A Difficult Balancing Act

In Carla Cantrelle's romantic drama Looking Up, aerial performer Wendy (Cantrelle) flies through the air with the greatest of ease, to the wonder and amazement of vocationally frustrated bartender Jack (Bryant Mason). For the daring young woman on the trapeze, the really difficult balancing act is love. Cantrelle's aerial ballet, choreographed by Tanya Gagne, is both hair-raisingly risky-looking and graceful. Lurking in the background of the romance are difficult and frightening suggestions. When Jack meets Wendy, he makes a joke about Peter Pan. In that legendary play about of children in flight, which has provided employment to generations of rigging specialists, little Wendy Darling learns that when you grow up, you aren't any longer allowed to fly, so growing up is scary. Will this apply to our Wendy, and her boy who won't clean up? It's a good question, but the play drags a bit in the middle, where Wendy and Jack's lovers tiff seems transparently constructed to supply plot and conform to rom-dram formula. However, by the end, Cantrelle recovers her footing with aplomb, with a humorous yet rivetingly suspenseful test of both Wendy and Jack's trust in each other and their ability to come down to earth, as well as their physical coordination.

The plot is a standard, dependable romantic machine. Tending bar at a club, Jack dares to look up at the evening's performance act -- Wendy -- and is smitten. She comes down to earth, chats with him, and wins the keys to his apartment, ostensibly so that she can take a nap, but they both know that they really want each other. They have pleasant conversation, great sex, and a common interest in rope. (No, not like that -- Jack's grandfather was a New England sailor; before meeting Wendy, who periodically replaces her rigging, Jack's knot-tying knack was unappreciated by the world.)

A period of domestic bliss follows, slowing the plot somewhat. Of course, all is not perfect in Wendy and Jack's lives: he still hates his job and his crackhead boss Skeeter; she is grieving for her recently deceased mentor, Mario, and for her former life in a circus. Both stress over the difficult balancing act of limiting commitment versus unpredictable freedom, in love and work. Then the relationship hits a rocky patch, for apparently random reasons. Jack makes a mistake that is never foreshadowed or even shown, only discussed. Wendy makes a mistake that reveals insecurities that are, again, never foreshadowed, and which could have been avoided with a little communication.

Cantrelle's acting is solid. Directed by Giovanna Sardelli, she navigates the earthbound bits of the play with equal grace and ease. Mason also rises to the difficult challenge of holding up half of a two-hander. Physically and emotionally, Mason's Jack seems more held down by gravity than most earthlings, contextualising his desire for not only his “Tinker Bell,” but the powers she has seemingly wrested from physics and fate.

Aerialism is a beautiful art and, as Cantrelle shows, a wonderful language for the elucidation of the human psyche's invisible leaps and falls, risks and flights of fantasy, transcendence, and love. Bogged down by a plot that, very unlike a trapeze artist, avoids even the appearance of real danger and aesthetic risk, Looking Up nevertheless has some lovely moments, mostly involving Cantrelle's aerial performance. Furthermore, devoted fans of romantic relationship drama may find Looking Up a fresh new take on the genre. I look forward to seeing Cantrelle find or invent a story on which she truly can soar. I am sure that she will soon.

Ghosts in the Machine

The amazing Richard Foreman describes his famous avant-garde productions as "theater machines." Foreman's latest "machine," Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, absolutely fits this description. Like previous Foreman "machines" running down the decades, this one is a magical contraption that assembles seemingly random components of human experience to create something new and insightful. The experience is transformative. When you enter the Ontological Theater of St Mark's Church, Foreman's usual shop floor, the place has been decked out somewhat like Madame Blavatsky's seance studio. The walls are covered with gigantic antique "spirit photos" -- in which two portraits, one of a living person and one of a presumed ghost, are exposed within the same frame. Names (of the living person? the ghost? the photographer?) and long-passed dates are scrawled along the borders. Three-dimensional theatrical masks pop out of a few of the photos.

The spirit photos are all mounted on a slight diagonal to the stage floor, suggesting that this "machine" occupies a different plane than the auditorium, literally. Center stage is occupied by two small grand pianos, one veiled with a heavy cloth.

In the upstage wall are set two projection screens, with punched borders suggesting photograph negatives. The screens stare -- blankly, at first, and then are filled with images shot in two distant locations, England and Japan. Dressed like high-society seance participants, a small ensemble of live actors begins a "journey" to another place and time.

As usual for Foreman machines, the design elements are bizarre, surreal, and evocative, combining whimsy and unease. The seance conductor wears black tie, with vampire teeth and a frilly lace apron, emphasising his role as an attendant to the living from the undead. A gigantic garish puppet, "King Mockingbird," is crowned with tiny American flags, referencing America's mimicry of the rest of the world.

The actors open blank books and hold them up against the screens, reading the projected video images through the thin pages. Is there acting here? Yes, but the performers act as if entranced. Their coordinated speech and motion is impressive, but this is not the kind of show in which acting serves to illuminate character or forward a plot. The inhabitants of Potatoland do convey curiosity about that strange other universe -- ours, or rather, the world of the human consciousness. The Potatolanders are engaged, frustrated, and bewildered.

The human performers start their journey by taking drugs, and soon find themselves mesmerized by the parade of images on the screen. Foreman marshals the three troupes of performers -- American, English, and Japanese -- to compare the journeys of tourists to the "spirit world," to the sub- or heightened-consciousness, to actual distant climes, and of course, the best armchair tourism of all -- theatre spectatorship.

As usual, Foreman comes up with some intriguing paradoxes. "I am here before you arrive / I will be here after you have gone," the image of a performer on the screen aptly says -- but being only a projected image, recorded on a continent far away, this person is not "here" at all, ever. "Trust me / I go backwards / Trust me / I repeat myself," another chants, fulfilling her iterated prophecy even as she speaks it. "The visitor sleeps amidst the excitement of the experience," a HAL-like voice intones. To consider this mere speculative musing is a mistake.

At one point, Foreman confidently declares that "only by being a tourist can one experience a place" -- and then shatters that idea with a filmed scene on a staircase, featuring the Japanese ensemble, involving 1940s costumes, hiding, and what sounds like air-raid sirens. With varying degrees of severity and horror, New York, England, and Japan have all been attacked from the air. Ever since, the art and culture of these three places have struggled to make the receding memory of those horrors "immediate" as their survivors inevitably fade into mere spirit.

"Go to England immediately!" the Potatolanders are commanded, but this is easier said than done. They -- and we -- can see "England" on the screen, but is any flat image on a screen, any spectre from the photographed past, really "immediate" to its living spectator? Or is it the "immediacy" of trapped, distant images that leads people, in Potatoland and on planet earth, to believe in the magic of photography, cinema, and theater?

Like the imaginary time machine of H.G. Wells, Foreman's latest theatre machine takes us to "other worlds," and in so doing, compels us to examine our own with new eyes.

Imperfect but Intriguing

Dr Frankenstein is having a good year. In New York City alone, the past few months have seen the opening of the Mel Brooks spinoff musical Young Frankenstein, a more faithful musical adaptation of Mary Shelley's timeless novel, and even a puppet-theatre version. Now, Tada! has joined the bandwagon by presenting "A Perfect Monster," a new, short, and G-rated musical adaptation, by Tada! founder and Artistic Director Janine Nina Trevens (book) and Deirdre Broderick (music and lyrics), directed by Trevens. A crowd of whimsically costumed and acted monsters, fast-moving plot, and the empathetic performance of talented seventeen-year-old actress Saleema Josey as Sibyl, a mad scientist who is still in primary school, will have the youngest audience members captivated. Meanwhile, Trevens's allusions to many of the fable's most iconic incarnations, from Hollywood to Hammer, will keep adult chaperones reasonably well entertained.

The set is dominated by Sibyl's lab, which includes the requisite paraphernalia, including bottles of strange incandescent liquids on shelves and a Macbeth-style bubbling cauldron that promises to birth many a strange organism. It is all bathed in green and purple light, cheering up the foreboding scene.

Like Frankenstein's creature, "A Perfect Monster" is imperfectly made, yet undeniably impressive. The tale begins with music redolent of monster movies, and quickly introduces Sibyl, an antisocial young girl who has no trouble "making friends" -- out of random objects, such as "moldy french fries / and rhinoceros eyes" combined in the cauldron.

Dressed like a pint-sized Peter Cushing in a pastel frock coat, waistcoat, antique trousers and gaiters, Sibyl lives up to her name. The Roman mythological Sibyl of Cumaea was a mythological female clairvoyant who reportedly lived as a recluse in a cave. (Incidentally, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley resurrected the Sibyl in a later novel, disaster-movie precedent The Last Man).

At school, Sibyl is ignored and mocked by her classmates: the vain, pretty, and vapid Mary (Maya Park, alternating with Sophie Golomb), snotty, preppy jock Preston (Brendan Eapen), and class clown Charlie (Christopher Broughton), who tells stupid jokes that the kids, and apparently the audience, are expected to consider hilarious. When she gives a brilliant report on her "science" hobby -- the monster-making experiments -- they don't bother to listen.

Therefore, it's no wonder that Sibyl prefers to spend time with her menagerie of monsters. Unfortunately, each is a manifestation of Sibyl's own fears, frustrations, and seething self-hatred, from the indecisive three-headed Trio (Gabriela Gross, Sophie Silverstein, and Katie Welles) to the dancer with four left feet (Adam Mandala) and a creature dressed ridiculously in a McDonalds french fries container, who has a fork and spoon for hands. As the monsters explain, when Sibyl has a bad day at school, she comes home and makes a monster, then pours all of her rage onto that unfortunate creature.

Finally, Sibyl makes a "perfect monster" and best friend: a winsome female named Perfection (Jasmine Pervez, alternating with Ariana Sepulveda), who gets even with her classmates by beating them at their own games: respectively in sports, beauty, and joke-telling. Sibyl thinks that Perfection "belongs" to her, but must learn that "to make a friend" in the non-architectonic sense, one must be a good friend to others.

Having set up the fascinating problem of the child-heroine's insecurity and its diabolical manifestations, Trevens solves it rather too facilely and in a manner that seems unintentionally reactionary. When Sibyl finally learns her lesson, and resolves to treat her handmade "friends" as people and not objects, she abandons mad science for cake-baking. Soon, Charlie confesses his attraction to Sibyl, offering her a hand-picked bouquet of flowers, and defying Mary and Preston to befriend her and all her monsters. Problem solved.

I am not saying that this adaptation should have gone the way of the original, with alienation resulting in irrevocable catastrophe, but children can have great nonsense-detectors. An alienated, insecure girl will not be healed overnight by a boy's interest. Or, rather, if that's all that takes to bring the child out of her cave, that might be a problem in itself.

The monsters, with costumes constructed by Cheryl McCarron and the late Shelley Norton from concepts by Trevens, are delightful, and are unlikely to frighten even the most easily rattled youngsters. They are all benevolent. The one evidently based on Godzilla sports jazz shoes laced up with bright ribbons along with her scales and tail. Unlike in the source novel, there is no violence whatsoever, and no monsters are either destroyed or driven from home.

The music is lively enough while it's being performed by the Tada! company, but is immediately forgettable. The Tada! company, whose actors range in age from primary school to age 18, comprises a tightly directed and choreographed ensemble led by some very promising leads, particularly Josey and Perez. Most importantly, the cast appears to be having fun onstage.

Tada! makes certain that kids will never get bored by starting the play with a magic show, which fills the time during which the audience is led to their seats. The program is filled with games and activities for fidgeting young spectators. This is a great idea, but some of it is simply wrong. In a match-the-name-to-the-photo game concerning movie monsters, "Frankenstein" is the match for a photo of Boris Karloff in director James Whale's Hollywood classic Frankenstein: but Karloff played the creature, not his creator, Dr Frankenstein. Likewise, the answer to the question "Which author is responsible for the gothic legend of Dracula?" is arguably not the provided answer, "Bram Stoker," as Stoker adapted his story from a "legend" developed decades earlier, by Gothic writer John-William Polidori in his short story "The Vampyre."

Still, I must admit that I was also somewhat alarmed by the play's description of Sibyl's magical process as "science," and also by her happy abandonment of "science" for cake-baking. Possibly, parents who take their primary-school-age daughters to this show should afterwards have a brief chat about what science is, what it isn't, and how there are plenty of scientists--even girl scientists--who have made great friends, and not in seclusion, nor out of spare parts.

Direst Cruelty?

Since its 2001 premiere, writer-producer-designer-director Frank Cwiklik's Bitch Macbeth has garnered enough interest to be revived twice, with the current revival at Brooklyn's Brick Theater. Cwiklik has made some bold choices. Unfortunately, didactic and wearyingly repetitive dialogue and a one-dimensionally acted, illogically constructed principal role make this second revival conspire against its auteur's best intentions. In Bitch Macbeth Thane Macbeth (Adam Swiderski) is a comparatively sensitive soul ill at ease with the brutality of his dystopian culture. In this culture, naked young women from fallen clans are auctioned as sex slaves, and collective belief in inexorable Fate, personified by a coven of dominatrix “domgidas,” who read the future in men's wounds after whipping them, enables the masters to pity themselves as slaves. Meanwhile, Macbeth's "bitch" or "femme" tries to bury the humiliation and pain of her slave past by pushing Macbeth to kill his way to the top of the oligarchy.

Or, perhaps, to the highest level of the video game. In this world, politics is a competitive sport. Characters fight their way up in accordance with strict rules, and communicate in a limited glossary of commonly understood terms denoting status and competition, such as “challenge,” and “take all.” The "game" even has a referee, as over the slave auctions and other rituals presides "RBiter" (Fred Backus). This RBiter is the Arbiter of all destinies, which R indeed, Bitter.

The cast contains a few standouts, including Swiderski's nuanced, tormented Macbeth and Mercedes Emelina's understated, quixotic Top Domgida. As Femme Macbeth, the driving force of the action, actress Samantha Mason is not a force to be reckoned with. Mason delivers her lines in a soft, squeaky, almost monotone whine. Mason sometimes achieves cloying affectation but never genuine emotion, never showing why Macbeth is so cowed by her. A large part of the problem is in the writing of the role. "I am undone by my sex,” Femme Macbeth explains. “I was sold early. Lucky to land soft, I learned. He taught me. There are men of two types: malleable and intractable. There are two types of women: sold and kept. I swore I would be kept. I am undone by my sex."

Undone also by this repetitive preaching, Femme Macbeth is also the perfect, and perfectly implausible, chauvinist fantasy woman. She uses her sex appeal to wrest power from the most “malleable” of the men who run her society, then blames her pain illogically on her femaleness (“my sex”) -- rather than on the other “sex,” which has “sold”, bought, and hurt her.

Overall, the script of Bitch Macbeth suffers from pretentious verbal haemorrhaging. "I sweat out poisons and rehabilitate my senses," one Small Asbury (David Mills Boynton), the rebellious heir apparent of the "prime clan," tells his lover. "I can't comprehend my own struggle... I am perpetually adolescent... I wonder what you see in me and what that really means. It's like hell on earth."

One of the most famous images of Lady Macbeth is John Singer Sargent's painting of Ellen Terry in the role. Statuesque, decked out like a serpent in a skintight gown of gleaming green metallic scales, Terry's Lady Macbeth exuded power. At the same time, rapturously holding aloft her husband's crown, she worshipped his state-given authority. On the Victorian stage, Terry threw the schizoid nature of this character -- the perfectly cruel lamia and cruelly perfect submissive wife -- into her society's collective face. Had Mason the acting chops that legend ascribes to Terry, and were Cwiklik's script ruthlessly edited so that subtexts are revealed rather than stated and neo-Victorian misogynist phobia does not pass for metaphysics, Bitch Macbeth might be, as Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth begs, filled "top-full with direst cruelty." As is, it's merely dire.

A Harder Nut

In 1991, choreographer Mark Morris shocked and delighted audiences with The Hard Nut, a witty, gritty, revisionist Nutcracker inspired by R. Crumb cartoons and 1960s kitsch. Now, director and choreographer Angela Harriell's The Nutcracker: Rated R, at Theatre for the New City through December 23rd, is a harder and nuttier interpretation than Morris's, and dynamically, engagingly danced as well. Performed by healthy, human-looking dancers of a variety of body types, The Nutcracker: Rated R fuses traditional pointe work with other dance styles, including an adeptly executed breakdance, comically faux-drunk ballroom, burlesque, hip-hop and modern. There is something for everyone in Harriell's work -- except traditional ballet purists. In this variation of Tchaikovsky's classic Christmas ballet, little Clara Stahlbaum (the sylphlike Juliana Smith) is grumpily attending her restauranteur parents' annual Christmas party, in the restaurant. She has upset her mother by wearing a goth sweatshirt. Her gay, shy, artistic brother Fritz (Adam Pellegrine) is equally out of place among their football-fan guests. When the children's hippie uncle, Drosselmeyer (David F. Slone Esq.) crashes the party with a messenger bag full of fantastic presents, Clara and Fritz both get the night of their dreams. That's right: in this version, Fritz gets to share Clara's adventure, and ultimately undergoes a transformation no less magical than that of the original Nutcracker Prince.

Smith has an amazing range as a dancer, stretching from graceful to edgy. She seems equally at home on pointe during the grande pas de deux near the end as she is with faux street dance and mime. As Fritz and the 1980s rockstar "Firecrotch," Pellegrine shows great versatility, blossoming from a gangly, awkward teenager into a campy, out-there star and finally a figure of more fragile grace.

Harriell's visual witticisms are wonderful, from her update of the Battle with the Rat King (now involving the not toy soldiers, but boiler-suited minions of the Health Department, and fought for dominion of the Stahlbaums' restaurant); to the towering Empire State Building that replaces the Christmas tree; to a sad, haunting pas-de-deux by a pair of half-sleeping homeless people.

Jean Luc van Damme's video images, shown on a screen at the top of Adam Pellegrine's minimalist set, are used sparingly and help to clarify the narrative. The video never steals attention from the dancers. Harriell's costumes are vivid, memorable, raunchy when appropriate, and help to define clear, strong characters. The "Queen of the Blow Fairies" is decked out in white sequins and platinum hair, and Times Square stripper Svetlana ("From Russia With Nuts") looks freezing in her ridiculous fur panties. The rats are adorable in hot pink wigs, ears, and tails. Harriell's The Nutcracker: Rated R might not be Tchaikovsky's vision of sugar plums, but it's certainly visionary. Running in the holiday season at Theatre for the New City, it ought to become a New York Christmas tradition.

Richard Reflects, Brilliantly

"I do mistake my person all this while," the future King Richard III (Michael Cumpsty) reflects after railroading his murder victim's wife into marrying him literally over her husband's dead body. "Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass." Renaissance superstition held that devils cast no shadow, so Richard needs a mirror to assure himself that he is not really a devil. In Classic Stage Company's production of Richard III, Cumpsty's Richard's reflections are brilliant, in a variety of ways. The set, by frequent Kulick collaborator Mark Wendland, literally surrounds Shakespeare's famous sociopath with illuminated looking-glasses. The performance space is paneled with mirrors and illuminated by gigantic crystal chandeliers, which are reflected in both the mirrors and a gleaming, slick floor. Oana Botez-Ban's costumes combine sleek, timeless shapes with evocative colors. Groups are color-coded. For example, the princes in yellow; Richard's brothers and sister-in-law wear blue. The bereaved women who blame Richard for their menfolks' deaths wear shiny black-and-grey gowns that capture and reflect the chandeliers' glaring light. Despite being surrounded by reflective surfaces, however, Cumpsty's Richard and the court strenuously try to avoid seeing themselves as they are.

Cumpsty and Kulick's informed, unpretentious directing makes this a non-patronizingly accessibleRichard. Hand gestures accentuate a few of the script's most opaque archaisms, such as "moiety,'' and when the dialogue mentions offstage characters, we see them. For example, the play opens with Richard facing the upstage mirrors, and turning to contemplate his brother Edward IV, who stands frozen, also reflected, wearing the crown and embracing a red-velvet-garbed mistress.

When Richard says that his "winter" is "made glorious by this noble son of York," he gestures to his brother. Later, when Edward mourns their middle brother, Clarence, murdered at his apparent demand by Richard's treachery, the king crosses to the "Tower" mid-speech and embraces his dead sibling, while the court looks on.

Cumpsty plays Richard as a believable three-dimensional being, not a snarling caricature. His disarming affability seems dangerously genuine. Cumpsty’s casual, chatty delivery of the early soliloquies is more compelling than Sir Ian McKellen’s famous interpretation in Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film, and makes room for a huge change in persona when Richard finally lets his act fall apart.

Cumpsty’s Richard jokes with his enemies, and induces the audience to brittle nervous laughter. In one of the staging's most psychologically spot-on moments, Richard III presents his grieving sister-in-law, whose brothers and sons he has killed, with his superficially charming request to marry her one remaining child. Helpless and asked for a response, she laughs -- as in Chekhov's phrase -- through tears. Her reaction for once exposes Richard's absurdity. It is a laugh of dissent.

Among a strong cast, the other standout performance besides Cumpsty's is that of another bereaved dissenter, the former Queen Margaret, as played by Roberta Maxwell. Marching across the space like a general on the battlefield and delivering her "prophecies" with biting, confident lucidity, Maxwell reveals "Mad" Margaret as a surprisingly sane woman in a mad world.

Only the "prophetess" Margaret knows the real extent of Richard's destructive potential. When the women of the court crawl to her, demanding to learn how to "curse,'' Margaret gives us a haunted but patient orator and mentor figure. Maxwell's Margaret and Cumpsty's Richard are equals and opposites. Once as ruthless as him, she now sees herself in him as if in a carnival trick-mirror.

One weak point was the decision to distribute flags printed with Richard's insignia, a white boar, to the audience during Richard's election by the people of London. The passing of bunches of flags from spectators on the aisles to the middles of the rows was a distracting hassle. In order to participate in the flag brigade, this reviewer had to look away from the stage. While gazing at fellow spectators to see if any concerned citizens would refuse to hail Richard of Gloucester (yes, some did) this reviewer momentarily paid no attention to the impassioned speech that Buckingham (Michael Potts) was giving to the London populace. Directors as genuinely innovative as Kulick and Cumpsty need not rely on gimmicks.

Cumpsty and Kulick’s Richard III is the first production in Classic Stage Company’s Fortieth Anniversary Season. It will be a hard act to follow, but demonstrates why, unlike Richard, Classic Stage Company has enjoyed such a long and happy reign.

Back From the Future

Having seen, or, rather, heard, Radiotheatre's I>The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, I eagerly anticipated another installment in their current H.G. Wells Science Fiction Theatre Festival -- The Time Machine, now playing at 59E59 Theatres through November 4th. The climax and ending of this adaptation of Wells' 1895 classic The Time Machine, written and directed by Radiotheatre's chief innovator Dan Bianchi, packs a chilling punch. However, the whole is not up to Radiotheatre's usual level of suspense and immediacy, on account of a frame-and-flashback structure that situates most of the play in the hero's past experience.

The set-up takes its time, with the Time Traveller (Jerry Lazar), a mad scientist whose grief for his late wife is his life's unhealable wound, puttering about his living room in the company of three rather nondescript friends. He invents the Time Machine. They don't believe him. Finally, the moment we are waiting for arrives: the Traveller tests the Machine, with himself in the driver's seat.

Moments later, the Traveller returns. He has come from the very distant future, to tell a story of high drama from beyond the end of human history. Unfortunately, a lot of the danger is a bit minimized by the fact that the Traveller has returned safely to the past -- obviously racked by post-traumatic stress, but alive and physically well.

The one future character who is differentiated enough to invite concern, love interest Theena, is passive and communicates nonverbally, albeit like her counterpart Weena in Wells's prose.

More frustratingly, Theena is played not by a live voice (like Lota in Radiotheatre's Moreau), but by pre-recorded sounds. They are great, surreal sounds, by the masterful Radiotheatre regular Wes Shippee, but they still combine with Theena's limp pathos to make her seem something less than human. Or, given her uncertain Linnaean classification, something less than a sentient creature.

This dramaturgical structuring makes it seem as if the Traveller's travels, narrated by him in the past tense, are part of the past, not the future. Of course, that paradox is part of Wells's and Radiotheatre's point, and supports the play's exploration of the effect of the possibility of time travel on speculation about deterministic versus fatalist concepts of history.

The action picks up when the Time Traveller reveals that he is not through with travelling, and finds that his friends remain skeptical about his vision of the future. The end of the play is scary -- especially because it is more scientifically possible than almost any other science fiction conceit with which I am familiar.

In short, if you love Wells, "The Time Machine," or the sci-fi or horror genres, this dramatization will prove enjoyable. So program your own Time Machine for an evening before November 5th and blast off to 59E59.

Those Pesky Martians

In 1938, Orson Welles directed a radio theatre adaptation of H.G. Wells's classic sci-fi horror novel The War of the Worlds. Some people turned on their radios in the middle of the broadcast, mistook the story for an actual news report on an actual, present, invasion of hostile Martians, and panicked. It seems silly, until you see, or, rather, hear, award-winning New York performance art company Radiotheatre's newest adaptation of The War of the Worlds, written and directed by Radiotheatre's chief innovator Dan Bianchi. The voice of the newscaster, reporting, he says, from the site of the Martian touchdown in Port Jefferson, Long Island, sounds hauntingly like an actual 1930s radio journalist. The sound effects easily suggest visuals, and the story is as horrific as in the original.

Radiotheatre's signature performance style -- on-book readings accompanied by vividly evocative, masterfully layered sounds effects and rousing, movie-score instrumental music -- makes the piece emotionally engaging and viscerally chilling while appearing a blatant theatrical illusion.

While communicating what all the fuss was about back in 1938, this adaptation also incorporates some distinctly modern, specifically post-9-11 touches. Its main concern is not how the humans resist the aliens as how the horror of murderous invasion changes them, causing widespread panic and making the nameless, Everyman hero, voiced by Frank Zilinyi, do something that, before the landing, would have seemed unthinkable. Part of Radiotheatre's HG Wells Science Fiction Theatre Festival, The War of the Worlds plays at 59E59 Theatres in repertoire with three other Radiotheatre pieces.

The cast wears a uniform of nondescript black clothes, and the set is almost as noncommunicative: a backlit sign that says "Radiotheatre," a pile of pseudo-antique travel trunks, a few portable flashing lights, and, enshrined on top of one of the trunks, a small photo of Orson Welles. The sound effects, on the other hand, are complex, paramount, and perfect. The Martians' mechanical walking "tripods" tramp into and out of earshot, their sinister machinery whirring, squeaking, and shrieking. Our hero runs through muck, cracks open creaky wooden doors, and scurries around his hiding places. Pounding music heightens the adrenaline rush and signals the approach of the dangerous Martians, and dangerously panicked people. Kinder music underscores the return of daylight, peace, and hope.

The large ensemble bring several distinct human characters to life. Supporting Zilinyi are Peter Iasillo as a Martian-shocked soldier who fantasises about a resistance movement based on the behaviour of New York City's rat population; Elizabeth Burke as the hero's rather naive wife; Cash Tilton as an ineffectual Senator; and Patrick O'Connor as an eccentric medical researcher.

Most compelling is the versatile R. Patrick Alberty, double-cast as the lone radio journalist who keeps reporting even when he fears he is the last human alive and an obnoxious minister who can't decide if the Martian's bright death ray is Satan or a vengeful yet radiant God.

Comparisons with the recent War of the Worlds film, starring Tom Cruise, are inevitable. The play engages with the issues of psychology, philosophy, and ethics that Wells incorporated into his tale; issues that the movie completely ignores.

Radiotheatre's The War of the Worlds concludes with an epilogue that alludes strongly to the world of the original broadcast, and the threat of imminent war that, in 1938, was anything but fantasy. This play should appeal to a range of audience: fans of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and American cultural history, but also anyone for whom daydreams and nightmares prove engrossing pieces of theatre.

The Return of Beebo Brinker

Beebo Brinker, the sulky, sexy, tortured and maddening butch heroine of Ann Bannon's 1950s lesbian pulp novels, lives in Greenwich Village. New York's oldest elevator operator, Beebo keeps a low profile when the cops raid the bars, but every femme in the Village knows her, or wants to. Bannon called her a cross between movie star Ingrid Bergman and athlete Johnny Weissmuller. For Bannon's readers, Beebo served as a tour guide to the strange, wonderful New York lesbian subculture and a fantasy lover. At the same time, Beebo's dark, violent, man-emulating and self-hating side revealed the dark side of Bannon's books: their persistent undercurrent of internalized homophobia. The Village is a great place to live, they suggest, but a girl would have to be a martyr to live there -- or else very, very brave. Beebo and her world are resurrected with eerie accuracy in Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman's The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, a stage adaptation of several of Bannon's books. Part pulp romp, part exploration of cultural history, the play concentrates on a love triangle between Beebo and two very femme women, estranged sorority sisters and lovers Laura Landon (what a romance-novel name!) and Beth Ayres, nee Cummings.

Laura comes to Greenwich Village to forget about Beth, who dumped her to marry a man. While Beebo falls for Laura, Beth resolves to leave her husband and children and travel cross-country to New York to find Laura and pick up where they left off.

Meanwhile, Laura's friend Jack, a forty-something gay man sick of deluding himself that rent boys love him, relies increasingly on Laura for platonic companionship. Soon, he is asking her to share his loneliness.

Yes, the characters are walking stereotypes. Jack is a particularly egregious example. However, the production garners laughter and exudes pain because Leigh Silverman's direction renders the entire world similarly melodramatic and unreal. The mise-en-scenes look ripped from the covers of Bannon's books. Laura (Marin Ireland) looks down, arching her back like a wilted sunflower, as straight roommate Marcie (Carolyn Bauemler) lounges on a bed, exposing one garish pink Doreen bra strap and turning her body downstage as if aware of an audience. Beebo (Anna Foss Wilson) leans against a wall in the bar surveying the scene with an intense gaze, fitting easily into the roles of both spectacle and voyeur.

Rachel Hauck's versatile minimalist set is dominated by a platform that functions as several beds and floors. This leaves it to Theresa Squire's costumes to establish the period. They do, with clarity, finesse, and fun, but without going overboard into parody or kitsch.

Beebo is suited up in men's style trousers and shirts and severely brushed-back, apparently Brylcreem'd hair. A few striking touches: tall boots and a red velvet vest, emphasise her beauty and iconoclasm, but also her tragic drive to control her world and its other women.

The other girls wear such 1950s staples as crinoline-stuffed skirts, belted sweaters, and pointy, bulky bras. Marcie in particular seems to have got her fashion sense from Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe.

The actors make up in technically precise character-acting for the characters' absence of depth. Each has a clearly defined walk, stance, and voice. There are two standouts, however. One is Bauemler in the sharply contrasting roles of Marcie, scary vamp Lili, and worldly, cynical romance novelist Nina Spicer, an homage to Bannon herself. The other is Wilson. Beebo spends much of the play merely watching the other characters, surveying her domain, but Wilson builds into even this a rage at her world that bursts through the cool exterior at just the right moments. Paradoxically, it is the fantastic Beebo who, of the play's principal characters, ultimately appears the most complex and self-contradictory, which is to say, the most genuinely human.

As a play with lesbian characters at front-and-centre, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is a rarity in New York theatre, even off-off-Broadway. It is a great piece of cultural archaeology and often riotously funny. At the same time, it is a play about people caught between difficult realities and often more difficult fantasies. They try to see through a maze of prejudice and self-denial to find out who they really are, and find the courage to live by the truths they discover.

Dark Magic

The legend of Dracula, as created by Bram Stoker in his 1898 novel, has captured international attention for over a century and inspired retellings in a variety of media, most notably film. But the book, to be honest, is a bit of a mess. It is unclear who the protagonist is, as the naïve Victorian lawyer Jonathan Harker dominates the first half of the story, while his wife, Mina, plays the leading role later. Stanton Wood's adaptation The Night of Nosferatu, produced by Rabbit Hole and directed by the brilliantly innovative Edward Elefterion, deals with that duality masterfully. Wood turns Stoker's structural problem into a brilliant metaphor for the title character's (after)life of "boundary crossing," which makes him attractive to the boundary-constrained Mina. Previously presented by Rabbit Hole as two plays, the work is even stronger as an amalgam of conflicting halves.

That is not just a metaphor: in the combined piece's first act, the actors all wear black, and it deals primarily with Mina's mental exploration of Nosferatu's castle and confrontation with the vampire, as she telepathically follows Jonathan on a business trip to Transylvania. In Act 2, they wear white, while Nosferatu becomes a stranger in the exposed world of Mina and Jonathan's society and invites Mina, incarcerated in an insane asylum, to break boundaries with him.

This reviewer was mildly annoyed by one aspect of an otherwise insightful script: the constant declarations, in the first part, that Romania is a country of darkness and superstition, where ghoulies make themselves right at home but human beings would not want to visit. Having been there and seen some remarkably innovative theater in the city of Sibiu's annual International Theater Festival, I think that Stoker's assumption needs some rethinking.

Most of the cast are veterans of Rabbit Hole's productions of the two parts. The major exception is the role of Mina, now played with a lot of steel and passion by Tatiana Gomberg, who, last year, shone as another Gothic heroine in Theater 1010's Northanger Abbey.

Matt Cody reprises his wonderful Midtown International Theatre Festival performance as Nosferatu. The tall actor's stooping walk, gratingly gritty voice, alternatingly threatening and pained expressions, and undercurrent of empathy make for a truly memorable performance. Cody's mannerisms allude to legendary actor Max Schreck's in F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, but never merely mimic. As Harker, Paul C. Daily's Dudley Do-Right normalcy and naïveté contrast sharply with Mina's growing self-awareness and increasing identification with Nosferatu.

The humans' costumes are simple but effective, with the women's skirts suggesting the late-Victorian silhouette without going all out in period decoration. Nosferatu wears a long black overcoat that accentuates his hunched back. His hands and face are caked in white makeup, his ears are pointy, and his fingers are elongated into sharpened points, just like Schreck's. At the right moments, he and the other vampires display the obligatory weird teeth.

As in the previous presentations, the set consists of a black curtain. There are no props, and no recorded sound effects. The actors create the play's world with mime, manual and oral sound effects, and the creepy amber glare of hand-held lights. The revelation of Nosferatu in his coffin is accomplished by merely jerking back the curtain to reveal Cody, with artificially extended bleach-white hands crossed on his chest and a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression.

With mise-en-scene like this, Wood, Elefterion, and the cast make powerful dark magic. Rush to see it before the sun rises and it disappears.

Sparrow's Song

The set of Piaf: Love Conquers All, designed by actress-singer-director Naomi Emmerson, is surreal. The legendary singer's hotel room is rendered in stiff, flat, white panels, with the furniture painted on in black lines. It looks like a black-ink sketch on a giant piece of white paper. Here and there, a real, three-dimensional prop painted an intense pinkish-red—an umbrella or a bunch of roses—breaks the illusion. This is all perfectly appropriate for a play about Piaf (Parisian slang for "sparrow"). For the woman who sang "La Vie en Rose," life was flat, except for rare roseate splashes of love. In Roger Peace's script, the dream of love gives the destitute girl who becomes Edith Piaf a reason to live, and sing, but also makes her vulnerable to debilitating despair. The multitalented Emmerson acts Piaf's dizzy highs and devastating lows with all the passion necessary, eschewing melodrama for true pathos, horror, and ecstasy.

A second actress-musician, Stephanie Layton, plays an array of Piaf's lovers, mentors, and associates, of both genders. Layton's metamorphosis into the elderly Parisian nightclub impresario Papa is especially impressive. Wisely, Peace chooses not to have Layton, or anyone else, portray Marcel Cerdon, Piaf's beloved muse. Only Piaf can see him, and only her singing can bring him to life.

The best reason to see Piaf is the bilingual Emmerson's gorgeous singing of a number of Piaf classics, in French. These include "Milord," "Sous le Ciel de Paris," "Je Ne Regrette Rien," and, of course, "La Vie en Rose." Emmerson hauntingly recaptures Piaf's full-bodied vibrato but makes the songs fresh and powerful. It is through the carefully ordered repertoire that she tells the story of Piaf's emotional journey.

The show enjoyed several successful runs in Emmerson's native Canada. We New Yorkers should be honored that Piaf has chosen to pay us a visit.

Wand Music

At its best, the New York International Fringe Festival showcases daring, original, exciting productions deserving of further stage lives. The Blue Cake Theater Company's intelligent, intriguing, heartfelt performance-art piece Theremin: Music From the Wave of a Hand, written by and starring Ben Lewis and Duke Doyle, exemplifies the Fringe at its best. The title refers to the first electronic musical instrument and its tragic Russian inventor, Leon Sergeevich Teremin. The theremin, its inventor, and its first virtuoso, New York University music student Clara Rockmore, captivated America in the 1920s. Then, Leon Theremin mysteriously disappeared. His instrument followed his vanishing before making a resurgence in the 1950s in the soundtracks to The Day the Earth Stood Still and other sci-fi films. A retro signifier of weirdness, kitsch, and alienation, its haunting electronic trills are featured in the Beach Boys's "Good Vibrations."

Brian Wilson, the possibly schizophrenic Beach Boys songwriter, is the play's protagonist. As played by Lewis, Wilson talks to a theremin and to his ghostly idol Theremin (Doyle) while holed up in his home, straitjacketed. Society destroys genius, Wilson insists. Observe Theremin, who spent many of his lost years in the dreadful Kolyma Gulag. But, as Wilson explores Theremin's life, work, dreams, and delusions, he destroys treasured myths about genius, music, and alienation.

Doyle and Lewis competently act the characters they wrote, even though they both look a little young for the roles. Lewis's Wilson exudes the naïve energy of the garage-band Mozart, modulating his madness with moments of piercing clarity. Doyle's Theremin is socially awkward but diplomatic and charming. He plays Theremin's fear of the KGB and other, more personal demons quietly but clearly. As Theremin's muse Rockmore, the versatile Elizabeth Palin is stoical and equally convincing as Theremin's wide-eyed 22-year-old protégé and weary, elderly traveling disciple. Gabe Levey maintains a stiff upper lip and nebbishy demeanor as Theremin's Soviet manager Alexander.

A fragmented, nonlinear, and often stylized performance style makes Theremin much more than a docu-play about a pair of creative eccentrics. One section, in which scenes from Theremin's life are frantically replayed in the style of a sci-fi B movie, is a riot. Wilson's selective memory and runaway imagination also make for some surprising narrative twists. Finally, thereminist John Hoge plays live onstage. There is a lot of "multimedia" performance in this city, where the "multimedia" is the icing on the cake. Here, it's an essential ingredient.

Farquhar in the Park

It's been a slow day for recruiting officer Kite. The army needs soldiers for an incomprehensible foreign war, or maybe several, but he has managed to sign up only five new soldiers, and one is a lawyer. "Are you mad in the head? Enlist a lawyer? Discharge him!" his superior officer, Captain Plume, shouts. "I will have no man in my army who can write, for he will write ... petitions!" George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, smartly produced by the New York Classical Theater, sounds as if it were written yesterday, but it was first produced in the 18th century.

Captain Plume, played by Torsten Hillhouse, is a class A jerk who believes "it is our policy to leave as many recruits in the county as we take out." This has made him a deadbeat dad many times over. Plume is in love with Sylvia Balance, the daughter of a local judge. Plume's best buddy, civilian dilettante Worthy, is in love with Sylvia's cousin Melinda, who has rebuffed him. Both women have money, which makes them even more attractive to the men.

Meanwhile, don't ask how the war is going. When Sylvia's wise father does, Plume replies that, on his last deployment, "we were so intent on victory we paid no attention to the battle."

The principal actors use their comic skills to amp up the silliness. As Plume, Hillhouse struts like a peacock and delivers his most absurd lines with a caustic deadpan. Shad Ramsey's Worthy jumps around in the pain of unrequited love, contorting his body and screwing up his face like Jim Carrey on Turkish coffee.

Sylvia (Katie Sigisimund) spends a large part of the play in drag, aping the perfect recruit. Sigisimund plays these scenes with confidence and a low voice. As the braggart soldier Brazen, Sean Hagerty speaks in a silly, plummy accent and is endearingly obnoxious. Erik Gratton's Kite is at his loopy best as a fake fortune teller.

Director Grant Neale's promenade theater staging is minimal but effective. After every few scenes, a pair of musicians, Ricky Ryerson and James Honderich, perform 18th-century folk music while leading the audience through the park to a new location. (On the night I saw it, they made an unexpected detour around a Parks Service tractor and a garbage van without skipping a beat.) Like recruits, the audience must follow the leaders.

Production designer Amelia Dombrowski's costumes suggest the silhouettes of 18th-century clothes but are not period-play copies. I especially liked the foppish Worthy's pinstriped frock coat, decorated with what appears to be pieces of a necktie.

Farquhar was much better at writing political satire than romance. For most of the play, he keeps the lovers apart, leaving little opportunity for the actors to build chemistry. This makes the romance seem contrived, but that may be Farquhar's cynical intention.

Like the Public Theater's annual Shakespeare in the Park season, The Recruiting Officer is produced outdoors in Central Park, and admission is free. Unlike Shakespeare in the Park, you don't need to wait on long lines to reserve tickets. Simply show up and watch. With that policy, great performances, and Farquhar's funny, timely script, you have no excuse not to enlist.

Undead

In 1922, when German film director F.W. Murnau released Nosferatu, A Terror-Symphony, a silent adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, he could not have imagined the afterlife that his film and its creepy lead actor, Max Schreck, would wrest from oblivion. In movies, Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu. Tim Burton named the debonair corporate villain of Batman Returns after Schreck, and in Brooklyn auteur E. Elias Merhige's The Shadow of the Vampire, John Malkovich played Murnau coaching Schreck—a real vampire—to just play himself.

At this year's Midtown International Theater Festival, Rabbit Hole Ensemble is reviving the legend again, in Stanton Wood's new play, Nosferatu: The Morning of My Death, the second work in the company's trilogy of Dracula-inspired plays. Morning is both a worthy successor to Murnau's film and an original response to it. It is not a direct adaptation of Murnau's film, nor of Stoker's novel. Instead, it is the first-person account of their heroine, named, as in Stoker's novel, Mina Harker.

For Morning's Mina, the cruel yet charming Count Nosferatu has one redeeming quality. He offers her the chance to cross borders and break boundaries—literally, the boundaries between life and death, but also the various social boundaries that imprison Victorian women. After Mina's vampire-induced sleepwalking lands her in an insane asylum and a straitjacket, the asylum director's wife regrets that "it felt wrong to put her there." "Had to be done," the doctor says, shrugging.

In telling the tale from Mina's viewpoint and making it a struggle between Victorian woman and her ordinary life-drainers, Wood recalls Francis Ford Coppola's inaccurately titled 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula. However, Wood's deft, theater-style handling of the story and his empathetic excavation of Mina's inner monologue make Morning lively and haunting, if not quite new.

The acting in the lead roles is as strong as Wood's writing. Jenna Kalinowski's Mina is passionate without being melodramatic, sensitive yet never sentimental, and increasingly indignant. As the madhouse inmate Renfield, Danny Ashkenasi is frighteningly accurate. His wide-eyed ranting is zany yet natural, and watching him mime eating flies is nauseating. Paul Daily plays Mina's husband as a bland, irritating Dudley Do-Right, but that's exactly how Jonathan is supposed to be.

Matthew Cody, as the vampire, speaks in a gruff, gritty voice. The ensemble repeats his lines after him, creating an echo effect that couldn't be done better with technology. Cody's portrayal of the character is nuanced and three-dimensional, radiating both arrogance and alienation.

Cody's makeup (by Courtney Daily) and costume emulate iconic elements from Schreck's look—the white face, the black suit, and the extra-long fingers that taper into sharpened knife points. Thankfully, Daily eschews the outsize putty nose that Murnau may, disappointingly, have lifted from the visual lexicon of Weimar anti-Semitism.

Director Edward Elefterion's blocking often makes Nosferatu appear to Mina from upstage, his pale face and hands seeming to float in the darkness surrounding her. This reinforces Wood's suggestion that he is not only Mina's confidante but also her alter ego, the rebellious double that her husband and his society try to kill.

Elefterion's lighting design is as evocative as his directing. The lights, including some manually manipulated by the actors, cast their shadows on black curtains upstage, referencing but never copying Murnau's famous exploitation of shadow theater. Elefterion is clearly a director to keep watching.

This coming Halloween, Rabbit Hole Ensemble will present its entire Nosferatu trilogy. Until then, the Midtown International Theater Festival offers a great opportunity to preview the work. Like its antihero, you might decide that one taste isn't enough.

Triple Noir

In the cult 1950s noir film The Shadow-Pier, socialist-leaning World War II veteran Johnny, his African-American best buddy Justin, and sweetheart Corinne battle the forces of evil, as personified by Ocean City, Md., property developer Mr. Barnardine. All their fates will be decided on the salted boards of Ocean City's creepy Shadow Pier, which is also the name of Barnardine's sleazy resort. This film became a cult obsession because it was shown only once—and only partially—before one Agent Spencer, of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, arrived to shut it down for promoting Communism—or "racial harmony." Like another 1950s classic, Rebel Without a Cause, The Shadow-Pier achieved notoriety as a "cursed" film, because all of its actors died early, unnatural deaths.

The major difference between Rebel and The Shadow-Pier is that the latter was never made, except in Jonathan Wallace's brilliant new play, also titled The Shadow-Pier. A winner of Abingdon Theater Company's prestigious Christopher Brian Wolk Award, the play is being premiered by the Howling Moon Cab Company as part of the Midtown International Theater Festival.

Wallace's play consists of three interwoven narratives—that of the fictional film; its creators' battles with McCarthyism, as personified by Agent Spencer; and a modern standoff involving the film's ghostwriter (the last living member of the creative team), a modern film scholar desperate for tenure, and an insane former FBI agent who builds bombs in his basement and claims to have a unique, extant copy of the film.

What will Johnny do to get Corinne back from the vicious Barnardine? What will actor Ed Hudgins (who played Justin), film financier Eliane Tenbroek, and cinema owner Sam Stein do to keep themselves off the blacklist? What will film scholar Moira Spelling risk for job security? And can haunted ghostwriter Ferry Tenbroek prevent the curse of The Shadow-Pier from claiming any more lives?

Wallace's script explores each of these questions with an equally riveting dose of suspense. He adroitly exploits the fragmentation of the three narratives to increase the tension. James Duff's stylized, minimalist direction highlights the noir atmosphere with tableaux that look as if they came from 50-year-old reels.

The Shadow-Pier is complicated, but it isn't a mess, structurally speaking. Wallace has supplied a clear protagonist in Ferry (Peter Reznikoff), who, when contacted by the film scholar and the psychopath (Jared Morgenstern), fights his instinct to leave the cursed film safely submerged in his memory. Forced to recall the dark days of the 1950s and the lessons in the film itself, he constantly calculates his risks, just as any film noir hero does.

Reznikoff's Ferry is a haunted but ordinary old man. His pain and grief are detectible but never exploited for melodrama. All four actors play one role in each of the three narratives, and they switch between their roles with creative versatility and great clarity. In particular, Reznikoff's handling of the switches between the reserved patrician Ferry, the energetic first-generation-American Stein, and a cardboard-nasty Barnardine is impressive.

As the scholar Moira, Ferry's alcoholic, film-financing cousin Eliane Tenbroek, and film heroine Corinne, Gayle Robbins shows an intensity reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn. At the same time, the contrast between her self-assured, put-together Moira and her scatty, sloppy Eliane is huge.

The costumes, like the actors, do triple duty. Melanie Swersey's black, white, and gray outfits lend the film-within-a-play scenes a good deal of noir verité. Minor changes, such as the addition of plastic glasses or removal of the men's hats, change the era and the character instantaneously. The set, by Elisha Schaefer, remains the same: the wooden pier dominates the film scenes and, like its namesake movie, haunts the worlds of its creators in the 1950s and their 21st-century survivors.

It is not often that one sees a play that takes genuine aesthetic and structural risks while having something real and vital to say. The Shadow-Pier, like the film within it, is a masterpiece waiting to be dredged up and shown to the world. Brave the curse and go see it.

Players' Wives

The view from the sidelines fascinates playwright Joel Shatzky. His promising, lucid Amahlia concerned a figuratively tortured U.S. ambassador to an unnamed South American dictatorship who lives vicariously through his ex-lover, a doomed dissident journalist from that country. In Girls of Summer, written in the 1980s and now running at Brooklyn's Impact Theater, Shatzky looks at major league baseball from the viewpoint of a trio of players' wives. In the play's most successful moments, the team wives recognize how their lives have been sidelined—by the ruthless sports industry in general and their individual husbands in particular. However, the play suffers from a sitcom-style flight from genuine conflict, repetitive jokes, and a lack of psychological realism.

Girls of Summer predates, I think, the ensemble-of-housewives TV genre (as exemplified by Desperate Housewives, The Housewives of Orange Country, and, in the U.K., Footballers' Wives), but it does not transcend it. I saw the show, upon the company's request, at a final dress rehearsal where a few elements were still being ironed out—one actor in the smallest role is partially on-book, but I was assured he will not be when the run begins. Still, the glitches that ruined the play for me will be retained, because they are in the script.

Shatzky's three graces of the sidelines are thinly drawn types. Gina Marino (Heidi Azaro) is married to the team's most valuable player. She is a frantically religious Italian-American who knows her husband Dom's every game better than any sportscaster, but is in obvious denial about his playing beyond the ball field. Mary Lou Davis (Jennifer Oleniczak) is a Southern belle, desperate for her daddy's withheld approval and married to the rookie player. She knows nothing about baseball and is initially the butt of jokes by Gina and milquetoast sidekick Toni Browning (Loren Karanfilian).

When Gina is visited at home by her husband's sleazy manager, "Shifty" Jack East (Tim Lewis), who inexplicably wants her approval of Dom's new contract, the women must learn to overcome their differences and first impressions. Unfortunately, the intermission begins with that conflict apparently solved, and the problems the characters will face next are only hinted at: they show little sense of imminent danger. This deflates the suspense that ought to captivate an audience until the house lights fade again.

In Act 2, things get even messier. There are new challenges to the players' fragile careers and to Gina's marriage, while Mary Lou still struggles to fit in among the cliques of team wives, and Toni starts considering that she should make a career for herself in case her husband loses his. These professional and personal conflicts are promising and could have been developed into compelling theater. But they are soon deflated by the sitcom-style insistence that everybody should hug, make up, and feel all better before the entertainment ends.

The most glaring example of that formula made me absolutely lose my ability to suspend disbelief. It is at the end of the play and is a revelation, so if you intend to see Girls of Summer, you might not want to read on. When it is revealed that one of the wives has been raped by another's husband, the rapist's wife not only is relieved that her friend did not betray her but later makes jokes about her husband's (the rapist's) small endowment. Her friend, the woman whom he raped, actually laughs at and elaborates upon this.

By bringing this conflict up very late in the game and smoothing it over so easily, the play misses another opportunity for genuine, psychologically realistic conflict. Azaro and Oleniczak are competent actresses, capable of naturalistic acting when the play demands it, but their laughter at this moment seems as robotic as those of the wives of a different community: Stepford. I understand that it is a grave thing for a critic to reveal any part of a play's denouement, but this one is so far out in left field, it sends the play mercilessly to the dugout.

In the program notes, Shatzky writes that, in writing Girls of Summer, he wanted to explore "how the wives of these sudden millionaires coped with ... husbands who had been told, since they were big enough to hit a ball or throw one, that they were gods." A fascinating, funny yet tragic play could be drawn from that premise. After all, when the Greek gods were egocentric rapists, the best of the ancient writers knocked them clean out of the sky. If Shatzky's Girls of Summer played that kind of hardball, he would be batting 1,000.

Freedom Sketcher

According to Oscar Wilde, "The best government for artists is no government at all." British playwright Howard Barker's No End of Blame investigates whether all institutions make artistic freedom impossible. Produced by the Potomac Theater Project at the Atlantic Theater 2, this series of "scenes of overcoming" follows a freedom-seeking political cartoonist across Europe and the 20th century. Bela "Vera" Veracek, transparently based on a real, Eastern European-born British cartoonist, Victor "Vicky" Weisz, searches doggedly for a place to work and publish in freedom. Written in 1981, the play seems hardly to have aged, given recent censorship controversies—over the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politskaya, the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, and, in Barker's Britain, Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell's drawing of an Israeli politician eating a baby. For example, Veracek is told he can't caricature Winston Churchill because Churchill is "a god."

Elsewhere, Barker uses Veracek to criticize the covert censorship that many artists believe is disguised as development and education programs. Veracek visibly cringes as a smiling Soviet censor's board promises "to help rescue artists from their bourgeois habits" because "all artists grow enormously when they share ideas."

No End of Blame is one of two mainstage plays presented by the Washington, D.C.-based Potomac Theater Project in this summer's New York season. It is directed by Richard Romagnoli, who also directed the company's 2006 D.C. production of No End of Blame starring acclaimed actor Paul Morelli. As Veracek, Alex Draper fills Morelli's shoes impressively. He presents a complex, self-contradictory character, most brash when he is also clearly most afraid.

As Veracek's friend and opposite, the art-schooled, line-toeing painter Grigor Gabor, Christopher Duva is mouselike in both his tone of voice and his body language. The 11 actors in the ensemble work cohesively, playing a staggering range of characters, and accents, with schizophrenic ease.

The set is dominated by a huge projection screen, on which we see Veracek's and Gabor's drawings. "Veracek's," which are really by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, are bold, often physically distorted figures with deep shadows and striking chiaroscuro, often with tiny eyes and screaming mouths. "Gabor's" (by Clare Shenstone) are appropriately technically precise but soulless.

The costumes, designed by Catherine Vigne, are simple but serviceable. They suggest the play's many eras, from 1918 through the 1970s, without making it look like a period piece.

Veracek's personality, as opposed to his art, is a dated cliché of the artistic rebel. His first iconoclastic act is to attempt to rape a traumatized civilian woman whom Gabor is trying to draw. This foreshadows Veracek's confrontational cartoons and his search for a libertarian society with a truly free press. However, it is still the old Romantic genius, for whom individual expression and feeling are everything and non-artists don't much matter.

At some moments, the production seems to raise controversial points, then retreats into the safety of silence. In one World War II "Veracek" cartoon, a British soldier is being strangled by a fat, bald man with a thin black mustache and pound notes sprouting from his pockets. Not merely a critique of capitalism and war, this image is strongly suggestive of the "war profiteers" (often explicitly foreign and Jewish) that were the butt of British editorial cartoons dating back to World War I. Must a "free" press publish this in order to be truly free? The play does not broach those issues.

Still, No End of Blame makes the audience think. Reduced in his old age and exile to "painting by numbers," Gabor concedes that this is "difficult." In staging this ambitious and provocative play, Romagnoli and the Potomac Theater Project adamantly refuse to paint by numbers.

Police Story

At the beginning of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Italian playwright Dario Fo's protest-farce, the right-wing policeman Bertozzo (Daniel Doohan) warns the audience that, this being a radical play, Fo will take every opportunity to make him and his colleagues look ridiculous. Fo delivers, and so does the company, My Fair Heathen, which is performing Gillian Hanna's updated and Americanized translation at the Kraine Theater. In a Milan precinct office, Bertozzo is cleaning up after the death of an anarchist who either committed suicide or accidentally fell from a fourth-floor window while being interrogated as a suspect in a bomb plot. Then the case is opened by the Maniac (Megan O'Leary), a 16-times-committed mental patient and brilliant improv actor who has been arrested and hauled in for impersonating a university professor.

The Maniac goes on to impersonate the judge and win control of the police force, and asks questions about the Anarchist's death that the police will not ask themselves. Ultimately, the Maniac's vigilante justice reaches its most extreme point, and he confronts the audience with a dreadful choice that will probably divide even the most idealistic of New York liberal audiences.

Fo mixes the horror with buffoonish comedy, and My Fair Heathen plays it with aplomb. The police consider the anarchists "usual suspects" while ignoring right wing and neo-Fascist crimes, and when they find that the anarchists are not in fact organized criminals, they claim that "their disorganization is a cunning facade."

As an oafish Constable, Matthew Wanders performs a dance of hysterical contortions when he gets his hand caught in a mousetrap, doesn't think to remove it, and waits for the senior Bertozzo to do so. When the Maniac coaxes a trio of cops into an impromptu yet perfect cover of the Bee Gees, it seems both effortlessly natural and completely bizarre.

As the Maniac, O'Leary is sufficiently maniacal, and delightfully hyper in contrast with the sluggish cops. Wanders's wacky facial expressions and Del Lewis's deliberately unfunny bullying as the Superintendent make those actors stand out in an already strong cast. As the straight man and sometime M.C. of the evening, Doohan's Bertozzo incites pity if not exactly empathy. As an investigative journalist, Gretchen Knapp contributes a sobering realism. The group slapstick moments are swift, slick, and zany, thanks to director Janet Bobcean's blocking.

In several meta-theatrical asides, the actors drop their roles and play themselves, arguing about the play's shape, delivery, and meaning despite the audience's presence. Someone blows not the Maniac's cover but that of the performer playing him, by declaring, "That woman is getting out of hand!" Even Fo himself does not escape the play's barbs, as O'Leary defends herself by calling the author "a sexist dinosaur," but "a brilliant sexist dinosaur."

A major difference between the Maniac and the bumbling policemen is that the Maniac can think for himself (or, perhaps, herself), asks good questions, and comes to his (or her) own conclusions about events and their meaning. The policemen lack reason, imagination, and courage. It is therefore odd that in one of the play's proscenium-breaking digressive asides, the Maniac explains to the audience, as a rote lesson, that the corruption in the Milan police office is also practiced by the Bush administration. To state this rather than allowing us to imagine and reason it out for ourselves is to treat us like idiots, or lemmings.

Overall, though, My Fair Heathen smoothly conjures "the laughter in the labyrinth" from Fo's scathing defenestration of his society's respectable bullies. The company's Anarchist is laugh-out-loud funny as well as chilling, and unfortunately speaks to our place and time as loudly and clearly as a cop car's siren.

Shakespeare, Dressed Down

Have you seen Shakespeare's Richard II? Not the one with the snarling, limping serial killer—that's Richard III. Richard II is about the king who thinks he can't be deposed because he was elected by God to start colonial wars and pay off his sniveling, conspiring, hypocritical cronies. Theater of the Expendable's production, retitled Dick 2, is a perfectly serviceable one. Expendable is a young company made up mostly of non-Equity performers who are recent college graduates, some with no professional credits, or none outside Expendable. Therefore, it's not surprising that there is a steep learning curve. Some of the actors gave wooden performances or looked bored while listening to the principals' speeches. Twice, an actor got a wrong start on a line, then backed up and said it again.

Despite this, Dick 2 showcases some promising talents. These include the oratorical, eloquent Jacob Ming-Trent as Richard II and the swaggering Alan McNaney as his nemesis Henry Bullingbrooke. As Richard's queen, Jennifer Lagasse is properly plaintive and argues against their separation with great pathos. The underutilized Raushannah Simmons, playing a few courtiers and a lady-in-waiting to the queen, shows some great facial reactions to overheard bad news and is always in character without ever upstaging the principals. John Forkner gives a vivid turn as a philosophical Gardener.

Expendable is dedicated to producing work that is "spare" yet "transformative." This production is definitely spare: the set consists of a simple wooden chair on an unpainted wooden dais, and a minimal wood-frame box representing a coffin. These few objects are well chosen: the throne and the grave, the defining spaces of Richard's existence.

In some ways, however, more thought needs to be put into what kind of world this minimalism creates, and whether that world is compatible with the script. When "trumpets" are mentioned in the dialogue, we hear what is clearly one trumpet. Courtiers and even the queen sit on the edge of the dais or the floor—and no one remarks upon this strange convention.

The costume design, by Dick stage manager and prop master Marta Tejeda, lacks a cohesive rationale and often violates the terms of the script's world. The actors wear modern dress, which is fine, but the style is uniformly dress casual. Richard's queen, sporting a tunic top, a cardigan, and pants, looked something less than regal even in a modern monarchy. Her clothes allow her a freedom of movement that clashes with the stiff formality of her courtly speeches and deliberately pathetic lamentations. Several of the actresses playing male roles inexplicably wore women's-style suits. One wore low-rise pants that slid down when she knelt, like a knight, to her king. Rebellious warrior Thomas Mowbray (Alisha Soper) wore eye makeup, unlike all of the men played by men.

Minimalism is a great aim, but Shakespeare relied upon costume to delineate status relationships. A world in which a king's uncle can wear a tweed flat cap is not one to which Richard, whose culture reinforces his bullish belief that he is divinely appointed and therefore invincible, belongs.

The dramaturgy, by freelancer Marc Etlin and Expendable founder Geoffrey Roecker, needs some improvement. In the program notes, Richard is described as a "sensitive" and "poetic" type, certainly true of the legendarily introspective child-king but not at all true of Ming-Trent's blustering interpretation.

The press release claims that at the age of 10, Richard became king of "the world's most powerful nation." In 1377, the year of Richard II's coronation, England was dwarfed by the Byzantine empire, China's Ming empire with its million-strong army, and even some of its closest neighbors, such as France. That the tiny archipelago-kingdom of the Plantagenets really rivaled these superpowers is hard to swallow, no matter what John of Gaunt says in his jingoist "sceptred isle" speech, the play's most famous passage.

Finally, the reason why the title has been changed to "Dick 2" is unclear, unless it is a veiled commentary on Vice President Cheney or an attempt to call the haughty protagonist by a suggestively insulting nickname. Because the text has not been modernized as well, "Dick 2" sounds as if it belongs to a different world from the play and seems to patronize its audience.

Dick 2 is by no means a perfect production of Richard II nor an original one, but it is accessible and engrossing. Its minimal production values and complex double- and triple-casting of small roles reflect the production values of Shakespeare's time. An important play historically, it alarmed Queen Elizabeth I with its apparent justification of regicide and was revived in 1601 as a command performance for Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, on the eve of his suicidal attempted coup d'état. If you have not seen it, Expendable offers an approximation of the original production, thankfully without the original danger.

Domestic Politics

In Aminta de Lara's Golondrina (Swallow), an old Venezuelan man slouches inert in a huge armchair, his face a mystery to the audience. In this death chamber, the man's two daughters, long estranged from each other, face off. In the plaza below the apartment, another confrontation is taking place, as protesters against the policies of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez clash with a small counterdemonstration. Produced by SinTeatro and running at La MaMa's First Floor Theater, the play is co-directed by De Lara and Diana Chery. Its greatest strength is De Lara's clear delineation of the parallels between domestic and political conflict. Unfortunately, its greatest weakness is that this perceptive act of comparison and contrast is executed in such a didactic, unsubtle manner, it does not necessarily translate as drama.

In writing Golondrina, De Lara appears to have prioritized clarity of message over character development and the pleasures of discovery. The sisters are one-dimensional mouthpieces for their social and political positions. Carmen Elena, played by Chery, is a Chavez supporter and has spent a good part of her life placating men who abuse her. "What we need here," she says, defending Chavez, "is a strong hand. Someone with balls." "Just like father," observes her older sister Claudia, a fiercely independent doctor and cafe society dissident played by De Lara.

The script explains its symbolism so blatantly it could be its own Cliffs Notes. Of the godlike paterfamilias, Carmen Elena declares, "I always thought of him as immortal, superhuman, omnipresent." Long after the suggested back story has made the fact obvious, she claims, "You could never say no to him." Demystifying their relationship, Claudia accuses, "We're both full of resentment: you just choose to blame yours on Mother."

Elsewhere, the script again states the obvious: "I don't know what to do. I am feeling stressed." The big revelations are foreshadowed too heavily and melodramatically, and so are entirely predictable. The absence of ambiguity creates an absence of suspense.

Even the political commentary remains too nonspecific to arouse interest. "Nowadays, thinking against the government is a crime," Claudia protests. What government policies in particular do the dissidents oppose? Why have these issues come up? Why does their surfacing frighten the regime? Some lines are simply melodramatic, embarrassingly reminiscent of soap opera: "Why did you start saying things? Things that are better left unsaid" and the frantically delivered "You don't understand! You just don't understand!"

As for the acting, De Lara and Chery embody the characters well, though they never transcend the limited emotional range allowed by the script. Carmen Elena spends a large amount of time shouting at her sister. It is as if De Lara and Chery had forgotten that plays are like music: to make the high notes stand out, you need some lower ones, at least occasionally. About halfway through, this emotionally charged attitude became monotonous.

The action is periodically interrupted for some interesting photos of Venezuelan life, by Carlos Ayesta, shown on hanging screens in short computerized slide shows accompanied by forgettable music, while the actresses either move in trancelike gait or display their internal emotional battles with poses that seem borrowed from silent films. One visual effect, the electronic supertitling of a Venezuelan patriotic song, was hampered by at least two typos in the scrolling lyrics.

The set consists of only the father's chair. It is odd that such a determinedly domestic play—a play about a house in a particular state, which also represents that state—should not have a set that reveals more particulars of the father's home.

Lastly, De Lara's research needs work. Claudia, the doctor, does something to her father's body that would set off alarm bells in the mind of any halfway competent pathologist—after she warns her sister that their father's body will most certainly be examined by law enforcement personnel. If this is consciously self-destructive, then the playwright needs to indicate that in the script.

Something else that the playwright needs to indicate is whether the "English translation" by Francine Jacome, noted in the program (but not on the front cover or on the press release), means that the play we are seeing is Golondrina (Swallow) by Aminta de Lara, translated by Francine Jacome. As a writer, De Lara should know to give her fellow writer, the translator, proper credit.

De Lara, SinTeatro, and La MaMa are to be commended for courageously tackling some difficult and vital subject matters, and bravely without any "I'm not a feminist but..." apology. In Golondrina, there is a play that needs to be seen. At La MaMa, right now, that bird is taking flight, but has not yet found its wings. When it does, I look forward to seeing it soar.