Post-9/11 Dystopia

Andhow! Theater Company, based in the East Village's spacious Connelly Theater, is well known for the intricate sets and high production values that space allows, and for producing stylistically experimental, heartfelt new plays. Its premiere of Chicago playwright Laura Eason's Area of Rescue is no exception. The moment you see Neal Wilkinson's set, you know this piece takes place in another world. Outside a sumptuous glass and metal mansion, trees without leaves stretch into the proscenium from a yard covered with barren rocks. The mansion's doors slide straight up into invisible sockets in the walls, suggesting architecture on Star Trek's Spaceship Enterprise or maybe Lost in Space. The latter title describes Eason's characters exactly.

In a futuristic dystopia inspired by a post-9/11 "national security" culture, freethinker Gordon (Arthur Aulisi) and his family get lost in their home and their home country, places that, as the play progresses, change beyond recognition. The play opens with Gordon and his 10-year-old daughter, Hetty (Kiki Hernandez), mourning his wife and her mother, Lily, on the day of Lily's funeral. The somber occasion is interrupted by the tactless neighborhood gossip, the widowed Ida Henri (Maria Cellario), and young "serviceman" Ivo (Omar Evans), who is courting Lily's sister Mia (Jackie Chung).

Questions immediately arise. How did Lily die? Whose fault is it? And why are Ida and Ivo so curious about the gruesome details?

Meanwhile, Hetty's world is about to be rocked by another cataclysm: the trees outside the house, already "stripped" of their leaves for reasons of "security," are scheduled to be felled completely to make way for an "area of rescue," a sort of terrorism shelter whose design, Hetty points out, concentrates people in an enclosed space without keeping the terrorists out.

As in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which Area of Rescue is strongly reminiscent of, regime change is inevitable. The destruction of Hetty's trees happens concurrently with increasing threats to Gordon's personal safety and, consequently, to hers.

Eason's dystopian world constantly references issues in contemporary American politics. The government is a theocracy, and all inhabitants wear ID cards color-coded for "religion." Homosexuality is totally taboo. Abortion, even of "dead" fetuses that would be stillborn, is illegal. As a result, orphanages are filled with congenitally disabled children—a situation that happened in reality in Nicolae Ceauşescu's Romania after that dictator's abolition of birth control and abortion.

Gordon's family employs, if that is the right word, an unpaid servant named Alleah—a name that reads like the Jewish name Leah and sounds like the Muslim "Alia." Played by Abby Royle, Alleah must work as a slave for 11 years before being granted citizenship so she can choose to leave the home. Gordon's collusion with slavery complicates his character intriguingly, and that of his daughter, who never questions the morality of Alleah's enslavement.

Directed with a haunting naturalism by Jessica Davis-Irons, Area of Rescue features a few standout performances in a large but cohesive cast. As Hetty, Hernandez, a 10-year-old student making her professional theater debut, is smart and vulnerable, but never precious. If only Dakota Fanning and nearly every child I've seen in a movie lately could take acting lessons from her. Arthur Aulisi invests Gordon with a quiet, cautious anger that eventually boils over at just the wrong (for this character) moment.

As Ivo, Evans is disarmingly friendly, at first, especially to Hetty. That makes him especially noxious later. I didn't quite believe in Mia's attraction to him, as Chung was more passionate in her trumpeting of the regime's maxims than in her declarations of love. But the script does not make clear what Mia likes about this particular serviceman, or whether she is dating him only out of fear. As Ida, the play's other stock villain, Cellario provides comic relief even as she hurts Gordon and his family.

Jill BC Duboff's sometimes trance-like, sometimes ominous, sound design enhances the atmosphere. Becky Lasky's stiff, puritanical, uniform costumes look as if they came out of the theocratic dystopia in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. They constrict the characters' movements and muffle the women's sexuality, forcing everybody to toe the party line.

As topical dystopias go, Area of Rescue is not nearly as innovative or chilling as either The Handmaid's Tale or Caryl Churchill's recent play Far Away. Some of Eason's writing is very heavy-handed. A New York theatergoing audience probably does not need to be convinced that fear of terrorism can create a paranoid "security state" and erode vital civil liberties. I felt that for much of this play, Eason was preaching to the choir.

However, at the most crucial moments, Eason's allegory is not only spot-on but cogently original. When Ivo and Mia talk about the mystery of death and the construction of the local area of rescue, Ivo reminds Mia that she thinks "there isn't an answer." Speaking of, respectively, terrorism and death, Mia responds, "To those things, not to these things."

A regime that knows the answer to the afterlife question but does not know how to stop terrorism is bad news. The brilliance of Area of Rescue lies in Eason's juxtaposition of those two facts to create horrific paradox and irony that transcends the preaching.

The Possessed

In 1986, renowned British playwright Caryl Churchill teamed up with anthropologist David Lan to write A Mouthful of Birds, a haunting ensemble play that explores the reasons why people become "possessed" by spirits, ideas, and impulses. In this series of interwoven nightmares, a mother kills her baby to neutralize her aggressive husband and a giant, predatory, birdlike creature. A modern transsexual reads about 19th-century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, and that long-dead spirit helps him to free his own body from his alienation from it. An alcoholic is tormented by an unpainted window frame that pours alcohol down her throat. A midlevel executive of a meat export company falls in love with a pig that is headed for his own slaughterhouse.

Breeding Ground Productions's revival at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center's Flamboyan Theater, staged as part of the Spring Fever Festival, showcases some compelling performances by gifted actor-dancers. As the bird spirit, Skyler Sullivan is disturbingly birdlike. He has a bird's crooked, wings-heavy posture down perfectly, and his taut, heavy movements and rasping voice make it clear that this demon is more vulture than nightingale.

Standing out in another nonhuman part is Mark Lindberg as the Pig, whose eyes stare with eerie pathos from behind a simple pink mask that obscures his face's more human features. Lindberg also plays Barbin and Pentheus, the latter a major character in The Bacchae. Euripides's ancient Greek tragedy about destruction by mad women is a major influence on Churchill and Lan's writing. As the infanticidal mother, Debbi Jean seems both mundane and completely mad.

Director-designer-sound-painter Tomi Tsunoda has introduced two innovations into this production, and, sadly, neither appears necessary or helpful. The first is sound painting, a musical technique in which performers without instruments conduct performers with instruments through a program of improvisation by using a complicated sign-language vocabulary of more than 700 gestures developed by New York-based composer Walter Thompson.

In theory, this is a perfect way to illustrate and enhance Churchill and Lan's story, as the audience watches the sound painters (Tsunoda, Jessica Levine, Laura Shiffrin, Joanna Lampert, and Andrew Scoville) control the musicians while the demons control the possessed characters. In practice, it creates some beautiful, often chilling, trance-like music, but as the sound painters stood, knelt, or jumped around at the edges of the thrust stage, they frequently obstructed my view of the actors.

Furthermore, the musicians whom the sound painters ostensibly control are not visible, with the exception of one woman sitting upstage at a laptop with a glowing white Macintosh Apple appliqué on the downstage-facing reverse side of its screen. (The music sounded electronic, and no musicians are credited in the program.) As the play's dialogue is not improvised and is not intended to vary during the show's run, it is not clear why the music needed to be impromptu.

The second directorial interpolation is actually a deletion—of the intermission. Intermissionless plays are fine if, like Churchill's brilliant Far Away, they are 60 minutes long. A 90-minute long intermissionless play, if it is a good one, is also watchable, and there have been many engaging examples, from Salome back in 1892 to this year's tense, rapid-fire Nixon's Nixon.

However, the performance that I saw began at 8:30 and ended well after 10:30, without a break. I have been assured that the play is supposed to run only two hours, but even that may leave spectators feeling exhausted. That the performers are able to manage it is impressive, or maybe they are possessed by some particularly energetic spirits.

If you have the stamina to sit through this show, it is an interesting experiment, if not an entirely successful one, with much in it that is fascinating.

Gangster Musical

In Theater 1010's latest musical, a Salvation Army "broad" is reluctantly attracted to a suave, gray-suited gangster with a taste for dangerous risks; a stern, disapproving superior officer suspects her loyalty; and a crew of crooks struggles to keep their way of life despite some Bible thumpers' best efforts. It sounds like Guys and Dolls, but it isn't.

Happy End was written in 1929, ages before Frank Loesser's Broadway classic, by the Threepenny Opera team of Bertolt Brecht (lyrics) and Kurt Weill (music), along with Elizabeth Hauptmann, author of the original play. The show seems to have inspired Guys and Dolls, but it breaks boundaries in ways Loesser never did.

This edgy, gritty, cynical romp covers some territory that Threepenny did previously, but it is well worth seeing, not least because of Weill's strident, memorable score and the strong, vibrant performances of a multitalented and energetic ensemble under David Fuller's well-paced, visually arresting direction.

Happy End begins in Bill's Beer Hall, a Chicago franchise. The original Bill's, we're told in a rousing drinking song, was in Bilbao, Spain, but became defunct under rather unclear circumstances. Having just threatened the pharmacist Prinzmayer, who owes protection money, a crime gang led by the ruthless Dr. Nakamura, aka "The Governor" (Greg Horton), is plotting Prinzmayer's destruction.

Into the mix saunters Bill Cracker (Joey Piscopo), the gray-suited hero. He has just knocked off Nakamura's top rival, a gangster so creative, he orchestrated a robbery of the Niagara Falls train by turning his gang into a wedding party, with himself as the captivating bride.

This makes Bill a "big shot"—and a liability. Nakamura and the boys plot to frame him for the pharmacy job, but they are foiled by a self-destructively honest Salvation Army officer, Hallelujah Lil (Lorinda Lisitza), who sacrifices everything that's important to her in order to tell the truth and save Bill's life. If only, Brecht and Hauptmann seem to sigh, the rest of humanity could live up to Lil's example.

Of course, they don't. In this script, unlike The Threepenny Opera, Hauptmann and Brecht are more satirical than didactic. Of the innocent Lil's fall from the Salvation Army's grace, Bill observes, "It ain't my fault that Jesus fired you 'cause he's got a dirty mind." The stupid young gangster Baby Face, when told that his alibi is an "intimate dinner party," tells the cops he was at "an inanimate party."

Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold's translation either preserves the original's wordplay or invents some new gems. "Please to keep your organ out of shakedown operation," Nakamura tells his church-organ-hawking associate. "This is serious business." The one weakness is the Asian Nakamura's perpetual confusion of his L's and R's. This leads to a tongue-twisting disaster when he tries to say "revolver," but it soon gets predictable, and, as a racial stereotype, it jars with the piece's overall humanism.

There are many standouts in the strong company. Lisitza acts Lil with confidence, as a worldly, world-weary missionary. This playing against type keeps Lil engaging. Lisitza is also a brilliant singer, a belter with a full soprano voice modulated by moments of sweetness but never weakness.

Other notable performances include Dave Tillistrand as a cross-dressing gangster, who sings in a powerful baritone and gives a bad-drag portrayal of "Madam Goddam," the legendary bawd of Mandalay; Judith Jarosz and Cristiane Young as two surprisingly similar and formidable godmothers, of the crime syndicate and the God syndicate; and Timothy McDonough as Baby Face, whose agile slapstick is almost as hilarious as his facial expressiveness.

As Bill, Piscopo is alternatingly threatening and frightened. His swagger transparently disguises the character's insecurity. He writes the character in his body language, which is always specific, in character, and in the moment. Piscopo also directed the "heist film," a silent-movie rendition of the gang's comical bank heist. The onscreen action is coordinated seamlessly with live action in this clear and inventive multimedia moment.

Set and lighting designer Giles Hogya creates an atmosphere halfway between Berlin cabaret and Chicago dive bar. The stage is crowded with a jumble of simple furniture and theatrical clutter, with a spotlight standing dead center. The hats of the gang's victims hang menacingly on a far wall, and blue lighting washes Lisitza's face with a deathly cold hue during her most chilling songs. The costumes illustrate the characters well, and I especially liked Nakamura's silver cobra-headed sword cane.

Several of the actors double as musicians, with their playing, directed by Michael Harren, well synchronized with the singers. In short, Theater 1010 deserves kudos for bringing the undeservedly obscure Happy End so riotously to life.

Estrangements

Barbara Kahn and Jay Kerr's Pyrates!, a musical about 18th-century sea robbers Anne Bonny and Mary "Mark" Read, delighted audiences at Theater for the New City well before Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg's The Pirate Queen. In their newest collaboration, 1918: A House Divided, book writer-lyricist Kahn works magic again, this time with composer Alison Tartalia. A House Divided begins with the jaunty but efficiently clarifying song "Shake the Tambourine for 1918." The world of New York during the First World War is quickly established. Then we meet protagonist Breindl Gershon (Victoria Lavington), a young Russian-Jewish Brooklynite who dreams of being an artist and prefers to be called Billie. She also entertains a silent crush on Rina Calvatti (Victoria Levin), the lonely Italian accompanist at the local picture palace, where everyone goes to watch silent films and newsreels produced by the military.

Billie clashes over art and sexuality with her traditional sister Raisl (Erin Leigh Schmoyer) and Old World father (Dan Leeds). Her father exiles her from the house, and, with no one to turn to except Rina, she finds love. Meanwhile, the war divides New York society, and Billie's Greenwich Village friends confront a big risk when their antiwar protest in Washington Square faces potentially violent opposition from the police.

As Abraham Lincoln warned, "A house divided cannot stand." Will Billie and her estranged family find the courage to make peace? Can the war be stopped before it destroys her community more than the internal divisions between the hawks and the doves already have done? And will all the characters survive their battles, on the home front as well as those abroad?

Kahn tells a complex, riveting story about love, courage, and the painful division of homes, cities, and nations. Meticulously researched, with vintage newsreels playing on a cinema screen above the stage, A House Divided also resonates painfully with present-day reality. When painter Jamie (Robert Gonzales Jr.) sings a farewell duet, "The Last to Die," with his just-drafted boyfriend Ricardo (Michael Naclerio), the Iraq War parallels were unmistakable. The two romances are endearing, though a scene in which a third woman, artist's model Carmen (Kelly Scanlon), hits on Rina in front of the timid Billie is never really followed up.

Some of the lyrics are witty and reach for Sondheim in the use of rhyme: "I'm really not offended / By a nude who has descended / A stair / I really don't care!" At a few points, they fall into cliché. "Happy as a lark" and "free as the breeze" are examples. But with help from Tartalia's varied, memorable, and often soaring score, Kahn generally eschews preaching for passion, and the result is engaging.

The cast is uniformly strong, and the singers make themselves heard clearly over the instruments. Most of them also play instruments, in the style of Sondheim musicals recently directed by John Doyle (Sweeney Todd, Company).

Mark Macante's set is simple but effective, dominated by a huge, forbidding movie screen in a gold frame and the rows of chairs that make up the cinema auditorium. Amy Kitzhaber's costumes look appropriate for the period, though greater risks could have been taken. The "Drag Ball at Webster Hall" could have included more drag—in that scene most of the women wear dresses, and all of the men wear trousers.

Kahn's direction keeps the bustle moving. My only objection was to the final tableau, in which four actors stood between the lovers Billie and Rina, interfering with the metaphor for reunited lovers, home, and community.

I left A House Divided humming "Shake the Tambourine" and haunted by the lyrics of "The Last to Die." I hope to see it revived soon. It needs a little tinkering, but it should keep its energy and power.

Aliens Amongst Us

When Constance Congdon's play Tales of the Lost Formicans was first produced, at the Humana Festival in 1989, it introduced American audiences to a strange new planet. The play's revival, directed by Brett Maughan for the theater company Nicu's Spoon, takes New Yorkers on a funny, tragic, and insightful return voyage to Congdon's otherworld. On this terra incognita, "wheeled sarcophagi" that look strangely like cars "are used to carry the spirits to the next world"; masturbation is a religious ritual; and the "wobble" of domestic furniture is due to "climate change or some other antropic reality."

However, the anthropologists examining the mystery planet are space aliens, and their brave new world is earth: specifically, the suburbs of the United States. While newly divorced mother Cathy struggles to keep her family together despite her son's teenage rebellion, her father's descent into the oblivion of Alzheimer's disease, and her own loneliness, the aliens, too, try to make sense of her life. Finally, there's the neighborhood conspiracy theorist, who has an explanation for everything except his desire for Cathy.

Formicans is a brilliant play. The language that Congdon invents for her alien characters is specific and often hilarious, full of the kinds of insights that come from refusing to look at anything in the usual way. "Offspring are born without wheels and must acquire their own," observe the aliens, plopped down near skateboarding kids and a Corvette. The characterization of the humans is realistic, often painfully so. When Cathy's father, once a brilliant mechanist, fixes the aliens' equipment, only to find his memory of the incident wiped out by them, Congdon reveals what life must seem like to an Alzheimer's sufferer.

Several strong actors carry this production. The versatile Brian J. Coffey makes Cathy's father appear confused and lucid, gentle and frightening, as occasion demands. Lindsay Goranson provides extra comic relief as Cathy's daffy best friend. As the paranoid yet empathetic neighbor, Michael Hartney nearly steals the show. His crystal-clear physical acting and expressive face make this character an archetype rather than a stock type. As the Head Alien, Jovinna Chan delivers her conclusions in a robotic deadpan with just enough evident confusion to avoid becoming monotonous.

The cast is not uniformly strong, however. Rebecca Challis, as Cathy, struggles to play a character who is much older than her playing age. I found her scenes with her parents more convincing than those with her son, Eric (Nico Phillips). Although listed in the program as a "theatrical guru," Phillips lacks the subtle and three-dimensional acting that his role requires. In the first act, Phillips shouts most of his lines with little expression, making Eric appear a simple bully, not a troubled young man whose aggression masks his vulnerability and fear. In a scene in the second act in which Eric, sleeping rough in an inhospitable city, is confronted by a cop, it did not seem as if the boy was afraid.

The aliens' costumes are simply yet boldly designed by Rien Schlecht, in streamlined black with white wraparound shades. The set, by Maughan and S. Barton-Farcas, is less effective. A hollow wooden box represented a desk, bar, Corvette, and other objects and locations. Its underside was hollow and unfinished, and it is moved or turned throughout the play. This made scene changes lengthy, slowing down the play's momentum. Several times, actors noisily moved this wooden monolith while other actors were talking, making it hard to hear the dialogue or pay attention to the action.

In sum, this production of Formicans has some kinks that need working out, but the play is a modern masterpiece, generally well acted here. Its small, odd, funny, and haunting world is a place well worth visiting.

Mad Scientist of the South Seas

As Carl Sagan once observed, science affects our everyday lives in countless ways, yet very few people understand it. The result is a world in which the cloning of Dolly the sheep can horrify people who don't think twice about their car emissions' effect on the ozone layer. This world seems very far away from that of 1896, when H.G. Wells wrote his science-fiction horror classic The Island of Dr. Moreau, but in Radiotheatre's new staging, the tale is a fable for today. Chilling and thought-provoking, Moreau is also a superbly crafted, fast-paced, and perfectly scored piece of live "radio drama." Catch the abridged version, now playing at the Red Room Theater as part of the Frigid Festival. It's well worth seeing twice—once now and again in October and November at Radiotheatre's H.G. Wells Science Fiction Theater Festival at 59E59 Theaters.

In this adaptation, written and directed by Dan Bianchi, wholesome young American missionary and shipwreck survivor John Prentice (Aaron Mathias) washes up on the shore of an obscure island in the South Seas. He is revived by Montgomery (William Greville), an exile from San Francisco, and taken to meet Montgomery's friend and mentor, the English eccentric Dr. Moreau (Cash Tilton).

Prentice also meets the folks whom Moreau calls "the natives"—strange creatures, not entirely human, who turn out to be the products of Moreau's experiments in the extreme acceleration of evolution in nonhuman animals. Still mostly animal, they fear their creator Moreau and his "house of pain" and so follow the rules he has laid down, in which they are periodically instructed by the horn-headed Sayer of the Laws (Greville).

The actors deal admirably with the challenge of playing humans, animals, and everything in between. In particular, Elizabeth Burke portrays both Prentice's prim but gutsy fiancée and the fierce but loving islander Lota as a sharply specific pair of opposites. Robert Nguyen howls, screeches, and barks his way through his lines as Moreau's bestial henchman Mungo, and, as Moreau himself, Tilton is alternately affable and maniacal.

As Prentice, Mathias exhales some of his lines as if he's actually been running through a forest, exhausted and terrified. Wes Shippee juggles the sound and his role, the beast-man Oren, with aplomb. Patrick O'Connor's narration is clear and passionate but does not overwhelm the characters.

Originally on a mission to bring the doctrines of his church to South Seas islanders, Prentice quickly becomes confused. Should he flee Moreau's island or must he save its "natives" from their devilish god? Is his ambition to change the people of non-Christian nations into people more like himself (which seems as hubristic as Moreau's diabolical project)?

Radiotheatre tells this engrossing story in its usual style. Actors stand in front of microphones, reading from their scripts with great skill in the characterization. A complex score of sound effects and music creates background, mood, and suspense. From the heartbeat-like drums to the shrieks and yowls of the islanders to the South Seas waves, Bianchi's sound design conjures up sets and action to rival the most expensive Broadway mega-musical or a blockbuster enhanced with computer-generated imagery. And it's all in each auditor's theater of the mind.

A worthy follow-up to the same company's character-driven, chilling The Haunting of 85 West 4th Street, this is a must-see show. Or rather, a must-hear and must imagine for yourself show.

Young Wife's Tales

Laboratory Theater's Scheherazade, a work in progress now in performance at the Bowery's Dixon Place theater, ambitiously aims to "lay bare the extravagant sex and violence of these bejeweled tales through a hybrid of marathon storytelling, slapstick physicality, and elegantly absurdist ballet." When the project is in a more complete state, it might achieve some of those objectives. At the moment, it is an incomprehensible mess. As a recording of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade plays, a troupe of four performers (Corey Dargel, Sheila Donovan, Oleg Dubson, and Alexis McNab) take turns reading, at breakneck speed, from Richard Burton's Victorian translation of the 10th-century Middle Eastern folklore compilation Alf Laila wa-Laila, better known as Arabian Nights. In this famous piece, Scheherazade, the wise and witty new bride of the mythical, tyrannical sultan Schahryar, tells him a thousand and one nights' worth of periodically interrupted stories, ultimately convincing him to abandon his policy of serial marriage and daily wife murder.

The speed of the reading made it difficult to follow. The ballet, consisting of rather stagy modern dance and repetitive, choreographically unoriginal, simulated sex, was neither elegant nor absurd. It also seemed constrained by Dixon Place's small performance space.

Director Yvan Greenberg has cast a skinny, topless man (Oleg Dubson) as Scheherazade and a woman in greasepaint facial hair (Sheila Donovan) as Schahryar. The other two performers also play roles in a gender opposite from their own. The intention behind this interpretation is unclear, as the actors make no attempt to embody their characters' genders. The female performers gave themselves "erections" by prancing about with scimitars held between their legs, and the male performers shook their nonexistent breasts. That alone does not constitute convincing mimesis, nor innovative satire.

The show appears glaringly unrehearsed. The actors read much of the text from printed, bound scripts on music stands. At the performance I saw, they made a few reading errors, skipping words and then returning to them. Greenberg assured me after the performance that this was deliberate. Several times during the show, Dubson had to pause to pull his slipping face veil back onto his nose, and once his pants slipped a bit as well, revealing decidedly modern black underwear.

The costumes, designed by Greenberg, are humdrum Orientalist clichés: a kaffiyeh for the Sultan, pink harem pants and face veil for Scheherazade. I did not understand why the sound design, also by Greenberg, included incomprehensible mumblings through what sounded like police or military walkie-talkies.

Throughout the performance, two small televisions, placed at frustrating angles perpendicular to the sight line of the entire center audience section, played a loop of interesting animated cartoons. This video material was created by Dubson, "using images," says the program, "by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, N. Simakoff, and Lotte Reininger." It seemed to have very little to do with the live action unfolding simultaneously. At a moment when two women characters are described giving birth, the screens showed a pair of magical creatures fighting and periodically transforming themselves into different animals.

According to Greenberg, this "work in progress" may change throughout its Dixon Place run. This means that the Scheherazade you see, if you choose to see it, might not be the show reviewed here.

I have no objection to artistic experimentation, but theater companies have a duty to create work that is completed enough to engage the audience. What I saw at Dixon Place was difficult to hear and often not understandable, provoking first frustration, then boredom. Instead of illuminating, clarifying, or deconstructing Burton's Nights, Laboratory Theater's production, in its present state, only obfuscates it.

Teacher, Student, Despot

In an unnamed South American country, apparently modeled on Pinochet's Chile, the new military dictator, Colonel Medina, promises the new American ambassador that there will be a presidential election. An election Medina hopes to win, but, still, a free and fair election. An election that will be "as fair as is necessary." The American, of course, agrees. This is the kind of dreadful non sequitur that permeates modern geopolitics as well as Joel Shatzky's thoughtful yet heartfelt new work, Amahlia, at Brooklyn's Impact Theater. In this three-character morality play, Ambassador John Whitman (Joe Lampe) finds that his actions may determine the fate of the title character, the Anna Politskaya-style dissident journalist Amahlia Marti (Andrea Suarez), whose dangerously truthful research into Medina's crimes threaten his reign, even if the election is only "as fair as is necessary."

Some years earlier, at an unnamed American university, Whitman was a young lecturer and Amahlia was his student, and lover. He was a passionate parlor radical, bristling with rage against the hypocritical, conservative International Relations department. He taught her political consciousness.

When Amahlia takes her lover's radicalism home from the parlor, are the consequences his responsibility? As well as a morality drama, this is a tragedy. It is a redolently Faustian one: to gain power for himself and the United States, whose interests he represents, Whitman risks losing Amahlia—the soul of the ethical rhetorician he once was.

As Amahlia, Suarez is skittish or combative, depending on the moment. She is a great rhetorician with an oratorical flair that makes her a convincing adversary of Medina's. Lampe's Whitman is opportunistic but tortured—a great creature of opposites. Philippe Blanchard's Medina is imposing, cruel, suave, and decidedly theatrical.

Samantha Jane Polay's costume design is simple but very evocative of character. Medina's ivory-handled walking stick betrays the aristocratic pretensions of the populist leader, and Amahlia's costume changes from red to white to gray as she moves from inamorata to crusader to prisoner. At the American university, Whitman festoons his white Oxford shirt with leftist political buttons, then covers them up with his ambassador's jacket; finally, when he seals his destiny, he removes the buttons. The acting is uniformly strong.

The story of Amahlia is ambitious, with two linked worlds—Whitman's and Amahlia's—clearly delineated in the dialogue of the three characters. It is told in nonlinear order, a strong decision that heightens the suspense of what is really a very simple plot. Director Esther Neff keeps the transitions clear by spatially isolating Whitman's university digs from his ambassadorial office within the ground plan.

Medina is a horrible man, a criminal against humanity, but he is also disarmingly charming. His doctrinal Nietzschean self-justification is not very different from the rhetoric of Nietzsche's postmodern inheritors and the Enlightenment authors of America's policy, and myth, of manifest destiny. Whitman, meanwhile, is also a horrible man, but he is tortured by his guilt, even if he does begin and end the play by loudly protesting his innocence.

I understood why Whitman is attracted to Amahlia. She is beautiful, brilliant, and, ultimately daring. Besides, he is a closet megalomaniac, and what sexual relationship better fulfills that fantasy than a teacher-student one? But I had trouble seeing what Amahlia, and especially the post-enlightenment Amahlia, saw in a man who pressures her for sex when she's trying to write an important term paper and calls her "my Patagonian petunia."

The script also could have been strengthened by some merciless editing. At two and a half hours, including the 15-minute intermission, the play felt at least half an hour too long. Characters sometimes repeat exposition or describe their feelings, even feelings they have already evocatively shown. "Somehow, this was always just a game for me," Whitman confesses, superfluously, about his youthful radicalism.

Amahlia is a good play, but if streamlined, it could be a great one. It's an enjoyable and thought-provoking inquest into the American political conscience, and I hope to see it developed further.

More Than Sound and Fury

Macbeth is a play with ghosts, as everybody knows. The spirit of the just-murdered Banquo invades his murderer's feast, and Macbeth sees a ghostly dagger and, later, a line of apparitions of Scots both dead and not yet born. One character who isn't seen as a ghost is Macbeth himself. Until now. In Andrew Frank and Doug Silver's new adaptation at Manhattan Theater Source, Macbeth: A Walking Shadow, the title character (Ato Essandoh) faces death almost as soon as the play begins. Then he haunts the scenes that follow—the past events that brought him to his precipice.

The title is perfect for this adaptation. Macbeth walks as a shadow, or ghost, through his own history, as he is a dead man from its out-of-order beginning. This begs a question: Does fate make everyone a walking shadow if history is divorced from chronology? The production has a few flaws, but its many risky victories make it an interpretation you will not want to miss.

Essandoh gave an acclaimed lead performance in Seattle's Intiman Theater's adaptation of Richard Wright's Native Son. Here, Essandoh creates a reckless yet vulnerable, indignant yet timid, haunted and haunting Macbeth. The man is a mass of contradictions, fighting as much with his many schizophrenic personae as with the escalating series of enemies he creates. Essandoh's often quiet yet clear voice strips the rusty bombast off the most famous speeches and lets us actually hear what Macbeth has been trying for centuries to say. When he ends up cursing life and fate, he is miles away in tone from the beginning. Or, given the nonlinear chronology, from the middle.

Other standouts in the cast include Chuck Bunting's Duncan, whose lack of charisma is anemic to the extreme; Lou Carbonneau's physically small yet limber, subtle, and ultimately enraged Macduff; and Michael Baldwin's alternately innocent and canny Malcolm.

The sound design, by Andrew Bellware, is an almost continuous, complex, moody score, with a subtle Celtic influence. It gives the play the feel of an action movie. It is carefully synchronized with the action, and supports rather than overwhelms the most emotionally intense moments.

Making the banquet a stand-up cocktail affair is another inspired decision, lending the scene great physical dynamism. However, some adaptation and staging choices are illogical. Macbeth kills Duncan onstage, which is shockingly effective—but his victim is attacked standing up, which conflicts with the account that Macbeth gives in the dialogue. The role of Donalbain, the younger of the two princes, has been cut, but Duncan still gestures behind him and introduces his "sons," plural.

Some of the witches are double-cast with the Scottish thanes, making them apparently male. This obscures the gender issue that is absolutely key to the plot. In the original, Macbeth's wife believes that she must be "unsexed" to commit regicide, and that if her husband doesn't help her, he is not a real man.

Of course, Shakespeare's company always cast men as women, but they indicated the characters' genders through costumes and acting. Here, an actress played the Thane of Ross without any attempt, in body language or dialogue delivery, to mark the character as male. Consequently, I wondered whether this fantasy Scotland has female warriors, and why, if that is the case, Lady Macbeth must lose her "sex" to kill.

There is some stage combat, with broadswords. The fighters looked very cramped in the narrow alley theater, and when they swung their swords in the audience's direction, a few spectators in the front row lurched backward in their seats.

With nods to Quentin Tarantino's nonlinear, music-heavy dramas of epiphany and revenge, this adaptation deconstructs Shakespeare's story instead of simply telling it. In Essandoh's performance, a vividly complete character rises from the fragments of his tale.

Russian Magic

Ryan Kravetz's set design for Urban Stages's holiday family show, The Magical Forest of Baba Yaga, with scenic art by Alexander Solodukho, is positively beautiful. The playing space is transformed into a green and gold forest, evoked by a canopy of gilded leaves, a molded cliff, giant moss-colored toadstools, and a waterfall of turquoise satin. Reaching up from this landscape are two tall, gold-veined, sadly slouching trees. As we discover in the first lines of this play, those trees used to be Fred and Egon, two little boys from New York City. Their Russian-born mother, Lisa, warned them not to stray into the forest in Central Park or they might be captured by the Baba Yaga, Russian folklore's legendary "witch of the wood." That is exactly what has happened.

In Baba Yaga, Stanton Wood's translation of Eugene Schwartz's early-20th-century Russian play The Two Maples, Lisa (Maria Silverman) ventures into the forest to find her sons. Guided by their voices, Lisa tries to get Baba Yaga to free the children. Matters are complicated by the helpfulness of Lisa's eldest son, Ivan (Aidan Koehler), who both needs his mother and needs to prove his independence and indispensability. The Baba Yaga assigns Lisa some impossible tasks as a condition for her sons' release. Ultimately, Lisa learns that the only power she needs to break the witch's spell is one she already has lots of—love.

This is a great show to bring the family to see, especially if the prospect of seeing yet another adaptation of A Christmas Carol makes you want to shut yourself up in Scrooge's counting house until February. Wood's story is traditional yet innovatively told, and winningly rooted in New York City problems. For example, the Circe-like witch transforms people into the animals they most resemble, so a real estate broker (Ned Massey) becomes a ravenous bear—and continues, in this predicament, to try to tout his hottest Manhattan properties.

Adults will get certain jokes, but the strong plot, Colm Clark's plaintive and whimsical songs, and Russian director Aleksey Burago's breathtaking stagecraft will keep young children involved until the end. The children who saw it with me were delighted and paid attention all the way through. They disagreed over which was the best character—"the witch," "the dog," or "the mother."

The cast is uniformly strong. Silverman sings with a high, strong, and beautiful voice, and shows both Lisa's empathy and her no-nonsense toughness to great effect. The three women who play the boys—Catherine Kjome, Lacey Rainey, and Aidan Koehler—pull off their shape shifting impressively. Egon, Fred, and Ivan act like modern primary-school boys, not idealized Peter Pan figures.

Massey communicates the bear-like and human qualities of his character equally well. Nikki E. Walker's Baba Yaga is a brash, haughty, exhibitionistically wicked sorceress well worth waiting to see. Kjome and Rainey double as the dog and cat, with specific and perfectly appropriate vocabularies of body language. Led by band leader Greg E. Adair, the cast members each play an instrument during the musical numbers—ranging from Massey's guitar to Walker's eerie bowed saw.

For the costumes, Lioudmila Maisouradze deserves kudos. Dressed as giant bees, the backup musicians are well integrated into the picture. The costumes of the speaking animal characters evoke a dog, cat, and bear clearly but are also sumptuous creations of multipatterned fabrics. It is apt that they dress in patchwork. In this Baba Yaga, Burago and Urban Stages have created a patchwork quilt of Old World and New, for young audiences and older ones as well.

If Walls Could Speak

Eighty-five East Fourth Street is a typical early-20th-century East Village building: a brick box with a sprawling set of front steps leading up to a door and a column stack of squarish floors. Inside, the staircases are steep and narrow. One flight of steps, the old marble ones, is worn down in the middle with use, so that they look as if they're melting. The ground-floor lobby is covered with an ornate mosaic of blue-and-white tiles that a real estate agent might call charmingly distressed. Jovially sharing this space are two theaters, the Red Room and the Kraine, as well as the Horse Trade Productions office and the KGB bar.

There is nothing unusual about this place, at least that isn't unusual about the East Village in general. Except for the large number of deadly accidents, murders, and sightings of the paranormal and undead that have taken place on the site since the 1880's.

"Some may call it coincidence," a man sitting behind a music stand intones in Horse Trade and Radiotheatre's co-production of The Haunting of 85 East 4th Street, now playing in the Red Room Theater. "Some may call it the cold hard facts."

In this play, written and directed by Dan Bianchi, Radiotheatre does a remarkable job of exposing both the facts of this site's history and the legends that have risen up around it like so many skyscrapers of whispers.

Radiotheatre has polished up an unusual and effective storytelling technique. Like Orson Welles and company recording their radio horror-show "The War of the Worlds," a quartet of actors (Clyde Baldo, Frank Zilinyi, Karyn Plonsky, and Dan Almekinder), in nondescript clothes, sit behind music stands. Speaking into microphones held close to their faces, they tell us the story of the building, alternating between narration and Ken Burns-style role playing. Sound effects and an occasional puff of sinister, flame-colored smoke from a steam machine illustrate the oral stories.

Some fascinating characters are associated with 85 East Fourth Street. They include its tragic builder—pragmatic, anti-clerical Irish immigrant Frank Conroy; Lucky Luciano crony Gianni "Deep Pockets" Parmigiano; and the bizarre Sullivanian cult. The cast members assume all these roles in a spookily convincing manner and speak confidently in their polyphony of accents and dialects.

Several of the moments that are intended to be frightening are not as scary as they could be. Hearing actors scream isn't viscerally frightening unless the audience gets some sense, themselves, of what frightens the character. One tiny glitch in the generally impressive researching of the piece is the reference to a prowling monster called "Frankenstein." (In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein is the mad doctor; his creation is a "creature without a name.")

Still, the stories themselves are terrifying, and Radiotheatre's technique of providing voices and sound effects forces the audience to recreate the horror's visual aspects as mental theater.

Much more horrific than any B-movie moment are the true stories of 85 East Fourth that Bianchi has unearthed, such as that of Lazarus, aka Otabenga, an African man who was imprisoned in a New York zoo during the 20th century. Or the cold hard fact that for more than a hundred years, New York City's prison population has been composed overwhelmingly of ethnic minorities, and it changed groups as the demographics of the city changed. In 1918, it was Eastern European Jews. Before that, it was the Irish immigrants who, Bianchi claims, later became the cops and locked up more recent newcomers.

Then there's the Brooklyn Bridge. Buried in its foundations are at least six bodies of workers killed in accidents during its construction—five more bodies than No. 85 has in its walls. Digging into one building's past, Bianchi finds New York haunted most chillingly by the effects of poverty and injustice.

The Haunting of 85 East 4th Street is an innovative piece, crafted out of great love for the city and its history, mixed with bewilderment and outrage at the horrors hidden in our local history. Go see it, and the "permanent occupants" are certain to accompany you out. They like to be remembered, and Radiotheatre gives them their wish.

Puppets and Bureaucrats

"Isn't this a very formal norm?""Actually, it's a very normal form."

When you hear that, you might be forgiven for thinking you've arrived in the realm of Lewis Carroll or Dr. Seuss. You'd also be wrong. The Garden Party takes place in Czechoslovakia, circa 1963, as interpreted by Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who, after some time in prison, became the Czech Republic's first president. Presented in a double bill with the short puppet-play The Mistake, The Garden Party opens the Havel Festival, a series of plays and lectures commemorating Havel's present residency in New York and his 70th birthday.

In The Garden Party, young, introverted chess whiz Hue Plume (James Bentley) shares his house with silent, parlor-dissident hippie brother Mark (John Kohan) and their zany, toadying parents (Michael Marion). Hue plays chess by moving the pieces on one end of the board, then switching chairs and playing for the other side. He's adept at switching viewpoints as needed. "Not so good, Dad—it sucks," he comments; then, switching to the other side of the board, "Kicking ass, Mom—checkmate!"

Dad sends Hue to an office party at "the Downsizing Office" to network with a family friend, who is evidently a neighborhood bully who grew up to be a paid bully. At the party, Hue meets Frank Slug (David Nelson), a member of the Speakers Bureau, who has come to assure the workers that they had better be enjoying themselves.

Nelson absolutely steals the show. A jumpy, zany actor, he screeches most of his lines, and his style suggests Alan Cumming. Bentley provides a strong contrast, giving an understated, deadpan performance while delivering his nonsensical dialogue at a rapid-fire pace. Before long, Hue is using his chess skills to climb the dizzying heights of communist bureaucracy—taking the audience along for a hysterical tour.

The costumes, designed by Meredith Neal, combine 1950's kitsch with Alice-in-Wonderland colors and crinolines. The knee pants and stockings of the bureaucrats make them resemble 18th-century courtiers, which may be the point.

The set, by Heather Wolensky, is pure domestic realism, and there is a bit too much of it. It includes a shaky iron gate that remains onstage during the indoor scenes; chairs that turn into trees once branches are planted in them; and a large painting of what appears to be Havel that Mark inexplicably paints right in front of his parents' noses.

The creation of a chessboard using a gobo-fitted light is creative, but an extremely long set change is required between the last two scenes, which the audience must watch from the seats because the Brick Theater has no lobby. While the set was being changed, I heard at least five loops of the recorded music, which, while charming, quickly became monotonous.

The piece's greatest strength is Havel's wordplay, in Jan Novak's new translation. The dialogue appears to have been updated, as the characters read e-mail and mention Ray Bradbury's anti-censorship novel Fahrenheit 451. However, from the creativity-deadened characters' mixed clichés ("If you can't stand the heat, no use crying out a river") to a very funny sequence in which two frightened bureaucrats trade repetitive banalities with the threatening Slug, Havel's nonsense sounds timeless. "Today it is action, not words, that speaks volumes," one character declares. It will have to be, when routine and fear have so paralyzed the speech of even the experts from the Speakers Bureau.

The Mistake, translated by Carol Rocamora and Tomas Rychetsky, is a funny, then chilling, vignette of life in prison, here adapted as puppet theater. An unnamed prisoner makes the "mistake" of taking a morning smoke, which is distinctly against protocol. His cellmates attempt to teach him the rules, but he refuses to accept or acknowledge them, or even move. Then things get disturbing. It's a short but effective parable about how people who have given up resisting conformity are threatened by someone quietly doing what Havel has called "living in truth."

Puppetry has a long and healthy history in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, and has often been used to convey social commentary and satire. This puppet show, however, was rather wooden. Until the final moments, the puppets merely shook their arms at each other; two were inexplicably tied together back to front, and the puppet representing the silent rebel was conspicuously attached to the puppet stage by a stick. The moment of violence was flimsy and excited neither fear nor pity. The dialogue, voiced by Joe Beaudin, Daryl Brown, and David Nelson, would have made a powerful radio drama.

It is wonderful that the Brick, in tandem with the other Havel Festival venues, is presenting all of Havel's plays to American audiences. The full list, along with a timeline and other useful materials that add context, are included in the festival program. Havel's words, when active, definitely speak volumes.

Haunted

When the lights come up—or barely come up—in Dramaton Theater's puppet-play trilogy The Traveler, at Theater for the New City as part of the Voice 4 Vision puppetry festival, we see a man peek out from behind a rock. His face is chalk-white, his tiny hands appear shriveled, and between the near-invisible rods that connect these hands to his chin there is nothing. No body. The black-clothed, black-masked body of his puppeteer lingers upstage of him, the solid shadow of a barely material man. The design of this puppet, and most of the others in The Traveler, exists midway between Japanese bunraku and rod puppetry. Like the showcase's artists, the puppets' characters are caught between different places and different forms. Thematically, The Traveler concerns travelers, the homeless, the invisible or transparent, and ghosts. Each of which, Dramaton passionately contends, is synonymous with all of the others.

The first tale, "The Road," is an adaptation of British poet Richard Middleton's 1911 short story "On the Brighton Road." In "The Road," or, rather, on it, are two homeless travelers, an old man and an 18-year-old boy. The road in question is in southern England, on the way to Brighton. The man is newly homeless, but the boy has been on the run for years.

But something is not really right with this picture. The cars they pass on the road—realistically represented as near-blinding pairs of headlights careening across the stage—are modern. What is going on here? And will the travelers ever get to Brighton? These mysteries find an entirely predictable solution, but the piece remains entertaining, and a good introduction to the style and themes of the whole showcase.

Like "The Road," the second piece, "Purgatory," is an adaptation, from Irish poet and playwright W.B. Yeats's 1922 melodrama. Outside a decrepit, burned-out, stately mansion, the aging, homeless descendant of a headstrong noblewoman and her working-class husband leads his "bastard" son into his own inescapable purgatory.

The story seems very dated, with the father an alcoholic, destructive ingrate and the aristocratic mother a tragic martyr to her love for him. Without her dangerously democratic sexuality, the house would not have burned down. This is especially apparent when the old man watches his parents' ghosts at their moment of tragic downfall—his own conception. The play critiques the protagonist's classist paranoia, but the characters are two-dimensional figures of evil and good.

That is not the case in the final piece, "K." This original play was written for Dramaton by Enma Ito, artistic director of Japan's Fantoma Theater Company, and translated by Shima Ushiba. Ito achieves a remarkable complexity of character for a script of this length.

The title seems to allude to Josef K, the harrowed protagonist of Franz Kafka's The Trial. Like Josef K, the hero of "K" is the focus of a much-unwarranted accusation. He is a black cat. Bitter, self-centered, and distrustful of a world that condemns him without knowing him, the black cat is transformed when he meets the Faceless Man, the ghost of an aspiring artist who died unrecognized. The Faceless Man renames the black cat "Holy Night" and entrusts to him a difficult, important, and sacred mission that will transform them both.

With "K," Dramaton definitely saved the best for last. "The Road" and "Purgatory" are entertaining, beautiful (of a sort), and clever, but "K" is emotionally compelling, and the ending almost draws tears. Furthermore, whereas the preceding two pieces could be performed by live actors, "K" cannot. Defiance of gravity, human transparency, an animal character that would give Walt Disney nightmares, and a voyage into what appears to be a sewer system all demand puppetry, and they show off the medium wonderfully.

The cat puppet is as minimal as Dramaton's other creations are. It consists of two glove puppets: the cat's head and its bluish-black, shiny, chaotically furry, and very limber tail. It is at once ugly and beautiful. Its eyes narrow to black holes from which no light escapes, and its long black teeth keep it looking scary rather than cute. Its extra-long silver whiskers stand out in bold chiaroscuro.

The Faceless Man resembles Dramaton's other human puppets in its construction: two rods for the arms and a pale face floating above them. Only this face is sculpted in a transparent material over a flat, face-shaped plate, which appears to be made out of a mirror. What better way for the frustrated artist to haunt his abandoned world than as a literal mirror held up to nature?

"K" concludes with a beautiful final twist that I can't reveal but that makes perfect sense of the title and shows how imagination drawn out of darkness can brighten the world. Which is exactly what Dramaton, in presenting The Traveler, accomplishes.

Frog and Everyman

Anna Kiraly and Kuba Gontarczyk's Slow Ascent, a shadow puppet play accented with live action, is about one of those things that happens in the crazy world of corporate New York City. In spite of its title, it is anything but slow. Playing at the Theater for the New City as part of the Voice 4 Vision puppet theater festival, the show portrays a nameless Everyman who finds himself bored and nervous in his office building's elevator as it makes a dreadfully slow ascent. Stuck in this box, Everyman is confronted by a giant frog with a hysterical laugh eerily reminiscent of Peter Lorre. Frog, as this character wishes to be addressed, needs Everyman's help to fight a heroic battle to prevent the city's destruction by an earthquake of biblical proportions—that night. They must rendezvous after work, in the boiler room. Maybe it is a dream, or a fantasy—or not.

Kiraly and Gontarczyk tell an uncanny, amusing story, and their medium matches their message perfectly. Everyman, played with lovely physical subtlety by Kazu Nakamura, dances an eerie duet in a box-shaped white space with his two-dimensional, downsized "shadow" double: a translucent photograph of Nakamura in costume, disembodied and reassembled as a rod puppet, in a light box "elevator" car.

The light box is one of many different representations of the elevator that the show contains. Nakamura paces around on a white square mat that garishly stands out in the Theater for the New City's black box. It is a two-dimensional elevator space, and in it he seems as confined as a Marcel Marceau character feeling the boundaries of his invisible cube.

Photo rod puppets also represent Frog and a mysterious woman who crosses Everyman's path at work and wakes him from his dreams. The ascent and descent of the elevator is marked by a slow, perfectly vertical meteor trail of light streaking up and down the black pillar of a miniature skyscraper.

As Slow Ascent emphasizes, an elevator is a box in which stationary people are moved by an unseen external force. That is also an accurate definition of a puppet theater. Just as the corporate world drains color from its 9-to-5 denizens, so does Kiraly and Gontarczyk's transformation of Nakamura into his two-dimensional grayscale other self.

The only color in the show is the bright orange of the city in flames, in the Frog's apocalyptic vision, projected on the shadow theater screen. It is vivid and frightening, and takes on an alarming hyper-reality in contrast with the black, white, and gray world of the rest of the play.

Kiraly and Gontarczyk also take common phobias—of elevators and other enclosed spaces, frogs, earthquakes, and loneliness—and reproduce them in new, strange, and engaging forms. The incidental music, by Joemca, added to the mysticism of the proceedings, and the three puppeteers—Alissa Mello, Morgan Eckert, and Michael Kelly—keep the flat figures as animated as Nakamura is.

Slow Ascent uses puppetry, but it isn't your everyday Punch and Judy show. Kudos to Voice 4 Vision and Theater for the New City for bringing it to New York audiences.

For Artists at Voice 4 Vision, Puppetry Provides the Ideal Medium

What do you think of when you hear the word "puppets"? Bunraku? Punch and Judy? Jim Henson's Muppets, Mr. Rogers's hand-puppet royal family, or Tim Burton's Corpse Bride?

As those examples prove, puppet shows have engaged audiences of all ages and cultures, and the medium was and still is a part of pop culture. From Oct. 12-22, when the Voice 4 Vision puppet theater festival takes place at Theater for the New City, New Yorkers will have the rare chance to see a diverse selection of puppetry from around the country and the world, including Anna Kiraly's shadow puppet play Slow Ascent as well as The Traveler, a piece about vagabonds, traveling, and ghosts by the puppetry company Dramaton Theater.

Neither Kiraly nor Dramaton member Ken Berman began their artistic careers in puppetry: they both made serendipitous journeys to the medium. Kiraly began her career as a set designer in Europe and subsequently began designing puppets. She won a place in the prestigious NEA/TCG program for designers, jointly developed by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Theater Communications Group. She made contact with puppeteer Dan Hurlin, and he introduced her to the Puppet Lab at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, where she developed Slow Ascent. Kiraly continues to be strongly influenced by visual media, including visual art, film, architecture, and animation—the animation of Jan Svankmajer in particular.

Slow Ascent

Berman started out as an "unfocused" visual artist. His early work, he says, includes "strange kinetic object sculptures, portraits, and still lifes in a manner most commonly likened to Lucian Freud." At the same time, he played in "an angry punk-rock band" with his twin brother. Then, he "drew a marionette of a skeleton with a light bulb for a head, a halo of flies buzzing around the light." He and some friends formed a puppet performance collective called the Lost Art of Puppet Theater, which brought Berman's monster to life.

The first performance, he recalls, "satisfied every part of me," and puppetry became a key element in his subsequent work. After performing an early, short version of The Traveler at a Voice 4 Vision "puppet slam" open platform, Berman and Dramaton Theater developed the full-fledged version that you can see at this year's festival.

One of Berman's strongest influences is Victorian ghost stories. "They were written with a strong sense of psychology that symbolized the mysteries beyond the human psyche," he notes. In terms of visual style, his influences include German expressionism and surrealism. He also admires modern puppeteer Basil Twist, "because he uses atmosphere in the same way that we do—merging the environment—water, air, etc.—with the emotional and dramatic intention of the puppet."

For Kiraly, puppets are "works of art come alive"—or undead. A puppet, she says, "can look so real when animated" or "so abstract or lifeless," as Svankmajer often explores in his animations. "You see a lifeless puppet hanging, and then you see it assembled and animated, and as soon as it begins to move, you are ready to believe it's alive," she says.

Puppetry also allows experimentation with scale in ways that performances involving actors rarely do. In puppetry, Kiraly says, "you can play with scale to create dramatic compositions, more like in film shots. You choose your point of view, and it doesn't have to be fixed, as in theater."

She recalls that "designing puppets gave me a lot of freedom of expression." In this traditional art, she found room to innovate. She enjoyed "coming up with new types of puppets and experimenting with animation techniques." She also appreciates puppets' apparent ability to transcend limitations that human performers must observe. "Puppetry and animation are great genres," she observes, "because they don't even have to deal with as much reality as the physical body of the actors and its physical limitations."

In Slow Ascent, the puppets are shadow puppets— specifically, as Kiraly explains, "digital printouts of photo-realistic images." She thought they were "a perfect choice to show how dreams can be even more confusing when seemingly real," while shadow puppetry allows her to "explore the chemistry of opposites." For Kiraly, nearly any object can be transformed into a puppet, "anything from a bag to an elaborate marionette." As she points out, "It's what you want to say of how you 'animate' them that really counts."

Slow Ascent

Berman developed The Traveler because he wanted to say something about vagabonds, including wandering spirits, and human psychology. "Ghosts have always been a strange obsession with me in particular because they inhabit some world beyond ourselves," he says. "They are much more informed of the entire journey of life. Yet at the same time, ghosts are caught in a limbo that hinges on a singular event: they cannot move forward past their—or others'—transgressions. Dramaton's shows have always set up a series of questions about compulsions, passions, and self-discovery—in this way, I think the lexicon of ghosts and the supernatural is an extremely entertaining way to approach this subject matter."

Puppetry is a perfect medium for this theme, because "the disembodied figure" of the puppet "becomes metaphorical for the state of transience that the characters inhabit," Berman says. "Human actors simply cannot capture a concept so literally as a puppet."

Today, Kiraly points out, "puppets appear everywhere, from TV to Broadway shows and recently even the Metropolitan Opera. … It is getting the recognition it deserves, and artists are beginning to see how amazingly versatile puppetry is and how expressive puppets can be." At Theater for the New City during the next two weeks, you can see this versatility and expression firsthand.

Visit the Voice 4 Vision Website at http://www.voice4vision.org.

Joking With Cancer

Two-Mur Humor, a Dramedy About Cancer is a well-intentioned project. Written and acted by cancer survivors, it is being staged as part of the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival as a benefit for the Two-Mur Humor Fund. This foundation pays medical bills and provides "laughter and hope" through "arts and entertainment" to children who are cancer patients and survivors. Unfortunately, Two-Mur Humor is not a very good play. Jim Tooey and Valerie David's plodding script about two thinly sketched survivors who meet in a waiting room begins with a rap number. This is played on a none too clear recording, over which actors (and Two-Mur Humor's Fund president and vice president) Kelly Chippendale and Tooey vocalize. Performed this way, the lyrics are almost unintelligible, except for the ending, in which Chippendale and Tooey chant, "She's malignant, I'm benign/I'm malignant, she's benign" repeatedly. This demonstrates that the phrase "ad nauseam" can accurately describe experiences other than undergoing chemotherapy.

After the rap, Two-mur Humor drags on for an intermissionless two hours. The characters share experiences with which cancer survivors and their loved ones will certainly identify. The dramatic question is absolutely minimal: will they survive? Both characters are essentially passive, no matter what platitudes about positive thinking, learning, and life changes they declare to the audience.

The "humor" is predictable at best and, at worst, embarrassingly ignorant. There is a drawn-out joke about a "stool in the shower" of Chippendale's character's hospital suite. Her Rabbi, a Lubavitcher look-alike, offers her spiritual help in the form of a Hebrew for Dummies Book—for $35, marked down from $37.50.

In another scene, a Chinese-American physician, Dr. Lee, is played by Caucasian actress Chippendale in opaque glasses—with bizarre holograph photos of "oriental" eyes covering the lenses. More Fu Manchu than Patch Adams, Dr. Lee has some trouble pronouncing l's, so when trying to explain that during his MRI test, his patient (Tooey) will see "white lights," Lee stutters "white rice," then "white rights," before Tooey finally corrects him. To check the clarity of his speech, Lee asks, "I making myself queer?" Hilarious.

The celebrated Dr. Adams believed that humor can be used to treat all kinds of diseases. Two-mur Humor tries to fill Adams's prescription but succumbs to complications of mediocrity and racism.

Silent Richard

The program bio for actor Henry Holden, the mobility-impaired actor who plays the title role in Nicu's Spoon's new production of Shakespeare's Richard III, declares that Holden "lives by his motto: attitudes are the real disability." Disabled actors have long proved that motto true, overcoming with their strong, professional acting the prejudices of able-bodied spectators. For example, Sarah Bernhardt did not let the amputation of her right leg end her career. After her recuperation, she played Hamlet from a chair and, in the film Jeanne Doree, gifted her legendary talents to the silver screen. That film was a silent, but in her other late performances, as far as I know, Bernhardt memorized her lines and declaimed them herself.

I wish I could say the same of Henry Holden. Despite being credited as Richard, he speaks very little of the play's dialogue—the soliloquies, a few asides, and a few one-liners. The rest of the role is spoken by Andrew Hutcheson, who stands in a corner of the playing space reading from a script on a music stand.

Holden's acting style is completely different from Hutcheson's. Holden's Richard, when he speaks, is a grinning, sneering, truly captivating jester of misrule. Hutcheson's a prim, dispassionate shadow of Kenneth Branagh's declamatory style. This makes Richard look schizophrenic, and the constant shifting between actors violently jerks the listener out of the play's world each time it happens, like an alarm clock repeatedly interrupting a fascinating dream.

Worse, Holden does not even attempt to lip-sync to Hutcheson's recital. While Hutcheson talks, Holden keeps his mouth still in a half-open puppet-like expression. Because no other role is played this way, it makes Richard look like a robot or a puppet.

Is this a deliberate, radical staging concept? Not really. "Co-player" Hutcheson is a late addition to the cast: his bio appears in a program insert, not the program itself. When I asked a company member why Holden and Hutcheson share the role, she said that "circumstances led us to this point, and we're very happy with what we have now."

This production has a lot going for it. The play is directed competently and creatively by Heidi Lauren Duke, who clarifies the action by adding silent scenes that show the murders of most of Richard's victims. The supporting cast is strong, with standouts including Amber Allison's flexibly played multiple roles; Wynne Anders's vehement Queen Margaret; Rebecca Challis's haughty, vulnerable Queen Elizabeth; and Jason Loughlin's terrified Clarence and confident Richmond. Timothy McDonough, an actor to watch out for, makes an unusually arresting presence out of the minor thug Catesby.

Victoria Roxo's set starkly and clearly introduces Richard's uncomfortable, unstable obstacle course of a world. A crumbling granite arch balances precariously on a pair of splintered, haphazardly arranged wooden stilts. The floor is a tricky puzzle of mismatched gray stones bisected by a growing tree of dangerous cracks.

However, the vacuum at the center created by a mostly silent, mostly blank-faced Richard makes the whole look unprofessional and dehumanizes the character more than Shakespeare ever did. This is not, I assume, the intention of a company that aims to "give voice" to unheard groups, including the disabled.