Monster Trucks from the Future

Star Wars. Monster trucks. Deepthroat (both the porno and the scandal). Apple Rug Production's On Air Off follows three radio announcers and a technician as their 1953 broadcast is interrupted by a barrage of sound waves from the future. In between the static, they learn about Vietnam, women's lib, and winning lottery numbers in 1976. The question is, what will they do with this information? Exploit it for personal gain? Or use it to help make the world a better place?

The stage is well-set. Shows like Kenneth Barry P.I., (featuring such characters as Ricky Rat Face and Johnny the Block) and commercials for "smooth-tasting Mayfield cigarettes," give the audience a sense of time and place. Visual juxtapositions - such as busting heads of cabbage to simulate fight sounds - work well and heighten the humor.

And the cast delivers. Emily Spalding is brilliant as the icy-smooth Evelyn, and shows her range with other characters such as a Chinese waitress and a French femme fatale. Adam Lerman (who both plays the sound technician and does a terrific job with the actual sound design of the production) is the perfect straight man, delivering his deadpan lines with aplomb. And the entire cast does great voice work: we get hard-boiled detectives, craggy Cagney-types, oily advertisers, and no-nonsense newscasters.

The only problem is that once the pieces are all in place the play doesn't go anywhere. Following the barrage of radio broadcasts from the future, there is a brief and wholly unsatisfying exploration of what to do with all they've learned, and then the players flee the stage like bats out of hell.

The table is set, the ambience outstanding, but, ultimately, you walk away from this production hungering for more.

All Aboard the Derelict Trail

The See You Next Tuesday Company's production of Bukowsical! opens with the lines "“What’s the feeling you get when you’re down on your luck/And you’re too drunk to fuck?” and doesn't look back from there. On our musical journey we encounter singing booze bottles, flung fetuses, and soiled seductresses galore. If you're faint of heart, this may not be your cup of J&B. But if you've got a little Bukowski in you (and the show maintains that "there's a little Bukowski in all of us"), this is the venue for you. The show is framed as a backer's audition for a fictional theatre company, which is trying to raise money to mount a show about Bukowski's life. To give the backers a taste of what the production has in store, they take us down the "derelict trail" of Bukowski's life. We start with Bukowski as a child, where he is beaten by his fellow classmates to the tune of "Art is Pain." In "Writing Lesson" the ghosts of Faulkner, Plath, Burroughs and Tennessee Williams advise him to "get down, get dark, get dirty," and in "Through a Glass, Barfly" Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn battle it out for the honor of playing Bukowski on film.

Although the framing mechanism quickly breaks down (is the audience supposed to donate money?), you're so caught up in the silliness that you don't really notice. The Bukowsical! Band, consisting of Gary Stockdale, Jon Burr, Robby Kirshoff and Ed Caccavale, do an excellent job, and the lyrics of Gary Stockdale and Spencer Green are right on track. A couple of sour notes - the hackneyed moral outrage of a bishop, and a completely out of place ballad by Buk's ex - do little to take away from the overall value of the production.

Performances are steady all around, with Marc Cardiff excelling in his role as the Founder of the fictional theater company, and Brad Blaisdell doing his blinking and balderdashed best as Charles "Buk" Bukowski.

One of the biggest laughs comes when a lawyer from the firm of Ernst, Williams and Weinstein arrives to put a halt to the production. (Bukowski's widow, did in fact, try to stop the show.) The lawyer tells them that as, a New York Jew, she knows musical theatre, and this company's never making it to Broadway. That remains to be seen. In the meantime, it's all aboard the derelict trail.

Good, Wholesome Entertainment?

We all know milk does a body good, but does a play about four confused and horny people make for wholesome entertainment? Does the Body Good tracks the stories of two seemingly unrelated couples. We start with a down-on-his-luck milkman. On his first day at the job, a housewife plants a big, calcium-fortified kiss on him. The majesty of this kiss is such that it prompts him to break up with his fiancée, in the hopes that he and the housewife (whose name he doesn't even know) can someday be together.

Meanwhile, another story unfolds on the other side of the stage. Mr. Harrison is a junior high school teacher locked in an unhappy marriage. He is having an affair with a young, but precocious student. When he refuses to declare his love for her, she threatens to tell everyone about the affair.

For a performance like this to be successful, each half of the story has to carry equal weight. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The milkman story, which should be charged with erotic tension, falls flat. Olivia Henderson gives a shiftless performance as the housewife and you never quite buy the milkman's, played by Vince Eisenson, longing for her.

Fortunately, the other half of the play features a pair of fine performances. Ros Schwartz, who plays Quinnie, the lusty and precocious student, does a great job in a difficult role. You even believe her when she says things like, "I love your cute masculine whisper." Patrick Link, who also wrote and produced the play, is impressive as a teacher lost in lust in confusion, wondering whether his uninspiring marriage is worth saving.

It was Link's goal "to present four dangerously lost characters as they make the most basic possible decisions about what to do with their lives." Unfortunately, a sense of danger only permeates half the performance. In the other half, once the novelty of the kiss wears off, we're left with nothing but a milk mustache.