Thanks to You

Watching Amy Staats in her solo show, Cat-her-in-e, is like watching an entire collection of home movies squeezed into one body. Playing all of her relatives, she shrinks into shy, scared children, pulls her neck back to become an awkward, tall teen, and opens her eyes and arms to become a booming stepmom. More important than the skilled shape-shifting, however, is the overwhelming layer of nostalgia that hovers over Staats's performance. As it follows Amy's (her character's name) early reverence and later gratitude for her older cousin, Catherine, Staats's play is literally a thank you card: it begins and ends as she perches in front of a computer, writing to thank Catherine for her wedding gift.

Narrating one's youth is a familiar dramatic formula with a successful history, ranging from A Christmas Story to The Wonder Years. With that in mind, Staats isn't embarking on a particularly innovative or challenging mission. Hindsight almost guarantees hilarity and insight. Perhaps this is why the show is far more successful in its childhood portions. When everyone grows up, the play loses its pace and its place a bit.

We meet Catherine, a reclusive and aggressive type with a penchant for imaginative games and stories, when a 4-year-old Amy visits her relatives for Christmas. Catherine is 12 and not exactly an inspiring personality: she cheats at the Barbie Olympics and chases after her young cousins' dolls with a toy's severed head.

Nonetheless, the young Amy and her 5-year-old sister, Susannah, are obsessed with their older cousin and the schemes she weaves. They beg her to play and bait her to add more unusual details to her tales. The show is fueled by what is either Staats's fabulous memory or meticulous attention to fabricating details. The rules and intricacies of every game are explained to comical and touching effect, while her reminiscing zeroes in on the slightest sights and sounds of her youth.

Staats has a knack for nailing personal quirks and expressions, and it comes through in her multiple roles. To distinguish between family members, she assigns each one a particular (and usually unflatteringly funny) body language. It would be mere ventriloquism, however, if Staats just stuck to these usual postures. Instead, she takes the impressions a step further and ages each character as time goes on. Slightly, a sister's boyish slouching straightens, her own squeaky voice clears up, and her aunt's tight-faced squint seems to gradually pull her skin further and further inward.

With its canary-yellow color, boxy outline, and cinched empire waist, Staats's dress is both childish and womanly at the same time, allowing her to jump from Aunt Anne to a baby version of herself in a beat. Usually, the older women place their hands on their hips in some way, accentuating a shapelier figure, while the kids awkwardly slump in their bodies.

Of course, as the characters grow up, talk of marriages and careers replaces playtime. While Amy has started acting in New York and has seen some success, a thirty-something Catherine is living alone with her cats and still trying to put a medical school application together.

When an adult Amy invites herself over to her aunt's house after not visiting for five years, she feels awkward and unwelcome. "I realize I am trespassing," she says. The statement raises an interesting question: is the play itself a violation of privacy? While thanking her older cousin, Staats makes the contrast between Amy's exciting city life and Catherine's plateau so obvious that the resulting portrait of her cousin is far from flattering.

Ironically, the play seems most condescending when Amy tries to express her gratitude. The script sometimes treats her success as Catherine's biggest accomplishment. She explains that "61% of the things I've done in my life have been influenced by you."

This self-indulgence is the play's biggest flaw. It's reminiscent of the adage: "Enough about me. What do you think about me?" The audience is supposed to care about Catherine, but she fades in and out of the picture too much for us to truly understand her. Instead, we are left with a coming-of-age story that is mostly about Amy. It's an entertaining and often smart piece of theater, but perhaps Cat-her-in-e is the wrong title.

Devil's Due

If an episode of The Twilight Zone were spiced with a heaping helping of sexual innuendo and dashed with an exhaustively moral message, the result would look a lot like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Written in the 50s by George Axelrod, the story feels every bit like the campy satire of its time. Although Axelrod pokes fun at the Hollywood formula, his story also blatantly subscribes to it. While the characters joke about the shortcomings of filmmaking, they themselves are Tinseltown caricatures: the dumb blonde actress, the easily outraged producer, the perverse veteran, the jaded artist, and the wowed yokel. Complementing the two-dimensional personalities are the thin plot and over-the-top acting. Still, like the beautiful star at the heart of the action, the show is delightful to watch in spite of its vapid quality.

If there were a list of all the stereotypical requisites for being a loser, reporter George MaCauley (Morgan Sills) might check off each item: living with family through adulthood, inexperience with women, a squeaky voice, and, to top it all off, a tacky bowtie. When he's sent to interview sex symbol Rita Marlowe (Jennifer Danielle), the contrast between elite and geek accentuates his shortcomings. What's a man to do to improve himself? Make a deal with the devil, of course!

Lucky (or unlucky, as it turns out) for George, Rita's agent, Irving LaSalle (Tuck Milligan), just happens to hail from Hell. Not the devil himself, he explains that he "merely works in the literary department" down there. Irving offers George a tempting deal: exchanging wishes for pieces of his soul.

Milligan takes a little while to settle into his role, but when he does, he revels in the deliciously evil dialogue. Finishing every line by rising in pitch and suggestively trailing off, his Irving is equal parts master manipulator and English gentleman. The sneering-yet-suave tempter act has been done many times before, but Milligan seems to be having such fun camping it up that you can't resist enjoying every time he pops onstage to torment George.

Compared with Irving's smooth certainty, George is a bumbling bundle of nerves with an expression that suggests he's forever on the cusp of exclaiming "gee-golly!" Even though George receives his initial wishes for love, success, and charm, he still lapses into his old self. While his schoolboy shtick gets a little irritating, Sills shifts from doofus to debonair in a way that's natural and funny. His portrayal manages to be both a tribute to and a parody of the lovable loser of classic films.

The plot itself is rooted in movie-making. Rita is planning to star in a film adaptation of a successful play by a rising-star writer, Michael Freeman (Eric Rubbe). Michael, a love interest of Rita's, also intends to pen the screenplay. But with no writing talent (his only article was a profile of one Rock Hunter), George uses two of his wishes to usurp poor Michael both romantically and professionally.

Oddly, George's wishes grow more selfless as his soul-shedding continues. He even forges a friendship with Michael that ends with unexplainable sacrifices by each of them at the play's conclusion. After more than an hour of amusingly evil buildup, the solution to everyone's problems comes quickly and gets such a breezed-over explanation that it's reminiscent of a Scooby-Doo denouement.

Such a simple remedy would be easier to swallow if it were presented more as an ironic mockery of the cheesy Hollywood ending than a simple mimicry of it. The bland wrap-up seems out of place because the rest of the play laughs at itself more obviously.

Thanks to director Holly-Anne Ruggiero's dance-like blocking and snappy pace, the first two acts are good, fluffy fun. The production's brisk speed does the script's dirty jokes and one-liners justice, as the ensemble delivers each zinger with bite. One standout quip: when George complains to Irving that he doesn't have the talent to achieve his dreams, his agent sneers, "I'm not talking about talent, I'm talking about success."

In this production, the color of success is gold. In contrast to the dominance of white in Act One, set designer Anne Allen Goelz tellingly blankets the stage in gold for the scenes following George and Irving's arrangement (a Fall-like loss of innocence). As everything from garbage bins to clipboards to Rita herself takes on a gaudy metallic shimmer, this overwhelming abundance of "success" starts to seem as tacky as George's bowtie.

Of course, George learns that there's more to life than a gold-plated pencil collection and tries to right the wrongs he's committed on his path to the top. Unfortunately, the play's simply not as fun when it preaches. While the characters might realize you don't need a demon to write a good story, he sure helps this one.

Don't Speak

When a playwright, a person whose entire career rests on the power of words, argues that communication is futile, it's a bit unnerving. In three of his early (that is, pre-English Patient and pre-Talented Mr. Ripley) plays, Anthony Minghella does just that: a couple struggles with their long-distance relationship over the phone; a courting pair vainly attempts to pack their entire biographies into a rushed stop 'n' chat; and a woman quits speaking, only to discover that silence changes things as little as talking does. The Potomac Theater Project has grouped these three works together for a series called The Politics of Passion. Such a title is quite fitting, as the characters' conversations (or lack thereof) play out more like diplomacy and debate than romantic banter.

The series is a sharp and crisply paced sequence of one-acts. While the cast delivers the dialogue with a fluid precision that feels at once natural and exacting, director Cheryl Faraone adds smooth rhythm and clever blocking to Minghella's motor-mouth monologues. Oddly, the production's strongest point is also its weak spot. In overemphasizing the useless conversations and disconnection between its characters, some of the scenes feel meaningless themselves and fail to leave a lasting impression.

The first play, Hang Up, offers a painfully accurate portrayal of the struggle to maintain a relationship via telephone. It is the most natural of all three scripts, and the performers (MacLeod Andrews and Lauren Turner Kiel) offer touching depictions of love stretched thin. Kiel is amusingly antagonistic, consistently crinkling her nose and finding fault in every comment her boyfriend makes. As the more lighthearted half of the couple, Andrews wears a relaxed expression and delivers lines like "I miss you and I love you and where are you?" like they're breaths of fresh air.

However, their longing and loneliness gradually give way to resentment and mistrust, and their conversation pans out like a dangerous dance in which one person will eventually get hurt. The fading in and out of the background radio heightens awkward silences and moments of confrontation, while Kiel's character slowly descends a ladder (acting as a physical moral pedestal) as she's suddenly put on the defensive. Complementing the fine scene is sound designer Lucas Kavner's perfect opening song selection: the Smiths's "Bigmouth Strikes Again," a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the war of words about to commence.

The second play, an excerpt from Minghella's film Truly, Madly, Deeply, does not enjoy the same spot-on progression. Plucked from the middle of a much longer work and lasting about 10 minutes, the scene doesn't contain much in the way of development, and the characters seem quite aggressively hurled at the audience.

Nina (Julia Proctor) is nervously trying to escape from her date with Mark (Michael Wrynn Doyle). In a desperate ploy to get her to stay, Mark proposes that they share as much as possible about themselves in the time it takes to hop to a nearby statue and back. Watching the budding chemistry between the actors is a treat and makes one wish they had more time together. As Nina and Mark nervously feel each other out, Proctor and Doyle navigate the choppy dialogue with panache and infuse their respective autobiographies with contagious emotion and intrigue. Unfortunately, the scene is so rushed—its breathlessness is only exacerbated by the aerobics—that you miss a lot of the rapid-fire dialogue that's given such care in the other two plays.

While the hopping pair just don't seem to shut up, the main character in Minghella's Cigarettes and Chocolate does so completely. Lent has arrived, and Gemma (Cassidy Freeman) has decided to give up talking. This drives her self-absorbed friends crazy and consequently draws from them lengthy confessions.

The language veers between overly melodramatic (double suicides, monks setting themselves on fire, the plight of the downtrodden, etc.) and exquisitely lyrical (a pregnant friend describes her baby as "like a big sob in my stomach," another friend dismisses his not-so-secret love for Gemma as "an irrelevant passion").

Some of the actors fumble with this delicate balance, while others firmly cradle it to powerful effect. As Gemma's stuffy and selfish boyfriend, Rob, James Matthew Ryan is especially hilarious. As her friend Gail, Laura C. Harris makes an excellent transition from excited effervescence to outright disgust at the prospect of having a baby.

As Gemma sits silently with averted eyes and a woeful expression while her friends spew their secrets, her presence feels extraneous. The production would be stronger if she were more expressive in offering some kind of reaction to their confessions or if the character weren't present at all during those scenes. Perhaps the stumbling block here is that Minghella initially wrote Cigarettes and Chocolate for radio. On the airwaves, Gemma's presence would've been implicit as her friends delivered their tell-all monologues.

Still, nearly two decades after its debut on a BBC radio channel, the script hasn't lost its resonance. The characters' conversations may prove that nothing changes, but, fortunately, the quality of Minghella's play hasn't either.

Mommy Dearest

During one scene in The House of Bernarda Alba, a solemn servant sets water and wine on a table as Gregorian chants echo off the home's stone walls. Such overly pious details dominate Manhattan Theater Source's fabulous interpretation of Federico Garcia Lorca's play. Most important, the religious visuals hint at the title character's obsession with keeping up appearances: the house will look holy, even if what happens inside is far from sacred. This backdrop is fitting when Bernarda (Joy Franz) declares an eight-year mourning period on the day of her husband's funeral, essentially turning her home into a convent for her five daughters, aged 20 to 39. Few visitors and no men are allowed inside. As the confining walls close in on the girls, their literal and emotional claustrophobia surfaces in cruelty, jealousy, and near madness. Thanks to a superb cast and direction by Kathleen O'Neill that consistently hits the mark, tension builds slowly and compellingly until sparks of frustration tragically catch fire.

This production particularly emphasizes Lorca's humorous undertones. In Bernarda's personal kingdom, notions of convention and class are warped by her misguided sense of priorities (reputation first, love second). Here, cruel words are delivered comically, while drunks and eccentrics are presented as the heralds of truth and logic.

In a place where things aren't as they appear, it would be inaccurate to label Bernarda a mere dictator. Although it's a startling treat every time Franz steps onstage and barks an order (audience members may feel the need to straighten their posture as her disapproving gaze hovers above), her Bernarda is obviously not heartless. Franz deftly shifts from unmerciful witch to wry wit in a beat, offering a harsh barb one moment and a deadpan one-liner the next. As her crazy mother wanders in the yard, she tells a maid to make sure she stays clear of the well. Not because she might fall in, Bernarda says, but "because that's where the neighbors can see her."

Bernarda's foil is her servant, Poncia (Olivia Lawrence). With Poncia's unabashed hatred for her boss and complete lack of enthusiasm for her work, Lawrence carries every scene with a sharp tongue and an unending supply of sass. Her hilarious anecdotes and sarcastic advice provide a light counterpoint to the play's sad plot.

When the town's best-looking man comes calling for the eldest daughter, Angustias (Stephanie Schmiderer), the other sisters are consumed with envy and bewilderment. They conclude that money is the only reason someone would desire their old, sickly sister. As they fight over the always offstage suitor, Pepe el Romano, the actresses make the girls' desperation palpable.

Martirio, the physically deformed daughter, is perhaps the play's most complex character, and Meredith Napolitano portrays her with a fragile bitterness. Unfortunately, Benita Robledo's performance as Adela, the sister who has an affair with Pepe, fills the young daughter with so much anger that she lacks the naïve, romantic quality that should be her tragic flaw. When Adela's love drives her to extreme measures, the climax doesn't seem justified.

With less stage time, Joy Seligsohn and Cambpell Echols offer stellar supporting performances as an insane grandmother and the seemingly alcoholic daughter Magdalena, respectively. As Lorca disguises the play's most poignant revelations as drunken ramblings or crazy rants, both actresses have a knack for the rhythm and nuances of his imaginative lines.

In one scene, grandmother Maria Josefa, dreaming of children with white hair—a welcome change from the dark house—says, "We'll all be like the waves, one after another. And then we'll sit down and we'll all have white heads and we'll be the foam of the sea. Why isn't there any foam here? Nothing but mourning shawls." Within the seeming nonsense, Maria expresses the desire for freedom that the daughters repress.

Complementing the lush language is a beautiful set. With caked, clay walls and an amazing manipulation of angles (the start of a staircase, the hint of a hallway), designer Ed McNamee maximizes the small space. Rounding out the church imagery is the set, shaped like the tip of a cross—two arched doorways on each side and an indented alcove at the rear—just like the front of a cathedral. As Bernarda spends most of her time in the center, beneath a hanging cross, it gives the appearance of a priest saying Mass.

Before the play began, O'Neill offered two telling explanations. The first was for the freezing temperature: "It should get warmer when the lights come on," she said. The second was for the cramped space: "You're going to feel very close to the actors."

Interestingly, both the cold and the congestion catapulted the audience into Bernarda's chilling prison. If this was intentional, it was brilliant. If not, all directors should be so lucky as to have apologies work this perfectly in their favor.

Word Play

At the conclusion of On the Verge, one character exclaims, "I have such a yearning for the future! It is boundless! Not annoying. Not annoying at all!" Unfortunately, in the 20% Theater Company's recent revival, Eric Overmyer's script feels boundless in its length and is more than a little annoying. While the story's three Victorian-era ladies press forward on a time-traveling expedition, the plot, weighed down by an overbearing love affair with language, never takes off.

Upon venturing into "Terra Incognita," Mary (Julie Baber), Fanny (Johanna Weller-Fahy), and Alexandra (Nina Louise Morrison) discover objects from the future (such as eggbeaters, Cool Whip, Super Soakers, and car mirrors) and absorb anachronistic knowledge through "osmosis." The actresses have a strong, warm chemistry and offer performances so imaginative that it's too bad they don't have the material to match.

They obviously relish Overmyer's alliterative and verbose dialogue (one muses, "What a succulent word! Dirigible," continuing, "Ineligible dirigible. Incorrigible dirigible. Gerbil in a dirigible."), and they deliver their lines with panache. However, the production's overemphasis on perfect diction often robs its scenes of any resonance. With sharp, choppy speech, the actors spit out their lines so precisely that their performances are more academic than dramatic. The play, which sounds very pleasant, often seems better suited to a book on tape than a stage.

Sometimes with her tongue literally pressed in her cheek, Weller-Fahy seems so excited by the lyricism of her lines that she delivers each one like a scale, rising in pitch and volume. She is much more successful with serious monologues of simpler vocabulary. When Fanny worries about what may happen to her marriage, she says, "The future looms as steady and stable as a table top." The sentence may be plain, but when Weller-Fahy sheds her gleeful demeanor, it provides a touchingly hushed pause outside the show's motor-mouth pace.

As Mary, the longwinded leader, Baber manages to make studied pronunciation sound quite natural. Her breathy excitement and good timing add a cool credibility to even the most ridiculous lines. She is at her best when getting giddy over anthropological smut: thinking about Masai warriors clad only in blouses, flirting with a cannibal, discussing mating rites. Her deep growls and shrieks of pleasure give the stiff, know-it-all Mary some shape.

Morrison steals the show as the adorable Alex. She consistently accents just the right syllable for comic effect and knows the exact moment to add a wide-eyed glance or pursed-lip squeak to quirky remarks like "trousers, ladies, are the future" or "trapezoids of destiny." She also infuses Overmyer's verbal gymnastics with much-needed flexibility. Deconstructing the word "imaginative," for example, she waves her hands, as if pulling the word apart in the air. "Image. Native. Image-native. I am a native of the image. An indigine of the imagination." Combined with one of the script's best turns of phrase, her palpable wonderment lifts the words above sound bite territory and makes a fine scene.

In their travels, the female explorers also find an array of unusual characters, including a yeti, a gas station attendant, and a lounge singer. Cliff Campbell plays every supporting role with a rubbery versatility. In contrast to the women's staccato precision, many of his characters have a sloppy style of speaking. As Nicky Paradise, a singer from the 1950s, his words slide into one another. It is a welcome departure from the women's schoolmarm talk and effectively proves Fanny's earlier prediction: "I've seen the future and it is slang." Although conversation may suffer as time wears on, Campbell makes the loss easy to swallow.

While the play is mostly an aural experience, director Portia Krieger and costume designer Denise Maroney provide some visual delights. The ladies' costumes are an amusing blend of dainty (billowing blouses, hoop skirts) and outdoorsy (large boots, earth-toned jackets), particularly their lacey, shell-lined pith helmets. One other memorable detail is the characters' discovery of "lunar snow." Illuminated by several circles of light (by Scott Needham), the actors sprinkle fistfuls of glitter into the air. As they run their fingers through the sparkling dust, it looks as though they're touching falling snow. The effect is both cosmically beautiful and wickedly inventive.

Unfortunately, these moments are too infrequent to save a show that doesn't have enough substance to justify its two hours and 15 minutes. It's telling that its most poignant point is accidental: in one of Mary's final speeches, she fires off a list of future technologies and tragedies, ending with "Ground Zero." Since the play was published in 1985, the phrase was probably describing where the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, however, the words feel chillingly contemporary. The characters may be downright giddy about what's to come, but in a world where the most familiar point of reference is catastrophe, the future doesn't look too bright.

Of Tempests and Tempters

Homer's Odyssey is a grim tale of extreme hardship and grief, with a steadily increasing body count. Hilarious, right? In fact, when watching this new adaptation by writer and director Kate Marks, you'll be surprised to find yourself laughing. In Odyssey, produced by the Looking Glass Theater, she tackles the classic with a modern eye, a colloquial tongue, and a comic touch. Yet in treating an epic so lightly, Marks often reduces the original poem to a childish level that is more irritatingly goofy than clever. Still, thanks to her crisp extraction of the text's potentially humorous themes and astoundingly imaginative choreography, these missteps—like those of its title character—are more like unfortunate hiccups in a play that turns out to be an entertaining interpretation and a visual stunner.

Marks limits her adaptation to The Odyssey's most action-packed parts, Books V-XII. Since these sections are told mainly in Odysseus's words, they lack the narrator's hero worship, which fits the play's purpose well by presenting Odysseus as a flawed leader. We see a captain who gets lost, can't give a good pep talk, and manages to always make the wrong decision. Andrew Zimmerman gives Odysseus real depth, offering a solidly dramatic performance in a crowd of comic caricatures. With a gradually weakening posture and an increasingly weary expression, he evolves from a cocky fame junkie to a (literally) washed-up man who at last recognizes his faults.

His severity provides great fodder for the supporting cast. When Odysseus says, "I'm flawed," as if considering a completely foreign concept, one of his few remaining men sarcastically responds, "What a revelation!" Whether they're exploring an island or plotting mutiny, the Greek soldiers' frustration and dumb-jock sensibility make them the perfect screwball companions.

Although the troops blame their captain, the gods aren't making things easy either. After Odysseus allows his men to rape the prophet Cassandra (a wonderfully versatile Libya Pugh, who plays several parts, including Odysseus's wife and one-half of the man-woman Tiresias), Athena (Elena Chang) swears retribution and calls on Poseidon. Nevertheless, she helps the mortal through his trials. In voice and movement, Chang shows smooth restraint as a forgiving god. With her fluid athleticism and Marks's creative blocking, Athena shape-shifts from god to stag to Odysseus's wife.

If there's a fine line between parody and misguided caricature, Marc Santa Maria's Poseidon and Jamie Lea Thompson's Circe walk it carefully. Santa Maria's goggle-clad sea god is a bully with a penchant for wrestling-match taunting. While this shtick could grow thin, his excited buoyancy turns Poseidon's insults into sidesplitting smack-downs.

Circe, a witch, torments Odysseus's men by turning them into pigs. As a company that aims to "explore a female vision," it makes sense that Looking Glass's production makes Circe into a seductress-cum-feminist avenger. Her character initially comes on a little strong with the "men are swine" argument, but Thompson's transitions from sultry slinking to screechy indignation are both terrifying and amusing.

Other characters don't achieve this balance as successfully. Calypso (Sarah Petersiel), a nymph who falls in love with Odysseus, is portrayed as a petulant flower child, while Polyphemus (Anthony Wills Jr.), the Cyclops, is portrayed as, well, a petulant mutant child. Their performances and the script make these characters excessively youthful (Calypso sings loopy melodies, Cyclops speaks in baby talk), and here the play loses itself in overly goofy jokes and gestures. Since both actors show promise in their other parts, it would be nice to see them give these characters more dimensions.

The play's overuse of cultural anachronisms is similarly hit and miss. A large part of the epic tradition is capturing a culture, and Marks's use of contemporary and historical references is fitting. When she hits the mark, it breathes modern air into the classic, such as when the soldiers try to remember why they sacked Troy and one of them proposes "Oil ... olive oil." Unfortunately, most of these asides don't pack such a meaningful punch and come off as bland attempts to gain cheap laughs.

Most of the bumps in the play's dialogue are smoothed out by its graceful choreography. With a black-box theater and a bare-bones set (oil barrels as masts, a second tier, a color-changing curtain), the nimble actors serve as scenery, props, and special effects. Marks's blocking (there was no choreographer) for depicting the sea is simply breathtaking. Clad in whirling blue skirts and tight tank tops, the actors craft several raging storms.

Their most delightful creation is the tide arriving on Calypso's shore. Rushing downstage in two rows, the first line of actors drops lightly into the arms of those behind, leaving a billowing blue skirt and a slight breeze in their wake. Repeated several times, the dance is a beautifully sensual device to show the passage of time.

Significantly, Marks cuts her version short. We don't see Odysseus find his way home. But with fabulous images like these, it's difficult to care if he ever will.

Head Trip

The house has just opened and the audience is filtering in, but Realism has already begun: Stuart (Stephen Plunkett) is sleeping on his couch at center stage. There is no curtain sweep or fade to black that explicitly kicks off the U.S. premiere of Scottish playwright Anthony Nielson's drama: Stuart simply wakes up, and that is precisely its point. Taking us through his character's wild ponderings on an otherwise uneventful day, Nielson cleverly blurs the line between reality and imagination, challenging our notions of each. With Stuart's presence outside the dramatic action, there is no distinct beginning or ending to the fantasy or reality. While many absurdist cerebral plays lose themselves in a surreal haze, Nielson's sharp script takes the stream of consciousness and distills it into a witty and deeply human drama. Making sure that no thought goes unnoticed, director Ari Edelson (also artistic director of the Exchange, the newly established company that replaced the Jean Cocteau Repertory) adds crisp blocking and a fluid pace that helps connect the dots between the lead character's mental ramblings.

We meet Stuart as his friend Paul (Jordan Gelber) wakes him and they have a quick argument over Stuart's insistence on doing "nothing" all day. Although he may only have laundry, television, and moping on his agenda, each mundane task is infused with memories and daydreams, sometimes literally. Dad (Herbert Rubens) jumps out of the fridge to complain, while Mom (a superb Kathryn Rossetter) pops up from the washing machine to remind her son to check his pockets before the spin cycle.

In addition to providing a quirky playground for the constantly moving cast, Antje Ellermann's set skillfully mimics the murky divide between real and imaginary. For example, with the absence of a wall between the toilet and the living room, the audience members are forced to play Nielson's game—to either truly believe there is no separation or to fill in the blank with their own imaginary wall (as one commonly does when watching theater).

In Stuart's unfiltered mind, however, there's no separation between the toilet and everything else. What he thinks throughout his day is an eclectic blend of filthy, offensive, touching, and, most frequently, hilarious. Along with his parents, he's joined by his inner child (Tim Spears), a talk show panel, his ex-girlfriends, and a show-stopping trio straight out of Motown. In multiple roles, the supporting cast serves as an effective pit crew for the protagonist, rushing in and out with equal doses of slapstick and sincerity.

Gelber particularly shines in this style, firing out questions as a pompous talk show host, lip-synching as a (white, male) Nell Carter wannabe, and strutting around in a big fuzzy suit as Stuart's sassy cat. He's nearly breathless by the end of the night, but it's worth his exhaustion: each scene is deliciously funnier for his presence.

As Stuart, Plunkett bounces back and forth between straight man and devilish instigator with a simple twist of his eyebrows or twitch of his lips. He's at his best when Stuart lapses into boyish behavior, adding a straight-faced, velvet-voiced legitimacy to everything from fart jokes to sexual fantasies.

For all its bathroom humor, Nielson's script is ultimately a poignant reflection on relationships. Stuart is seeking closure over his recent breakup with Angie (Ali Marsh). As he leaves her repeated messages, his thoughts turn to his mistakes and joys in dating both Angie as well as his earlier love, Laura (Bree Elrod).

The fawn-like Laura provides a great counterpoint to Stuart's filthy thoughts (though she can't escape being part of them), and Elrod commands her scenes with a hushed gracefulness. Beneath the playful warmth she adds to her lines and movements, her guarded posture and wide eyes show a layer of fragility and fear that hints at the guilt Stuart feels as he mulls over his romantic failures.

While Marsh's character doesn't have quite the same depth or stage time, she delivers a delightfully compact performance. As Angie finally returns Stuart's calls, Marsh's voice-over fuels the show's crescendo. The two actors play their painfully awkward conversation to perfection, with Plunkett desperately fumbling to reach out and Marsh curtly knocking him down at every turn.

As their back-and-forth grows frustrating, Angie asks how they can peacefully end the conversation. "Talk to me like you're going to see me tomorrow," Stuart proposes. What follows is a delicately loaded exchange of typical pleasantries. Though simple on its surface, such a scene exemplifies what makes Realism a wildly intelligent theatrical experience. Like Stuart's lingering presence onstage, their clunky, heartbroken banter resonates well beyond the final line, reminding us that even a performed fantasy can feel powerfully real.