Nuptials

When certain elements are introduced in the course of a play, they have specific, set-in-stone effects on the play's events. For example, if at some point a gun is shown onstage, that gun must be fired by the end of the show. Sam Marks's new work, The Bigger Man, brings to mind two more: If a character suddenly "finds religion," that religion is always a cult. And if a guy shows up at his ex-girlfriend's wedding, that guy will cause a whole lot of trouble. The ex in question here is Len, whose former amour Lily is getting married to a gentleman named Mike in her rural Pennsylvanian hometown. Len's a (supposedly) reformed drug addict and thief who's brought his unreformed, unrefined stoner buddy Rick with him to stay at an ugly motel the night before Lily's wedding. The two New Yorkers are undone by the remote locale and consider some cannabis-flavored relief, but also talk about a promise not to do drugs, which they made when they signed something on their invitation.

Lily's brother Jerry appears and wants them to leave. He hasn't forgiven Len for abusing Lily and stealing from her while they were dating. Len refuses to go, saying that Lily called him and asked him to attend. Jerry warns them about what they signed and leaves.

After a number of scenes like this, which are blacked out in the middle of thoughts, it gradually emerges that Lily has devoted herself to the Foundation, a spiritual group to which her brother, fianc

Fun & Dames

Vaudeville, though enormously popular in its heyday, has not enjoyed the longevity of other types of entertainment. In the last few years, however, there has been a quiet resurgence of these anything-goes acts on the alternative performance scene downtown and in the boroughs. At Walkerspace, Women's Expressive Theater is presenting Big Times, a lovable, fun-for-all-ages tribute to and send-up of the art form. The little TriBeCa theater's lobby is tricked out in old show posters and leads to a wooden stage enshrouded in rich, red velvet curtains and lined by bulb-style footlights. Two-person tables as well as bleacher seating is available, and old songs are piped through the room before the show.

As the lights dim, the Moonlighters (described on their Web site as "New York's finest ukulele and steel guitar ensemble") take to the stage

Schemers

When will actors learn that it's better to find someone, anyone, to direct their show rather than do it themselves? History tells us that unless your last name is Allen (as in Woody), Branagh, or Welles, you will probably not pull it off. (Even they don't get it right all of the time--Frankenstein, anyone?) Four fine dramatic performers have started their run at the Access Theater in John Nassivera's Making a Killing. But with one of the four doing double duty as player and show-helmer, the show is rudderless, and the cast is left to keep on course as best they can.

Killing begins on the opening night of E.G. Nelson's new play. His agent, Marge Decker, is in her West Side office, fielding calls about the troubled play and its absent writer. Several states away and several hours later, Nelson's producer Marty and actress wife Estelle have just arrived from the theater at a cottage in the snowy wilds of Vermont.

It's reported that Nelson has jumped off the George Washington Bridge and is missing and presumed dead. But this is no surprise to Marty and Estelle, who've planned the whole thing

Real Estate Camelot

Almost everyone in New York has a few apartment horror stories, whether they're the "what's that thing that just scuttled across my floor" kind, or the "I'd rather pay the extra thou per month in rent than have to search for a place again" kind. Between the cast's friends and family, real estate people, and disgruntled renters, a show like Co-Op: A Comedy of Epic Pretensions, now playing at the Producers Club, is pretty much guaranteed a solid audience. But it takes more than a strong hook to make a strong show, one of the many neglected details in this underwhelming musical production. Anyone familiar with the Arthurian legend will quickly get a handle on the plot. HouseProud Towers, a grand apartment building on the Upper West Side, once had a great co-op board president named Uther Pendragon. When Uther was killed in his sleep, the building fell into disrepair. During these dark times, Uther's secret son, Arthur, was growing up in the basement, raised by the Scottish janitor Codger.

When Arthur turns 26, he inherits his father's apartment and assumes his rightful place as the board president. This news does not sit well with Omelet du Mal, Uther's secret lover and the mother of his son (and Arthur's half-brother) Morton. Will Omelet realize her plan to topple Arthur and seize control of the building? Will Arthur discover his wife Galleria's infidelity with fitness guru Litmus the Pure? (Do you remember how the King Arthur story ended?)

Of course, the point of a homage is not to change the story but to tell it in an interesting or amusing way. John Cecil's version suffers from too many words and jokes that don't go anywhere. The conceit of mixing details from the Middle Ages and the present day is tricky to achieve, and is not achieved here. His script would have been more effective if he had committed fully to modern times.

During the segues from speech to song, the cast is hindered by prerecorded music that doesn't provide the warmth or correct timing of a live band. The actors would sometimes have to wait for the tape to kick in, and the music was unappealingly tinny, like songs that came preprogrammed into 1980s Yamaha organs. Choreography was minimal, with the exception of the silly "Can I Kiss the Bride?" number, which featured Litmus's exercise-inspired dance moves.

The cast seemed lost, with each actor trying his or her own take on the style of the production. Some were a little over the top, and some were too realistic. Orion Simprini (as Litmus) and Jenn Marie Jones (as Galleria) had a few funny moments but were not able to sustain them. This can be attributed to letting the writer also serve as director. An impartial observer would have given the actors more to do, instead of arrogantly assuming that the dialogue would carry the show on its own.

The producers of Co-Op put advertisements in the real estate section of a newspaper, a cunning tactic that brought in several people. Their Friday night performance was completely packed, and the audience was ready to enjoy the show. It's a shame that this good fortune was squandered by putting on a show that wasn't ready for an audience.

Slackers

For the last dozen years, from the peak of Generation X to the lesser-known Generation Y (or whatever branding the pundits eventually decided on), there has been an ongoing discussion about the apathy of America's youth. Our society's elders have commented on young people's laziness, and it appears that young people have now embraced these low expectations and wear them as a badge of honor. How else could one explain Richard Lovejoy's play Tiny Dynamite, which seems to get off on its own obnoxious contempt for and dissociation from the world? At the start of the show, a young woman begins a monologue as she pulls props out of a large wooden box. She speaks in cheerful terms about her sad life, as if she's talking to an ex who is not in the room. One gets the feeling that she's leaving somewhere. The date on a calendar onstage says, "December 31st."

The calendar is flipped to January, and we are 12 months before that first scene. The woman (Liz) is moving in with her bland ex-lover (Jon), his bratty sister (Jen), and their lazy friend (Ben) in an undersized apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Liz has a hard time adapting to their carefree, party-heavy lifestyle and begins to have feelings again for Jon. Jen and Ben interpret Liz's seriousness and desire to spend more time with Jon as selfishness. Their living situation begins to unravel, and Liz decides that she'll kill herself on Dec. 31.

The script, with its faithful re-creation of the stilted dialogue and dull situations of real life, does no favors for the cast. When Lovejoy strays from the everyday and tries to inject some drama into the proceedings, it comes across as ridiculously clich

Tennessee Prose

Tennessee Williams is quite the popular playwright this season. Five by Tenn opened off Broadway in the fall, and The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire are currently enjoying runs on Broadway. Now at 59E59 Theaters, Linda Marlowe is starring in Mortal Ladies Possessed, a new work based on Williams's short stories. Perhaps the show's creators should have left those books on the shelf. The night begins with a door frame and a woman's personal effects strewn about a black box stage, and disembodied voices talking loudly and impatiently. Some character names and facts are thrown around, but it's tough to absorb this information out of context. Then Marlowe enters as the Widow Holly, patiently listening to the cacophony. There is silence, which the Widow Holly breaks with the sort of absurd personal statement that authors use to start their plays/books off with a laugh. (In this scenario, it does not have the desired effect.)

It turns out that she rents out rooms, and we see bits of the lives of the boarders at her New Orleans residence. Blackouts and the addition or subtraction of scarves and eyeglasses indicate changes of stories and characters. Since all of the tales are reminiscences, time is not linear, and in moments the characters jump from the near past to the faraway past to the present. But what makes perfect sense on the page, accompanied by character names and narrative directions, does not translate here to the stage.

Marlowe is a fine actress who speaks in a delightful girly rasp and commits fully to the physical and emotional presence of her characters. Her accent, though, does not play as effectively. The honey-coated drawl of Tennessee Williams's heroines is almost as iconic as the characters themselves, and certain expectations are inevitably formed. As Widow Holly, Marlowe spoke like an Australian who lived in New York for several years and then recently relocated to the South. There was no consistency, as if she was struggling to find the character's voice during her performance.

The only role in her repertoire here that needed no dialect coaching was Flora Goforth, the imperious owner of a Mediterranean villa. Marlowe was able to use an accent close to her own as she played up this deliciously vicious woman. This piece, in the middle of the set, was very funny, had an understandable story progression, and did not overstay its welcome. The same could not be said for its companion pieces.

A theatergoing audience appreciates it when the crafters of a show do not underestimate their intelligence, or their ability to interpret text and subtext. But when a production makes its audience work too hard to figure out who's who and what's what, oftentimes the audience stops trying. At the conclusion of Mortal Ladies Possessed, there was a hesitancy on the audience's part to clap, as they were not sure if they had, indeed, arrived at the end. All they, and this show, needed was a little more structure.

Rites of Secession

When the red states won on Election Day 2004, many people in the country were devastated. Some were particularly unhappy about George W. Bush getting a second term. Others mourned the defeat of John Kerry. Massachusetts natives Nathan Phillips and Joe Schiappa turned their grief into Massholia, a sprawling and unfocused rock musical now playing at the Flamboyan Theater. A gimmicky prologue is set at the first Thanksgiving. This meeting between settlers and Indians is filled with the usual intentionally anachronistic speech and pop culture references that comedians love to put in "old-timey" scenes. The prologue foreshadows the nation's troubles with the settlers' assassination of a benevolent Magical Turkey that lives in the woods. (Even then, we couldn't recognize a good thing when it was right in front of us!)

Cut to Boston on Nov. 3, 2004. Reactionaries have prompted Massachusetts to secede from the union to form Massholia, a new country run by John Kerry. His son, John Kerry Jr., has plans to take over the nation through deadly cranberry gas concealed in a baseball. Junior recruits high school student and "typical Masshole" Robbie Cordeiro to throw the poison baseball at a Red Sox game. Robbie sees this as a chance to show the world his dancing skills, and to impress Jen Leonard, the new girl in school.

Yes, there are many plots, many characters, and many, many scenes in the show. They vastly outnumber the music numbers, which is odd for a musical. It's also a shame, because Brett Warwick's songs range from good to outright catchy and are far superior to those in several Broadway shows one could name. Katie Workum's energetic choreography

Scotch Drag

When Americans think of British entertainment, they invariably think of Merchant-Ivory dramas and Monty Python craziness. But those expecting period costumes or silly walks at Brits Off Broadway's newest production, Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters, will be in for quite a shock. Writer/performer Russell Barr's solo show is set in the seamiest sections of Scotland

Gray Matters

Sketch comedy is a cruel mistress. She demands that you come up with original material. She insists that each show top the previous one. And above all, she commands that you do these things with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. At the premiere of BOOM, celebrated New York sketch group Elephant Larry's eighth new show, EL succeeded in making its mistress, and the audience, very happy indeed. As the audience filed into the Peoples Improv Theater, a screen was onstage, and "factoids" linking to the show, as well as ads for its co-sponsor (satirical weekly magazine The Onion), were being shown, movie theater-style. The lights dimmed, credits rolled, and out came four clean-cut boys, singing about how three of them were "following around" the fourth one. It was a straightforward premise, built on funny lyrical revelations, and kicked off an entertaining hour of live sketches, taped links, and songs.

Elephant Larry's members drew their material from television, history, and popular culture. A recurring joke involved a game show that was named after an overly elaborate description of its premise, rules, and grand prize. The traditional "man visits doctor" scenario was turned on its ear when the doctor turned out to be a chatbot. (For those unfamiliar with instant messaging, this is a computer-generated "persona" that responds to a user's questions with a stock set of answers.)

The most lovably silly sketch centered on Dr. Frankenstein's monster creating his own monster, whose vocabulary was mostly limited to the word "monster." The simple repetition of that word was enough to get everyone laughing, and the sketch continued in surprising ways from there.

One of the classic pitfalls of the form, which has plagued everybody from the lads of Monty Python to SNL's Not Ready for Primetime Players, is how to end a sketch. In the absence of a proper conclusion, writers will comment on the lack of an ending, spin the premise out into boredom, or just abandon the sketch entirely. To their credit, Elephant Larry's performers were able to end on a joke and a blackout, without leaving the audience feeling cheated.

EL has written a strong show, full of sketches that make you smile and several that make you laugh out loud. It's impressive how it has created a show that, without a lot of profanity, politics, or "blue" jokes, manages to play smart and not square. These guys are earnest, clever, and ready to please; it's a refreshing change of pace in an increasingly snarky, too-hip-for-the-room NYC comedy scene.

For those comedians who are willing to try their luck at sketch comedy, the creative struggles tend to outweigh the returns. (How often does a sketch comedian turn his or her stage success into onscreen success that doesn't involve being a background player on a televised sketch show?) Lucky for New York that Elephant Larry doesn't dwell on such things. Its performers' goal is simple: for 60 minutes, they want to make our troubles go BOOM.

Bard at the Bar

When you go to an Off-Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare, you can usually count on the script being good, even if the production is weak. When you go to a show performed in a bar, you can usually count on the crowd being good, even if the production is sloppy. But with Twelfth Night: The Drinking Game, returning after a sold-out run last March at the Slipper Room, you can actually count on the evening being good, even if the production isn't polished. The Legitimate Theater Company has hit on a new and innovative way to bring the Bard to the people: make it bawdy, make it fun, and give the people plenty of excuses to drink. The space they've chosen, a bar with an adorable proscenium at one end, is just small enough to allow for lightly microphoned performances but large enough to hold an audience and a separate drinking area. The audience is split into teams and is cued (by a blue card, a red card, or two "flipped birds") when to drink. Then the tale of mistaken identities, gender reversals, and (appropriately enough) drunken revelries plays out, with much consumption of alcoholic beverages.

The surprising thing about the show, besides how well suited it is to the gimmick, is that there were some adventurous takes on roles that are usually cut-and-dried (and often dry). Sir Toby Belch, normally played as a ridiculous old boozehound, is portrayed by Jordan Smith as a harmless, aging frat boy. His partner in crime, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, has been transformed from a cowardly fop into a dim good ol' boy, with Jesse Wilson breathing new life and conviction into every line in a very likable performance.

Kent Meister's Orsino works a sexy/sleazy angle that appeals to the feisty Viola, disguised as his manservant Cesario. But Orsino's behavior with the guys is far different from his fawning conduct toward the mourning Olivia (Morgan Anne Zipf), who doesn't go for him. Viola (Megan Sara Kingery), desperate for her master's approval, sets about wooing Olivia for Orsino, but Viola's ardent speech and indifferent attitude make Olivia fall for Viola's male persona.

There are more outrageous and modern-day tweaks to the text. The relationship between the leather-clad sailor Antonio and pretty boy Sebastian (whom Antonio saved from drowning) is more intimate than avuncular. Maria (Molly Pope) is more slutty wench than saucy handmaiden. Oh, and most of the male characters seem to be almost equally interested in the same sex as in the opposite one. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This is a very physical, sexual show, with any subtle naughty references made abundantly clear. The staging is frenetic, with the actors sitting in front of the audience and jumping on and off the stage for their cues. Their energy and passion for the material is infectious, and even if the second half is slowed down by plot machinations and a near absence of drinking cues, the performers managed to win over the audience by the end.

For drinkers, this show might bring them to the theater more often. And for theatergoers, it might bring them to the bar more frequently.