Night of the Living Drag

Wedged in the oh-so-narrow crevice between obnoxious schlock and sublimity lies The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, an at times horrific piecemeal of 50’s horror tropes, Nazi Germany, and drag dazzle presented by Theatre A L’Orange. It’s also sharply staged, cunningly written, and frequently disturbing in its hilariousness. Set in the secret laboratory of a German castle (designed to a B-Movie T by Chesley Allen) in 1945, Anne weaves an unsettling tale of a botched Nazi experiment, wherein Dr. Frankenstein’s buxom Aryan superwoman Anne is born with… well… a little something extra. Banished to the castle’s attic for years with only a sassy talking diary to keep her company, Anne’s chances at freedom and love increase when her long lost creator returns to his old lab, with the reanimated head of Adolph Hitler in tow. After two foppish Americans show up looking for lodging, the whole affair spins into kitschy, chaotic madness of the best kind.

As mentioned above, Anne might have ended up as a mere pastiche of plot elements from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Frankenstein, and, yes, The Diary of Anne Frank – but playwright Ilya Sapiroe’s clever script fuses the spirits of these various sources (and genres) in a quite agreeable way. The device that houses Hilter’s reanimated head, for instance, gives an appropriately retro-horror vibe, and simultaneously renders the Fuehrer as a gibbering idiot. Another particularly nice convention, well handled by the game director Elizabeth Elkins, is the personification of Anne’s diary, as portrayed by the deliciously laconic Lavinia Co-op. The vampy Co-op wears an oversized open book headdress, pops in like the Cheshire Cat, and cajoles Anne into compromising situations. It is also worth noting that there are several amusing musical numbers by Kevin Cummines.

The play’s overall success obviously owes much to Mimi Imfurst, the celebrated drag queen who plays the childlike, but occasionally baritone Anne. The way that Imfurst bounces giddily after graphically disemboweling a victim elicits a strange blend of awkward sympathy and humorous disconnect. At times, the audience is meant to root for Anne, yet at other times we are meant to fear her. Like all the other mash-ups provided by Sapiroe’s farce, Imfurst gregariously milks this imbalance to hysterical effect.

Joseph Beuerlein, Geoffrey Borman, Ryan Feyk, Jessica Caplan, and Eric Jaeger round out the willing cast, with Feyk’s decapitated goofball Hitler and Borman’s gangly terror Fritz leaving the most lasting impressions. As an ensemble, the cast in general excels at whatever singing, role swapping, and shenanigans are required. It’s always nice to see a cast have a good time with material, and this makes a bizarre, unquantifiable show like Anne that much easier to enjoy.

As a final note, I want to address the title, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, specifically. It is a title obviously constructed for maximum offense and one that hopes to draw a crowd based on morbid curiosity alone. There are those who will be supportive of this audacious move and those who will be flabbergasted. On two occasions I avoided referring to the show by name, for fear of being dragged into some unfortunate discussion of appropriateness with someone from the latter camp. That said: mission accomplished Mr. Sapiroe. You both piqued my interest and made me embarrassed to say why.

I Memed a Meme

OMG!!!!1 Everyone’s favorite little kitties from icanhascheezburger.com transcend their humble http beginnings in this overly derivative, but occasionally amusing musical from Sauce and Co. Inspired by the ubiquitous URL above (also called LOLCats in the popular lexicon), I Can Has Cheezburger – The MusicLOL is the latest off the “[Insert Cultural Phenomenon] – The Musical!” assembly line, but is nowhere near as clever as, say, last year’s Perez Hilton Saves the Universe. The story is simple enough – Lolcat wants cheezburger. Lolcat is uploaded to internet. Lolcat meets various other forwarded email stars. Lolcat must choose between his new friends and cheezburger. Big dance number. LOL. Curtain.

“Lolcat” (played friskily by Seth Grugle) and his anthropomorphic friends sing and seem to have a lot of dumb fun as they pursue their destinies – be they cheezburgers, buckits or excel sums – but eventually a MusicLOL must stand on its own furred feet. Book/Lyric/Music writers Kristyn Pomranz and Katherine Steinberg rely too much on the inherent funniness of the Lolcats, who are projected on a screen behind the action as frequently as possible. Cheezburger’s music and story are as by-the-book as possible, and, even worse, largely structured around which image pops up when. Even though everyone in the packed house laughed when the “Pew Pew Pew” kitty popped up on screen, it had little to do with the rote musical they were seeing. There is a strong potential in this visible connection between what is onstage and its internet inspiration, but, disappointingly, the former only rarely evokes ROFLing.

Despite a few inspired performances (like Liana Jessop as the squealing “Orly Owl” and Vincent Digeronimo as the Eyor-like “Lolrus”), Cheezburger hardly qualifies as an EPIC WIN.

Crossing Over

The prospects of a better life across the border are weighed against the tolls of migrating in Las Escenas De La Cruz (translation: “Scenes of the Cross”), a spirited, but over-the-top venture from the activist company iDO Theater! Spoken in both English and Spanish, Scenes of the Cross follows a group of refugees across the border, along the way illustrating the events that drove them from Mexico or the future travails that await them in America. Most of the young cast members make their stage debuts in this docudrama, which fluctuates drastically between life and death melodrama and romantic high-jinks that would be more at home on the Telumundo network. Working example: a scene in which the group leader (played with zeal by Maxy Jiménez) threatens to leave behind a snake-bitten youth packs a riveting punch, but the final segment where two newly dating immigrants discover that they are – sorpresa! – long-lost siblings feels like the wrong note to end on.

Overall, Tales offers a mixed bag of dignified intentions and hasty execution. But there is a unique energy and undeniable immediacy in the production’s rough style, bolstered by the fact that these young men and women are telling their own all-too-true stories. As such, the actors all display a touching, if untrained, commitment to the material. While the lighting design and staging lack any coherent style, the jumpy narrative chronology nicely affords a larger perspective, one which highlights the character goals that are achieved or, in the case of the young girl who’d like to go to school after arriving in America, not achieved.

Learning Curve

Forget Juilliard and the Pasadena Playhouse. Why waste your money on an expensive acting program, when you can have the brainwashed members of Theater Mitu guide you through the eight canonical acting philosophies in their inventive, but ultimately off-putting multi-media project Dr. C (Or How I Learned to Act in Eight Steps), now playing at the 3LD Technology Center? Based equally on the written treatises of theater luminaries as disparate as Aristotle, Stanislavski, and Anne Bogart, and the jerky, overexcited gesture acting of the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Theater Mitu presents an Orwellian machine dance of incredible deft and magnitude. Eight company members (designated to play theater abstractions like “acting,” “audience,” or “critic”) are prodded around by a robotic voice as though they were mere algorithms in a grand computer program, commanded to compute “acting.” Projections of text, lights, music, and movement are used to calculate each theatrical philosopher in his or her own aesthetic idiom, and along the way the troupe of singing actors lament their fate as cogs in a robotic system.

If conceivers Ruben Polendo and Jocelyn Clarke set out to achieve a stimulating new type of sensory experience, they’ve done a laudable job. But if they also hoped to offer some larger comment on the theater, or even “convert” anyone to the joyous practice of theater, they have fallen quite short. This notion of conversion is inescapable – most of piece exudes a perplexing religious air, as though one has stumbled into some strange cult of theater clerics mid-ritual. True, there is some spirituality inherent in the art form, and the question of how artists interact with these “holy” texts is broached well here, as the performers literally commingle with projections of that text. But frankly, this text was never intended to be sung, chanted or shouted. For Peter Brook to suggest “theater is life” in the book The Empty Space is one thing, but to have it intoned repeatedly by eight wildly gesticulating, sweat-drenched actors in close proximity will likely scare off even the most devout theater apostle – case in point, me.

I have been a theater artist and critic for about five years now and I love the theater intensely, but once Eight Steps passed the succinct Aristotle introduction and moved into the more elegiac Adolphe Appia step–singing phrases like “Music is the direct expression of our inner being,” my initial response was one of embarrassment. This is what the normal people think of us, I said to myself: a bunch of self-aggrandizing hippies that roll around on the ground together, orate about how great they are, and then charge admission. Admittedly, this first response is too harsh and probably an unfair reply to what Polendo, Clarke and Theater Mitu aim to accomplish, but nevertheless, I couldn’t shake my feelings of discomfiture until the rousing Bertolt Brecht segment.

Along with the all-too-brief transitory scenes, the explosive, self-aware Brecht cabaret entertains enough to make up for the other flowery mumbo jumbo. Adam Cochran gives an exhilarating performance, swinging from a tangled knob of microphone cords, as hilarious texts such as “be alienated” or “one of the cast members is secretly gay” or “Matt Carlson voted for Bush” are projected around the stage. Here the pretentious mood is shattered, affording, in my opinion, a more honest expression of the theatrical experience.

Polendo, also the director, certainly stages the piece impeccably. The convention of the computer program is expressed clearly and we quickly learn the rules of the operation – an introduction to the philosopher, a frenetic reading/representation of their text, and finally an analysis of video footage. Throughout, Kate Ashton, Alex Hawthorn, and Jake Wilten deliver the mechanized environment faultlessly as respective designers of lights, sound, and projections. Candida K. Nichols' unique costume designs also deserve special notice. The company members are all intrinsically committed to the piece's demands, with Justin Nestor and Cochran leaving particularly lasting impressions of zeal.

In a lot of ways, Dr. C (Or How I Learned to Act in Eight Steps) presents a complete picture of the theatrical world. When I say that I’m embarrassed by the more egotistical “method-y” aspects of this production, it’s certainly not Theater Mitu’s fault – I’m really embarrassed that artists in our medium are sometimes encouraged to take themselves so seriously. It’s hard to blame a brave company for having the ingenuity and courage to dust off our more self-important old texts and have some fun with them. Especially Brecht – that was IMMENSELY FUN.

Fly Me to the Moon

Has the state of the world ever seemed so dismal that leaving planet Earth looked like the only practical answer? In Mare Cognitum, a pleasant, but sometimes too gloomy entry in Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear’s Get S.O.M. repertory merger, three fed-up roommates decide to boldly go where no twenty-somethings have gone before. Faced with the ever-widening precipice of war and full-fledged adulthood, Lena, Jeff and Thomas are immobilized like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, unable to muster up the will to join the protest just outside their window or even to go on a job interview. Jeff has made himself a protest sign that reads “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” even though the rally is protesting the US government’s imminent bombing of another country, but he has yet to get out of his pajamas. College student Lena distances herself by critiquing the protest, although an unnamed, hipster classmate’s shrewder assessment makes her feel even more academically and politically ineffectual. Thomas the atheist comes to terms with the fact that he has actually been going to confession all these weeks and not to job interviews. Imaginative denial obviously runs high in this apartment, but it takes the depressing news that the bombing has commenced to launch our protagonists into a Quixotic extra-planetary adventure.

Jeff and Lena in particular (played by Kyle Walters and Devon Caraway) show a refined skill in make-believe, staging a “practice” protest in the apartment before unsuccessfully attempting to join the actual one downstairs. In general, playwright David McGee does well to let his characters play with each other and the audience like this; indeed, they seem quite aware when they are reenacting each other’s flashbacks and happily pretend to be secondary characters with enthusiasm. If the tone weren’t perfect, this sort of high style narrative device wouldn’t work, but McGee’s ebullient attitude and lively characters work hard to persuade you that there is nothing weird about it. More importantly, when these three make like Apollo-era astronauts and fly their apartment to the moon, you don’t question it. McGee and director Jesse Edward Rosbrow draw a line between fantasy and reality that is sharp, believable and entertaining.

What does feel out of place, though, are the intensely devastated reactions the characters experience when they return to the same-old, disheartening Earth at the end. McGee obviously intends some reference to the spiritual disillusionment astronauts are said to suffer upon coming back to Terra Firma, but when his high-spirited characters experience heartbreak so totally – like Jeff, who crumples against a wall sobbing – it feels like too much, too quickly. The notion that Lena, Jeff and Thomas are detached enough to pretend to fly to the moon is one thing, but to see them reduced to husks of people when their knowingly make-believe adventure ends is near laughable. In short, things are pretty bad on Earth these days, but they can’t suddenly feel that much worse than before.

Director Rosbrow stages the action convincingly within the confines of a living room, and the world he creates for the characters is particularly accented by a thorough sound design from Jared M. Silver. There is almost always specific environmental noise coming from outside the apartment – the protest, a garbage truck, and later, otherworldly moon noises. Elisha Schaefer’s set design and Wilburn Bonnell’s lighting design satisfy until an underwhelming “Earthrise” on the Moon spoils an otherwise nice moment – though given the level of production and likely budgetary limitations, it almost feels unfair to mention it.

The cast leaps to task as necessary, with Walters giving the most endearing performance as Cowardly Lion-ish Jeff. Caraway’s bossy, inconstant Lena is convincingly vigilant to the point of nuisance, though she softens in some very affecting moments with Jeff. Justin Howard as Thomas is, by design, left out of a lot of the fun, but one of the play’s funniest moments comes when he reluctantly agrees to join the imaginary journey.

Back in the real real world, Mare Cognitum represents another kind of unique escape – the escape from expense. Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear is actually an amalgamation of Theatre of the Expendable, Small Pond Entertainment, and Cross-Eyed Bear Productions, three theater companies that have banded together to save on theater rental and production costs. A fitting set-up – three companies coming together to play – for McGee’s playful lunar romp.

The History of Stuff

Recent interest in the environmental crisis has spawned a new sort of genre in speculative fiction – the exploration of mankind’s long-term impact on the planet; most notably the tendency to leave our junk all over the place. Thanks to Pixar’s hypnotic masterpiece Wall-E, it is trendy to sift through future fossil records of refuse in search of meaning and, perhaps, a precise flash point where our wasteful race went wrong. In Wall-E, landfills of useless items choked out humanity's progress, but in Ashlin Halfnight’s contemplative new play, Artifacts of Consequence, our leftover stuff takes on a deeper meaning after civilization has fallen. At some unspecified point in the future, contemporary society has collapsed; leaving Ari, Minna and Dallas in an underwater repopulation facility, where they catalogue found items and tend to the other sedated citizens. We are never told exactly what ended the world in Artifacts – Cholera? Flooding? – but soon enough we become aware that food replacement pills from “The Department” are running short and internal tensions are running high. The arrival of a wanderer named Theo seems to brighten up sprightly Ari’s mood, but before long the pressure of maintaining the facility becomes too great for Minna.

Halfnight and the immensely capable director Kristjan Thor’s great conceit here is the strict ritual of archiving things like sneakers, literature, and Twizzlers. An invisible garage door opens along the apron of the stage and the characters present the audience with each knick-knack for evaluation. In cases of literature and plays, a troupe of groggy-eyed actors is awakened from sedation to read the words aloud. You see, Dallas (Jayd McCarty) was once a curator at the Smithsonian and he has trouble admitting that the food needed to save the human race is more important than the great literary achievements of history.

Halfnight and Thor present the small human moments just right – while singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from Oklahoma, a usually sedated actor (Tobias Burns) suddenly swaggers charismatically, caught up in the music; or allowing each character to savor a stick of chewing gum for the first time in years; or Theo’s (Marty Keiser) nostalgic smile as he cradles a Chewbacca action figure and delivers the line, “Laugh it up fuzz ball.” Yes, Halfnight and Thor often remind us, these are just things, but they are also adept signposts for our memories and, in dire straights, able surrogates for happier days.

The mood is almost spoiled towards the end, as the circumstances become more dismal and the “garage door” is left open. From there on, the characters frequently address the audience about their mental states or predicaments, which feels overly meta at best and like a cheat at worst. Eventually, Ari even remarks that she expected a better ending. Breaking the fourth wall is a proud theatrical tradition and, to be sure, an example of the practice is all but cited here in the evaluation of a passage from Our Town. But this sort of on-the-nose commentary seems tonally at odds with the subtle and specific world that Halfnight and Thor – not to mention the exemplary design team of Jennifer de Fouchier, Kathleen Dobbins, and Mark Valadez – worked so hard to craft.

Beyond that, there are some superbly honest flashes towards the end of Artifacts, such as an-all-too-truthful decision from Theo and a uniquely stunning ending beat. Overall, Thor’s comprehensive staging reinforces Halfnight’s wistful anthology of brick-a-brack and sentiment with unparalleled style. Sara Buffamanti imparts much heart to the piece in her role of Ari, the 80’s movie obsessed innocent coming of age in world much darker than Dirty Dancing suggested. Her romance with Keiser’s genial Theo lends the piece relief it would sorely miss otherwise.

McCarty and Rebecca Lingafelter (as Minna) are interesting parental figures for the other characters, and their bracing chemistry suggests that each possesses a rich past. While Lingafelter is at her neurotic best in Minna’s more obsessive-compulsive moments, she tackles her character’s eventual breakdown very respectably. And again, Tobias Burns, Hanna Cheek and Amy Newhall make great numb actors in their short scenes.

Through anthropology and atmosphere, Artifacts of Consequence searches for significance in the scraps of society and, more often than not, this formidable work finds it.

High Fidelity

So, not only are you a young African American woman searching for identity in Berkeley, California, with a granola chewing, enlightened mom, while all your friends live in the-significantly-less-enlightened Oakland; your aunt is also the legendary Civil Rights activist Angela Davis. Oh, and you’re named after her too. Good luck. No wonder Eisa Davis spends so much of her dynamic, exuberantly autobiographical play, Angela’s Mixtape, listening to the radio.

Presented by New Georges and the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Angela’s Mixtape tracks Eisa’s journey into womanhood through a rich tapestry of music – sometimes sung, sometimes recorded. This is her “mixtape” of human experience, a sort-of thesis proposal for her collegiate aunt to see if Eisa measures up to the strong Davis women who reared her. As in the best hip-hop, Ms. Davis samples influences as varied as Marx, Debussy, and Back to the Future in her pursuit of self.

And does Davis’s “tape” make the cut? Absolutely. A sharp, unifying staging from director Liesl Tommy imbues Davis’s bouncy narrative with the perfect rhythm. Eisa’s questions about fitting in, classifying her race to friends, and later, wrestling with her family legacy, mature naturally in the story and are often punctuated with harmonic bits of a capella singing. Music, Davis proves, keeps time superbly.

Davis, who was recently on Broadway in Passing Strange, might have trouble surmounting that intertext, since Mixtape covers a lot of the same ground. Race, family, and music figure heavily into both pieces, but Davis’s script carries a potent political charge and draws an interesting conclusion about art as activism. Where Passing Strange was content to be a fun ride from adolescence to adulthood, Mixtape’s protagonist emerges from her larval stage actualized and equipped to take on social injustice, like her aunt did in the seventies.

Only one aspect felt self-indulgent – a scene near the end when Eisa directly asks Aunt Angela if she has lived up to her name. Eisa’s struggle with this is discreetly transmitted quite well throughout the play, but something short circuits in the blunt stating of it. Suddenly we see Eisa, the playwright asking for approval, as opposed to Eisa the character, which puts audiences in an uncomfortable position.

But any minor discomfort will be worth it, because Ms. Davis is a joy to watch otherwise. Deftly communicating a wide range of ages and intents throughout, she truly feels at home amid Clint Ramos’s beautiful light-boxes, photographs and scenic design. Dancing or sulking, she attacks every action with copious amounts of energy. In a particularly affecting moment, Eisa decides to describe herself as mixed-race to schoolmates, and her immediate reaction of both relief and heartbreak is intensely honest.

Kim Brockington, Denise Burse, Ayesha Ngaujah, and Linda Powell provide fine support for Davis in a number of roles, usually distinguished by smart costume triggers from designer Jessica Jahn. Only Ngaujah occasionally eluded recognition, when swapping between Eisa’s stepsister and cousin. Powell, as Angela, has an unenviable task, as her legendary character is talked about for much of the play. But Powell plays it cool and subdued, allowing our knowledge of her activist days to fill in any blanks. Brockington and Burse as Mom and Grandma both give very genuine, fully rounded performances.

Angela’s Mixtape is an intricate compilation of influences, full of music and meaning, of heart and heritage. From collections like these, our lives gain perspective. Sometimes these tracks need to be lined up and properly ordered before you can make sense of them.

Of God's and Atoms

Uneasy nuclear paranoia radiates from Trinity 5:29, Axis Company’s brisk, deftly staged meditation on Robert Oppenheimer and the test of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Rather than a straight docudrama, director Randy Sharp has opted instead to focus on the historical weight of the test, often evoking religious allusions to good effect. Brought to Los Alamos by President Harry S. Truman, Oppenheimer and his possibly communist lover Jean Tatlock find themselves faced with a giant wooden crate, within which resides an unseen atomic conductor. Their every movement around the crate is watched closely by General Groves, who eventually brings Tatlock’s political leanings into question.

At Los Alamos, Truman is more God than President – making his lapdog Groves the over-achieving archangel, I suppose – and the piece frequently experiments with Biblical allegory. In one segment straight out of Genesis, Tatlock entices Oppenheimer to peer inside the giant crate, though Truman has expressly forbidden it. Later, Oppenheimer stands in for Jonah when he is trapped in the crate. Indeed, these religious citations provide a perfect context for the creation of the atomic bomb: what is the extent of mankind’s power? What is the extent of mankind’s right to dabble in such power?

Trinity’s script (no singular playwright is credited) is terse and cryptic, as though every line of dialogue shields a well-guarded secret of national interest. At one point, Tatlock tries to spoon-feed Oppenheimer radioactive condensation from the conductor under threat from Groves, a fascinating scene that clearly illustrates the desperate sense of life and death hanging over Los Alamos in July of 1945. While someone seeking an informative biography of Oppenheimer might be disappointed, the snappish, abstract text offers a worthy examination of his historical significance.

Director Sharp and his designers economically create a spooky, sanitized aesthetic using only tinny period music, hard lights and a few set pieces. The staging is meticulous and purposely rigid, probably to highlight the military aspects of the narrative. Brian Barnhart, Marc Palmieri and Britt Genelin turn in solid performances as Truman, Groves and Tatlock, respectively, but Edgar Oliver’s Oppenheimer is a bizarrely theatrical creature, nearing the realm of farce. Not an inappropriate choice considering Oppenheimer’s larger-than-life historical status, but next to the more grounded cast members, Oliver’s velvety line readings evoked old Hollywood more than nuclear physics.

And then after forty-five minutes, Trinity 5:29 ends abruptly in a flash of light. My audience was dumbstruck by the swift intensity of the piece, blinkingly wondering if the play was really over or if it was just intermission. Despite some unevenness in the cast, Axis Company’s rumination on man’s destructive atomic destiny closes aptly – a blast of radiance and then nothing.

Outlook Hazy

Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing ridiculous headgear? Probing and humorous philosophical questions like these are supposedly at the heart of Bob Jude Ferrante’s comedy A New Theory of Vision, but you might be hard pressed to find them under the crude technical effects and bizarre story swerves. As the late Douglas Adams – something of a comedic philosopher himself, paraphrased above – might say, laboring through A New Theory of Vision’s cross-eyed gook of ghosts and computer graphics is “unpleasantly like being drunk.” Doesn’t seem so bad? Just ask a glass of water.

Vision follows Berkeley philosophy chair Lee Krebs (a committed Eric Percival), as he wrestles with his department, who wants him to write another best-seller, and visions of his dead girlfriend. When an uneasy student with Aspergers Syndrome, Erich (Matt Steiner) proposes Lee use virtual reality to develop a fresh perspective on philosophy, Lee agrees. Despite concerns from the student’s counselor (Maeve Yore), Lee and Erich embark on a poetic and surreal journey of discovery.

Never mind that technical stuff feels ten years old – choppy virtual reality hardly seems relevant in an era of iPhones and World of Warcraft. Ferrante’s play (and this production in particular) has many faults, but it certainly doesn’t want for ambition. Hanging a whole narrative on the quest to write a philosophy book about cyberspace is a tall enough order; factoring in Lee’s dead girlfriend and a handicapped sidekick suggests that the playwright had a very, very big story to tell. Or rather, several stories to tell. Vision’s script suffers most from a case of mistaken identity – first it thinks it’s Good Will Hunting, where a downtrodden professor reaches out to troubled student; then it thinks it’s The Omen, about a conniving, but brilliant devil-child (Steiner comes off a little too robotic) who sabotages those closest to him; and finally the script settles on The Cell, in which the counselor, Cara, helps Lee confront his psychological problems through special effects. Did I mention this is a comedy?

Also strange – a lot of talk about Lee’s work “hurting” Erich dominates the earlier scenes of the play, and indeed Erich is eventually hospitalized… but from what? Long hours at the computer? Then, from his hospital bed, Erich deviously orchestrates the downfall of Cara’s husband and, to some extent, Lee by posing as other people online. Cara is devastated by this, but not so devastated that a suddenly repentant Erich can’t convince her to help “rescue” Lee from continually reliving the death of his former girlfriend. There are interesting characters (Yore works wonders as Cara) and interesting ideas (like online ethics or V.R. philosophy) in Vision, but Ferrante’s short attention span keeps them from fully developing.

Also troubling, the play takes its title from Lee’s first widely popular book, a book that Lee wrote years ago and is desperately trying to escape. The specter of the book and Lee’s inability to live up to its success seems like a metaphor for his need to emotionally get past the death of his girlfriend, Jane. In both cases, he refuses to deal with the past. By titling the play A New Theory of Vision, , Ferrante sends a subconscious message that it was ultimately the more important of Lee’s books and that, metaphorically, he will NEVER really outrun his past. This problem is unnecessary because we have NO IDEA what either of Lee’s books is really about, so there’s no reason the virtual reality book he writes over the course of the play with Erich couldn’t be called “A New Theory of Vision.” (Some quick research reveals an even deeper level to this frustration – “A New Theory of Vision” is actually the title of a REAL book by Lee’s philosopher idol, George Berkeley!)

But there are things to like too. Throughout the earlier parts of the show, various characters interacting with Ted “become” his dead girlfriend Jane, by suddenly adopting her British accent and mannerisms. Ferrante and Parker showed surprising restraint here and the buildup leads nicely to the later part of the play where Lee confronts his demons, even if he does so in a laughable V.R. helmet made from a pilot’s jiffy hood.

The biggest highlight of this clumsy staging by Cat Parker is George Allison’s inventive, but inconsistent production design. Using the entire set as a projection surface, Allison creates a wide range of environments with video: the Berkeley campus, the Bay Bridge, and an abstract swirl of colors to represent cyberspace. In one neat sequence, as Lee tries to translate a bit of Latin, the words scroll above him when he figures it out. Or when he remembers his dead girlfriend, Allison punctuates it nicely with flashes of her body and the newspaper headline about her death. Cool stuff, but very distracting if the video fails to sync with the action on stage or cuts out altogether, as it did many times during the performance I attended. Like Adams said, “Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”

Though buried under unsuccessful video effects, baffling plot turns and insubstantial philosophy, A New Theory of Vision brims with good ideas. Maybe after a tune-up, it can cure its astigmatism.

Resistance is Futile

In his book The Blind Watchmaker, evolutionary biologist (and outspoken atheist) Richard Dawkins describes a theoretical process through which our “primeval soup” of proteins and DNA originally thrived by growing on a scaffolding of inorganic crystals. This notion that the first beginnings of organic life on Earth were nurtured into being by synthetic elements seems fitting when one thinks of how humans have reintegrated the synthetic into their lives – glass eyes, fake limbs, implanted boobs. Is this recent compulsion to make ourselves perfect through plastic really just nostalgia for those good ole’ developmental days? Regardless of motivations, the inevitable consequences of this shotgun marriage between biology and technology are at the heart of Universal Robots, Mac Rogers’ adventurous new take on Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R.. The original play’s title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots and it is often footnoted in science fiction anthologies for introducing the concept of robots and, in fact, the word “robot” to the world. Rogers’ version is equal parts historical drama and parable, expertly presenting the moral and political gray areas a servant class of robots would necessitate.

Czech playwright Capek is actually the main character of Universal Robots and the narrative follows the activist author (rendered with adequate intensity by David Ian Lee) through the peaks and valleys of Rogers’ alternate 20th century. When a gender-confused scientist named Rossum (Nancy Sirianni) invents robots in the early twenties, President Masaryk (David Lamberton) appoints Capek, his sister Jo, and their circle of coffee shop bohemians as the Czech ethical committee on the treatment and usage of robots. At first these humanoid robots are given a strict set of parameters to differentiate themselves from humans, such as alienating speech patterns and a rule preventing use of the first person pronoun “I.” However, as technology improves and there are calls for weaponized robots to suppress Nazi Germany, Rossum’s Universal Robots find themselves on the brink of consciousness and revolution.

If Rogers’ script has any weakness, it is the conceit that the audience is watching a troupe of acting robots “tell the story” of how they came to rule the world. Occasionally the cast chants religiously or breaks character to offer a bit of commentary – sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. The compelling narrative about Capek could easily stand on its own, but the frequent breaks and asides of this “storytelling” framework tend to subvert it.

Yet the story told deserves much praise. Rogers’ script could have been the clunky old “robots are people too” tirade seen so often in films like A. I. Artificial Intelligence or I, Robot, but instead it greets audiences with genuine characters like Capek’s sorrowful sister Jo (played faultlessly by Jennifer Gordan Thomas) and complex philosophical quandaries about whether pedophiles should be given child-shaped robots. Sure, one could parse out allusions to contemporary debates about war and genetics, but the true beauty here is the authenticity of Rogers’ re-imagined twentieth century – where robot-producing Czechoslovakia emerges as a world power. Supported by Rosemary Andress’ sharp, but restrained staging, Rogers’ robots believably progress from faceless mannequins to PTSD afflicted soldiers.

Universal Robots’ cast features many highly competent actors, but two performances stood out as truly outstanding. Ridley Parson infuses much humanity into his fearless portrayal of Baruch, a Jewish American advisor to FDR, who offers U.S. support for Czech President Masaryk to send combat-programmed robots into Nazi Germany. Baruch’s mission is a murky business and Parson doesn’t shy away from the moral implications. After soldiers, women and children in Germany have been efficiently “contained” by the robot army, it is clear that Baruch and Masaryk have exchanged one genocide for another.

Likewise, Jason Howard displays incredible nuance in robot Radius’ evolution from a crude automaton to a self-actualized, but deranged individual. In a tender scene when Jo asks Radius if he is able to embrace her, he affirms and Howard’s deadpan response is hilarious: “Do you wish to enact this scenario?” Through Howard’s performance, these charming encounters make the traumatized android’s eventual descent into madness all the more tragic. The robots’ affecting journey into sentience (and the parallel journey of those who manufactured them) is at once funny, stirring and horrifying.

While Rogers’s sci-fi fable concludes that Dawkins’ ever-evolving romance between the organic and the inorganic might end in heartbreak, he also suggests that inhuman robots could eventually learn to be humane. This leaves us with a final allegory, I suppose, about how all the things we make – like art, war, and love – have our best traits programmed into them.

Or how when you come right down to it… sigh… robots are people too.

A Lonely Hearts Club Band of One

“There are seven levels.” So says Paul McCartney anyway, upon discovering the true nature of reality the first time he smoked pot, which was with Bob Dylan. This and other fascinating, impromptu anecdotes make up the majority of johnpaulgeorgeringo, Dave Jay’s live action wiki of all things Beatle. And Paul is right – there are probably seven unique levels of enjoyment awaiting audiences in Jay’s magical mystery tour.

Level one – history. No other rock band can quite summon up feelings of weight and importance like the Beatles. No doubt, the legend of four working class blokes from Liverpool who, through pop and psychedelia, rocketed to the top of music charts is already a familiar one. But in his analysis, Jay takes great pleasure in scraping stories out of often-unrecalled nooks and crannies. That drummer Ringo Starr lived on canned beans while in India, for instance, or that the boys all had stripper girlfriends in Hamburg, Germany. More impressively, Jay’s interactive opus takes the form of a lively examination rather than a pedantic thesis. Real questions from audience members are required to prod “the band” into talking, so every yarn emerges genuinely from Jay’s comprehensive knowledge of Beatle trivia. The relaxed atmosphere the show creates is quite amazing, with theatergoers likely falling into two camps: those who simply forget that they’re not actually talking to the Beatles and those determined to trip Jay up in obscure minutia. Either way, it’s a blast.

The second level of enjoyment is performance – the sheer skill with which Jay executes artful dodges and mellow recollection. His precise characterizations of all four Beatles spring forth quite organically, even if Mr. Jay trends towards caricature. After all, history remembers these musicians as larger than life, so Jay doesn’t tarnish that image. He does well to work in broad, recognizable strokes; his George is quiet with a capital “Q” and his Paul is a high-pitched fruit loop.

Unsurprisingly, music is another pleasure here. During Q&A dry spells, Jay frequently grabs a guitar and plays. Some of the compositions are his originals, styled after Lennon and McCartney to good effect. This is a slippery slope, because there are probably some who would balk at the suggestion that Jay’s songs are of “Beatle quality.” But Jay covers his tracks, occasionally belting out quirky, but entertaining versions of Beatle material (Shhhh!). Standouts at the performance I attended were a version of “Yesterday” with “scrambled eggs” replacing the chorus and Ringo’s laughable attempt at “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

Those interested in more current gossip, ranging from Heather Mills to Lennon: The Musical will also find something to like in johnpaulgeorgeringo. Jay offers some nice reflections on how the band members and their legacies have been tainted over the years. If asked, Lennon will honestly confront allegations that he had a homosexual relationship with manager Brian Epstein or address his failures as a father. Sometimes, Jay’s decisive admissions were so blunt that audience members skeptically asked, “Really? Is that really true?”

It is also important to consider marketing when seeing a piece like this and its success; originating in last year’s Fringe Festival, johnpaulgeorgeringo is now making the rounds at comedy clubs (like Ha!) and Off-Broadway theaters. Jay and his co-creator Brad Calcaterra have successfully fashioned a low-maintenance event that is accessible to a wide audience. Everyone has at least marginal interest in the Beatles and their story. Predictably, each audience member at the performance I attended had at least one question – myself included. Perhaps the only disappointment in this respect was that this big, accessible audience wasn’t there. For a Saturday night at a midtown comedy club, it was shockingly unpopulated. (It seems even the Beatles aren’t immune to economic instability.) One wonders what a larger, rowdier audience might have coaxed out of Jay.

But I didn’t mind the intimate gathering, as it increased the profundity of casually hanging out with these iconic day-trippers. This is the sixth level I found appealing: the spiritual aspect of the show. For all its humble trappings – there are no tech or sound cues – the johnpaulgeorgeringo experience manages a complex simulacrum of closure. Even though you know it isn’t real, it is as if you can finally close the book on all those idle musings or dorm room arguments. “Wait, they’re not saying ‘I get high’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand?’” Or, “see, I told you – Yoko did eat George’s cookies!” In this Dave Jay proves a high artist, because his glib portrayal of these all-too familiar stories feels definitive.

And there is the final layer to Jay’s performance – the recognizable, but unknowable allure we each found the first time we heard John Lennon’s voice treated with an echo effect or the crackle of guitar in “Revolution.” Jay has all but bottled “Beatle” in a digestible one-hour container. In the words of Sgt. Pepper, “sit back and let the evening go.”

Room on Fire

"Let me take a casual peep at those slanderous gabs," says Isabel Lewis, as a short burst of jazzy music erupts and she jazzily saunters across the PS 122 stage in Lewis Forever: Freak the Room. This moment encapsulates the whole experience of the earnest, but ultimately too unpolished Freak the Room – for the Lewis siblings, every mundane task (like crossing the stage to fetch a newspaper) becomes a lively, self-indulgent ritual. Not to say that Freak the Room is pompous in any way, just that the Lewis's project seems wrought from a distinctive "twinspeak" that the rest of us are not privy to. The few short snatches of dialogue are indecipherable dream language – something about a bad newspaper review, maybe? About being appreciated as artists? These usually lead into prolonged dance numbers or, in one case, a well-choreographed fight scene.

And to my thunderstruck surprise, there is actually a scene where the Lewis kids tie silver handkerchiefs over their faces and... ahem... "freak" the room. Well, the room's furniture, anyway.

The most compelling segment of this mad revel is a live video feed interview, where Eric, who is not actually a Lewis sibling, uses a video camera to aggressively prod the others along like hostages. Since the camera is plugged into a live monitor onstage, the audience is treated to very intimate images of the somewhat stunned performers. This sequence ends with the Lewis's pre-framed on the monitor, bawling their eyes out to "I Got Life" [cq] from the hippy musical Hair. The inclusion of the Hair track at once suggests the proper context for the Lewis's undertaking – Freak the Room is a modern take on the sixties-era "Be-In." After making this connection, it is easy to enjoy the rest of the whole, frantic endeavor.

Much of the high-energy dancing and sofa-humping showcased here is very engaging, but simply goes on too long without evidence of intended direction or target reaction. When able performers dance in unvaried movements long enough for it to get boring TWICE, one simply can't help wonder if there is a purpose beyond the performers having a good time. Though admittedly more of a happening than a play, Freak the Room feels a little light on substance. There is a tenuous thread of searching for the truth throughout: in the brusque video interviews, in the need to disprove the newspapers “gabs”, and even in the sudden, bursting honesty of the drum-heavy dance numbers. Perhaps the pounding, strangely timed dances are a celebration of this continued search for truth, or maybe just a sensory escape from the fact that we might never find it. Maybe the Lewis’s are suggesting that our identities are in flux between the lies we tell the camera and those that are printed in the paper? Maybe we’re all just silver faced hump-bots desperate for connection on any level?

Regardless of the Lewis’s intent, the result looks like a dozen theatrical conceits thrown at the wall, in hopes that what sticks somehow says something profound about our collective unconscious. For all the talk of “transnationalism” and cultural unity in the promotional materials, the piece’s slurred decadence might end up alienating some audiences. There are nothing but good ideas here, but the strange excesses and illogical pacing feel as though the Lewis siblings could use an objective guiding hand rather than following their inner muses with complete abandon. Towards the end, George Jr. suggests that the show is reinvented for every performance, but it wasn't clear if he was commenting on the fleeting nature of performance art in general or if the show is literally rewritten for each performance. If he meant the latter, the show's messiness is somewhat understandable.

But as I said, all four siblings – George Jr., Isabel, Sarah, and the imposter Eric – are vigorous in their commitment to the material. Each brings a unique timbre to the proceedings, whether it’s suave or poetic. Their dynamic came together agreeably during the final portion of the evening, when they held a kind of "funeral" for the evening's performance, complete with an Allen Ginsberg poem sung as dirge by the audience.

By that point, despite its pacing and directional issues, Freak the Room’s sincere performers rub off on the audience. To the Lewis’s credit, we all sang and, on some level, lamented the end of this truly inimitable, raucous performance.

Bright Lights, Dark Highway

Never mind the lush stagecraft and atmospheric bliss that make up most of The Debate Society’s production Cape Disappointment; you’ll probably be laughing long before the first lighting cue. As Hanna Bos and Paul Thureen gleefully rattle off cuckoo tourism slogans about Detroit (such as “When you’re here, you’re in Detroit!”), you’ll say a quiet thank you to yourself or whoever dragged you unwillingly to Performance Space 122. That’s because Cape Disappointment doesn’t actually disappoint – in fact, it’s the best play by The Debate Society yet. Like some inbred lovechild of Richard Foreman and Robert Altman (who is babysat on the weekends by David Lynch), Cape Disappointment employs imaginative theatrical effects to construct a scatological narrative about aberrant behavior in a bygone, supposedly squeaky-clean era. The action of three unrelated stories takes place on the dark roads surrounding a dilapidated drive-in theater (scrupulously designed by Karl Allen), where old timey glitz has crumbled into ageless junk. Hitchhiking with a stranger, rendezvousing with creepy locals, out of gas – at each turn, the characters find themselves thrust into horror movie scenarios that morph, like the ramshackle drive-in, into meditations on better days long gone.

While the script, by Bos and Thureen, utilizes tangential zigzags and sometimes elusive plot devices, the storyline is far more coherent than previous Debate Society ventures. Particularly effective is the use of sunny voice-over narration in the segment titled “The Pedophile and the Little Girl,” which skews the creepy scenario with a children’s book kind of sweetness that becomes endearing, even touching. In all three storylines, we live with these loopy, at times repulsive characters long enough to care about them and whatever it is they’ve lost. And they’ve all lost something – a home, a pet bird or just their way along the winding highway. For Aunt Gracie (Pamela Payton-Wright), who is being chauffeured by her niece and nephew, there is nostalgia for her hometown of Sisterville, which once looked forward to the economic boons of a man-made lake. But the lake never came to Sisterville and all of the marinas and scuba equipment stores banking on the future business dried out. You see, in Cape Disappointment characters can even be wistful for the good times that never happened.

Director Oliver Butler and show’s designers have outdone themselves with the show’s staging and ambient elements. Along with Allen’s thorough scenic design, lighting designer Mike Riggs’ piercing assortment of distant headlights and rotating lighthouse beacons deserves much esteem. Thanks to the innovative design, the show can peak furtively out of the shadows and through the floorboards or just bounce in the dark with a flickering flashlight – you only catch glimpses of action and are allowed to fill in the blanks yourself. In one compelling, but infuriating scene, two lost children crunch along through the dark woods, but then run screaming in terror when they see something looming large above them. We never see it. The buzz and pop of period radio stations designed by Nathan Leigh scores most of the obscure events, completing Butler’s moody jigsaw of sensory information.

Co-authors Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen where typically absorbing in their various roles. Bos’s wailing reaction to a dead turkey is hysterical, but the best scene for both her and Thureen is the final, unmoved moments of “The Pedophile and the Little Girl.” Michael Cyril Creighton and Pamela Payton-Wright both make worthy contributions as well, most notably Creighton’s wide-eyed movie buff salesman and Peyton-Wright’s softly reflective Aunt Gracie.

A singular experience of high style and excellent craftsmanship, there is really only one thing to say about the transcendent Cape Disappointment : “When you’re seeing it, you’re seeing Cape Disappointment!”

Last Inaction Heroes

Mostly thanks to Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan, cinemagoers of all demographics are currently obsessed with unlocking the mysteries of the man-child – a hard partying "frat packer" who fights the necessity to grow up even into his thirties. Binge drinking, gross-out high jinks and a sportsman-like attitude towards sex make up the typical character traits and humor of this brand, eventually revealing a disarming sentimental side. After what was surely only a matter of time, the bro-mantic movement puts the moves on the New York theater scene, with Danny O'Connor's strapping and surprising one-man show, Zero. O'Connor's multi-character, inebriated opus succeeds on a lot of levels, just maybe not the ones it intended. Zero examines the remnants of a Texas high school eight years after graduation, where nearly everyone, it seems, has failed to move on. Everyone is still in love with dream girl Mindy McFee, even though they constantly complain about the fight to escape their younger selves. As the characters Leonard and Sam frequently admit (with equal amounts of pride and disgust), they are the "kings" of their town; but in reality, their ambitions are paralyzed by the comfortable, unchanging surroundings. The return of old friend Alex – a soldier coming home from Iraq – shakes up to the status quo on the evening in question.

Zero's script, written by O'Connor and his late brother Robert, is a noteworthy character study, as well an able exercise in dialogue and structure – which is probably a nice way of saying nothing much happens in the story. But it doesn't need to, since lack of ambition and momentum are really the key antagonists here. Alex, Leonard and Sam talk around things in the same circles, they lie or they just goof each other; whatever it takes to keep everyone talking, but not talking about anything important. Otherwise they might actually consider the state of their lives and have to confront their demons. This here-and-back-again dialogue exudes an air of ambivalent disconnect nicely throughout most of the script, but becomes detrimental when the characters are hung up on something for too long. A scene where Alex and Leonard argue over what type of animal is on the Jagermeister bottle seems to last forever, without being funny.

There’s also a larger issue with the comedy, because there are plenty of funny lines and gags, but nothing really plays as "funny". It isn't O'Connor's performance or the characterizations, it isn't the many pop-culture references or the jokes themselves, but something short-circuits the transmission of the goofy stuff – perhaps it is the nature of the one-person-playing-many format, where the crackle of a group's chemistry must rely on one actor's timing and endurance. As a result Sam's over-the-top boisterousness and Leonard's quirky indecisiveness come off like Greek tragic flaws rather than “screwball antics.”

Which brings me to the main point about Zero: though the O’Connor brothers set out to write a comedy about over-aged frat guys partying, via Danny O’Connor’s performance it accidentally becomes a profound survey of the degenerate generation. The characters Alex, Leonard and Sam are so confidently defined through posture and voice that in hindsight they seem to have been played by three different actors entirely. The audience lives with these three characters on stage for most of the play, examining their motivations (or lack thereof) and detecting their every lackluster attempt to bring about that thing we keep hearing so much about these days – change. But the spiritual revolution never comes. It probably won’t ever for these guys. Watching O’Connor’s three main characters swallow that disagreeable tonic in their different ways is concurrently heartbreaking and enlightening.

(There is an entirely unnecessary sub-plot split up over five monologues involving James and Gabe, students from the same high school as the other guys, but from a separate group of friends. In the end, the newly metrosexual Gabe learns a lesson about honor and James gets trampled upon. But first they attend an overly-weird poetry performance by Malthazar that is constructed solely out of pop-culture references and song lyrics. There are funny parts in this, like when lonely James says lackadaisically says “Yay” after blowing out his pity-party birthday candles, but overall this segment failed because James, Gabe and even Malthazar felt like watered-done versions of the three central characters.)

In a monologue halfway through the play, Alex the soldier recounts the events of a raid in Iraq where he was forced to kill an Iraqi. The bar room lights shift to a somber crimson and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” warbles softly in the background. Alex takes shot after shot of Jagermeister, becoming increasingly more inebriated throughout the story, until he is squinty-eyed and speaking in heightened, almost poetic language. "No one day in Iraq is different from the next," he says "they pass like freight cars, the subtle distinguishments lost in the blur of their passing color." This puzzling ritual affects deeply on two levels; first that O’Connor’s late brother and co-writer was a soldier in Iraq, and second that Alex hopes to transform his harrowing experience into a familiar unreal haze with alcohol. His need for a comfortable routine has yielded a chillingly disconnected attitude towards Iraq; "it's easy there," he says. Now Alex, the only character to actually escape the repetitive hometown world of Zero, so desperately wants to return to a life without ambition, difficult decisions and regret that he can build one in the trenches of Iraq.

Where most potty mouthed man-child comedies thrive because of their sizeable hearts, O’Connor’s piece astonishingly blossoms in its heartbreak.

Return of the King (Oedipus: The Special Edition)

I was recently talking to a playwright who does a lot of work in regional theaters all around the country. He grumbled that he was having a hard time getting his work produced, joking that all of the big theaters are "only interested in plays about f**ked up families." Well, he shouldn't feel too bad; the Pearl Theater Company's sharp but ultimately academic production of The Oedipus Cycle has convinced me that all theater in the western world was founded on a proud heritage of f**ked up families. The name Oedipus, for those of you who have never read… well… anything or met a psychologist, refers to a mythic Greek king from Thebes who unwittingly murdered his father and bedded his own mother afterwards. This doesn't work out very well for him or his children. Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle consists of three smaller plays from three separate trilogies – Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone — and spans three generations, with each exploring the historic tragedy of the Oedipal family. The Pearl Theater's production marks the debut of a brisk new translation by Peter Constantine that condenses the whole cycle into three hours.

What most struck me about Constantine's translation was the seeming focus on Ancient Greek religion, which, according to some quick research online, isn't usually the hallmark of the Sophocles text. Here, nearly every big action is preceded or followed by a speech bemoaning that character's "fate" or "destiny" or "curse." This deterministic mindset is almost belabored in the script, but it certainly raises interesting questions about accountability. For instance, in Oedipus at Colonus the audience has probably forgiven old, self-blinded Oedipus – after all, he was destined to kill his father and have intercourse with his mother. If Apollo prophesied it, what could Oedipus do about it?

In terms of the modern significance of the Oedipus story, should blaming his unfortunate circumstances on the gods allow Oedipus to shrug off responsibility for his actions? Don't we tell these stories so we can learn how characters deal with the consequences of their mistakes? Or do we go to theater just to see a series of events unfold by divine intervention? In exploring these different interpretations, I'm not saying that Constantine's translation fails in any way. I only point them out because these questions seem to lead to a place of undeniable interest… directly into the heart of Western Theater. Constantine and director Shepard Sobel attack most of the material admirably, molding a taut infrastructure that emphasizes brevity, but is still loose enough to leave room for these big ideas of guilt and destiny.

Part one of the evening, Oedipus the King, succeeds nicely because Sobel and Constantine open with such an air of confidence and contentment in the character of Oedipus. Aided of course by Jay Stratton’s punchy performance as the Theban king, the character's initial happiness enhances his inevitable fall at the end of the narrative. After restoring peace to Thebes, Oedipus learns that bringing the former king's murderer to justice is the only cure for a sickness spreading through his kingdom. The murderer turns out to be Oedipus, of course, and the former king turns out to be his father, whose widow Oedipus married and sired children with. Any contemporary actor playing the title role has an unenviable task towards the end – the moaning devastation of Oedipus must be mythological in scale, Stratton succeeds admirably at this, along with the rest of the largely game cast. Dominic Cuskern and TJ Edwards, as Tiresias and a Shepard respectively, are particularly deft.

Probably the least produced of the cycle and also the last full play by Sophocles, Sobel and Constantine's Oedipus at Colonus presents an emotive portrayal of the last days of Oedipus. Exiled from Thebes by his own sons years after part one, the now blind Oedipus and his daughters wander into the sacred area called Colonus, just outside Athens. It seems Oedipus' two sons have gone to war over the throne of Thebes and the embittered old man wants nothing more than for his violent brood to destroy themselves. Mr. Edwards takes over the role of Oedipus, lending him much charm and pathos. In one very sympathetic moment he says of his past, “I suffered these deeds more than committed them.” Also, Jolly Abraham's performance as Antigone is superb. The only drawback in this terrific "second act" is the unfortunate double casting of Susan Heyward as Ismene and Polynices – though the concept of casting one performer as two of Oedipus' children is strong, Ms. Heyward's portrayal of Polynices the soldier reads as overly meek.

With Antigone, Constantine and Sobel’s production runs out of steam, despite an unswervingly strong performance from Ms. Abraham in the lead role. In the aftermath of the violent war between Oedipus’ sons – Polynices and Eteocles – his daughter Antigone faces death for defying King Creon and attempting to bury one of her dead and dishonored brothers. John Livingston Rolle gives a solid turn as Creon, as does Ms. Heyward in her reprisal of Ismene, but somewhere along the way the lack of urgency in Antigone’s predicament causes this Antigone peter out.

Throughout the evening Constantine and Sobel call on the magnetic Ms. Heyward to deliver all the “bad news speeches” or epilogues. In one such speech she says, “These things are now unalterable in their authority.” Though compellingly staged and faultlessly designed, The Pearl Theater’s Oedipus Cycle mostly feels like an interesting experiment in practicality and so never seeks to become the “unalterable authority” on the Oedipus mythos. That said: it is a perfectly viable, accessible means of experiencing Western Theater’s original f***ked up family.

In the Zone

With the economy in the throes of collapse and a historic election looming, I think everyone can agree that this is a unique period for the American experience. At the core of the TMZ-esque obsession with Sarah Palin and the good intentions leading to this fiscal perdition, the root problem seems clear – a fundamentally misunderestimated sense of priority. This predicament is expounded well in Spin, the stageFARM’s bite-sized treatise on lop-sided public opinion, currently playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Spin is comprised of five short plays, each slickly directed by either Alex Kilgore or Evan Cabnet, exploring the crossed-up ethics of the current American zeitgeist. Spin provides novel juxtapositions, such as those between prisoner torture in Guantanamo Bay and the world of Fetish Porn, and also the search for a line between reality television and infotainment. Though at times ridiculous, this dialogue merrily sums up the current landscape with equal parts honesty and satire.

The first entry, “America’s Got Tragedy” by Gina Gionfriddo, provides the most on-the-nose commentary of the evening, by staging a reality show where an Aristotle-quoting literature professor judge must decide whose life is more tragic according to the classical definition: Brittany Spears or a soldier recently killed in the Iraq war. While Gionfriddo’s piece is delicate in the right places, it sometimes errs too much on the side of preposterousness – for instance, Brittany and the dead soldier eventually hook up. All told, the piece fulfills its primary goal in exposing the scope of American concern very well, and Dreama Walker plays a very relatable, compelling Brittany.

“90 Days,” written by Elizabeth Meriwether, was my favorite of the five plays. On Elliot’s last day of rehab, he speaks to his wife-to-be Abby on speakerphone, and becomes painfully aware that his drug problem probably wasn’t the only thing wrong with their relationship. This play works well within Spin’s broader concept, when you consider celebrity rehabilitation centers like Promises and the current fad of checking in and out without really solving the problem. Here, the simplicity of having one character walking around, talking to another who can’t see what he’s doing is a brilliant conceit, making for much comedy and visual irony. Patch Darragh’s silent, secret reactions to a fiancée whom he is clearly very mixed on are hysterical. Rebecca Henderson also gives an amazingly clear and textured performance, considering she is only heard via speakerphone.

In Judith Thompson’s monologue “Nail Biter,” a Canadian CSIS agent, David, attempts to justify his torturing of a fifteen-year-old detainee in Guantanamo Bay. As the soberest piece of a predominantly comedic evening, one wonders if “Nail Biter’s” guilt-inducing testimony about human rights in the age of Youtube will land the way that Thompson hoped it would. The script’s downbeat tone notwithstanding, there is no denying either the power in examining a torturer who believes himself vindicated or Jesse Hooker’s honest, restrained performance.

“Fun,” by Mark Schultz, has much to say about trust, human connection and art through the lens of the fetish porn industry. Grady is a seasoned politico-porno actor, who often stars in X-Rated films with a social or political bent. (One vague description involved Nazi’s, but beyond that it’s up to our imagination.) He’s sharing a ratty waiting room couch with Jamie, whose unique ability – vomiting on people – the avant-garde producer wants to feature in his films. Where Schultz could have hung everything on the vibrant cat and mouse game between Patch Darragh and Dream Walker, he instead takes “Fun” into a surprising realm of significance, suggesting that living in the exciting now, which may or may not include bloody psycho-sexual fistfights, is a good way to blot out a much regretted past. Darragh and Walker are fantastic here: natural, funny and not afraid of the rawer material.

By the time “Tone Unknown,” the final piece by Adam Rapp, came around, Spin had already been through reality television, rehab, torture and fetish porn. Wondering what could possibly finish off an evening like this, I was not disappointed. The Rapture, of course! In this piece adventure journalist Victoria Houselight (who uses a fake British accent) has brought her cameraman on an expedition to find Cerval Hyler, a reclusive rock legend, said to be able to recreate the sounds of The Rapture on his electric guitar. And in a move that echos the opening ceremony of the Olympics in China, Houselight hired an actor with better abs to stand in for the shirtless, bag-headed musician on camera. Rebecca Henderson absolutely owns this piece as the haughty Houselight, and though there seems to be a lot that Rapp wants to say about fake news, theater school and repressed sexuality, the script swings into full-blown absurdity before it reaches any sort of profundity.

Spin largely succeeds in humorously contrasting the disparate elements of the early 21st Century climate and even more so in asking us to distinguish cultural importance from media nonsense.

All American

It’s an idea that could have gone either way – Voltaire’s eternal optimist desperately tries to apply his upbeat philosophy to the misfortunes of modern -day America. Thankfully, the expertly staged, solidly entertaining FringeNYC entry Candide Americana represents the best of all possible adaptations. Kind of. As presented by the Rabbit Hole Ensemble in their characteristic minimalist mode, Candide, his philosophy teacher Dr. Pangloss, and his lady love Miss Cinnbunsa ruminate on contemporary tragedies as they experience them firsthand – Bosnia, 9/11, Katrina, The Staten Island Ferry Crash – with each event slashing a new hole in Pangloss’s cheerful worldview. Voltaire’s original novel played the naïve Candide’s dreadful journey for laughs, and Stanton Wood’s modern version doesn’t stray from the satiric tone. Almost eight years later, it’s still a delicate thing to fool around with 9/11, especially in New York, but by including it Wood drives Voltaire’s point home in a relatable way – sometimes tragedy happens randomly and it is foolish to try to see a silver lining.

Edward Elefterion’s crafty staging utilizes the performers to the maximum extent possible by relying on them to communicate place through blocking and ambient sound. Josh Sauerman is vigilantly wide-eyed as Candide, and the other six performers tackle multiple roles with plenty of charm.

If there is any fault in this artfully composed retelling, it’s that the contemporary setting doesn’t necessarily add anything to Voltaire’s original. This is not to say that our modern tragedies are in any way similar to the travails of Enlightenment Europe – only that the journey from youthful optimism to adolescent cynicism to a refined sense of cautious pragmatism will always resonate, regardless of the time and place.

Lost in Time

Dark humor, detachment and fatalistic dialogue make for a trippy road trip to Pennsylvania in Matthew Freeman’s new play When is a Clock?, currently running at the Access Theater. Presented by Blue Coyote Theater Group, Freeman’s script renders played-out family dramas like divorce and adultery in a fresh, almost psychedelic form. After all-around wet noodle Gordon’s wife leaves him, his only clue to discern her whereabouts is a mysterious bookmark from Cornersville, PA. In fractured chronological order, we meet Gordon’s wife, son and co-workers, each of whom contributes to her leaving. When Gordon finally finds his wife and confronts the strange shaman she has shacked up with in Cornersville, he learns a baffling truth about the nature of their relationship.

Hardly a typical play, Freeman’s script is really a collection of monologues broken up by a few two-character scenes. What really works about the monologues is that most of them only make sense in hindsight, as we are often shown half of a conversation without knowing who is being addressed—only later are we shown the monologue in context. It is a simple trick, but an effective one that adds many layers to each performance of each repeated scene, especially when scenes we have watched a few times suddenly swerve or deviate. The language of the text balances poetic flourish with stark pragmatism very uniquely, and as a result the voice of When is a Clock? sounds like nothing else. That said, from the final confrontation on, the play’s cohesion gets a little unstuck, preventing audiences from clearly ascertaining exactly what has happened and, even more important, what it might mean.

Since Freeman’s talky prose vividly describes each environment, Director Kyle Ancowitz and the design team opts instead for high style, which clicks very well with the script. The projections of lonely small town roads, the upright bed that standing actors “lie” in, the overall rigid staging (and re-staging!) of the scenes — everything beefs up the atmosphere of disconnect. The characters move from one location to the next like chess pieces, moving according to some unknown set of rules, alternately addressing the audience or each other. At times they appear through illuminated fabric walls, adding a ghostly quality to their comings and goings.

It was easy to buy Gordon as a disillusioned husband, thanks to Tom Stagg's precise, subdued performance. His runaway wife Browyn, played by Tracey Gilbert, comes across as both sympathetic and irrational — roped into a strange belief system to fill the void left by her husband. The entire cast is pitch-perfect, with especially good performances from Matthey Trumbull as Gordon’s fish-hating boss and David Delgrosso as the overzealous, statistic-spouting cop investigating Browyn’s disappearance.

Despite a let-down ending, When is a Clock? skirts traditional structure and content aptly, leaving in its wake something wholly new. The tone lands somewhere between the films of Todd Solondz and the surreal paintings of Salvator Dali — a bizarre, but still mundane landscape of non-related non-entities, desperately seeking connection.

Rock the Cradle

In the “Special Thanks” section to Piper Mckenzie’s rich new production of Babylon, Babylon, writer/director Jeff Lewonczyk thanks (among others) Robert Altman, The Blue Man Group, Herodotus and the writers of the Old Testament. Never before has a piece of information in a playbill so succinctly summarized the content of the show on stage, because Lewonczyk’s opulent Mesopotamian happening, currently running at the Brick Theater, synthesizes the best aspects of those four influences with notable ease. The transformed Brick Theater simulates the ancient Temple of Ishtar in Babylon, where about a dozen devoted female worshippers have come to pay their respects to the goddess of fertility and war – hopefully before the invading Persian army breaches the city walls and makes slaves of all Babylonians. But Ishtar worship isn’t really like any other kind of worship. The ritual involves a female waiting for a male suitor to approach and offer a coin. Then the pair retreat to the “Holy Ground,” where they pay their respects to the fertility aspect of Ishtar’s personality in a quite appropriate manner. Never mind that many of these women make reference to being married; in these different times Ishtar worship seems to trump all other forms of romantic communion.

Lewonczyk’s play occurs all around the audience in real time. As Babylon, Babylon’s 33 cast members mill about, we shift focus between their various conversations. While unique personal reasons have brought these women and men to the Temple of Ishtar on this historic occasion, each story provides subtle distinctions on the themes of sexuality, death and destiny in the ancient world. The High Priestess of the Temple agrees to hide her disguised cousin, the fearful Prince of Babylon, in the Temple until the war is over. Another girl is desperate for her little sister to lose her virginity in the Temple, so it will not be taken by an invading Persian rapist. One female devotee of Ishtar comes back to “worship” several times during the play, very eager please either her goddess or herself. Midway through we meet Enheduana, a recently reincarnated “Seeker of Vengeance” with a grudge against Ishtar and her Temple. Her arrival and actions eventually resolve the play, dragging everything into complete, brutal entropy.

In writing, the piece sounds like very heavy material, but Lewonczyk and his team have created a sort of party atmosphere. For the most part the material plays with dark humor and humanity, tempered occasionally with ominous strains of ancient myths retold or hints of Babylon’s bloody prospects peaking through the Temple door. Often there is music, chanting and reserved dancing when the cast imparts one of the many ancient myths, like Ishtar’s descent into the underworld and my favorite, her battle with warrior-king Gilgamesh. While the lighting and scenic design were both a little sparse for my taste, Julianna Kroboth’s stunning costumes and the overall attitude of the piece created a persuasive atmosphere. Fight director Qui Nguyen’s brawl at the end deserves much respect, simply for the amount of bodies and moving parts involved.

No one in the massive cast stands out as distractingly hammy or bad. While I won’t run down the roll call, there was generally an impressive naturalism at work in the acting. These characters aren’t historical caricatures; they are simply people – desperate, devoted or just seeking distraction. As the High Priestess and circus ringleader, Hope Cartelli displays much aptness to both seduce and devastate. Fred Backus brings a particularly enjoyable jerkiness to Timgiratee, a jilting lover. Lewonczyk himself plays Logios the narrator with much charm. And as I said before, Adam Swiderski and Aaron Baker’s cheesy, super-heroic take on Gilgamesh and Enkidu is most entertaining.

Swiderski, in fact, plays an important triple role in the proceedings. As Gilgamesh, he represents the tragic mythological hero of the old style; as Zuuthusu the doomed old man, Swiderski represents the helplessness and weakness of the Babylonians' present predicament; and as Tom Kazanski, a modern day American soldier stationed in Iraq (just 50 kilometers from the ruins of Babylon), Lewonczyk uses Swiderski to make the final assessment of the region’s destiny. The inclusion of the time-lost (or hallucinating, whatever) soldier could have been an aggravating attempt to shoehorn modern politics into the piece. In Lewonczyk’s hands, though, it is merely a reserved observation: why has there always been war in “The Cradle of Civilization?”

The chatty, flashy, legendary, holy party that is Babylon, Babylon might not answer that question, but it sure has a lot of fun asking it.

Nothing Ever Happens on Mars

For years Sci-Fi writers like H. G. Wells and Kim Stanley Robinson have looked to the red planet and tried to dream what it holds in store for the human race. Will its tripod-like inhabitants destroy us? Or will we terraform the barren world to suit our needs and live there? MIT professor Jay Scheib, who conceived PS 122's stimulating, but sometimes incoherent new production Untitled Mars (this title may change), seems to think that folks on Mars will suffer from the same ambition, lust and madness that the rest of us do on Earth. With help from the Budapest theater company Pont Muhely, Scheib transports his chaotic vision of a not-too-distant Martian habitat to the stage. Or is it, as the dialogue sometimes suggests, merely a simulation of a Martian habitat in Utah? This experience, perhaps more akin to performance art than a typical play, is often very vague. There are usually two or three things going on at once and obviously we're not meant to lap up every detail. Regardless, Scheib's characters have obviously adapted negatively to their confined existence away from society. We are immersed in the station psychiatrist's fight to keep her clinic open, a go-getting plumber's real estate venture in the Olympis Mons region, and a repairwoman's struggle to keep hold of her sanity.

Scheib and his team of scenic, light, video and sound designers have woven a persuasive tapestry out of the show's technical elements, a superb effort that is more than worth the price of admission. Here is not a theatrical Mars, nor a minimal one. Scheib's portrait is one of efficiency, borrowing heavily from contemporary technology. At one end of the stage there is a white, cylindrical module that is maybe 15 feet in diameter. This functions as a sort of central command for everything and there is a long window all the way around, so that the audience can see the actors inside. On the other end of the stage is an all white, but otherwise typical conference room. Between the two structures there is a long table and a plethora of projection surfaces. There are video cameras positioned liberally about the stage and at any given moment, one or two of them are projecting onto one of the screens. Amid constant radio chatter and otherworldly sound effects, the cast – sometimes in full spacesuits – moves in and out of these two habitats. Often, the audience must rely on monitors to see what is going on or to try to make out garbled dialogue, which adds to the overall sense of absorption into the piece.

When this sensory cacophony quiets down and only a couple of characters are featured, audience members hungry for rich characterization might find that the human parts of Untitled Mars don't quite measure up to its stylistic sum. Despite a sincere effort from the cast, they are only ciphers carrying out rote motions. None of the characters, like the plumber or the repairwoman, are particularly empathetic; and indeed, this might be the point. The play is clearly about a big idea – the good and bad elements of human nature exported to a new world – but the mode of the piece doesn’t allow us to easily wrangle any cathartic resolution out of its complex texture. Like the members of this habitat’s crew, perhaps this is only an experiment and we aren’t supposed to be able to read any emotions through these pixilated video images. Maybe Scheib is channeling some bleak premonition of man’s future, where the devices around us have choked out our genuine emotions. Or am I giving him too much credit?

Either way, several plot points are lost in the play's detached opaqueness. One crew member transforms into a green Martian, complete with an alligator tail, but we don't know if he is actually transforming, if he is aping a Martian as part of the training simulation or if his transformation is just a metaphorical echo of an earlier remark that claims humans will actually have to, in a manner of speaking, "become" Martians to survive the planet's harsh terrain. Narrative elusiveness and aloofness can sometimes be valuable tools in theater, lending a piece great applicability – but in the case of Untitled Mars, I always felt like I was missing something. If the play had been overtly performance art, with no illusion of a narrative structure or characterization, the story incongruities and lack of character depth wouldn’t have mattered. But since there are characters and there is a definite story being told, the absence of these elements felt detrimental.

This cast is asked to do some pretty strange things — simulate sex both on stage and on camera, dress in space suits and, in some cases, just show up to pre-record a quick video snippet. No matter the nature of the role, every cast member handles the material with unimpeachable naturalism. Natalie Thomas' silent performance as the temporally-confused Mannie largely consists of dance, but she exudes an appropriate and endearing childlike quality. Helio the lower-class Martian is also quite funny in the hands of a deadpan Karl Allen.

Purposely or not, Untitled Mars lacks some heart, but more than makes up for it with its conceptual and technical surefootedness. As they say, sometimes the story being told is not as important as how it is told. In this case it is told with considerable elegance and ingenuity, creating a glum, if unfocused, facsimile of man's destiny on the red planet.