A Cathouse Divided

The cinema of the 1940's and '50's, with its schizophrenic blend of prurience and moral certitude, is perhaps the greatest boon to camp theater since cross-dressing. While pop culture remains the form's idiom of choice, sexuality and sincere emotion are two of camp's largest—and arguably its only—targets. Todd Michael's Vice Girl Confidential, a "film for the stage" now playing as part of the New York International Fringe Festival at the Cherry Lane Alternative, is no exception. With wig and ermine pulled snug, the author steps into camp's iconic high heels as Stella Duvall, matron of a high-class New York City brothel in 1942. When the murder of a once pure, Midwestern girl-turned-prostitute exposes a sex slavery ring, Duvall finds both the city's vice squad and the worst of its underworld knocking on her front door. Faced with losing her business—or worse—what's a girl to do but toss her head back, straighten her wig, and strike back with all the grande dame dignity she can muster?

Though the evening smacks heavily of the work of Charles Busch, Michael has a strong enough command of the form to look more like an admirer than an outright imitator. His largely able cast also helps to secure the necessary noir-ish tone, with noteworthy performances by Jeff Auer as Chief of Police Jim O'Roarke, Christopher Yustin as D.A. Walter Slade, and Johnny Calone as dim-bulb mob enforcer Trigger Martin—Of Mice and Men's Lennie gone bad, essentially.

As Stella tells Chief O'Roarke, "Jimmy, being in the indoor sporting business, I'm usually a good sport." The same might be said of theater and theatergoers. Though the otherwise twist-laden plot stumbles to a disappointingly benign conclusion in the final minutes, Vice Girl Confidential is a house of ill repute that's well worth the visit.

Waiting Game

In his later years, Pablo Picasso found a certain profit in repainting the works of other masters in his own style. The act was the purest form of homage: by filtering a painting through his own hands, Picasso was attempting to possess those elements of the piece that previously had possessed him. Such appropriation, it should be noted, is as much an attempt on the copier's part to reassert the autonomy of his own imagination as it is a gesture of respect. The primal equivalent is the warrior eating the heart of his enemy to absorb his strength. Will Pomerantz, the director of John Griffin's Godot Has Left the Building, now making its New York City premiere at 45 Below, explains in his program notes that he sees Griffin's piece as a "conversation with Samuel Beckett's play," the revolutionary absurdist work Waiting for Godot. Perhaps. I view it more as an exorcism. Though intended as a sequel—What Would Beckett Do Now?—the conceit feels more like a convenient excuse for Griffin to rewrite a play that clearly preoccupies him. He is taking a bite at Godot's heart.

Godot, version 2.0, is set on the same blasted plain as the original and includes the iconic dead tree, but a few upgrades have been made. The formerly empty landscape is now littered with broken computers, empty coffee cups (Starbucks, natch), old newspapers, discarded kitchen appliances, etc.—these being "the refuse of modern society," according to Griffin's opening stage description. (The picturesque set and lights are by Garin Marschall.)

If the ubiquitous dead computers and scattered Starbucks logos aren't enough to indicate that modern business—electronic-age capitalism, basically—is Griffin's idea of the new alienation, we need only look to the updates he's made to Beckett's human refuse. Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps from the original, are dead and buried—literally, upstage right (one of Griffin's finer nods to his prequel).

In their place, we have Joe (Edward Griffin), who enters wearing a shirt and tie, and carrying a briefcase. Though barefoot, the fault is absent-mindedness, not poverty. Joe's mercantile mind has been set adrift by the disappearance of everything familiar to him: "I dressed for work, showered and shaved, though not in that particular order, thinking that once I had my coffee I might wake up and realize that I had been dreaming." He's left clinging to a cellphone whose store of numbers is now useless.

His counterpart is Sebastian (Scott David Nogi). Bearded and ragged, and much less perturbed by the surrounding wasteland than Joe, Sebastian is a more direct descendant of Beckett's beloved vagabonds. Even he, however, is wrapped in the remnants of stature: a once fine robe, now tattered, seems to hint at a past in letters, if not academia proper. The impression is reinforced by his pad and pencil—which Nogi wields the way a young Dr. Freud might—and by the fact that he is the first to suggest philosophical games of reason to pass the time.

And, oh, is there time to be passed! The waiting is uploaded from the original in all its lengthy anti-glory. As is the uncertainty on the part of those doing the waiting. A typical exchange:

Joe: How are we to wait if we don't know what we're waiting for? Sebastian: How did the chicken cross the road? Joe: What? Sebastian: It's the same thing. Joe: Oh. [beat] What do we do in the meantime?

The difference between this and a similar conversation in Beckett's play is perhaps Griffin's most cutting comment on the existentialist dilemma as it stands today: Joe and Sebastian don't even have the comfort of a Godot. They are bereft of any single thing on which to concentrate their hopes of salvation, other than the amorphous act of waiting itself.

It's a shame, then, to see the exactness in Griffin's work weakened by our constantly having our attention called to it. The production suffers from over-enunciation. At first, I thought Nogi's and Edward Griffin's energetic articulation was peculiar only to them (indeed, it's not shared by Gabriel Guitierrez as the Artist or Bert Gurin as the Old Man—the revamped Lucky and Pozzo, respectively). But there is little warmth hiding beneath their exceptionally well-aspirated "t's," just as there is little of the messiness of humanity in Griffin's intellectual clarity. As funny as the play often is, it never dips south of the head far enough to touch the despair so present in the original.

Just as Picasso's copies, while informative of the great man's preoccupations, are mostly of middling artistic value, Godot Has Left the Building is excellent as a writing exercise. With luck, Griffin has now managed to free his imagination from Beckett's grip enough to conduct a true conversation, not with the ideas of another playwright but with his own.

Low Blows in High Society

There is something difficult to pin down about Roll With the Punches, Garet Scott's excellent new comedy, premiering at the Abingdon Theater Complex under the very able direction of Kevin Thomsen. Rarely have I laughed so much, and rarely have I not been able to recall quite why. In this respect, Scott is in good company. Who, after two hours of diaphragm-pummeling zingers from Oscar Wilde—or Joe Orton, or any other celebrated farceur—can recall more than one or two of the most biting lines? Lightning flashes and is gone. That doesn't mean we aren't still awed by it during the brief second it splits the night. Still, after some meditation I realized why I couldn't remember most of Scott's best jokes: a great deal of them were never actually spoken. An impressive number of Punches's sharpest turns of phrase aren't, in fact, turned; they are only alluded to. We are pointed in their direction by the corner of a sly smile, or a slight uptick of the voice. Scott has made a farce of innuendo. Trying to communicate the magic of this or that particular moment to the unlucky soul who couldn't attend requires the constant qualifier "you probably had to be there." Considering the art form's single limitation and its singular virtue—live bodies paying witness to other live bodies in a shared space—this is the very definition of good theater.

The play begins with the wheelchair-bound lady of a San Francisco manor, Susan Evans (played in wonderfully maternal drag by Mark Finley), fretting over her two children. And for good reason. Her school-age daughter, Millicent (Jamie Heinlein), is fond of turning tricks on Frisco street corners. Her son, Marshall (Noah Peters), is overly fond of the culinary arts and ball gowns, things the man of the house, world-famous surgeon Dr. John Evans (David R. Gordon), is fond of berating him for.

But Dr. Evans is also fond of women. Enter Penelope Raintree (played by the author), ostensibly hired to help Susan keep an eye on the children. It's soon apparent that Penny has her eye on someone else in the household. Susan's efforts to turn her husband's own wandering eye away from the attractive new hire are rewarded with a one-woman wheelchair race down to the waters of San Francisco Bay, courtesy of the future Mrs. John Evans "the 2nd." Does dear Susan perish? We're not sure. Punches gets slightly over the top from here.

Emerson wrote that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." If so, Scott's mind is admirably unencumbered. (That her mind is not little was never in doubt.) Her use of theatrical devices is as protean as her sense of humor. To name just a few: the scene leading up to Susan's impromptu race to the Bay is done as a puppet show, and I counted at least two musical numbers, one of which featured gold lamé and a kick line. Then there's Nellie, the Irish maid, who is played, at one point or another, by every actor in the cast, occasionally all at the same time (to indicate the transformation, each helpfully dons a green apron sporting an outsized bosom).

Mostly, though, Punches is a campy amalgam of soap opera staples and classic movie melodrama, shot through with a cruel modern sensibility. Think Days of Our Lives as conceived by Christopher Durang and commandeered by any studio-era starlet at her most self-parodying.

Indeed, Finley, whose drag a fellow audience member eerily likened to Joyce van Patten ("through a mirror, darkly," I might have added), could easily wear the noble strip of light across his eyes—the tiara of the dramatic leading lady as lit in 1940's films. The rest of the cast walks the fine line between light camp and full-fledged hamming with similar aplomb. I spent much of my time wishing theater was actually capable of close-ups.

The true measure of camp, of course, is its disdain for genuine emotion. It gives us the shell of feelings—their image without their substance, essentially—so that we may enjoy them without being burdened by them. After understanding why I couldn't recall most of Scott's best punch lines, I realized that my amnesia was actually pleasant. For two hilarious hours, I had been unburdened.

Royally Lewd

Bloody Mary, Rachel Shukert's comedy about the life of Queen Mary I of England, now playing at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, is, to be blunt, a deluge of profanity and sexual perversion. Mary's reign—as if the monarch's titular nickname isn't indication enough—racked 16th-century England with religious and political turmoil. Hundreds were burned at the stake as Mary sought to redeliver her country to Catholicism. At the Clemente, Shukert has the moxie to drag this troubled period through the anachronistic gutter of our modern, sacrilegious, pornography-soaked culture. The product is a sex comedy of the basest, most violent type.

To be clear, I think this is a good thing. Anyone with a taste for the kind of obscene—and obscenely smart—linguistic excess that made, say, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut such a delight should make time for Third Man Productions's lewd gem. If more history were given the same irreverent treatment, we might feel less alienated from it. We certainly wouldn't be bored by it. Shukert's work is crudity par excellence.

The evening begins with King Henry VIII (Ian Unterman) loudly sodomizing Queen Catherine of Aragon (Kristin Slaysman). When Catherine points out that this particular method has yet to produce an heir, Henry offers unsurely, "This is how they did it back at Eton." A brief anatomy lesson by the queen and a second, more "proper" attempt later—which includes a mid-coital tableau and a suitably cinematic flash of white light—and Mary herself (the excellent Audrey Lynn Weston) emerges meekly upstage, dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl.

What follows hews impressively close both to what we know and what we think we know of Mary's life and times. Henry soon throws Catherine over for Anne Boleyn (played in hilarious drag by James Ryan Caldwell), who bears him the daughter who will later become Queen Elizabeth I (also Caldwell). Henry then throws over Boleyn (who ends up beheaded) for Jane Seymour (whom we do not see here). Seymour finally bears Henry his much-desired son, Edward (Reginald Veneziano). However, in quick succession both Henry and Edward shuffle off their mortal coils, leading to a short squabble over the crown, a political skirmish that Mary eventually wins.

Good comedy doesn't pervert the essence of its subject as much as it points up the absurdity that's already there. From her promiscuous father—Mary's ill health is rumored to have been the result of congenital syphilis contracted during her birth—to her plainly chilly marriage to Phillip II of Spain at the venerable age of 37, the story of Mary's life is already rife with sexual undertones (even leaving aside her intense devotion to Catholicism, a religion of subsumed eroticism if ever there was one). Shukert simply turns these into wildly glaring overtones.

For instance, when young Mary catches her father receiving oral favors from Boleyn, the king stammers that the service is actually a kind of medical procedure. Mary innocently presses:

Mary: Why can't Mummy [do] it for you?

Henry: Because Catholics can't do that, Mary!

Mary: Cardinal Wolsey can. I've seen.

Those times Shukert moves away from such easy vernacular into what I can only call heightened ribaldry—inventive, period-sounding vulgarity, essentially—the wonderful cast rises easily to meet her. When his sixth wife denies the dying Henry one last fling, he rumbles, "Such treason! To deny thy dying husband a final tussle of the flesh? When God alone knows what kind of [female genitalia] he shalt find in heaven! Hearken thus, slattern! Or thy shall au revoir to one's tête as did an ill-fated queen long before thou couched here."

Such pervasive indecency would grow thin without a human, emotional anchor. This is exactly what Weston provides in her turn as Mary. She is the nerd who discovers that even after she's bested the bully—in this case, by strapping him to a pole and torching him—she will always be greeted icily by those people whose acceptance she craves. Weston's sweet insecurity is the necessary counterweight to Bloody Mary's coarseness.

At bottom, this rampant solecism speaks to more than just a gleefully depraved imagination; it's clear and admirable evidence of Shukert's love for the language, even if that love is more fit for the brothel than the nunnery. Oscar Wilde offered that "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Perhaps, but as Bloody Mary shows, sometimes the gutter works just fine.

Unbirthing the Truth

The life of a momentous work of theater generally runs as follows: first, the work is a bombshell exploded in the art scene; after initial, tense resistance from the mainstream, it is then lauded and subsumed by the very people who originally dismissed it; finally, the work becomes so ubiquitous that, when restaged with no additional artistic bells and whistles (such as a directorial "concept"), it seems very much like a parody of itself. For all its virtues, the most lasting impression I carried away from the Michael Chekhov Theater Company's production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child is that Shepard's most well-known play may now be edging into the third, self-satirizing phase of its life cycle. Shepard has been referred to as the "poet laureate of America's emotional Badlands." Buried Child is no aberration in the oeuvre; the work is, arguably, one of its pinnacles. (Just ask the Pulitzer committee, which awarded it the prize for drama in 1979.) The setting is the decaying farmhouse of an Illinois family. Dodge (Thomas Francis Murphy), the salty patriarch, is largely confined to the living room couch by an unnamed illness. He is cared for—in the loosest sense of the term—by his wife, Halie (Patricia Elisar), and their two sons, the emotionally crippled Tilden (Tom Pavey), and the one-legged, bullying Bradley (Brian Lee Elder).

The fun begins with the arrival of Vince (Jason Griffith) and his girlfriend Shelly (Kristin Carter), Greenwich Village types on a trip away from the city (New York is never named, though it doesn't need to be). Vince claims he is Tilden's son. Much to both his and Shelly's chagrin, however, no one in the house recognizes him. It seems the decay is not limited to the walls around them; a secret has been rotting the foundation of the family itself. When Vince leaves Shelly alone in order to buy Dodge a bottle of whiskey—a futile attempt to get in the elder's good graces—she takes it on herself to uncover exactly what is sour at the heart of this particular American Gothic.

As with all but the best mysteries, the pursuit of the truth in this case is more engaging than what is eventually uncovered. Indeed, if the secret in question weren't handled so elliptically, a case could be made that it borders on being offensively stereotypical of the worst of rural America. Shepard deals in symbols, though—he is our most accomplished purveyor of stage image as metaphor—and not, generally, in outright social commentary. So I will refrain from reading too much into his devices, and rather take him at his word.

Which is exactly what the Michael Chekhov Theater Company does as well. The show fits comfortably in the limited room of the half-accurately named Big Little Theater. (In his curtain speech, the acting house manager described the space as a "postage stamp"; to credit his observation, taking your seat is indeed a little like seeing how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.) Like nearly everything else involved in the production, the skill with which such a large show—three or four characters are almost always onstage—is shoehorned into such a diminutive theater speaks to the company's extreme competence.

But this competence never takes wing into inspiration. Though each cast member turns in an unimpeachable performance—Murphy as the gruff Dodge and Carter as the beleaguered but otherwise normal Shelly, especially—the overall effect is similar to viewing a print of a famous painting in place of the vibrant original. Unstraying faith to the word of such a well-established work of art, it seems, comes at the cost of a fresh encounter with the work's spirit.

In all fairness, there is no blackly critical finger to be leveled at the company's efforts. They do Buried Child the honor of letting it speak for itself. Unfortunately, what the work seems to be saying at the moment is "reinvent me, or let me rest."

Restraint and Refrains

The grim masochism squeezing at the heart of brothers Allen and Wallace Shawn's delicate new musical, The Music Teacher, first appears to be nothing more insidious than a bit of urbane self-deprecation. After a brief, filmed montage of snow-covered groves and teenagers lounging in idyllic fields—all blurred just enough to indicate that we will be watching a memory play—the fifty-something Mr. Smith (the wonderful Mark Blum) casually settles into his spot before the audience. "There are a lot of people in this world about whom you can honestly say that it just doesn't matter if they're alive or dead," he tells us. The otherwise caustic comment is endearing for what comes next: Smith, the titular music teacher, admits without rancor that he considers himself one of them.

Wallace, playing writer to Allen's composer, frames the piece as a wistful reminiscence. Yet, even before we're properly situated in the memories Smith will be exploring—his stint, 20 years past, as a music instructor at a small, rural liberal arts boarding school—we are aware that there was a schism in his life and that we are looking with him backward across the fissure. And as with any such retrospection, hindsight reveals that the tendrils of misfortune reach further back than expected, into moments that seemed entirely innocuous at the time.

For Smith, it's the occasions he spent teasing, and being teased by, his teenage students. "So are you girls planning on going swimming today?" he asks in the first scene. To which one female pupil gently mocks, "Oh—why do you ask that? Do you want to come too, Mr. Smith?" "Yes, well—what I might like to do and what I'm going to do are two entirely different things," he responds. Self-restraint, we find, is no different than any other indulgence: it is best taken in moderation. Smith suffers from an excess. And this conflict—what is desired versus what is attempted—quickly becomes a refrain, both spoken and unspoken. Later, as part of the miniature, wonderfully scored opera occupying the middle of the piece, it will be sung.

This mini-opera, in fact, is both the story's fulcrum and its masterstroke. Pushed into composing it by his two favorite students, Jane and Jim (Kathryn Skemp and Ross Benoliel at the performance I attended), Smith finds that he focused like a laser on its completion. After its performance, in which Smith, Jim, and Jane—who is also the librettist—play the leads, every ounce of energy the teacher has worked to suppress is released into his life like an atom bomb. Jane, whose older self (Kellie Overbey) describes her role in the aftermath with beautiful simplicity, is especially devastated by what follows.

The power of The Music Teacher isn't immediately obvious. The piece gives us a before-and-after view of a man's life by walking us over the bridge between the two. But Teacher never goes so far as to give that bridge a name. An audience member is left, instead, to compare one end of the journey to the other and draw his or her own conclusions.

I, for one, appreciate the courtesy. Wallace, no stranger to the war zone of sexual torment (his Marie and Bruce and A Thought in Three Parts spring to mind), is lyrical without being florid. Allen, himself a music professor at a rural, liberal arts institution, is gifted both technically and as a stylist—note the difference between the rhythmic, almost Stravinskian melodies of the "musical theater" songs and the markedly (sometimes satirically) Verdian sweep of the operatic score. Neither brother says more than is needed. Their restraint, unlike their poor protagonist's, is healthy.

The only times Teacher falls flat are the few instances when the two authors fail to support a given moment with an appropriate theatrical convention. A modern overcoat and an English breakfast setting are brought into the Grecian courtyard of Smith and Jane's magnum opus. (I must note here that the set, which transforms smoothly from numerous school settings into an ancient garden and back again, is a great credit to designer Tom Cairns.) While such anachronisms are admittedly amusing—an older couple behind me seemed near diaphragmatic distress—one needn't be an opera scholar to realize that they would quickly earn a teacherly veto.

Musically, the only nonstarter is an ostensibly seductive nightclub number—an oddity for a composer so comfortable with style. Allen is unwilling or, I suggest less confidently, unable to move away from the rhythmic and harmonic complexity that is his home ground. Crooning requires a certain structural and melodic simplicity. Without this, the warm bedroom eyes of the seducer turn into the cool appraisal of the collector.

This, not coincidentally, is what Smith lists as his secondary profession. He doesn't collect anything that can be put under lock and key, though. Rather, he is a collector "of experiences…of beauty." While running his riches through his fingers one lonely night, he adds, "I had kept my life a secret because I wanted no one to be hurt by me, and I had harmed no one." But, in fact, it is Smith who has been hurt. And, when we stop to reflect on it, we have been too.

Speaking Directly: Playwright and Director Mark Finley

 

Mark Finley

I first came in contact with Mark Finley in his role as a playwright, when he mounted his play The Mermaid with the theater company called the Other Side of Silence II (affectionately known as TOSOS), where he is artistic director. I wasn't unduly surprised to learn, during my time around that project, that Finley also directs-as in other fields with limited resources, no one can afford the blinders of a specialist. But the good noises his peers continually made about his talents piqued my curiosity.

I was finally afforded the opportunity to see his work when he took the reins of Ross MacLean's Follies of Grandeur, which recently played at Theater for the New City. With the show fresh in mind, I sat down with Finley to discuss his views on directing for Off-Off-Broadway, his take on the current state of the theater, and the pleasures of sitting outside a stage door in pink pajamas.

Offoffonline.com: How did you get into directing?

Finley: I went to North Carolina School of the Arts for acting, then got involved in a theater company called the Native Aliens Theater

Collective. One day, a friend of mine gave me a book called Young Stowaways in Space to look at. It was a young-adult science fiction book written-in 1962?-for boys between the ages of 12 and 15. It blew me away how homoerotic, how sexist this thing was. It had to be seen. I figured that, rather than hand it to a director and say, "This is what I want, blah, blah, blah," I would try to direct it myself. So I came up with a framing device for it and basically staged the book.

Was there something about the material that made you want to take that step?

MF: It was the way it was written. It wasn't just the dialogue. The dialogue was bad enough. It wasn't written to be spoken. If you tried to make it the way a human would talk, it would just be dumb, instead of amazingly, spectacularly, charmingly dumb. I hope this doesn't get back to the author.

So that was your first full-scale production as a director?

MF: Yeah. I mean, I probably should've started with a simple, little three-character Chekhov or something, where nobody really moves, instead of moving nine people-who are onstage most of the time together-through outer space.
So yeah, I kind of started as a late sophomore/early junior and not a freshman at directing. But I fell in love with it right away. As an actor, you can only control your performance, if that. As a writer, you control even less; you control the word on the page, then you just kind of throw it into the ocean and hope somebody gets it. As a director, you're absolutely responsible for what the audience sees. I love that.

Thinking about the arc of things you've chosen to direct, is there something in particular that you look for in a script?

MF: I always look for humor. Also, the thing I love about Follies is the total humanity of the characters. I certainly had never seen this story told in this way, in such a theatrical, forgiving, human way. Nonsexual, nonexploitive.
Even the topless moments are nonsexual.

A testament to your skill, I guess.

MF: [Laughs] I guess. So the quick answer would be: first, humor, then humanity. With this one, I'm also walking away going, "Wow, I really kind of realize why I like to work on comedy more," because it's just more fun.

Because comedy generally has a higher energy?
I think it's just less depressing. If you're working on a show, it's a world you have to live in 24/7, and my release is humor, not drama. So I would much rather live in a wacky, kooky, nutty place than a very important, serious place for eight hours a day. Personal preference.

How do you view the state of Off-Off-Broadway today?

MF: When I first came to New York in 1987, Off-Off was literally a showcase land for people to get seen, to maybe get cast in stuff. Now-and this was evidenced last year with the IT [Innovative Theater] Awards-Off-Off-Broadway is so much more diverse. It's so much more than little groups of people getting together and saying, "Let's do Sam Shepard's Red Cross for two weekends and try to get some agents in." It's people forming theater companies and putting seasons together, trying to make a go of it. There are institutions out there that have always been doing that: La MaMa, P.S. 122. But companies like Emerging Artists Theater and Women Seeking… have established a watermark of "this is what we do." And people seek that out, and I think that's great.

What are your ambitions for the future? Is there something you're pushing toward?

MF: I want to be able to direct full time, all the time. Everywhere, anywhere.

Would you say that you have a philosophy that you adhere to in your directing?

MF: The way I approach a project came from my friend John Reese, whom I worked with on a project in Virginia a few years back. He stepped up and said, "O.K., this is how this works: I do my work, you do your work, then we work together, then we go home." Sounds pretty basic, but you'd be amazed how many people don't or can't adhere to that.

So hands-on?

MF: Yeah. This is going to sound really arty-farty, but I like to feel like I'm building a machine with my actors that I can leave and they can drive. Often, I've had actors come up to me after a production and say, "You know, when those lights go up, I feel like I'm stepping on a roller coaster and we just come out at the other side." And I'm like, "Good, that's how it should be." I'm not a fan of lolling around on the floor. It's not my thing.

Do you have a story that epitomizes what Off-Off-Broadway is for you?

MF: I don't know if this is a funny story or anything. I'd stopped acting for a while, and a friend had gotten me into a production of Pillow Talk, with Native Aliens [Theater Collective]. It was a stage adaptation of the movie, and I played Doris Day. I didn't do it in drag; I dyed my hair and I ran around in pink pajamas through the whole thing.
We had one matinee performance. It was early in the run and it was raining, so it was very lightly attended, and I'm sitting on the fire escape just out of the rain-I had maybe three scenes where I'm not onstage-just sitting there in my little pink pajamas and I'm like, "What the hell am I doing here? I'm in an almost empty theater on a rainy day in the middle of the spring, but I'm just so happy to be here. I don't even know why. I'm just so damn happy to be here."

Psycho/Sexual

Nelson Avidon's new play, Girl in Heat, now at the Michael Weller Theater, isn't so much a fresh skirmish in the war of the sexes as it is a recap of the conflict's main themes. She's crazy; he's horny. Mind games and clumsy flirtation—the former by her and the latter by him—unsurprisingly ensue. It's tempting to dismiss the piece reflexively, the same way you would wave a hand at a friend telling you something you already know. And if Girl had been cast any differently, this might indeed have been the best way to salute both its coming and its passing. But someone, either Avidon or director Robert Walden, had the good sense to cast Avidon himself and the wonderful Cheryl Leibert. What might otherwise have been as erotically charged as a student essay on Freud becomes, in their hands, less a two-dimensional map than a light sketch of familiar territory. In their best moments—the ones where they are man and woman, instead of "man" and "woman"—you can practically smell the pheromones in Avidon's script.

Given the general lawlessness of the gender war, it's a welcome comedic touch to stage this particular tussle in a lawyer's office. (The richly convincing set is by Maya Kaplun.) Joseph (Avidon) is a litigator coming up for partner in his firm and a married man. Marilyn (Leibert) is a young temp in the last hours of her summer employment. After everyone else in the firm has left for the night, she invites herself into his office for her particular brand of face time with the boss. The erotic tête-à-tête that follows alternates between playful Eskimo kisses and brutal, emotional head butting.

The imbalance is clichéd. He has everything to lose—wife, job, future—while she has nothing, not even (surprise, surprise) her sanity. But underneath its conventions, Girl is entertaining for spotlighting the irrationality at the heart of the human mating dance, particularly on the male end: just how much abuse and manipulation will a man put up with when the carrot of sex hangs, he thinks, just within his reach? The question is practically a part of testosterone's chemical composition.

And if Joseph is any indication, the answer is: quite a lot. Marilyn begins to break him down almost before she's opened his door, mostly through an aggressive insincerity that Joseph is too libidinous to take offense at. As she asks after an exceptionally nasty mood swing, "We're playing games, aren't we?" "Sure," he responds, perhaps a touch too lightly. "Well," she presses, "where's your competitive spirit?"

Elsewhere, after one of her more disconcerting maneuvers, Joseph is left to gawk. "Where did you come from?" he asks, to which Marilyn will only offer, "From reception." Leibert is a torrent of inappropriate emotion; it's a pleasure to watch her sweep the buffoonish Joseph away.

For his part, Avidon uses his wonderfully expressive face to chart Joseph's slow slide backward—as he submits himself ever more fully to Marilyn's wiles—until he has landed squarely in his long-past teenage years. "This is what I thought sex would be like before I had sex for the first time," he giddily confesses while Leibert looks on at him with inscrutable, cold eyes. She is his captor. He is the willing captive. Avidon is cheekily walking us through the Stockholm syndrome of the dating man.

It's a shame, then, that Avidon the writer doesn't walk us as far as we could go. Girl is only two-thirds of a decent play. Questions about what effect the various secrets and bodily fluids swapped by the pair will have on both their lives—in his case, professionally as well as personally—are brought to a fever pitch, only to be abruptly tied off in a nice, writerly bow. A little messiness can be a virtue, however. If Girl in Heat needs to be tied off at all, I would have preferred a tourniquet.

Age Against the Machine

The four vignettes that make up Michael Smith's new piece, Trouble, now playing in the Joe Cino Theater at Theater for the New City, are not unlike the four elements: watery in places, sometimes laboriously sodden, occasionally breezy with offbeat musings, then suddenly fired with bitchy wit. The choppiness is reassuring in a way. With his reviewing for The Village Voice in the 1950's and 60's, Smith is widely considered the man who legitimated Off-Off-Broadway; it's nice to see that he has retained some of the amateurish charm that is the form's hallmark. Running through the center of the four loosely related sections—the way a river runs through manmade borders—is the aging but still formidable Tess Byerson (Kathryn Chilson), New York City's new commissioner of art and culture. Like any aging river, Tess may sport a few more wandering curves than in yesteryear, but she has lost none of the force of her current. She makes this fact clear in the opening scene, set in a Chinese restaurant during a press barrage: "Look at the pictures. Every single one, I'm not just smiling, I'm radiant. I can't fake that."

Self-love, though, is inelegant. Smith's concern here is not with unchecked ego but with the delicacy of ego in its slow dance with time. Glamour inevitably fades; time eventually leads the waltz. What else could justify Tess's very next line: "But then what?" Indeed, what could justify the next, most successful part of the evening, as Tess and her aide, Dickie (Alfred St. John Smith), head out to the studio of artist Sandy Morphol (the brilliant Jimmy Camicia) for a visit as part of her hard-won commissionership?

After spending a tense few minutes in an elevator that doesn't appear to be moving, Tess and Dickie emerge into the "sweatshop," where the Andy Warhol stand-in lords over his models like a god. (The enmity many Caffe Cino veterans hold for Warhol and his posse is the stuff of Off-Off-Broadway legend; I can only think that Smith's affection for the long-defunct coffeehouse helped sharpen his pen to such a gleeful point here.)

So it is that Smith is at his best with a target in his sights, and Morphol's exploitive temple proves to be excellent ground for some of his strongest material. For instance, when Tess discovers that she is being videotaped while models copulate in the background, she is indignant. It's left to Dickie, a fan of Morphol's, to smooth the burgeoning rift:

Tess: I don't do porn. Dickie: But you look divine today. I mean it. This is one of your best days. You're like a love goddess presiding over the orgy. Athena never looked so good. Tess: You're sweet to say so. Now will you get the [expletive] out of my frame?

Such nimble jiu-jitsu is rarer the further from this scene we travel. Like Tess, we begin to feel the wheel of time slowly turning; for an audience member, needless to say, this is more fun as a dramatic theme than as a hard fact. When we get to the final vignette, which takes place between Tess and her previously unseen lover Randy (Dino Roscigno) in a jail following his arrest, whatever comic energy Smith once mustered has dissipated into the cavernous, dark air of the Cino. All that's left is an unfocused attempt at pathos, as Tess realizes she is no longer wanted.

That Smith also directed the piece may have something to do with this dissipation into fuzziness—what he couldn't sharpen as a writer he certainly couldn't improve with staging, if he could see that anything needed improving at all. Still, as anyone who's contemplated the paradox that is King Lear knows, to write about age and aging requires remarkably youthful vigor. With Trouble, Michael Smith shows that he may be technically a little long in the tooth, but when he sets his mind to it, those teeth can still deliver a wicked cut.

Parent Trapped

The most effective moments of Dutch playwright Alex van Warmerdam's The Northern Quarter, now making its New York premiere at the Sanford Meisner Theater, are the two stage images that bookend the evening. Minutes after lights' rise, the 41-year-old protagonist, Faas, uses a flashlight to follow the winding tendril of a long, red knit scarf—like a man slowly collecting the thread sewn for him by the Fates—until he comes face to face with his personal Klotho, the goddess of spinning: his disturbingly cheerful mother, still blithely crocheting. All roads, we're seemingly told, lead to Mom. The rest of the evening doesn't so much advance from this image as circle its significance, like a dog sniffing around its master. Faas (the excellent Dave Geuriera), under the aegis of both his mother (Heather Hollingsworth) and his rigidly decorous father (Vincent van der Valk), has been held the long years of his life under what amounts to house arrest. He is not allowed outside; he is barred from reading books (when his father relents and gives his son a dictionary, Faas discovers that all but a few paternally approved words have been scratched out); he is even denied a shrimp sandwich on the grounds that wanting one means he is not entirely content at the present moment. Trouble starts when Faas begins to assert to his parents the truth of that accusation.

The uneven charm of van Warmerdam's script, as translated from the original Dutch by director Erwin Maas, is in its particular type of absurdity. It's not a pure blend. Where the absurd argues that the world and those who people it are threatening for being entirely inscrutable, van Warmerdam seems to suggest that the true threat to our well-being is not attempting to go out and crack the code.

It's no surprise, then, that once he lets Faas into the world—where he finds his beloved books and experiments with painting, among other things—the mood noticeably lightens. A warm breath of common sense begins to creep into the dialogue (a duel of philosophy with three quirky construction workers is the high point of this shift in tone), as opposed to simple logic, which, in keeping with the absurd tradition, the parents show time and again to be easily perverted.

Maas's attractive visual sense generally accentuates these various dips and rises (with strong support from costume designer Oana Botez-Ban and light designers Lucrecia Briceno and Tim Cryan). This is a double-edged sword. Where sometimes Maas's staging serves to adeptly underscore a moment's subtext—as he does with the red scarf image—he bludgeons others with obviousness. (I'm thinking particularly of several scenes in which mother and father use their son as a sitting stool, needlessly emphasizing his subjection.)

The cast members bear up well, though. They know the work is, at bottom, a clown show—as pointed up by the many inventive costumes as well as through makeup (the parents, for instance, are powdered and lavishly rouged)—and the actors ratchet up the energy accordingly. Particularly fine work is done by van der Valk and Hollingsworth. However, it's Geuriera's imperturbable Faas who anchors the evening. He wisely refuses to play his unwilling shut-in as a child trapped in a man's body. Instead, he aims at the more interesting challenge of playing a man trapped in a child's life.

That van Warmerdam lacks the teeth for the viciousness of the unadulterated absurd makes his inclusion of a gun and its eventual use all the stranger. Yet from this misstep comes a crowning touch. With his father looking on, Faas steps off the stage and passes through the audience, out into the brisk air beyond the theater doors, from which we can hear real life humming on 11th Avenue. After a long, pained moment, the father offers a simple endorsement: "Goodbye, son."

Religious Phallusy

The art of making people laugh at what they would otherwise find offensive is, at bottom, a balancing act. On the one side, you have mean-spiritedness; on the other, impishness. Veer too far into the former, and you end up in the off-putting mire of misanthropy; too far into the latter, and you're left with the empty satisfaction of the prankster (or the forced smile of the pranked). As it stands, look not for a mischievous twinkle in the dead eyes of Thomas Bradshaw's Prophet, the bad joke now playing downstairs at PS 122: the pointless toxicity of the religious, gender, and racial stereotypes on display sinks the thing deep into the mephitic muck.

At light's rise, a middle-aged suburbanite named Alex (Peter McCabe) plants himself center stage, announces that his habitual kowtowing to his wife has made him unworthy of his penis, strangles her to death, then takes off to the ghetto in search of an unschooled, easily dominated "negress" as a replacement, but not before he is commanded by a cartoonish God to re-subjugate women, on pain of eternal damnation.

What follows is a hodgepodge of action and consequence: Alex begins his ministry, with his new wife Shaniqua (Detra Payne) as the proving ground; the ministry falls apart as the wives form a frothing mob bent on mass castration; and inevitably, several characters go to their goofy-voiced maker.

I would say the piece is offensive, but that would imply that it elicits some kind of excitement

A Good Buzz

A great deal of art intended for children is best left unexamined by adult sensibilities, as anyone who's watched a self-appointed guardian of moral or social conscience disappear down such a slippery slope knows. (Exhibit A: Jerry Falwell looking deep into the sexual agenda of the Teletubbies.) Still, it's hard to resist scratching beneath the surface of the puppet show The Adventures of Maya the Bee, now entering its sixth season at the Culture Project. The central conceit is something every kid can relate to: shirking your chores to play in the wonderful world around you. The unusually inquisitive (for a worker bee) Maya is born into the hive at the show's opening, quickly decides that collecting pollen doesn't scratch her traveler's itch, and flexes her wings in search of points unknown. Over the course of her three-day jaunt, she comes face to face with various insects of both pond and meadow

See Jane Hook

If ever a set more intuitively captured the strengths and defects of a play script's construction than the one built for John Pallotta's Jane Ho, now playing at the Lion Theater at Theater Row Studios, I haven't seen it. A plush boudoir replete with lighted mirrors and velvety reds sits beneath a spare, back-lighted bedroom, with only a curved, lushly carpeted staircase to join the two. As attractive as they are, designer Gregg Bellon's interiors are appropriate for being just that, interiors. Entering the world of the four anonymous sex workers at the heart of Pallotta's work is like slipping on earmuffs

Criminally Sane

If the Elizabethans had formulated nihilism, George F. Walker's Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline could very well have graced the stage 400 years prior to its original 1977 production. Set in late 19th-century Europe, the work is filled to the brim with revenge, rape (or attempted rape), swordplay, and the requisite pile of corpses. The only thing marking it as a thing of our time is the author's wicked awareness of the emptiness of all the machinations

The Passion of the Antichrist

That the antagonist of a story is often more intriguing than its hero is nothing new. From its inception, Western drama has enjoyed titillating its audience with a view from the other side of the moral divide

The Absent Gardener

The characters who populate Saturday Players' new comedy, Finding Pedro, are pulled from the various strata of society with what seems like a deliberately egalitarian eye. In a single play, indeed at a single party

Birds Not of a Feather

Despite Axis Company's insistence that each of the four installments of its serial play Hospital 2005 is self-contained, the three short plays that make up the third episode are manifestly uneasy bedfellows. The umbrella conceit of the evening is flexible enough to be intriguing: having fallen victim to an avian flu pandemic sweeping in from the Far East, one lonely, anonymous man (roles are not attributed) slips into a terminal coma and spends the last few days of his existence wandering the troubled back alleys of his own mind. The problem is that, as the play wears on, these back alleys start to feel ever more disturbingly like little more than run-of-the mill tangents. The piece begins promisingly enough: a slickly professional short film projected onto a large screen at the rear of a blank stage chronicles the man's last day or so before his collapse. We begin with his morning ablutions, then follow him to his day job, where a persistent and worsening cough irks his co-workers, and then back to his home, where his rapidly deteriorating condition forces a repairman to call the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Finally, as he slides into the coma, we watch his ghostly form step out of his body and see the hospital gown-clad actor physically enter the stage. What the man steps into, however, is the issue.

Of the three sections, the first is the most relevant to the man's recently changed circumstances. As he takes stock of his strange, new surroundings, a small gaggle of barefoot people dressed all in white enter from stage right

Mock the Casbah

Persians are "passionate people," argues Iranian-born actor Arian Moayed, and "all that hair," he offers as an afterthought, is just "to keep us warm." Issues of hirsuteness aside, if theater company Waterwell's re-envisioning of Aeschylus's The Persians is any indication, I would add that Persians are also somewhat schizophrenic, and not a little over-caffeinated. And thank the gods for it: what better way to shake some life into what is widely considered the world's oldest surviving play? First performed in 472 A.D., the work is remarkable not only for its age but also for the fact that it is the only extant Greek play to deal with an actual, historical event, namely the Persian king Xerxes's invasion of Greece just eight years earlier. With monumental hubris on full display, Xerxes amassed an army of nearly a million men

Instant Karma

The British theater company Filter joins the seemingly endless list of groups that bill themselves as exciting, new breeds of theater collectives for the single reason that they collaborate across disciplines. Granted, Filter

The Virgin Deicides

Only in the most fanatical believers do the twin monoliths of faith and religious doctrine always stand in unison and not occasionally at loggerheads. As anyone who has been caught between the two can attest, from Martin Luther on down, when the message of one's heart and of one's church disagree, the spiritual pain can be excruciatingly acute. The greatest accomplishment of William S. Leavengood's ruminative new drama, Little Mary, is that it manages to translate that friction undiminished across religious and denominational divides. For the politically progressive Archbishop Tivoli (the wonderful Ron Orbach), head of a small Catholic mission situated in the desert some 60 miles east of Los Angeles, this friction is more painful than most. He has taken as his cause overpopulation and the ever-increasing strain it places on the planet's resources. Birth rate reduction, however, is not exactly in accord with the divine command to be fruitful and multiply.

This is made abundantly clear with the arrival of Tivoli's mentor, the kindly Cardinal Gian (Jeremy Lawrence), who admits he has been dispatched from Rome to either dissuade Tivoli from preaching the subject or, failing that, to have the archbishop excommunicated. However, such censorial considerations are quickly supplanted by the announcement that Tivoli's 15-year-old star pupil, Christina (Monica Raymund), is pregnant, that she is still a virgin, that God is the father, and that she carries not one but seven unborn saviors. The message that Christina says the children represent, told to her through dreams, sends shockwaves that stir even the powerful College of Cardinals in Rome.

Leavengood wisely mirrors the New Testament only once or twice, and then only faintly. (The most blatant instance that I noticed was when Tivoli's assistant, Mother Lulit, played by Robyn Hatcher, tries to cull the "truth" from Christina