Ease on Down to Harlem Rep

"Ease on Down the Road," the courageous and determined Brooklyn girl Dorothy sings to the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion in this classic musical variation on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but the journey is anything but easy. As directed and choreographed by Keith Lee Grant for Harlem Repertory Theatre, this Wiz is characterized by synchronized dance routines, a very tricky doubling scene, and the juxtaposition between the reality of life in Dorothy's rough neighborhood and her uncompromising love for the family whom she's inadvertedly left behind there. It begins with a narrative dance piece which is both energetic and clearly told. At school, Dorothy escapes to elsewhere by covertly reading a book at her desk, while her teacher is distracted by the behaviour of more extroverted, less appreciative students. Outside, she walks into an ambush by an aggressive group of kids, and is saved only by the intervention of a kind but tough elderly woman, a double of the good witch Addaperle, whom she will soon encounter as soon as a Christmas Eve blizzard whisks her away to the Land of Oz. Will she find the self-determination and self-confidence to get herself and her newfound friends Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion to the Wiz, who will solve all their problems, allegedly? Will she find the courage to go home, despite the temptations of the Emerald City?

The Wiz was performed in New York a short while ago by a different company, and many theatregoers will also remember the iconic performances of Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Lena Horne in the film version. Still, Harlem Rep offers a creative interpretation that's worth seeing even if you've memorized all the songs. The yellow brick road runs through the audience, making us all citizens of the weird otherworld of Oz. The dancers representing the snow and wind, who carry Dorothy off to Oz, are entrancing, especially the young man whose duet with her dominates that number. Jimmie Mike, a veteran of the national tour of Miss Saigon, plays the Lion (early in the show) and The Wiz later with tons of charisma and a sharp satire of both egotistical stars and religious leaders who promise more than they can deliver. City College theatre student and Brooklyn High School of the Arts graduate Danyel K. Fulton as Dorothy is a brilliant young performer who makes Dorothy a convincing modern teenager without ever being precious or losing the fairytale sensibility of the piece. Both can sing: Fulton is a fantastic, strong, confident belter. It is clear why both were nominated for AUDELCO Awards for their previous performances at Harlem Rep.

This is why it's disappointing that when The Wiz first appears, Mike is replaced as the Lion by a second, uncredited performer, whose performance is less specific and compelling (and is also quite a bit shorter than Mike, and whose facial hair, noticeably unlike his, is painted on.) It would have really been better for one actor to play the Lion all the way through, unless doubling within roles is used more consistently across the cast, and for a good thematic reason.

Less strong than Mike and Fulton is Roderick Warner's Tin Man, who wasn't always audible over the pit band and didn't move as if he had mechanical joints. The Scarecrow (Eric Myles) is a winsome, exuberant guy whose friendship with Dorothy tugs at the audience to beg her to stay in Oz. Doubling as good and evil witches, Alexandra Bernard shows versatility, but her most memorable moment is her beautiful, full-voiced solo as Auntie Em, "The Feeling We Once Had."

Natalya Peguero's costume design and Kaitlyn Mulligan's set are very hit-or-miss. The Scarecrow's straw mohawk is a great idea, as is putting bad witch Evillene in a business suit and making her lair the boardroom of AIG ("no bad news!" Evillene shrieks at her winged goons.) Less inspired is a plastic lion nose that looks like a store-bought Halloween costume and large painted flats reminiscent of school plays.

All but the youngest spectators will know how the story of The Wiz turns out, but Harlem Rep's production emphasises the reason why this fairy tale matters. Written in the nineteenth-century midwest by Lyman Frank Baum, son-in-law of an early American feminist and Seneca Falls signatory Matilda Jocelyn Gage, the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shows an American girl finding courage and principles without losing sight of home, family, and love. As updated in 1975 by Charlie Small (music and lyrics) and William F. Brown (book) to an African-American, urban 1970s context, with Dorothy a Harlem schoolteacher, The Wiz gains new resonance. It is also far truer to Baum's intentions - and his plot - than the saccharine 1939 film version. Here, Dorothy demonstrates the scepticism of fatalist dominant narratives that allows her to overcome Oz's absurdities. When the Tin Man explains - as in Baum's book but not the film - that he turned into a tin man because his axe kept chopping off parts of his body, which he replaced with machines, Dorothy opines that he should have gotten rid of the faulty axe.

When the Gatekeeper of the Emerald City won't let the foursome in the front door to see the Wiz, Oz appears to have its own civil rights issues to overcome, sadly not dissimilar from those which President Obama has recently tried to smooth over with beers in the White House back yard. So head to Harlem Rep for a wonderful escape from America - and a good hard glance, through the looking glass, back home.

Happy Birthday, Cabaret Cataplexy

Last Monday evening was the fifth anniversary of Cabaret Cataplexy, an evening of "performance art, costume design, and music within a community of emerging and evolving artists in order to explore the cutting edge ideas that inform their work," performed on the fourth Monday of every month in the Lower East Side's Slipper Room and curated by performance artists Monstah Black and Ashley Brockington. Having survived for five years, one of them a dangerous pit of recession, Cabaret Cataplexy could reasonably be called a New York performance institution. Monday's line-up consisted of music, comedy and burlesque by an admirably multi-ethnic and often genderqueer group of performers. This reviewer's knowledge of burlesque is rather limited outside of its depiction in narrative theatre and film, but it seemed as if the six acts that performed on Sunday night ranged from the professional and genuinely creative to the opposite of both. For a series which introduces new artists and promises entertainment to loyal patrons, perhaps that is a good thing. No act seemed particularly "cutting edge," but some were entertaining or thought-provoking.

Cabaret Cataplexy is emcee'd by Ms. Brockington, appearing Monday night in a black silk top hat and a sparkly bikini top and skirt, denoting both extremes of straight patriarchal burlesque's voyeur-spectacle spectrum, her electric pink St Marks' tourist stall style wig celebrating artifice. Brockington maintains a great rapport with the audience, chatting with members impromptu between acts and zinging effortlessly between topics you'd expect in a burlesque show and ones you wouldn't. "I need you to concentrate on your negro roots and think of Lucy," she enjoined at one point. When the audience participation wasn't inspiring, she compensated smoothly. When one guest replied to the question "what brought you here tonight?" with the answer "The bartender Malik's friend Johnny," Brockington replied "the bartender Malik's friend Johnny. If that's not six degrees of separation, I don't know what is."

What of the acts themselves? From the back of the room, where this reviewer was, it was often difficult to hear or see anything, which makes this review incomplete, and, as I have said, the lineup was uneven. Least interesting was a lap dance performed onstage, apparently to an audience member, by a woman who sang to said audience member whilst said audience member giggled and the audience echoed the giggles. A band called SupaHero Gogo Star (this reviewer thinks she heard) consisted of amateurish, hollering lead singers in tamely genderqueer costume, beautifully harmonizing backup vocals, and saxophone.

A duo performed a "live cooking show" in which they promised to conjure "a batch of young, cute, brown, effeminate boys" from a picnic basket if the viewers shake their house keys and proffer spare change. This group consisted of the male magician and an assistant performer in an awful Amy Winehouse beehive with a self-consciously-babyish-woman's voice, like the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Tilly on helium. If this was a parody of a woman, it was too close to common stereotype to be witty. During the incantatory dance, a banner reading "limp wristed fag" was unfurled and the performers mimed limp wrists and a homophobe's condemnatory scowl and finger wag. One act was absolutely unoriginal, cliched, and idiotic: "Cindy Silent," a man in a Catholic-schoolgirl plaid skirt and "Dirty Girl", a blond woman in a white dress, who performed with, and on, an inflatable sex doll, then paraded it through the audience to their exit.

One of the better performers, whose name this reviewer couldn't hear over the crowd, danced what appeared to be a conventional burlesque performance, like a mermaid, without a tail, but "swimming" in a tangle of blue and green diaphanous material, with seaweed-like string in her hair. Introduced by a pantomiming sailor-suited gawker, she soon divested herself of all her marine features, to the accompaniment of the song "I Just Want to be a Woman." The Little Mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen and Disney "just wanted to be a woman," too, but primarily in order to attract a prince. Conversely, Cataplexy's character appeared to adamantly claim her human dignity in her own right. That is an amazing plot for a burlesque act, one that critiques the ostensible reason for the medium's existence. If Cabaret Cataplexy features more acts like that one, it should go on for at least another five years.

Williams's Modest Craft

Tennessee Williams's best plays are known for their brutal emotional honesty. This was gleaned from his confrontations with his family, his society, and, always, with Thomas Lanier Williams, the complex flesh-blood-and-mind person who sometimes was able to escape into the role of the great American playwright. Then, sometime after the critical failure of his play Orpheus Descending Williams started taking talk therapy from the wrong kind of psychologist -- virtually the only kind licensed to practice in those days. Dr. Lawrence Kubie convinced Williams that his homosexuality was a disease that needed curing, and tried to "cure" it. Williams had the sense to quit seeing Kubie, but homophobic self-hated would haunt his characters for decades. Williams spiralled further downward after the catastrophically young death, from cancer, of his longtime lover Frank Merlo. Williams "seethes with something like self-hatred," a Time magazine reported in 1962.

The plays that followed these events are disappointing, somewhat disingenuous, and increasingly unbelievable, from Suddenly Last Summer, in which the homosexual tourist gets his alleged just deserts by becoming dessert for a crowd of malnourished third-world street children, to the 1972 comparative critical triumph Small Craft Warnings, which is now being revived at the WorkShop Theater by White Horse Theatre Company. Billed as the best of Williams's "later" plays, is it actually a good play?

That depends on what you mean by "good." Psychologically realistic it is not. The most obvious autobiographical figure, jaded, lonely, and intellectually overqualified gay screenplay-doctor Quentin personifies every stereotypical defect that the psychologists of Williams's day ascribed to aging gay men. He even compares gay sex to an addictive intravenous drug, and claims to seek sex only with straight hookers. When his latest underage (of course) pickup not only confesses to reciprocating his desire but also refuses payment, Quentin flees.

Then there are the women. Williams's women come in three varieties, which sometimes overlap: the hysterical, domineering, and ultimately powerless wingnut, based on his mother; the helpless, hapless, witless basket case, based on his mentally unsound and ultimately lobotomized sister Rose; and the various unbelievable women who stand in for gay men, including, sometimes, as autobiographical figures. The two women in Small Craft Warnings fit the pattern. Obese, overbearing beautician Leona is a mean drunk who keeps a cynical, crude gigolo in her trailer home and mourns morbidly and with entirely too much erotic interest for her "faggot" (Williams's word) brother, who died of what she claims was "pernicious anemia," which, in her delusional protestations, made him gay by decreasing his virility with his red blood cells. (Remember the obnoxious sister-in-law of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof who is always bragging about her "red-blooded" Neanderthal sons?)

Far more monstrous in her pit-bullishness and hypocrisy than Lucrezia Borgia and Sarah Palin combined, Leona is not a real woman: she isn't human enough. Leona's sometime surrogate daughter-figure, sometime sexual rival Violet is the Rose Williams type, a skinny, filthy, battered and homeless prostitute who spends most of the play crying in the toilet. The most interesting character of the bunch, de-licensed, negligently murderous obstetrician and abortionist Doc, is merely a one-dimensional shadow of a character from Williams's lost better phase: the destructive yet insightful defrocked priest T. Lawrence Shannon in The Night of the Iguana.

These people are an unconvincing cross-section of human society, but they're a pretty good weather map of the storms that, by 1972, were raging at gale force in Williams's mind, and, to some extent, in his often hateful society. If we see this distorted cast of characters as as a Cubist portrayal of Williams at his nadir, writing from the wrongnesses he imbibed from the lips of docs who should never have been licensed in the first place, they reveal something truthful, and horrific. The play is over two hours long, however, and the point is made by the end of Act One.

The characters, damned to their drinking and other destructive behaviours, cannot, for the most part, change, grow, or learn. Occasionally, a moment of sublimity happens when Leona plays a recording of Tschaikovsky's "Souvenir Melancolique" on the juke box: it was her brother's song, she recalls. Leona talks over the recording, and Williams's language dances with the music. The cast try to animate these thinly sketched people, but except for Linda S. Nelson, whose Leona is a masterpiece of stormy charisma, it's a Sisyphean task.

The title refers to a weather report: the storm-stirred seas off the California coast will be dangerous for small boats. Each of the people propping up the play's bar is a small craft, defined by their lonesomeness and vulnerability, but also their beauty. Every person, Williams was able to recognize, even through the haze of fear, bereavement, homophobic brainwashing, professional disappointment, and alcohol, is a "craft," invested with the beauty of Tschaikovsky's wordless "souvenir" ("memory.") Unfortunately, all these people are also clearly "crafted" in the obviousness -- unintentional on the author's part, apparently -- of their artificiality.

Neither Here Nor There

Female? Educated, with good genes, whatever that means? Age thirty-one or younger, a non-smoker, with no history of STDs and regular periods? You're in luck, young lady: you can find employment as a pregnancy surrogate! There will be a cycle of regular “blood draws” (yes, needles!) some travel, an invasive procedure and then of course the pregnancy, but it's a good way to make a life, and a living. Especially if you're broke. A quick Google search of the phrase “surrogate mother” throws up lots of clinics across America, from New York to Cincinnati to Portland, Oregon where women can give this gift to richer, less fecund women. In 2006, Oprah reported that increasing numbers of American women are exploring cheaper surrogates – the women of India. Screenwriter and playwright Jennifer Maisel saw that show and decided to write a play about the issue, There or Here. Maisel created Neera (played by Purva Bedi), a poor Indian woman who decides to put her body up for rent, and, later, starts rethinking the decision.

Unfortunately, Maisel also decided to limit Neera's scenes to a very few, give us zero insight into the character's thoughts, feelings, or struggles, and to focus her play on the self-centered, boring, and incoherently-rambling upper-class American woman who avails herself and her husband of Neera's gestational assistance. That decision weakens the potentially powerful concept --that decision, in combination with the play's many instances of bald exposition, psychologically improbable action, reduction of the complex subcontinental nation of India to a vaguely-depicted monocultural dystopia, and apparently purposeless nonlinear chronology.

Hypothethetical Productions's staging of the play, at the Fourteenth Street Y Theater, is made watchable by a few good actors. These are Bedi, playing, among her several roles, an Indian call center employee with an impressive range of facial reactions to her American callers' babbling rants; and Shalin Agarwal in the doubled roles of stoical, angry Indian cab driver Rajit and as Raj, a cheerful, pleased-to-serve Indian-American techie who is also the American mother-to-be's equally self-obsessed mother Ellen's (Judy Rosenblatt) improbable toyboy. Agarwal differentiates his two characters clearly, and is most expressive when his characters are silently watching and listening to the arguments of others. In these instances, his expressions and body language reveal more than the dialogue does.

Maisel's view of human nature often goes against the grain of observable life. The audience is expected to believe that the love of American couple Robyn (Annie Meisels) and Ajay (Alok Tewari) is worth saving, and makes it a shame that they haven't got kids with whom to share it. However, Robyn talks mainly about herself and her supposed needs. She and Ajay need a baby because Robyn has been diagnosed with cancer, so they'd better harvest the genetic material while they can -- without delaying the chemo, hence the surrogate. Ajay's hobbies include loudly declaring his total alienation from India -- where he was born -- in all but the genetic sense and buying phone sex from Indian sex workers at a call center.

Robyn also talks on the phone very often with a technical support worker at an Indian call center, who claims to be "Angelina" from "Tulsa." Angelina tolerates Robyn's use of her as a free psychoanalyst, best buddy, and general sounding board, even though it seems unlikely that this would not get found out and jeopardize Angelina's employment. Call workers do not generally have one-person offices, and, as anyone who has called a call center recently knows, "calls may be recorded for quality-assurance and/or training purposes."

Robyn and Ajay are so unsympathetic and one-dimensional, I did not care whether they got anything they wanted, be that babies, phone sex, marital bliss, a cancer-free life together, or all of the above.

Making everything worse is the play's oversimplified India. For example, the play uses two languages: each scene is subtitled in both. They are English, and, well... Hindi? This reviewer doesn't speak any of India's languages, but recalls that there are more than one.

There or Here tries to say a lot of insightful things about intercultural interactions, India's economic boom, American outsourcing of vital and not-so-vital jobs, commerce in human bodies and lives, motherhood and metaphysics, but Maisel never digs deeply into any of these. Consequently, There or Here is neither here nor there.

The First Irish Theatre Festival: More than Friel to Shaw You

How do you build a bridge linking Manhattan Island with the Emerald Isle, and, in New Yorkers' eyes, the Republic of Ireland with Northern Ireland? For George Heslin, the answer was simple: create an Irish theater festival. That festival, First Irish 2008, opened on September 6th, with most plays running for three weeks. With all tickets prices at $21 or less, First Irish 2008 is one bridge that's definitely worth crossing.

An Irish actor and director who first came to the United States in 1996, Heslin has been a full-time New Yorker since 2000. He is the Artistic Director of Off-Broadway's Origin Theatre Company, which produces American premieres of plays by contemporary European playwrights. In early 2008, Heslin decided that Origin should produce the city's first-ever festival of Irish Theater. Soon, First Irish 2008 had offers of productions from eight theatre companies. Heslin garnered the cooperation of New York's City Hall, the Consulate General of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Bureau, and even Irish President Mary McAleese. "I never heard a 'no,' and that is the truth," he said.

First Irish 2008's repertory ranges from the American premiere of Broadway veteran Conor MacPherson's 1992 work Rum and Vodka to Amanda Coogan's "tableau vivant" Yellow, about the unwed mothers sent to Ireland's Magdalen Laundries to repent their alleged sins. Origin's contribution is End of Lines, a series of five short plays by Irish playwrights inspired by journeys on the New York subway. The resulting snapshots of New York life, as understood by travellers from someplace else, glimmer with oblique glimpses of the travellers and the places from which they came.

One End of Lines playwright, Ursula Rani Sarma, pointed out that what excited her about the project is the 'inspire' part. There is a whole lot of time when artists try to find ideas, when we try to find out what we have to say about the world. That's okay, but in being brought here and told to wander round the subway, to find inspiration, I was being told, 'that's okay. You're not wasting time. You're being inspired. Surely, spectators of Sarma's play and its four companion pieces will agree that her random reconnaissance was time well spent.

According to one actress who appears in End of the Lines, Paula Nance, the project is exciting in part because it incorporates the work of three Irish playwrights who are women, including two from the North, Sarma and Nance's play's author, Morna Regan. "I've written a thesis on Irish women playwrights," Nance told me, "so this is very exciting. There are a lot of great female Irish playwrights, and they don't get as much exposure as they deserve." Rani-Sarma agreed. "I'm pleased by Origin's support of women playwrights," she said. "It's about being aware, about having an awareness. That's very progressive." Of Regan, author of the critically acclaimed Midden, which Origin stage-read in May 2008, Nance added "I love Regan's gift for creating intensely complex women who find themselves in extreme situations, but have maintained fire and humour, and her ability to balance her characters' points of view, to make us see both stories in every conversation."

In the past few years, Broadway has played host to several Irish playwrights, including Brian Friel (Translations), Martin MacDonough (The Pillowman) and Conor MacPherson, (The Seafarer), whose work is famously distinguished by its lyricism, or, as Irish actor Mark Noonan puts it, "that witty storytelling." At First Irish 2008, Noonan will perform MacPherson's early one-actor play Rum and Vodka, stepping into the shoes of one of MacPherson's storyteller-(anti)heroes. Why this play? "Rum & Vodka was the first play I ever read, back in 2002," Noonan recalls. "It was my first move into the world of theater and I actually I used a snippet of it to audition for the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin. It especially has value to me because of this." A departure point for Noonan, the piece also was for its author. "I think that Rum & Vodka is where Conor MacPherson first found his voice. I think it may be one of his best pieces of writing and in time will be an Irish classic." So when Heslin told Noonan about his idea of an Irish theatre festival in New York, Noonan said "that is genius, and I want to be a part of it." When not performing Rum and Vodka, Noonan wants to see "all" of the plays in the festival. "I'm a big fan of Gary Duggan"--one of the co-authors of End of the Lines, he added, "so I really want to see his work."

One critically acclaimed Irish playwright whom Origin introduced to American audiences is Enda Walsh, one winner of Ireland's prestigious Stuart Parker Award for first-produced-plays by emerging playwrights. Walsh's play The New Electric Ballroom was performed in New York earlier this year, and now, New York audiences can encounter more of Walsh's words at First Irish 2008, thanks to D.C.-based company Solas Nua. Who are Solas Nua? In 2004, Washington D.C.-based Linda Murray, who is originally from Dublin, noticed "a lack of representation for contemporary artists from her country in the US." With Dan Brick, she co-founded Solas Nua. According to National Public Radio, Solas Nua is "perhaps the only theater group in the country that produces nothing but contemporary Irish plays."

This company has since become D.C.'s second resident contemporary-Irish theatre company, along with the Keegan Theatre (which is also bringing a show, Liam Heylin'sLove, Peace, and Robbery, to First Irish 2008.) Besides producing Irish plays in the American capitol city, Solas Nua presents film festivals and literary events, including, says Brick, "a large book giveaway every St. Patrick's Day." Solas Nua started considering producing Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs after Murray saw the 1996 original production at the Triskel Arts Center in Cork. In 1995, Solas Nua produced it as their first-ever production. "It's exciting," Brick reflects, "that a new production of this play is our way of introducing ourselves to New York."

What is Disco Pigs about? "Two seventeen-year-olds on their birthday," Brick explains. "They were born at the same time, have grown up together and have created a separate world for themselves cut off from everyone to the point where they speak their own imagined language. In essence, the play is about entering life as an adult. One of the characters starts to realize that they can't exist in their own little bubble forever and the other doesn't. The tension comes as they start to experience different desires and thought processes." Walsh's plays are notable for their unpretentious lyricism, non-naturalistic conventions, and, as the London Times critic Brian Logan put it, "characters on the edge of madness." Brick agrees. "In fact," he says, "you could say that Disco Pigs is the play that defined Enda Walsh's style of writing. From this play forward, you can trace the claustrophobic environments and fierce language that recurs in all his other plays." When Heslin asked Solas Nua to bring a play to First Irish 2008, Brick and Murray "immediately got involved." While Brick is in town, he's looking forward to participating in First Irish 2008 not only as an artist, but also as a spectator. "I'd like to see the Canal Creedon Piece, When I Was God, he said, "and also catch some of the new plays written for the festival. And as I've performed Conor MacPherson's Rum and Vodka in the past, I'm interested in seeing that production, too."

If you'd like to hear more about contemporary Irish theater in America from the directors who bring it to life, First Irish 2008 will present a panel talk at the New York Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, with the kind assistance of Irish Rep, who have also donated to the festival much-needed rehearsal space. Don't miss the panel, titled Directing the Irish: From the Page to the Stage, on September 24th at six p.m.

As preparations for First Irish 2009 begin, which Irish and American theater companies will it showcase? Brick and Noonan, the two producers to whom I spoke, are already hoping to be back in New York at this time next year. "Of course we want to be part of First Irish 2009," Brick said, on behalf of Solas Nua. "If we're invited back, of course."

First Irish 2008's opening reception was held on Wednesday, September 3, at Mutual of America's Park Avenue offices. There, Norman Houston, Director of the British Northern Ireland Bureau, announced the news that the non-sectarian, non-governmental Independent Monitoring Commission has declared the IRA "no longer a threat to peace." Northern Ireland "isn't about conflict and division anymore," Houston said, "it's about creativity and energy. We're undergoing a renaissance." Theatre, one product of that creativity, is essential to building cross-cultural bridges, as it "helps us to challenge assumptions." Heslin agreed. "This festival is made up of individuals," he said, "and also groups, corporations -- and nations."

More Information:
First Irish 2008 Website: http://origintheatre.org/1stIrish

A Trivial City

Atomic City, a sixty-minute avant-garde performance art piece presently running at the LaMama Annex, is clever and certainly well-intentioned, but has nothing new to say; nothing challenging to ask. According to its publicity, Atomic City is a "tragic comedy." It is unclear why, as it elicits neither laughter -- through tears or otherwise -- nor shock and awe. Lacking in original insight or complex characterisation, this piece, by Fuerzabruta performer Jon Morris and Danish troupe Terra Nova, is merely smug and patronizing. The Atomic City looks very much like the world of Dr. Seuss's anti-proliferation classic The Butter Battle Book. Two groups of neighbors-cum-adversaries are divided by a wall. In this case, the wall is made of paper. As in The Butter Battle Book, as tensions between the groups mount, the wall gets taller. Soon, the characters risk being immured by their own fears.

Morris and Terra Nova have set up the Annex auditorium as an alley theatre. The two stands of seats face each other across the stage space. As the wall gets taller, it blocks each half-audience from seeing not only the actors on the other side, but the other half of the audience. Thus do walls, and conflicts, divide us and obscure our common humanity.

On each side of the wall lives a nuclear family. The paterfamilias of each is a white-coated scientist, a stock type in anti-proliferation parables from Dr Strangelove on backwards. At one point, the two scientists struggle to occupy the same white lab coat. They also have another point of contention: the pleasant, pecan-pie-baking, robotic-voiced, puff-skirted and aproned wife of one scientist has defied the wall to have an affair with the other. Her son notices, and is mad. The Narrator, who stands outside the wall, and provides both sides with increasingly large water guns, also notices and is faintly bemused.

On the sidelines, performers create nuclear missiles from pre-printed kits with crayons and tape. Evidently, in trying to protect the integrity of their nuclear families, and their own positions of sexual and social control, the nuclear scientists are going to destroy their families and the Atomic City.

On Atomic City's television gameshow, a red, white, and blue-dressed host invites contestants to participate in the "Final Termination," and invites the LaMama audience to welcome the guests who are so eager to play. He introduces one "Lisa Patterson, from Iowa," who "loves the smell of burnt rubber and anything on a stick!" How quaint and amusing those Red State Americans are, with their polluting cars, taste for unhealthy, cheap non-cosmopolitan food, and murderous drives toward "Final Termination." Surely we would never see any such thing in our more civilized parts, for example, Westchester County.

The show's political insight leaves something to be desired. "We want more walls," the publicity declares, "and less drama." In some situations, walls are stupid. The Berlin Wall and Lamar Alexander's idiotic plan to wall illegal immigrants out of the American southwest definitely are. Other walls, however, are more complicated. The Plaquemines wall in New Orleans is essential to keep out not people, but water. The very controversial Israeli wall traps and divides Palestinians, but also is arguably the logical consequence of attacks on Israeli civilians. Atomic City's platitudes about walls don't begin to address the questions that the building of real walls raise.

According to the publicity card, the Atomic City's "monumental" conflicts escalate from "trivial issues," such as, I suppose, the housewife's affair. This is disingenuous, as the issues that led to the real problem walls and to the carnage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are anything but trivial. It's a pity that, in Atomic City as in the Atomic City, those vital questions are never really explored.

Foreman's Bandwagon

Since 1967, the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, housed in the East Village's 200-year-old St. Mark's Church, has provided New Yorkers with regular doses of its founder's trademark cluttered-symbolist-folkloric-multimedia-Surrealism. They hysterically practice ontology—the study of the nature of existence itself, complete with trips through the collective subconscious and visual delights such as giant hummingbirds, alien seances, and model planes piloted by gangs of baby dolls. A good deal of this is provided by Foreman's productions of his own plays, but, as Artistic Director of the Ontological-Hysteric, he has also been broadening the tradition by inviting other, often emerging artists to try out his ideas, and their own, in the Ontological Incubator. The Incubator is a wonderful program, because, let's face it, not all theatre audiences like Foreman's plotless phantasmagorias straight up. Some, however, might be more open to Foremanesque performance if it has the semblance of a traditional narrative. The Incubator's latest presentation, The Brainium Brothers and Sons Theatrical Outfit's The Two Sisters, or Douglas Mery, Next to Nothing! (A Play About Witches Under Pressure), draws heavily on Foreman's bag of tricks, and his sumptuous visual style, but also follows a story, a Southern Gothic family drama centered on a pair of orphaned sister “witches” who tell fortunes from their pageant wagon.

The sisters are personifications of two of the modern age's most powerful inspiring daemons: religious and scientific curiosity. The resulting script, co-authored by Matt Cosper and director Anthony Cerrato, is a bit rough around the edges, and gets off to a slow start. It trades on some rather tired conventions, but is nevertheless enchanting, mainly for its visual style and smart, humanizing acting.

The older of the two witches, played by Melissa Miller as a gritty yet sultry pragmatist, possibly represents science; the younger (Tara McMullen) searches for her dead mother and is prone to fits of religious zeal. The two struggle to control each other until the arrival of a drifter (Aaron White) with a gunshot wound, the titular Douglas. At one point, he refers to himself as "Modern Man." Soon, this poor guy is entangled in the sisters' love-hate relationship, and seduced, tormented, and endangered by them.

The battle between science and religion, and the legend of "modern man" tormented by demoniacal abstractions symbolized by ruthless and hysterical “witches” isn't exactly avant-garde, but The Two Sisters, or Douglas Mery, Next to Nothing! is entertaining. There's a truly magical moment when the trio of characters are caught in the pageant-wagon in a storm, and an interesting divided-lady circus trick. Miller is a particularly gifted actress, showing her character's toughness, loneliness, and harsh love for her uncontrollable sister, whose beliefs and behaviour frighten her terribly.

Kaitlyn Mulligan's set is one of the most delightful and ambitious I've seen in awhile: a faded turquoise "gypsy wagon" with windows that open all sorts of ways, increasingly revealing more and more of its interior, with a skirt of dusty gold cloth, perched on a wilderness hill covered with the dust of the earth and ultimately revealing several holes with buried secrets. There are some incredible special effects that I really shouldn't describe in advance, heightened by Stephen Arnold's sublime and suspenseful lighting. Jason Sebastian's sound design effectively mixes modern influences with ominous noise and folksy tunes.

In the set design and blocking, the oddly-shaped space of the Ontological is ignored rather than treated as a challenge: one of the pillars holding up the ceiling bisects the set for no aesthetic reason, and this reviewer's view of a monologue was blocked because the actress stood immediately behind that pillar. Annie Simon's costumes are great, a combination of Depression-era South workaday clothes and bright, shiny, clashing motley of medieval jesters.

The Brainium get off some good lines and images. “You don't love me—you'd do what I say if you loved me,” the religious sister rants, like a petulant God. “Why is it that I've come here?” the man asks. “To dig,” he's told, and tossed a spade. To dig for what? Answers, or his grave? There are also moments in which the dialogue becomes pretentious and clichéd. “I do not desire the end of the world,” one of the witches cackles. “My desire is the end of the world!”

Other cliches are trotted out: “Frankenstein” and "Einstein" are often name-dropped; the sisters perform brain surgery, with the older, scientific one analyzing the man's brain and the younger, spiritual one trying to inscribe it by writing on a giant book.

When the man tries to find his stolen raccoon-fur hat—his symbolised true self—he is confused by identical hats appearing on the heads of both sisters at once. Which is authentic? Foreman's own plays tend to raise often original questions about the nature of consciousness, reality, and memory. The Two Sisters only rehashes an old feud.

In short, the script of this play needs a little further work, but the show is entertaining and eye-catching, with a fantastic central performance. Foreman fans in particular should not miss it.

Going for Baroque

What comedy divine from blank verse springsWhen Judith Shakespeare's fairest Comp'ny brings A play-in-mostly-verse, by Hagen, Paul Of Pope's Rape of the Lock, to that great hall Known as the Duo, in East Fourth Street fair! Through Pope's old words they've blown some fresh new air.

Here, Pope's the narrator, and matches wits With actors playing Lock, and pitches fits. His off-stage-left critique is first intrusive Declining, later on, into “abusive.” Pope's view of humankind's not optimistic, So in the flesh he's sadomasochistic.

They've cast as heroine Belinda (she Of threatened curl) one who in truth's a “he” (John Forkner.) Pope himself's played by a “she”: Miss Littlestone--Soul of Hilarity! Her Pope sneers--he's a misanthropic grouch-- Whilst Forkner's 'Linda lolls upon a couch Set in a set made decadently garish By cloth of gold worth half a wealthy parish.

(In keeping with a Judith Shakes tradition Some girls play boys; boys girls: for the position Of gender in this world is social -- learned. That's shown true when the roles are thus o'erturned.)

Paul Hagen's “Popish” language is delightful: His Seussic verse is comic and insightful. He vivisects the paranoid A. Pope Who with "improvisation" cannot cope. (When one bold actor adds to “nymph” an “-o” Repeatedly, it causes quite a row.)

Lock's play-within-a-play recounts the tale Of Goldilocks (Belinda), red-lipped, pale Who to her joy and horror, is pursued By one too-rakish, scissors-wielding, rude And popular (unfortunately) Baron (Played by Miss V. Morosco, who does dare one To think she's somehow channeling James Dean And Malkovich's Valmont: suave, and mean.)

With sharp tableaux Jane Titus smartly blocks The action well, engaging as she mocks Pope's vanities, and his renowned creation. Miss Darling's costumes show smart combination Of Pope's time's clothes and ours: gowns, frock coats, bows One pair of bluejeans, plus, perched on one nose A pair of plastic glasses. When the play Is mostly over, the actors suddenly break into a more realist prose style, gang up on Pope, and struggle for control of the story.

This twist is not exactly original: it reminded this reviewer of the scene in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods in which the disgruntled fairytale characters violently gang up on their smug, self-distanced Narrator. After Lock's coup de cast, the script goes on perhaps a few minutes too long.

Ultimately, however, The Rape of the Lock is a riotously fun evening, equally likely to amuse and provoke both the original poem's fans and critics, as well as the uncommitted and uninitiated. As The Rape of the Lock is the first full production derived from the Judith Shakespeare Company's Resurgence new adaptations development program, I look forward to encountering the next product.

A Giant Play for Little Spectators

Literally Alive Children's Theatre, based in the Players Theatre in the West Village, has been making a name for itself as a producer of low-tech, high-concept theatre for families with young children. Literally Alive's recent adaptation of The Little Mermaid garnered criticism that compared it positively to Disney's multimillion dollar stage version. Now, for their contribution to the First Irish 2008 festival of Irish theatre, Literally Alive's Michael Sgouros and Brenda Bell have unveiled an original adaptation of Irish writer Oscar Wilde's children's story "The Selfish Giant." The result is visually delightful, with spirited acting and some of the most creative audience-participation and attention-getting techniques I have seen in children's theatre. It also transparently reveals the challenge of adapting this Victorian Christian evangelical morality tale for a multi- or non-denominational modern audience.

An hour before each performance of The Selfish Giant, Literally Alive holds a free pre-show workshop, in which show puppet designer Julia Darden helps children to make shadow-puppets out of construction and crepe paper, up on the Players' stage. The puppets, shaped like flowers and snowflakes, are then used in that day's show.

The audience participation continues in the play's prologue, in which Todd Eric Hawkins, who will play the Selfish Giant, asks the children in the audience to guess "what you need to put on a play" ("Acting!" "Costumes!" "Lights!") and then introduces them to the company members who provide these elements. Hawkins identifies each of the actors and names their roles. This will be helpful later, when human performers represent birds, seasons, sleet and snow.

Then the story begins. The Selfish Giant does not want anyone else to play in his garden; even he doesn't play in it himself. He has made his rule clear, on a sign that reads "TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED." When the Giant goes off to visit his cousin in Cornwall, whom he doesn't much like, his beleaguered servant, Patrick (energetically played by Sal Delmonte), throws open the gates of the garden to the children of the neighboring village, which is as poor as the Giant is rich. (In the original story, Wilde explains that these children have nothing to play with except stones and dirt from their unpaved roads.)

When the Giant returns, he is furious, and replaces the cautionary sign with a stone wall. That keeps the kids out for good, but also drives away the birds, the flowers, and even Spring, causing it to be perpetual winter in Narnia. Or whatever country this is.

The triumph of Winter is one of the most captivating moments in the play. The season is represented by a dancer (Stefanie Smith) in a fluffy, floor-length white tiered skirt and a huge white hooded cloak that blows about her as she dances with partner in an ice-colored suit. He lifts her and spins and she flies, scattering snow and freezing air. The Giant is dismayed by Winter, but for the audience, she is a wonderful sight. The accompanying music, composed by Sgouros and performed by Sgouros, Laura Jordan, and Kristin Smith, has a lovely marimba part reminiscent of falling snow.

Then the story experiences some growing pains. Children sneak into the garden, and the Giant suddenly learns to like them -- especially one whom, he suspects, is an apparition of himself as a child. Why this change? He has learned that a garden kept selfishly apart from the world cannot bloom, and happily announces a goal to rediscover his inner child.

This is a bit odd for a play directed at the 3-10 set, who presumably have not yet lost their inner children because they are allowed to be children in the outer sense. However, in Wilde's story, the little boy who gives the Giant his attitude adjustment mysteriously has nail marks in his hands and feet. In Literally Alive's modernization, we will reach salvation by psychology and letting go of our grown-up seriousness, selfishness, and repression, an updated moral that's at least as silly as the original one.

To be fair, much Victorian-era European writing for children presents a fairly serious challenge to the modern adaptor. Most of it was intended to teach a few doctrinaire principles: that salvation after death is worth making sacrifices in life, that the rich should share their wealth with the poor through charity rather than through political reform or revolution, and that the prime example of both these principles may be found in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

From Hans Christian Andersen's original "Little Mermaid," who died for unrequited love but gained an immortal soul, to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva and Frances Hodgson Burnett's pantheon of rich, spoiled children who must learn humility and charity before regaining security, this is the formula. A few brilliant writers -- Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie -- broke the rules, compelling children in their stories and audiences to confront the complexities and absurdities of the real world. Oscar Wilde, in writing "The Selfish Giant," was no such rebel.

Despite this, "The Selfish Giant" has some redeeming qualities. Literally Alive deserves kudos for translating them for a new generation of theatregoers.

The Sounds of Silence

Contemporary Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse's Sa Ka La, now being produced by Oslo Elsewhere, has all the ingredients of a standard-issue domestic traumedy, from the estranged adult siblings and their significant others gathering for a birthday celebration, to an impending death in the family, to grudges, repression, and secrets itching to reveal themselves, including, of course, adultery. The recipe should be familiar to anyone who's seen the recent New York stagings of Crimes of the Heart, Festen, or The Clean House, or read the Washington Post's review of August: Osage County. Here we go again, this reviewer assumed, and settled to wait for the inevitable eleventh-hour confession of poverty-driven-stinginess, child abandonment, incest, or whatever. Then Fosse proved this assumption absolutely wrong.

As Henning (Frank Harts) and Johannes (Raymond McAnnally) wait for their wives--a pair of sisters (Birgit Huppuch and Marielle Heller)--and joint mother-in-law to arrive for the mother-in-law's sixtieth birthday party, another story unfolds on the same stage, which, in the world of the play, is a hospital room across their nameless city. The sisters' Mom has had a stroke, and her daughters are with her and a sympathetic but acerbic Nurse (Jacqueline Antaramian) at the hospital, waiting for their mysterious estranged brother (Noel Joseph Allain) to arrive. Meanwhile, everyone has failed to inform Henning, Johannes, and their friends (Anna Gutto and Mike Caban) that Mom's party has been called off, much less why. None of these people are much good at communication: the proliferation of mundane secrets, adulteries, and grudges demonstrates that. They remain in the dark partly because they prefer it to difficult knowledge; partly because the people who supposedly love them want them in the dark. Meanwhile, Mom, her muscles partially paralyzed, struggles to speak. The gibberish title phrase -- "Sa Ka La" -- is nearly all she is able to utter. Like the Ancient Mariner, she must communicate this truth -- whatever it means -- to someone in particular before she can find respite in death.

What does"Sa Ka La" mean? Nothing I can tell; maybe nothing Fosse knows, either. A dynamic, chillingly realistic actress, Kathryn Kates communicates the urgency of Mom's desire to communicate, without shedding any light on her message. Other questions remain unanswered as well, about details of the lives and conflicts of the sparsely drawn yet totally psychologically genuine characters. This is no accident. It is as if Samuel Beckett, the playwright of absolute minimalism, had convinced Fosse's fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, the master of realism, to agree to a collaboration. Fosse, translator-director Sarah Cameron Sunde, and a sharp, tightly-knit ensemble cast make the conflicts real, so the details take a back seat to the suspense, the tension, and the screams inside the silences.

Sunde's blocking increases the deliberately infuriating sense of missed communiques; of characters passing each other in the figurative night. Characters in both locations cross in front of each other. In one scene, a character in the party room and one in the hospital stand back to back, almost, but not quite touching.

Jo Winiarski's scenic design reveals the outlines of hospital room and party room at once. It consists of an unencumbered platform, a hospital bed, a tiny table bearing a birthday cake almost levitated by a bunch of bright blue-and-white balloons, and a wall of wide, tall glass windows. The ice-blue, grey, and white tones of the set also possibly suggest the icy shores of Norway, at least as this reviewer, never having seen those shores, imagines them. At the same time, the room could be anywhere. Jen Caprio's costumes, in matching shades of blue, gunmetal, white, and sunrise-orange, allow the characters to stand out against the sets while fitting in the overall color scheme.

The only area in which this play doesn't entirely work is the dialogue's repetitive inclusion of the word "yeah." The first few "yeahs," denoting affirmation, nonchalance, fear or boredom or helpless verbal litter, are fine. People talk like that, yeah. But then when you can, yeah, hear thirty seconds of yeah, dialogue, in which the word "yeah" is spoken, yeah, seven times--yeah, seven, yeah, it starts to sound like a gimmick. Like Mamet's first naturalistic, then overdone signature expletives. But that's a small glitch in an otherwise compelling production of a play that has taken too long to find an American audience. Far too long, yeah.

Fear and Trembling in Copenhagen

"Oh, this is awful," Abraham, dressed in faded robe and turban, tells his young son Isaac in Ellen Margolis's provocative and thoughtful play When It Stands Still. "Your mother will have my head for this." Later in the play, Sarah discovers the myth of Iphigenia, in which the father who sacrifices his child in compliance with divine demand is indeed murdered by the grieving mother. Why does Sarah tolerate Abraham in the Biblical version, and take revenge in the Greek? Why would people ever think fear useful or sacrifice necessary? Was Abraham crazy? Was his god? And what important details are left out of this traditional story? All these questions bothered the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. His attempt to answer them was his greatest work, the 1843 treatise "Fear and Trembling." In the New Testament, humanity is advised to "work out your sorrow with fear and trembling." In Margolis's play, produced by Toy Box Theatre Company at the Gene Frankel Theater, Abraham tries to put this advice into practice. At the same time, in another universe, so does the young Soren Kierkegaard. The result is not grace, but more suffering, radiating outward from Abraham and Kierkegaard into the lives of the people they claim to love.

Margolis's take on this subject is never preachy. Often, it's comedic. A scene in which Soren compels Regine to play Abraham to his Isaac, pulling his hair torturously before raising the sword, is funny in a squirm-humour way. "And so on," the ancient Sarah says, "chapter and verse" -- ages before the chapters and verses of the Jewish and Christian sacred texts were written. Margolis also has a way of stating a seemingly bland fact about the life of her beloved Kierkegaard, then turning it in a few words into a provocative insight. "The Danish philosopher loved to experiment with fear and obsession," we are told. "In that, he was like God."

Nuanced, emotionally hyperrealistic acting makes this idea-heavy script move quickly to the zenith of both Abraham's mountain and Kierkegaard's tragedy. As Kierkegaard, Toy Box co-Artistic Director David Michael Holmes screws up his face in comedic agony during a drive with Regine and rolls his eyes in annoyance at his crass, boorish patrician father. Lindsay Tanner competently portrays Regine. This character is somewhat under-written, conforming to the stereotype of the down-to-earth "sentimental" (Kierkegaard's word) woman with no interest in the realm of ideas, who just wants to be a perfect bourgeois wife with the angry genius as her equally conventional husband. Of course, it seems that the real Regine was like that. Tanner is great at seemingly silently, broodingly hurt.

As Abraham, Kierkegaard's father, and Mr. Olsen, Rich Zahn proves himself a versatile character actor. He keeps those three roles clearly differentiated, physically and vocally. A scene in which Zahn appears in a fake Medieval chronicle play of the Sacrifice of Isaac, complete with bad, stiff, acting, derives its humor from the contrast with the good, realistic acting of the whole cast throughout the rest of the play.

The set, designed by director Jason Shuler, is a dreamscape of sharp, geometric grey, black, and white hills, and Medieval pageantry: gold cloth, a pair of fluffy, puffy white wings suspended from the flies, a proscenium-within-a-proscenium and even a deliberately unconvincing wooden ram on wheels. Jennifer Paar's costumes perfectly evoke the play's two cultures -- nineteenth-century upper-class Copenhagen society and the imagined culture of the Old Testament world.

Lastly, live violin accompaniment composed and beautifully played by Leanne Darling, who is seated in a choir loft-like space above the actors, increases When It Stands Still's natural tension and poignancy. How often can you hear live incidental music Off-Broadway?

Go spend some time with Soren Kierkegaard, trapped in the moment when Abraham leads Isaac up that mountain. Trust me, it's far from a torturous experience. Except if you really think about it, as did Kierkegaard -- and Margolis and company.

Wrestling the Demon of Art

DADAnewyork's Brunch at the Luthers, the latest work by self-described "activist playwright" Misha Shulman, is a collection of "Dadaist" vignettes that purports "to explain the Western consciousness," whatever that is. According to the press release, said consciousness is "ruled by such surrealistic influences as Bush, Bin Laden, Trump, Hurricane Katrina, and the tragic situation in Africa." Because "what leads to wars is the strict adherence to logic," Shulman hopes to combat war with a Dadaist "assault on logic." Brunch at the Luthers starts somewhat promisingly with a quartet of actors, standing before music stands, chanting nonsense-words and nonsense-phrases in monotonous harmony, fascistically conducted by a man in a wig reminiscent of a signer of the Declaration of Independence or a British barrister. This would be better were the actors not conspicuously reading their lines from highlighted pages, or were the words less pretentious. "Wrestling a demon of art--Don't!" they bark.

In another piece, three women in bureaucratic suits investigate whether blood spilled on a floor is blood or water; how it got there; whose blood, if blood, it is, and whether it matters. Perhaps the terms reference Bin Laden's "your blood is blood and our blood is water" speech. Predictably, they don't discover how the blood -- if it is blood -- was indeed spilled, because they get distracted by semantics. This is the only real insight or intelligible idea that the play offers, but it's hardly original that bureaucracy can be deployed, deliberately or accidentally, to obscure atrocity. This piece is written by Normandy Raven Sherwood, also responsible for the set and costume design. Some of the other earlier vignettes were also authored by people other than Shulman.

Once we get to the main attraction, Shulman's depiction of a brunch party at the Luther household, a sense of deja vu sets in. Mr and Mrs Luther appear very similar to the M. and Mme. Martin (get it? Martin... Luther?) of Romanian Absurdist Eugene Ionesco's masterpiece The Bald Soprano, only much less entertaining.

Mr and Mrs Luther are preparing brunch for an acquaintance, "State Congressman" Mansfield, (a biologically female "undercover feminist" in a man's suit and necktie, identified by the playwright as "a riff on Hillary Clinton"), and Mansfield's "niece or nephew," Harlot Sierra O'Toul.

Ms or Mr O'Toul may or may not be coming to brunch, and is either an "erotic dancer" or an "exotic dancer." That "erotic" entertainment often gets billed as "exotic," or foreign, and vice versa is a good point, that might have been intriguingly explored at greater depth. The arrival of some guests, bearing gift bags containing decoy ducks and decorated with Hanukkah and Christmas imagery, calls into question the religion of the Luthers, and lets the audience know that symbols are to be distrusted and identities are unstable.

As the play meanders forward, cocoa is made, rubber duckies and feathers eaten, diners start quacking like ducks (after Ionesco's humans-turned-rhinoceri) and then O'Toul appears. Like Mansfield, she is a biological woman (apparently), with the poses and voice of a cross between 1950s fictional icons Betty Rizzo and Beebo Brinker. (The) Harlot does a garish, cross-eyed, ungainly "erotic/exotic" dance on an oriental carpet, suggesting the Jazz Age's "Salome dancers" who, while the causes for World War II materialized, capitalized of Jews, Muslims, "the Orient," sexuality, homosexuality, and women. Like King Herod -- arguably another Absurdist character, given his depiction in Wilde's Salome, Mr Luther gets noticeably hot and bothered. Then his wife and the other guests exclude him from the gathering, and the apartment, and form a conga circle themselves.

All of the actors except for Kroos, playing Mr Luther, speak in stiff, wooden voices and use body language that is exaggerated but lacks the discipline and clarity of intentional Expressionist-influenced acting, such as that seen in the work of Stephen Berkoff or, here in New York, Rabbit Hole Ensemble. The blocking is nonsensical: in one scene, actors stand directly in front of others who are talking.

This "activist" play does not shed any light on how "logic" causes wars. That is a shame, because I really wanted to find out how that works. The most infamous wars, it seems, are caused by a regime's own "assault on logic." In order to keep the wholly irrational institution of race-based slavery, pre-Civil-War American politicians had to rape the logic of the European Enlightenment philosophy that informs the Declaration of Independence in order to craft a Constitution where all men are created equal, but some are counted as only three-fifths of a person.

In the pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler crafted an entire belief system based on inherently illogical principles, then ruthlessly silenced or drove out almost everyone who tried to subject it to the cold fire of logic. World War II broke out because, after a good while of this and many millions of deaths, reason needed to be restored. Lastly, the Bush administration has failed to give a consistent logical explanation for having started the present war in Iraq. This is probably because they never had one.

To sum up, Brunch at the Luthers is a piece of self-indulgent pretentious rubbish. However, if you like Dada -- or, rather, Shulman's idea of Dada -- these words should not deter you from seeing it, because reason is oppressive, and language deceptive and meaningless.

Ex Machina, Into History

Everyone knows that film actors like to go on crusades, especially if they're unlikely to go down in history as brilliant actors. Brigitte Bardot tries to prevent the murder of animals, Charlton Heston campaigned to prevent the prevention of the murder of people, and 1940s screen siren Hedy Lamarr invented Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) to prevent the Nazis from winning World War II, and tried to get the US government to consider using it. Yes, really. If you want to learn the true story of how Lamarr invented FHSS, and what subsequently happened to her creation, Frequency Hopping, written and directed by Elyse Singer, reveals all. Frequency Hopping is especially memorable for its impressive array of new media, by production and media designer Elaine J. McCarthy. This ranges from computer animation projected on scrims, swathing the actors in two-dimensional images and popping them into the landscapes of gigantic 1940s photographs, to the incidental music, which emanates from several large player-pianos, without a human musician in sight. The latter is provided by Eric Singer's LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, programmed by Paul Lehrmann of the Ballet Mecanique Project. Anyone interested in the use of technology in theatre should go see this show: in this regard, it is inspiring and challenging. In the 1950s, on live radio, Lamarr's sometime confidant, revolutionary Hollywood composer George Antheil, reminisces about his involvement with Lamarr. What exactly was its nature? Was Antheil the star's lover, or did they share something more extraordinary? When the two met, Antheil was supplementing his composer's fees by peddling disturbing quackery about "endocrinology" that sounds like eugenics. (He thinks that a certain endocrinological profile makes "men like Wilde and da Vinci" gay.) Lamarr wants to enlarge her breasts using hormones. Once she's gotten a diagnosis out of Antheil, she tells him that really she wants his help with her hobby: "making secret weapons." An exemplar of geek glamour in Angela M. Kahler's elegant, dignified period costumes and J. Janas and R. Greene's naturalistic, historically accurate wigs, Newhouse's Lamarr soon invents FHSS -- and discovers that sexism in Hollywood and Washington is more powerful than the best frequency-jamming apparatus.

Singer's exploration of Lamarr and Antheil's shared belief in the power of their imaginations to harness technology to create beauty and preserve life is truly revolutionary. Such optimism is rare in science fiction, which tends to be dominated by predictions of technological dystopia, and absolutely needs to be explored more thoroughly in our culture. The California-based STAGE award, which recognizes and provides development for plays about science and technology, should help. As the New York Times reported, Frequency Hopping went through a lengthy and, Singer admitted, energy-sapping process of "play development" before STAGE gave it the recognition that in part allows us to see it today.

While Frequency Hopping is interesting, it also frustratingly sounds like a very innovative engineering lecture rather than a human drama. The plethora of technological bells and whistles does not help: rather, it competes with the actors. When Lamarr (Erica Newhouse) and Antheil (Joseph Urla) endearingly play, like children, that they are a torpedo and an airplane, this could have been a moment of great theatricality. Unfortunately, a computer-animated airplane and torpedo appear on the scrims; flight paths zoom around them in glowing loops of dashes, and mock the merely human actors' attempts to suggest machines in flight. In another scene, news footage of Nazis marching in a parade loses its power to frighten by being shown partially in reverse, and to jaunty electronic music, making it seem as if the goose-stepping storm-troopers are actually a troupe of dancers.

These two scenes reveal what is right and wrong with Frequency Hopping. The technology, and the story of a technological breakthrough, is compelling, accessible, and magical. I loved the concept, and wanted to love its execution. However, the scenery-chewing technology -- onstage and in the exposition -- often drowns out the humanity. That is a shame, because it was Lamarr and Antheil's humanity, as well as their scientific curiosity and technical know-how, that inspired them to apply their scientific curiosity to combat the most inhumane technocracy the world has ever known.

Shifty is Nifty

Shifty villains indeed abound in All Kinds of Shifty Villains, Disgraced Productions’s delightful if rather two-dimensional film noir spoof, now playing at the Kraine Theater. So does a silent, affable, rubber-limbed circus clown in a red nose. But is the clown a villain? And are the villains of the noir world – the femme fatale, the ambitious maniac, the cops and robbers – actually a carload of sad clowns? All Kinds of Shifty Villains, scripted by Robert Attenweiler and directed by Rachel Klein, asks these questions, none too seriously. The answers they come up with are more fun than a phone booth full of Maltese Falcons. This is the kind of noir story that opens with a hardboiled, womanizing private eye, Max Quarterhorse, gamely played by Joe Stipek. As the San Francisco fog lifts, Quarterhorse is trying to quit smoking and drinking because, among other reasons, the local police precinct has banned these pastime. The cops don’t want it to "turn into a graveyard” or “a drunk tank.” While they’re worrying about atmosphere and sobriety, a lunatic is planting bombs around the city, a femme fatale has a secret, Quarterhorse’s secretary, “the kid,” desperately wants him to realize that she’s a woman, and a matronly arms dealer’s pair of thuggish sons face an agonizing decision: cereal for breakfast, or whisky?

As deftly directed by Klein, the physical comedy is broad, balletic, and reminiscent of the Marx brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Each member of the ensemble cast has developed a specific body language for his or her character, which makes up for the deliberately cardboard characterizations.

Attenweiler's dialogue is often raucous with whimsical absurdism. "You came here for something," one of the thug brothers accuses Quarterhorse, "and something can turn into prison bars, just as cereal can turn into whisky." Some jokes, however, are tired and predictable. The woman who wants to be kidnapped because it’s the only way to indulge her rope fetish isn’t surprising at first, and gets less interesting the longer the gag (no pun intended) is played out. When Attenweiler gets the absurdities of the noir genre right, he gets them very right. "Max is sure" that a bomb "is on the roof!" one cop shouts at another. “Right!” the other cop replies, “We'll check the rest of the building!"

Lisa Soverino's lighting design aptly creates the dim spaces and chiaroscuro of the films. Emily Taradash's costumes look like Halloween costume knockoffs of classic 1930s-40s attire. The costumes impressively survive what must be the considerable stress of circus-style performance.

Noir is built on suspense, and sometimes this play is too silly and too loosely structured to have any. The action goes on for quite some time after the last bomb threat is neutralized, and the characters are not fully developed enough to incite anxiety as to whether they will find fulfillment as well as safety. This is largely the same kind of trouble that weakens Broadway’s otherwise brilliant and funny vintage-film spoof Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Like its bumbling cops, All Kinds of Shifty Villains doesn’t look into anything too deeply, but is certainly amusing.

An Angry and Revealing Hedwig

You want to see a play, that friend of yours who hates plays is in town, and wants to go to a concert, and has brought along someone whose only interest is politics. And drag queens. And hates Broadway musicals. The solution? John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s cult rock-drag-politics and decidedly anti-traditional 1998 musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now directed by Marc Eardley, for 3S Theatre Collective, at the Barrow Mansion in Jersey City. If you haven’t seen this show yet, then you’ve probably been living in the title character’s wig box. Mitchell and Trask’s whimsical allusions and wordplay span the Platonic creation myth to cold war history, playfully revealing connections between topical problems and existential mysteries. Trask’s music competes easily with the rock classics of which Hedwig sings snatches throughout his mid-gig banter. Whitton’s spirited performance will delight the show’s fans while showing the previously uninitiated why Hedwig has become a legend.

In that legend, Hansel Schmitt (played by sonorous cabaret singer and actor Jonathan Whitton) hates life in East Berlin, with his quasi-fascist drone of a mother, and without his sexually abusive father, an American soldier sometime stationed in West Berlin. Like his mother, Hansel is soon seduced by an American “sugar daddy” in uniform, who offers him a new life in Kansas, the part of America famously located on the oppressive, grey side of the Rainbow Curtain. Hence a botched sex change, which turns Hansel into one Mrs. Hedwig Robertson, saddled with an “angry inch” of his natural genitalia, and, soon, reams of abandonment, loss, anger, and artistic inspiration.

The biggest loss of Hedwig’s life, however, is either his American soul mate, army brat and famous rocker Tommy Gnosis, who fled from the indeterminateness of his “angry inch” and own confusion, or Hedwig’s passionately-authored songs, which Tommy stole and presented to the world as his own. While performing a gig in a hideous dive on the night of one of Tommy’s big commercial concerts, Hedwig finally reveals all, and tries to work out how he is incomplete, and whether he can put himself together again.

I say “he” and “his,” in contrast to most authors writing on this play and its film adaptation, because that is the best way to describe Hedwig. Unlike the other iconic East German transgender character, the heroine of Doug Wright’s Pulitzer-winning drama I Am My Own Wife, Hedwig does not become a woman because he has always felt like one, or ever felt like one, but because the laws on both sides of the Iron Curtain will not allow him to marry his GI Joe while remaining a man. Hedwig arguably does not see himself as a woman, but as a mutilated gay man. He describes his “angry inch” as the place “where my vagina never was.” He resists facile identification as a woman, or with either side of the various walls that cut up his world, and ours.

Disturbingly, Hedwig has brought with him more than an inch of baggage from Germany. Throughout the show, he disparages and maltreats his “husband” and roadie Yitzhak (Louise Stewart), an Eastern European Jewish drag king (or is Yitzhak a drag queen, appearing not in drag, simply played by a woman?). “Atrocity, for man, woman… or freak,” Hedwig announces as he liberally spritzes perfume in Yitzhak’s face. As Hedwig’s dissolution increases, Yitzhak rebels, reaching for the human dignity and choices.

As Hedwig, Whitton is vehement, tragicomic, and, yes, extremely angry. Stewart gives a subtler performance as Yitzhak. She shows moments of fatigue, hatred, and subversion, but generally the character remains a device, without a full-fledged self. The band accompany the two actors with great verve and powerful sound, though sometimes it was a bit too powerful, muffling the specific wording of Hedwig’s rage.

Stephen K. Dobray’s set is minimal but effective, consisting only of the instruments and sound equipment of Hedwig and her “Angry Inch” band, some battered luggage, and a wall covered with graffiti. Some of the graffiti seemed to make the time-setting confusing. Hedwig arrived in Kansas in time for the fall of the Berlin Wall, but one graffiti slogan is “Impeach Bush”—imaginable only a decade later, unless it refers to the first president of that name.

Hedwig’s costumes, relatively simple concoctions of hot pink plastic, black leather, and gold lame, look suitably like the detritus of the 1980s. Designed by Laurie Marman, they aren’t as cheekily creative as they might be: the original Off-Broadway Hedwig’s blonde ringlets were shaped by toilet paper tubes. However, they are just ostentatious enough to articulate the character’s media-created glam-trash ideal of American womanhood.

“If there was a fourth wall,” Hedwig warns the audience, “you couldn’t see the actors.” This genre-bending, gender-bending piece, as realized by 3S, is transformatively revealing.

A Dog Eat Dog World

Acting is all about choices. What do the characters want? How do they resolve to get it? When confronted with a number of options, what decision do they make? In improvisation, actors strive to make bold and immediate choices. Consequently, when Dan Safer, artistic director of the avant-garde, improv-heavy theatre troupe Witness Relocation decided to base a new work on Behavioral Choice Theatre, the resulting work, Vicious Dogs on Premises, cuts to the essence of theatre. In this examination of life in a dystopian land of doglike humans, Witness Relocation examines the relationship of choice to oppression, freedom, fear and happiness. An episodic work, Vicious Dogs consists of a number of vignettes and improvs divided by the ringing of a bell, like a horrific combination of boxing match—or perhaps dogfight?—and game show. Scenes scripted by Innovative Theatre Award-winning playwright Saviana Stanescu give the work structure and momentum, while the unscripted parts are closely tied to the scenes’s themes.

The casting of the show's four performers in the various etudes and scenes, and the order in which they are presented, are determined at random at the beginning of each performance. This allows as many combinations of the play's parts as hands dealt from a scrupulously shuffled deck of playing cards. Each night, the actors, devoid of choice, play the hand they are dealt. So too, Witness Relocation suggests, do many people outside the playhouse. In an oppressive state, people have no choices, but are certainly not free and often not happy. The question this juxtaposition raises is broad and frightening: do we want to have a choice, about anything? Does it take courage to demand to have choices, or maturity to make them?

Across the board, the performers an co-choreographers (Heather Christian, Sean Donovan, Mike Mikos and Laura Berlin Stinger—are agile dancers. When playing dogs, they are eerily doglike. In one scene, each of the four mimetically transforms into a different sort of dog, ranging in facial expression and movement from the fanatical rambunctiousness of a retriever to the bared-teeth, leash-straining grimace of a more menacing canine. They work well as an ensemble: no individual performer dominates the piece, and a scene in which a majority of three interrogate the odd one out shows the trio operating as if with one mind.

Kaz Phillips’s video art, on screens set in the upstage wall is somewhat less vital. The image of a bare lightbulb in the interrogation scene is clever but hardly unexpected or shocking. Anatomical drawings of the insides of dogs add nothing to the dialogue and dance, and sometimes distract the viewer from the live performance.

Sometimes the topicality seems a bit strained. According to the press release, the plight of Michael Vicks's abused dogs, “trained to fight” and therefore permanently unsocializable, inspired Safer “to muse on how much people, too, can heal after they are tortured in their own lives.” One of the improv scenes consists of a woman reporting on the latest vapid news gleaned from surveillance of celebrities. Whatever violation of privacy "Amy Winehouse" has endured lately, it seems, is not exactly torture. In the scripted scenes, “torture” ranges from the genuinely horrific (Abu Ghraib) to the “torture” of having loved and lost in a cynical urban dating scene dominated by computers. Stanescu's tongue-in-cheek depiction of the latter situation keeps things in perspective.

In Vicious Dogs, Stanescu and company make trenchant observations about our dog-eat-dog world in sharply visual, kinetic ways.

Stephen Burdman: Making Theatre a Walk in the Park

Stephen Burdman serves as Artistic Director of the New York Classical Theater. Every summer, New York Classical presents several productions of free, minimalist promenade, or roving classical theatre in Central Park, near the 103rd Street / Central Park North entrance. This year's repertoire includes Cymbeline, reviewed this month by offoffonline.

Q: Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's least-often produced plays. Why did you choose it for New York Classical's 2008 production?

Stephen Burdman: Our mission is to present "popular classics and forgotten masterpieces" - and I think that Cymbeline fits very well into the latter part of our mission. I also happen to love the play - I directed it in 2002 at NYU's Tisch School for the Arts. Louis Scheeder, Director/Founder of the Classical Studio and Dean of Faculty at NYU Tisch School for the Arts, is directing the current production. When I approached him to work for us, this was one of the plays that he wanted to do. Our audience has also seen many Shakespeare productions from us - ten, in fact - and I felt that this was an important play to which they should be exposed.

Q: Cymbeline famously occupies an intriguingly ambiguous place in terms of genre. What is it? A comedy? A tragicomedy? A romance? Something else? And does it matter?

Burdman: For me, I really don't think it matters. In fact, much like The Winter's Tale - which one of my board members describes as a "greatest hits" of Shakespeare: Magic, Comedy, Tragedy, et cetera. Since the first great tragic-comedy, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, I feel audiences are open to the mixing of genres. For me, this makes the piece more interesting.

Q: It is certainly a fascinating piece. This year, Lincoln Center Theatre presented Cymbeline, starring Martha Plimpton, Michael Cerveris, and Phylicia Rashad. How does your Cymbeline differ from that one?

Burdman: Well, first of all, it is outside. Second, it is roving - each scene takes place in a different location and the audience follows the play from place to place as the performance moves from scene to scene within twelve acres of Central Park. Third, there is no scenery. And fourth, all of our rehearsals and performances are free and open to the public. I am not able to tell you the differences in the productions, as I never saw the Lincoln Center production, but ours is very interactive and runs two hours, without an intermission.

Q: Your summer 2007 show, George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, is a brilliant comedic classic, but also a disturbing satire of army recruitment for unpopular and unintelligible wars. Contemporary parallels were inescapable. Contrarily, Lincoln Center's Cymbeline has been called an "escapist" play, and even criticized for its supposed lack of modern relevance. How does your Cymbeline speak to contemporary society?

Burdman: Our produciton of Cymbeline is about relationships - father to daughter, father to sons, husbands to wives, brothers to sister, friends to friends and many more. Plays become classics when they are able to reach beyond their contemporary audiences and reveal something essential to the human condition. Cymbeline does this through relationships.

Q: What is up next for you and New York Classical?

Burdman: This summer we are presenting Macbeth throughout Battery Park/Castle Clinton (6/26-7/12) and then George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance - our first Shaw - in Central Park (7/31-8/24). In the summer of 2009, we will be celebrating our 10th Anniversary Season with a production of King Lear in Central Park followed by The Tempest in Battery Park. We will close that season with a Moliere comedy in August 2009 in Central Park. Plans are also underway for 2010, but are not secured yet.

A Magical Journey

Shakespeare’s rarely performed romance Cymbeline is a challenging play, for both actors and audience, but New York Classical Theatre’s new version is a walk in the park—literally. Director Louis Scheeder’s clear blocking and a judiciously edited script make for a delightful, accessible play. While the play’s Roman-era British lovers are constantly tossed between England, Italy, and Wales, the company leads the audience around what passes, in New York City, for a continent divided by water and mountains-the lakeside area of the north entrance. This is Shakespeare as a live road movie. It reveals the experience of the play’s weary travelers without ever making the audience weary. The plot of Cymbeline is romantic fluff with a serious and sinister undercurrent. The ineffectual, always dangerously underinformed King Cymbeline of Britain has a daughter, the princess Imogen, who has just married her lifetime best friend, the court-raised but not royally-born orphan Posthumus Leonatus. This disrupts the machinations of Imogen’s evil stepmother, who had been scheming for a match between the princess and her own stupid, crass son Cloten.

At the Queen’s instigation, Posthumus is banished to Italy, where he meets the scurrilous, stereotypically Italianate Roman courtier Iachimo, who bets Posthumus that he can make Imogen prove herself unfaithful. Posthumus’s acceptance of this bet sets into motion a plot that quickly veers toward tragedy. As the Queen and Cloten steer the royal family toward disaster, only Imogen and Posthumus can save them -- by reaffirming their belief in each other, and helping Cymbeline in spite of his abandonment of both of them.

The cohesive New York Classical company delivers many strong performances, and impressively, everyone’s speech is clearly audible in the noisy park. Most players do a great job of projecting without appearing to be shouting most of their lines. One scene, a secretive attempted seduction, is a rare exception.

As Imogen, Ginny Myers Lee gives a spirited performance that glues the episodic play together and gives the audience someone to root for. As the dangerously clever Iachimo and the dangerously stupid Cloten, respectively, Marc LeVasseur and Erik Gratton steal much of the show. LeVasseur’s haughty demeanor and Gratton’s farcical facial contortions are fantastic.

Once the going gets rough, Patrick Jones’s Posthumus exudes pathos, though he is less cholerically enraged at his apparent betrayal by Imogen than Michael Cerveris in Lincoln Center Theater’s production this past winter. As the Queen, Sherry Skinker plays the villainess with great subtlety. She is not the extreme, scary Machiavellian schemer that the character was as played, at Lincoln Center, by Phylicia Rashad, but a more convincing saboteur of her deceived husband’s kingdom.

Michael Marion's Cymbeline is tragically daft and often visibly bewildered, the unstable nucleus of this nuclear family who sends his children spiralling away. Finally, Michael Bartelle and Stephen Stout, as two forest-raised princes on the edge of adulthood, communicate both childlike wonder and the eloquence that eludes the clumsy Cloten.

Unlike LCT, New York Classical has intelligently cut the script down to a manageable length, removing extraneous characters, muddy political exposition, an entire family of archaic ghost figures, and—given that this is park theatre—all references to walls and furniture. Amelia Dombrowski’s costume design clearly delineates Romans from Britains—the former in haughty red capes, the latter decked with earth-tone Celtic plaid; and follows the English Renaissance theatrical convention of using contemporary costume—meaning, doublets and gowns—even in plays set in earlier periods.

To sum up, this Cymbeline is seamless, familial, and suspenseful, with more profound changes in the characters’ emotional lives than costume changes. Go see it, and let New York Classical take you on a truly magical journey.

Curiouser and Curiouser

"Seizures suck," declares Molly, a young woman afflicted with them, to her doctor. "They show up like ghosts." That is why Molly would like to get rid of them, and the doctors can accomplish that, by removing part of her brain.Unfortunately, more than Molly's epilepsy might be lost in that endeavor.

Molly's story is one of several intertwined tales of brain damage, disease, and transformation treated provocatively yet conscientiously by Rabbit Hole Ensemble in their haunting piece A Rope in the Abyss.

Earlier this theatrical season, a character in Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll proposed that humans could build an artificial brain "out of beer cans" if we only knew how a real one works. The same frustration confronts Rabbit Hole's characters, but they explore the problem in greater detail than Stoppard's. Like the titular rope, each of Rabbit Hole's stories begins with familiar people, naturalistically (for the most part) portrayed, then plummets into mysterious places that science has not yet fully explained.

When a person loses their memory or changes personality, are they still "themselves?" Is the real self a "soul" that inhabits the brain? Can love survive in the absence of memory, self, and language? Is it better to fully comprehend one's grief or guilt, or is amnesia, in this context, a blessing? And can humans communicate in a vocabulary made out of different kinds of pickles?

A Rope in the Abyss asks all those questions, and then some, but modestly provides no declarative answers. Focused sharply yet broadly on its subject matter and tautly, unpretentiously, and empathetically constructed, each of the stories is a miniature drama, with lightly sketched characters filled in vividly by the passionate, technically precise acting of the four-actor ensemble.

In keeping with Rabbit Hole's signature aesthetic, there is nearly no set, absolutely basic costumes, no sound effects other than those created by the actors, and special effects consisting merely of the sharp, deliberate use of lighting to create striking chiaroscuro, shadows, and contours that help tell the story.

Playwright and director Edward Elefterion, who very deservedly won the 2007 Midtown International Theatre Festival's award for Outstanding Direction for Nosferatu: The Morning of My Death, works magic again with clear characterisation, painterly tableaux, and brisk pacing.

As Molly, Tatiana Gomberg (the ethereal Mina Harker of The Night of Nosferatu) conveys this bewildered young woman's desperate desire for a cure and subconscious fear of losing her self. Gomberg also shines as catankerous health nut Lorraine, who, after being "dead for two minutes" after a stroke, changes every aspect of her personality, horrifying her slacker son Harold (Dan Ajl Kitrosser). Both of Lorraine's personalities as acted by Gomberg are wholly convincing, and consequently compel the audience to share Harold's confusion.

As Harold and amnesiac murderer Russ, Kitrosser pulls off some tone-changing physical comedy, but also adequately conveys the horror that both characters ultimately experience. The tale of the murderer, narrated in pseudo-Seussian rhyming couplets, is the least successful of the many narratives. Its scientific context is explained less clearly and completely than the other stories.

This is unfortunate because its subject--repressed and recovered memory--is perhaps the most controversial within the medical establishment, with some medical scholars and practitioners declaring that repressed-memory-recovery is a myth and others insisting it is a common occurrence. The whimsical verse poetry perhaps illustrates the character's mind (Russ is an LSD addict, initially) but it is ultimately a case of style substituted for substance.

Overall, however, A Rope in the Abyss constantly intrigues and engages as it winds through many conflicts and lives. That is no easy rope trick.

Kitrosser's interpretation of a third role, haunted Iraq War veteran, is the least patronizing performance of that type that I have seen in a long time, and I have seen several.

The final two members of the ensemble, Nosferatu actors Danny Ashkenasi and Emily Hartford, spin a sad and beautiful love story about Hugh, an opera singer who loses most of his memories to an aneurism and Donna, Hugh's loving but overwhelmed, frustrated, and alienated wife. Yes, you do get to hear Ashkenasi sing opera, and it sounds convincingly operatic.

The moment in which the opera springs forth from the recesses of Hugh's damaged mind is the play's most surreal and mysterious moment. I can't tell you the details, but not because I don't remember them. I do. In fact, A Rope in the Abyss, will remain in my memory, I hope, for a good long time.

Well-Beaten (Socio)paths

"When a famous person crashes their plane or skis into a tree, everyone cares," muses one of the two nihilist heroines of US Drag, a new play by Louisville Festival playwright Gina Gionfriddo, now playing at Off-Broadway's Beckett Theater. The heroines, cute, dolled-up, unemployed and cynical recent college grads Angela (Tanya Fischer) and Alison (Lisa Joyce), take on New York City, determined to achieve fame, fortune, or, at the very least, their monthly rent on the room they are subletting from socially inept Wall Street broker Ned (Matthew Stadelman). Angela and Alison take a picaresque tour of an absurdist underworld that's definitely recognizable in our own world. Picked up at a bar by wealthy trustafarian and disturbingly obsessed amateur crime historian James (James Martinez), they find out that the police have offered a $10,000 award for a serial attacker’s capture. They turn bounty hunters, and join an awareness-raising group called S.A.F.E., whose leader Evan (Lucas Papaelias) warns people to stay safe by refusing to help strangers, under any circumstances.

Meanwhile, Angela is courted by egotistical and cruelly inventive "creative nonfiction" writer Christopher -- a wannabe Dave Eggers. Alison, disturbed by a dream, decides that she must find a husband immediately, and goes after the character who most should remain single in the interest of public safety.

Gionfriddo explores a popular theme in the contemporary theatre: spoiled, unemployed middle-class beautiful young things behaving amorally (by the author's standards) in the Big Apple. Popularized in Jonathan Larson's cult Broadway musical Rent, the subject also dominates Michael Domitrovich's Artfuckers, currently running Off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth. Gionfriddo adds nothing new to the tradition. Angela and Alison carp about women who buy "thirty-five dollar mascara and drink two lattes a day"; Christopher claims that his "creative nonfiction" is true because his parents abused him "symbolically."

Gionfriddo saves her sharpest barbs for self-proclaimed activists whose activism constitutes mere ego-aggrandizement, bereft of any genuine concern for the victimized or oppressed. James stalks crime victims whose names he finds in the news in order to offer them consolation.

Evan tells S.A.F.E. that apprehending the attacker is not their mission. When the characters watch a didactic, downbeat documentary about refugees, Alison decides it would be far better if the "massacre" were accompanied by music by Nine Inch Nails.

The costumes, by Emily Rebholz, playfully mimic the "trendy" apparel of the New York young, wealthy, and pretentious. Trip Cullman's direction is adequate, though in some scenes characters talk while lined up in a horizontal row, forced into presentational poses, and a transition in which one of the heroines strips and changes costume onstage right next to the exit seems unsupported by thematic, plot, or practical demands.

Sandra Goldmark's set is dominated by several lampshade-covered lights that jut horizontally from the upper reaches of the upstage wall, reminiscent of the furniture-museum set of Moises Kaufman's production of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife. The purpose of these lampshades is not clear, but they look very whimsical when they turn on and off in unison.

Underscoring US Drag is Gionfriddo's conviction that in our society, or perhaps only in Manhattan, empathy is uncommon and unpopular. This is stated — or, rather, overstated — throughout the play. "A good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan," preaches Evan to S.A.F.E. When Angela first meets Christopher, he signs a copy of his book and admits that it will only be worth much when he is dead. "How much?" she asks, comically calculating her potential profit.

"A sociopath lacks the capacity to empathize. The only pain they notice is their own,” someone says, informing the audience unambiguously that most of the characters are sociopaths. This didacticism causes the play to ramble on the same track without ever developing or allowing the audience to puzzle anything out for themselves.

More problematically, Angela and Alison are only vaguely defined characters, with costume changes more complex than their changes in outlook and character. The world they inhabit is interesting, but they are its twin black hole, a vacuous vacuum that sucks all life and energy away.

Producing company The Stage Farm's motto is "we make plays for play-haters." Possibly, then, US Drag will appeal to people who wish to see characters who are stock types, and hear clearly stated messages. If you go to the theatre because you like theatre, because, at its best, it challenges your horizons and you appreciate a challenge, you might find US Drag a bit of a drag.

However, in the real New York City just as in Gionfriddo's version, there are all types of people. If US Drag gets the "theatre-haters" into the Beckett Theatre, Stage Farm will have accomplished the kind of altruistic act that is so sadly absent from Angela and Alison's world.