On the Couch

What to do with so-called "couch plays," which tend to pivot on talk over action and are generally set in a living room? It's a common concern for many directors; they either try to infuse them with movement or avoid them altogether. So the fact that Theater of the Expendable is staging a new play with a setting that never departs from a living room—and has a couch as its focal point—is, in an unlikely way, something of a risk. I'm not sure it's a successful one, but for a short one-act play, it was worth a shot. You do feel as if you're in the title character's living room while watching The Tragedy of John. The Studio Theater in Theater Row is intimate, and the audience, which faces the couch, is in the same physical location as John's (Liam Joynt) beloved TV set. Television seems to be the main activity in his world, and he is already watching it as everyone enters. There's also a well-stocked bar, although John and his poker buddies seem to prefer beer. And this, apparently, is John's life.

In a larger space, playwright Neal Zupancic's slice-of-life piece would have been swallowed whole. As it is, director Corinne Neal has allowed the play's first half to become weighed down with lengthy pauses between lines and Joynt's intentionally blasé, depressed monotone as John. An unspoken catastrophic event two years ago has turned the character into a recluse who won't leave the house.

Despite his crusty, indifferent attitude, for some reason he seems to have a group of people who want to be around him. Maybe he was once incredibly charismatic. Maybe they're hoping he'll start making cookies again, which, according to his best friend, Steve (Nathan Brisby), would be worth the wait.

Or could it be that they're worried about him—that they're loyal to him in response to some past kindness? John has, after all, taken in a down-on-her-luck friend, Amy (Desiree Matthews), although he's nice to her only occasionally. Amy clearly has her sights set on John, but he's not interested.

Meanwhile, Steve brings over his new friend, Julia (Christina Shipp), whom he's crazy about while blissfully oblivious to her cocaine habit. But Julia's more interested in John. Despite the fact that she seems to do everything that John claims to despise about women—she presses him for personal information, coaxes him out of the house, and bakes him cookies (he hates it when women cook for him)—he falls for her almost immediately.

Maybe it's because the play is mostly talk and the setting is so intimate, but some of the later scenes with just two actors have the feel of a well-rehearsed piece for a scene-study class. They're well done but sort of awkwardly out of place. For instance, Matthews's cheery, practical Amy clashes nicely with Shipp's intense, quixotic personality as Julia. But it's hard to tell if they're actually getting along or engaging in a barely masked fight. And Joynt and Shipp's pillow talk scene is sort of charming but almost too intensely earnest compared with the rest of the play.

Brisby and Matthews have a funny argument over sitting in John's spot on the couch. But Brisby's spurts of anger toward the play's end seem too sudden and explosive when set against what is mostly people just hanging out, talking, and watching movies.

It would be easy to say that a play where two beautiful women fling themselves at a man who hasn't left his couch in two years isn't logical, but then we've probably all seen some version of this in real life, though perhaps not as extreme. In fact, though John only occasionally says anything kind or of particular interest, it's partly what he doesn't say (or do), the mystery around him, that gets him so much attention. I certainly wanted to know what landed him on the couch.

Though the awkward pauses never disappear entirely, by the play's second half they are largely overshadowed by the momentum that comes from the characters trying to figure out John's mystery. It was interesting to watch in the way you want to get to the end of a novel, whether good or bad, just to find out what happens, or if anything will happen at all.

The actual ending was sort of a pleasant surprise, with the entire story hinging on a one-liner, which shows some structural cleverness on Zupancic's part. It's a pretty good one-liner, but not everyone may find it worth spending an hour and 20 minutes to get there.

Into the Woods

One of the best theatergoing moments I ever had was at the now closed Empty Space Theater in Seattle, when the actor in the one-man play Underneath the Lintel somehow got the audience to sing a chorus of "We're Here Because We're Here." I wasn't quite sure how he did it, except that he had already sung it several times during the production and by that point it seemed only natural. I always hope to find a little of that experience again. Happily, one moment in Reduxion Theater Company's airy and solidly pleasing rendition of Shakespeare's As You Like It also elicits audience participation—by getting the audience to repeat a line with only gentle urging—even if this moment, unlike the one in Lintel, is light instead of laden with meaning. At this point, I knew we were in good hands.

Director Erin Anderson has corralled her cast into a unified world, divided into two settings and updated to the 1800s. One is in a French duchy, while the other is in the woods of Arden, where those exiled from the duchy flee to live amid shepherds and other country dwellers. At the play's beginning, we are told that Duke Frederick has banished his brother, Duke Senior. His niece, Rosalind (Sarah Schmitz), falls out of favor with Duke Frederick as well, and once banished, she decides to disguise herself as a man for protection while in exile.

Duke Frederick's daughter, Celia (Jessica Angleskhan), flees with Rosalind, her cousin, whom she loves dearly. Shortly before this, Rosalind falls in love with Orlando (Sean Logan), a young gentleman whose brother has denied him his inheritance. Orlando, too, is forced to run away to the woods, where the rest of the story plays out. Multiple romantic capers, identity mishaps, and reunions ensue.

A thoughtful use of double casting, such as using the same actor to play both dukes, suggests that the forest is a parallel world to the court. Though the characters in the woods have supposedly been banished, they do seem to have a pleasant time, picnicking and singing to pass the hours, while in the duke's court there is a capricious ruler and the threat of violence. In fact, this was one of the few productions I've seen where I really understood the need for a fight choreographer. A couple of the swordplay scenes are actually very funny, but the serious undercurrent of violence also serves to raise the stakes. After all, although the play's a comedy, the duke has banished Rosalind on the pain of death.

All of the performances from this solid ensemble—especially David Nelson as the fool, Touchstone—are well executed. Shakespeare's fools have some of the more difficult language to convey to a contemporary audience, but Nelson gives the lines as much clarity as possible while keeping their mirth. My only complaint is that Sarah Schmitz does speed through some of Rosalind's wordier speeches a little unclearly, but at other moments she proves herself a more than capable actress. It's particularly interesting to watch how she offers an emotional approach to the practical, clever Rosalind, as opposed to Jessica Angleskhan's more calculated turn as the less cunning Celia. And Sean Logan hits just the right note as Orlando—motivated not only by lovesickness but also by a sense of scorned entitlement.

Costume designer Jessa-Raye Court has clad the actors in costumes reminiscent of recent Jane Austen films. More than any of the show's other elements, the costumes' pastels and whites hold the play's pastoral world together. For different performances, the show rotates through different theaters within the Producers' Club, so letting the costumes (which are more movable than the set) set the production's easy, genuine tone was clever.

The set pieces—rustic patio furniture, a wooden bench around a tree from which a netting of leaves protrudes, even a swing—are easily moved, however. Though Anderson uses the space as best she can, making use of multiple exits and having the actors physically break the fourth wall at appropriate moments, such a well-mounted production really deserves a bigger stage than the one it had on opening night. It's just too small for the larger cast scenes, when there are more than a few actors onstage. At least one of them seemed to get mashed up next to the theater's fire extinguisher.

Still, the players do an admirable job of tackling the play through to the finish, especially considering the amount of time the script spends winding things down and tying up loose ends. This production is rigorous in its approach to the text—enough for the Shakespeare aficionado—and sufficiently welcoming for those who may be a little less familiar with the play.

Bard Parody

It's the end of the first act of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), and the trio of actors in Phare Play Productions's energetic and very, very funny performance—Michael Climek, Ben Klier, and Scott Morales—cheerfully congratulate themselves on having completed all 37 of Shakespeare's plays. But, as they double-check the program, the three are struck with a visible panic at what they have skipped—and though I have never seen the play before, I know exactly what's coming. How could any Shakespeare parody be complete without poking fun at Hamlet—or, according to Complete Works (and everyone else, apparently), "the greatest play ever written"?

That's the thing that makes this play tick. The reverence we give to Shakespeare can literally make audience members, performers, and literature students nervous. This hyper-paced comedy doesn't get its manic energy just from affectionately making fun of Shakespeare's plays—it runs as well on making fun of the frenzy he sends people into.

Complete Works, originally performed and still linked to the Reduced Shakespeare Company, sprints through abbreviated comic versions of the Bard's plays using only three male actors. With few props and no set to speak of—other than an intentionally fake white curtain—the actors, who address each other with their real names, alternate between joviality, hammy smugness, and a jittery, nervous panic. Appropriately, one of them plays a Shakespearian "scholar" who can't keep anything straight. They sail through the comedies, but find much more to laugh at in the tragedies (a full-scale rap on Othello is particularly noteworthy). The second act is entirely devoted to Hamlet.

While I wouldn't necessarily say that familiarity with Shakespeare is a prerequisite for enjoying the show—there is much flat-out improvisation and physical comedy from the actors—I do think it helps. My favorite scene, a well-executed Titus Andronicus in the context of a cooking show, might not be quite as funny to someone who wasn't familiar with the plot's cannibalistic bent.

The production is pretty low-budget, but by and large it works. One of the things that makes it so much fun is that the actors clearly revel in the material. That they're enjoying themselves so much allows the audience to do so as well. Bounding across the stage in sneakers and tights, they give an energetic performance that borders on the acrobatic, sometimes with a volume too loud for the Lodestar Theater space.

But they're also a tight trio—the speeches given in unison are well executed enough to give the production some polish. In one particular scene—and whether this is due to the actors' chops or to a sharp sensibility on director Christine Vinh's part, I can't say for sure—Scott Morales gives a thoughtful, intimate monologue enhanced by the other two watching him in respectful silence. And although it's, of course, a setup for a gag, it's affecting enough to suggest that these guys know how to do more than just goof off. (And goofing off well is a lot of work too.)

The three are decent improvisers; they've added plenty of their own material, some of which is pulled out of recent headlines and pop culture (one of them got in a Don Imus reference) and some of which comes from playing off the audience's responses. If audience participation is not to your taste, this is probably not the best show for you. These three are pretty aggressive about including the audience members in the performance, and they sometimes single people out.

The cross-dressing gags do get old pretty fast, and there's certainly more than a few moments that get lost in the unceasing frenzy. But if you're looking for a competent production that will make you laugh, you'll find it here.

Desperate Housewives

With any Shakespeare play, it's always a puzzle deciding what do with those legions of extra "guys." In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Lion Theater, director Brad Fryman has cleverly solved the problem of these companions and hangers-on: he's turned them into a guitar-strumming, Hawaiian print shirt wearing, West Coast-style knit hat sporting, rock 'n' roll entourage, and it made perfect sense. Long after the evening was over, I was still thinking that he had it pegged exactly: they're groupies, of course. What else? But the entire production is not nearly so well executed. In fact, much of this light comedy comes off flat. In the play, Falstaff (described on the Oberon Theater Ensemble's Web site as a rock 'n' roll producer past his prime) decides to simultaneously pursue two married women, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford of Windsor, with an eye toward their pocketbooks. The women are infuriated by his love letters and collude to exact revenge upon him.

In the process, Mistress Ford hopes to teach her jealous husband a lesson, and two of Falstaff's disgruntled cronies decide to tell the husbands that he is courting their wives. Meanwhile, Mistress Page's daughter, Anne, is pursued by several men, although the one she wants does not have the blessing of either of her parents.

Having solved the groupies problem, the Oberon took on the next hurdle, the big one in any contemporary Shakespeare production: the language—both for the actors who have to wrestle with it and the director who must convince a potentially skeptical audience that a seemingly foreign tongue has meaning to them. Overall, the actors have a good handle on the words; some of them are clearly experienced with Shakespeare and give able performances, particularly Fryman as Falstaff, Walter Brandes as Master Ford, and Kate Ross as Mistress Page.

Beyond that, this production seems to be trying really hard to convince us that Merry Wives is not a scary play. "But those thee's and thou's I find need better translation. So welcome all to Windsor … Windsor 2006," sings Bardolph, played by Mickey Zetts, who is also the show's composer/lyricist.

But having the wives sport boots and jeans doesn't automatically translate the text for modern ears. The production succeeds at not being intimidating, but it never gels. In particular, the dialogue is sometimes emphasized (or not) in odd places. At one point, one of the men jumps up to declare that Mistress Quickly—a busy flirt/personal assistant type with hipster glasses and a hot pink skirt—is the "prize," suggesting a plot complication that never materializes. Emphasis in key places might have helped to decode the plot a bit more.

Though the production is peppered with good comic ideas—like running accent gags, and Mistress Ford getting kissed by every man in Windsor—good ideas they remain. The play and individual gags are executed too slowly to be funny in practice. And while Zetts's lyrics sometimes serve the play well—particularly as an inexpensive set change ("Another field/Near Frogmore/A totally different field than before")—such songs as "Cuckold" seem unnecessary and slow the action down even more.

The music's relatively laid-back tempo doesn't help the production's pace either. That isn't to say that there is no way this could have worked—if the world of Windsor had seemed a bit sad and stagnant, a bit of slowness might have made sense. But the faces of the merry wives brim with laughter, and the press release from Oberon, which is also producing <a href= http://offoffonline.com/reviews.php?id=974 Sweet Love Adieu in repertory with Merry Wives, says the group was looking for something joyful and celebratory to do.

Although Fryman gives a strong, ribald performance as Falstaff, it would have been wise if he had chosen between acting and directing. The production could have used another set of eyes on it, from start to finish. In fact, one of the show's problems is that Falstaff comes off like the victim of a vicious trick, as opposed to his own folly. Watching his reaction, I felt more sorry for him than anything else. It could be that the lack of comedic pacing offers a little too much time to think, or perhaps a world like Windsor can't be as easily transplanted to today as the show's creators had hoped.

By the end, the wives' machinations seem more cruel than merry. And when, at the play's end, Zetts sings that "Windsor's like any place you ever knew," it seemed a little forced. The only contemporary women I can think of who have so much time on their hands are in sitcoms and evening soaps. Where else could a woman be so desperately bored that she spends her time seeking revenge on a conniving fortune seeker whom she has already found out, rather than just ignoring him?

Bewitched

With any show described as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, the audience is likely to know from the beginning what the end will be: sad. Howard Richardson and William Berney's Dark of the Moon, set in 1920's Appalachia, is no exception. The story is an intense spiral of melancholy, yet there's much to appreciate, and even some musical good cheer, in Phare Play's production at the Lodestar Theater. After all, if you already know the ending, you're free to just experience the play as it occurs—in this case, the experience is defined most by a strongly evocative sense of place. Between the setting, the Appalachian dialect, and the communal sensibility of the large cast, you might forget you're in a theater in Midtown.

At the start of the play, the witch boy John begs Conjur Man and Conjur Woman to make him human so he can court the free-spirited Barbara Allen. A deal is struck under the condition that Barbara Allen must remain faithful for a year—otherwise, John will once again become a witch.

Kevin Sebastian as John and Emily Mostyn-Brown as Barbara Allen do seem to have a magnetic attraction, and Barbara Allen's parents are mostly relieved to marry off their already pregnant daughter. But Barbara Allen's latest steady, Marvin, is not happy to be outdone by the physically smaller, though charismatic, John. (A tableau showing the two men's heights is visually one of the play's best moments.) As a result, Marvin is left wanting revenge. When the townspeople peg John for a witch—and John's former witch companions, jealous of Barbara Allen, make a bargain of their own with Conjur Man—the couple's fortunes begin to unravel.

The setting is carved out of a mountain—a backdrop painted a shimmering brown, with a couple of sparse trees, meant to portray a rural North Carolina town. And though it's not a musical in the traditional sense, there are bluegrass and folk gospel tunes sprinkled throughout the production. Director Blake Bradford smartly uses the musical numbers as a natural part of the villagers' lives, and bluegrass songs that the villagers use to pass the time are often more spiritual than some of the gospel hymns.

The instrumentals—down to the washboard and mandolin—are well played. Several cast members are in fact bluegrass musicians, and most of the vestiges of typical musical-theater voices are stamped out in favor of a folk/mountain music sound. By the end of the play, even some of the dialogue erupts in rhythmic choral chanting, a logical progression for this churchgoing community that tends to walk in step.

The dialogue suggests that it's a sense of freedom that makes the witches different from the humans, in both good and bad qualities—and that being a witch is spiritually easier. But the seemingly stunted movements of the witches, who drag their bodies across the stage, can be almost hard to watch, and they belie any suggestion of freedom. A later scene, where the witches move together fleetly, makes more sense.

The production is in some ways a little rough around the edges, and it's difficult not to wonder about some of the leaps in logic in the text itself. Why can Marvin beat up John, though John was previously able to level him with one hand? And to a modern audience, part of the resolution is actually a bit appalling.

Yet there's certainly a visceral, atmospheric appeal to Dark of the Moon that has a strong pull. I left wondering if John had indeed bewitched Barbara Allen, as the town people wondered. Or if, like the storytelling that wins Desdemona's heart in Othello, such star-crossed love is a spell in itself.

Canterbury Tales

If you've been pining for a really well-written contemporary script and you've yet to encounter Moira Buffini's Silence, do yourself a favor and catch the Roundtable Ensemble's production—performed in rep with The Mammy Project and The Taming of the Shrew—at the American Theater of Actors's Chernuchin Theater. In this case, "contemporary script" means there's a medieval England setting, replete with the threat of Viking raids, a clash of pagan and Catholic ideals, a journey by cart, and a character based on a strong royal woman who lived in England prior to Queen Elizabeth. (That's right, there were royal women of note in Europe before Elizabeth.)

But don't be scared off by the remote setting. First of all, without a modern context—which this production punctuates in transitions featuring rock music by composer Jonathan Sanborn—for comparison, the dialogue wouldn't make much sense. "One day, maybe not for a hundred years, maybe not for two, all women will be driving loaded carts up hills. That's my dream," says one of the play's protagonists, Ymma of Normandy.

Ymma (Kelly Hutchinson), the daughter of a saint and a woman of fiery, if righteous, rage, is sent by her brother to England to be punished for an unnamed crime, at the discretion of King Ethelrod (Joe Plummer). To her fury, Ethelrod marries her off to a 14-year-old Viking king, Lord Silence of Cumbria (Makela Spielman). But the marriage has, in more than one way, surprising results. The two become fast friends, and Ymma embraces her future in Cumbria, bound to Silence.

Meanwhile, the once wavering and effete Ethelrod becomes convinced by a dream that he should have married Ymma himself. He then pursues the traveling party—Ymma; her long-suffering lady in waiting, Agnes (Helen Coxe); Silence; Roger, a priest (Greg Hildreth); and Ethelrod's warrior servant, Eadrik (Chris Kipiniak)—to Cumbria.

It's surely no accident on Buffini's part that for much of the play the characters embark on a journey away from Canterbury toward a pagan land, a reversal of the pilgrims' travels in The Canterbury Tales. Along the way, love triangles abound, and the play covers a broad spectrum of topics, some of which are emblematic of a world on the brink of change: ruthless ambition, rape, violence, and gender definitions. The players move through the story in the aptly gymnasium-like Chernuchin Theater, which is marked by several precise scrims lit with green light and patterned with forest branches, and also makes use of a broad balcony.

The text is bookmarked by narrative soliloquies that let the audience easily navigate the plot. If you normally have trouble following the sensibilities of modern epic writers, this production may be a way of enjoying a text with such sprawling subject matter. While taking on rather serious topics, Buffini ably rolls out the one-liners, and director Suzanne Agins gets comedic timing from the cast in even the most unexpected places. As the priest, Hildreth earns a laugh just from introducing himself.

Agins also gets a well-executed and energetic performance out of her players. Chris Kipiniak as the reticent giant Eadrik gives the impression that he is either a dumb brute or the very definition of "still waters run deep." But Hutchinson, although regal enough as Ymma, dashes through her lines; Agins would have done well to slow her down. Perhaps because of the text, the production is not nearly as satisfying once the journey winds down and the travelers reach Cumbria. There's not too much to be learned about these characters after the play's halfway point.

As the travelers come upon a wide and open meadow, the priest cowers at the uncharted territory—and, no doubt, at an uncertain future. Agnes urges him to focus on the meadow's details instead of becoming overwhelmed by its vastness. As they cover a wide range of topics, fleshing out the particulars, both the script and this production follow her good advice.

Tuna Wars

If you're in the audience at Laughing Wild, chances are, at some point you will do just that. It would be nearly impossible, when confronted with the jumble of intensely witty insights and one-liners—and playwright Christopher Durang's overall glorious absurdity—not to find something to laugh at in this 1987 play, as well as something to think about. The Infant of Prague, Sally Jessy Raphael, and an insanely large and metaphorical can of tuna all make appearances in Green Sea Theater's production at Under St. Marks. The considerable problem this production faces is trying to execute the script's ambitiousness. It's not just that the play straddles the line between political commentary and social satire, but that the structure itself—particularly the first two acts—is tough to carry out. Those acts are made up of two long monologues—one by the Woman and one by the Man—called "Laughing Wild" and "Seeking Wild," respectively. They're long enough to be essentially one-man shows, and keeping an audience's attention for such a long time is a complicated responsibility, even for a very strong actor. A performer has to be completely captivating to pull it off.

In the midst of her stream-of-consciousness speech, the Woman explains to the audience how she hit a man over the head after she was unable to ask him to stop blocking a can of tuna at the supermarket. In classic "me generation" form, she then promptly left for the art museum because she needed to be surrounded by culture instead of tuna. Maddalena V. Maresca is clearly a talented actress, but her deft changeability—from one line to another, she's practically a chameleon at times—and earnest attempts to map the ups and downs of a somewhat crazy person's speech aren't enough to make her monologue entirely entertaining.

Oddly enough, although her performance is perhaps more vigorous than Jimmy Smith's as the Man (Smith also directed the play), his more realistic, nervous quirkiness is ultimately more compelling. (It helps that he has some of the funnier lines.) The Man tries to share positive aphorisms from a recent, and ultimately unsuccessful, personality improvement program. Yet he seems increasingly frustrated with his inability to understand the social climate he's living in (and therefore relate to others), particularly the public and political statements about AIDS and homosexuality.

His best lines are zingers that come from his personal musings: "God is silent on the Holocaust, but he involves himself in the Tony Awards? It doesn't seem very likely." His frustration with trying to understand those around him leads him to reveal how he was hit over the head by a woman (the Woman) in the supermarket, an act he says he can't understand. Although many of the ideas presented in the two acts are interesting and momentarily funny, the presentation ends up being a little boring.

In the third act, "Dreaming Wild," the two characters are physically brought together in overlapping dreams, and the act attempts to exorcise their inability to understand each other and communicate. The play does pick up quite a bit at this point. But neither the physical energy, including a supermarket cart fight, nor the great deal of attention given to the lighting and costumes is enough to reverse the first two acts' lackluster outcomes. (One of the Woman's costumes has a wacky 80's motif—an oversized yellow-and-black print top. The Man, when dressed as the Infant of Prague—a Czechoslovakian statue of Jesus—is decked out in a white gown.)

At first, the ambiguity of an unadorned black-box stage makes sense, and the show was probably under-designed intentionally. After all, the setting is undefined and the characters are themselves lost, but giving them a tangible place might have helped to guide the audience's focus.

Yet even without a defined sense of physical place, the time is undeniably the 1980's. The press release declares that the play is a "visceral response to period ideas from Ronald Reagan to Diana Ross." When the Man tries to comprehend the idea that people think God would decide that those who get AIDS will be homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin addicts, we see it as a completely inadequate summation, given the widespread, international decimation the disease has caused.

As for the "culture wars" themselves—of which the Man is in the crossfire—I realized, while watching this play, that I wasn't sure who had won. Although the Man refers to a 1986 Supreme Court decision on homosexuality that was overturned in 2003, the controversy over gay marriage certainly hasn't been settled.

Because the play's time period is still recent, this production offers an unusual opportunity, not so much to see the parallels with today's politics but to understand how we're still living with the political legacy of the 80's.

Women on Strike

It got off to a slowly paced start, but The Happiest Girl in the World crept up on me. A few scenes into this production by the Medicine Show Theater, I was surprised to suddenly find myself charmed. For one thing, the title song, which is reprised more than once, is so melodic, wistful, and poignant in its context that it is still turning in my head—not surprising, since lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg co-wrote a classic song with those same qualities, "Over the Rainbow." In Happiest Girl, Harburg's lyrics accompany music by the 19th-century composer Jacques Offenbach, a pioneer in the development of operetta. The instrumental score is performed mostly by one piano, so there is an emphasis on choral harmony, and the combination of operetta, show-tune camp and wit, and romantic crooning makes for a pleasant and varied musical evening.

Based on Aristophanes's antiwar play Lysistrata, the musical is receiving a rare revival since its premiere in 1961. Director Barbara Vann has combined two existing drafts—the libretto is by Fred Saidy and Henry Mayers—and added some text from the original Lysistrata as well as some of her own.

At the start of the play, Lysistrata (Sarah Engelke), the wife of the Athenian general Kinesias (Samuel Perwin), is weary of the wars that keep taking her husband away. She is enlisted by the goddess of chastity, Diana (Nique Haggerty), to lead the women of Athens in a "no peace no love" campaign in which they refuse to sleep with their husbands until they forsake war. Meanwhile, the women of Sparta, who are the wives of the opposing warriors, are doing the same.

Trouble ensues (this is a musical comedy) when Diana's Uncle Pluto, ruler of the underworld, balks at the notion of a harmonious world, and when Diana's inexperience with love threatens to thwart the plan—and inspires the comedic number "Never Trust a Virgin." Nique Haggerty as Diana is naïve but well meaning, an adorable nymph with a soprano that particularly brings out the classical quality of Offenbach's music.

Engelke has a lovely voice, too—more in a musical theater style. She's an engaging Lysistrata, radiating grace and resolve. As her husband, Samuel Perwin certainly has a beautiful and strong singing voice and the poise of a soldier, but he doesn't match the intelligent demeanor of his wife—although maybe that's the point. When he tells Lysistrata that her lips are "for a lovelier purpose" than speaking her mind, I had to wonder if he had ever met his wife. Mark J. Dempsey as Pluto is a pleasantly understated and thoughtful incarnation of a roguish devil, as opposed to a mean-spirited one. He's calculating instead of evil.

Where the production has trouble is in its tendency toward disorganization and too many choices. While the cast is quite solid, there was much that was unfocused and unclear. Vann's heavily populated stage, which holds bleachers, a marital bed, Greek columns, and a large cast undergoing multiple costume changes, lends the production a Dionysian chaos that, although fun at times, dilutes the story. When the gods are crowded in a pyramid shape on bleachers, it's a good idea but one that brings the action to the back of the stage for too long.

Then, too, Vann can't resist the temptation to overemphasize parallels that were already obvious. When one character says that the Athenians now have a slingshot that will be the end to all weapons, the line is pointed and hilarious. But when the Athenian women change their costumes to modern-day SWAT T-shirts while on the offensive, it seems to beat the parallel over the head.

But I can't dismiss the crowd and chaos altogether, because they do help to express one of the play's more poignant themes—holding on to peace and happiness when dangerous worldly forces threaten to take them away. As the Greek Marines keep marching in to bring him back to war—and away from his wife—Kinesias laments that he and Lysistrata are the only people on earth who need to be "rescued from the Marines."

Though there is a fair amount of bawdiness to the production, at its heart this is a story about trying to find a peaceful, safe corner of the world, a place to share your life with your loved ones.

Hammers and Chocolates

In The Quotable Assassin, the second play in Love, Death and Interior Decorating at Altered Stages, Simon Dubanev says he is "a man who believed not in himself but in a cause." But then, they say that the personal is political. Although The Quotable Assassin is concerned with the experience of a European revolutionary condemned to death, we never really learn too much about Simon's life before prison, other than he was a history teacher who killed the king. Like the evening's first one-act, Walls, the play actually unveils a romance complicated by its characters' inability to move past their psychological barriers. How much we're expected to consider these two works a complementary duet—the program describes them as "an evening of two distantly related one-acts by Keith Boynton"—I'm not sure. Halfway through Walls, Gail, who is renovating her deceased, and much beloved, father's house, hangs a lamp that also lights the second play—which like its counterpart centers on one male and one female character. And there are some other parallels. But by the time The Quotable Assassin—an elegantly executed pearl of a play—was finished, I found myself wondering whether the first piece should have been included.

In Walls a house under construction—mostly consisting of blue walls and doorways, and one wall covered in the posters of Gail's childhood—is the setting where Gail, in a sharp, no-nonsense performance by Joan Kubicek, and her past love Carter (Mike LaVoie) are doing renovations. Despite having previously left without explanation, Carter earnestly proclaims that he loves her still. LaVoie grows into inhabiting his character, an impulsive, intellectual clown—"I like myself OK. But I enjoy myself immensely." Boynton, who also directs the play, smartly has the characters play the whole stage, squatting and sitting on the floor when there are no chairs, and tempering what is ultimately too much talking around the point.

Boynton, a recent college graduate, already displays a great ear for realistic, intelligent, and witty dialogue, and he occasionally locates real poignancy—is there anything as awkward as one person singing "Happy Birthday" alone from start to finish? But although Gail hands off pieces of paper to Carter as resolutely as if she were brandishing a weapon, the stakes just don't seem as high as the characters would have us believe. And while the ending is cleverly constructed, it's also a little too contrived to pack an emotional punch.

Unlike the contemporary Walls, The Quotable Assassin is a period piece set in a prison cell in a "fictional European nation." Not long after Lucia, the novelist who interviews Simon for research, first enters his cell—which is not much more than a bed—she tells him, "I intend to look very closely indeed. I intend to peel your soul like a grape, Mr. Dubanev, until every little vice and neurosis and secret grudge and infantile hope lies bare and dry before me like a prehistoric skeleton."

While the intricacies of Simon's soul are never really revealed to us, the play does show how the two characters understand each other. Simon tells Lucia that of all her novels, he particularly likes the one that "is really about you," and we know from the expression on her face that he has her pegged.

Though neither the script nor the direction is perfectly structured—the last two scenes seem to contradict each other too rapidly, and the text at times stretches itself too thin—it's ultimately a pleasure to watch. Director Sandra Boynton stages the piece quite gracefully (and for those of you parents or nannies, yes, this is the well-known children's author, and also the playwright's mother). Lucia's parade of costumes and the interludes of chanting choirs between scenes also bring an unlikely beauty to the stark setting.

Keith Boynton holds his own as Simon, but the production is most fortunate to have Roya Shanks, who gives a delightfully meticulous and vibrant performance as Lucia. Both characters turn out to be surprises in their own ways. In particular, Lucia proves herself to be more than the superior, sheltered novelist who hands Simon both a stay of execution and a box of chocolates as an incentive to let her interview him in their first meeting. In fact, she turns out to be near heroic in her persistent belief "in something finer than causes and movements." And the play is likable for the same reason.

It may seem strange to say that a young playwright navigates the world of a political assassin with more aplomb than the world of Walls's two twenty-somethings. But sometimes you need to step away from something, in time or location, to really see it clearly.

Written in the Air

Half the fun of New York is in raiding its pockets. On a Sunday night, you can walk through a curtain into a tiny black box like the Big Little Theater and see a sleekly designed bit of theatrical Americana like Seduced. The play, "back by popular demand," is part of the ongoing Sam Shepard festival, in which the company will produce all his plays in a multiyear festival through December 2007. Though it may have fewer resources than some, the Michael Chekhov Theater Company does a good job mining the imagistic possibilities in Shepard's play. The set design is fairly minimalist, as seems fitting for a story about a recluse who has cut off contact with the world of the living: there's a black recliner with a small table, two small palm trees, and an off-white floor. And while it's not a solution that would work for many plays, the striking coordination of the staging and the visual design goes a long way toward making director Richard Whiteman's production a cohesive whole—at one point, turquoise lights match a turquoise dress that matches a turquoise glass.

And sure, the lights are at times a little glaring and the volume of the actors' voices a little too loud for the space. But when a group of performers and a creative team put so much heart and forceful energy into a play, it makes it very easy to have a good time.

The lights first come up on an elderly man with overgrown nails and uncut hair. This is Henry Hackamore (Vance Clemente), a former airplane designer and tycoon—and a thinly veiled substitute for Howard Hughes. He is now a paranoid recluse whose unseen entourage moves him from hidden location to hidden location, for no apparent reason other than his insistence. Hackamore, in a confident, straightforward performance by Vance Clemente, is watched over attentively by his gun-toting bodyguard and servant Raul. Played by Michael Smith Rivera in a powerful portrayal, Raul rubs Hackamore's aching feet and patiently calms his paranoid fits.

To bring him something of the world he's shut out, the dying Hackamore has requested the presence of two women from his past. They are Luna, played by Amy Cassel-Taft with something intelligent and maybe a bit sympathetic underneath a taunting, coquettish veneer, and Miami, played by Jennifer Leigh, whose dialogue is often punctuated with movement. Not surprisingly, they can't deliver what he wants. When Miami embarks on a story about Las Vegas at Hackamore's request, it's immediately apparent that we're never going to hear the end of the tale. Hackamore also forces the two women into a verbal contract and insists that, instead of using ink, they sign it in the air—which was, after all, his domain.

Though the play is short enough that it doesn't drag excessively, there's too much stillness after the intermission. But then again, maybe that's the point. Air after all isn't an easy thing to possess—"Now try to see the space it's not consuming," Hackamore says early in the play to Raul, in discussing the positioning of a palm tree. But the intentionally undefined setting, combined with an assumption that we know whom this is about and when the story is happening, may make it a little hard to grasp for an audience today. It was particularly confusing when Miami said she hadn't been to Las Vegas since 1952. I couldn't help wondering—was that 10 years ago, 20, 54?

When Shepard wrote Seduced, Hughes had been dead for only three years. He certainly has his place in American mythology, and American mythology is still as intangible as ever. And yes, this is a play at least a little about American desire— "It would be great to fly over America in the daytime, though," says Raul. "Just once. Somewhere over Nevada." But I can't help thinking it may have been more powerful—or, at the very least, less abstract—when Hughes still had as strong a hold on the nation's imagination as he had when the play was first produced, in 1979. The Aviator not withstanding, I'm not really sure that people want to own this myth as ferociously as they did at the time.

For a play with more than a touch of the absurd, it's a surprisingly nuts and bolts production guided by the text and accentuated by the visuals. And it may have a particular appeal to those interested in seeing the range of Shepard's work and his place in American theater as a whole, which is why it's perfectly placed as part of a festival. There's an implicit invitation to come see more.

Brotherly Love

Footsteps and brandy bottles thump their way through The Brothers Karamazov, creating a rhythm of intimacy that might not have been easily accomplished in a space larger than the Mazer Theater. This quality combined with the musical choices and other sound effects forms a collectively effective soundtrack. The theater's intimacy also bolsters the production's other strong points. My first reaction to the set's wooden, muted tones was that I wanted to spend some time there, and because of the audience's proximity to the stage, I was able to. When the family members dine, we practically dine with them; when the brothers Alyosha (Nick Leshi), the monk, and Ivan (Joe Laureiro), the scholar, converse at a cafe, we are eavesdroppers. And when the third brother, Dmitri (Sean M. Grady), the free-living ex-soldier, tells Alyosha how he seduced his principled fiancée Katerina (Colette D'Antona), we are witness to both the riveting enacted flashback and the conspiratorial excitement with which he shares the tale.

It was during this scene that I began to be drawn into the story, but such moments in director Tal Aviezer's inspired theatricality unfortunately turned out to be an occasional occurrence in a nearly three-hour evening. Now if any play can merit the length of a Russian novel, it's probably one whose source material is literally a Russian novel. And it may be too much to expect that such a plotline could move quickly. But the length could have served to convey an epic piece in whose intricacies and detail an audience member becomes lost. Instead, it plods along, awkwardly paced and drowned in speeches. In the effort to cover every plot point and philosophical statement, the main ideas become diluted.

Certainly, the Red Monkey Theater Group has taken on an ambitious task. It could not have been easy to stage the complexities of this Dostoyevsky story, in which, after a long separation, the three Karamazov brothers are reunited, in part due to the plotting and whims of Feydor Karamazov (Mace Perlman), their lecherous, pleasure-seeking, alcoholic father—who also happens to be showering attentions on Grushenka (Angela Perri), the woman his son Dmitri loves.

As this happens, Ivan keeps a close watch on his mercurial father while contemplating leaving town again, and the elder monk, Father Zosima, tells a reluctant Alyosha that his proper place for the time being is outside the monastery and that he must re-enter his family's world. When the plot is exploded by a horrible, if apparently inevitable, crime, the characters are forced into a contemplation of the crime and their possible complicity in it.

Though almost all of the performances could have benefited from some shaping, the relationship between the brothers is conveyed nicely. The brothers have long lived apart, but when the rational Ivan—earnestly played by Joe Laureiro, declares resolutely that he loves his brother Alyosha, we know it to be true. Sean M. Grady exhibits the most range as Dmitri, a character who understands that he is in many ways a reflection of the father he despises. What is unfortunate is that while both Colette D'Antona and Angela Perri demonstrate crafted performances, they sometimes seem to be in a different play from the other characters.

The script, an adaptation by Carolyn J. Fuchs, could stand to be trimmed—at times it's repetitive and even contradictory. Some of these contradictions do have merit in offering clear glimpses into complex characters. When Feydor proclaims that "the Russian peasant needs beating" shortly after chastising the priests for living off the peasants' money, we see him for the empty, meanspirited person he is. And when Katerina says she loves Dmitri, though she knows he has treated her poorly, we know such things happen in life. But when, in an earlier scene, the same Katerina crassly demands, "Give me the money" immediately after having been described as both proud and delicate, it's just confusing. Such a line may work as irony in a novel, but it's a difficult problem for an actor to solve.

The director's notes in the program read, "The power of Dostoyevsky's words is such that they breach the barriers of time, language, and culture, straddling continental divides and over a hundred years of history, to, as Hamlet would say, 'hold the mirror up to nature.' " But it's not enough to have good intentions and strong source material. No doubt the story confronts pertinent modern issues about how to live, domestic crime, redemption, and the extent of familial bonds—and I respect the director for wanting to address them. I just would've liked to have seen myself in the mirror.