Avoiding Boredom

Richard Foreman says he is doing something new. Again. But despite his intention to create what he calls a "fascinating event that ... makes a new way of 'being,' " the resulting spectacle is a collection of images, sights, and sounds that manages to maintain, at best, mild interest. If this is the "new" Foreman, then it may be time to stage some of the classics instead. Foreman's latest performance piece, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, marks his second exploration into combining live action with video. The first, Zomboid, has many similarities with this piece. Both have the same kind of setup, which his company, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, bills as "a new kind of theater in which film and live action trace parallel contrapuntal dream narratives." What that means is a video plays in a room, and its narrative doesn't have much to do with what the characters are doing onstage. Both Zomboid and Sleepy feature a narrator whose utterances supposedly have some kind of deep, philosophical import. In both plays, this voice-over says, "Suppose I were to postulate …"

So, let's postulate. Is this really a new kind of theater? Foreman's career has spanned more than 40 years, since he founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the late 1960's. Since then, his plays have earned him nine Obie Awards and an honorary doctorate, as well as numerous books, lectures, and scholarly articles devoted to his work. Obviously, he has done something right. And more often than not, he has done something new.

But this piece doesn't seem new. It has a retro feel to it; the setting—baby dolls, a mannequin dressed in a veil, books open on the walls, and endless writing scrawled across every available surface—seems to represent a confused history of various artists and their movements, from Artaud to Dada to Brecht.

Sleepy also features four actors wearing slightly different military-style uniforms. They run around on the stage, blinding themselves with handkerchiefs, climbing up on walls, and pointing to an airplane attached to the ceiling that is driven by a gang of baby dolls. The actors have maybe five or six lines throughout the performance.

Most of the "dialogue" is given to the creepy-sounding narrator (Foreman himself), who slowly repeats koan-like mantras, such as "the invention of the airplane ... a mortal blow to the unconscious." While the actors cavort about, a video plays on two walls at the same time. It shows images of different characters covering their eyes with handkerchiefs, picking up and dropping books, or standing in front of the camera, staring at the audience.

The piece doesn't seem that different in its "counter-narrative" from plays that others have been doing for years, such as Jonathan Zalban's WTC or The Waltz of Elementary Particles by Theater Lila. Zomboid and Sleepy both have oversize props and a kitschy potpourri of mismatched, albeit visually stimulating, objects lying about the stage, just as earlier Foreman pieces do. But the video seems like one of those modern art videos at the Whitney Museum that is interesting for 10 or 15 minutes but not for over an hour, even with live action.

Was the old Foreman something that needed that much changing? With his "new" work, he hopes to "avoid boredom" (he mentions that "boredom will be avoided" more than once in his online blog about this production of Sleepy, so it was obviously a concern). And the audience has much to look at, between the actors and the video. Yet the focus on the video diminishes the value of the actors onstage.

In an older Foreman piece—say, Symphony of Rats—even if it left you scratching your head as you left, you were sure to see some creative and entertaining segments. These would be mini-narratives where different characters' seemingly random actions added up to a cumulative effect that made sense. There was a payoff. Not so here. With Sleepy, what we get are repetitive motifs. Yes, Foreman is trying to say something about the unconscious mind, even if it's not clear what it is he is trying to state. But what results is not even an intellectual exercise.

There are some bright spots in the performance, moments of synchronicity when the video and the live action come together and give some sort of aesthetic pleasure. The piece is, after all, by Richard Foreman, who has managed to make an impressive career writing and directing theater that has always been outside of the mainstream. But such moments are far too few.

Endless Ride

Cherry Lane Theater has taken a big chance with its new production of Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, but it's not the first time. And this time, like the last, the effort appears to have paid off. Baraka's play premiered at Cherry Lane in 1964. A short, contentious piece, it brought up controversial questions about race, ranging from such issues as interracial dating to the pressures many blacks feel from their communities and from a society that tells them they must "act white" in order to succeed.

Today the play still brings up many of the same questions, but the major controversy surrounding this new production may be not so much the story within the play as the one outside it. A few years ago, in his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) notoriously suggested that Israel had previous knowledge of the 9/11 bombings and had warned its citizens to stay away from work that day. And indeed, the fact that there are several references to Jews and Judaism in Dutchman complicates the work in light of Baraka's statements.

That said, the work is still important in how it focuses on matters of integration and assimilation. The play's main character, Clay (Dulé Hill), is a young black intellectual who, by all appearances, is happily acclimated to an integrated America. He is educated, well dressed, soft-spoken, and articulate. What people don't know, however, is the rage that boils underneath, which comes out only when provoked. Such provocation presents itself during a chance subway encounter with the seductive and unpredictable Lula (Jennifer Mudge), who challenges Clay to defend his bourgeois lifestyle.

In interviews about Dutchman, Baraka has suggested that the play is an allegory about race in this country, where Clay represents the aspirations of black Americans and Lula represents America, in all that this nation promises and can take away. In a talk-back session after a recent performance, Baraka told the audience that the play's title comes from the Flying Dutchman, a ship that must sail forever until its captain finds love, which is like the subway in this piece. Clay and Lula express many emotions toward each another: lust, hate, and fear, but love is not among them. Baraka suggests that the subway, like the Flying Dutchman, must be the setting for love in order to end a vicious cycle as it travels the rails endlessly.

Kudos to Troy Hourie, whose set is fantastic: theatergoers are greeted by a 1960's subway operator standing in front of a white-tiled wall inlaid with an emblematic tile "D," like the familiar station signs adorning the walls of many subway stops. One must pass through a period turnstile to enter the theater.

While waiting for the performance to start, videos of New York City subways arriving and leaving a station play on a loop along the walls. Occasionally, the lights flicker on and off, imitating a stopped subway car. When the performance begins, the conductor arrives and pulls down the flats in front of the stage, revealing a very lifelike replica of a 60's subway car. The cumulative effect is a kind of total environment, where the audience feels it is inside a subway car from that era.

Hill is formidable as Clay. He is always unassuming and seemingly innocent throughout the beginning of the play. But he can also be menacing and in charge, as the play's later part demands.

As Lula, Mudge is best when she is attempting to seduce Clay; she is not as convincing when analyzing him. Though wild, her character has an amazing perceptivity: She recognizes and sees significant things about Clay, even though she has never met him. Because of this, Lula should be savvy and sophisticated, but a bit off her rocker, like a J.D. Salinger character grown up. Yet too often Lula is depicted as a ditzy valley girl. In these moments she seems more of a lightweight figure than the formidable adversary she should be.

The conductor (Paul Benjamin) has a relatively small but important part. Twice during the production, this character, a black man, comes out and performs a minstrel routine. This performance connects Clay's individual struggle to the historic struggle of African-Americans to manage white society's expectations and stereotypes—which were performed through minstrelsy—and their own need for self-expression and cultural preservation.

Though for many what Baraka has accomplished in the play might be blemished by the incendiary remarks he has written since its premiere, this does not diminish the work's importance. Dutchman still proves its value in its ability to rouse discussion about race in America.

Different Slant

The Slant Theater Project, created in 2004 to produce challenging new work in site-specific venues, continues to test itself with The Obstruction Plays, six new works by some of New York's most exciting playwrights. Although the results are mixed, the experiment proves once again that interesting work is going on at the Slant. "Obstructions" are intended to force artists to come up with new and creative ways to solve problems. Well-known obstruction exercises include Lars Von Triers's film The Five Obstructions, in which he challenged director Jorgen Leth to remake parts of his film The Perfect Human in five different ways, each time adhering to a certain rule or limitation.

At the Slant, 30 obstructions (five for each of the six plays) were created—some might say sanctified—by playwrights Lee Blessing, Naomi Izuka, and Sarah Ruhl, and each play had to conform to the obstructions assigned to it. Obstructions range from the benign (the play must have a waffle iron) to the more challenging (there must be a character who speaks entirely in verse). The best obstructions are those that move beyond adding a character or a prop and get to structural problems. Such obstacles force the writers to come up with new and inventive ways of creating drama.

The Dinner Party, written by Dan O'Brien, is ostensibly about dinner with the playwright's family, but the overwrought narrator, who introduces himself as Dan O'Brien, continually interrupts, circumventing the drama and ultimately undermining the performance. Though the piece is funny at first, the trajectory is well established early on—the play must not go on—and by the end the performance has begun to seem stagnant.

Priest in a Pool, a short, abstruse piece by Michele Lowe, explores a moment of truth between a teenaged camper and a priest who attempts to convince the boy to jump into an empty pool, in what appears to be a variation on a trust fall. The premise here is strong, but the characters' motivations become confusing at the bewildering climax.

Caution: Parents May Be Less Insane Than They Appear, by Lisa Kron, satirizes an older couple's apprehensions about technology. When their children visit, they find all the furniture in the house has been moved for fear of upsetting an electronic vacuum. The siblings then discover that their glib disregard for their parents' concerns may not be justified. This funny piece turns dark quickly, but the ending lacks some of the terror it might have mustered.

I See London, I See France is a comic piece written and directed by Evan Cabnet. The premise here, which I won't give away, especially because of the play's brevity, is highly entertaining. The obstruction requires that part of the play must be about Donald Rumsfeld. The representation is, to say the least, unflattering.

Blossoming Andromache, written by Marcus Gardley, takes a sensitive look at an encounter between a young man named Spooky and a drunken derelict. The vagrant is bribed by Spooky's friends into pretending he is the boy's father after the real father fails to show up for a long-awaited reunion. The play starts off slowly and is overly poetic, but the characterizations are superb and the dialogue is highly unexpected.

Unlimited, by Mat Smart, incorporates a large cast of 15 actors. The play consists of very little narrative, especially at first, when it tends to drag. The ending, however, picks up considerably and includes a beautifully orchestrated moving sculpture created out of the actors' bodies.

The Obstruction Plays contains, in total, a cast of more than 20 actors, with standout performances by Robert Karma Robertson, David Carl, Arlando Smith, and Therese Barbato. The performance is a sort of ultimate drama-nerd event. Instead of going to see a "normal" show that's about looking for an answer to a dramatic question, we go to see the questions themselves, and the kinds of problems they raise when given time onstage.

It Can't Happen Here

For writers on the political left, the midterm elections have delivered a mixed blessing. The results may have signaled the waning days of the Bush administration, but they have also created a crisis in source material. Bush has provided an endless wealth of subject matter for works like David Hare's Stuff Happens and Saturday Night Live sketches. For those looking for one more nostalgic exercise in Bush bashing, A.R. Gurney's Post Mortem, a problematic but overall funny farce about the future of American politics, may fit the bill. Gurney's new play explores a Christian dystopia in the not too distant future. In this America, all citizens are required to carry a copy of the Bible, most offices are routinely bugged, and theater classes analyze evangelical comedy. In this political atmosphere, Alice (Tina Benko), a renegade lecturer in the theater department of a backwater Christian university, attempts to thwart the academic and sexual advances of one of her undergraduates, an industrious but not too bright English major named Dexter (Christopher Kromer).

Dexter has recently discovered the "lost" plays of one A.R. Gurney, a "minor dramatist" of the 20th century. He is particularly struck by one of Gurney's plays titled—you guessed it—Post Mortem, a work so profound it has the power to put an end to the theocratic dictatorship as well as solve longstanding social problems ranging from health care to public transportation. But first Dexter has to convince Alice to help him, and to love him.

Like Gurney's recent works O Jerusalem and Screen Play, Post Mortem is receiving its world premiere at the Flea Theater. All three plays are overtly leftist, and both Post Mortem and Screen Play look toward a future where Christian fascism has taken over America. The plays shy away from naturalism to display a sort of self-referential postmodernism where they contemplate their own theatricality.

At one point in Post Mortem, Dexter asks Alice (one may assume he is asking the audience as well), "Are you ready for a recognition scene, Alice? I recognize now I'm a loser." Most of the play's irony comes from its references to the "discovered" play of the same name and the "fate" of the author, A.R. Gurney, who may or may not have been killed by Dick Cheney. While this kind of wink-and-nod trickery is entertaining at first, it becomes overplayed, especially in the second act, where the explanation of a Kennedy-like assassination conspiracy and its subsequent cover-up is painstakingly detailed.

Though the farcical first act is engaging and humorous in its crowd-pleasing and liberal in-jokes and self-irony, the second act presents other major problems. It begins with a tedious lecture on the evils of cellphones (especially in the theater), which may allude to one of the playwright's personal bugbears, perhaps more than he intended.

The spiel is delivered by Betsy (Shannon Burkett), who serves as a kind of interlocutor/hostess for Dexter and Alice in the talk-show format that makes up the second act. This kind of sermonizing illustrates the act's flaws, as the satire on talk shows attempts to create a new dramatic arc. Instead, with the characters talking about what happened in the years between the first and second acts, any dramatic action is circumvented, and what results is characters talking about what they did, which is as unexciting as it sounds.

As Alice, Benko plays the farce at full tilt: she is an overwrought academic desperately looking for the tools to use against an oppressive society. At times, however, the seemingly English accent that she affects can be distracting. Burkett, as the annoying Betsy, is spunky and earnest. As Dexter, Kromer is the least farcical character, playing the eager newcomer somewhat too lightly in comparison with the other characters.

Though this production of Post Mortem is not perfect, credit must be given to Gurney and especially to the Flea. Beginning with Anne Nelson's The Guys (about firefighters lost on Sept. 11), it has demonstrated that it is one of the city's few theater companies to continually challenge and question the consequences of living in a post-9/11 America.

Shepard Revisited

The controversy over whether or not art should be politically engaged has long been divisive. Theodore Adorno, the New York-based critic of modernism and pre-eminent figure in the Frankfurt School, argued that one of the defining features of 20th-century art has been its resistance to confronting social causes. Since Adorno's time, however, much artistic work has taken on social issues. Take, for instance, the difference between when Sam Shepard wrote his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Buried Child and its most recent New York production, by Nicu's Spoon. Shepard's plays often look at such matters as the decline of the American dream in oblique ways that do not superficially engage social problems. In interviews, he has notoriously undercut notions of "themes" or "agendas" and focused much more on the stories themselves. Buried Child is far more attuned to the story of the grief-stricken patriarch Dodge (Jim Williams), his religiously zealous wife Halie (Wynne Anders), and their misbegotten progeny—all of whom are in various states of denial and self-loathing—than it is concerned with Midwestern poverty or the mythic, forgotten West.

Yet the social issues are there, and Nicu's Spoon, a downtown company committed to producing socially relevant theater, has actively searched Buried Child for new points of entry. This production features a talented deaf actor, Darren Fudenske, playing his first speaking role as the man-child Tilden, oldest son of Dodge and Halie.

Clearly, raising a social issue is what Nicu's Spoon has done, as reported in a recent New York Times article on the controversy surrounding the production. Some in the deaf community have protested Fudenske's performance, saying it contributes to the perpetuation of the idea that deaf people have to speak instead of using American Sign Language. Fudenske, who does sign and has performed in productions where signing was the predominant form of communication, has defended his choice to portray Tilden as a victim of parenting that did not allow the use of sign language.

Other aspects of the production also reflect Nicu's Spoon's desire to diversify the traditional character list of white Midwesterners. It has cast both Dodge and his grandson Vince (Erwin Falcon) as Asian-Americans. As for the story line, it remains the grim portrait of a declining farm family: after the questionable death of his fourth son, Dodge has long since given up farming to resign himself to alcoholism and endless TV watching, while Halie has sought relief in religion and the hypocritical Father Dewis (Alvaro Sena). Their sons, Tilden and Bradley (David Marantz), have squandered their years in the long shadow of the family's shame. But a visit from Vince, Tilden's long-lost son, and his girlfriend Shelly (Wendy Clifford) could potentially change the dynamics of this suffering family.

Standout performances alone by some of the actors make this performance worth seeing. They include Fudenske, whose raw characterization and coarse voice bring to the surface the long-buried pain of a man who has lost his grip on reality as a result of the choices he has made. With his gruff demeanor and sharp tongue, Williams's Dodge readily displays the resignation of a man deeply disappointed by life. In scenes where other actors are onstage, their characters become secondary to the Oedipal tragicomedy between Williams and Fudenske. Even when some of Fudenske's words are incoherent, enough tension is brought about by his presence to make the audience feel ill at ease.

As Halie, Anders delivers a subtle performance but sometimes seems to miss the comedy inherent in the script. Sena's Father Dewis at times falls into a similar trap. Falcon comes on too strong as Vince, running over many of his lines in his constantly angry diatribes. Marantz, as the debilitated Bradley, shows his character's frustration but sometimes seems to lack the feeble menace Bradley attempts to exhibit.

The production's main problem is that it is not terribly funny. Shepard's play should be both terrible and humorous, and it should become all the more devastating at the end because of the humor throughout. But in this rendition, there are too many times where the humor is missed, and whether that was deliberate or unintentional, it makes some of the scenes seem longer than they really are, as written.

While Shepard's plays may not be the best choice for those wishing to produce socially conscious theater, Nicu's Spoon has successfully attempted to bring his work into the activist sphere by crossing the divide between art for art's sake and art that is politically aware.

Mobster Rocker

In a 1971 interview, Sam Shepard famously remarked, "I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock 'n' roll star." Without a doubt, The Tooth of Crime is the play where he most actively pursues that goal. This "play with music in two acts" deliriously conflates and contorts two seemingly different career paths: that of rock 'n' roll musician and that of mobster. The story follows Hoss (Ray Wise), a mob boss and rock superstar whose career has reached its pinnacle. Bored by his success and worried about the small-time competition nipping at his heels, he wants to go on a "kill" (we later learn that this means to musically one-up someone) and seeks the advice of a seer named Starman (John-Andrew Morrison), who, along with his manager/lover/confidant Becky Lou (Jenna Vath), convinces Hoss to wait in his austere mansion to avoid making a mistake.

Unsatisfied, Hoss seeks the help of Galactic Jack (Charles Gideon Davis), a fast-talking D.J. who scientifically keeps track of who is on top of "the game" for mobster/musicians. Jack informs Hoss that he is the top rocker/killer around, but that there is a minor threat to his reign. Hoss jumps on the assertion that anyone could challenge him and begins to worry about the so-called "Gypsy killer." Finally, Hoss calls in his old partner in crime, Cheyenne (Cary Gant), to convince him to take their show back on the road after many years. After a tranquilizer from Doc (Raul Aranas) calms him, Cheyenne informs Hoss that a Gypsy killer by the name of Crow (Nick Denning) is gunning for his place.

The Tooth of Crime is not one of Shepard's best works. It spends far too long demonstrating Hoss's incapacity for action, and the entire first act consists of his repeatedly saying the same thing (I'm old, and my time at the top is nearly over) to an ever-revolving cast of characters who all try to quiet his fears, one after the other.

That said, La MaMa's revival does a wonderful job adding as much as possible to the starkly Greek-like text through excellent acting. Its efforts pay off, especially in the much more exciting second act, where Hoss battles Crow for control of his empire. The best part of the play comes halfway through the second act, where Hoss and Crow have a musical sound-off, much in the style of hip-hop competitions where each competitor takes turns verbally flaying his opponent.

Ray Wise adeptly plays the elder statesman whose time has come. In his ranting is the quiet resignation of someone who has been defeated by his own weariness. Jenne Vath is stellar as Becky Lou, especially late in the second act, where she performs a kind of theatrical exorcism of past demons. Nick Denning, as Crow, looks the part but seems a bit too geeky for an up-and-coming rock star.

The exceptional stage design by Bill Stabile features a large and slanting glass enclosure in which the band sits. The play itself is performed on top of the structure. The musicians are barely visible through tinted glass but can be fully heard as they play the original score written by Shepard himself, instead of the subsequent score written by T Bone Burnett, which Shepard generally prefers.

Despite a slow start, The Tooth of Crime rocks out, especially in the second act when the pace picks up considerably. For anyone who wants to be a rock 'n' roll star, it's a good place to pick up a few pointers.

Onstage, For the Very First Time

Samuel Beckett, the existentialist playwright whose plays like Endgame and Waiting for Godot virtually defined serious high-modernist drama, is not usually discussed in the context of Bread's schlocky 1970's pop ballad "If." One could even caution the excellent Neo-Futurists, in their desire to draw a connection between the two, not to go there. But go there, with glee, they do. Multiple times. While alluding to Beckett's eight-minute play Rockaby in their new comedic work, The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled: "Never to Be Performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!, the Neo-Futurists play that cheesy love song repeatedly. And after each time, the old woman from Rockaby (actually one of the Neo-Futurists in drag) pleads for more. The gag is funny even if you haven't read Beckett. And if you have, it gives a new twist to an old classic. It's not that the old woman is sad about the wasted years she wants back, and howls about her deep need for more life. It's that she needs to continually hear the sappy song just one more time.

The premise of the piece, if you haven't guessed already, is that Beckett has written other works that have never been seen onstage before. These include works that cagily and hilariously engage in questions about existence (such as what happens when your life's work—in this case, keeping a table from falling over—turns out to be worthless).

Other pieces parody Beckett's plays, and still others end up lost again before production. Throughout this series of short works, the Neo-Futurists work in a subplot where a presence, strikingly similar to Beckett himself, makes himself known through increasingly threatening letters stating that he does not want the works presented.

As usual, this group of off-kilter grad school rejects delight in their sometimes obscure but always gratifying antics.

All in the Genes

Perfect, a new play written and directed by Tanya Klein, is billed as "a 21st-century farce," but it is largely missing the humor and fast-paced plot normally associated with farce. The play presents a dystopian future where genetically modified humans have an upper hand over the so-called "normals": they attend elite institutions, win grants and awards, and earn higher incomes. In short, they are "perfect." But in the case of Sarah (Laurie Ann Orr), there appears to be a glitch in the genetic coding. Her mother, Mary (Ali Baynes), has noticed that she has received her first two B's on assignments, even though she's been accepted at Harvard. Sarah's interest in tutoring a "normal" named Jack (Karen Green) deeply troubles Mary as well. On top of that, Mary's niece, Jean (Natasha Graf), another genetically engineered whiz kid, is visiting and might notice the change in Sarah.

Little does Mary know that Jean is having her own problems with a new gene therapy that supposedly re-establishes the drive to succeed. And Sarah's secret lover, a "normal" named Charlie (Mateo Moreno), wants to free her from the endless task of being the best. Meanwhile, Mary attempts to lure a gene therapy doctor (Michael Jalbert) into giving Sarah a potentially dangerous treatment to make her strive even harder.

Normally in a farce, an unlikely situation changes quickly and often, becoming ever more wacky and unpredictable. The problem with Perfect is that very little happens. The "obstacle" facing Sarah is continually the same one: her gene therapy prevents her from doing what she really wants, which is to become a rock 'n' roll star. The stasis that this creates makes the production flaccid and slow instead of fast-moving and unexpected, as a farce should be.

There are a few good moments. As Mary tries to convince the doctor to give Sarah the gene therapy, the increasingly depraved sexual antics she resorts to are funny. Baynes's performance as Mary points toward an overtly ridiculous direction that the production should have engaged in more.

Predictably, the play ends with a kind of didactic moral, a lesson Sarah gives her mother about how we are all "really human"—"normals" and genetically altered alike. It seems safe to say that what this production needs is another set of eyes.

¿Te Gusta Gefilte Fish?

How many stereotypes can you fit into an hour and a half? Hermanas, a new comedy by Monica Yudovich, readily answers that question by methodically playing out every possible association with Jewish mothers and Latin men, though it is clearly done out of love. The play centers around two sisters, Lisette and Angie, who share everything, from an apartment, to avoidance of their mother, to boyfriends. Unfortunately, Hermanas comes across more as a loosely written pilot for an ethnic sitcom than a stage play. Much of the humor is predicated on the seemingly unlikely juxtaposition of Hispanic and Jewish cultures, presenting, for example, a doting mother just as likely to mash a tamale as a matzo ball. This is funny to a point, but it becomes redundant.

Still, there are some superbly funny moments where the shtick Latino works as a cross-cultural wonder. The mother, Telma (Kathryn Kates), adeptly plays the zealous busybody: reminding her children to share, she explains that when she was a younger sister, "everything was passed down to me…toys, clothes, toothbrushes." Her monologues on the phone to her daughter, unhinged from the encumbrance of plot progression, are the show's best moments. Also a standout is Paulo Andino as Eduardo, who plays up Lisette's hilariously vain former boyfriend with gusto, flexing his muscles in leopard-skin boxers while belting out "Besame Mucho."

As Lisette, Yudovich is overall a bit too uptight to be convincing, while Bridget Moloney's Angie is sweet if lacking in the sluttiness her character would seemingly require. A major problem is how facile the narrative is: a new, potential suitor for Lisette is introduced when he simply knocks on the family's door and announces that he is a new neighbor. Don't look here for plot innovation. But if you want a show that searches out the permutations of humor at the limited nexus of Jewish and Latin stereotypes, you are in luck.

Stage Magic

The Father in Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author innocently asks a theater director, "Isn't it your job to give life onstage to creatures of fantasy?" This question gets at the central theme of Rinne Groff's dramatic comedy Orange Lemon Egg Canary, an entertaining new play about theatrical illusion. Canary is about a small-time magician named Great (Steve Cuiffo) whose illusions mystify audiences and seduce women. The story begins with Great waxing philosophical about the nature of illusion. He suggests that the creation of illusions is merely the fulfillment of the audience's desires. Since he is more of a philanderer than a philosopher, this maxim quickly becomes apparent in the next scene. Here, Great attempts to get rid of his most recent conquest, the attractive young Trilby (Aubrey Dollar), for whom the staged illusion of Great's greatness as a magician is presumably far more than Great, the man, can offer.

Trilby quickly becomes interested in Great's profession. And though Great is interested in her, like any great magician, he never gives away his tricks. Unless the trick he is turning happens to be on his ex-assistant and former lover, Egypt (Laura Kai Chen). The lovely former aide is angry at Great over a fizzled affair and is scarred, both physically and psychologically, from a trick gone awry called the "Hypnotic Balance," which involves balancing the hypnotized assistant on the end of a sword.

Simultaneously, another story develops through separate scenes as another magician's assistant, Henrietta (Emily Swallow), describes the seduction and allure of magic and life on the stage. Slowly, Henrietta reveals that she is more than just any assistant, and her story speaks directly to Trilby and Great.

The narrative has many twists and turns. Some are surprising, others not as much. The best bits come when Great reflects on what makes an illusion. Michael Sexton's direction is at its strongest in a flashback where Great and Egypt hilariously demonstrate how "magic" is made of this illusion—and how illusion is truly in the eyes of the beholder. They do this by tricking a volunteer from the audience, but let the audience in on the trick. The volunteer's expression during this stunt is priceless: she is amazed at what the audience sees as a simple trick, a flick of the wrist.

A major problem, however, comes at the end. Multiple plot lines are presented but are brought together too quickly at the conclusion, when everything is neatly tied up too fast. And, though I don't want to give away too much, the ending depends on a certain degree of serious drama (even after all the comedy) that is undercut by the absurdity and awkward humor of the situation.

Cuiffo as Great is, well, great, at once endearing and slimy. A huckster with a tender spot, he draws the audience into his snares as he does with the women in the play, using his quick smile, flash of the hand, and charmingly drunken manner. Before the play begins, he ambles out into the audience, doing cheap magic tricks and placing his hand ever so innocently on the occasional lady's knee.

Dollar is convincing as the ingénue Trilby, though she is not so successful as the more devious character she is supposed to be later. As Henrietta, Swallow is playful and audacious. Chen, as Egypt, plays the former lover with the utmost contempt, but she seems a little awkward in some of the more tender moments.

Andromache Chalfant's set is simple and utilitarian. The stage is decorated with merely a trunk, a small table, and a chair, but on both sides chairs are strewn about in disarray so that the setting looks like a theater that was destroyed and demolished some time ago. Representing the bygone venue where Great's grandfather (a magician as well) once played, this design produces an appropriately haunting aura.

Ultimately, the case made by the play is that illusion is a process that requires not only the creator of fantasy but also the intended audience, which participates fully in that creation by wanting to see the chimera played out. If the further illusions that Rinne Groff continues to fashion are anything like Orange Lemon Egg Canary, she should have no trouble finding willing partners in creating them.

In Memoriam

As any New Yorker knows, the divisions run deep in the fight surrounding the monument to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The victims' relatives, developers, politicians, and interest groups have clashed over their different visions for a memorial to those who lost their lives at the World Trade Center. Forgoing this battle, local artist Jonathan Zalben has devised his own eloquent monument to 9/11. His, however, is constructed entirely of sound and light. Zalben's homage, WTC, consists of an art instillation of interactive video, which is motion controlled, and a multimedia performance. The performance segment is actually made up of three separate short pieces—Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and WTC—that tie three separate attacks on Americans into a trilogy. The first two segments serve to remind us of the prolonged global conflicts that the attacks brought, as does the third, ominously.

The first piece responds to the sinking of the Lusitania, the British passenger ship traveling between New York City and England that was torpedoed by a German U-boat during World War I. Nearly 200 Americans were killed, and the sinking is often viewed as the catalyst for America's entry into the war. Zalben, standing in front of a video projection, plays a violin, accompanied by cello and flute, as a string of repeated images are projected onto the screen.

When the music begins, the still images appear. They are photographs of the boat and of the voyage. Each image appears slowly; colorful shapes merge until they become whole, revealing a snapshot from the past where moments before there was digital chaos. Each image blips on and off the screen like a poorly received TV signal. They materialize for a brief moment of lucidity and then dissolve again into flickers, with the elements of abstract shapes and color again taking over. In a way, the images remind us of remembrance itself and the unreliable way in which a memory comes and goes.

As the flutist walks around the room, standing at times behind the audience, she plays in time with the cello and the violin, building to a slow crescendo. As the three come together, the swell creates a cathartic moment of great beauty, the music abating as the images, ever fleeting and always changing, allude to the ephemeral quality of even our greatest marvels of engineering and ingenuity.

The second piece, Pearl Harbor, reflects on that national tragedy and its aftermath. In this piece the projection is footage from World War II. The most poignant of these clips shows a young man, an American soldier, as he lies down in what appears to be the bottom of a boat. Brooding, he stares intently into the camera, straight through the decades that separate him from us. But like the images from the first piece, his visage quickly disintegrates into an abstract, digital blur.

These first two segments offer the best of Zalben's multimedia art. They build quickly, then fade away. They are ephemeral and haunting, and they evoke the past without over-sentimentalizing it. They achieve the opposite effect of what visual media usually do with the past; instead of making it seem closer to us, they make it seem further away.

The last piece, WTC itself, is different from the previous two. The still images of the wreckage of the Trade Center appear in vibrant colors, with sharp contrasts between light and dark. They appear to be superimposed—in an effect that makes it look as if the photos of the WTC are ripped—over an American flag. The suggestion seems to be that despite the attacks on this country, America continues on. During the segment, Zalben's eloquent violin music is projected from tape. This piece, as well, features modern dance: a single dancer under a sheet slowly writhes across the floor, although the dance seems a bit disconnected from the rest of the segment.

It's clear that Zalben's project was immaculately, almost hyper-neurotically, planned out. He researched the archival images, wrote the music, and even created the software that so compellingly picks apart pictures from the past. Obviously, he has spent a good deal of time and effort on this worthy project.

Critic Walter Benjamin reminds us that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably." The brilliance of Zalben's WTC is that it not only reminds us not to forget but also reflects on the nature of memory itself in its absolute fragility.

Brave New World

One of the best things that BecauseHeCan does is to serve as a kind of consumer warning for its audiences. Some theatergoers may know their Pinter better than their printer, so they are apt to learn a few things here about the dangers of computer identity theft. But while clever, the play ultimately becomes a victim of its own pretensions: it tries too hard to be edgy and comes off as somewhat entertaining yet devoid of significance. Moreover, the drama, unlike in most suspense plays, falls instead of escalates as the production proceeds. What results is something that starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. The piece is a techno-thriller by two-time Pulitzer nominee Arthur Kopit that takes place in a digitally dystopian New York City and concerns Joseph and Joanne, a seemingly happy, wealthy, and successful Manhattan couple. A member of the city's literati, Joseph (Ronald Guttman) is a publisher and apparently an author in his own right. One night he invites over for dinner a group of his creative writing students. Among them is a blue-haired, disheveled young man in tattered jeans and a trench coat, named Astrakhan (Karl Gregory).

The "he" in the title presumably refers to Astrakhan, who, unbeknownst to Joseph and Joanne, is a gifted and sinister hacker poised to use his computer skills against them. You might wonder why, but then there is that title. More to the point, Astrakhan has fallen in love (or lust) with the fetching Joanne (Ylfa Edelstein). Determined to have her, he digitally assumes the identity of her Luddite husband to make it appear that Joseph is an international dealer in child porn. Most of the play takes place "after the fact," and there are lengthy explanations of how identity theft occurs and what will happen legally to Joseph, as well as what has (or has not) already occurred between Astrakhan and Joanne.

Clearly, Astrakhan wants to Oedipally assume Joseph's sexual relationship with his wife. But he also wants to shift the weight of cultural power from Joseph's old world—that of books, literature, and print—to a new age of digital supremacy, where who you are is not as important as the computerized representations of who you seem to be.

The production suffers from a number of problems. The sound and lighting try to seem gritty, but one can only take so many buzzing noises and strobe-light effects, especially when the strobe light exactly matches the color of the antagonist's hair. The dialogue, though sometimes glib and witty, often seems as if it is trying too hard to be those things. Meanwhile, this Manhattan couple comes off as too sophisticated for their own good. Joseph and Joanne are so self-assured, smug, and shallow (but in a "aren't we clever and cosmopolitan" kind of way) that you almost don't care if their lives get ruined.

Also, at times the lines are so pithy and so frequent that some of the actors, especially in the second scene between Joseph and the FBI agents, ran over them without giving the language room to breathe. In several scenes, the actors seemed in a hurry just to get through the dialogue.

Although it's a thriller, little is exciting about the play. The mystery at the beginning—why Joseph is being targeted by the police—is intriguing. But the action never builds, and the last scene results in a rambling explanation of what buttons Joseph pushed on his laptop while sitting on the porch months ago.

That said, credit is due to the dazzling set design, When the audience walks in, it sees what seems like a cross between some kind of near-future S&M bar and a dungeon inside a computer. The stage is set in an arena style, and all around the walls there are 0's and 1's, the binary code that is the basis for all computer coding, while green lights project globular shapes over the floor. It is a bit overwhelming, but that's the idea: the audience should feel estranged from the new, technological world represented by Astrakhan.

As Joseph, Guttman not only looks the part but played the too-cool-for-the-New-School act particularly well, especially when things begin to fall apart. He seems unperturbed that his world has been turned inside out. Edelstein, as Joanne, balanced the part of the slut and the good wife without giving the audience too much of either, ambiguously leaving the truth up to conjecture. As Astrakhan, Gregory was funny and had the range to come off as sick too, although the monologue he delivers at the end, which should be macabre, was somewhat stale.

The play has some saving moments—among them, its often smart and humorous dialogue, even if it is delivered with such coolness and so quickly that its richness can be overlooked. Overall, though, BecauseHeCan simply can't: it's an impressive-looking production but in bad need of repair.

After Eden

The world was green once, full of new possibilities and unfound discoveries. They might include graceful images of fields and towns, vividly described food, and the beauty of a simple yet evocative piano accompaniment, all of which define the Michael Chekhov Theater Company's production of When the World Was Green. The piece was written by Sam Shepard and longtime collaborator Joseph Chaikin for the Olympic Arts Festival during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. It tells the story of an aging chef who kills one of his patrons, whom he believes to be a cousin who must die because of a decades-old familial blood feud. The entire play takes place in the cell of the Old Man (Peter J. Coriaty). There, awaiting his punishment, he is interviewed by a young woman (Alia Tarraf) who may or may not be the daughter of the man he killed.

On a basic level, the play is a glorious homage to food. Indeed, for the Old Man, the world was green during his idyllic past as a cook. His memories are draped in a sweet kind of nostalgic melancholy. The Old Man's succulent descriptions of various foods and their preparations, and the scenes where he teaches the Interviewer how to cook a dish, make the piece also about the creative process itself. Although his life was governed by the grim fact that he had to murder his cousin, he was still able to find small moments of great beauty in the meals he created. Ultimately, though, the Interviewer wants his story, and this is the gift he gives to her.

The piano music, always present, was scored for the original production and playfully interacts with the characters. The pianist, Larry Chertoff, is just offstage but in view of the audience. The riffs and ditties that he plays not only focus distinct lines of dialogue—conveying, for instance, the importance of a scene ending—but are a constant reminder that the Old Man's mission in life was to kill his cousin, who was a pianist. It is as if the cousin is never gone, despite the Old Man's insistence that "it's all over now."

The Old Man, played by Peter J. Coriaty, deftly displays a kind of distant sadness as he ruminates about his life, devoted, as it was, to food and death. He also shows a rabid anger at the Interviewer over her insistence that he retell his story. Tarraf is appropriately pushy in the role and nicely builds up to revelations about her own past, although in her solo scenes, directed toward the audience, she was a bit overly sentimental.

The set is minimal: a metal cot, a small table, and a simple light representing a window all underscore the straightforward unpretentiousness with which Carol Kastendieck has directed this under-recognized Shepard classic.

"The joy in theater comes from discovery and the capacity to discover," Joseph Chaikin writes in The Presence of the Actor, his seminal book on acting. The joy in this production of When the World Was Green is great because there is so much to discover.

Prophet Taking

Sunday school was never terribly interesting. But unbeknownst to my 12-year-old self, the Bible is filled with the kinds of juicy stories about sex, death, and destruction that should make any adolescent salivate. I Have Loved Strangers, a new work by the excellent Clubbed Thumb company and part of its "Summerworks 2006" series at the Ohio Theater, draws on Bible stories about prophets, placing them in present-day New York City. The problem here is that there are far too many plots, characters, and anachronisms. Although there are a few shining moments as well as some good acting, what mainly results is a confusing work that attempts to do too much.

The play takes place in a New York that is like a modern-day Babylon. With elements of the stories of both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, it tries to weave together three different plotlines about prophets and prophecies. What emerges, however, is not a melding of the old and the new but a stiff hodgepodge of conflicting narratives. The three stories are disjointed and seemingly unrelated, and are tied together only toward the end. Scenes from different plotlines are juxtaposed for maximum confusion. Not until late in the production does one finally begin to understand who each character is.

The first story has to do with a prophet in rags, Jeremiah (T. Ryder Smith), who by dress and speech seems to belong more to the Bible than the Big Apple. Not unlike the biblical Ezekiel, he breaks a bottle to symbolize the imminent destruction of the land, although it is not clear if this destruction is destined for New York or Jerusalem.

Jeremiah is first seen wandering aimlessly among contemporary Manhattanites, who are choreographed moving in sync in a manner closer to dance than drama. As the urbanites discuss funny and entertaining "slice-of-life" tidbits that would appeal mainly to an audience of New Yorkers ("Smith Street used to be a dump, but now it's really nice"), Jeremiah appears to be a lunatic prophet of doomsday, not unlike the contemporary kind. He could easily be wearing a placard that says, "Repent! The end draws near."

His story is in stark contrast to that of the far more mellow Hananiah, a new age prophet (and, in the Bible, a false one). He appears in domestic scenes with his wife, who is greatly swayed by his charisma. With his good looks, quick smile, and impervious self-assuredness, one could easily imagine him as a charming cult leader. The scenes between Hananiah (James Stanley) and his wife, Ruthie (Jennifer Ruby Morris), are funny at first, placing the seemingly otherworldly character of a prophet in a quotidian setting for a domestic satire, replete with such marital problems as miscommunication, petty fights, and bruised egos. The first scenes are quite amusing and fresh, but the narrative becomes more serious and tedious as the unhappy couple's relationship steadily worsens.

The third story line has to do with a ragtag group of revolutionaries who seem like the Weather Underground radicals of the 60's and 70's. Though it is not clear what they are fighting for and whom they are fighting against, their struggle slowly becomes part of the other two stories, leading to an explosive ending. There is also a fourth, half-told, and seemingly unrelated story line that involves two unnamed persons wandering through a forest, visiting a cemetery, and watching fireflies. Throughout most of these scenes, the theater is dark, and the actors are seen by the flashlights they carry.

As Jeremiah, Smith astutely assumes the role of someone who has become a medium of God. He writhes on the floor, bends his back and trembles, and appears to be in great pain and fear, not knowing what he will say next and how much trouble it will get him into. Stanley, as the hunky Hananiah, has a winning smile and easy affability that makes it easy to understand why his wife, played in a suitably understated fashion by the vivacious Jennifer Ruby Morris, has fallen for his charms. Despite his seemingly sweet veneer, he also shows signs that he is a sinister, manipulative figure desperately trying to control his wife.

The set is quite minimal: a terracotta-colored screen as a backdrop and a castle-like gate to add to the biblical feel.

I Have Loved Strangers is a challenging piece that, in moments, uses ironic humor to show a biblical figure in modern-day life. It also raises interesting questions about the nature of prophets and why people follow them. Overall, though, this overambitious production has an ambiguous quality that never quite lets the audience know exactly what is going on. Ultimately, we would profit from a bit more clarity.

Brief Encounter

Although the term "well-made play" often brings up negative connotations, the genre provides a simple format for imaginative dialogue and a tight plot. Dark Yellow, a new work by Julia Jordan, amply supplies both. The play tells the story of a night of intrigue and sex between Bob, a lonely, aging traveler, and Jen, a waitress at a rural bar. The play opens with a scene entirely in the dark. The only thing the audience experiences is the sound of Bob's voice as he tries to coax Tommy, a young boy, out of a hiding spot. The pair are being pursued by someone, although it is not clear whom. Though the opening rambles a bit too long, the scene ends in an exciting, surprising flourish.

Except for the first bit and a small epilogue at the end, nearly the entire play, about one hour and 15 minutes, is conducted in the next scene, which takes place in Jen's living room. It quickly becomes apparent that she has picked up Bob at the bar where she works. Though she is ready to jump into bed with the older man, Bob seems troubled. He may be cocky (when Jen asks him to tell her something she doesn't know, he replies matter-of-factly that she will be "naked in an hour"), but he's still tentative, and continually pulls away whenever the two draw together.

As the potential lovers play a snappy and imaginative word game of "tell me something I don't know," we learn that they are hiding things from each other, and both are more intimately involved than we might first suspect. The ending presents several twists and turns; some predictable, others not so much. The final scene leaves the audience with a tender if ambiguous glimpse of a kind of redemption following a night filled with sex, violence, and deceit.

This is a play that is invested heavily in characterization, and the characters, for the most part, are strong, though at times there are some inconsistencies. One wonders, for example, why two rural, seemingly lower-class white Americans would be so knowledgeable about New York City, a frequent topic of their discussions. Despite a kind of "explanation" for their shared interest in the city, their fascination seems more a reflection of the playwright's interests. Also, Bob's diatribes have him drifting between philosophy professor and lowlife a bit too much.

Still, Elias Koteas is superb as Bob—at times aloof and timid; at others, reckless and menacing. He has a great ability, through all of his bluster, to come across as someone who is deeply questioning his life choices. Tina Benko, as the attractive and self-assured Jen, portrays a woman who knows what she wants and is appropriately startled by the evening's surprising revelations.

Jordan is very much in control of her craft. Her dialogue is pat and witty, and one-liners abound. At one point, Bob notes, "I'm just trying to get into your bedroom, not Carnegie Hall." To which Jen replies that he should have gone home with her co-worker, who is "younger and prettier, which is a pretty good combination in the middle of nowhere." Also, there is a tight economy of plot, so that every piece of the story is tied together neatly at the end.

To that end, Dark Yellow is a straightforward work containing a relatively easy-to-follow story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It is playing in the Studio Dante, a postage stamp of a theater with a richly decorated interior—one suspects that this is the kind of show the venue specializes in: well-crafted, traditional plays that are more like Off-Broadway and maybe even Broadway productions than the more experimental ones often found Off-Off-Broadway.

The set design, especially to those accustomed to the generally low-budget standards seen Off-Off-Broadway, is opulent. The doors, ceilings, appliances, and fixtures are all real. Jen's living room appears exactly as one would expect: quaint and well kept, though perhaps a bit expensive for a country waitress. It is obvious that a considerable amount of time and skill went into this lavish setting.

Like a poet who chooses formalism over free verse in order to feel free inside an already established structure, Dark Yellow creates an entertaining experience within the narrow bounds of a well-made play.

Memories of Moscow

A Russian proverb says, "To live a life is not as simple as crossing a field." Or, crossing a field can be far more complicated than it would seem to be. Or needs to be. Similarly, Shoot Them in the Cornfields! is an ambitious, poetic production that wants to be about many things, but in the end has too much going on and is more complicated than necessary. This new play by Sophia Murashkovsky tells several convoluted stories, the main one dealing with a young, American Jewish student, Sonya, in Moscow during the turbulent days of the 1991 coup d'état. The play also includes the story of Sonya's Russian grandparents, Yelena and Mikhail Levin, who were arrested and sent to prison in the 1950's by the KGB, ostensibly because they were successful Jewish business owners accused of "entrepreneurialism." Much of this portion takes place during a cruel interrogation of the couple. Other narratives include the Levins' romance during World War II and a subsequent abortion, and the failed love affair of Sonya and a Russian soldier, Dimitri.

The title, Shoot Them in the Cornfields!, comes from the midcentury Russian government's practice of murdering mentally retarded citizens. Many were shot in cornfields. The Levins had successfully employed mentally retarded workers who, after the dismantling of the couple's factory, were later executed.

The entire play is performed in a singsong verse that at some points is clever but often detracts from the storytelling, with lines that seem to go far off the narratives in order to keep the rhyme scheme. One interesting effect of the verse is that the language becomes alienating, in a "Brechtian" sense, to the audience; it is different enough that it can never be mistaken for "real" speech. Indeed, the production includes many aspects that could be considered Brechtian. This includes the show's best bit, the second-act opener that features a movie projection where the cast is seen onscreen singing and dancing to "Russianized" versions of American show tunes, with lyrics such as "not a ruble to spare for the Chattanooga choo-choo?" The cast watches itself onscreen, effectively becoming part of the audience.

Yet this playful interlude has elements that are as sinister as they are alienating. The projection is crosscut with words like "desire" and "ambition." At one point, the actors, who are singing over the original soundtrack, hold a note for a startlingly long time, changing its pitch to a deeper, more ominous one midway through. Near the end of the song, the dancing begins to less resemble the innocent tap that accompanies show tunes and becomes more like the marching boots of soldiers going to war. The result is upsettingly appropriate for a production that displays the brutality of an oppressive regime.

With reserve and dignity, Yelena (Carolyn Seiff) aptly plays the Jewish grandmother who perseveres through many hardships. As Sonya, Maila Miller is frenetic and seems nervous onstage. Joey Klein, as Dimitri, the xenophobic Russian boyfriend, has dreamy good looks and an appropriate slyness about him, but often appears stiff. The best performance was by Grant Morenz as the KGB informant Ivan, who is strangely presented as foppishly gay, at once outlandish and threatening.

A major problem was the tech work, which was particularly off during this performance. It was full of mistakes, which could be seen as a deliberately alienating effect, such as lights turning on and off at inappropriate moments, but more likely were ill-timed light cues. In a few moments, the sound cues seemed to be mistimed as well.

The set consists of a simple wooden ramp with a small platform jutting off from either side. This unnaturalistic setting, coupled with the rhyming dialogue, the alienating effects, and the characters' ability to simply "walk" from scene to scene, covering vast distances, eras, and stories, gives the overall production a dream-like effect, where the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred.

Overall, Shoot Them in the Cornfields! is a victim of its own ambitions, and it attempts to do too much. The themes are many: memory, loss of love, Russian nationhood. There are too many plot lines to follow, and some of these are not even resolved in the script. Unanswered questions sprout like fresh stalks of corn: Exactly why does Dimitri suddenly turn on Sonya? Is he dealing drugs or involved in prostitution? Why is Ivan played as gay? What is the purpose of the two girls who begin to fondle each other in the background late in the show?

This is a challenging production that tries to tell the story of an American girl who, by retrieving her family's past, salvages her present. Like memory itself, however, the piece is a muddled thing of conflicting narratives and modes. What results is a confusing collection of assertions, images, and ideas.

Live, It's Greek Tragedy

Should plays teach, or should they entertain? In many ways, this question gets to central issue in Stages of Learning's production of Euripides's The Trojan Women. The company undertakes the difficult task of staging a Greek tragedy while formulating a message about contemporary media and their relation to calamity. What results is a brave, if heavy-handed, tale of woe that speaks to our society's desensitization to tragedy. Euripides had a didactic purpose in mind when writing the play. The Greeks had been involved in the pillaging of the island of Milos, a Greek ally, for its refusal to participate in the Athenians' larger struggle against Sparta. Euripides wanted to call attention to the slaughter of Milos's citizens.

Stages of Learning's production takes this ancient tale, about the fate of the women of Troy after the city falls to the Greeks, and offers a smattering of parodies about modern media. Hecuba (the inconsolable Trojan queen), the chorus, and the invading Greeks appear in scenes involving talk shows, press conferences, Internet voting, commercials, and 24-hour news shows. For example, the opening prologue with the deities Poseidon, Athena, and Apollo is presented as a kind of talk show. Similarly, Talthybius is not only a Greek messenger to the Trojan women but also a Bill O'Reilly-style TV anchorman.

Though humorous at times, these takeoffs mostly seem too separate from the original play. The original and the modern in this adaptation are not organically combined, and the effect is a long, clunky mishmash of conflicting styles.

One of the problems in modernizing a Greek tragedy is that the form has a very specific structure. It was, after all, a highly stylized religious rite in honor of Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine. Like many rituals, it is repetitive, and for an audience accustomed to the more plot-driven style of TV and movies, it can be monotonous.

In this production, the long, tortured monologues, (especially those of Hecuba, but also the opening prologue where Poseidon pontificates at length on Trojan history) could have been made more interesting by action-driven theatrical techniques. Instead, Poseidon stares out at the audience, speaks grandly to Athena and Apollo, and occasionally shakes his trident to emphasize a point. The multiple scenes where Hecuba laments her lost city suffer from the same problem. There is too little action and too many words, and the words are all in the same tone of grief. At this performance, the audience became noticeably, and quickly, tired.

One way the production attempts to counteract such potential weariness is through the addition of two extra, lighthearted scenes not in the original. These scenes take the form of commercials for a particular product. (Think Trojans. You get the idea.) Though humorous, they do little to further the plot, and they do much to make what is already a long hour-and-a-half show longer still.

Most of the back story about the Peloponnesian War is delivered by the chorus of Trojan women in the traditional style of stasimon, a kind of song and dance ritual that in Greek tragedy is slow in both movement and tempo. In this production, the stasimon is particularly lento and melancholy, whereas the scenes that satirize the media are generally upbeat, fast, and funny. In this way, the production points out the difference between what Hecuba experiences and what the audience sees when watching the tragedy through the lens of mass media. The way the news portrays tragic events seems almost fun.

Jennifer Shirley, as Hecuba, is appropriately grief struck while at the same time displaying a proud, matronly manner befitting a former queen. T. Scott Lilly as Talthybius is emblematic of the production as whole: as the quintessential Greek messenger, he is emotionless and detached, but as a parody of an anchorman, he is filled with gusto and mirth. When the two collide, the actor seems confused. In one instance, as the messenger, Talthybius relays the news about who will become slave to what Greek master; then, as the anchorman, he shoves a microphone into the soon-to-be enslaved women's faces. He then stands there, dumbly, not knowing if he is a conduit of the news or the news himself.

The polished set design by Amanda Embry effectively evokes opulence in a state of ruin. Doric columns line the sides of the stage, with one large column knocked over in the middle of the floor.

Euripides was the least popular of the major Greek tragedians. Some believe this was because many of his plays were mostly intended to raise awareness about issues instead of entertaining audiences. So is the purpose of theater to entertain or to educate? As far as pure entertainment is concerned, Stages of Learning has something to learn, based on this production. But in offering a different take on Greek tragedy in terms of our media's treatment of horrific events, The Trojan Women has much to teach.

Theater as Language: The Foreman-Artaud Connection

What do an oversized mallet, a rat in a spacesuit, and a 1930's French madman have to do with one another? Read on for the answer. Or rather, don't read the words, read the signs.

It is rather easy to make the connection between contemporary avant-garde American writer and director Richard Foreman and 1930's French drama theorist/actor/occasional lunatic Antonin Artaud. Foreman is one of the most Artaudian playwrights working on Off-Off-Broadway today.

Both are well known for zany productions that are heavy on theatrics and light on characterization, with more emphasis on mise-en-scène than on text and dialogue. They are both concerned with contemporary issues, and both are associated with work that is difficult to approach: there is little "plot" that is determined by recognizable characters. They are both generally popular with an elite theater crowd and are largely unknown to the general public. What is not often explores is Artuad and Foreman's connection through the labyrinthine social science of semiotics.

Semiotics, the study of signs, was first popularized by Ferdinand de Saussure. At the turn of the century, while teaching a course in linguistics in Geneva, he proposed a radical new way to study language. Instead of studying where words come from or a history of language (diachronic study), Saussure suggested a study of the relationships of words in language at the moment (synchronic study).

In doing so, he developed a new way of looking at the sign. Roughly speaking, it's about phenomena and their meaning. As any introductory linguistics course will teach you, Saussure talked about the difference between the signifier (or the sound-word) and the signified (the mental "concept"). For example, I say "playwright" (signifier) and you think "Shakespeare" (signified).

This field of study had a profound effect on the way 20th-century thinkers in various fields began looking at things, including those working in theater. Artaud, in his seminal work The Theater and Its Double, called for a "theater of cruelty" that, among other things, favors a play's theatrical elements (sight, sound, space, costuming-all referred to as mise-en-scène) over the text and dialogue. In addition, these theatrical elements, Artaud wrote, create a language of theater that is entirely its own.

This theatrical language stemmed from Artaud's reading of Saussure. Artaud proposed a semiotics of theater that deals largely with non-textual theatrical elements: lights, staging, costuming, effects, pantomime, and motion. This new language would avoid the confusion between theater and text. In The Theater and Its Double, Artaud wrote, "If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupt

In a 2002 interview in The Drama Review, Foreman acknowledged the influence semiotics had on him. Speaking of a quintessential semiotician, he said, "When I started writing theater, I was under the influence of people like [Roland] Barthes."

At the Brick Theater's recent production of Foreman's Symphony of Rats, that semiotic influence was palpable. Foreman's work is a theater of lights, action, and movement.Don't look for character development.Look for ominous puppets/actors, like the ghastly 

"crippled rat" that rises out of a wheelchair and extends grotesquely long arms that seem to reach across the entire stage. Look also for props that serve to drive the plot and take on the substance and weight that most theater gives to the characters.

One of those props, a spaceman/rat, becomes an intrinsic force throughout the play. In the beginning, it represents a thing of desire and envy to the main character, the president of the United States. The spaceman/rat has been to the nether regions of space and is now a national hero with whom the president wants to be affiliated. By the end of the play, the spaceman/rat has become a thing of terror, a hideous rat whose hollow promise is revealed. The rat, which was once what the president most wanted, turns into what he most fears.

This use of terror, invoked in both the characters and the audience, is an underlying element of Artaud's theater of cruelty. It is one of the forces that drive his proposed new language of theater, which is based not on conventional characterization but on an older form of ritual theater that originated in Greek tragedy. 

This terror is appropriately evoked through the theatrical elements of sight, sound, and staging. The dialogue is almost insignificant, which can be a problem. A friend who went with me to Symphony of Rats (and has written extensively on Foreman himself) noted that it would "be fun" to "turn the volume down" on the dialogue and "write your own," since what is important is not the lines but the spectacle. At one point, one of the characters sprayed the audience with copious amounts of perfume. Here, as in Artaud, the language of theater is specifically theatric and not in the words.

Take it as a sign of the times.

Richard Foreman's ZOMBOID! Film/Performance Project #1 is playing at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (founded by Foreman) through April 9.

In Black and White

Conversation With a Kleagle is loosely based on the life of Walter White, a black writer whose light complexion allowed him to investigate the Ku Klux Klan during the early 20th century and convey devastating inside information about its use of terrorism and lynching. The production reveals some of that potentially explosive life story, but unfortunately the script contains deep flaws, especially in the characterization. Most of the play revolves around two conversations between John Watson (the Walter White character), a black Chicago journalist who passes as white to travel in the South, and a Kleagle, or KKK recruiter, named Randall Monahan (Chris Keogh). The Kleagle, who is aware of Watson's background and thinks the black man doesn't "know his place," plans to kill him. Watson is then tipped off by a stranger, an African-American shoe shiner named Tookie, and narrowly escapes. But when he returns to Chicago, he learns that Tookie has paid for his intervention with his son's life. Watson decides he must face the Kleagle again and find out why he had the killing done.

Problems with the conception of these characters begin right away. In an expository opening monologue, the audience learns that Watson is black and that Monahan knows this. This could set up a potentially mesmerizing scene where Monahan drops threatening hints as to what he might do. Better still would be to keep the audience guessing about whether Monahan knows about Watson, based on the Kleagle's ambiguous and vaguely hostile language.

Instead, Monahan makes only a few threats. A conversation that could be about subterfuge, fear, and what isn't known turns into easy boasting. Watson cajoles Monahan into bragging about his exploits as a Klansman by agreeing with his racist views, and any potential tension is killed.

In the rare instances where Keogh is allowed to be intimidating, he is exceptional. Keogh is explosive, powerful, and threatening, someone you would not want to be at the mercy of. But he hasn't been given good enough material. Being completely evil, his character is too absolutist. There is nothing conflicted about Monahan, no questioning of who is right in his confrontation with Watson, and no indication of what the Klansman's motivations are. Instead of the nuanced evil of, say, Roy Cohn in Angels in America, we get the flatness of Darth Vader from Star Wars.

Another missed opportunity comes in the subplot involving Tookie, a modest, generous Southern black man, and, surprisingly, a stereotype. He is an endearing simpleton, a bootblack who, though ignorant, is noble in his sincerity and tragic in his sacrifice. As the friendly, helpful black man, he represents absolute good in contrast to Monahan's total evil.

The play also presents an irrelevant flashback dealing with Watson's childhood and the threat of racial violence against his family. His mother urges him to pass as white—advice, it later becomes evident, he does not follow except when he goes South. As indicated by his profession, Watson has decided to be black: he writes only for black newspapers. The flashback does little to develop his character, because the more central conflict is not over his passing as white but whether he will confront Monahan about what he has done to Tookie's son. Yet too much of the play deals with the issue of Watson's racial identity.

Furthermore, Andrew Burns plays Watson as someone who bears his torments mostly internally. He does not seem troubled; any evidence of his struggle over passing as white is not outwardly apparent in his gestures and expressions. Instead, Burns seems impatient to get to the end of each scene, and his character, though often appearing angry, never seems particularly tormented by racial injustice or by his mother's ambitions for him, as flashbacks suggest he would.

To the play's credit, there are a few memorable instances of unforgivably racist yet vividly descriptive lines that reflect hateful Southern attitudes. These lines are reserved for Keogh and his expressions of vitriol, delivered in a booming voice. And one directorial choice is creative, at least at first: the general Klansmen serve as stagehands so that during transitions where Watson is onstage they menacingly stare at him and pantomime threats. But the device becomes tedious after the second time.

In all fairness, writing socially conscious theater, for all its importance, can be uniquely difficult. The writer must walk a fine line between artist and reformer. Conversation With a Kleagle is a play rife with possibilities for great drama. It's too bad so few of them are realized here.

Hard Times

The American Clock, Arthur Miller's paean to those who lived through the Great Depression, is an ambitious but ultimately flawed portrait of Americans' plight during the turbulent early 1930's. Although the Brooklyn-based Sackett Group, in only its third production, tries to weave together the play's multiple strands, we get mostly shreds of stories that too easily unravel, and the overall effect leaves the audience chilled. Most of the play, an early Miller work, concerns the Baums, a Jewish family living well in Manhattan during the 1920's. But when the stock market crashes in 1929, Moe Baum (Steven W. Bergquist), the father, loses his finance job, and the family begins its long spiral into poverty. Bergquist is appropriately understated as the proud patriarch, genuinely concerned for his family but unable to accept his reversal of fortune.

The Baums are forced to move back to a dilapidated section of Brooklyn, their former home. A whole generation, it is noted, returns to live with its parents—now Bubbys and meshuggah grandfathers—only to be ensnarled in petty domestic disputes while facing dwindling prospects.

Rose Baum (Susan Faye Groberg), Moe's troubled wife, notes with chagrin that sometimes you can go a whole year in Brooklyn and "never go back to Manhattan." Groberg, with humility and sincerity, brings to the production a personal touch that is sorely missed in the other performances, where many of the actors seem to be simply going through the motions.

A large portion of the narrative focuses on Lee (David B. Sochet), Moe and Rose's young son, whose coming-of-age story takes him through the years from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Alabama. Sochet has the difficult task of playing Lee at 13, 15, 18, and into his early 20's. Though his portrayal of Lee's earlier years is a bit too naïve and earnest, he comes into the part more when he's older and working as a journalist.

Strangely, The American Clock presents, along with the Baums' story, short narratives concerning a Midwestern farmer who loses his property and travels east; a loosely aligned group of newly unemployed financial kingpins; an African-American hobo who travels the country in search of work, singing all the way; and a wealthy, socialist CEO who realizes the error of his ways. There's also a dance competition that seems to have no real connection with the other scenes.

All of this is narrated, stiffly, by a clever financier who realizes, before the crash, that he needs to withdraw all his money from banks and instead buy gold—or, at the very least, carry thousands of dollars around in his shoes.

The play's multiple plot lines leave too little room for the development of the individual characters. As a result, there is little crucial empathy created for the characters and their stories. Ultimately, the only characters the audience cares about are the Baums, whose story is more nuanced.

The Sackett Group's choice of The American Clock was an audacious but dangerous decision, and unfortunately the company has fallen victim to many of the risks inherent in mounting the work. Aside from being too overarching and in need of drastic cutting, the play is not particularly well suited to Off-Off-Broadway. With its large cast of more than 30 characters, musical numbers, and major changes of setting, it would be much more effective as a well-funded Broadway or Off-Broadway production. On the Brooklyn Music School Playhouse's vacuous proscenium stage, with a stark, black backdrop and spartan set, the characters seen dancing and singing onstage appear small and distant.

The director, Robert J. Weinstein, makes the interesting choice of having all the actors, when they are not playing in scenes, seated onstage and watching from the sides, as in Our Town. This somewhat compensates for the massive, empty space that so wants to be filled.

The American Clock is a relatively unknown Miller work that is seldom chosen for production, and the Sackett Group's daring venture reveals some of the reasons why. With a more appropriate lineup for the rest of the season, brighter things should be expected from this new company in the future.