Secrets and Lies

Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind is as American as Topdog/Underdog is black. It's a virtual epic poem/novel/absurdist road movie of the mind. Above all, it's a three-course feast for eight actors. In Manhattan Theater Source's production, director Daryl Bolling sets some especially ravenous performers loose on this banquet. Shepard's 1985 play is initially about a marriage doomed by the husband's relentless insecurities, violence, and paranoia; opening out, it takes on post-World War II American life. Jake (Todd d'Amour) thinks he has beaten his wife, Beth (Laura Schwenninger), to death in a jealous rage. When he confronts the possibility that she may be alive and recovering somewhere, he becomes obsessed with finding her.

It turns out Beth and Jake are both yearning to reunite, but their families won't let them. Each partner is in torturous recovery—physical for Beth, psycho-spiritual for Jake. The beating has left Beth brain-damaged, but it hasn't diminished her love for her husband. Likewise, Jake is an infantile brute fighting off memories of his dead father's abuse and neglect, but he can't live without Beth's love.

The play crosscuts between Jake and Beth in their neutral corners (California and Montana, respectively) with their crazy families, while Jake's brother Frankie (Jeff Wills) goes on a quest to confirm that Beth is alive. Frankie just wants to ease his brother's scrambled mind. Like most foolish acts in this play, Frankie's journey arises out of pure love.

In the midst of arguments, crossed signals, and reconciliations, illuminating family histories spill out. Shepard uses plain middle-American vernacular to whisk us from decade to decade, city to city, soul to soul—imagery conjured solely from the characters' reminiscences. Shepard's young and old Americans speak only of their own experiences in strict dramatic context, but he makes the stories feel emblematic and panoramic.

It takes superior actors to preserve the poetry in these passages without coloring over their plainspoken realism. On the other hand, too much restraint could render the lines flat, mannered, and tediously familiar. Bolling's triumph is that his entire cast is up for the challenge, though some show more imagination than others.

As the main protagonist and dramatic catalyst, d'Amour kick-starts the play with the appropriate jolt. He makes Jake's menace and vulnerability linger as a presence even in the scenes where he doesn't appear.

Each actor has dazzling moments to spare, but the big surprises are the unexpected standouts. Campbell Echols, as Jake's sister Sally, brings the most lived-in realism to her line readings. There is never any doubt that she has lived the scarred, compromised life her monologues attest to.

Another great standout is Cindy Keiter as Meg, Beth's hilariously earnest, docile mother. At a glance, Meg appears to be Edith Bunker/Gracie Allen on autopilot, but Keiter makes Meg's innocence genuine at every instance, then negotiates turns in Shepard's dialogue that reveal depths of emotional intelligence and strength. That's simply what the role requires, but Keiter makes these transitions dizzyingly graceful.

In a heart-stopping moment, Meg's fussy, domineering husband, Baylor (Hank Davies), chips away at her relentless optimism until she is forced to reveal to him that her passivity is mostly for his benefit: If he knew how helpless he'd be without her, his entire macho world would crumble. Keiter understands Meg so well that she elevates her to a kind of heroine for the compulsively empathetic.

On a slightly lower rung, Schwenninger, Davies, Ridley Parson (as Mike, Beth's brother), and Wills give vibrant but relatively unadventurous interpretations of their characters. Schwenninger makes Beth as blunt and physically uncoordinated as you might expect, but her longing doesn't resound as forcefully as Jake's, making the invisible magnetic pull between them feel a little one-sided.

Likewise, Davies draws some of the biggest laughs from Baylor's absurd aloofness and machismo, but he rarely displays anything more than surface irritation in the hunter-rancher's verbal assaults on his family. Parson and Wills, as the put-upon, overprotective brothers in each clan, play exasperation a bit too broadly at times. Yet all the cast members show enough of a grasp of their characters to deliver an inspired surprise on any given night.

Bolling smoothly corrals his ensemble on a wide (I want to say widescreen) plank of a set, managing the space with a fluidity that makes the scene transitions feel cinematic. When the action shifts from California (stage left) to Montana (stage right), the sense of distance, cultural and geographical, is palpable.

All this talk about depths and dark themes might obscure an important fact: the play is funny as hell too. Shepard's absurdism springs so purely from emotional truths that the shock of recognition simply tickles. As Jake's doting mother, Lorraine, Emily Mitchell is the cast member who tap-dances most nimbly along the play's tragicomic ledge. When Lorraine tells Sally about the husband/father/war hero who abandoned them for a life of alcoholic brooding, Mitchell turns Shepard's prose into a lacerating requiem and a hilarious riff in the same breath. Now that's how an actor should come to the table at a classic Shepard play: starving.

Pulpish Play

The Green Game sounds as if it could be an offbeat classic, had this production's director not so consistently sabotaged its author. Playwright M. Stefan Strozier appears to have constructed a sly and playful political allegory, undercut by slack, glancing direction from ... M. Stefan Strozier. Though buried under awkward staging and lifeless line readings, Strozier's play offers some resonant observations about Homeland Security-era hypocrisies and any-means-necessary war profiteering. The almost pulpy plot concerns a backroom deal between some Cuban grifters and a rogue U.S. senator. Sen. Albright (Joe Wissler) wants to trade a set of U.S. mint plates he somehow stole from the Secret Service for a counterfeiting machine his Havana connection promises will produce unlimited, undetectable copies of U.S. currency. He wants to funnel this funny money into neoconservative-style foreign policy adventures.

But the deal turns out to be an elaborate ruse involving his resentful daughter, his dead wife, treason, greed, and some ugly family secrets. Ultimately, The Green Game winds up a tragedy in the classical/Shakespearean mold. A quintet of dancers, including singer Keri Ann Peterson, forms a kind of kinetic Greek chorus.

Strozier's dialogue is lean, punchy, and often delightfully left field (at times I thought of good, world-weary Graham Greene), but almost none of his actors make enough of an investment in their characters to lend them any emotional realism or force. The default mode of delivery here is fast and hollow. If Strozier the director is going for a kind of farcical screwball pace, he seems to have lost all sense of nuance in mashing the accelerator.

April Gentry, as the senator's aggrieved daughter, utters pivotal lines like "Why are you doing this to me?" as if somebody scuffed her Manolos. In the play's tragic denouement, the senator cries out, "Why, God, why have you done this to me?" with the kind of grief that accompanies losing a minor bet on the Giants. His chilling refrain, "America must be protected," grows feebler each time it's repeated.

Another stifled pleasure of this play is its arresting dance. Choreographed by Mindy Upin, the dance numbers languish under the blandest of bland piano cues. The dancers portray the local color in a seedy Havana nightclub, yet their seductive moves clash with music you'd expect to hear on a corporate training video. As the Lady in Red, Peterson, a striking singer-dancer bombshell with pitch as graceful as her moves, symbolizes the allure of greed. It's both a compliment to her and a bad sign for the headliners that my eye often wandered from the drama proper to the Lady in Red having some random background fun.

Of the actors in the foreground, only Jessie Fahay, as the comical femme fatale New Orleans Louise, gives a credible performance. She somehow dredges up the irony and innuendo of Strozier's text in a subtle, believable fashion. Her polar opposite here is Ben Bailey, who shouts his way through his role as high-strung black marketeer Johnny Silver, badly telegraphing a coke habit (sniff, blink, sniff) while betraying a very real habit of stepping on lines. In between these two extremes, McGregor Wright, as a sarcastic, faithless priest, and Wissler's Sen. Albright are simply affectless and false.

The Green Game has the makings of a good play, given either stronger casting choices, inspired direction, or both. As presented at Theater 3, Strozier's intriguingly written material only plays dead.

Home Team

Five Story Walkup is a swift, accessible collection of short plays and monologues by seasoned pros. The show's program says it's about "the places we call home," but these seven works are bound together more by a general plainspoken sincerity than by theme. Web Cam Woman is a first-person narrative monologue about an "ordinary woman" who has struck a Faustian bargain with the Internet, trading her privacy for the opportunity to be her own boss as an at-home Web cam exhibitionist for pay. But playwright Laura Shaine lets the onstage action tell another story. The way the Web cam woman (Cynthia Mace) creeps along the walls of her apartment like a POW evading searchlights gives the lie to her ostensible liberation.

It seems that the anonymous men who pay to watch her are the real bosses here. Shaine lays on the feminist allegory a bit thick, but Mace makes the clash between the woman's plainness and her seamy occupation (admittedly, all there in the text) almost dazzling.

A Glorious Night is the strangest and most experimental of the evening's plays. Harry (David Randolph Irving), a jittery bachelor either preparing for or enduring a potentially hot date, speaks to the woman across the fourth wall. Nothing too radical there, except that Harry's anxious banter includes what sounds like his raw, unedited thoughts. It's as if Irving were performing an internal and verbal monologue all at once.

Whether brushing his teeth or using the toilet, Harry describes his actions in an excruciating singsong. Playwright Daniel Frederick Levin seems to be dramatizing (or reproducing from experience) the tense play-by-play that runs through a person's mind during even the most casual encounters. It's all pretty slight, but too short to be fatally so.

Quincy Long's Aux Cops is the resident hardboiled New York piece. Imagine Steven Adly Guirgis (Our Lady of 121st Street) writing a scene in an outer-borough police squad room. A high-strung candidate for detective (Thomas Eckermann) sweats through an interview with a superior (Daniel Gallant) intent on measuring the exact length and flexibility of his temper.

In this hilarious piece, Long gets some lyrical mileage out of absurd procedural jargon and Dragnet-like cadences that somehow sound just right. Gallant conducts this friendly/testy interrogation with the stony composure of Sterling Hayden droning through Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film The Killing. Eckermann sweats and balks epically, but never broadly. Aux Cops feels like the propulsive start of a larger work about jaded flatfoots in the NYPD's far-flung outposts.

Arguably, the simplest work in this showcase is bird feeder. Clay McLeod Chapman writes and performs this monologue about a secret love affair between two young boys that ended in suicide and left one of the lovers carrying their secret as if it were a heart-shaped albatross. The narrative builds slowly and sometimes feels a little obvious along the way, but it ends on a haunting note. Fadeouts don't get any more resonant.

Gallant, who directs the entire showcase, also wrote the segment Tripartite, about two brothers with a romantic interest in the same woman. The dialogue suggests a Shakespearean romantic comedy modernized by a crack TV writer.

The playful, allusive banter between the brothers, Oscar (Irving) and Ryan (Eckermann), and Renee (Kayla Lian), the castrating mystery woman who threatens to come between them, is light and airy. Perhaps too light and airy at times. Heaven knows, this play's Oedipal themes (the brothers' offstage "Mom" looms just as imposingly as Renee does) and Cane and Abel tensions don't need any further trite underscoring, but Gallant doesn't provide much dramatic tension.

Neil LaBute's monologue, Love at Twenty, takes a piercing snapshot of a 20-year-old woman discovering the treachery of adult relationships head on. She's in love with her married college professor, who has sold her a lot of absurd romantic promises that she, of course, believed wholeheartedly. As the woman, Kira Sternbach makes this naïveté believable and touchingly familiar.

In the closer, Blue Monologue, John Guare offers a slice of biography and local history, a stirring testament to his love for his parents, the borough of Queens, and the art of playwriting. Eloquent and lovely.

Five Story Walkup contains vivid sketches that won't leave an indelible mark on the soul for years to come, but they do entertain and provoke. In other words, go.