more remarkable traits of Christmas is that despite the deceptively complicated subject matter and layered performances, this show is actually quite easy to sit through, thanks to Broadwater’s fluid pacing. No scene goes on for too long nor gives any audience member a chance for distraction. Daniel Zimmerman’s scenic design changes and Dan Scully’s lighting cues go a long way to moving the show along in such a seamless manner.

One thing is for sure: in a play about the fragility of friendship, it is important to keep the right people by your side. I hope that the Babel Theatre Project and Moss stick together to come up with more works to match this success.

Not So Suddenly, Last Summer

For most recent high school graduates, the summer before college is a series of innocuous adventures: house parties, road trips, maybe the occasional hookup between shopping sprees at Bed Bath & Beyond. That’s not the case for beleaguered Allegra (Marnie Schulenberg), the heroine, or closest thing there is to one, of Adam Szymkowicz’s sharp play, Pretty Theft, which closes the Flux Theatre Ensemble’s 2009-2010 season. The Dartmouth-bound Allegra is the kind of good girl found in Tom Petty songs. Sympathy abounds for her: her mother is abusive and aloof, her father is dying, and she chooses to spend her summer working in a group home for troubled adults.

Don’t be fooled, though: Theft is in no way one of those formulaic, “that summer changed my life” works. Far from it, in fact, as anyone familiar with the playwright’s work can attest. Szymkowicz’s plays are of a more irreverent ilk. His dialogue is quirky but character-appropriate and while his plots aren’t quite linear, they’re not crazily labyrinthine either. Characters travel along jagged lines that occasionally intersect. This is refreshing because while we can’t foresee the path Theft takes, its destination seems completely justifiable when it is reached.

So when Allegra connects with Suzy (an effervescent Maria Portman Kelly), a classmate who excelled in promiscuity and petty larceny while Allegra majored in scholastics, one expects the show to hit the requisite notes of friendship, betrayal, and self-discovery. To Szymkowicz’s credit, Theft does (thanks in part to Zach Robidas’ spot-on portrayal of a doltish All-American teen boyfriend), and then, unsatisfied at merely appealing to the lowest creative denominator, moves way beyond that.

Allegra meets Joe (Brian Pracht), an autistic patient with a penchant for stealing other’s belongings and lashing out at his caretakers. The two, orphaned by the world in so many ways, develop an understanding that is both dramatically rich and emotionally satisfying. But Allegra surprises herself by finding connections between herself and Suzy as well, in a friendship that takes a half-step back for every step forward that it moves.

Szymkowicz entwines Allegra’s story with that of the enigmatic Marco (marvelously inhabited by Todd D’Amour), a grifter in a Western greasy spoon who flirts with his waitress, played by Candice Holdorf (in typical fashion, Holdorf makes the most of every scene, suggesting a lifetime of disappointment and settling for a character not even granted a first name). All of the principle characters are guilty of various types of theft - as the play title suggests - born of their various needs, but they share more than just this thematic kink. Eventually, these disparate characters’ lives will converge.

It is to director Angela Astle’s credit that these characters do so at a perfectly measured pace. She is a resourceful director who knows how to take advantage of every tool in her arsenal, including set designer Heather Cohn’s versatile production layout, in which the same set pieces evoke a ballet studio, diner, mall, and even a bedroom, within Tribeca’s Access Theater. (Kudos to the ensemble cast for so quickly executing these changes).

More importantly, of course, Astle has assembled a top-notch cast. Pracht is nothing short of a divine presence, heartbreaking and true, and Kelly navigates the tightrope of providing comic relief while suggesting Suzy’s deep vulnerability. Schulenberg, as anyone who saw her in last fall’s Angel Eaters, is a gifted actress, and it is a privilege to watch her carry Theft. She captures the nuances of what the costs and gains of a lonely life are. However, I would have liked for her to have explored Allegra’s darker impulses a bit further.

In a play about stealing, though, it is altogether appropriate to applaud D’Amour, who very nearly steals Theft by show’s end. I’ve praised the gravelly-voiced actor before for his work in What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends, and yet I was still struck by his expert portrayal, one so insidious that it creeps right up on the audience. Of course, in a production as well executed as Pretty Theft, as in life, the signs were right there all along.

It would be a crime to miss them.

Paint it Black

Watch enough of the “I Love the [insert decade here]” pop culture shows on VH1 and you’ll be familiar with Michael Ian Black, one of their most frequent talking heads. The comedian, a graduate of sketch comedy troupe The State, has also been seen on several other television programs, usually playing various riffs on himself. Black has branched out, slightly, in recent years, and become an author. In 2008, he published My Custom Van ... And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face. Joe Jung of Project: Theater has refashioned roughly a dozen of these comic essays into their current show, My Custom Van, directed by Jung. Black’s theatrics may be zany, but they aren’t inherently theatrical; it’s just sardonic humor. So the onus falls on Project: Theater to build from Black’s foundation and fill the stage.

And fill they do, to a point. Project: Theater achieves half of its mission, which is to “produce engaging, creative and entertaining theater with an emphasis on works that are new,” and Van (which can be seen at the Upper West Side’s Drilling Company Theatre). This production does just that, selecting roughly a dozen vignettes from Black’s book and magnifying them in some of the most enjoyably over-the-top ways imaginable.

Van is a night of ribald humor. Its characters, all inhabiting some corner of Black’s mind, are all id and no superego. This show can get loud and dirty, and is probably best enjoyed by a younger audience.

Take, for example, M. Ian Black, the blustery character played by Andrew McLeod (all character names are pretty much spins on that of the author). M. Ian recounts in great detail his many conquests from the previous weekend. The man is an arrogant cad, prone to overstatement and over sharing, but McLeod, clad in a business suit and orating with the bravado of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, gives a performance of hilarious bluster.

Josh Tussin turns the volume up even higher in a pair of scenes as “M.I.B.” In one, he brags about having sported an impressive array of facial hair; in the second, he rages about throwing the most awesome taco party ever. It’s hard to imagine from where the actor draws his energy. I’ll let him keep that a secret.

The whole ensemble, which also includes Amanda Byron, Brian Frank, and Jung himself, is rock-solid. And Chad Lefebvre’s stellar lighting and projection design becomes an important character throughout the evening. But despite their immense talent, Van’s fractured episodic structure of chapters feels far less consequential than did their last production, a marvelous revival of The Secretaries. Here, all the pieces are in play, but they remain just that: pieces. It’s more like a night of consistently smart stand-up routines than a coherent work.

And it must be said, I’m not sure what this work does to support the other half of the Project: Theater mission, to stimulate “an immediate and compelling dialogue between artist and audience by asking questions rather than giving answers.” Van is great fun, but doesn’t take on a life of its own at the end of the evening. If questions were posed, I’m not sure I heard any beneath all the irreverent humor, impeccably delivered as it was.

Jung and his skilled cast and crew deserve much praise for turning Black’s writing into a stage piece. It may not be full of insight, but it sure is full of laughs.

Peck a Little, Talk a Lot

The layout for Diana Basmajian’s production of Limonade Tous les Jours, the Charles Mee play about May-December love in the time of croissants, is such that the audience sits on either of two sides of a small stage area at Chelsea’s Cell Theater. It’s a tight squeeze, and a problematic one as well. Anyone not sitting in one of the two “front” rows often has a difficult time seeing much of the action. What is clear from any seat, however, is what a star turn Eleanor Handley is giving as Ya-Ya, a divorced Parisian cabaret singer. She meets Andrew (Austin Pendleton) at a café. He’s in his fifties, while she is in her twenties, but the two share something in common. They are both coming off of failed marriages, Andrew to a woman a decade his junior and Ya-Ya to another older man who cheated his marriage away.

The two share something else as well: a love for the word. The two sit together and talk, and over the course of Limonade talk a great deal more. And their willingness to talk about their mutual aversion to love somehow leads to a love affair between the two of them.

Limonade follows a series of conversations between these two characters about the nature of love. Andrew thinks with his head, while Ya-Ya follows her heart. But while Mee’s play wants to show how love can find a way, his work actually has a different problem. He never makes clear why these two characters wouldn’t stay together. They come together immediately and fall into bed almost as easily. Any wall that either of them puts up feels inorganic, meant to stall the work’s inevitable outcome.

Basmajian’s direction shows plenty of smarts. Since the entire action occurs in the same space, she utilizes effective transitions like co-star Anton Briones’ impressive tap number (choreographed by Erin Porvaznika) and several filmed scenes of the lovers frolicking through the streets of Paris (video design is provided by Tee McKnight) to help distinguish between scenes. This suggests some texture to Andrew and Ya-Ya’s relationship, that time has gone by and they have forged a real connection in the moments they share between scenes. And Hilary Noxon’s set is quite functional.

However, other decisions do not work. In addition to the difficulty seeing both leads at the same time, several scenes depict the lovers in post-coital bliss, in such places as a makeshift bed and bathtub. Handley strips down to her undergarments while Pendleton removes nothing more than his shoes, glasses and camera. This inequity is distracting. Either have both actors strip down for realism or let them both pantomime having made love. I spent too much time wondering why this decision was made, and it distanced me from the action.

Truth be told, aside from several Edith Piaf torch numbers ably sung by Handley, there is very little action in Limonade. What there is is plenty of conversation. However, the emotional center of the play never builds. Both characters’ beliefs are clear from Mee’s first scene. We know as much about them twenty minutes in as we would if the play were to carry on for another two hours at the same pace.

Both lead actors seem to be operating on different levels as well. Pendleton is a terrific actor (The Last Sweet Days of Isaac, The Little Foxes) in addition to being an esteemed writer, director and teacher, and he underplays his role here almost too much. He can be so stoic that I often doubted he had any real investment in his affair. The splendid Handley, on the other hand, is a luminous presence and is far more ebullient, as her age naturally dictates. Passion oozes out of every pore of her body. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her onstage – which is why when Limonade asks Andrew to fall out of love with Ya-Ya, it’s too much of a reach.

What Limonade is ultimately lacking is an obstacle, something to put Andrew and Ya-Ya’s burgeoning relationship in jeopardy and make those watching truly care about them. As it stands right now, the only obstacles are those between the audience and the stage.

Tuff Tawk

Whether it be the Jonas Brothers, ALF or the Twilight series, most of us have our own guilty pleasures: people or works that are in no aesthetic sense good but that always put a fond smile on our faces. For the narrator played by the masterful Zachary Oberzan in Rambo Solo, that work is First Blood -- not the film that gave birth to the Sylvester Stallone franchise, but David Morell’s 1972 debut novel on which Ted Kotcheff’s film was originally based. Solo is Oberzan’s attempt to lovingly reenact the novel. He doesn’t play himself, per se, nor does he actively play the character of wronged vet John Rambo. Instead, he plays an aficionado with a Stallone drawl, addressing an audience to whom he speaks with the familiarity of new friends seated on the floor of Soho Rep’s Walkerspace.

Oberzan explains how his obsession with the Morrell novel was borne from a viewing of the film on HBO as an adolescent. Afterwards, he bought the novel and read it ad mauseum. In Solo, he narrates Morell’s entire original plot, occasionally commenting on its incongruities and sometimes pointing out how it differs from the film. He also offers legitimate analytic commentary about such things as the bond forged between Rambo and Sheriff Wilfred Teasle (one of the characters hunting down the renegade soldier, played in the film by Brian Dennehy).

Nature Theatre of Oklahoma created Solo. The genesis of this show is purportedly a recorded phone conversation that took place between Pavol Liska and Oberzan. Liska and Kelly Cooper co-conceived and directed this meta work, whose novelty stretches almost all the way through the end of the performance (the show’s last fifteen minutes could have been abbreviated). But there are two things that elevate this original work.

The first is Solo’s overall structure. Oberzan performs his reenactment against a triptych of videos depicting three different versions of the actor giving the same performance in his own studio apartment. (Peter Nigrini is credited with video work and Matt Tierney with sound.) Not only does this satisfy a basic element of audience curiosity (who doesn’t sometimes wonder about the personal details of a performer while watching him or her?), but it is fascinating to see how well-prepared Oberzan is. His live performance matches at least one of the recorded ones almost perfectly at any given time. When Oberzan’s live presentation may skew off by a second or two, he easily realigns his performance to one of the other videos in no time. (It appears that an earpiece he wears keeps him on track.)

The second reason is Oberzan himself. The dynamic performer completely immerses himself as the narrator with enough octane to fuel this avant garde monologue piece. He makes the speaker a three-dimensional man, odd enough to be hopelessly devoted to a dismissed pulp novel yet passionate enough to think that perhaps the work is worth re-examining. He makes his persona’s boneheadedness oddly lovable, and his exuberance absolutely contagious. After a while, the speaker’s gruff rhythms make the dialogue sound like its own kind of poetry.

Particularly amusing is how Oberzan wholeheartedly embraces his own low-rent storytelling techniques. He throws M & Ms on the stage floor to simulate gunfire, and hides under a towel in his bathtub when Rambo must hide from his enemies in a riverbed. And his ebullience for the tale is contagious. He establishes a connection with the audience from the onset of the show, creating a communal feeling that never dies.

Here’s hoping that Oberzan and Nature Theatre of Oklahoma will take on the forgotten Stallone arm-wrestling classic Over the Top next.

Keeping It in the Family

The basic premise of Christina Anderson’s Inked Baby faces the danger of falling into sensational, soapy water: When husband and wife Gloria (LaChanze) and Greer (Damon Gupton) cannot conceive a child, they decide to have Greer instead conceive with her younger sister Lena (Angela Lewis). Only despite modern fertility innovations, the three opt for conception the old-fashioned way, with Gloria’s husband and sister in bed together for the most strictly scientific of reasons. Some writers might make the journey leading to this decision the crux of their show. Not so for Anderson, an emerging voice with plenty of promise. The intimate encounter between Greer and Lena kicks off her Baby, which just opened at Playwrights Horizons. She takes what could have been merely an odd love triangle and fashions a story that is about much more – and also, at times both refreshingly and disappointingly, about even less.

Anderson has more on her mind than domestic drama. Baby also packs a whopping amount of social commentary, though director Kate Whoriskey (Ruined) keeps the show moving at such a fluid, involving pace that one never tastes the medicine on its way down.

Baby takes place in an unknown American city, but one that represents Chicago or Detroit. Gloria, Greer and Lena have lived under one roof ever since Lena was laid off from a New York job in the finance sector. It is the childhood home of the two girls, built and tended by their father, who passed away when the girls were young. Lena, roughly a decade Gloria’s junior, was sent off to school and so has spent the better part of her life away from home while Gloria took care of their ailing father.

Between their differences in age, education, and fortunes in love and genetics, there are ample reasons for tension between the two sisters, but Anderson doesn’t really mine any of them. Instead, Greer and Gloria become disengaged from one another in ways that seem less than organic, with Gloria morphing into an unpleasant nag and an unfaithful drag.

At this point, Baby shifts away from the home front and into more metaphysical – and perhaps, even, metaphorical – terrain. It seems that perhaps the reason for Gloria’s past miscarriages has little to do with her own biology and more to do with the family’s lifelong exposure to an industrial waste dump. Greer, Lena’s childhood friend Ky (Nikkole Salter), and Odlum (Che Ayende), Gloria’s secret man, all manifest frightening symptoms of a new kind of virus, one that has them spewing soil from various parts of their body. Though clearly not HIV, Anderson clearly recalls both the dismissal and panic that arose during the disease’s early days.

Baby then becomes about something very different from what it initially suggests. Rather than debating the bioethical issues of what happens when a surrogate mother is a close relative, the show tackles the issue of environmental racism. The low-income area where these characters have lived may literally be hazardous to their health. Anderson’s play is undeniably steeped in the current state of the African-American experience. The playwright pays literal homage to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun both in her dialogue and, presumably, in the naming of Lena’s character.

This is heavy stuff, doled out in quite a palatable manner, but while Baby transfers its subject matter, it never quite reaches any transcendent level. Instead of cresting, the problems of the individual characters in the play give way to the politics of their creator. Anderson is to be applauded for her ambition, but in switching from a realistic predicament to one less so, she loosens the grip she has on her audience.

This is not the fault of Whoriskey’s excellent cast, who all tap into their characters’ (often) unspoken emotions of fear, grief and shame. Gupton is impressive, and it is nice to see Tony-winner LaChanze (The Color Purple) shine in a non-musical role. The real discovery is the incandescent Lewis, who never hits a false note. All actors, though, are to be commended for finding the poetry in Anderson’s dialogue and for making their characters’ emotions identifiable for audiences of any race.

Unconventional as it may be, Baby is certainly a work worthy of much attention and discussion. Anderson has given birth to a child of which she can be proud.

Something Asunder Down Under

Characters on the fringe of society have often made for riveting works of art, from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe to Our Country’s Good to Separate Tables. The Production Company’s current staging of Patricia Cornelius’ 2003 play Love, directed by Mark Armstrong and playing at Center Stage, focuses on a trio of such characters and, as her simple title suggests, asks just what these three would do for love. Do not be mistaken, however. While Cornelius’ title is simple, her play is anything but. Winner of the Wal Cherry Award, a prestigious Australian honor bestowed upon new plays, Love is a challenging work, for both the audience and the trio of resourceful actors bringing the show to life. The play wonders who deserves love. Does everyone? What is love? Can it really exist in different forms with different people at the same time?

Love portrays people who use that term when what they really mean is want or need. Full of vim and vitriol, Cornelius connects the dots between three very intense characters, all constantly in need. Annie (Erin Maya Darke) is a prostitute and drug addict who falls for Tanya (Bronwen Coleman). Their passionate affair comes to an end when Tanya is imprisoned (one of the play’s few details that might benefit from further embellishment).

Enter Lorenzo (Ken Matthews), a fellow junkie and manipulator. Annie easily falls for him, or at least she thinks so – perhaps she has just fallen into his web, thinking she is starkly in need of someone to take care of her as Tanya had. However, Lorenzo doesn’t quite fill the void left by Tanya. When her incarceration is over, Tanya returns to Annie and Lorenzo remains in the picture. They form the oddest threesome, at times repellent and at other times oddly beguiling in their symbiosis. All of them, it seems, serve a need for one another.

Cornelius’ bizarre love triangle is an astute portrayal of desperate living, mainly because she does a superlative job shading in the details of these characters’ sordid lives. But it is the three actors who take her sturdy foundation and run with it. Witness Matthews’ work, in which humor, libido and drug-infused mania collide in a perfect storm. Watch Coleman balance her tough persona with touches of maternal instinct, with attention to both the nurturing instinct and sense of ownership that goes along with that.

And pay close attention to Darke’s complicated character development. As Love progresses, Annie’s ping-ponging begins to take a devastating toll on the character. Darke clues the audience in with subtle cues, embracing realism and subtlety over more obvious tricks. It is to the entire cast’s credit, though, that all three elicit equal amounts of empathy. Annie is not the protagonist of the show; rather, all three characters share that honor.

Cornelius is a co-founder of the Melbourne Workers Theatre, which seeks to elucidate the flaws in mainstream perception of Australian culture and identity. She has succeeded with a play that is both stark and soulful. Every moment is layered with texture. Like Armstrong’s last Production Company work, The Most Damaging Wound, Love is a deeply rich project. One can look into the face of any of the show’s characters and read into them a different motivation for just how and why events have escalated. Sarah Bader’s dead-on sound cues and Dan Henry’s expert lighting further strengthen the mood of the play.

A variety of reasons drive Cornelius’ characters to make poor decisions, but in Armstrong’s production, nary a one can be found.

With Friends Like These...

Once you’ve earned the right to drive, vote, and drink, the thrill of milestone birthdays is pretty much gone. What’s left, except to bemoan having gotten on in years and to wax nostalgic for the past? As a result, birthday parties tend to be breeding grounds for disaster. Perhaps Anthony, the title character of On the Night of Anthony’s 30th Birthday Party…Again, should have remembered that before lying that he was a year younger than his true age of 31. Anthony may be the title character of the L. Pontius play currently being seen at Manhattan Theatre Source, but he isn’t the most prominent one. In fact, the rest of the ensemble share more stage time than does Andrew Glaszek, who plays the birthday boy.

Pontius’ play follows the farce framework made popular by such playwrights as Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular) and Michael Frayn (Noises Off), albeit with slightly flimsier results. Charlie (Tom Everett Russell) is throwing a surprise birthday fete for his partner, Anthony, in the couple’s new condominium. He has invited their close-knit circle of friends to the event, all of whom have shown up. But while only some have arrived bearing gifts, all have brought along some baggage.

The main plot revolves around Ben (Tyler Hollinger) a free spirit who has decided to run off with his friend Kate (Synge Maher) despite having dated Jenny (Kate Grande) for the last year and a half. Meanwhile, Otis (Carsey Walker Jr.) uses the occasion to nurse his own love jones for Kate as well as a hankering for marijuana. Kate has invited her boss, Max (Brandon Potter), to set her up with single friend Beth (Stephanie Lovell), though he really also harbors a secret crush on his employee. Due to a misunderstanding on Max’s part, he thought that this dress-up event required a costume, and has arrived in full bunny rabbit regalia.

As Anthony devolves into a one-track play that might as well be called Everybody Loves Kate, director Megan Demarest does her best to distract with the usual door-slamming and eavesdropping that befits such works of farce. Unfortunately, Jason Bolen’s set consists solely of the guest bedroom, so instead of one door opening right when another closes, characters have to enter and exit the same bedroom door. The pacing is currently not fluid enough to keep the show running at the appropriate level. There are too many stops and starts, and Anthony’s rhythms are far too choppy.

Aside from Jenny and Max, all of these characters are supposed to be best friends since college. However, Pontius’ determination to have various characters explain aspects of their shared history and personality that other would have already known makes them feel like they know each other far less than they should. Occasionally, it even forces the characters to appear dumbed-down. The skilled Hollinger makes for a charismatic ladies' man, but not even he can sell Ben’s forgetting his engagement to Jenny. How could something like that completely slip one’s mind?

Pontius also fails to mine the characters’ history with one another. If they know secrets about one another, the occasion of Anthony’s party would be an ideal time to unleash them, but this opportunity for drama is lost. Is there a reason, for instance, that Beth hasn’t dated in three years? Or for Otis’ sudden crush on Kate? Or why Ben and Kate were never an official couple? Saying that everyone’s long friendship made Jenny feel excluded lacks a true payoff.

Perhaps the most bothersome aspect of Anthony is the tonal shift between its two acts. Just when one thinks Anthony will remain an off-stage device, the character emerges. Glaszek does an impressive job in the second act, balancing an extended monologue with continued costume and prop bits, but it forces Pontius’ action to come to a halt when it should continue rising to a logical climax. He literally forces the majority of his characters to stand still for the better part of the act. And it is hard to grasp why Anthony is so upset. Did he have a bad day? Is he apprehensive about aging? Does he harbor a secret of his own? Or is he really just irked by the various characters running into the guest bedroom? That reason doesn’t seem weighty enough for the tirade that ensues.

Only some of Demarest’s actors are able to hold their own. Russell is always a hoot as the anal party host. He should have had more to do; Charlie is merely a caricature. If he had been less reactive, he could have been a more bodied character. Lovell is terrific. Her sense of timing and delivery remain spot-on, even when Beth’s scenes begin to feel a tad repetitive. Grande shows a lot of promise, though Pontius doesn’t seem to have much respect for the put-upon character. I wasn’t even sure who to root for in the Ben-Jenny-Kate triangle. Jenny seems too good for both of them. So, in fact, does Max. Hopefully Anthony will opt to go out of town for his next birthday.

Night, Brother

The Love of Brothers plays host to a slew of harrowing subjects in its depiction of complicated fraternity: AIDS, abuse, incest. But perhaps the most jarring thing about this important show is just how many people seem to be missing out on it. Brothers, directed by Andreas Robertz and written by Mario Golden, plays the downstairs theatre of the Theater for the New City, a venue known for championing challenging original works. In that respect, this two-character piece is well-suited for TNC. So why were there only four people at the performance I attended?

I imagine one major reason is the show’s dark subject matter. Rogelio (Mauricio Leyton) and Sergio (Golden) are brothers bonded by the obstacles which they have overcome. Both brothers are gay and share an apartment in San Francisco, but they were born in Mexico City to privileged parents who have since passed away. All was not well, however. Sergio, an aspiring writer, suffered abuse as a child.

Rogelio, meanwhile, suffers both emotionally and physically. Not only has he achieved greater success as an artist (he is a well-received painter), but he also feels guilt for not having prevented his younger brother’s abuse. More immediately, though, is Rogelio’s health. He has AIDS and his body is breaking down as a result of cryptococcal meningitis. He wants to make amends to Sergio for failing to protect him in their youth before he dies.

And so Rogelio announces to Sergio that the end is near. He vows to both stop painting and stop taking his medication, thereby opting to begin the end of his life. This is a devastating declaration, and Leyton delivers it with the appropriate amount of surrender, lacking in self-pity or despair. Golden’s viewpoint is that Rogelio is making an important decision, rather than merely giving up.

Sergio’s reaction is likely to polarize audience members, though. He goes to great lengths in his desperate attempt to convince his brother to choose life. As Brothers continues, Rogelio and Sergio use both art and conversation as a means to excavate the demons of their shared childhood – demons that both pull them together and threaten to tear them apart. To Golden’s credit, Sergio’s choices seem firmly rooted in character, keeping his plot from feeling merely sensational.

This is not unfamiliar terrain. While the motivating factors are different, Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-winning ’night, Mother addresses similar themes. Golden’s play does not quite hit the same grace notes. Brothers is a more protracted play. Some of the dialogue makes scenes feel both redundant and padded. However, Robertz compensates for what the play lacks in poetry with a staging that packs plenty of power.

Both actors deliver fierce, committed performances. Leyton’s work is one of carefully measured dignity and gravitas, while Golden’s work is more effusive; he's a little boy lost. As the characters retreat increasingly from society into each other, the play requires both actors to bare their hearts and souls, which they do to impressive effect. I imagine by show’s end, the two are exhausted. There is a third, nonhuman character to the show. Yanko Bakulic's set is effective as well. The brothers' nicely decorated apartment ultimately serves as a prison for the two of them, hermetically sealing the two of them from the rest of the world.

Robertz’ production is bold and, yes, geared for adult audiences. It isn’t a show for everybody. But four seats filled in the audience? These Brothers deserve more love than that.

Father Figure

The title of Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s play Fresh Kills doesn’t refer to any recent murders, but that doesn’t mean her characters aren’t up to some very bad things. Director Isaac Byrne navigates a performance of palpable tension to show the dark places to which some people are capable of going, but while he is adroit at bringing the what of the play to life, Wilder’s failure to provide the why makes for a frustrating, though not unrewarding, evening. Occasionally, a show starts off strong but loses steam. That is not the case here, however. Fresh essentially begins in medias res; it starts in the middle of the action. The play finds its characters at a dramatically compelling crossroads, but fails to explain how they got there or where they are headed. It’s a great middle, but still in search of a beginning and end, the dramatic equivalent of an Oreo cookie with only the marshmallow stuffing.

Fresh Kills, playing at 59E59 Theatres, actually refers to the name of the Staten Island town where blue collar family man Eddie (Robert Funaro) lives with his wife, Marie (Therese Plummer). As far as we can tell, Marie is a compassionate, understanding wife, still in love with her husband, whose main concerns seem to be raising their child, keeping their house up and paying their bills.

Which is why it comes as a surprise to find Eddie picking up Arnold (Todd Flaherty), an underage male hustler, in his pick-up truck after finding him in a gay chat room. Is Eddie acting out on latent homosexual urges? Is he depraved? Merely curious? Wilder never clues the audience in as to what has drawn Eddie to seek out Arnold in the first place, or for how long he has been trolling the websites.

Nor does she adequately explain what lands Arnold in Eddie’s car. It is difficult to make heads or tails of what transpires between Eddie and Arnold, because their encounters never add up to a full affair. Then, before you know it, Arnold has ingratiated himself into Eddie’s family. Without seeing or knowing too much about Arnold’s home life, it is impossible to take him at his word, and so we never know if he is looking for a substitute family to replace his own disappointing one, merely pursuing his own sexual impulses, or if he is a deranged sociopath.

Flaherty fits the role physically – the dodgy look in his eyes suggests danger and instability – but the actor has a habit of garbling many of his lines and not always making the dialogue his own. Funaro, on the other hand, overcomes Wilder’s script deficits to peel back the layers of a confused, flawed man. While Wilder never provides sufficient context to explain how Eddie lands himself in such a threatening situation, Funaro does a brilliant job of showing Eddie’s agony with his current plight. It is a performance that is completely open and honest. Plummer, meanwhile, matches Funaro scene for scene in a resourceful performance that constantly stretches beyond mere “beleaguered wife” stereotypes.

Jared Culverhouse rounds out the ensemble in the pivotal role of Nick, caught in the middle as both Eddie’s best friend and Marie’s brother. Nick is a sea of volcanic rage, protective of Eddie yet loyal to Marie. His work further energizes the whole play (very well-paced by Byrne), and his versatility – dancing between comic relief and vitriolic intensity – textures what otherwise could have been a one-note work.

Byrne is to be complemented for staging such an arresting work in an intimate space (the audience sits on either side of the truck in the center of the theater), and Jake Platt’s lighting design goes a long way toward establishing the mood. Nonetheless, Wilder’s structure leaves many questions unanswered in Fresh. Wilder wants to explore what happens to people who pursue interests that run far afoul of what is considered acceptable by mainstream society, yet there remains far more territory to excavate.

Look Back in Awe

It was a logical choice to adapt E. L. Doctorow’s novel saluting Americana, Ragtime, for the Broadway musical stage in 1998. Doctorow’s ambitious tale, interweaving a prosperous New Rochelle WASP family, African-American servants and Eastern European immigrants during the early years of the 20th century was ripe for an introspective millennium audience. And the skilled team of Terrence McNally (who wrote the book), Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and Stephen Flaherty (music) was able to capture the pulse of the book, lovingly translating its ups and downs to rich musical effect. (All three won Tony Awards for their efforts). But how can one scale down such a show, big in every way, around the budget and size of an Off-Off-Broadway theater? Such a question does not seem to have deterred Tom Wojtunik, who directs Ragtime for the Astoria Performing Arts Center. Wojtunik makes such good use of his performance space in Astoria’s Good Shepherd United Methodist Church that one could easily think it was conceived for that exact space.

To give away much of the show’s plot would be as criminal as some of the more gut-wrenching acts that drive the show’s powerful three hours, so I’ll abstain. Instead I reflect upon the way that Doctorow has his stories intersect and entwines the lives of characters both fictional and historic (including activist Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini) seemingly with a minimum of effort.

Wojtunik builds upon these exchanges in a wonderfully literal way. Choreographer Ryan Kasprzak has the characters parade through the auditorium, moving throughout the audience (who are seated in five sections around a de facto thrust stage and also must face each other). In the first act, the characters from the three different groups find themselves integrated among each other; early in the more racially-charged second act, these characters march through the same movements, but in a more segregated manner. Wojtunik’s point is simple but profound: these characters represent us. Their problems are our problems, and we cannot escape them.

One of the elements that make Ragtime a rarity is that it is never simply one character’s musical. The central love story between Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (D. William Hughes) and his erstwhile paramour, Sarah (Janine Ayn Romano) has a ripple effect that forever alters the lives of her employer, Mother (Anna Lise Jensen), her Younger Brother (Ricky Oliver), and Tateh (Mark Gerrard), an enterprising Jewish immigrant whose paths keep crossing with that of Mother’s.

All of this may sound a bit dark, and while Ragtime has its heavy moments, it is also full of uplift, thanks to a catalog of songs that rank at the very top of the modern canon. Hughes and Romano have the unenviable task of taking on theater royalty in reprising the signature roles of Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald, but they do so with absolute confidence. Witness Romano’s chilling take on “Your Daddy’s Son,” or their harmonic convergence on the show’s biggest number, the duet “On the Wheels of a Dream.”

Jensen also drives the show in her own right. Mother undergoes a sea change of emotional realizations throughout Ragtime, which the actress underscores with subtlety and grace. Jensen also has a gorgeous voice, put to great use in the number “Back to Before.” Rare is the actress who can take a few minutes of standing still and alone on stage and turn it into a command performance.

If Jensen provides the show’s heart, then Gerrard is every a bit its soul. Mother may just be waking up to the dangers in the world, but Tateh knows them all too well, and the actor’s full-bodied performance aches at both possibility and regret. The role of Younger Brother is the one that suffers the most in McNally’s adaptation from the novel, but Oliver makes every moment count. He is certainly an actor to keep an eye on. The show’s ensemble chorus also comes through time and again, particularly in such numbers as “He Wanted to Say” and “Till We Reach That Day.”

Ragtime is a technical marvel as for an Off-Off-Broadway show. Though Hughes had a few projection problems (particularly when singing “Make Them Hear You”) at the performance I attended, overall Kristyn R. Smith proves to be a resourceful sound designer. David Withrow’s costumes, too, are all first-rate. There is simply no weak link in this show under Wojtunik’s hand.

And all of the pieces come together to make for a harrowing, unforgettable night of theater. While this show is sturdy enough to be an evergreen, it is nearly impossible to watch Ragtime and not think about the nation’s specific historic moment. Passionate and bursting with talent, APAC’s production is a towering testament to the angels on whose shoulders we now stand.