Blind Love

Myths disseminate from culture to culture like phrases relayed in a game of telephone: the Greeks borrowed from African and Egyptian myths, Romans borrowed from Greek sources, and the Renaissance, in turn, embroidered upon Roman tales. With each retelling, a subtle change of emphasis, a detail added or evaded, could alter the myth's meaning entirely. Yet some universal essence of these myths survives, helping form, as well as adapting to, each culture's values. The earliest recorded version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche is by the Latin prose writer Apuleius in his book The Golden Ass. It is the template for modern fairy tales, at least the happy kind with a Prince Charming and wicked stepsisters. Joseph Fisher's new work, Cupid & Psyche, plays jazz-like improvisations upon this standard story, enriching it while elucidating its relevance to us today.

Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and desire, has developed a few unseemly wrinkles lately. Her acolytes have abandoned her in favor of Psyche, a mortal princess of astonishing purity. Jealous, she hatches a plot to get Cupid, her son, to make Psyche fall in love with an ugly monster. But when Cupid sees her, it's love at first sight.

The problem is, Cupid doesn't want Psyche to see him because his own supernatural beauty makes any mortal who sees him fall instantly in love. He wants Psyche to love him for himself and not his looks. He whisks her away to a labyrinthine cloud castle, where he talks to her every night in the dark. Lonely, though beginning to love him, she asks for her sniveling sisters to visit her. They convince her that her husband must be a hideous demon and that she should spy on him while he's asleep, despite his grave warnings to the contrary.

In the instant she beholds his beauty, she is banished from it. Aphrodite's wrath is still unquenched, however, and she reluctantly enlists the help of her hated rival, Apollo, to get rid of Psyche for good. To win back Cupid's love, Psyche must travel to Hades and risk eternal sleep. Suffice it to say, a kiss from the charming Cupid can awaken this sleeping Cinderella so that the tale concludes happily ever after.

Revealingly, the star of the story in this production is Fisher's original character Runt, a mortal servant to Aphrodite and Cupid. Runt, played with bravado by Nick Cearley, possesses an endearing frailty as the "wise fool" that makes him a more empathetic character than the all-too-human gods. His puckish insinuations steal the show wonderfully from the allegorized "beautiful people" of the gods.

The gods have spunk of their own, though, as most evident in Johnny Sparks's portrayal of Apollo. He convincingly demonstrates a wide emotional range, from haughty intellectual snob to heartbroken unrequited lover.

Director Alex Lippard has done an admirable job blocking the play, aided by Lucas Benjaminh Krech's imaginative lighting design and Michael Moore's set. Scenes on Earth take place at the back of the stage within a gigantic gilt frame surrounded by sheer white veils. Other scenes occur on the stage proper, where large, tear-shaped lightbulbs drip down like icicles and two smaller gold frames on both sides of the stage contain sources of misty, aqua-green illumination.

Costume designer Erin Elizabeth Murphy adds an allegorical dimension by giving the mortals' outfits cool turquoise accents while adorning the gods in shades of hot pink. Thus, it's perhaps telling that Runt, unlike the other mortals, wears a sleeveless pastel-pink sweater, while Apollo, unlike the other gods, has faint blue accents in his golden tie.

While Fisher's script has many funny and profound lines, the writing style seems too prosaic at times. The overweening passions of the gods, one feels, should be allowed to burst forth in poetry and song—or, at least, pop lyrics. Dare I suggest this fairy tale would work better as a musical?

Also, the end of the first act, in which Cupid finally kisses Psyche, made me wonder if the play had ended: there was no cliffhanger to entice the audience to come back after intermission.

On the other hand, the play's real ending seemed slightly rushed, with too many unexplained events—why, for example, can Cupid's kiss awake Psyche from death, and wouldn't Aphrodite know this as Cupid's mother? Moreover, not enough plot strings (or heartstrings) are tied up: we never quite learn, for example, what becomes of Aphrodite and Apollo.

Nonetheless, Cupid and Psyche presents a creative and entertaining new interpretation of a myth that has previously captivated such artists as Antonio Canova, Agnolo Bronzino, and Walter Pater. The production conveys the tension between the physical gaze of mortal love and the inner eye's gaze on the immortal soul, in a parable that is at once timely and timeless.

Forgotten Ibsen

Victorian melodrama—can any two words make a production sound more moribund? Yet Ibsen is the master of Victorian melodrama—or "domestic tragedy," as he preferred to call it—and he is the most produced playwright in the world besides Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare, most contemporary productions of Ibsen's masterpieces require a unique directorial concept to reinvigorate them for today's audience, or they act as a star vehicle for a Hollywood glamour-puss. For every Hamlet staged underwater or Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar, we have The Dollhouse staged as grand opera with bunraku puppets and little people (as directed by Lee Breuer) or Cate Blanchett in Hedda Gabler (as recently seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music).

Likewise, the best way to generate interest in an Ibsen or Shakespeare production that has been directed "straight" with little-known actors is to revive one of their more obscure plays. For Ibsen buffs, the Fresh Look Theater Company is offering a rare chance to see Little Eyolf, his nearly forgotten late work of 1894.

The problem with this production, however, is that the director, David Greenwood, insists on sentimental naturalism, period costumes, and a literal-minded fidelity to the script—in what, unfortunately, has become the quintessentially stuffy "Ibsen" manner. Unfortunately, this ill suits the play itself. Little Eyolf is a wild amalgam of nearly incommensurable styles. Perhaps more than any other Ibsen work, it manages to couch the banal if bitter domestic squabbles of Ibsen's familiar middle-period dramas in the aura of the mythopoetic motifs of such early triumphs as Peer Gynt and Brand, making something surprisingly new.

Alfred Allmers has recently returned home, where he lives with both his wife and sister, from somber mountain solitudes where he ventured to finish his book on human responsibility. While there, however, he realized his real responsibilities to his 9-year-old son, Eyolf, whom he has previously neglected. Eyolf is a cute, bookish boy who has been crippled by a childhood accident. This domestic scene is broken up by the intrusion of the Rat Wife, a Pied Piper-like creature from Norwegian folklore, who comes knocking on their door.

After the Rat Wife leaves almost as mysteriously as she enters, Alfred is left to explain his new revelation to his wife, Rita, who becomes jealous because he is dividing his attentions between her and Eyolf. We slowly learn the ironic double meaning of her jealousy: "Eyolf" is also the pet name Alfred called his sister, Asta, when they lived together, incestuously, and she dressed up as a boy.

When the real Eyolf drowns in an accident, Alfred and Rita argue bitterly over who is to blame. Rita confesses that she's happy Eyolf died—maybe now Alfred can experience passion for her. Alfred reveals that the only reason he married her was for her looks and money, not for strong feelings of love or lust.

Can one doubt that this is Ibsen's barely coded 19th-century way of telling us that Alfred's a closeted gay man? Yet few commentators or directors--and certainly not this one--have seized upon this as the key to Alfred's character, and perhaps to the tragedy as a whole.

Alfred meets with Asta, who reveals her discovery that they were never brother and sister. She then runs off with a poor match of a suitor to escape Alfred's advances and Rita's imprecations. Alfred and Rita are left alone: Alfred threatens to commit suicide, while Rita threatens to take in the poor village boys who did not rescue Eyolf from drowning. In the end, however, Alfred and Rita agree to raise the village waifs together as an act of great forgiveness.

The ending is problematic and deliberately ambiguous. While Henry James believed it marred the whole play, many interpret it to mean Ibsen had faith in his audience to see through the characters' stated resolves. Their happy compromise is all a sham; the final revelation of unredeemed misery—too horrifyingly tragic to stage?—is left for the audience's imagination. In fact, this is exactly the question the audience members discussed at this performance, even before their faint applause.

While the other actors often appeared as caricatures in a conventional Victorian melodrama, Christopher Michael Todd, playing Alfred, was astounding in the vulgarity of his expression. His eyes would gape and squint, his lips quiver, his brow scrunch at every turn. At the time, I thought his expressions were grossly under-felt and the product of overacting. In retrospect, perhaps such overacting is exactly what the role demands—I only hope it was a deliberate choice, not ironic serendipity, that produced it.

I also hope that some visionary director like Breuer or Robert Wilson, who recently directed Peer Gynt, chooses to stage this play, which, more than any other by the author, exemplifies critic Eric Bentley's shrewd remark that Ibsen's so-called "realistic" tragedy depends on retaining elements of the "trolls and devils of Peer Gynt...[and] of Ibsen's inner consciousness."

Generation Gaps

In today's linguistic marketplace, many catchphrases stay in syndication longer than the TV shows that gave rise to them. Philologists of the 22nd century will surely trace many roots of our future-speak back to Seinfeld: "soup Nazi," "Festivus," "yadda yadda yadda," and the infamous if ever-popular "master of my own domain" have already attained a wide and legitimate cultural currency. Watch out, because Mat Smart's new comedy, The Debate Plays, may have coined a new slang term that has similar resonance: "a Luigi." What—or, rather, who—is "a Luigi?" you may ask. A "Luigi" is the safe, nice, stable, and generally boring guy a girl dates after she's had a tempestuous long-term relationship with a reckless, selfish, neurotic, and interesting Super Mario. A Luigi is definitely "Player Two." The term is revealing not only in how it defines a certain generation but also in the values that it implies this generation holds.

In dealing with three generations in the life of the same town, The Debate Plays consists of three interrelated one-acts revolving around a love triangle and an obscure Nebraska law that allows the man who took a woman's virginity to challenge her new lover to a debate. The first one-act pits Scott "Scooner" Hooner, the pill-popping slacker who sells suits at the local mall, against James Hamilton, the considerate if somewhat corny and bland M.B.A. grad who makes a six-figure salary, for the love of one Courtney O'Connell.

The stuffy formality of the debate format soon explodes into the absurdly manic, no-holds-barred question-and-answer duel of wits between James and Scooner. After Courtney goes mad and shrieks "Mayday!" at the end of a crazed monologue in which she fails to decide a winner, she appeals directly to the audience for help. The audience then votes for whom they think she should date. The night I attended, the audience surprisingly chose James in a landslide. The cast later told me, however, that Scooner usually dominates but James has an edge if there is an older crowd.

The next one-act takes us back more than 100 years to the Wild West to show us how the law originated when a love triangle resulted in a bloody shootout that killed over a dozen people. The characters dress in drag—the men in big hoop skirts and the woman in bowler hat and handlebar mustache. But the real zaniness ensues when the shootout occurs in slow motion to the 12-minute rock anthem "Only in Dreams" by Weezer (choreographed by director Evan Cabnet). The characters lip-sync the lyrics in between their stylized, trigger-happy death agonies, to hilarious results. In fact, during the instrumental bridge they all break out of character to jam on air instruments.

The last one-act takes us into a future where the 29th Amendment guarantees our right to privacy in consensual sexual relations between persons of legal age. The exact nature of the play depends on who won the vote earlier, but both scenarios involve a distant relative of the loser coming back to confront the law, the town, and the aged Courtney herself.

The whole night is a wildly entertaining, fun romp. My only suggestion would be that the play needs a new title if it's not going to scare away the hip, younger crowd it targets. Part of what makes the night fun is the intimacy of the setting: the traditional theater seats in the black-box space are roped off, and the audience sits at small tables on the traditional stage area as if we're at a dinner theater. Except, since a bartender fetches drinks between acts—and the weekend performances don't begin until 10:30—it's more like "drink theater."

As the cast developed a casual ease with its audience, the acting became increasingly spunky—as if the audience and cast were speaking in the shorthand and in-jokes of old college buddies. Jeff Galfer had loads of off-kilter charm as Scooner and executed his bitter rants with loving relish. He was even funnier when he playfully deconstructed the Western belle in drag. Though Garrett Neergaard played the bland "Luigi," he nonetheless managed to imbue his character with a soft-spoken sincerity whose very corniness can be endearing.

Chad Goodridge, in a variety of supporting roles, superbly punched his jokes. Meanwhile, Kathleen White, with a glint in her eye and a gruff slur to her voice, brought a quirky, cartoonish quality of camp farce to her role as the gunslinging Amos Morgan.

If this play is any evidence, the current twenty-something generation has a great deal of anxiety about how it will change or conform to a corporatized world. More self-conscious about demographic packaging, politically correct attitudinizing, and multicultural posturing than any previous generation, their most frequent defense mechanism against their individual powerlessness is to make fun of the powers that be. If only all of their jokes could be as funny as The Debate Plays.

In Search of Lost Time

Memory plays often suffer from those ponderous longueurs the backward glance is prone to: no matter how significant or traumatic the recalled event may be, it has led to the present's wistful, cozy, and inevitably repetitive nostalgias. And while the act of remembering does not have to be as impervious as Proust's cork-lined room, one can ill afford the luxuriousness of looking back if confronted with current dangers. Thus, to frame events as memories—secure and made precious in the mind, their dramatic moment must be long dead. Time regained may well be conflict lost. Skin Tight, written by New Zealand playwright Gary Henderson, attempts to avoid this problem. It is not until the play's end that we discover that the fighting, lovemaking, and confessions between two aging lovers, Elizabeth and Tom, are definitely memories. By saying this, don't think I'm giving anything away. The whole play is suffused with small eddies of conversation and ebb tides of monologue where the lovers lose themselves in reminiscences about their past.

The opening sequence is a corny stage fight that predictably turns to sexual teasing as the lovers collapse onto the bed. The play takes a long time to warm up even after the lovers get talking. Is it really believable, for example, that this is the first time an older couple discusses their "first time" with each other? While it's not apparent yet that the events occur in memory (whose blurring force compresses the bright details), the quick alternations between passion and violence don't seem altogether believable. In fact, most of the action sequences appear a bit "canned"—especially one in which Tom yanks Elizabeth around by a knife she's biting in her mouth.

James Jacobus, as Tom, often lapses into overwrought, actor-ly expressions (pursing his lips, screwing his brow) when he is trying to show his character being pensive. He is much better at expansive and humorous gestures, such as when he rants. Stephanie Barton-Farcas demonstrates a more even-keeled control throughout, though her tone never really matches the desperate pitch of her character.

The play eventually strikes a note of genuine pathos, however, when it slows down to let the characters confront each other with their stories. Elizabeth, it turns out, has always resented Tom for going off to fight in the war. She confesses, though, that her affair with a young sheep sheerer during this time only led her to realize that her love for Tom was inescapable. Likewise, the couple's angry litany of petty domestic resentments hits hilariously true to home.

The end of the play attempts to portray a poignant scene of the lovers saying their last goodbyes, nude in a bath. Does the full-frontal nudity distract one from the quiet mood of sentimental sorrow that's intended? Not much. What it lacks in shock value it gains in intimacy, especially since their bodies quickly turn away or submerge in the tub downstage under dim-lit blue gels moments after they disrobe. But even this scene did not help the play escape a certain generic blandness.

Director Pamela Butler's stage design—a bed with white sheets upstage right, a tub (or trough) downstage left—is merely functional and lacks the expressionistic evocations that often give memory plays their eerie translucence wherein things reflected become more real.

Interestingly, love, unlike other powerful emotions that dissipate with time, sometimes appears more alive, more real insofar as it has been lost to a vanished past. Within memory, the events of one's love life usually become starker, stranger, and more fraught with their future significance.

This play, however, produces the opposite effect: a limp, nostalgic monotony lacking the erotic triste of remembering a long-lost love, which the play intended to evoke. While the experience of watching it was more or less entertaining while it was happening, it was also fairly forgettable afterward.

Moth to the Flame

Love is devastation, destruction, disease. Love—real love—destroys one's life, tears human beings apart, and makes small differences in relationships seem irrevocable. Love, especially male love, is a death wish: it is the trapeze artist's desire to fall, the bullfighter's secret wish to be gored, the fighter pilot's dream of a glorious crash. One asks: Who was the greater lover, Prometheus or the vulture? But a great love, a true lover, is both. Love is the fire that chars the heart, excoriates it, even as it illuminates what is left of the body's ash for a brief instant. When one is in love, every bed is a bed of nails.

Such are the meditations provoked by Sam Shepard's unforgivingly dark drama A Lie of the Mind, now playing as part of the Michael Chekhov Theater Company's Sam Shepard Festival, an ambitious project in which the company plans to produce all 45 of Shepard's plays between now and December 2007. While some of Shepard's plays may be spunkier, more spontaneous, or more surreal, A Lie, which took the 1986 Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, is certainly the most brutal, bleak, and uncanny work in Shepard's oeuvre—and that's saying a lot.

Jake, a bad boy with tattoos and cowboy boots, wakes up from a stupor in Nowhere, Calif., to remember that he beat Beth, his wife, to a bloody pulp. Jake's brother, Frankie, visits Beth's parents' house in Montana to see if she is dead or alive. Meanwhile, Jake, in the midst of a nervous breakdown (as much from guilt over the incident with Beth as from trauma over killing his father many years ago), moves back in with his mother, who still requires someone to baby.

Beth's father, Baylor, goes out hunting for deer but accidentally shoots Frankie in the leg. Frankie is then trapped by a blizzard in the house of in-laws who hate him—all except Beth, that is, who falls in love with him as she slowly recovers from her brain injury. Mike, Beth's older and overprotective brother, goes on a vigilante rampage when he finds Jake has come back for her. Jake is still impossibly in love with Beth and cannot bear to repeat the past, whether with her or with his father, although he must, and does. In the end, the characters must choose to either annihilate their pasts wholesale or stagger on in their own foolish footsteps forever.

The acting is more than sufficient all around, with Thomas Francis Murphy as Baylor giving a standout performance. He absolutely nails the jingoistic Montana backwoodsman who both hates and is co-dependent on his wife—down to his twitching caterpillar eyebrows and the slow, smoky warble of his voice. You are entirely convinced when he declares, "Hunting isn't no damned hobby—hunting is a way of life, an art." He gives the kind of performance where you wonder how much Murphy is acting and how much he is this character, until you glance at the headshot in which he has slicked-back hair and well-plucked eyebrows, and wears a suit jacket.

Susan Capra, playing Baylor's wife Meg, also utterly convinces as the goodhearted, put-upon, naïve country hausfrau. Likewise, Frieda Lipp, playing Jake's more cosmopolitan and Californian mother Lorainne, displays a widow's bitterness that balances between vulnerability and stoicism, grief and an insanely giddy hopefulness.

Anna Podolak, playing the brain-injured Beth, has the most difficult role in the play, since the character has to start with screams, stutters, and baby talk and then become an articulate seductress over the course of two hours. While Podolak is adequate in the role, a little more rehearsal time might have helped.

The spare set design by director Kathy Curtiss utilizes the small black-box space well—it is minimal without being merely suggestive. Like the play itself, everything counts.

When in love, one inevitably faces the choice of whether to destroy what one is or be destroyed by it. As James Baldwin once said, "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." One must either keep repeating oneself in the "rut" of a love or choose to destroy one's own history to break free from its illusions.

Like the many possible definitions of "lie" in the play's title, the play itself resonates with a variety of meanings: love as sex, love as deception, love as violence, love as one's place, and love as a ditch one can't climb out of—the more you try to scramble out, the more the dirt crumbles beneath you as you fall back in. This wonderfully stark production offers a powerful voice that demonstrates all of these bleak possibilities.

Notes on Camp

"A work can come close to Camp, but not make it," Susan Sontag wrote, "because it succeeds." Much of the confusion about defining the camp sensibility is from conflating high camp with low. Low camp's modus operandi is the ironic fetishization of sincere and passionate items of kitsch. High camp, on the other hand, proceeds by means of pastiche and travesty—by warping and reassembling the detritus of forgotten or marginalized cultural forms into textures and spectacles that delight in the extravagance of beautiful failures.

However, all camp depends on theatrically dissolving content into style. Not "mere" style but sheer style. No true camp sensibility would ever disparage style, since camp is an inherently aesthetic outlook on life. A taste, in fact, and one that subverts moral ends to the playful, aesthetic means of perpetual fabulousness, which is perpetually a pose.

Which leads to a question: Is Measure for Pleasure, the new play written by David Grimm now playing at the Public Theater, too good, too knowing, and ultimately too earnest to be camp? On the surface—where genuine camp delights to remain—it would seem to be the very apotheosis of theatrical high camp: a romp through Restoration comedy by way of gay sex farce. There's more leopard print and hot pink brocade, cross-dressing, and dildos sprouting cupid's wings than one can shake a very large (slap) stick at. Plus, a set design (by Alexander Dodge) of rococo columns bedizened with vaginas and phalluses in relief.

But look again, and there is something deeper than just dirty puns and frilly outfits going on. There is a kind of poetry. And I don't mean the smooth alexandrine couplets that are ubiquitous throughout the play. No, the real poetry is in the tenderness of the play's devastating wisdom.

The aptly named Grimm, with help from director Peter Dubois, has conceived of a theater that—like the theaters of Joe Orton, Jean Genet, and Oscar Wilde before him—both is and is not camp. Like his forebears, Grimm offers a drama that recognizes the painful failure of life through the pleasant, if savage, ironies of its own sumptuous theatrical success.

Captain Dick Dashwood (Saxon Palmer) duels with Will Blunt (Michael Stuhlbarg), the servant of Sir Peter Lustforth (Wayne Knight), over Blunt's telling Hermione Goode (Emily Swallow) that Dashwood is a rake. Both, however, are secretly getting serviced from Molly Tawdry (Euan Morton), but only Blunt knows that Molly is a transvestite prostitute rather than Hermione's lady-in-waiting.

The real fun with secret identities begins, though, when Lustforth and Dashwood dress up for their vast ritualistic orgies in the underground cave of the Hellfire Club, based—loosely (what, or who, isn't in this play?)—on an actual 18th-century secret society. Who shows up at the festivities but a masked Lady Vanity Lustforth (Suzanne Bertish) and Hermione's would-be ward, Dame Stickle (Susan Blommaert). The whole comedic charade, of course, ties up into perfectly paired couples that each tie the knot, including one homosexual marriage.

Knight, famous for his role as Newman from Seinfeld, exhibits wonderful comic timing and a flair for bawdy verse. Just as much in abundance as these gifts is his physical skill at screwball high jinks as he cavorts about stage huffing and humping as the old, fat, and lecherous Sir Peter.

Bertish, playing his periwig-wearing and death-pale powdered wife Lady Vanity, has the commanding hauteur to deliver such withering statements as "My life is a Greek tragedy—to be blest with such a face and watch men suffer." The phrase doesn't wither her rivals so much as point out her own desiccated visage, which, in Sir Peter's words, "resembles [his] blue, wrinkled balls."

But it is Euan Morton, playing Molly in her several incarnations, who stands out among this marvelously talented cast. In the guise of a very gay man, he delights with the kind of hyperactive lapdog bitchiness of the echt-homosexual character Jack from Will and Grace. Morton also plays a crotchety country doctor for nearly half the play, as well as the prostitute "Molly," since the nonstop schemes of the plot require him to layer character upon character. Just watching Morton slip into new personas and then teasingly break character for an aside is as delightful as trying on expensive suits at Barney's and Bergdorf Goodman that one can't afford.

Speaking of clothes, "style consultant" B.H. Barry and costume designer Anita Yavich's lavish period dress with subtly updated details affirms Oscar Wilde's camp dictum to live by: "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."

The stylish ironic excess of this production make it a high-camp extravaganza, but the meaningful humanity of Grimm's wit make the play much more than that: high art, as well.

No Sure Thing

The best early Sam Shepard plays snort and kick like blood stallions—their energy feels raw, almost random; their plots are as screwy as their characters. Many later Shepard plays domesticate the horseplay—and horsepower—of his earlier imagery into well-made structures whose force increases with greater craft and control. Among living playwrights, only Shepard's early mentor, Edward Albee, can vie for how prolifically and profoundly he has remade the American stage. The Michael Chekhov Theater Company, founded by Michael Horn, is attempting the herculean task of presenting all 45 of Shepard's plays, within its inaugural year, in its new black-box space, the Little, Big Theater. Its efforts aren't as hopeless and slapdash as they may sound—most Shepard plays require minimal sets, and the company has been planning and rehearsing for two years already.

Among Shepard's 45 plays, however, a few don't measure up to his own uniquely high standards. Simpatico, written in 1994 when Shepard returned to the stage from his work in film, has too many spices stirred into the pot: its dramatic kick fizzles. The ingredients don't add up. Rather, we're given red herring soup. By the end, the expected wallop of revelation goes sour in the mouth.

Carter, a wealthy businessman in the horse-racing industry, visits his old pal Vinnie, a down-and-out loner who holds pictures and letters from Carter's sordid past. In the opening scene, Carter (Peter Picard) is desperate to protect his reputation, while Vinnie (Tom Pavey) grows increasingly manic attempting to re-establish a lost friendship.

Powerful undercurrents of jealousy and guilt seethe, since the two also share history with Rosie, who long ago eloped with Carter even though she was married to Vinnie at the time. The tension is as tight as a new-strung guitar string—the slightest movement from the actors playing Vinnie or Carter makes a visual and visceral music. Vinnie convinces Carter to go talk to his new girlfriend, Cecilia, who Vinnie claims is pressing charges against him, and Carter agrees once he suspects that Vinnie gave her some of the scandalous pictures.

From here, though, the plot never untangles itself to achieve the same taut level of suspense. The mystery of what the pictures and letters are about is never fully revealed. On the one hand, it is said that Carter, Vinnie, and Simms, a since-reformed fall guy in their scheme, once doctored the mouth tattoos on two racehorses. On the other hand, it is suggested that the photos show Simms in graphic sexual positions with the horses. Exactly how these two stories connect, though, left me befuddled.

Moreover, any—or all—of the characters may be compulsive liars. Since nobody can be trusted, the audience has no hope of figuring out the "real" motivations and events that compel the characters, and the initial force of the plot dissipates.

The play's subtext about each character's futile search for identity thus becomes as contradictory as Matlock putting an epistemologist on the stand who says that none of us can ever reconstruct the past through mere artifacts or identify its causal chains, if there are any. Such limits to knowledge may be true enough for relativist history professors to be mindful of, but without the ability to discover significant clues—without the hope that there is some truth, the gripping mystery of a dramatic plot dies.

Regardless, the fine acting and crisp direction (by Ann Bowen) of the production make it, if not entirely compelling, at least a worthwhile evening of theater. Picard skillfully transforms Carter from a smooth, glad-handing businessman into a shaking alcoholic schlub. Likewise, Pavey's riveting depiction of Vinnie's tissue of lies deconstructs his character like crumbling onion skins so that nothing remains of it by the end.

Gary Lamadore, playing Simms, is convincingly hermetic as he alternates between wry, worldly understatement and overblown confession. Alison Costine similarly manages to conceal the true nature of her character, Cecilia; at first appearing ditzy, she later hints that this may be a deceptive act.

Though the portrayal of these deeply flawed characters displays nuance and force, it cannot overcome the deep flaw in the play's structure. Shepard implicitly acknowledges going against the grain of the detective genre by referencing classic film noir. In fact, Simms sighs and says "wise decision" when Vinnie tells him he stopped going to the movies—they don't make 'em that way anymore.

For all the fascinating unraveling of ultimate motives, the audience becomes confused and frustrated from never hitting the pay dirt of sudden illumination. Instead, the last image of a cell phone ringing unanswered seems emblematic of the unanswered questions that audience members must confront as they leave. Perhaps Shepard intended the play to show the messy cloud of questions we must confront in real life. If so, the play may find few who are "simpatico" in its audiences.

Old-Testament Decadents

The story of Lot (Genesis, verses 18-19) is filled with fascinating themes and ambiguities. While the destruction of the city of Sodom is often cited as an example of God's vengeance upon homosexuals, this may come more from misinterpretations than scholarly Biblical exegesis. Unfortunately, the new dance theater piece Sodom's Wife fails to illuminate much that is troubling about the Biblical text and focuses on gently spoofing the traditional interpretation. The basic story may be familiar: God is about to wipe out the wicked—though not necessarily homosexual—cities of the plains, Sodom and Gomorrah, but Abraham bargains with him to save his nephew, Lot, who has recently moved there. Two angels come to visit Lot and tell him that he needs to take his family out of town before God smites it with fire and brimstone.

The townsfolk surround Lot's house and demand that he hand over the angels to them—for the purpose, in traditional interpretations, of a homosexual gang rape. Lot offers the men his two virgin daughters instead, but the men are not satisfied. The angels, however, come out and blind the townsfolk. At dawn the next day, Lot and his family leave. Despite a warning, Lot's wife looks back at the city, and she is transformed into a pillar of salt. Lot escapes with his daughters to a cave, where they get their father drunk and trick him into having sex with them in order to carry on the family line.

In Sodom's Wife, the narrator, a prissy drag queen (Michael Shattner) in a sequined, butterfly-shaped top, introduces vignettes with treacly jingles. A few supporting characters—a madame, a prostitute, a junkie, and a satyr-like clown—are added to help flesh out the story line, while the angels of the original story appear as women playing sexless, almost robotic space aliens from a planet near Vulcan.

Director Erin Brindley seems to have wanted to contrast the simple, homespun look of Lot and his family with this queer assortment of decadent creatures. The problem, however, is that the actors playing the native Sodomites are too wooden to capture the all-out extravagance necessary for a campy fantasia. And while Charles Hendricks, as Lot, has the most glowing stage presence, he sometimes declaims his lines.

The play alternates between spoken scenes with more traditional theatrical blocking and movement sequences sometimes punctuated with music. The spoken scenes were developed over many months through improv exercises with the actors, and they lack the linguistic verve of incisive playwriting. Their structure is loosely that of a memory play while Lot's wife is suspended in her moment of looking back. By the time Shattner announces, "And—another memory," I thought I heard a groan in the audience.

The movement sequences, on the other hand, are overwrought and underdeveloped: characters play games of red light-green light, pantomime a tree (several times), wrestle on the ground to mimic sex, or perform simple dance steps. The least-clichéd movement scene, though, is when the characters re-enact different ways that Sodom may have been destroyed—as the methods of destruction become more absurd, the characters' actions grow sillier. The characters seem to be having fun for once, and the audience does, too.

The final destruction scene, though, is theatrically underwhelming: a few lights flicker, the angels walk around "zapping" the citizens of Sodom, and Lot's family climbs on steps around the stage's periphery. This feels far from fire and brimstone.

The playbill mentions that the original concept, ironically planned before Hurricane Katrina, was to change the setting to New Orleans. Perhaps the collaborators of Ripple Productions scrapped this idea because they didn't want to court controversy or seem unduly tactless or timely.

Nonetheless, if a company were to properly stage this mythical spectacle of sex and violence, it would do well to have a more daring and decadent spirit. Chintzy bead necklaces, a miniature Mardi Gras float, candy coins tossed at the audience, and video projections of actual news footage might have given the play the edge Ripple was seeking.

Truth And Dare

Playwrights are called "ahead of their time" once we feel we've safely caught up to their insights and innovations. Thus, even the most far-seeing and radical visionaries often become assimilated into theatrical convention. T.S. Eliot, however, offered a rejoinder to critics who claimed that "dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." "Precisely," Eliot replied. "And they are that which we know." Even so, Frank Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, written in 1891—five years before Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi scandalized audiences with the mere mention of the word "merde"—resists canonical sterilization. The play continues to be so incompatible with acceptable notions of theatrical staging that productions become interesting for the tactics by which directors evade the rawness of the truths Wedekind confronts.

Audiences today still require that his portrayal of child molestation and adolescent rape, S&M, suicide, homosexuality, compulsive masturbation, abortion, and group sex be mollified with theatrical metaphors. Not even our cynical, "pornified" zeitgeist can stomach such unmitigated joy or nihilism. The play, therefore, is about how much the theater itself must mask.

Spring's Awakening concerns a group of teenagers discovering the vitality of their sexual being while realizing the ruinous consequences that it causes when it's suppressed to conform to adulthood's strictures. Robert, a 15-year-old, seduces a 13-year-old girl, Edie, whose mother spoon-feeds her stories about babies being delivered by storks. Edie's mother forces her to get a secret and dangerous abortion even as Edie fails to comprehend that she's pregnant.

Meanwhile, Ian—Robert's best friend—threatens suicide if he doesn't pass the exam for the next grade. Courtney, Edie's slightly older and more sophisticated friend, runs away from abusive parents into the arms of the local theater director, but not before igniting Ian's explosive desires. Robert attempts to defend Ian's actions with a starkly factual essay but gets expelled for obscenity. Moreover, the whole play is set against a backdrop of other boys at the boarding school exploring the full range of their newfound homosexual impulses.

Director Charmain Creagle uses modern dance as a metaphor for erotic fantasy to represent the fragile innocence with which these young characters explore their nascent sexuality. Melissa Coleman, dressed as an androgynous wood nymph with Boy George-esque facial makeup, spryly crouches and slinks around all the nooks and crevices of the stage while watching the action. During monologues, she silently entwines herself around the characters' arms and legs in sinuous and sensuous curls. As dancers, the characters must come to terms with their growing bodies' gravity, just as their characters are coming to terms with their bodies' growing gravitas.

On the other hand, in one of Wedekind's most outrageous scenes, a group of boys challenge each other to a "circle jerk" to see who can hit a coin with his semen. Creagle depicts this with expressionistic gestures—such as throwing fists in the air and biting one's arm—set to punk music. While the gestures were not graphic enough to convey the full force of the scene's violence, the ski masks the boys wore made them vaguely resemble grotesque pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Creagle offers another effective visual corollary to the play's themes by representing the adults' roles in projections on a screen looming over the adolescents' heads. We see only isolated body parts of the adults—mouth, feet, breasts—as if they had become chopped up, flattened into video images, and manipulated to endure the technocratic restrictions of some vast super-ego-in-the-sky. Ironically, these body parts belong to the same actors who play the adolescents. By contrast, the adolescents onstage appear tender, palpable, fluid, and alive: they are, literally, in touch with reality.

The one exception to this is Robert's progressive mother, played live by the young and fetching Hana Nora McGrath. This mother figure is the play's only embodiment of a mature, sexually awakened yet not morbid or moribund adult. McGrath convincingly manages the difficult tensions of her character—between youth and age, innocence and authority, sympathy and instruction. She conveys a luminous aura of sexual suggestiveness as she undoes her stockings while Coleman's wood nymph alternately skitters around her, clasps her back, and, cat-like, plays with her socks.

Inseung Park's set design—large, irregular wooden panels floating in midair that frame the stage, with blossoming tree branches growing downward in back of them—adds an element of delicate spatial tension, as well, by seeming to disembody the very heft of the materials.

Ultimately, Wedekind's play does not intend to merely shock, and this graceful and intelligent production contains a tenderness that refuses to sentimentalize experience. Instead, it offers us the shock of recognizing the underlying vulnerability and innocence of truth and sex, the many veils of which it depicts through a tantalizing dance.

Rock 'n' Roll Saviors

Chekhov once quipped that "if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last." This basic dramaturgical tenet wasn't heeded in the productions of Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard and Thick Like Piano Legs by Robert Attenweiler, now playing at the Red Room. Nonetheless, the two one-acts packed enough heat to make an entertaining evening dedicated to down-at-their-heels musicians trying to find salvation amid the squalor of sex, drink, and rock 'n' roll. Attenweiler's new one-act depicts the regulars at a dive bar on the Lower East Side. The bar's struggling piano player, Tom (Nathan Williams), has one last big night to perform before he's off to Georgia.

When he enters the bar, however, he discovers someone's stolen his instrument. No one has a clue what happened to it. Upset that a "baby grand can't just fly away easy like, say, a baby elephant," Tom lashes out at the burly manager, Jack. Jack suspects Tom swiped it himself before scooting out of town. Meanwhile, Joanie, Tom's girlfriend and a cocktail waitress at the bar, gets upset that he has decided to leave her behind like "a chewed-off hangnail."

The play begins, though, with a fourth character, Billie, flashing a large wad of bills and asking Jack, "You wanna know where I got all this?" Jack would rather remain ignorant of what he suspects are her illicit dealings. Billie (Mary Guiteras) is a ne'er-do-well who lives out of her car and dreams of being a lounge singer. Like Tom, she's also back at the bar for one big last night—of boozing.

What I found odd was that the play never suggests a connection between the big wad of bills that Billie suddenly and inexplicably possesses and the conspicuously missing piano. To me, this looked like the gun that never went off, and could have acted as a dramatic decoy in the "case of the missing piano." As it is, Billie, though an amusing drunk, becomes somewhat extraneous to the plot.

Despite its loose construction, the play has enough action to hold one's interest. Attenweiler's one-act evokes the ambience of Tom Waits's ballads through its drunk and dreamy characters' slangy, exuberant dialect that's prone to down-home idioms and exaggerated storytelling, though the language slips into mannerism on occasion.

Likewise, the actors display panache and swagger without overdoing it most of the time. Bret Haines as Jack evinced a quiet control that radiated the sly worldliness, if not weariness, of the longtime bartender. Vina Less, as Joanie, conveyed the love-struck hysterics of a bright-eyed youth without resorting to melodramatic screaming.

"Cowboy Mouth," an early Shepard rock opera he co-wrote with Patti Smith, is pure spontaneous combustion throughout. Two lovers alternately argue and entertain each other with silly games in a seedy apartment. Slim unleashes his frustrations on his guitar, but can't quite be the rock 'n' roll savior that his quirky girlfriend, Cavale, hopes for. She's torn between romanticizing Johnny Ace, the black rock 'n' roll star who blew his brains out, and her more domestic dreams of owning a dishwasher and fancy shoes.

Bored, poor, and strung-out, the two lovers play out a fantasy life where they frolic like animals, pretend to go shopping, and make up wild stories. Eventually, they call the Lobster Man to get them some food. This strange delivery person intrigues them, and they call him back as a kind of prank to see what will happen.

Shepard's stage directions end the play on an intentionally ambivalent note, with the Lobster Man, unveiled as the rock 'n' roll savior, spinning the gun Cavale uses in her Johnny Ace monologue in a game of Russian roulette. The hammer strikes an empty chamber, and the lights slowly fade to black.

But director John Patrick Hayden chose to ignore the detail about the gun from Shepard's staging, and ends with the rock 'n' roll savior exultantly sprouting wings while Hendrix blares like an angelic chorus in the background. Without the gun clicking on an empty chamber, Shepard's well-constructed and grim parable about becoming disillusioned with the false idols of rock 'n' roll seems to have turned into a feel-good spectacle.

Overlooking my minor quibble with the last image, though, this fast-paced and exciting production is like a reckless joy ride with a stolen car. Becky Benhayon brings spunk, humor, and her own eccentricities to her interpretation of the peculiarly morbid yet bouncy character of Cavale, while Adam Groves delights with his boyish charm as the jumpy, energetic Slim.

While there weren't any smoking guns, these two one-acts successfully capture the explosive energy of down-and-out drifters in sexy, smoke-filled dives. Like rock 'n' roll itself, with its all-or-nothing attitude in the face of youth's big hopes and slim chances, these plays help life's disappointments seem a little less lonesome.

Infernal Discourse

George Bernard Shaw imagined hell as an amusement park dedicated to licentious pleasures. While there may be "quite enough reality on earth," the "horror of damnation," he says through his mouthpiece, Don Juan, is that "nothing's real" in hell. Unfortunately, the horrific dreariness of reality intrudes into the Medicine Show's production of Shaw's dream play within a play, Don Juan in Hell, the self-contained third act of his Man and Superman. Dona Ana, an old flame of Don Juan's, is a fresh arrival in hell. She meets her former lover and her deceased father, an ex-military commander who is visiting from heaven. The devil calls and tries to convince Juan to switch places with the commander so that hell can have a new catch. Acidly eloquent monologues ensue about the nature of love, marriage, and the meaning of life.

The famous libertine, weary of endless sensual indulgences, decides he prefers the contemplative life of heaven. For some reason, the devil changes her mind and protests Juan's decision. But any dramatic conflict is secondary to the witty banter in this comedy of ideas that resembles a Platonic dialogue in the way Juan gets all the best lines.

Director Alec Tok appears to have made a deliberate choice to stage Shaw's philosophic reverie utilizing Brechtian dramaturgy. On the surface, this makes sense because Shaw is in many ways the English Brecht: both playwrights wrote "epic theater" that emphasized didactic arguments, often at the expense of action, in an effort to engage their audience's intellects and further social—and often socialist—causes. In addition, Shaw's dream play concocts an atmosphere of brittle illusions, which seems to make it suited to the distancing effect that was Brecht's goal. Brecht wanted his audiences to see the illusion of theater as an illusion, and not mistake it for some "naturalistic" reality.

The problem is that Tok stays on the surface; his use of Brecht's dramaturgy is superficial and distracts our focus from the depths of Shavian meditations. The play, for example, "breaks the fourth wall" for only an instant—when the devil hands a random audience member a dollar bill to demonstrate the allure of mammon. It almost works. But the gimmick takes attention away from the alluring sophistry, which is the heart of the play.

Likewise, the costumes, while well constructed and imaginative, led to confusion. Juan wore a codpiece, multicolored tights, and a troubadour outfit complete with plumage and ruffles, while the commander was adorned in a mink thrown over World War I gear bespattered with inexplicable, Pollock-like drips of yellow and gray. More disconcerting yet was the fact that he had silver glitter smeared on his face.

Tok and costume designer Uta Bekaia attempt the radical juxtaposition of styles that Brecht urged, but the effect is baffling. The bafflement was most likely intentional: a superfluous nonspeaking actor enters and exits at odd moments wearing a new costume each time, from cross-dressing in a French maid outfit to parading as a Roman soldier.

Moreover, while elaborate Brechtian masks are used, they are rapidly dropped with little change in the characters' voice or action to denote any transformation, thus nullifying their effect.

While many of Tok's attempts to set Shaw's play to Brecht's directorial music may seem interesting, at least theoretically, the production flounders because of more basic reasons: overzealous blocking and emotionally callow acting.

During the play's long monologues, the actors engage in incoherent and distracting behavior. The audience is never given the chance to focus on the intellectual gymnastics when the characters halfheartedly toss pillows, pantomime animals, or—in one of the most egregious scenes—pretend to give birth to a helmet. It's as if Tok, afraid the audience will be bored by Shaw's speeches, overcompensates with too much action. Yet the transitions between scenes stultify with moments of dead air.

The least ingratiating aspect of this production, though, was the cliché-ridden acting. Brecht proposed a theory of acting opposed to Stanislavsky's, which relies on the interiority of deep, primal memories. Brecht's theory proposed that actors articulate a series of controlled and highly stylized gestures. The actors in this production, however, displayed neither naturalistic emotion nor stylistic control in their movements. They travestied the subtlety of the text with the banality of their unfeeling expression. With the occasional exception of Peter Judd, who played the commander, they wallowed in overwrought melodrama throughout.

The entire play came to a fitting conclusion on the night I saw it. A prop malfunction caused the climactic unveiling of heaven to be delayed. As Mark Dempsey, playing Juan, fidgeted with a curtain, he came out of character for a second to shrug apologetically to the audience.

If Shaw—or Brecht—wanted to disabuse us of the possibility for human transcendence, he couldn't have hoped for a more earthbound production.

Paranoid-in-Chief

Presidential pomp and circumstance has always been a surreal spectacle. How bizarre was it when "Dubya" searched under his Oval Office desk looking for lost weapons of mass destruction in a self-satirizing skit for a press gala? Of course, the Clinton years provided their fair share of sideshows in the Oval Office, too. Our current political climate contains enough levels of dramatic irony to plunge even the most casual political observer into the spinning vortex of partisan rancor and the warped rhetoric of media manipulation. Who needs theatrical send-ups of political life when our real-life political theater sends itself up?

In the Brick Theater's revival of Richard Foreman's 1988 play, Symphony of Rats, directed by Ian W. Hill, the president gets sucked down the rabbit—or, in this case, rat—hole of paranoid schizophrenia. The media have swarmed around the president's sex life like a pack of frenzied rodents scavenging in a back alley for a piece of garbage to gnaw on. The president cracks up. He imagines he's communicating with voices from outer space. As his delusions of grandeur grow, he believes he's been beamed to another planet where angels, aliens, dancing rats, and comic-book monsters run amok. Each delusional episode blurs together into a jumbled pastiche of sci-fi freaks and screwball comedy that portrays the president's increasingly manic imagination.

Alyssa Simon, playing the First Lady with the "reptilian smile," however, deserves special mention among a crowded supporting cast for the subtlety with which she makes a "straight" character appear more strange and sinister than the fantasy creatures that too often appeared like benign waxwork figures around her.

Many of the vignettes are visually arresting. The president—played by a hyperactive and often cross-eyed Hill—hears voices that tell him he's "lost his swing." As golf balls pop out from between his beret-wearing mistress's wide-open legs, he crushes them underfoot as if they were eggs. In another vignette, he watches in terror as his symbolic mistress, the Statute of Liberty, gets spread on the dinner table and raped.

The most powerful man in the world suddenly has his mojo go awry and his god-like abilities desert him. A paraplegic asks to be miraculously healed, only to rise up and turn into a towering demon with claw-like arms.

The president gets replaced by a cardboard cutout with a happy-face balloon for its head. He whisks scissors from his pocket and becomes a barber as the inner self seeks vengeance on the outer "suit." The suspense created by simply flashing a sharp object in the same visual space as a balloon is palpable.

Like a bad acid trip, events accelerate as they become more detached from reality. A character spoofing a film noir detective comes to investigate the president, the president boogies at a disco crowded with mindless ingénues, and he plays a life-size game of whack-a-mole.

Eventually, though, the incoherence and over-stimulation of these lavish spectacles get somewhat tiresome. Endless sight gags can hold our attention only so long, and one gets the sense that each outlandish scenario, funky costume, or entrancing prop exists merely to one-up the zaniness of the last. The production shares the aesthetic of the music video, the metaphysic of the short attention span, and the psychology of media saturation. Its first principle is "I think, therefore I—oh, heck, what's on the next channel?" Any sense of narrative or momentum liquefies into a sensual kaleidoscope of ever-changing sexual cartoons.

Because the president in this production is portrayed generically, any satire in the original production has been blunted, with no attempt to update the jokes to fit our current commander in chief. The play, therefore, is not so much about politics as it is about the thin line between sanity and schizophrenia.

In fact, the production embodies many of the dramaturgical ideals of that true paranoid schizophrenic, Antonin Artaud. At one point, an exasperated president, slouching behind his desk far upstage, asks the audience if anyone wants a glass of water, then realizes he can't give somebody one because he's supposedly on TV and not in a theater. Conversely, a few minutes later the president strides right up to the audience during an intense monologue where some of Hill's sweat dripped onto my notepad. Like Artaud's proposed "theater of cruelty," we experience an orchestration of pure theatricality that unfetters itself from narrative conventions and textual supremacy in favor of a savage attack upon our senses.

My own tastes, however, incline toward spectacles where the visual slapstick and visceral stunts hang on—or at least by—a thread of narrative. Films such as Fight Club and Schizopolis, for example, do a better job at conveying the schizophrenic nature of reality because they are able to represent the funhouse of a character's mental life without the story itself getting lost in it.

Foreman's Way

Richard Foreman fancies himself avant-garde. In an article he wrote in 2001 to commemorate his 50th production at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, he claims that in the 60's he created "an unusual kind of theater that many people found strange." The problem is that if Foreman's theater appeared strange in the '60s, it has become institutionalized into a museum piece today. The self-proclaimed "daring" aesthetic sensibility he developed over 40 years ago to shock looks like a self-parody now. With his newest work, ZOMBOID! Film/Performance Project #1, he cobbles together the same old props out of his surrealist toy box with inarticulate catch phrases lifted from sophomore philosophy class to create what is, essentially, a multimedia dance theater piece with a circumscribed repertoire of gestures.

His piece makes us feel comfortably smart and artsy without challenging any of our preconceptions. We know what we're going to get, and Foreman delivers: abstract nonsense spoonfed to us on feedback loops, tableaux that feature oversized, gimmicky props that have an equally over-determined symbolism, and a mishmash of random "nonevents." For all the disembodied eyeballs, dice with letters on them, Hebrew scrolls, piles of books, sledgehammers, blinding lanterns, and blindfolds that he drags into his diorama, we are left neither moved nor amused, or more contemplative.

The central motif of ZOMBOID! is a human-sized stuffed donkey and the blindfolded young people who interact with it. There is also a film playing on two screens in back of them, featuring other blindfolded people and occasional text. The text, with bludgeoning redundancy, proclaims such things as "suppose I were to postulate..." and "the inevitable donkey." These phrases, along with a few other pseudo-poetic epigrams, sound more tendentious the more they get repeated in a cloyingly smarmy voice.

The film aspect is new to Foreman's work, and he talks about it in his notes as if it were revolutionary. But it ends up seeming like just one more element of his predictably theatrical mise en scène. The stage itself is already behind a thin panel of Plexiglas—making it resemble a TV screen, though that is not Foreman's intention—and so the flatness of the film screen appears as distanced and unreal as the live action.

The live actors engage in prayerful posturing, jockey for sexual favors on all fours, play with the props, look out a lighted window in the wall of the set, and sometimes simply watch the film with the rest of us. All of this, I took it, could be a parable for the history of Western metaphysics. The game of pin the tail on the donkey might be a trope for philosophy's search to pin down the thing-in-itself, the truth of which we are categorically blind to.

The rationalism of the Enlightenment, for example, is depicted with a searchlight attached to a clock tower, while the so-called "linguistic turn" of early 20th-century philosophy is represented by a character proudly singing her ABC's. The whole show ends with a Kabbalistic revelation, as Hebrew scrolls appear to float through the set's window in an angelic flood of light. This seems a bit upbeat for the existential dark humor that Foreman often aims for.

Then again, one might read the piece as a political statement: the film of silent, blindfolded persons at times resembles hostage videos; the toy soldiers lined up along the stage front may be an obvious comment on our society's culture of war. But none of this is supported by the context of the play, which strikes a mockingly disinterested and cerebral tone. The play simply exists as an aesthetic "nonevent," a sterilized object of meditation, a cluttered space devoid of point or purpose.

In fact, the program states—in shrill, self-congratulatory prose—that one should try to avoid compositional procedures. Of course, Foreman studiously fails to avoid his own. The program also proclaims, "Ah—this moment starts to be interesting?—Toss it away!" The tone of the play, like his manifestoes, is of a mind that discards its genuine insights—a mind that has trouble taking itself seriously because it suspects it takes itself too seriously. Foreman's hyperventilating manifestoes are evidence of this, since they attempt to justify his style with theoretical explanations even though his art must succeed or fail on its own merits.

The contrived zaniness inside the Ontological-Hysteric Theater cannot compete with the reckless theatrical anarchy of real life outside on St. Mark's Street. Take the costumes, for example. The tutus, fetish gear, piercings, and berets that the characters wear look tepid compared with the costumes of the gutter punks and drifters a block away.

While Foreman has garnered nine Obies, a MacArthur "genius" award, and countless grants from public and private foundations, ZOMBOID! does not advance anything significantly innovative or interesting. By democraticizing his so-called "elitist art" to validate everyone's interpretation, he has emptied it of all intrinsic meaningfulness. To believe it meaningful, then, is merely a form of pretentiousness.

Child is Father to the Man

Sam Shepard Rodgers Jr.'s father arrived home from World War II with shrapnel lodged in his neck. Junior was an Army brat; his father, a nomad who moved his family from Illinois corn country to the Badlands to rainy Guam to the balmy weather of Southern California. Sunshine and happiness didn't suit the old man. Instead, he just wandered off one day to live alone in the arid desert of New Mexico, where he eventually burned to death and became the land. Still a teenager, Junior decided to leave town and hitched up with a troupe of traveling actors performing in churches, then hit the road to New York City. There, he dropped his family name and took to jazz and rock 'n' roll, bussing tables, playing cowboy, and writing crazy plays.

Buried Child, for which he received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, is not one of Shepard's crazier dramas; it is, rather, a drama about the impulses of craziness that well up when family skeletons are repressed. In the words of director and longtime Shepard interpreter Cyndy Marion, it is "structurally his finest play." The mythic bronco bucking of Shepard's early works—with their jagged and jazzy improvisations—is here harnessed with a mature guile and a mastery of form.

In Buried Child, Shepard lays a slow fuse of narrative to ignite the spontaneous, combustible images of his early plays. The psychological and symbolic impact is more profound than a random fireworks display. The bitterness and betrayals exchanged between fathers and sons are given an eloquent and excoriatingly rigorous expression.

As the play begins, an old man named Dodge is harassed by his wife yammering from the next room. Dodge's aging son, Tilden, brings in corn and husks it. Something is amiss: there hasn't been corn outside for years.

Vince, Tilden's son, arrives at the house with his big-city girlfriend, Shelly. No one in the family claims to recognize him. Vince drives off to fetch Dodge a bottle of whiskey, leaving Shelly behind to fend for herself amid his messed-up, madcap relatives. Bradley, Tilden's brother with a wooden leg, nearly rapes her.

The next morning, Dodge's wife viciously attacks everyone in sight. Only Shelly has the nerve to stand up to her. But the family members refuse to acknowledge Shelly—as if she were the surrogate for the audience members, who are powerless interlopers in this violent family romance. Dodge, perhaps impelled by Shelly's boldness and recognizing his own impending death, unleashes the family's secret—the buried child.

Vince comes staggering back, smashing beer bottles on the porch as if they were hand grenades. Now it's Vince who can barely recognize his family; Shelly who's not sure who he is. It's as if Vince, climbing through the porch screen ripped open with a knife, is the buried child, exhumed and birthed from a new womb.

Dodge, before dying, cedes Vince the house. In doing so, Vince's epiphany during his nightlong drive—that his "face became his father's face, and his father's face changed to his grandfather's face"—is given dramatic truth. Vince begins to resume the same posture Dodge had on the couch in the play's beginning, curling up like a crumpled fetus.

The sudden transformations at the play's finale do not feel forced, which is a triumph both of Shepard's writing and the control with which the cast members portray their characters. They do so with a stark realistic edge and generous amounts of dark humor in the midst of madness.

Paralyzed, impotent, emasculated, and put upon, the males in this drama are all losers and loners, formless half-wits and former halfbacks, invisible and dead to the world in one way or another. Yet while each reflects the others in a sort of shattered hologram, each has a peculiar isolation all his own.

Rod Sweitzer as Tilden mesmerizes with his eerie, autistic stare. Bill Rowley as Dodge manages to give complex shadings to his character, who can go from a mean ol' cuss to a surprisingly sympathetic man beaten down by life in his second childhood. Likewise, Ginger Kroll as Shelly gains our affection despite her first impression as a stuck-up big-city girl. Chris Stetson as Vince displays both the swagger and vulnerability necessary for the role.

Like the painting of a whitewashed farmhouse half buried under rows of overgrown corn, which hangs from the set's wall, this profoundly moving production of Buried Child reveals uncanny levels of significance underlying a seemingly innocuous portrait of an American family.

Inner Life of an Outer Borough

While Manhattan might be the proverbial melting pot, Brooklyn is more like a smorgasbord of borscht and oxtail stew, spicy red curries, and dim sum dumplings. The rich diversity of the borough has a long history, too. Brooklyn—or Breuckelen, in the original Dutch, meaning "broken land"—has always been a city of down-on-their-heels eccentrics, from the Mohawks who lived in Gowanus and helped build the first skyscrapers to the more recent immigrants from Russia in Brighton Beach, Poland in Greenpoint, the Caribbean in Flatbush, or Puerto Rico in South Williamsburg. Chris Van Strander's new play, Breuckelen, puts Brooklyn's newest wave of immigrants—glib, disaffected hipsters—into the perspective of the borough's storied past. As one of the play's most poignant moments reveals, Brooklyn is a metropolis where the living literally walk upon the dead, since potter's fields abound underneath many major landmarks. Grand Army Plaza, we learn, used to be the site of public hangings. But while the play does attempt some somber realizations, its brightest moments occur when it simply revels in the exuberance of its wacky characters.

The play begins as if it were an open mike night at a typical Williamsburg bar. The performers for this framing device change every week—I saw a slam poet, a standup comedian, and a folk singer. Overall, their quality was much higher than one would expect from a typical open mike, and entertaining enough for their five- to ten-minute spots.

The last open mike performer who takes the stage, Melissa Schneider, segues into the plot of the play proper. She gives a monologue in the guise of a longtime Bushwick resident who is asking people to sign a petition to stop the rezoning laws that would allow a cherished local museum to be torn down. After she takes her seat back in the audience, a twenty-something from Park Slope (Jack Ferry) with the requisite thick black frames and laptop approaches her with such pickup lines as "Are you from Tennessee? 'Cause you're the only ten I see" and "I'm new around here, do you think you could give me directions to your apartment?"

Their exchange of quick-witted quips reveals that he's a lonely blogger lacking any historical sensibility, while she is a witch (not Wiccan) who conjures exotic spirits from the past. Ferry and Schneider have a fun chemistry that easily elicits laughs, and the script for this scene provides ample jokes. Their tête-à-tête can be difficult to hear, however, depending on where one sits in the audience.

The rest of the play is devoted to monologues from the ghosts of Brooklyn's past, which range from a lesbian owner of a speakeasy to a Russian squatter who was booted to make way for Prospect Park. Director Matthew Didner has chosen to stage simultaneous monologues to different sections of the audience, which are later repeated to the other side. While intriguing at first, this technique quickly becomes a distraction, then irritating, and finally boring, since one may have already tuned in to the monologue across the room when the one closer seemed less interesting.

Karie Christina Hunt upstages all the other ghosts as she whisks in on roller skates while rocking out to the Beastie Boys. She plays the naïf teen "guidette" stereotype from Sunset Beach in punk-rock 80's garb: a pink and black miniskirt; a tight, cleavage-bearing rainbow sequins top; and florescent-green knee-high socks. She tells the story of how a slimy older guy in a speedo picked her up by promising to get her on his cable-access TV show, and then took her to an abandoned building where the roof collapsed on them as they made love. Funnier and flashier than the more dour monologues by the other ghosts, hers may be worth listening to twice.

The problem with the other monologues is that they attempt to be the tragic equivalent of a punch line. Such short-form drama has a hard time pulling the heartstrings, however, when the late-night beer-drinking crowd is focused on "rollergirl" gyrating in the background.

One aspect I found disconcerting was that in a play that purported to be about the marginalized histories of a city boasting enormous diversity (in fact, all the ghosts were women), no people of color were in the cast. Now, I'm not the P.C. police, but a fair representation of Brooklyn's richness would demand at least a token Muslim, Dominican, or African-American.

Like an open mike night itself, the whole show was hit or miss: some monologues and scenes evoked spot-on laughs about our shared frames of reference and Brooklyn's encroaching gentrification. Other acts or monologues languished under the weight of their dreary earnestness.

But, like Brooklyn the city, Breuckelen the play is worth the trek: while you might not like all the characters, you're sure to find a few amusing.

Quixotic Reveries

If you crave minimalist, character-driven drama where playwrights construct complex yet coherent plots, actors invest themselves in the psychology of their characters, and directors have a totalizing style and vision, then the sublimely subversive group with the officious-sounding name the National Theater of The United States of America is not for you. On the other hand, this troupe of merry pranksters offers "maximalist" experimental spectacle driven by myths and metaphors, arresting images, and restless slapstick and vaudeville. While their plays don't always add up, that's often beside the point—or, perhaps, that is the point: theater is not supposed to be an equation. The sum of their disparate parts—which includes influences as diverse as Dada cabaret, big Broadway extravaganzas, and the twilight zones of Sam Shepherd and David Lynch—always seems happily greater than the whole.

Their newest creation, ABSN: RJAB (Abacus Black Strikes NOW!: The Rampant Justice of Abacus Black), is their first to be performed in a "legitimate" theater space, P.S. 122, though some of their members have been working together since 1997.

Abacus is a parable about the stubborn quixotism that is necessary to pursue one's artistic calling in the face of technocratic philistines and corporate zombies who devour brains. At least, that was my reading of it.

To say that this theatrical event is "about" anything besides its own exuberant theatricality (and the sharing of experience that is its prerequisite) raises the very notion of theater that this group challenges. What makes theater unique as an art form is not plot or characters or a unifying vision but those momentary and too-often elusive experiences of participation in an event that is potentially transformative because it has the immediacy and liveliness of human interaction in a community.

After a purposefully alienating welcome by the show's impresario, the actors construct not one but two stages in the process of a dance sequence set to deafening glam rock. The first is a Coney Island-like sideshow proscenium arch, while the second is a small, slightly elevated "black-box" stage, which lurks behind it. Most of the action, however, takes place between these two frames. Narrators on the proscenium describe the 600-year journey of Abacus Black, an aging knight in search of the lost City of Gold, then reveal vignettes of this story behind the curtain while they strike poses as caryatids.

An impromptu third stage even appears at one point for a mock puppet show, which ends with the largest puppet flipping to become a costume for a character that is part sun god, part scarecrow, and part Texas chainsaw massacre. Later, near the end of his journey, Abacus himself transforms into a human marionette.

One of the most striking scenes occurs when Abacus wraps his legs like a knapsack over the shoulders of a disbelieving yet loyal shaman figure who plays Sancho Panza to Abacus's Don Quixote. The shaman carries Abacus on his back so they may continue their mythic quest. Distant wolf howls pierce the static noise of surf in the background, while a smoke arabesque forms a golden, apparitional aura around a plywood cutout of a saguaro.

The story, however, is quick to break down for poignant philosophical fillips, such as "this was in olden times when knowledge brought people together." The story is equally ready to serve up pointlessly surreal songs—one memorable number might be described as a zombie picnic with Mephistopheles meets The Sound of Music.

Although the dance numbers have more panache than precision and one can hear less than half of what Abacus says in his inaudible, synthesized wheeze, the faults of the production do not prevent it from being an odd sort of triumph. It succeeds as conceptual theater—where the concept is to have fun, and to take the risks that fun entails.

The troupe's frenetic energy is catching. Backstage, I imagine the sound and light crews were equally busy multitasking to provide all the smoke-and-mirror effects.

The last—and most lasting—image of the play depicts the decrepit Abacus sitting on his throne (which has turned into a cage), as if his mythic quest ended with him being a sideshow freak, his sallow face illuminated by a small florescent light. The cage is wheeled backward, and his face recedes slowly into the void of history even as he lives on as the Ancient of Days.

The National Theater's method is truly collaborative: each of its members writes, acts, directs, and lends whatever other skills he or she has to the production. This difficult, though not untenable, democratic ideal permeates their performances, too. In their depiction of the continual metamorphosis of the self, from private hallucinatory revelation to public spectacle within the shared space of theater, they may be doing something truly experimental—appealing beyond traditional downtown theater audiences.

American Anomie

Richard Maxwell's plays resemble the paintings of analytic cubism, a style marked by a monochromatic, fractured collage of everyday three-dimensional objects reduced to two-dimensional squares and circles. Likewise, by breaking down and flattening our colorful American idiom into its component parts of straight talk and roundabout prevarication, Maxwell's plays help us observe the essential shape of our concerns and the undercurrent of anomie that belies our speech's animation. As important as analytic cubism was, however, its heyday was deservedly short-lived. The pleasures of such deliberately dull and angular compositions quickly fade because their appeal is almost entirely cerebral. Similarly, Maxwell's work, while an important step, is merely that: a step—it trips up if it stays put. Unfortunately, his current play, The End of Reality, malingers in its deadpan monologues until they finally succumb to the malaise of ambivalence that is their subject.

Five security guards on night watch struggle to relate to one another, and to a silent intruder in their midst, with various methods of coping with their boredom, helplessness, and fear. The images of an institutional lobby, a sterile corridor, and a motionless computer lab are projected by security cameras onto a video monitor. We are in the guard tower of a postmodern Panopticon, but, ironically, it's the guards themselves who are simultaneously anaesthetized and scared out of their wits.

Even if something happened, the guards, unlike police, are not supposed to fight. The florescent lighting imperceptibly flickers. Otherwise, there is a rigid monotony to their existence. The guards talk at—not to—each other about sports, the weather, their weekends. Without such talk, their vulnerability would be too palpable. However, their disconnected speeches, gauche pauses, point-blank stares at the audience, stylized male gestures, nervous repetitions, offbeat slang deconstructed in slow motion, and overwhelming lack of affect—even when describing situations that demand poignancy or paroxysm—betray them: they are faithless and afraid.

When the intruder arrives, it's as if such horror had been half longed for because it gives their lives dramatic moment. It's a kind of solution. They can finally utilize their skills and achieve the purpose of so much waiting. But, then, the conflict with the intruder seems to parody itself—the fight becomes an overly theatrical mockup of kung-fu movies.

Once detained, the intruder sulks in the center of the room: massive, silent, at the mercy of unknown forces—a living symbol of their anxiety. Yet their lives go on around him as usual with macho posturing, flirtations between the sexes, unconvincing sermons from the boss, and minor family crises. Nothing changes. Their situations, however, have been put into absurd relief: the dreadful has already happened, and—like Beckett's clowns—they can't go on, but do.

The play succeeds when it separates its characters' banal speech from their genuine feelings so that the heavy undertones of grief and longing break apart from the clichés they spout so fluidly. For example, the stop-and-go speech of a tough-guy veteran telling a female newcomer about his collection of Jordans and "Lil' Homies" (tiny figurines of urban stereotypes) reveals both his lack of self-awareness and his inner desperation, and it is a moment at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

Too often, though, the characters drone on in monotonous, disjunctive monologues. The characters don't seem to know where they want to go, their speech meanders, and, consequently, the audience begins to lose interest. Ultimately, there is not enough variety or enthusiasm in their dry, uninflected voices to sustain our attention for long swathes of soliloquy. When the characters engage in dialogue, on the other hand, their punctuated rhythms and extended pauses embellish the banal discourse so we can hear their alienation, not unlike the faint, hollow buzz of monitoring devices along the corridors.

The large, black stage engulfs the characters, while the sharp, white canvass backdrops convey the blankness of their yearning.

One shares the characters' uncertainty over whether their story is comically realistic or bleakly absurd. Or a tragedy, perhaps, about how the unserious levity with which we proceed with our lives undercuts the very matters of deadly earnestness that are at stake in them, even though, in the face of such existential nightmares, we have recourse to little else except these exchanges of shopworn trivialities to stave off hopelessness.

In the end, the image of a character who avoids reality by clinging blindly to his faith, talking incessantly of angels and ecstasy, is upstaged by a kneeling woman behind him who has been literally blinded by her fear. She reaches out her hands, imploring, while the personification of their terrors stalks off into the world.

Much like cubist portraits, it's as if Maxwell has put his characters under a strobe light, each threadbare trope of salvation shattered, frozen, and recognized for its inadequacy. Those brief flashes in the remorseless dark, however, are too inadequate even for their own designs.

Flower of Comedy, Root of Evil

When one hears of Machiavelli, the usual image that's conjured is the narrow-eyed portrait of the backroom backstabber, the Renaissance's harbinger of 20th-century spin-doctoring and realpolitik. A cold, clever, nasty genius akin to, say, Henry Kissinger or Karl Rove. What many people don't realize, however, is that during Niccolò Machiavelli's own lifetime he was most renowned for his farcical comedic touch in screwball sex romps like The Mandrake, now revived in a titillating new production at the Manhattan Theater Source. A senile, grumbling old lawyer, Nicia, keeps a beautiful wife, Lucrezia. His one desire is to have a son, but he just isn't up to the job. Callimaco, a gallivanting ne'er-do-well, has eyes for Lucrezia, but she is impossibly virtuous. So he enlists the help of Nicia's henpecking mother-in-law, an avaricious friar, his faithful, sloe-eyed servant, and a faithless fellow traveler who helps him concoct a scheme, which is this: Pretending to be a doctor, he convinces Nicia the only way to solve his problem is to get Lucrezia to eat a mandrake root.

However, there's a caveat, the first person to sleep with Lucrezia will die (a point-blank metaphor of the Renaissance superstition that the sin of adultery leads directly to murder). Delighted, Nicia agrees to capture a passer-by,Callimaco in disguise, of course,with the gang of co-conspirators and willingly arranges his own cuckoldry.

While the characters are the stock figures of commedia dell'arte, they are realized with such panache and precision as to render them into human cartoons. Like good cartoons, they display an exaggerated animation that real people too often lack. Michael Shattner as the dimwitted Nicia is especially hilarious, shouting expletives and shuffling around bent-backed as the play's impotent, crotchety laughingstock.

The production is chock-full of sight gags, little gestural asides, and even physical interactions with the audience, thanks to director Daryl Boling's well-timed blocking and marvelous use of a narrow, unadorned stage. The stage's layout resembles a high school football stadium in miniature, with small rows of bleachers flanking either side so that we watch not only the play itself but a mirroring audience as well. And, judging from the audience members' reactions, the buffoons and rapscallions plodding and plotting before them are recognizable character types we still have with us today.

Vinnie Marano's punchy new translation is completely contemporary and colloquial, with pun-a-minute double entendres, while Ollie Rasini's serviceable folk songs strummed by a troubadour break up the fast-paced scenes of this antic sex farce. One memorable scene has Callimaco (Jeffrey Plunkett), in the guise of the doctor, spouting possible causes of Nicia's erectile dysfunction, first in the Latin of the Vulgate, then in a transparently vulgar Latin, slipping into pig Latin, and then descending into complete nonsense. Meanwhile, Nicia absentmindedly splashes the bottle of urine that the doctor asked to examine, from which Siro, the bumbling servant (Ridley Parson), nearly takes a swig by accident.

Oddly, Machiavelli's send-up of all-consuming cynicism results in a genial outcome for everyone involved: the friar gets paid off, Nicia has a son, Lucrezia realizes her sexual coming of age, Callimaco pulls off the bed trick, and the others get to be in on a good practical joke. In some ways, Machiavelli's vision is like a comedic perversion of Adam Smith's providential "invisible hand" of free-market capitalism, which makes all turn out for the best in a world of cutthroat bankers and butchers bloodymindedly pursuing their own self-interests.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in fact, thought that Machiavelli's famous treatise on the ruthless machinations of statecraft, The Prince, was a satire. But, regardless of whether Machiavelli intended his works to endorse, exploit, or examine the godless pragmatism he witnessed surrounding him, it is clear that this delightfully lighthearted production of The Mandrake aims to gently mock the pretensions and follies of the eternal human comedy.

Sex and Politics

In Kirk Wood Bromley's three new one-acts, Three Dollar Bill, produced by Inverse Theater, the ideological tensions between gay values and conservative values tango in a tangled dialectic. Bromley's verse plays sound like linguistic Chinese finger traps: the more the characters attempt to reason out of their self-contradictions, the further they tend to be trapped by their own dubious assumptions. The first, and least successful, play, "What Are You Thinking, Mary Cheney?," is essentially a one-woman monologue in which the vice president's lesbian daughter tries to justify her existence. Skewered by the likes of the Moral Majority on the right for her sexual preferences, she is equally lambasted by the left for betraying the ACLU, Lambda, and others who try to defend her lifestyle choices.

We meet Mary in her idyllic "log cabin" in the woods�as if in a kind of demented Mister Rogers' neighborhood�where she greets us, reads us "fan" letters, and smashes cellphones when she gets calls from the irate public. While the premise is promising, the result comes off as a screed of self-justifying self-hatred. Director Howard Thoresen utilizes a wide array of blocking

Cruel and Unusual Pleasures

As soon as the curtains part in the Red Bull Theater's production of The Revenger's Tragedy, the audience is hurled headlong into an atmosphere of theatrical extravagance: a dance macabre at the Duke's court morphs from a stylized tableaux set to opera music into a lascivious discoth