Iron Curtain Call

Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu had been an ardent underground agitator against the Romanian fascist regime in his youth, only to become one of the most unflinchingly hard-line dictators during the Cold War. When the Romanian people revolted against his draconian rule in December 1989, they faced a confusing instability in leadership. To this day, the chaotic and bloody violence surrounding the Romanian Revolution is shrouded in conflicting reports and controversy about what happened. Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, now playing at the Hudson Guild Theater, is a whirligig exploration of dramatic forms that confronts the anarchic hope and despair of this historical moment and its immediate aftermath. Churchill and a group of acting students actually went to Bucharest three months after the revolutionary turmoil to gather evidence for the play and witness the effects of the uprising firsthand. Mad Forest offers a hodgepodge of documentary truths and surrealist fictions to represent a bizarre political situation where the line between truth and fiction continues to be a dizzying blur.

The first portion of the show is a fast-paced series of vignettes that capture an agitated day in the life of the Romanian workers: short sketches about waiting in breadlines, classroom propaganda, domestic tensions that arise from severe economic depression, and the struggle to carry on a normal existence in the face of a mounting political catastrophe. While Churchill's Brechtian alienation effects force the audience to think instead of responding viscerally to the characters, some scenes were so brief or disorienting that they seemed to lack any coherence or depth before the next one followed on its predecessor's coattails.

The second, and most successful, portion of the play depicts the actual weeklong skirmishes and sieges of the revolution through the voices of soldiers and workers, each speaking toward the audience in a collective monologue. We are left to connect their individual stories into a historical narrative ourselves, ending with a powerfully elegiac anthem and a gathering street vigil for the slain.

After the intermission, the show changes shape yet again to present an allegorical dialogue between a hungry vampire and a starving dog, complex symbols of the political bloodshed, parasitic relationships, and desperation that the Romanian people had to deal with in the atmosphere of their newfound (but ultimately foundationless) freedom.

The play's last section depicts a more traditional, domestic drama about how two families from different classes cope with the fact that the widespread economic shortages and political Balkanization won't be fixed overnight. The last scene is a wedding reception that transforms into a brawl, only to shift back, somewhat less believably, into a celebration containing folk dances, much as Romania's own fate swung precipitously between celebrations and violence at this time. But, if this scene's plot is not believable, it raises fascinating political questions about how much one can believe any historical representation, what use that representation has been put to, and what forces are behind the scenes doing the plotting.

The large cast was uniformly adequate, though Megan Ketch stood out in her sympathetic if brief portrayal of a poor young flower seller, while Matthew Gray delivered a strong performance as an arrogant officer who was nevertheless disarmingly compassionate beneath his tough exterior. Adam Belvo also showed multiple talents taking on a diversity of roles ranging from a priest, a grandfather, and a vampire to an old aunt, a painter, and a soldier.

Director Julia Beardsley O'Brien struggled with the difficult task of assembling this diverse and, at times, collage-like text into a dramatically effective whole. Though the play has a firecracker-fast pace in many sections, some scenes felt static and overly long, since once we absorbed their political point we were ready to move on to the next one.

Set design (by Neil Becker) and blocking were conservative, considering the postmodern delirium of forms—political and dramaturgical—that the play both depicts and challenges through its ironies. A few innovative stage techniques, such as a two-tier set during a scene where a teacher faced the audience on a platform while her students faced the audience from below, proved the most interesting. Here, for a rare moment, the production managed to find a parallel to the text's investigation of narrative disjunctions in both theatrical structures and the theater of war.

Mad Forest is a radical study of how revolutions often come disappointingly full circle, as one tyrant may be disposed only to be replaced by another. Although the play is presented in a turbulent variety of voices and formats, this production too often seemed stodgy and monotonous.

Kafkaesque

The Great Conjurer, a new play by Christine Simpson now playing at the Kirk Theater, finds unique solutions to dramatizing the life of Franz Kafka, a writer whose often deliberately flatfooted, methodical prose does not necessarily translate well to the stage. In his famous unfinished novels The Trial and The Castle, he represents modern man as lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth and subjugated to laws he no longer understands. Kafka's dark, dry, and comic tales portray the divide between one's imaginative longings and their inevitable frustration by material and mundane circumstances. Likewise, in his life Kafka struggled to reconcile his creative aspirations with the worldly expectations imposed by those around him. The question that The Great Conjurer asks is, Which should be regarded as more "real"—one's dedication to the estrangement of writing or one's homely responsibilities? To depict this schism, the set, designed by director Kevin Bartlett, is cut in half by three transparent scrims: a lone writing desk hunkers in the foreground while a whole tree trunk thrusts upward in the background amid blue streamers hung from the rafters. Both spaces, like Kafka's prose, have the force of realism, alternately minimal and magical.

In the background, the family from Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, wearing eerie, oversized masks (designed by Melissa Crawford), hector each other until they're mutually helpless. The story's main character, Gregor Samsa, the well-meaning but despised brother who wakes up one day to find he's a bug, doesn't wear a mask but crouches in dance-like poses off to one corner.

The story's family doubles as Kafka's real family when the characters venture into the foreground. Gregor, played with spunk by Brian Nishii, stands in as Kafka's imaginative alter ego, hovering at times behind the writer, twitching and backpedaling like an overturned cockroach—just as Kafka himself will sometimes wander into the realm of his fantasy. There, he scrawls phrases on a chalkboard with Gregor's encouragement.

Felice Bauer, Kafka's love interest, and Max Brod, his editor, friend, and father figure, both keep stolidly to the foreground. Brod, a conservator of Kafka's unsettling, evocative writing, argues with Kafka's father, who is constantly pressing his son to give up literature so he can settle down and find a good vocation. Dramatically, the tension is not fully realized, however, because Kafka's father never drops the mask, making him look fake, angry, and inconsequential. In hindsight, of course, the audience knows Kafka as a great writer and would naturally be inclined to side with Max (Andy Place) anyway.

The play's main conflict concerns Kafka's love for, and hang-ups over, Felice, to whom he twice proposes and twice spurns. One sympathizes with Felice (Sara Thigpen) in wanting more than an epistolary affair—Kafka wrote her more than 1,500 letters professing his passion. One suspects Kafka had more fidelity to fiction than to life: he wanted to write about passion more than he felt able to act upon it.

While one may be tempted to dismiss Kafka's love life as nebbishy and neurotic, the writer's ambivalence is wonderfully staged by choreographer Wendy Seyb in a sequence in which Gregor pulls Kafka back from Felice as Kafka's legs spin out in the air. Kafka, forced into the dark crawlspace of his fantasy, seems less real than Gregor, the defenseless insect, who has emerged to take his place.

Tzahi Moskovitz should be commended for his understated portrayal of Kafka as a polite, beetle-browed boy. Moskovitz does not ham it up and "Hamletize" during his many searching soliloquies. The one exception to the generally solid acting is Paula Wilson, playing the rather superfluous character of the narrator, who appears bumptious, shrill, and overwrought.

Director Kevin Bartlett smoothly blocked the large cast so that its members' moves convey both dramatic and allegorical meanings. In addition, the pace is brisk but controlled throughout the 90-minute performance—and especially lively when the characters overlap their dialogue on occasion. Live musicians perform on cello, clarinet, and accordion from a small alcove above the stage during key moments, subtly framing the play with a historical dimension, as Kafka was writing as a Jew in Eastern Europe shortly before the Nazis invaded.

To Simpson's credit, her portrait of Kafka does not lapse into idolizing. He emerges very much like a character in one of his own stories: conflicted and unsure about the laws of love and duty, he endlessly tries to reinterpret them as he gets ever more lost in the maze of his own powerful fictions.

Driven Crazy

What self-destructive urges drive males to engage in addictive and deadly behaviors while, often, those who want to help them end up hurt? Is it the failure of love to solace, or is it something deeper than that: the way anything in life, if pursued single-mindedly, can become an addictive ritual to escape life's disappointments? Jerrod Bogard's powerful new play, Hugging the Shoulder, now at the New York International Fringe Festival, explores these ideas through a love triangle involving two brothers and a girlfriend. The younger, yet seemingly more mature, gay brother drives his older brother cross-country so the latter can detox both from heroin and his recent breakup: he literally must try to puke out all the anger and grief that's in his system before overdosing. Alternating between these scenes are flashbacks of the characters' domestic conflicts, which include abuse, drug addiction, cheating, and the whole gamut of adult sorrows.

The play's intensity can be overwhelming at first, especially as its verisimilitude so exactingly captures the yearnings and dysfunctions of those at a dead end: the way, dog-like, they crawl back to the hand that beats them because it's also the hand that feeds them. Yet Bogard's script displays the subtlety of a mature Sam Shepard play with scenes that can seem merely real or like fantastical, metaphorical nightmares. The difference between the two is painfully thin.

Brian Floyd, playing the older brother, Jeremy, gives a richly textured portrayal of a man who has been damaged by life. Sean Dingman, as the younger brother, Derrick, likewise gives an emotionally convincing depiction of a conflicted do-gooder who begins to realize that his need to save others may, in fact, only hide his own helplessness.

The set, designed by Sean Boat, quickly transforms from dashboard and car seats to coffee-table spread with porno magazines and Budweisers next to a beat-up couch, conveying both the painful realism and the dream-like quality of the play.

By the end, the audience itself feels the ruptures between well-meaning longings and the hallucinations one creates when they are frustrated.

Boys Will Be Boys...And, Sometimes, Girls

When the main character in a play is named "Gayly Gay," you can rightly expect a kooky, campy cabaret, and Giant Squid Productions's presentation of Bertolt Brecht's A Man's a Man at the New York International Fringe Festival delivers. Gayly Gay is recruited into the British army in India against his better judgment by a pack of soldiers eager to take advantage of his affable gullibility. To do so, they sell him a fake elephant, which later leads to his court-martial when he attempts to unload it on someone else. In order to escape his death, the pusillanimous Gay changes his persona to a self-righteous, rifle-toting "tool" of realpolitik.

Brecht's early Lehrstück, or learning plays, have been relatively neglected, compared with his later, mature work, known as "epic theater." The learning plays have, somewhat unfairly, been characterized as too overt in their didacticism; audiences may simply want to be entertained, but Brecht wanted to "alienate" them so they'd think, and be changed by his social messages.

This version of A Man is pure fun, however, because the very serious themes of colonialism and the socialization of war through the military-industrial complex have been tempered with catchy pop anthems, sexy costumes, and lots of outrageous, if low-budget, theatricality. Director Leah Bonvissuto has interpreted Brecht's formalized style of acting—known as gestus, where the actor is supposed to present the "gist" of a character only through a series of rigid gestures—as kabuki-like slapstick. In this mode, the actors universally stand out, notably Timothy McDonough as he presents Gay's transformation and John Gray as the drill sergeant, Bloody Five, who possesses all the comic, overblown machismo of a professional wrestler.

While the devices of Brechtian dramaturgy have been amply garnished (with placards, breaking down the fourth wall, and actors representing objects as well as people), these become, in the deft hands of Bonvissuto and her talented cast, additional sources of camp extravagance instead of heavy-handed propaganda. This production of A Man demonstrates that one may contemplate politics while also bouncing one's head along to the band.

Music as Museum Piece

At the turn of the last century, Erik Satie utilized film segments, wrote absurdly specific performance instructions, used pistols and typewriters as instruments, and wrote egregious repetitions in his surreal musical compositions. Later, other composers like Mauricio Kagel and La Monte Young, whose Composition 1960 included a note to release a butterfly into the room, followed in Satie's footsteps. John Moran's new experimental opera, Zenith 5, now playing at Galapagos Art Space, is very much in the tradition of Satie. Moran treats the theatrical environment as a kind of sculpture garden of sounds. Each actor has a limited repertoire of gestures, like animatronic creatures in a haunted house.

An impresario (Katherine Brook) greets us, announcing in a delighted stage whisper, "There's a mouse in the house," falls down and scrapes her shin, and picks up a phone that beeps off the hook. An American Indian chief (Joseph Keckler) acts like a windup toy and chugs his arms as if he were a train, wades through water, and declares in a plaintive whine, "Hey, I'm Ray Charles." A granny (Erin Markey) snores in a rocking chair, awakens startled, and cackles. Two statues in lotus position (Mina Nishimura and Po Lin Tso) come alive to stampede as banshees, then shatter and collapse.

After the initial novelty of these random acts wears off, we sigh and realize there's no narrative. In place of a story, Moran presents us with an intricate, pointillistic collage of sounds and gestures. We must follow the stripped-down logic of a musical composition as it questions the very definition of music.

Instead of discrete notes, Moran has arranged elaborate sound cues in layered feedback loops. Instead of instruments, he "plays" on the sound board.

Whereas in traditional musical compositions it's not the notes themselves that hold our interest but the way in which they're combined, Moran's sound cues themselves are not that important, consisting of, for example, war whoops, bird chirps, warning dings at a railroad crossing, ticking clocks, chime sounds, and voices counting numbers.

What is important, though, is how these sounds recombine in new relationships as the work unfolds. The organization of such motifs produces rhythms, syncopation, and counterpoint. Moran explores the way that the gestures and sounds can harmonize or create dissonance with each other over time.

As with much theoretical music, however, the piece becomes more interesting as theory and less as music the longer one watches and listens. Both in a program note and in his informal introduction, Moran invites the audience to chat, order a beer, and even wander out of the room. One suspects he intended the piece as ironic Muzak, that ubiquitous, easy-listening programming designed to enhance consumer behavior and worker productivity in corporate spaces.

In many ways, Moran's highly programmed background noise is the opposite of John Cage's Zen-inspired compositions, such as his infamously silent 4' 33'', that challenge their audiences to listen closely to the ambient music of the environment itself. Moran, on the other hand, asks that we tune out occasionally and allow our attention to drift.

Both composers, however, examine not just the inner structure of music but the phenomenology of how we perceive it as well. How we listen, whether focused or bored, can be as important as what we're listening to.

Despite Moran's requests, everyone in the audience sat reverently still while watching and listening during the performance, which lasted a little over an hour. Moran might have had more success provoking his audience to ignore or interact with the performance if he had used Galapagos's front stage, which opens out to the bar, instead of the enclosed backroom, which one is charged $12 to enter.

Another possibility to elicit a freer environment would be to stage the piece at a museum space such as P.S. 1. Unlike theater and music audiences, who often feel they're entrapped (if by nothing other than the price of admission), museum-goers amble through an exhibit devoting a casual glance or an absorbed gaze as their interest dictates before blithely moving on. For example, could anyone be expected to sit through Douglas Gordon's entire 24 Hour Psycho (now at the Museum of Modern Art), which slows down the frames of Hitchcock's film until it takes a day to watch?

In fact, in 1902 Satie invented what he called "furniture music": background music that was meant to seem as peripheral and unexceptional as faded wallpaper. When Satie and his colleagues first performed it in a gallery, however, the patrons fell silent and listened attentively despite Satie's own protests.

Is it any wonder that Moran's work suffers a similar fate, unable to shake off our polite communal gestures of reverence for music as theater? After all, it was another opera composer, Richard Wagner, who insisted that theater audiences should be absolutely quiet during a performance.

Queens at War

In most accounts, Elizabeth I, as both a historical and a literary personage, is depicted as a decisive, levelheaded leader with a regal bearing—and a nearly mythic chastity. If anything, she sometimes comes off as a bit cold and calculating. Whether in plays from her own day, such as John Lyly's Endymion or Edmund Spencer's epic poem The Fairie Queen, or in movies such as Elizabeth or Shakespeare in Love in our time, she appears as the much-courted virgin monarch, inviolable in her reason and her body alike. That makes Friedrich Schiller's portrayal of Elizabeth as a weak-willed, hysterical, and indecisive woman in his 1801 play, Mary Stuart, now being performed for free in Battery City Park by the New York Classical Theater, an interesting dissenting viewpoint.

Schiller presents Elizabeth, a Protestant, in her conflict with Mary Stuart, the Catholic queen of Scotland, who also claimed divine right and royal lineage to the throne of England. Elizabeth must decide whether to execute her cousin and main rival or set her free, choices that are both fraught with dangers.

If Elizabeth (Patricia Marie Kelley) chooses to execute Mary (Kim Stauffer), who is imprisoned while awaiting her trial for murdering her husband, then she may incur the enmity of Catholic sympathizers, including the powerful French and Spanish.

If she does not, she risks having a rival usurp her position with a deadly plot. The treasonous implications become complicated by a double-dealing courtier (Bryant Mason as the Earl of Leicester), a hotheaded young knight looking to be a hero (James Knight as Mortimer), and a councilor (Don Mayo as Burleigh) who values what's best for the country even when his means of getting it are unscrupulous.

Mary appears as a tragic, nearly saintly figure more concerned with an abstract justice than political expediency, in contrast with Elizabeth, the fickle, headstrong matriarch who wants to have things both ways. Elizabeth's vacillations ultimately prove victorious, but leave her isolated, exiled in her own kingdom.

Kelley's Elizabeth has an appropriately icy edge for this play, but she nonetheless lets us warm to her unsympathetic, worldly character through glimpses of her humor and humanity. Stauffer's Mary, on the other hand, appears sympathetic at first but grows more self-righteous and not-of-this-world as the play goes on. Her religious passion, though, saves her from seeming merely priggish and colors her as a kind of flawed martyr.

Mayo's Burleigh evinces a flippant, haughty spunk that risks stealing the show. Michael Marion, playing Mary's prison warden Paulet, gives a notable and convincing portrayal of a pillar of solid good sense and moral rectitude.

While the production has no set per se, the entire audience must pick up its blankets and move for each scene to a new location in the park. This didn't seem to bother anyone as much as it might sound: chasing the actors around the park made the play more spontaneous and engaging than a traditional interpretation of a tragic period drama would be otherwise.

Director Stephen Burdman chose some beautiful panoramic backdrops, such as a spacious plaza symbolically looking out on the ocean at the Statue of Liberty, flanked by rows of monumental pillars, for the scene in which Elizabeth confronts Mary in person and Mary declares she is Elizabeth's sovereign. Prison scenes are set inside Castle Clinton, while other scenes take advantage of Battery Park's pleasant, tree-filled landscapes.

The play's gloomy political vexations are made much more palatable by the summer weather and scenic views, though the low groan of passing ferry boats or the chucking sounds of an industrial lawn mower going by may cause mild distractions. Nonetheless, the refreshing sea breeze blowing off the ocean and the gaggle of colorful, curious tourists in the background temper the play's pessimistic historical intrigue.

Birthing

Critic Walter Benjamin claimed that Kafka's stories only appeared to be allegories. Actually, their significance could never be fully fathomed, never easily explained—or explained away—with a simple correspondence to events in our world. The plurality of meanings in Kafka's stories keeps growing as we question them and as they question themselves. Their endless self-interrogation, in fact, is the process by which meaning's created. They are parables for what is possible. In this sense, The Sewers, the new play produced by Banana Bag & Bodice as part of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater's Incubator series, has a truly Kafkaesque feel to it. One may walk away from the theater a bit confused about what happened or what it might mean, but one relishes this confusion, assured that director Mallory Catlett knew exactly what she was up to.

The Sewers is the most breathtaking and beautifully original play I've seen Off-Off-Broadway this year. Rarely is work this challenging and innovative also so sumptuously entertaining.

Two women (Jessica Jelliffe and Heather Peroni), possibly sisters, form a love triangle with a megalomaniacal playwright and director (played with spectacular force by the actual playwright, Jason Craig). He has banished children from the imaginary village they inhabit, which is all that is left of the world. Both women seem to be androids, as hinted by the electrical cord that unfurls from between their legs. In fact, the only character who doesn't seem like an android is the unspeaking mechanic (Rod Hipskind) who scurries about the bleak room attending them.

When the playwright impregnates both women, a crisis arises. No children can exist in this world, but a double birth seems inevitable. Even after seeing the play and reading the script, though, I must admit I'm not sure what happens during the climactic scene in which the women give birth, but it is an astonishing theatrical moment.

My initial thought was that the women gave birth to the playwright, and the fate of this imaginary world doubled back on itself, as if in an eternal recurrence shaped like a Möbius strip. Perhaps, though, the playwright had been delivered from the womb of his own dark imagination. Or, perhaps, the playwright destroyed the children in a ghastly abortion. Maybe the children remain stillborn, or perhaps they swim like luminescent sea creatures trapped inside their mothers forever. The ambiguity is rich and tantalizing, and opens the play to countless new levels of interpretation.

The Sewers is self-conscious in the way of much postmodern meta-fiction, yet uses its self-consciousness to be genuinely funny rather than glibly ironic. At one point, for example, one of the women interrupts the other's monologue to ask, "What's the metaphor?"

The play is rife with metaphors, but it never digresses for the sake of making them. The metaphors, rather, are ambivalent puzzles that occur in the natural course of the story, the most wondrous metaphor being the set.

The entire stage appears to hover a few feet off the ground. Above, a corrugated tin roof frames a small room that's wallpapered with newsprint and refuse. Fluorescent lights flicker, a clothesline creaks on a pulley system off to one side, slop from a bedpan drips down a subway grate in the floor, cubbyholes pock-mark the walls, and hidden doors reveal a mirror-lined crawl space behind the back walls. The whole ambience conjures an institutionalized Third World prison or a postapocalyptic, postindustrial fallout shelter.

Oddly, the set is both claustrophobic and labyrinthine—it makes you feel that you are floating, yet enclosed; trapped, yet wandering in an endless maze with wormholes and secret passageways. Like the Pantheon, there's a hole in the center of the roof in which, at times, light floods down as if from heaven, giving the actors under it an otherworldly aura. The actors sometimes lean out from the stage to balance directly over the audience, which creates a vertiginous sense of awe. Thus, the setting, drab and cruddy as it is, begins to take on an aspect of the supernatural.

Kudos to set designer Peter Ksander for creating a space so wholly self-contained, so believable in its logic, that it floats in the mind afterward as an eerie alternate universe. Lighting designer Miranda Hardy also deserves generous credit for her haunting evocation of both the divine and scatological. One especially mind-blowing image was sonogram-like light sources attached to the women's bellies that only became visible in the dark.

My favorite scene, which epitomizes the inventiveness of the whole production, is when the playwright takes an exacto knife to rip a hole in the wall. A mysterious stream of greenish light pours in as if a vortex gave birth to the universe just outside the paper-thin walls of the set. The playwright then pulls a microphone out of the void to sing a loony song.

If only all plays could be as pregnant with meanings.

The Naked and the Dead

Betty Friedan, beware. While baby boomer feminists wore power suits and went by the title "Ms.," the second generation of the women's movement—led by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Camille Paglia, and Madonna—seemed more likely to wear leather corsets and lingerie while going by the title "Mistress." A backlash in the feminist movement resulted from women who, newly able to climb corporate ladders, suddenly found themselves desexualized and bereft of their identity as women. Riding a new wave of "do me" feminists who viewed pinup girls like Betty Page as sources of empowerment, burlesque has experienced a recent renaissance that is still going strong. A lot of guys like it too. Burlesque is a woman's invigorating embrace of her sexual identity, and a way for her to both subvert the male gaze by controlling the seduction fantasy and deconstruct any staid dynamics of the gender wars through humor. In fact, you might think of the tacky humor of burlesque as essentially camp for straight people.

The Orgy of the Dead, the new show produced by Do What Now Media, is a high-concept burlesque show couched in an homage to B-movie monster flicks. One dark and stormy night, a horror story writer, Bob (the delightfully corny Matthew Gray), and his uptight date, Linda (Carolyn Demisch), visit the cemetery for inspiration, only to discover that the ghouls and ghosts of the graveyard have come out to party. Captured by Wolfman (Adam Swiderski) and Mummy (Brandon Beilis), they must watch a procession of girls called up from the grave entertain the Emperor of the Dead (Josh Mertz) with their striptease acts.

These acts are broken up a few times by a parody of a 50's sitcom-cum-lounge-singing act, called "The Wolfman and Mummy Comedy Hour," complete with a booming laugh track that punctuates the intentionally nonexistent punch lines. The irony of the canned laughter and the shtick, however, is so easy and obvious, it can produce some genuine titters from the audience—so long as no one takes anything too seriously.

The show revels in its insouciant bad taste. What little plot there is has been inspired by a film of the same name by Ed Wood, the auteur who is infamous for such impassioned low-budget schlock as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space (but who may be more familiar from Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp in the titular role). For those not familiar with Wood, the plot that surrounds the burlesque is similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, minus Meatloaf.

The burlesque acts themselves featured lovely, lithe, and limber ladies whose choreography was generally faster and more dancelike than the slow and sultry "old school" burlesque that often features more buxom girls, who may be slightly zaftig by today's standards. Jessica Silver, playing a fashion victim, performed the traditional tassel twirl with aplomb, and Jessica Savage was noteworthy for her flexible rendition of an Amazon on the prowl.

While the ladies' moves were well performed, the pace seemed a bit rushed: the faux seduction of burlesque requires a slow tease, and one of the six girls might have been eliminated to give more time to the others to strut and strip their stuff at a more titillating tempo.

In addition, the culminating burlesque act, which featured the Empress of the Dead (Scarlet O'Gasm) as she's about to sacrifice the living flesh of Linda felt, well, a little dead. The beautiful Carolyn Demisch, playing Linda with a glamorous sass and a humorous touch, never takes off her vintage miniskirt-length coat—despite undoing her belt—nor does Ms. O'Gasm have much opportunity to showcase what promised to be her ample burlesque talents.

But these are really just quibbles. In burlesque it's not about how much skin a girl shows but how fabulous her costume is—including her makeup and undergarments. And the girls' outfits, constructed by Jennifer Leigh, were wonderful, down to their glittery lip gloss and their elbow-length satin gloves. One particularly funny getup was worn by Savage's Jungle Girl, who appeared in a silly African mask with tribal spear in hand. The monsters' costumes and the Emperor of the Dead's plaid lounge-lizard suit were appropriately cheesy.

Director Frank Cwiklik and choreographer Michele Schlossberg-Cwiklik showed obvious attention to details, down to the multimedia "advertisements" that greet one upon entering the theater and the cast's choreographed curtain bow. Moreover, the show has a great soundtrack that ranged from disco to doo-wop and included many comedic sound effects.

This burlesque show might have Betty Friedan rolling in her grave, but it'll more likely have you dying for more.

Say Ahhh

Many people have a phobia about dentists, those seemingly benign professionals who deal in wholesome smiles. Underneath the mild-mannered exterior, however, there lurks someone who wants to cram large objects down strangers' throats, dangle his hands in their mouths, and ask them to spit and bite on a daily basis, not to mention put them to sleep while prying at their jaws. Furthermore, the waiting rooms are often filled with those handheld toys and games—found nowhere else, it seems—that involve jets of water and small rings and balls. These dentists do traffic in a queer combination of pleasure and pain. Given this, maybe people's fears about them aren't actually irrational after all.

Bite, a sex farce about a group of dentists and their patients who moonlight at an S&M parlor, has been revamped since its trial run last April. While there was plenty of "vamp" in the original show, the new play has been improved. A few holes in the script have been filled, and the actors have had more drilling.

The main premise of the play—besides watching the actors prance around in fetish gear while getting gently slapped, kissed, whipped, and spanked—is that at certain "choice moments" the audience can vote for what it wants the repressed momma's boy, Dr. Greenmeadow, D.M.D., to do in "sticky" ethical and sexual situations. For example, should he make out with the coquettish vixen in a schoolgirl's outfit (Amy Overman), who tells him she's gorged on candy so she can get cavities and therefore see more of him? Many of the outcomes, thankfully, are counterintuitive, and there are some interesting twists.

In the old script, the fun of this chose-your-own-adventure gimmick, as Jessie Marshall's review noted last year, "dissolves into utter futility as it becomes apparent that the audience's 'choices' do not really affect the action in a significant way." The new version, however, has many more significant and tightly plotted deviations—with some choices leading to more deviant outcomes than others. In fact, writer and director Suzanne Bachner's total script, with all variants, has more than 200 pages.

Nevertheless, the choices still feel like digressions from a rather inevitable (if not fully realized) ending. The night I went, the final choice was shrugged aside, and the audience members were allowed to shout out what they wanted to happen to the characters in a rather inconclusive way.

The cast, however, is game for the romping, somewhat unpredictable antics. Robert Brown as Dr. Greenmeadow displays aplomb for generating laughs as the gentle, professional Everyman with a kinky side and questionable sexuality. At one point, thrust hard in a chair by a dominatrix (who may or may not be his hard-boiled receptionist), he almost accidentally tipped backward—only to deftly recover at the last moment, tilting up with a flourishing dance of his eyebrows and, of course, a winning smile. He's one "bottom" who is sure to come out on top.

On the other hand, Jennifer Gill, playing the naïve, white-trash Southern belle who resorts to being a submissive in Purgatory (the upscale S&M parlor) in order to afford expensive dental work, was a bit unconvincing in spite of her natural charm and delight in the frivolity. She never appeared to be in pain—either when her teeth hurt or when she was punished as a sex slave.

The mood of the whole play, in fact, is weirdly more warm and fuzzy than dark and edgy, despite frequent depictions of sexual abuse and more extreme things that are probably inappropriate to mention here. Nothing is really at stake, because no matter how many times we see bondage and beatings (though, oddly, no biting), none of the characters seem at risk of getting hurt. They rather enjoy it all—and when they don't, there's always a "safe word." As the suave, womanizing Dr. Bruce (Justine Plowman)—Greenmeadow's rival at the practice—might say, "It's just how we roll."

The S&M dungeon, as its mistress (Theresa Goehring) informs Dr. Greenmeadow, is a "lair of fetish and fantasy"—essentially a stage for one's "sexual psychodrama": clients are not allowed to have actual sex or get injured. Likewise, the play itself—especially in the second act when all the characters' supposedly darker flipsides come out underground—is merely innocuous psychodrama. The dentist's office, with its insidious sexual undercurrent of genuine freakish menace, contained the greater potential for comedic material.

The play suggests that even in the most humdrum homebody of us there dwells a secret, kinky sex freak just waiting to don a bondage mask or dominate a leather-clad slave who's balled and gagged. While there may be more bark than bite in this production's light take on a dark subject, it's sure to leave you smiling.

Missing the Muse

In epic poems, the poet traditionally begins by invoking the muse, a fickle divinity who may grant the writer the good fortune and power to accomplish his endeavor. In Sam Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer, now playing in an excellent revival at the Big Little Theater, Shepard dramatizes his own anxieties about the muse deserting him. Two slow-witted gangsters, Beaujo and Santee, guard Cody in a rundown motel room. He's handcuffed to a bed in a position like Prometheus or Christ, kidnapped from rural Wyoming because he possesses the mysterious ability to predict horse races in his dreams as if he were a shaman receiving secret code from the spirit level.

Unfortunately, he's been in a slump lately. The gangsters' boss, Fingers, has hinted they're all in big trouble if Cody's luck doesn't improve soon. In fact, the boss tells his toughs, they've now been relegated to dog races.

In the next act, Cody's on a hot streak—except all the pressure seems to be making him crack. Fingers (Peter Picard), a gaudy mobster who's half clown and half godfather, swings by to check up on them with his "heavy," an eerie skeleton of a doctor. Cody's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre: he leaps and skitters around the hotel room, talking in voices, twitching, and hiding under the bed.

Fearing that his luck may be running out, the doctor tries to extract from his suitcase some bones that, he claims, contain a residue of lucky dream serum. Before he can finish the job, though, Cody's shotgun-toting cowboy brother barges through the door to rescue him, such an improbable deux ex machina proving that Cody's luck hasn't run out after all.

Shepard wrote the play while living in England during a period when he contemplated giving up playwriting for rock 'n' roll, shortly after his first taste of real success as a writer. In the play's allegory, Cody represents Shepard's compulsion to go on writing plays after a serious funk of self-doubt and writer's block. Perhaps the gangsters symbolize critics and producers who hold the artist hostage, or perhaps they are the artist's own dim-witted inner demons.

Director Ann Bowen chose to eliminate one very English detail of the original script, probably to cut the need for an extra actor. The very last thing we're to see in the script is a waiter who delivers Champagne that the gangsters ordered from room service near the top of the act. The waiter has a Joe Orton-esque punch line, entirely cut here, that hinges on absurdly maintaining the proprieties of class distinctions in the face of absolute chaos.

Fingers responds, as the lights begin to dim, by requesting the waiter to play Cody's inspirational record. In this production, however, Fingers does not address the waiter or the audience but speaks, inexplicably, to the sound board operator. While it may seem like a frivolous detail, the fact that the whole play culminates with this line makes its importance pivotal.

Nonetheless, Fingers' direct address has its own virtues—it is a strange, disconcerting choice to end a strange play (made more disconcerting because of the somewhat happy ending Shepard foists onto an otherwise darkly surrealist tragicomedy).

Overall, the acting captivates. Tim Scott literally foams at the mouth with hysteria as the smarter, more anxious of the two thugs, to great comic effect. Brian Tracy, on the other hand, captures Beaujo's sensitive side while downplaying his character's foolishness, making him more human and less like a parody of a comic book gangster.

As Cody, Tom Pavey displays an impressive range of quick-changing moods and voices as he grows ever more schizophrenic from his inner visions and paranoid about external threats. Pavey jumps and jitters with a nearly religious fear and trembling by the end. Likewise, David Elyha is downright creepy as the doctor, especially when, like a medieval shyster hawking holy relics, he holds forth on the magic bones that fill his suitcase.

The production is minimal to the point of cutting out the multimedia projection the script calls for to represent Cody's dreams—as well as cutting a couple of minor characters. However, the actors have the magnetism, in this small black-box theater, to convey the mania of a religious awakening or nightmare, as it may be. The moral of the fatalistic overtones throughout Geography seems to be that the gods are fickle, but they're not without a sense of humor.

Thankfully for us, Shepard's own muse did not desert him, and he went on to write the major plays that made him famous. Moreover, his lucky streak seems to have continued with this new production of Geography, which plays with his one-act Chicago on the same program.

Fools and Lovers

Many a Shakespearean play has been marred and mangled by a production team hell-bent on a half-baked "directorial concept." On the other hand, if Romeo and Juliet aren't scantily clad lesbian lovers or Hamlet isn't a breakdancing android from outer space, small Off-Off-Broadway productions of the Bard's most famous works can have a hard time selling tickets. Most of us can recall getting dragged glumly to stuffy productions of, say, Othello or King Lear out of a sense of swallowing our cultural medicine—at least, we vaguely remember the first two acts before we dozed off in the third. Why torture ourselves again? Especially when this summer there's a slew of free Shakespeare outdoors, where if nothing else we can enjoy the weather.

As I hunkered down in my seat for Kings County Shakespeare's new production of Twelfth Night in the BRIC Studio theater in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, I realized many other theatergoers must have had similar reservations about productions of Shakespeare's workhorses. Glancing around me in the vast, loft-sized studio, I noticed only two people in the audience who were not immediately connected to the production—and both of us were critics.

King's County Shakespeare presents Twelfth Night in a traditional interpretation that attempts, as they say, to be "true to the text." Sets are minimal, though production values are quite high: the elaborate period costumes and the professionalism of the cast are strikingly evident. The actors' comic timing—and the pace in general—seemed to lag in the beginning, most likely a result of the actors having to perform to a nearly empty house that appeared even emptier because of its cavernous size. When they'd warmed up, however, the actors displayed a rollicking physicality and deft sense of the play's bawdy innuendo.

Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's most raucous, gender-bending romantic comedies. Viola disguises herself as Cesario, a page of Duke Orsino, after she believes her twin brother, Sebastian, drowned in a shipwreck. Orsino, whom Viola is secretly smitten with, sends "Cesario" to help him court Countess Olivia, who ends up falling in love with Viola, albeit in her garb as a boy, instead. (In case you wondered, there are no steamy lesbian scenes in this production, though the text seems rife with possibilities for a directorial opportunist.) When Sebastian returns, of course, misplaced identities—and affections—run amok.

The focus of this production, however, is on the ample and impish subplot supplied by the fools. Sir Toby Blech, Sir Andrew Augecheek, and Feste carouse, drink, sing, and play pranks on their priggish foil, the Puritan Malvolio. They trick him into thinking that Olivia is in love with him, despite the fact that he is her humble servant. The fools design ways to make sure he's humbled, if not humiliated, too, whether it's getting him to dress in silly leggings or to repent his desires by locking himself away in a dark box.

Ronald Cohen as Sir Toby and Ian Gould as Sir Andrew are the standouts in a talented and multicultural cast. Cohen, playing the ruby-nosed, salacious old sop, highlights Toby's gregarious desperation to find joy in what remains of his life, even at the expense of others, in a way that is, by turns, hilarious, revolting, and sad. Gould, not to be outdone, displays a limber comic chutzpah as the foppish and cowardly Sir Andrew.

Joseph Small's Malvolio has the necessary malevolent, sneering authority that makes his character enjoyable as the butt of jokes. The fetching Martina Weber, as a gender-twisted Feste, sang lovely, pitch-perfect songs (some original and some traditional) accompanied by live fiddle, percussion, and mandolin. Jovis DePognon was also notable for his twinkle-eyed interpretation of Sebastian.

Director Deborah Wright Houston doubled as the costume designer and chose to use sumptuous, Restoration-era period costumes with frills, lace ruffs, oversized gold buttons, and beautiful details and fabric. The press information claims that she deliberately chose Restoration-era (as opposed to Renaissance) costumes because they "illuminate the excesses in this play," but I am not sure how many in the audience could easily distinguish one era's frilly shirts from another's.

The missing element in the production I saw was a real audience, which was so spread out in the sea of folding chairs that people were too self-conscious to laugh much. The inevitable hushed tone was far removed from the far from stuffy productions in Shakespeare's day: actors had to compete with prostitutes, rowdy conversations, and food thrown from the pit at a time when seeing and being seen were often more important for audience members than the play itself.

This production would have fared better in a much smaller venue, where intimacy allows even a tiny audience a more unified response. It's particularly important in comedies, and most especially in Shakespeare's, where contemporary audiences often need camaraderie and cues from others to relax and enjoy themselves.

Revolution/Revelation

"False consciousness," Karl Marx believed, was the ideological byproduct of the capitalist power structure, which creates specious social categories to protect class interests. Its cure, Marx reasoned, was a bloody political revolution. The viscerally enthralling Marat/Sade, newly revived by Push Productions, thrives on the vertigo of debating such impassioned political ideas, where the intellectual consequences often turn themselves inside out. Originally produced on Broadway in 1966, the play earned both director Peter Brook and playwright Peter Weiss Tony awards. Brook's legendary production, in fact, still reverberates with those who saw it, as I fortunately learned from an audience member seated next to me who eagerly shared her vivid experience of that original, groundbreaking show—fresh in her mind 40 years later!

The immense success of Brook's version, which incorporated dramaturgical ideas from Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Atraud that profoundly influenced the nascent Off-Off-Broadway movement, has overshadowed other productions to the point where Weiss's play is rarely staged. Even younger audience members, who didn't have the opportunity to experience the original Broadway version, must compare any new mounting of Marat/Sade to Brook's production—or, at least, to its legend.

Weiss's play draws on two independent historical anecdotes, which he ingeniously combined as a play within a play. First, the infamous Marquis de Sade directed inmates of the Charenton mental asylum, where he was also locked away, in productions of his own plays for the supposed therapeutic benefits of art and the delectation of self-righteous, "progressive-minded" aristocrats who lived nearby. This historical detail will be familiar to those who saw Doug Wright's recent play and the 2000 film Quills.

The other historical anecdote concerns Jean-Paul Marat, a Jacobin leader of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. He was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondist, as he furiously penned revolutionary polemics while, to relieve a terrible skin disorder, he soaked in his bathtub—a literal bloodbath.

In Weiss's imaginary treatment, Sade stages a play about Marat's assassination that, while continually digressing from the climactic stabbing, alternates between musical numbers and philosophical banter. A chorus of sexually ravenous inmates, bruised and disheveled, breaks out in gleeful dance and march tunes that often end with chants of "We want our revolution now!"

In between these screwy show tunes—skewered with over-the-top choreography that plays off each inmate's disorder, Sade (Alan Jestice), a cynical aesthete in bathrobe and bedroom slippers embroidered with a fleur-de-lis, engages Marat (Tom Escovar), sunk in his bathtub until he is merely a wounded head, in a debate about the possibility of sweeping political change.

When the inmates—perilously on edge as they stage guillotine-style executions—finally enact Marat's murder, they go berserk with revolutionary and sexual fervor, liberating themselves in a vast uncontrollable orgy. The original Brook production staged the inmates' "play" inside a cage while the aristocratic classes sat on either side of the stage. At the end, the aristocrats escaped the deluge of erotic mania by locking themselves in the cage and letting the inmates loose, demonstrating that "revolution" means to come full circle.

Without aristocrats onstage, both my neighbor in the audience and I anticipated that this production would somehow chase the real audience members (or, at least, audience plants) onto the "prison" of the stage. Alas, this did not happen. The inmates merely cavort and hump onstage while the orderlies—and we—look on helplessly in awe.

Nevertheless, the production has pizazz aplenty, with a wonderful chorus of inmates. Each possesses his own unique psychotic "tic," from narcolepsy to exhibitionism. Director Michael Kimmel's choice to have an intermission two-thirds of the way through slowed the momentum somewhat. Both Escovar and Jestice displayed panache, however, simultaneously appearing logical and demented as they emphasized the fine line between sanity and psychosis.

When the asylum's droll warden intervenes several times to stop the play's antics, it seems that the inmates may be acting rationally to inhumane conditions while he is cruel and out of touch. In this production, unlike Brook's, Marat's Marxist plea for action hits closer to home than Sade's cold-blooded aestheticism, although both also appear as twin-born monsters gone mad with overtaxed reason.

What makes this production most interesting, though, is how it reflects today's cultural context, which is far different from 1966's. For example, our politically correct view of mental illness no longer considers homosexuality a disease, and many people with mental illnesses have been deinstitutionalized. Likewise, the moral certainties surrounding the Cold War have vanished in our age of relativism, in which conservatives and liberals alike find themselves in a slippery moral quicksand over issues like the Iraq war.

In light of such societal changes, this new production of Marat/Sade strikes a radically different note. The production feels entirely relevant—and redolent of our current political impasse. We need this new Marat/Sade because, as Thomas Jefferson purportedly said, "every generation needs a new revolution."

The Garbage Can-Can

Beware: Even though Clever Hans bills itself as "dance theater" and is listed in the theater section of most papers, this production is overwhelmingly pure dance. Moreover, it's smart choreography and well-performed dance at that. It may not be for everyone, though—especially if one expects traditional "theater." One man who looked like a stereotypical Midwestern tourist—trucker hat, un-ironic T-shirt, unintentionally low-riding jeans cut for a proverbial plumber, and palpably bored as hell at the shenanigans—left with his wife after the first dance.

Too bad. They missed the third dance in the triptych, which is a hilarious Beckett-esque send-up of vaudeville dance numbers that makes especially creative use of old-fashioned metal trash cans. If they had stayed, I bet they would have laughed along with the rest of the audience at the incongruous antics, which required no explanations.

Panel one began with three dancers who appeared vaguely like cat burglars. Dressed in black hoods and skirts, they shuffled crook-kneed around in a circle. Off to stage right, a woman in a green tulle dress stood tied up with a rope, which was attached to a miniature house at the back of the stage. The three dancers, crouched into each other like Russian dolls, slunk over to the rope. They began testing the boundary of the suspended rope—ducking or dipping under it and alternately popping up on either side.

One dancer, who often made frenetic, scissor-like motions with his arms and legs, touched the woman in green for a moment. Then, the three dancers scampered off, embraced, lifted each other, and formed a ring where they braided their bodies under one another's arms amid hanging tubes that their movements set off into pendulum motions. Meanwhile, the woman in green slowly turned backward as she wrapped herself in the cord, eventually entering the small house. At the end, the woman in the long green dress glided offstage on roller skates; the three dancers scurried into the wings.

Whereas the first dance was accompanied by an original classical score for a live violin, cello, and piano, the second dance was accompanied by two violins that were plucked more than they were played with the bow. The real audio accompaniment for the second dance, however, is a text: the dancers tell the fairy tale of "Clever Hans" as they enact it.

Clever Hans is anything but—each time Gretel gives him a gift, he eventually fouls it up. Hans has put a goat in his pocket, dragged a slice of bacon on the ground, and carried a cow home on his head. He finally brings Gretel herself back with him, then tosses eyeballs of barnyard animals at her.

The movement of this darkly comic dance thankfully does not limit itself to a strictly mimetic acting out of the story. Rather, three dancers playing Hans and one dancer playing both Gretel and Hans's mother linked together and pushed apart, screamed that they'll do better next time, and dryly recapped the text. More traditional dancing, which grows increasingly manic, was interspersed with pedestrian motions that resembled such things as a game of "rocks, paper, scissors" and the semaphore-like arm motions of an air traffic controller.

The third and most entertaining dance is the last, a study in awkwardness and sadomasochism. Accompanied by archival copies of Charles Ives's There is That and W.C. Handy's St. Louis Blues playing with a few cracks and blips on a phonograph, a male dancer soft-shoed on a pile of large rocks laid out in a line downstage. Meanwhile, a female dancer with pigtails hunched over on all fours with shoes on her hands, and mock-danced as if she were a trained dog. The male dancer then whirled the woman around like a dervish as he simultaneously tried to keep large metallic garbage cans spinning.

The dance took a sinister turn when he pinged a pebble off a garbage can lid that the woman held over her like an umbrella. Dissatisfied, he forced her to eat a pebble and then poured an entire bucketful of pebbles on her head. Undaunted, she stood atop an upside-down garbage can and performed a parody burlesque dance. The man retaliated by shining her shoes—and then her face. Next, he stuffed her in the garbage can and overturned it. She, however, refused to yield and continued to use her foreshortened limbs to perform a puppet-like dance. In the end, he grabbed her by the pigtails and rode off on her back into a door that wouldn't open.

Choreographers Lynn Brown and Lynn Marie Ruse show deft touches of humor throughout, which the dancers enlivened with their suppleness and physical wit. With only six performances, make sure you don't let this clever "dance theater" piece fool you into missing it.

Radio Beckett

Radio plays were a short-lived literary genre that nonetheless managed to leave many touchstones of lasting impact. While mostly forgotten today, the powerful radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, performed by Orson Welles in 1938, struck panic in hundreds of thousands who, tuning in after the introduction, believed Martians were attacking Earth. On the other hand, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which he finished composing moments before entering the studio, remains his single most famous work even today. Seeing Kaliyuga Arts's excellent new production of Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall (originally written in English for BBC radio), one can appreciate the possibilities of the lost medium—the seductions of pure sound and the way silence becomes existentially equivalent to death, or dead air.

Although presented as a live radio broadcast—complete with 1950's-style squared-off, oversized studio microphones and a mammoth antique radio that faces out to the audience, the production visually entertains with its large ensemble of actors producing an assortment of sound effects. Many of those effects, in fact, come from the actors themselves. Bucolic moos, bleats, and barks, along with plenty of barnyard clucks, crowing, and coos, make for an entertaining and funny backdrop to the main story.

Mrs. Rooney (voiced with a rollicking lilt by Helen Calthorpe) takes the long walk to the train station to meet her husband, running into various country eccentrics along the way. Mr. Slocum (Matt Walker) offers her a ride in his beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. While struggling to get the top down, Mr. Slocum and Mrs. Rooney erupt in such a fit of heavy breathing, huffing, and straining that the scene has rightly been dubbed "audial pornography."

When Mrs. Rooney arrives at the station, quite late, her husband's train has not arrived yet—there's been a "hitch." Finally, after some commotion amid the impatient passengers on the platform, it does arrive, and she meets her blind spouse.

Mr. Rooney (Rand Mitchell, who was in Beckett's original production of Ohio Impromptu) is a senile old gentleman, a classic Beckett ne'er-do-well who quips, "Did you ever know me to be well?" and sighs, "If I could go deaf and dumb, I might live to be a hundred." The irony is that Mr. Rooney—who can't even count the number of steps on the stairs to his house, though counting, he claims, is one of the great joys of his life—probably already is 100.

The couple saunter back home, ruminating on where they're going in life—the running joke being that we're clearly all going to the grave. Mrs. Rooney enigmatically mentions babies dead before they were ever born, meditating on her general sense of sterility. The play ends in the same spot it began, where the "hitch" that stalled the train is revealed.

Though they all share a bit of Irish brogue, the cast members have distinctive sonorous qualities to their voices—gruff or nasal, twangy or sweet, grating or smooth—that perfectly suit their character. Director John Sowle's precise orchestration of the whole medley of voices and sound effects produces a kind of poetry that truly does, at times, ascend to music.

What more fitting play to commemorate what would have been Beckett's own 100th birthday? Even if Beckett, the man, has passed on into dead air, we can be assured from productions like this one that his oeuvre's haunting voice will remain alive for quite some time to come, even amid our culture's contemporary static.

Myth Dance

Dance theater is an ill-defined bastard child of the contemporary stage. Between the narrative impulse to develop longer forms for modern dance and the drive of theater directors to express their vision in terms of pure movement and do away with texts, dance theater was born. From my experience, though, dance theater works much better when the director is a bona-fide choreographer. Dance that adds a heavy dose of "theatrical" elements such as sets, props, and story is more moving than theater that simply subtracts the dialogue.

Ellen Stewart, the creator of the self-described "epic dance theater" work Herakles via Phaedra, is the original "La MaMa" of the eponymous, Off-Off-Broadway experimental theater—the only original Off-Off-Broadway theater that's still around today. Unfortunately, however, she is not a dance choreographer.

The narrative in the first half is fairly clear, the stories more or less familiar: Theseus traces a thread through a labyrinth to slay the Minotaur. Newly crowned king of Thebes, Theseus welcomes Herakles, who has been disgraced and shunned by others. Herakles has killed his own wife and two sons after being tricked by Hera, who envies Zeus for having fathered him. Theseus helps Herakles perform 12 labors for absolution, which range from wrestling a series of wild animals to wrestling a girdle away from the queen of the Amazons.

Without dialogue, however, the latter part of the narrative becomes tedious and difficult to follow—especially if one is not well versed in the Greek sources. Though the program notes contain a helpful—if lengthy—synopsis, it's unlikely that audience members will bother to read along while they're watching the action.

In fact, one may do well to leave at intermission. Once Herakles is absolved of his sins, little dramatic tension is left to resolve. Moreover, the further complications of the plot become difficult to express through song and dance alone.

The choreography lacks the nuance and originality of a real dance piece, and the performers are clearly actors—not dancers. There are a few brief exceptions. In one sequence, a dancer dressed in the mask of the Nemean lion pounces on Herakles to the pounding rhythm of tribal percussion. Herakles somersaults across the lion's back, catches the lion's arm upside down in midair, and then flips the lion across his own back to be felled.

More prevalent, though, are sequences that merely make a gesture toward a dance tradition: flamenco, flappers of the Roaring Twenties, chorus lines, ballet, etc. The "etc." is the telltale sign of a hodgepodge experiment—too many movement styles are attempted, none of them attempted well.

The original score, on the other hand, is powerfully affecting. Here, the wide range of influences works because, musically, they fully embody various traditions to convey a wide array of moods.

During different parts of the evening, we hear freestyle slides on a bluesy electric guitar; long-held notes on a synthesizer that sounds like vibes; operatic recitative; salsa; gongs and chants; the hollow, staccato tapping of woodblocks; otherworldly trills from a bamboo flute; and repetitions of simple harmonic chords that, overlapping, form more complex structures reminiscent of musical scores by Philip Glass or Michael Nyman.

Furthermore, the musicians and singers are competent professionals, though transitioning from song to song was slightly awkward at times since they had to coordinate not only with one another but with a large cast as well.

The spectacle was stunning, however, and often made the show worthwhile to watch even when the dance lagged and the music seemed a bit derivative. At one point, Theseus runs down from a two-story ramp, unfurling a huge banner of tinsel-like streamers that takes over the entire stage, while, behind him, stagehands on skateboards whiz by, sweeping up the trailing strands.

At another point, a huge, parachute-like silk cloth is spread over the entire stage to represent a raging sea as dancers underneath the cloth bob and stretch as they portray tempestuous waves. The lighting design transforms the dull, earth-colored fabric into an iridescent seascape that changes hue from lilac to cerise to wine-dark blue.

The costumes are captivating, too. As the various wild animals, the actors wear gold thongs and elaborate masks, which show African influences. For the Stymphalian Birds, however, bright, oversized marionettes are suspended from puppeteers' hip supports to hover menacingly above Herakles. As with Julie Taymor's costume design for The Lion King, the usually marginalized theatrical element of masks takes center stage and makes an otherwise mediocre show spectacular.

Overall, though, Herakles via Phaedra does not live up to its vision. While the costumes, spectacle, use of the stage area, and music are well orchestrated, the dancing itself fails to demonstrate the same level of complexity and fails to dazzle. Over two hours of poor-quality dancing during a dance theater piece is ultimately too much to take.

Highbrow and Dirty-Minded

Sex farce has always been, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, a trivial genre for serious people. Part of the reason is that the arch, ironic sensibilities of literary playwrights—from Aristophanes to G.B. Shaw to Joe Orton—cannot easily stomach the cheese of traditional romantic comedies. Sex farce subverts romance, displaying the black caulk behind love's gilded mirror. At the same time, its distorted caricature of courtship often lets us see more accurately the gross outlines of passion's truer features. Kiran Rikhye's smart yet lighthearted frolic Stage Kiss is no exception: it playfully teases out the tension between high-minded sexual mores and one's dirty-minded wish for more sex. In fact, Stage Kiss sends up the genre of sex farce itself with a gentle parody of its conventions.

Neptune's annual rape and sacrifice of a small Grecian island's most beautiful virgin has both Phyllida and Gallathea fearing for their lives. Rather than lose their chastity, they each separately strike upon a scheme to cross-dress as dashing gents and hide out in the woods. Upon meeting, both maids quickly fall for each other—thinking the other is a man, of course.

However, both are too timid to give either their disguise or their virginity away. Venus, Neptune's lover and rival, tries to get each maid to make the first move, but to little avail. Neptune finally discovers them—but, in the end, Venus has her own tricks to keep Neptune from turning his.

Intentionally redolent of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It on the surface, Stage Kiss has its real inspirational roots in Charles Ludlum's "theater of the ridiculous." Ludlum's work reveled in outrageous polysexual high jinks whose version of camp derived as much from the cheap thrill of its spectacle as from its whip-smart downtown wit.

Trashy glam rock and drag queens informed the quirky sensibility of Ludlum's stage shows, which delighted in extravagance of all types—whether it was glitter poured over an actor's entire body or the silent lilting of a single leaf falling from the rafters. But Ludlum's travesties were also knowing theatrical pastiches: they plundered genres both high and low, casting an ironic wink at their historical context even as they kept one eye wide open on the contemporary underground scene.

Stage Kiss is reminiscent of Ludlum's work, noticeably The Mystery of Irma Vep in the way Jon Campbell and Layna Fisher, the actors playing Neptune and Venus, run through a series of accelerating costume changes as they comically race around the stage also portraying Gallathea's and Phyllida's respective—though hardly respectable—single parent. Director Jon Stancato does a wonderful job pacing the play with lively blocking that veers into the madcap.

Likewise, the costumes, designed by Merav Elbaz Janowsky, provide another piquant source of humor because Gallathea is played by a fey Cameron J. Oro dressed obviously—but not too obtrusively—in drag. The effect can be dizzying as Oro negotiates the postures of gay and straight simultaneously while bending and blending genders.

With its nonstop sex jokes, the play undercuts any bombast that the deliberately archaic blank verse might possess. Neptune's trident, for example, is composed of three dildos, and, at one point Venus somersaults into Neptune's arms for some acrobatic cunnilingus.

In fact, the constant quips and double entendres come off even better for their vestige of anachronism, because the meter heightens the play's atmosphere of artifice without detracting from the dialogue's intelligibility, thanks to the concise yet colorful—and, quite often, off-color—verse.

Campbell and Fisher manage to get in cahoots with the audience during several scenes that demolish the fourth wall, which they milk for the giddy humor that arises from the awkwardness that audience interactions bring. (If you're not game to being put on the spot, though, make sure you sit well in the back of the small theater.) Fisher, especially, gains our affections as Venus, the slut who stumbles around in a drunken stupor but always slyly manages to come out on top—and over the top.

David Bengali's set design bedazzles with AstroTurf, chintzy blow-up trees, and fallen, Day-Glo leaves. But one of the best touches in this gaudy, disco-like diorama was a minimalist gesture: Venus pulls down a small blind center stage with the words "The Woods" written on it as she sprays some pine-scented air freshener for comic effect.

Unlike romantic comedies, where the inevitable happy ending is too often sickeningly predictable, the "happy ending" of Stage Kiss has a delightfully tongue-in-cheek twist. Audiences should walk away charmed by the play's escapades, gleeful with a guiltless spring fever. One feels thoroughly emancipated from serious concerns of laws, politics, and wars—as well as the unwritten rules of romance, sexual politics, and the battle of the genders.

Shepard's Pie

In Hotel Chronicles, his offbeat memoir, Sam Shepard recounts how he used to sleepwalk around his house at night. His parents told him they had to tuck him back in bed in a somnambulistic state. Shepard, yearning to experience a closer connection with his parents, began to fake sleepwalking, especially when he heard his parents making love. Thus, part of Shepard's reality became the playacting of his dreams, just as his nightly fantasies acted themselves out using his body without him even knowing. This early experience is indicative of how there's no clear line between the real and the imaginary in Shepard's work: there are only seamless inversions of both.

In Action, four awkward members of a Dust Bowl family—who are, at once, total strangers and aspects of a single person—go through the rituals of Christmas dinner. They begin with long pauses, blinks, and stares while nervously sipping tea. Each character is in his or her own head, flipping through a book, telling a story no one listens to, or tapping feet under the table. As one character remarks to himself, "It's hard to have a conversation." When another offers to do someone a favor, it's perceived as a kind of thinly veiled threat. The action, however, is quick to escalate.

Jeep, the character for whom the whole scene may be a nightmare inside his head, smashes a couple of chairs in his rage at not being able to express himself. His brother, Shooter, goes to fetch a new chair—and meanwhile misses out on the turkey dinner. Jeep, in a quirky twist that's pure Shepard, has miraculously found a fish in the well outside, and begins to carve it up for Shooter. The smell wafts palpably throughout the small theater.

By the end, the images suffice to express the characters' sense of anomie and isolation: the women fasten and unfasten pee-stained underwear to a clothesline, Shooter cowers under an easy chair like a turtle, and Jeep screams that he has been imprisoned in a body over which he's lost all control. Penny Bettone portrays Jeep with a manic, masculine rage that still manages to keep some inward tenderness and vulnerability intact.

Cowboys #2, which also plays on levels of reality, is a rewrite of Shepard's first one-act, which he has lost. Two bums pass their time at a construction site playacting the part of cowboys. They wallow in the mud during a flash flood and long for a better life—and some breakfast, too, especially since one of them is a diabetic.

While the play is slight in itself, it provides a few entertaining monologues so the actors can let loose and act goofy. Both Jason Kalus and Adrian O'Donnell, as Chet and Stu, give rollicking, honky-tonk performances with lots of twang when they play their characters' cowboy alter egos. The actors are just as capable of suddenly pulling back, though, into more serious moods when their characters' mundane existence interrupts their game of make-believe.

The short play powerfully foreshadows Shepard's distinctive style: taut, well-plotted conflicts are abandoned to allow for wild, extended metaphors and stories of personal damage. Cowboys #2, like many of the plays Shepard was to write later, is about how reality often intrudes violently upon our fantasy lives.

Chicago, a play that demands that the dream state be accepted as a premise for reality, offers Tim Scott, playing Stu, a wonderful opportunity to mesmerize the audience with more of Shepard's zany tall tales as he flops and splashes around in a bathtub with his pants still on. Be forewarned: Artistic Director Michael Horn passes out towels to those seated in the first row, and they come in handy.

Stu represents the helpless slacker out of his element in the cutthroat corporate fish tank. His wife, who has just landed a new job, keeps receiving in the backroom upscale visitors who wear expensive suits or minks and haute couture dresses. These visitors also carry fishing rods, the bait of which they later dangle into the audience.

The fun, intimate atmosphere keeps the audience game for the high jinks: on the night I saw the play, an audience member in back of me teasingly gulped at the bait as it swayed in front of him. By the end of the play, after his wife has left for work, Stu gives breathing lessons as he steps out of the bathtub's little pond and into the bigger "pond" of the stage. Audience members cannot help but feel a mysterious energy as they inhale and exhale along with him.

Director Tom Amici has assembled a wonderful cast all around and has created a thoughtful production whose small scale allows the important details of Shepard's plays to shine through. When audiences exit from the intimate, comic nightmares of these early Shepard one-acts, life itself seems a kind of sleepwalking.

Platonic Kitsch

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is often told as a tragic tale of romance. Orpheus is the plaintive lover whose melodious lamentations for his lost love give him power over beasts and stones. Eventually, his songs gain him admittance to Hades, where he seeks to bring Eurydice back from the dead. Warned that if he looks back at her he will lose her forever, Orpheus cannot help himself. He looks, and she vanishes instantly from his gaze. Plato, however, interpreted the myth of Orpheus as an allegory of image and reality (as Plato was wont to do). In Plato's version, in his Symposium, Orpheus's desire to bring back Eurydice and himself alive from Hades is a sign that he is not willing to heroically die for love. Orpheus is merely a musician, a poet—and, thus, for Plato "shows no spirit." Because he seeks only the fleeting apparition of his love, Orpheus is "sent empty away."

The Medicine Show's revival of V.R. Lang's 1952 play in free verse, Fire Exit: Vaudeville for Eurydice, uses this passage from Plato as an epigraph—our first hint that this is going to be a strange, self-condemning anti-romance and not what it may seem on the surface: a feel-good burlesque with witty references to Greek myths.

Playing off Plato, Lang portrays Orpheus as the successful but essentially empty antihero and Eurydice as the naïve young girl who, having become bitter with cruel experience, is seduced into selling out at tawdry burlesque shows, where men go to ogle skin instead of contemplating high ideas. The mythic characters get updated to 1930's America, and the plot is filled out with a supporting cast.

Orpheus is a hot opera composer and librettist whose career is rapidly taking off; he is surrounded by an avaricious gaggle of gay agents and producers who look as if they're from 1930's Berlin cafe society with their foppish hats and silk cravats. Eurydice, on the other hand, is the simple, homespun nursing-school student whose silly aunts and tacky uncles are aging vaudeville types trying to hook her up with a big break or a bachelor.

Problem is, the play's form wants to revel in the lyrical impulse its theme condemns—high poetry and low show tunes alike. This contradiction irks one not just "theoretically" but in terms of the characters' motivations and the entire play's through line.

We can't quite figure out who Orpheus is or why Eurydice falls for him so hard. Moreover, why—if Orpheus is so empty of true love—does he bother to search for Eurydice for many years when he has plenty of screaming teenybopper fans? And, by the way, is it believable that teenyboppers are ardent opera buffs, or does this represent a descent into opera buffa?

Worse yet, Jon Crefeld, who resembles a more vapid version of Nick Lachey (if that's imaginable), acted as empty and lost as Plato describes his character of Orpheus. Whether his character was supposed to be stiff was difficult to discern—but if so, then why is Orpheus so feted in the play? Crefeld's interpretation of Orpheus exemplified a dim bulb more than the megawatts of genuine star power.

The play's condemnation of pinchbeck theatricality reaches its most absurd level when Eurydice's trio of aging, failed vaudevillian aunts belt out an off-key show tune. The acting and singing is an amateur representation of amateurishness. Again, I became genuinely confused as to whether their songs' grating wheeze was parody or dreadfully unaware self-parody.

The play contained a few entertaining bits, however, such as a scene where the fey producers devour a phallic baguette and dribble spurts of Champagne on themselves. Their drunken frenzy litters the stage with crumbs and suds until they're finally dragged into the wings.

Ironically, Uta Bekaia's costumes—that element of pure theatrical appearance—were unusually apropos in their sheer tackiness. For example, Eurydice's uncles "slap-schticked" their way in plaid suits, white wingtips, baseball caps, and truly horrendous dime-store ties. Eurydice herself cavorted in a stripper's faux-nurse outfit by the end.

These bright points, though, can't keep the piece from collapsing in on its self-contradictions. Lang's attempt at a "free verse" play ultimately fails: we cannot hear the rhythm, which is essentially a prose rhythm, except when the lines become jangly with clichéd rhymes. Moreover, the idea of using poetry and vaudeville to tell a story that casts aspersions on both leaves one little to believe in.

The contempt the play expresses for the tackiness and essential falseness of theater is, oddly, both reinforced and undermined by the production's cheap exuberance. The audience begins to sense there is something disingenuous about the production's sincerity of self-contempt, which lacks both irony and, like Plato's Orpheus, "true spirit."

Devil's Due

German literature has a rich tradition of drama with epic proportions. There's Wagner's Ring cycle, of course, and Brecht's self-styled "epic theater." Though lesser known, there's also Karl Kraus's play The Last Days of Mankind, which was so long he claimed it could be performed only on Mars, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fifteen-and-a-half-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. But the granddaddy of all of these sprawling Teutonic masterworks, which often are as impossible to watch as they are to stage, is Goethe's Faust. Clocking in at just over six hours, it's a work that is often read (or at least assigned) in college, yet rarely given a full production stateside.

It's not just the length of Faust that intimidates directors and producers; it's the wildly incongruous plot and fantastic stage directions as well. In Part I, which is the more conventional of the two parts by far (and makes sense as a self-contained play), we witness Faust, a lonely man of learning, surrounded by his books, globes, alchemy instruments, and astrolabes. Still, he possesses a desire to overcome his own academic verbiage, ever striving and seeking a transcendent knowledge of experience.

In fact, Faust has just retranslated the first line of Genesis as "In the beginning was the…Deed" when a poodle he found on a nature hike transforms into Mephistopheles, a devil. The poodle, which struck me as silly or bathetic when I read the text years ago, was one of the great surprises of watching a staged production. It is played by an actor in a giant papier-mâché costume and comes off as a wonderfully theatrical element of the ridiculous.

The devil, of course, has come to strike a bargain. Mephistopheles gets Faust's soul if he can find one moment that Faust believes contents him perfectly.

Mephistopheles then whisks Faust away to a rowdy bar to show him a good time; when this doesn't work, he takes Faust to an orgiastic rite of primitive witches (played by absurdly cross-dressing actors). Next, Mephistopheles concocts a plan to get a simple young peasant girl, Gretchen, to fall in love with him. But, as these things are apt to do, the affair ends badly: Gretchen had to kill her mother and her baby. With her suicide, she ascends to heaven, forgiving all, while Faust is still found wanting.

Part II is a crazy roller-coaster ride through several mythological realms, as Mephistopheles now pulls out all the stops to find Faust a transcendent moment. Faust whizzes around through world-historical zeitgeists, from an ancient Egypt of griffins and sphinxes flapping their golden feathers to a future where a mad scientist has created a little man glowing inside a test tube.

One fantastical scene has the man-made "homunculus" riding on the back of the sea god Proteus, who has turned into a dolphin. To stage the scene, actors in costumes hold props representing their characters in action. Nearby, several sea nymphs frolic on the half-shell, reminding me of scenes of mythological mischief from Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle.

In the middle of Part II, there is an hourlong play-within-a-play featuring Helen of Troy. Helen and Faust have a child, and there is a funny scene in which their child, represented by a surprisingly expressive puppet, hops and skitters around the mountainsides.

Suffice it to say, however, that Faust is never satisfied, and the tragedy belongs to Mephistopheles. If the second half of Part II begins to lag with its sheer glut of myth and profusion of characters, one wants to be sure to wait for the finale. Devils dance around with giant masks that make them look like bobblehead dolls, endless streams of silver confetti pour down from the ceiling, and a chorus of angels sings an operatic hymn to life.

In fact, director David Herskovits has inserted many imaginative touches throughout the production, emphasizing the self-consciously theatrical quality of the text, which is often interpreted "poetically." For example, stagehands hilariously prance out onstage to hold a cloth to cover Gretchen when she is changing and, later, to cover the destruction of a violin.

Set designer Carol Bailey has given different scenes radically distinctive styles, from romantic gardens painted on a backcloth, to a small proscenium stage for the miniplay, to plywood cutouts for the mountain crags.

While all of the actors are adequate, David Greenspan, playing a dapper Mephistopheles, has the edge of worldly savoir-faire and insouciant archness necessary to convey the obsessive scheming of a devil who's seen it all. His character shifts from making flip gestures and snide wisecracks to having genuine pathos in his "death" speech. Douglas Langworthy's new translation uses a snappy, vernacular verse that emphasizes the off-the-cuff wit of the original.

If you have the stamina, seek out this rare opportunity to experience a transcendently theatrical staging of an epically proportioned classic.

Hey, Mr. D.J.

Whether you're at an East Williamsburg loft party in Brooklyn or a velvet-roped mega-club in Manhattan's Meatpacking district, the best D.J.s know how to gently coax a crowd into ever-giddier heights of abandon. D.J.s are to songs and lyrics what astute librarians are to books. Their art is one that rides—that surfs—on sensibility, mood, and intuition; they are the tone painters of a vibe's pure gestalt. A great D.J. seems to have a sixth sense to mix songs smoother than a good bartender mixes drinks. The best D.J.s can weave a tapestry of sounds whose narrative arc over the course of a night transcends its individual sonic threads; the worst D.J.s, on the other hand, make you long for the random-shuffle option on your iPod.

Playwright and director Mitchell Polin's new play, Mustard, proceeds in a self-described process of "remixing" classical dramatic source material. That is, Polin "samples" the characters, phrases, themes, and textures of traditional plays, then re-dubs them, scratches them, subjects them to feedback loops and distortions, blends one into another, and creates a multitrack text that includes wholly contemporary rhythms and beats.

As a character in his play states, "Our situation as artists is that we have all this work that was done before we came along. ... I would not present things from the past, but would approach them as materials available to something else ... a collage made from various plays."

The classical text he "samples" in Mustard is that old Ibsen warhorse The Dollhouse. The sample, in this case, is the famous climax in which Nora tragically realizes her independence and walks out on Torvald. Between suspended splices of actual Ibsen dialogue and oblique allusions, Polin orchestrates a multimedia pastiche of musical and meta-theatrical vignettes.

During many scenes, characters make glib philosophical comments on the (non-)action or build up expectations for what is about to happen. Yet even though several characters repeatedly declare that "everything you are about to see has already happened," the play never quite seems to begin.

Insouciant girls in miniskirts and oversized sunglasses lounge around provocatively as if in a glossy fashion magazine. Other girls lisp gibberish nature poems or spout metaphoric nonsense about aliens and galaxies while playing magic tricks with small flashlights. All of this feels like a prelude to some promised "big event" that never materializes.

The play's high points, however, come when a live indie rock band, Tungsten74, jams out everything from 70's pop tunes like My Sharona to eerie Radiohead-like electronica. Meanwhile, a video screen in back of the stage alternately displays abstract rhythmic patterns, time-delayed double exposures of the actors' movements, and an image of the cosmos as an eyedropper's universe of writhing amoebas.

Of the cast members, Michael Burke displays the most stage presence and panache as an androgynous, leather-clad, potty-mouthed cynic who trolls the city's alleyways for sex. Unfortunately, his tirades never go anywhere—they are sterilized, self-contained exhibits in a kind of theatrical test tube. His barely concealed threat to rape the audience is never believable because we've long ago realized the play lacks the bite of real action.

Mustard is quite "experimental" in many ways, yet, like most experiments, it advances a big theory but delivers a small failure. The problem with the play is that while its goal of "de-centering" a text is an interesting—even noble—cause, the piece does not provide an alternative form of coherence to that Aristotelian chestnut about having a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. At least for me, while individual lines or bits of action were enjoyable, the overall impression was murky and ill conceived.

To be fair, the press release warns, "Polin is a director who moved from happenings into theater." In fact, I wished the play retained more of the spirit of a rock concert and of happenings, instead of utilizing the standard, static theatrical division between audience and actors. If a stated goal of the play was to break down the boundaries between life and theater, the audience members needed to be a greater part of the action: they needed to stand up, rock out, move around, intermingle, break-dance, and crowd-surf. They needed to touch and be touched.

The play needed to have the spontaneity of a live D.J. mixing and scratching tracks, responding to its live audience, rousing the wallflowers to blossom. As it was, the audience members slumped in their chairs, politely watched, and timidly crept toward the door before the band finished its last song.