Their Town

The Zombies are coming. Two years ago, they invaded Jane Austin (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Then, earlier this year, political scientist Daniel Drezner pontificated about a coming Zombie apocalypse (International Politics and Zombies) while The Center for Disease Control and Prevention provided America with helpful tips on how to prepare for Zombie attacks. Now, with the Nicu’s Spoon production How The Day Runs Down, they’ve entered the world of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town. In keeping with the emerging Zombie literature genre, How the Day Runs Down, by John Langdon, is not exactly satire. Instead, it uses the conventions of low budget Zombie horror flicks to reexamine the cherished themes of an American classic. In the case of Our Town, it’s an inspired mash up.

Recall that in Our Town, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and favorite production of high school drama clubs across the country, the play’s third act is set in a graveyard, where the newly deceased protagonist finds herself surrounded by the community’s dead. Although she asks to relive a day, she quickly finds reanimation too painful, and joins the rest of the dead, who are patiently waiting out eternity. How the Day Runs Down intervenes to ask: what if they lost their patience?

Like the three act play on which it is based, the intermission-less How the Day Runs Down is divided into three segments. Under the direction of S. Barton-Farcas, the taut hour and a half production builds seamlessly from comedy to suspense to pathos. Set in the present day, in suburban upstate New York, the first main segment of the evening focuses on two rifle-toting teenagers tasked with guarding their great-grandma’s grave, in case she should rise from the dead. As the siblings, Rachel Lee Lerman and Erwin Falcon, ease the audience into the world of the play. The dead are on the attack, but teenage siblings still squabble, and Lerman and Falcon do so here with sitcom-ish glee.

The centerpiece of the play, and the heart of the Nicu’s Spoon production, consists of a lengthy monologue delivered by a suburban mother, describing a Zombie attack which decimated her subdivision. Elizabeth Bell nails this role with an affable conversational style, peppered with a traumatized fixation with detail. Her description of an NPR reporter’s on-air death by zombies, for example, is bleakly comic without ever soliciting an obvious audience laugh.

In the final segment of How the Day Runs Down, as in the final act of Our Town, a young person meets an untimely death and has an inspirational exchange with the Stage Manager. As part of the conceit of the play, the Stage Manager fulfills much the same role as the Stage Manager of Our Town. He begins the production by introducing the audience to the world of the production (in this case, that includes instructions on how to kill zombies), provides helpful exposition throughout the play, and ends the evening by guiding a character to accept death. As the heroic dead boy, Matt De Rogartis provides a focused, saddened counterpoint to the teens in the earlier part of the production. Mark Armstrong’s Stage Manager dispenses folksy wisdom with a steely grit that keeps the production on track and renders the threat of the zombies real, and threatening.

And then there are the zombies: an eleven member zombie ensemble, covered in gory makeup, stringy hair, and strange assortment of clothing. Their fixed gazes never changes as they stoop about the stage. Under Barton-Farca’s direction, the zombie crew is never merely hokey. This bunch is downright creepy, and the production is great fun.

Hunger Pains

Playwright John Patrick Bray, whose one-act On Top, one of six short plays that comprise Rising Sun’s current production, must have been excited when he picked up last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The cover story, a feature on sex columnist and activist Dan Savage, championed the notion that a healthy marriage may require an occasional infidelity. On Top, among the production’s strongest offerings, serves as a near perfect illustration of that argument. As the cuckolded husband, Joe Beaudin strikes a delicate balance of depressed neurosis and sweet optimism. We see why his wife would seek pleasure elsewhere, and at the same time, we understand why she loves him. The other five plays of the evening follow a similar structure to On Top – one character convinces another to accept the unthinkable – but with more outlandish scenarios than a couple discussing betrayal in a grocery store. The fantastic situations, however, seldom yield fantastic results. In The Craving, David L. William’s play which inspires the evening’s title, a couple’s sexy role play reveals still kinkier desires. While EJ Assi infuses his performance with naturalism both in and out of his character’s role-play, Ashley Kyle Miller, as the fetishistic girlfriend, reveals her character’s secret fantasy with the same sense of playacting that she maintains during the much tamer, make believe scenario. Without that necessary shift, what could be a glib examination of desire and consent becomes, instead, a one-note joke.

Some of All Parts, by Mrinalini Kamath, more playfully examines the disjuncture between ego and id, with funnier results. The script’s inventive conceit is carried off with admirable dedication by Jerrod Luke, EJ Assi, and Lindsay Beecher, whose sense of decorum doesn’t quite match her spandexy, reptile print dress, however desirous the character is of sex.

Costuming choices in Len Cuthbert’s Delilah are similarly distracting. Dressed in bright pink pants, an aqua top, and pink hoop earrings, with her hair in a high ponytail and skinny silver bracelets clinking on her wrists, Andrea Cordaro’s outfit screams mall princess to an extent that belies the character’s obsession with quirky chicken jokes. As her dying-of-cancer-best-friend, Tedra Millan contrasts her scene partner’s glitz in a loose, fuzzy brown sweater. Although the script is no subtler than the costume choices, with teenage girls debating the merits of ceasing chemotherapy treatments, if published, Delilah could have a healthy life in high school drama competitions.

Still darker twists on the tensions between desire and death are Jae Kramisen’s Sit Still, a detective drama about a domestic violence victim, and Greg Abbott’s Vultures, a history-based drama that riffs on the emotional baggage of photojournalists. The former juxtaposes scenes of a horrific marriage and a detective office interview following the husband’s disappearance, but the structure grows repetitive and the closing revelation fails to justify the scene's suspense, which builds unevenly in any case. The latter play, which closes the evening, would also be strengthened by some textual trimming, however with themes of starvation and guilt, it provides an appropriate, shadowy bookend to an evening of plays about consumption and want.

The counterweight provided by Vultures is perhaps especially helpful given the fact that each play has a different director, which prevents the evening from cohering as nicely as it otherwise might. That provides a lot of opportunity for members of Rising Sun’s enormous ensemble, as well as for a plethora of guest artists, but the end result feels less like a fully formed evening of theater than it does a showcase of scripts, whose staging could use more time in development.

Radio Drama

When the house opens for Murrow’s Boys, currently playing at Brooklyn’s gorgeous Irondale Center, the eight member ensemble dances onstage. To get to the house seats, newly arriving audience members cross through the performance space, where the cast invites them to join in the revelry. The casual intimacy of ensmemble members’ invitations is warm, startling, and a bit awkward. It is a perfect note on which to start a play that depicts the fits and starts which accompanied the advent of broadcast journalism, a medium that offered listeners an unprecedentedly personal connection to foreign events. Edward R. Murrow, recently memorialized by George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck as the TV reporter who refused to be cowed by McCarthyism, is here depicted at the start of his journalism career. As chief Europe radio correspondent for CBS, Murrow put together a team of reporters who launched their careers – and, in a sense, radio – by bringing World War II home to the American public. The team came to be known as Murrow’s Boys; Murrow’s Boys tells their story.

It’s compelling stuff: a smart group of journalists inexperienced in radio cuts their teeth covering one of the biggest events in human history. The ensemble cast does a solid job of bringing an everyday affability to characters who find themselves tasked with the thrilling if frightening job of relaying international news in a time of crisis. Gabriel King’s Murrow is a principled young man and an enthused workalholic with a dignified confidence in his team. Kate Garfield, as Mary Marvin Breckenridge, “the only woman among the Boys,” has the self possessesion and poise required of a clever career woman who must assume from the first that her job will eventually go to a man (and it does). Exhaustive research into each member of Murrow’s team clearly went into the production, and it is impressive how seamlessly woven together their stories appear onstage. Still more detailed biographies are available on the Irondale website, at url.

Written by director Jim Neisen, together with the Irondale Ensemble, and utilizing copy of broadcasts written by the reporters whose lives the play depicts, Murrow’s Boys is part performed history, part media investigation. As a means of reminding audiences how timely it is to think about how people consume news and the impact of mediation on public opinion – what voices inform how we think? – the production intersperses its historical drama with snippets of present day voices. “I'm standing in for a ….” begins each of these segments, in which an ensemble member lists a few demographical attributions (region, age), before sharing a first person account of how that person gets the news (Fox News, Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert), and why. Those segments do a sufficient job of extending the play’s focus into the present day, but the connections are already there, ever present themes of the historical drama. The real heart of the production lies in its narration of the how a new medium altered the landscape of war journalism.

Despite contemporary fixation with our own new media (and the ensuing, so-called “twitter revolutions,”) Murrow’s Boys suggests an extent to which new media merely provide a new perspective to atrocities that have long existed. It deserves special credit for its brief depiction of the liberation of Buchenwald, which a recitation of Murrow’s famous broadcast from the Concentration Camp underscores. Theatrical depictions of the Holocaust (indeed, depictions of the Holocaust in any medium) are fraught with complicated issues of representation. Murrows Boys succeeds with an enactment that is simultaneously horrific and respectful, quiet and moving, experiential and removed.

Murrow's Boy's has just been extended through June 3rd. Don't miss it.

Marriage is What Brings Us Together Today

A heterosexual documentary film duo convinces married couples to file for divorce, in the name of gay marriage, and then films them during the year they live apart. Sound obnoxious? Well, yeah. The wonderful feat performed by Purple Rep’s The Unmarrying Project lies in its ability to take unlikable protagonists engaged in a useless political exercise, and still tell a savvy story. Written by Larry Kunofsky and directed by Rachel Eckerling, The Unmarrying Project boasts an ensemble cast so stellar, choosing standouts is impossible. As the filmmakers who instigate the project, Nic Grelli and Jolly Abraham nail the part of documentarians proud of their quirk, ambitious in their goals, and overconfident in their political potency.

The rest of the ensemble members each play a wide variety of roles with specificity and grace -- and they are a delightfully diverse bunch of characters. An elderly Westchester couple, modern orthodox Jews, a lesbian couple, a gay male couple, all happily married, as well as a straight couple married but perhaps less happily so, each agree to participate in the project. Conceived as an act of civil disobedience, the plan is for the couples to file for divorce and live apart for a year (the amount of time New York state requires to grant divorce) as an act of protest: if gay couples can’t marry, these couples will dissolve their own marriages!

Perhaps the most politically salient aspect of the play comes from how little its exploration of gay marriage deals with, well, gays. Marriage is marriage, as evidenced by the devastating fallout which inevitably accompanies the voluntary separation of people who love one another. The play nods at more radical ideas of romantic unions by briefly questioning the utility of monogamy (as well as by depicting the horrifying codependency with which each pair of characters is plagued) but the bulk of the play’s energy is devoted to examining coupledom.

Watching the dissolution of loving and committed relationships, however misguided the experiment, is, by turns, laugh out loud funny and heart achingly poignant. As a playwright, Kunofsky has a great ear for dialogue and authenticity as he gives voice to a diverse group of characters. To director Eckerling’s credit, the text is never didactic, and even plotlines with the most foreseeable outcomes maintain a sense of urgency.

If the play is to have a life beyond Purple Rep – and it should – Kunofsky will have to shave some time off of the two and a half hour length. Still, as an inaugural production for this new theater company, dedicated to running two productions in repertory, The Unmarried Project marks the Purple Rep as an emerging group to watch for smart, exuberant theater.

The Unmarrying Project runs in rotating rep with Mariah MacCarthy’s The All American Gender Cabaret. To get the supertext of the two productions, billed together as Gay Plays for Straight People, catch that one, too. This play about couples is, itself, coupled.

Popping the Question(s)

Anyone who has ever thought, while seated on a therapist’s couch, “this would make great material!” is in luck. At Interviewing the Audience, running this month at The Vineyard Theatre, writer and director Zach Helm invites select audience members to join him on a pair of great looking chairs while answering questions about themselves. Anyone who has never harbored such a fantasy -- or who would rather see a live talk show for free -- should head uptown to a Letterman taping. Originally created by monologist Spalding Gray in 1981, Interviewing the Audience reverses Gray’s standard storytelling technique: rather than drawing on his own autobiography, with Interviewing the Audience, Gray questioned audience members about their lives. In the years since Gray’s 2004 death, both personal storytelling (The Moth) and audience interview programs (This American Life) have become cultural mainstays; both can trace their roots, at least in part, to Spalding Gray.

Gray’s own work, however, continues to receive attention in its own right. At P.S. 122, an ensemble of actors performed selections his monologues as part of last month’s Coil Festival. At HERE, Lian Amaris recently staged her own monologue in response to his acclaimed monologue-turned-film, Swimming to Cambodia. And film festivals the world over are screening Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s new Spalding Gray documentary. With Interviewing The Audience, The Vineyard joins the Gray-enthused fold.

Each performance of Interviewing the Audience consists of three audience interviews. Whereas Gray conducted his production with a specific set of questions, Helm prefers to let his chats meander. He likes to point out whenever his interview subjects say things that are particularly meaningful or revealing, and like a therapist – or theater director – says it back to them in easily digestible sound bites. (“When you’re on your own, you make your own” he surmised last week when a young set designer/ Starbucks manager described a correlation between independence and innovation.) To Helm’s credit, these platitudes never feel forced – just, frequently, trite.

An oriental rug and a square patch of lighting, bolstered by red and black pendent lamps hanging from the fly space, create an intimate setting for the conversation, while The Vineyard’s deep proscenium creates a theatrical frame for each conversation. A glass coffee table functions as a sort of protective barrier between the house and the off-white chairs on which the interview takes place, sturdy enough to keep interview subjects from feeling over-exposed but light enough to grant audience members a full view of the stage picture. Helm matches the set’s comfortably mod aesthetic, from his gray argyle sweater down to the red stripe of his socks. Such carefully conceived production values go a long way toward marking the performance as a piece of theater, working to separate it from the sort of people watching made possible at coffee shops all over the city (where admission is the price of a latte, not a $50 theater seat).

Helm takes pains to emphasize the ephemera of the production. He begins each show by announcing the date (“This is the January 8, 2011 performance of Interviewing the Audience”) and closes each evening by reminding audiences of the date, adding with a certain degree of solemnity that the evening’s performance can never be repeated. That may be so – but one gets the sense that while the specifics of each performance vary, the production is unlikely to change in any substantive way.

It is hard to imagine Helm’s formula (ask audience members how they came to the show, ask perceptive-but-not-probing follow up questions, comment on how meaningful their conversation is) eliciting wildly different evenings. In the original productions, Spalding Gray’s use of uniform questions perhaps better created opportunities for difference by placing the focus on audience response (and not just on a friendly chat). Even rich variety requires structure.

Bruised, Bothered and Bewildered

The modest-sized hotel room cum theater features a wild-eyed tiger portrait hung over the bed, a 1960’s radio, and fourteen folding chairs. If it weren’t for the slick production design (by Chris Keegan and director Travis Chamberlain, who runs lights and sound while perched atop a hotel room dresser), the setting might suggest the sort of skits vacationing children put on for their relatives. But Tennessee Williams’ Green Eyes is not child’s play: it’s a whip smart romp through the boundaries of sex and violence, betrayal and fidelity. Written in 1970 but not published until 2008, Green Eyes played to sold out houses at The Bushwick Starr, as part of Target Margin’s Unknown Williams festival earlier this year. Now, under the auspices of P.S. 122’s Coil Festival, Chamberlain has remounted the production inside midtown’s Hudson Hotel. Aside from the obvious stunt of performing a play in a hotel room (light designer Derek Wright deserves a gold star for his work in this tight setting), the atypical performance space adds a disarming layer of playfulness not necessarily expected of a 30-minute psychological thriller that opens to a naked woman with bruises all over her body and a sullen husband demanding to know how they got there.

Williams never explicitly solves the mystery. Did the newlywed couple engage in rough honeymoon sex that the bridegroom has blocked out? Or did his wife sneak home a stranger while he drank himself into a stupor on Bourbon Street? Chamberlain takes pains not to paint either spouse as a victim, though they are damaged (and damaging) in their respective ways. As the tormented young soldier Claude Dunphy, Adam Couperthwaite brings a raw earnestness that creates sharp tension with Erin Markey’s more calculated take on Mrs. Dunphy, whose terrors are, perhaps, more deliciously mystifying. He is haunted by the horrors of Vietnam, which his new wife will not (cannot?) understand. Yet she is the one with the physical bruises at the outset of the play, and her demons are just as perplexing.

A three-part lecture series, The Kindness of Strangeness, presented in conjunction with Green Eyes at The Museum of Art and Design this month, contextualizes Williams as a member of the last century’s queer avant-garde. It’s helpful to note, for instance, that shortly after penning Green Eyes Williams publicly came out as a gay man. What is strangeness? Queerness?

Green Eyes is not a gay love story disguised in heteronormativity; this couple’s behavior is far from the norm. Remarkably, with Green Eyes, Williams anticipates by decades the inclusion of BDSM under the rubric of queer sexuality. That deviant desires exist across gender and sexual spectra is, by now, well-worn territory. Chamberlain skillfully takes Green Eyes one step further by locating the playfulness – the pleasure – in deviance. This is transgressive theater at its very best.

Lost Soul

What do you get when you cross a Chinese folktale with video and dance? In the case of Soul Leaves Her Body, a joint creation of director Peter Flaherty and director/choreographer Jennie MaryTai Liu, the result is an inspired meditation on loss and belonging. The seventy-five minute production is divided into three segments. The first, Ancient Story, a dance theater piece choreographed by Liu, provides an abbreviated telling of the original tale: an overambitious mother fails to recognize the depths of her daughter’s passion. As the daughter, Liu wears a beige dress so light it almost looks like crepe paper. Costume designer Wendy Yang Bailey dresses her suitor (Sean Donovan) and mother (Leslie Cuyjet) with a similar attention to lightness and minimalism; the costumes evoke age and status, while their pale, earthy hues are subtle and soft.

Color is added, instead, by video, designed by Austin Switser. Projected onto giant panels behind the actors, each onstage character has a video counterpart (Wai Ching Who, Rachel Lin, Howah Hung) dressed in a brightly colored, traditional Chinese costume. Set against sharp white backgrounds, their white face paint streaked with pinks and blues, the characters’ introductory video images resemble contemporary fashion shoots. That raises cool questions about how these folk characters function. What, exactly, do they model?

Onstage, the three performers deftly execute minimalist choreography and simple, expository text with a quiet intensity, evocative of the energies that pulse beneath the protagonist’s surface passivity. At times, the choreography and design elements converge to create textured tension, as when, ever so slowly, the young women and her suitor dance past one another. Projected onscreen behind them, two sets of hands exchange an inky note. Brandon Walcott’s sound design underscores the moment with music that sounds like a heartbeat.

The middle portion of the triptych-like production, Contemporary Story, consists almost entirely of film. Written and directed by Flaherty, and set in contemporary Hong Kong, the filmed segment of Soul Leaves Her Body follows three siblings as they struggle to make ends meet – and, tellingly, to find a home. Whereas her siblings (Suetmann Wong and Leslie Ho) play fast and loose, running scams and running away from them, Yan Yan (again, Liu) is more pensive, preferring alone time on the family’s rundown boat to the bustle of the city. Flaherty’s film is heavy on both starling close-ups (the garish pink and green of a mahjong table; the teeth of someone talking on the phone) as well breathtaking panoramic views of the Hong Kong cityscape, bolstering the production’s sense of dislocation.

In the final segment of Soul Leaves Her Body, the stylized performance conventions of the earlier pieces give way to a dramatic exchange more typical of black box realism (Liu and Wai Ching Ho discuss shared cultural histories and lost loves) despite the fact that Improvisation on Ancient Themes, by Xu Xi, is arguably the least realistic scene of any in the production. Exactly how these two women come to speak to each other is never clearly elucidated, though haunting matrilineal powers seem to have something to do with it. Unfortunately, drained of the performative conventions (dance, video, film) which so effectively gird the earlier pieces, this concluding segment falters, and the production’s power gets lost.

Until that point, the production is an exemplar not only of the rich textures created by skillful interdisciplinary collaboration but of the dynamic possibilities ancient stories offer to contemporary artists.

Recreational Purposes

Oh what a difference a decade makes. When Reefer Madness: the Musical premiered in New York in October of 2001, its campy send-up of God, patriotism, and starchy clean Protestant values felt ill timed. The new musical, by Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, had just run successfully in Los Angeles for over a year, and so a transfer to New York seemed like a logical step. Then came 9/11. The mood of the country shifted. Mocking America went ever so briefly out of vogue. Reefer Madness opened at The Variety Arts Theater to lukewarm reviews, and then closed quickly. Although the musical subsequently achieved greater successes – several international productions and a TV version soon followed – it didn’t make its way back to New York until now. This time around, Brooklyn’s Gallery Players has mounted Reefer Madness at a prescient moment in American politics. A tangled relationship to the country's cultural history is in the show's roots. Based on the 70’s cult classic film Reefer Madness, itself a re-cutting of the 1938 morality movie Tell Your Children, the musical addresses the evils of cannabis in a small American town. Tell Your Children was created to warn parents against the evils of “marihuana,” but any film in which a few joints drive people completely bonkers has the makings of a stoner comedy. The 70’s version, re-titled Reefer Madness, mocks the extremes of the original film, in which wholesome American teens go from quoting Shakespeare to becoming shiftless murderers and – worse? – engaging in premarital sex.

The musical, however, stakes out a different position for itself in relation to the 1938 original. While it indulges in heaps of campy exaggeration, the show also takes aim at the fear mongering which drives the original film. “We are taking down all the fingerprints/ of jazz musicians and immigrants!” goes a gleeful lyric from the musical’s faux-uplifting finale. Nine years and two wars after the show’s initial New York run, with tensions surrounding race and nationality dominating the current election season, the musical’s sardonic celebration of political scare tactics is utterly timely.

The Gallery Players’ production has a firmer grasp of history than its program notes, copied from Wikipedia (someone get these people a dramaturg!), might first lead audiences to suspect. Still, under the direction of Dev Bondarin, the show’s political undertones don’t develop as seamlessly as they might. Instead, when the production jerks from playful camp to pointed commentary, the shift feels unsupported. Stronger moments include the full company numbers “Listen to Jesus, Jimmy, a gospel riff, and the titular "Reefer Madness" a zombie-ish masquerade. Those numbers more successfully indulge pop culture aesthetics while applying them to the musical’s central warnings about media and messages.

Soule Golden’s costume design in particular does a great job of setting the show’s aesthetic, from monster masks (“Reefer Madness”) to feathery halos and white high heels (“Listen to Jesus”). The chorus’ most basic outfits – girls in bright primary colored dresses, boys in sweater vests and slacks – are pretty terrific too.

The six-person chorus of Reefer Madness is consistently excellent. Period appropriate, enthusiastic yet disciplined, they steal the show – and Joe Barros’ choreography helps them do it. Actors Jose Restrepo and Jaygee Macaougay also deserve special mention for their portrayals of Jack and Mae, the couple who lures the unsuspecting teens to degradation.

Next week voters in California will decide whether to legalize the drug that plays the real villain of Reefer Madness. If critiquing a politics of fear feels as timely as ever, the object of that fear seems to have shifted over the last seventy years. Then again, maybe not. At the opening weekend of Reefer Madness, after the drug leads to murder, false imprisonment, and cannibalism, an audience member was heard whispering to her companion, “that’s what happens if you smoke that reefer.”

Scary Brooklyn

The Halloween Plays, running in Brooklyn through October 31st, is far from the only spooky offering of New York’s experimental theater scene this year – but it may well be among season’s the best. The production marks the first collaboration between the Brooklyn-centric Brave New World Repertory Theatre and Carroll Gardens dance theater group Company XIV. It’s is a stellar example of the artistic depths that can result from smart companies pooling their resources. The production’s opening act harnesses the distinct neo-Baroque aesthetic of Company XIV and applies it to the creepiness of the Halloween season. Inspired by the Marquis de Sade, Dénouement—A Murderous Masquerade is a dance to the death. Set at a royal masquerade ball where the host supplies his guests with a handgun and invites them to play a series of macabre party games, Dénouement is a meditation on love, lust and devotion, in all its creepy glory. With choreography and direction by Austin McCormick, Artistic Director of Company XIV, the skilled dancers demonstrate a flare for elegant violence.

The host’s narration does a suitable job of framing the story, but Jeff Takacs’ text is easily overpowered by Dénouement’s provocative dancing. That unsettles the balance of power so central to the story – the dancing guests ought to read as mere plaything’s of the host – but no matter. A costume drama is a rare treat in an evening of one acts, which often skimp on production values. Here, Zane Pihstrom’s set and costume design are integral to the evening’s indulgent presentationalism. Dressed in period-inspired reds, mauves, and golds, the performers radiate with athletic vulnerability from their powdered wigs to their high-heeled feet. An upstage tree and several chandeliers give the impression of a fashionable dance hall, while an ornate, metallic looking proscenium decadently frames the playing space.

Directors Nell Balaban and Chip Brooks make effective use of the proscenium during the Brave New World portion of the evening. Too Much Candy, a clever reimagination of Hansel and Gretel by Cynthia Babak, puts a grown Hansel suffering from OCD on a journey to recover his repressed childhood memories. The familiar, creepy Grimm tale unfolds behind the proscenium in disorderly fragments, while the shallow playing space downstage of the proscenium exposes Hansel (Stuart Zagnit) in the present day. He neurotically muddles through his responsibilities as a family man and regularly visits a psychiatrist; he suffers an inexplicable fixation with candy.

Psychoanalytic readings of fairy tales comprise a major strain of folkloric scholarship, and Babak milks great performative comedy out of such heady analysis (pun intended). When Hansel dreams that he is locked in a cage – recall that in the fairy tale, the witch cages Hansel to fatten him up before she eats him – his psychiatrist delivers a pleasantly self-satisfied interpretation. As the doctor, Brave New World artistic director Claire Beckman is pitch-perfect in her summation. “Perhaps the cage represents the part of you, your consciousness,” she tells her patient, “that is not letting you access the memories of your youth!” She offers similarly symbolic interpretations of the cannibalistic witch and the candy. It’s a smart deconstruction of a familiar tale that helps explain its enduring power – but perhaps not quite so much as does the enactment of the fairy tale itself. Equal parts hilarious and horrific, the staging of Hansel and Gretel is a welcome reminder that fairy tales, properly told, are downright eerie.

The concluding play of the production, Greg Kotis’ Salsa, is the most conventional short play of the evening’s offerings. Set at a diner, the play opens to two men seated alone, who bond over a love of spicy food – but partway through the scene, it becomes clear that something is amiss, and when the curtain behind the proscenium rises, sinister forces are revealed. Actors Kevin Hogan and Sean Patterson have a lot of fun with their roles as the gentlemen of the diner, as does Alvin Hippolyte, as the sinister force.

It’s refreshing to see an evening of one acts featuring work with such varied aesthetic sensibilities. Each act possesses sufficient distinction to stand alone as a solitary work. Taken as a whole, however, The Halloween Plays reveals that there is more than one way to spook an audience.

'Tis the Season to Be Frightened

Tucked into an unmarked, abandoned-looking storefront on 27th Street, the Vortex Theatre Company’s NYC Halloween Haunted House is a far cry from the corn mazes and hay rides typical of Halloween fright fests. But urban legends can be just as frightening as pastoral ghost stories, and NYC Halloween Haunted House proves you don’t need to take the LIRR in order to get your Halloween thrills. Back for its second year, NYC Halloween Haunted House aims to terrify each participant, individually. Like Theater for One, the project that pairs one audience member and one actor together for the duration of a monologue, NYC Halloween Haunted House is a solo experience. Unlike Theater for One, however, Haunted House gleefully forgoes any pretense of democratic exchange. Participants are left alone and unguarded, at the whim of the haunted house and its cadre of creepy performers. Make no mistake: the cards are stacked in favor of the house.

Created by Josh Randall and Kristjan Thor, NYC Halloween Haunted House is a stellar example of artists making smart choices with the resources at hand: they place sensory deprivation high on their list of scare tactics. Consequently, the special effects at play don’t constitute spectacles in and of themselves. Instead, Randall and Thor cleverly use their special effects to heighten participants’ sense of isolation. The sound system plays ominous white noise. A fog machine obscures participants’ vision. So does the lighting design, which mostly ranges from dim to pitch black.

House rules state that there is to be no talking by participants during the Haunted House experience, which lasts about twenty minutes (screaming, however, is encouraged). Participants can’t even alert performers to their mental state by gaping in terror or grinning in delight: everyone is required to wear a surgical mask for the duration of the experience. Last year, at the height of the H1N1 epidemic, the masks signified pathogen panic and the threat of a mysterious disease. This year, thankfully, those significations have dimmed, but the masks are still plenty creepy. For one thing, they tend to make wearers uncomfortably conscious of their own breathing. In the context of the haunted house, of course, they also free the wearer from the burden of communication, allowing participants to more fully internalize the tantalizingly unnerving experience. (The white masks may also aid cast members in spotting participants in the dark.)

To reveal much more about the NYC Halloween Haunted House would spoil the fun of it. Suffice it to say that the cast members do an admirable job of balancing their dual roles as wardens and shepherds. They give participants the chills, but also clear instructions about what to do next. Managing the whole event and its steady stream of participants is an enormous challenge, but the Haunted House is up for it, efficiently moving participants from a group holding cell through their individual journeys around the house. For the truly frightened, the Haunted House takes a cue from BDSM play: calling out a safe word will bring the experience to a halt. And there is something in the house to frighten everyone.

What are you afraid of? The dark? Weird noises? Rape and murder? The NYC Halloween Haunted House has something for you…

The Scottish Play, Revisited

First things first: “MacBeth,” spelled backwards, is “The B Cam.” Well, almost. Playing on its near palindromic title, TheBcam/MacBeth sets out to pick up, like a filmic B Camera, the secondary shots implied by Shakespeare’s famous play. It does so by condensing the Shakespearan text, juxtaposing it with new work by Don Nigro, splattering live and prerecorded video feeds across the backdrop, and choreographing a few zany, full company movement pieces. Such an approach ought to square neatly with the Inertia Production’s mission, as the company seeks “new ways to synthesize text, physical performance and media.” Unfortunately, this production offers less synthesis than it does incoherence. MacBeth is perhaps the mother of all horror stories, yet under the direction of Kevin Kittle, TheBcam/Macbeth forgoes the original’s fear factor, and with it, its dramatic tension. Maybe because the production focuses so heavily on the ripple effects of the play’s themes, the Macbeth segments here serve more as source material than as dramatic content. It’s not that the Shakespearean performances are uneven -- just the opposite. As Macbeth and Lady MacBeth, Charlie Sandlan and Danielle Liccardo are consistent to the point of predictability, which prevents the cautionary tale of power hunger from achieving a compelling depth. Their most famous lines (“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” and “Out, out, damned spot!”) come across as mere placeholders, marking the inexorable progression of a familiar plot.

The company fares better with the original material, written by Don Nigro and the ensemble. In particular, a series of exchanges between a pair of young teens (Robert James Walsh and Carrie Watt) sparks with a palpable unease from which the whole production would benefit. The production suggests a relationship between the contemporary teens and a kitschy pair of fifties housewives, yet their oblique connection doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the housewives’ alcoholism is unconvincing as high camp.

Additional contemporary sequences include a diatribe against the perils of being an attractive single woman that is as fresh as a rerun of Sex and the City, though Liccardo delivers it with appropriately self-assured indulgence, and an imagined game show in which a contestant (Michele Slater) identifies YouTube videos by the horrific things YouTube commenters have written about them. The game show scene is an inventive, insightful take on contemporary aggression, yet rather than integrate it into the production as a whole, Kittle relegates it to the intermission, when much of the audience is out of the house, and bound to miss it. That’s a shame, because the YouTube game show, more than any other element of the production, elucidates the Shakespearean themes of power, cruelty and spectacle within new media.

The original video segments, designed by Theo Macabeo, are better integrated into the performance, though for a production that aims to take mediated elements as a central theme, the images do surprisingly little. Projected against the painted white backdrops of Doug Durlacher’s sets, TheBcam/Macbeth’s mediated images compliment the production much as a shifting scenic painting might. They are overpowered by the specter of the YouTube video which closes the intermission and, for those who catch it, creepily haunts the play’s second act.

At two and a half hours, TheBcam/Macbeth is a long production that encompasses a lot of disparate elements. Still, audience members most excited by the production’s promises should stay in their seats for the intermission.

A Play is a Play is a Play (is a Film)

Note to experimental theater directors: when audience members pass one another glasses of wine between acts, it goes a long way toward creating camaraderie. By the second act of White Wines, a four act meditation on Gertrude Stein’s short, mystifying play, playing under the title Now Repeat in Steinese, the house begins to feel as much like a quirky cocktail party as an audience at a play by an esteemed avant garde writer of the early twentieth century. Under the guidance of producer Drew Pisarra, the program forgoes pretension by staging a delightfully scrappy celebration of one of Stein’s earliest works. The evening is great fun. The so-called Mother of Modernism, Stein’s wordplay goes beyond mere cleverness and into a dreamlike stream of consciousness where sound and meaning blur. (“Modify the brave and gallant pin wheel,” goes a line from White Wines, “Show the shout, worry with wounds, love out what is a pendant and a choke and a dress in together.”) Despite the elusiveness of Stein’s writing – or because of it – she continues to be a staple of downtown theater. What enterprising experimental director could resist such a delicious challenge? The Wooster Group famously juxtaposed Stein with a soft-core bondage film for “House/Lights,” produced in 1999 and restaged it in 2005. Still more recently, the list of theater companies to that have produced Stein’s work includes The Atlantic, Target Margin, Horse Trade, Medicine Show, and Judson Church.

Pisarra himself is no stranger to Stein, having spent more than a decade staging her material. He last produced an evening of short Stein plays at The Red Room in 2007. Whereas his previous Now Repeat in Steinease provided audiences with exposure to a smattering of her little-known work, this time he ups the Steinian ante by literally repeating the same play four times. Taken as a whole, the evening inventively suggests a multiplicity of ways to stage the strange material. Textually broken into three portions, White Wines has no concrete characters, marked dialogue, or obvious plot. The sheer repetition of the evening helps elucidate the text; the later acts are also the evening’s strongest.

The first White Wines of the evening, under the direction of Kurt Braunhohler and Laura Sheedy, is also the most neutral, which is maybe to say the most nonsensical. They split the text into two characters, one played by Sheedy and another by Lucas Hazlet. She wears two white frocks and goggles on her forehead; he a gray suit. It’s a suitable embodiment of the text's looseness, if (like the text) hard to follow.

Ryan Bronz’ film version of White Wines, which constitutes the second act of the evening, makes clear how well filmic techniques can capture the play’s disjunctures. Just as the repetitive nature of Stein’s writing makes it at once easier and more difficult to hear, his editing choices, heavy on looped images and jump cuts, are both mesmerizing and faithfully confusing.

The third act makes the clearest choices of the evening, and consequently yields the most crystallized results. The roles are played here by two women, Rita Marchelya and Amy Dickenson, who bring a suburban desperation to the perplexing text. Director Andrew Frank hones in on references to “a clutch,” making the first portion of the text about two friends out shopping. In the next scene, the lights are lowered and they sit at opposite ends of the stage, on the phone with one another as they thoughtfully sip drinks and engage in a late night chat. We recognize these scenarios from countless romantic comedies (the female version of a buddy movie), but, here, something is off.

Rather than make the play’s bizarre use of language obvious or awkward, placing it in an easily recognizable context heightens its gleeful unease. In one particularly compelling moment, Dickerson tears through a stream of dialogue like the world’s most enthusiastic but clueless actor doing Shakespeare. Her emotional intensity is undeniable, but in this case, the words she’s given to say really are nearly gibberish. Feminist critics argue that Stein’s writing is an intervention in patriarchal language; here it suggests the failure of rom-com dialogue to speak to the lives of contemporary women.

The final installment of the evening splits the action from the text, to great effect. Three aproned women, Susan Slatin, Dorit Avganim, and Heidi Carlsen, go through the motions of baking bread (and also the motions of some Kabuki-slow hand gestures). Meanwhile, the recorded text of the play, read by a succession of three young children, plays on the sound system. To the uninitiated, Stein’s writing can come across as pretentious and inaccessible. Having her words read by children is a brilliant way to locate its inherent playfulness. Alex Confino, Slater Klahr, and Allison Johnston dutifully make out the text with childlike earnestness, rendering words illogical to everyone accessible to anyone.

Now Repeat in Steinese runs Tuesdays in June at Under St. Marks Theater in the East Village. Stein aficionados will relish an opportunity to see the multiple possibilities of this singular work, while newcomers will find a friendly invitation to join in the Steinian fun.

At Sea

The miraculously flexible 3LD Art and Technology Center is best known for productions with nontraditional sets (last season's Wickets transformed the theater into a passenger airplane) and inventive media (its Eyeliner video projection system allows companies access to cutting edge technologies). In New Island Archipelago, veteran avant garde theater group The Talking Band utilizes both aspects of signature 3LD shows: the theater is cleanly converted into the deck of a cruise ship; passengers' dreams are depicted in video on a cabin wall. Written and directed by Talking Band artistic director Paul Zimet, New Island Archipelago's plot is reminiscent of mid-century musicals, or else Shakespeare: happenstance places long lost family members on the same boat, cruise passengers don disguises, entrepreneurs scheme about land purchases. But the Talking Band mixes things up with suavely jovial musical numbers and story arcs which don’t quite resolve themselves – and then there are those dreams.

Shot in black and white and projected against the back wall, the video dream sequences, by Simon Tarr, depict each characters' subconscious sleep with an eerie beauty. As the play progresses and the characters confront one another on the increasingly claustrophobic cruise ship, so too do their dreams reveal the impact of their encounters with their shipmates. Fantasy, reality, and anxiety begin to converge, without pointing to obvious questions or convenient answers.

With 35 years of theater making under its collective belt and roots in Joseph Chaiken’s famed Open Theater, The Talking Band skillfully girds New Island Archipelago against oversimplification, or worse, vagueness. Up and coming downtown theater groups would do well to look toward the high standards set by this production, a serene meditation peppered with quirkiness. Founding member Ellen Maddow’s musical score heightens the production’s sense of whimsy; she also delivers a spot-on performance as worry wart cruise passenger Dot. The rest of the ensemble is similarly engaging, especially Todd D’Amour as Lem, cruise waiter and crusader for the proletariat, whose presence during the outlandish passenger talent show is at once generous, wordless, and very, very funny.

The production design extends into the 3LD's lobby, adorned with shuffleboards and photo ops. Once inside the the house, Nic Ularu’s sets and Nan Zhang’s lighting encapsulate the space in light colors suggestive of the seas' openness while also managing to induce the claustrophobia of an overcrowded cruise ship. Costume designer Olivera Grace does a terrific job dressing the characters to playfully suit their archetypal roles; a tiny hat worn by violist Beth Meyers is a particularly nice touch. Meyers and musician Harry Mann round out the off-kilter cruise as the ship’s band.

At the May 25th performance of New Island Archipelago, in a convergence as surreal as any depicted over the course of the play, costumed actors, shuffleboard playing audience members, and throngs of protestors carrying placards with incendiary messages all mingled in the lobby of the 3LD. In the next room, lower Manhattan’s monthly Community Board meeting was taking public comment on a proposal to construct a mosque near the World Trade Center site, bringing the production’s themes of community and obligation into sharp focus. The mash-up felt very New York: with space at a premium, islands can produce a lot of tension. New Island Archipelago controls that tension and uses it to craft a fine performance. Outside the theater, the tension is less controlled.

Wonder Land

If source material goes in and out of vogue, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the classic nineteenth century children's novel by Lewis Carroll, is decidedly "in" this year. There's a Syfy channel miniseries with Kathy Bates (Alice), A Disney movie with Johnny Depp (Alice in Wonderland), a Japanese anime version of an already popular manga adaptation (Pandora Hearts), and a volume of poetry (Alice in Verse). Add to the list a stellar stage adaptation at the The Irondale Center in Brooklyn: alice...Alice...ALICE! The most explicitly remarkable aspect of alice... is that it roves throughout the Irondale center, a gorgeous former church which has served as home to the Ensemble since the fall of 2008. An adult adaptation of a similar British children's classic, Peter Pan, inaugurated the space, making good use of the cavernous former sanctuary in suggesting that story's most magical element, flight. Alice's story, in contrast, begins by tumbling downwards, and so this production does too. It opens with the familiar picture of a two girls (Scarlet Rivera and Elizabeth Woodbury) seated beside one another with a large book. No sooner does Terry Greiss narrate a few opening lines than a man in a bowler hat (Damen Scranton) hurries past, muttering to himself. When Alice follows him down a rabbit hole (a staircase made into a wind tunnel with the help of a fan and confetti; scenic designer Ken Rothchild imbues each scene with similar inventive whimsy), the audience does too.

Directors Jim Niesen and Barbara MacKenzie-Wood, who also conceived the production, avoid layering their script with knowing commentary or preciousness. Instead, they treat Alice and all of the creatures she encounters on her odyssey with the dignity and self-assurance which the characters themselves possess. Because the story of Alice is so deeply rooted in the popular imagination, doing so permits each of the scenes a sense of deja vu at once comforting and unnerving.

Those especially familiar with the book or any of its faithful adaptations will be delighted by the ways that the production recontextualizes scenes without altering much of Lewis Carroll's dialogue. It's a lot of fun to see how easily the Mad Hatter's tea party becomes a frat boy beer fest; Woodbury, less convincing in her later turn as the Queen of Hearts, here makes the booze infused tea party come to life as a hard partying Dormouse. A filmed sequence screened in the rafters of the theater, which transforms Alice's exchange with the Caterpillar into a psychiatric interview ("Who are you?"), is an especially terrific choice, as obvious as it is uncanny. Scranton is pitch perfect as an obfuscating analyst/caterpillar while Rivera's Alice taps into reserves of self-confidence even as her adventures leave her riddled with doubt. As the production nears its end, the adaptation takes more extreme, darker turns. Greiss is disturbing as the pitifully doddering mock turtle; so is Michael-David Gordon as the vulnerable knave of hearts caught in an unjust trial. In the courtroom, we see Alice's quest for order become more crucial than a trivial numbers game, a quest which the Irondale Ensemble, skilled in adaptation, neither sends up nor solves.

Alice in Wonderland is a story of shifting perspectives. Alice grows both larger and smaller during her odyssey in Wonderland, gaining new points of view central to the archetypal coming of age story. By making its audience reassemble for each scene, Irondale's alice... prompts the audience to shift its points of view along with the title character's. Even the filmed segment relies heavily on shifting camera angles as a source of both comedy and disquiet. The production as a whole is as dizzying as it is insightful. Don't miss it.

Murder in the First. And Second.

A sheriff department with a sheriff on perpetual vacation. An artist with a penchant for photographing nudes and pastries. A daffy old mayor. A brilliant private eye. The community of Sentinal, Oklahoma, as depicted in Sneaky Snake Productions' Detectives and Victims, currently playing at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, is home to a collection of likable oddballs. Described in publicity materials as "two independent and interlocking plays," Detectives and Victims, which are designed to be seen in any order, play in rotating rep under the title A Brief History of Murder. Like the cult David Lynch TV show Twin Peaks, A Brief History of Murder, by Richard Lovejoy, addresses violent crime in a small town America by coloring a standard detective drama formula with shades of fantasy. As both Victims and Detectives spiral toward their bloody conclusions, the plays take harder turns into the supernatural. With two plays, a twenty member ensemble, a couple of musical numbers, multiple set changes and some very gory costume details, A Brief History of Murder constitutes a highly ambitious project. Under the direction of Ivanna Cullinan, the large cast delivers a consistently fun performance, even as the plays fail to deliver a neatly solved crime.

Neither Victims nor Detectives fully explains the mysteries and murders on its own. It would be enormously exciting and a delightful playwriting feat if, taken in tandem, the two plays worked together to reveal one another's secrets and render the full picture more clear. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen. Neither does the two-part production wholly emphasize varied perspectives. Although Detectives and Victims ostensibly focus on each play's titular characters, there is a lot of overlap between them. The two-part production most often plays less like two pieces of a master puzzle than like an experiment in staging alternate drafts of a singular script.

It's lucky, then, that Lovejoy is a playwright with a gift for writing good dialogue and comedic zingers. "I really can't afford any further library fines," says a Local Avid Reader (Lovejoy, in a brief cameo) upon discovering the town librarian brutally murdered with her heart and eyes ripped out, "I have a son." Indeed, some of the most obviously neat aspects to the double-billed production are the scenes we see twice; recognition of the familiar scenes is fun mostly because the jokes in them are pretty great. Under Cullinan's direction, the stage perspective is flipped in the alternate productions, a nice touch.

Cullinan deserves special credit for keeping each play under control, even as the plays themselves descend into zaniness. Both Victims and Detectives run just over an hour and half; each play begins with a clearly stated premise and identifiable subplots which grow murky as the plays grow more heavily mythological until it becomes clear that the mysteries have spun too far out of control for the scripts to explicate. In the hands of a lesser director, such a realization might cue audience restlessness, but Cullinan reigns the production in so tightly that its descent into carnage signals not only dilution of an otherwise cohesive plot but a joyously maudlin production choice. She also demonstrates an impressive ability to keep an enormous ensemble on the same stylistic page, an especially important quality for a production evocative of genre fiction.

The majority of A Brief History of Murder's characters appear in both Vicitims and Detectives, making the second play audiences see -- whichever play that is -- full of warmly familiar faces. It's crucial to the productions' ability to build suspense that audiences like the characters; we need to care whether they live or die and whether they are good or evil. Happily, we do. As the only obvious predator of the production, Timothy McCown Reynolds delivers a coolly creepy performance. Based on the Norse mythological wolf Fenrus, McCown Reynolds skulks about the playing space. "Historically, until this moment, you never missed a thing. Now," he tells a startled former agent of the KBG, "you rarely miss a thing," with a delivery that makes the observation as devastating as any of the gruesome murders depicted onstage. Other standout performers include Kent Meister as a chillaxed artist whose world unexpectedly crumbles, Jesse Wilson as a debilitatingly nervous rookie cop, and Adam Swiderski as a cagey KGB agent turned nude model.

While the large cast bolsters the productions' boisterous, epic aesthetic, both scripts would benefit from some slimming down of a few superfluities. A vacationing marine and her doting husband who fancy themselves detectives (a comedic duo of Sheila Joon and Salvatore Brienik) are among the few characters to appear in Victims only and their presence adds little to the production; a cancer diagnosis in Detectives is a distracting admission. The nymphish Portal sisters, (Sarah Malinda Engelke, Kathryn Lawson, and Eve Udesky), dressed in confusing shiny gold dresses, possess otherwordly powers of an unexplained sort; their last name is insufficient articulation of their identities or their purpose in the play.

A Brief History of Murder's production team gives the town of Sentinal, Oklahoma a homey feel. Costume designer Jim Hammer dresses the characters in comfy Westernesque clothes that contrast nicely with the play's wonderfully silly nude model scenes. Chris Chappell's original music and sound design adds a nice dynamic, infusing otherwise light scenes with a sense of the ominous. As the production's gore and effects designer, Laura Moss does nice work that celebrates the productions' roots in Grand Guignol theater.

Sneaky Snake Producions is an inventive theater company whose last production, Adventure Quest, also written by Lovejoy, traded on the absurd limitations that make up the worlds of video game quests. A Brief History of Murder draws inspiration from the considerably less limited worlds of ancient mythology. The result is a pair of plays that lose a little in their overexuberance but whose crafted enthusiasm for their material is itself a source of delight.

An Odyssey

"Am I awake or asleep?" That uncertainty, voiced by characters throughout the International WOW Company's Auto Da Fe, permeates the production, which works hard to create a dreamlike aesthetic. Nate Lemoine's set design drapes the deep floor and backdrop of the large playing space in blue tarp, with white ladders of varying heights providing definition against the otherwise seamless expanse. Jullian J. Mesri's sound design provides near-constant ambiance setting music; a fog machine provides a lot of fog. Under the direction of International WOW Artistic Director Josh Fox, Auto Da Fe would benefit from a greater sense of dramatic clarity, even as it attempts to stage foggy consciousness and indefinite geography. An Odyssey adaption by Japanese playwright Masataka Matsuda, the International WOW production marks the play's English language premiere. Inernational WOW has over a decade of experience in international collaboration, and its rendering of Auto Da Fe is at its strongest in its use of multiculturalism to evoke life after war. With a 28-member ensemble of diverse ethnicities and nationalities, Auto Da Fe is perhaps among the most genuinely multicultural productions to play Off-Broadway in recent memory; rather than localize this U.S. translation of a Japanese adaption of the Greeks, International WOW integrates multicultural aesthetics to weave a story that approaches timelessness. Piles of empty shoes and rent clothing, which have become near artistic shorthand for human disasters ranging from the dead of Vietnam to the Dirty Wars of Argentina to the Holocaust, are put to good use in this production, effectively invoking a history of global horrors without needing to identify a singular crisis.

The young ensemble executes each movement with a lot of dedication; a greater degree of actorly precision might help avoid the preciousness which plagues the production. Loosely following a soldier called Odyseaus A through a war ravaged landscape, Auto Da Fe relies on scenes and images rather than on linear plot. Most of the ensemble remains onstage for the duration of the production, and Fox clearly has paid a lot of attention to stage pictures created by the large cast. At an intermissionless hour and forty minutes, however, the imagistic production grows tedious even before its penultimate scene overwhelms every other aspect of the production.

As Auto Da Fe nears its end, a small group of soldiers discusses rape as a tactic of war. An angry soldier argues for miscegenation as genocide: by raping and impregnating local women, he says, the soldiers will systematically put an end to the enemy's race. Next, the company's young women and a few young men cue up to to be raped by the soldiers, played by young male theater types doing their self-serious best at performing militaristic aggression. One of the soldiers takes a woman from the front of the line and shoves her toward the rapist, who throws her onto a pile of rags. Were the scene to end there, it might have more powerfully suggested the horrors to come, but this lengthy production is unsatisfied with brief images suggestive of futurity. Like most scenes in the production, the rape sequence goes on much too long, undoing its own power in the process.

Where Auto Da Fe's other overlong sequences tend to start intriguing and become cloying, the rape scene becomes flat out offensive. If it's at all possible to depict a marathon rape sequence theatrically, doing so would require more mighty exactitude than the young Auto Da Fe ensemble possesses. Further weakening the horrors of rape, as the long line of rape victims take turns on the clothing pile, yet another member of the ensemble speaks into a microphone of his mother's sad response to his father's infidelities. Recitation of memory fragments occur throughout the production, so at its least inappropriate, the spoken-word memory of familial strife provides an alternate focus to the rapist; at its most idiotic, it suggests a parallel between adultery and rape.

Auto Da Fe has many beautiful design elements and a hardworking young cast. Within the excess, the production has good moments evocative of the International WOW Company's more successful work. Good intentions undoubtedly went into the making of Auto Da Fe but especially given the horrors of its subject matter, good intentions are insufficient. Military rape is the most graphic aspect of war addressed by the play, and presenting it in the manner used here reveals the WOW Company at its most immature, incapable of evoking the horrors of rape and overpowering the good work that went into other parts of the production.

Video is Not the Killer

Mid-century detective stories provide rich fodder for venues of all stripes, from the commercial glitz of Broadway, where The 39 Steps is about to wrap up a four and half year run ("Alfred Hitchcock meets hilarious" declared its early publicity), to the DIY inventiveness of the New York International Fringe Festival, where Race McCloud, Private Eye) premiered last summer. The most recent production to spoof and celebrate the gumshoe genre is Radio Star, produced by Horse Trade Theater Group and Tanya O'Debra at the Red Room on East Fourth Street, which presents itself as a live broadcast of a 1940's radio drama, with a twist: O'Debra, who also wrote the script, plays each of the parts. As a governing conceit, the stage-performance-as-radio-broadcast yields fun results. The performance space stays unchanged throughout the production, which begins just before O'Debra enters the theater, dressed in a fur stole, and concludes with her exit just under an hour later. As the show's bow-tied Announcer and Soundman, J. Lincoln Hallowell, Jr. creates sound effects the old fashioned way (tap shoes indicate walking, the lid of wood box mimics doors closing) and also via a Mac laptop, which plays music to set ambiance (composed by Andrew Mauriello) and commercials to set time period (the show is purportedly sponsored by "Iron Lung Cigarettes"). Hallowell's presence, like the sounds he cues, goes a long way toward creating the radio show atmosphere in a minimal amount of space, and especially toward supporting O'Debra as she takes on the play's varied, delightfully silly roles.

Perched on a tall chair and reading from a music stand, O'Debra nails each of the gumshoe archetypes. The story revolves around private dick Nick McKittrick, hired by the beautiful, unflappable Fanny Larue to solve the murder of her newly deceased husband. Along the way he encounters a bumbling inventor named Wally, a defensive secretary named Betty Buttons, and a disgusting manservent named Lucifer, among others. As a playwright, O'Debra peppers the script with punning innuendo ("Don't test me! The results will not be positive!") and winking anachronism (snuggies). As an actor under the direction of Peter Cook, she delivers each performance sans irony. It's a smart choice that keeps the pace up and the laughs funny through to the play's cute, final revelation.

Radio Star premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where minimal sets and virtuosic performances help U.S. productions first to get themselves overseas and, once there, to stand out from the pack. Those qualities prove equally useful in The Red Room, a theater sometimes misused by less minimalist productions attempting elaborate set changes in the small playing space. With its intimate house, raised seats, and (yes) red walls, The Red Room makes a perfect home for Radio Star's broadcast-as-theater, fully encapsulating the production. O'Debra's disciplined, vivacious performance fills the space from red wall to red wall.

Scenes from a Bad Economy

If catastrophe has provided inspiration to artists at least since the days of Aristotle, in more contemporary times The Flea Theater has provided a forum for plays that respond to contemporary crises (Anne Nelson's The Guys to 9/11, Beau Willimon's Lower Ninth to Hurricane Katrina). With The Great Recession, The Flea takes on the current economic downturn with an evening of ten minute plays by six prominent playwrights (Thomas Bradshaw, Sheila Callaghan, Erin Courtney, Will Eno, Itmar Moses, and Adam Rapp) whose careers have been nurtured by The Flea. Performed by The Bats, the Flea's company of early-career actors, The Great Recession creates not only a collage of stories about economic hardship but a snapshot of how some of the country's most talented playwrights respond, in their work, to crisis. One of the great pleasures of the evening is seeing each playwright's signature style distilled into ten minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rapp's has a vigorous fight to the death; Bradshaw's a gang of gleefully shallow people aping real feeling; and Callaghan's a smattering of stream of consciousness dialogue that teeter-totters between wisdom and gibberish.

The plays' scopes range from the national (Eno's Unum cleverly follows dollar bills in transactions to and from the Federal Reserve) to the personal (Moses' Fucked looks at the recession's subtle impact on the trajectory of a young couple's relationship; it also makes really good use of cell phones). Striking a balance between the two, Courtney's Severed infuses multifaceted impacts of the recession with a sweet human exchange. That's perhaps one of the best things plays can offer crisis, and Courtney achieves it with a nod to the role that media has played in narrating the recession. Four actors, splayed across the stage in cut-out frames indicative of monitors, discuss the recession's impact on their lives. Footage for a documentary, their stories comprise a literal backdrop for the interaction at the crux of the play: an artist (nailed by Amy Jackson, who balances quirk with resignation) and a businessman (Ronald Washington, with relaxed certitude) share an unlikely exchange while awaiting their turns before the camera. Director Davis McCallum deftly shifts focus between the dialogue and monologues while the likable ensemble lends warmth to each story, particularly Reynaldo Piniella in the role of an aspiring actor who explains that he's "not even at the status level to be in a show with a big enough of a budget to get cancelled." The line draws big laughs from an audience evidently familiar with the predicament.

Severed is not the only play of the collection to draw upon the recession's impact on the theater world: New York Living tells the story of theater kids swapping romantic partners and dealing with the real estate fallout that ensues. Bradshaw's writing clips over familiar tropes without dwelling in sentiment. His plays are among the funniest, darkest work written today. They are also proving to be among the more difficult to direct. Zany characters spiral out of control and into absurdity, but if played as broad comedy, his calibrated writing loses its satirical bite. Played too straight, on the other hand, it comes across as blandly made for TV. Director Ethan McSweeny here tends toward the former, to mixed results. An enthusiastic quartet of actors (Raul Sigmund Julia, Anna Greenfield, Andy Gershenzon, and Morgan Reis) delivers an engaging performance as individuals but never quite gets on the same stylistic page. Literal bells and whistles (okay, only the bells are literal) go off each time a character says the word recession, accompanied by a light cue, which is more goofy commentary than the script seems to require. Still, the overall effect of the play is a happy one that gets momentum up and keeps it there.

Other plays in the collection take a more dystopic approach. Adam Rapp's Classic Kitchen Timer tells the story of out-of-work Midwestern laborers who come to New York for a kill-or-be-killed social experiment. Hosted by a ghoulishly suave Nick Maccarone, Classic Kitchen Timer positions the recession between those for whom it's a disaster and those for whom it's an opportunity. Sheila Callaghan's Recess, in contrast, is set in a near future in which the Recession has worsened, apparently affecting everyone: nearly a dozen destitute young people share makeshift quarters in a cramped basement, struggling to hold onto sanity and stave off starvation. Director Kip Fagan fails to elicit much in the way of hard edges from the youthful cast, which keeps their familial tenderness from achieving real poignancy. Recess is perhaps the one play where an absence of older characters feels limiting.

On the whole, however, the ensemble of young actors lends the production a feeling of camaraderie. Transitions between plays are undertaken by the ensemble, with as much attention to presentation as to execution, which goes a long way toward creating unity between the six plays. Onstage, the Bats' ease with one another makes a strong case not only for the benefits of the Flea's training program but for the high quality of work that a theater with a resident ensemble can achieve.

Keeping House

Founded after World War I as a means of creating industrial design to compliment modernist lifestyles, the Bauhaus school of design was ultimately shut down by the Nazis, who were suspicious of its modernist innovations. Yet the impact of the Bauhaus movement didn't end there. Its legacy takes center stage in Chance D. Muehleck's new play, which examines the Bauhaus movement through multimedia performance. Much like its subject matter, bauhaus the bauhaus, produced by The Nerve Tank at the Brooklyn Lyceum, is a thoughtful, well-researched project that demonstrates keen insight into contemporary life. In the tradition of the Bauhaus school, Nerve Tank's creativity compensates for the uneveness of this experimental work. As the audience files into rows of folding chairs in the raw, open space of the Lyceum, the ensemble cast, dressed in white lab coats, neon gloves and wigs, paces across the floor. Their short, staccato steps become a dominant choreographic trope of the performance, which employs both precision of movement and stylized absurdities. The company does not always strike a desired balance between discipline and goofiness; often one quality overwhelms the other. When the balance is achieved, it creates a terrific dynamic that contributes to some of the production's strongest moments, as when one performer delivers a clever House that Jack Built inspired poem ("This is a wheel that becomes a bed that...") while a second performer executes a series of movements in conjunction with the rhyme. Neither pantomime nor wholly abstracted, the choreography grants the poem a transmutable embodiment. It's a prescient dramatization of a design aesthetic which aimed to create physical forms to support modern behavior.

As the Lyceum's current resident company, Nerve Tank fully inhabits the space. Under Melanie Armer's direction, little energy is lost to the Lyceum's distant ceilings or the playing space's excess areas. In keeping with Bauhaus emphasis on streamlined design and a lack of ornamentation, stage designer Solomon Weisbard has created a single, three-tiered white structure in the back of the playing space on which performers stand and images are projected. Video by Shawn X. Duan is also, at times, projected onto the brick walls and the Lyceum floor, further inhabiting the space by creating multiple focuses of attention. Perhaps more significantly, given the theme of the production, the video points to cultural shifts from industrial to digital design. Sound designer Stephan Moore likewise plays with the contrast between digitized and industrialized ontologies through his use of musique concrète, electronic music which looks beyond traditional instruments for compositional material. In that sense, though digital rather than industrial, the sound design parallels Bauhaus ideology, which advocated the exploitation of available resources by skilled craftsmen.

Muehleck's script weaves together a lot of diverse material, with text ranging from an M.A. thesis on Bauhaus performativity to copy from an Ikea catalog. Armer keeps the mood light and the pace up so that the collage of scenes shifts easily from one to another. A central irony of bauhaus the bauhaus lies in its skilled use of postmodern playwrighting techniques (collage, pastiche, repetition, nonlinear plot) to critique a school of design synonymous with modernism. That's an interesting answer to the play's question of legacy.

For more information on The Nerve Tank and bauhaus the bauhaus, see our Off the Cuff interview with Melanie Armer here.

Gays, Grandma, Giant Chicken

MilkMilkLemonade, a smart new comedy from The Management, tells the story of Emory (Andy Phelan), an 11-year-old boy growing up on a poultry farm with his chain-smoking grandmother (Michael Cyril Creighton). She wishes he would stop playing with dolls and learn to throw like a boy; he wishes she would turn the farm into a vegan co-op. Written by Joshua Conkel, The Management's Artistic Director, MilkMilkLemonade is structured like a children's play, complete with a narrator (Lady in a Leotard, played with anxious delight by Nikole Beckwith). "I will attempt to remain as neutral as possible," she tells the audience at the outset of the play, helpfully adding "neutral means boring." Other elements of the play that are evocative of children's theater include the cheery primary colors of Jason Simm's cardboard set, a giant chicken named Linda (Jennifer Harder, whose emotive clucks are translated into English by Lady in a Leotard), and a couple of enthusiastic dance segments.

In the hands of director Isaac Butler, the play's structural childlike qualities permeate every aspect of the production, to terrific results. MilkMilkLemonade is a gay coming of age story that tackles queerness from the perspective of an effeminate 11-year-old. Under Butler's direction, "childlike" never includes a knowing wink and nod from the grown-up artists. Neither does it devolve into cutesy preciousness. Instead, we are given a comedy infused with all the quiet seriousness and whimsy of preadolescence.

"If people didn't play the roles that god gave 'em," Nana asks Emory early in the play, "what would happen?" Yet for a dialogue that begins with a gloss of Leviticus, their exchange is marked more by familial pouting than by religious solemnity. MilkMilkLemonade is noteworthy for its depiction of a young generation of rural queers. Without making light of the challenges Emory will face as he grows up, it suggests those hardships are difficult and complicated, but ultimately surmountable. There is no utopic solution or angry cultural critique.

Anger is largely absent from the play. Linda the chicken is often sad but struggles to accept her chicken farm fate. Although Nana wishes her grandson would butch up, her love for him is as obvious as it is tough. Emory negotiates his desires and social expectations with a hilarious, heartbreaking earnestness. Only Elliot (Jess Barbagallo), a boy who lives down the street and has a penchant for playing with fire, struggles with anger, and he does so directly, imagining, in one of the play's more inventive devices, an evil parasitic twin who compels him to act on his furious impulses and who lives inside his thigh.

As the play unfolds, Emory and Elliot's relationship becomes more complicated than first meets Nana's eye. Their youthful exploration of homoeroticism is, by turns, terrifyingly destructive and adorably sweet. When they play a game of house that's Tennessee Williams by way of Molly Ringwald, MilkMilkLemonade is at its meta-theatrical best. The boys' game of make-believe trades in gendered cultural imaginaries that expose how normative gender has long served as fantasy. Fantasy: both an illusion and a sexy indulgence.

Make no mistake: MilkMilkLemonade, which takes its title from a dirty children's rhyme, explores its overarching themes (sex, bodies, fate) through playful action, not heady analysis or sentimental preaching. That renders its critique especially effective. This is a play with card-board chickens taped to the walls (a fabulous touch).

If it's worth noting that the play includes cross-gendered casting, it's only to emphasize that this is not drag. Each of the characters is played with unwavering integrity by the talented cast. Phelan and Barbagallo deserve special credit for meeting the challenge of portraying young boys without condescending to their roles. Emory and Elliot are smart and funny, neither too immature nor overly sophisticated. Phelan and Barbagallo do 11-year-olds everywhere proud.

It's tough to be an effeminate boy in farm town. When life gives you lemons, campy romps and breakout dance segments are still a lot of fun.