Not Your Mom's Variety Show Or Is It

With its glitzy burlesque, stunning acrobatics, bawdy jokes, and graying audience, Absinthe, the latest offering at South Street Seaport’s Speigelworld tent, makes for a bizarre mish-mash of an extravaganza. If New York’s burgeoning downtown burlesque scene gained an advertising budget that allowed it to attract a Bridge and Tunnel crowd, or if Cirque du Soleil forsook its insistence on aesthete seriousness for a self-effacing sense of humor, the result might look something like Absinthe. But not quite. The contradictions that make up Absinthe – intimate grandeur, grotesque athleticism, upscale striptease – would be highly difficult to replicate under different circumstances. As it is, the set-up often feels strained: the Gazillionare, who plays filthy rich ring leader of the sketchy circus, and his sweetly off-kilter assistant Penny emcee the production while trying hard to elicit interaction from the audience, with no subject off limits. That the audience is mostly white is a source of much banter; that the audience would perhaps look more at home seeing a tepid spectacle a la Disney on Broadway is hinted at through a recurring slew of curious references to The Lion King.

About the most reminiscent absinthe gets of Disney’s family friendly fare, however, occurs in the number On Air (performed by Geneviève and Maxime of Duo Ssens), a romantic trapeze routine set to a recording of Can You Feel the Love Tonight – though their routine is more sensual than any rumored secret still embedded in a Disney movie. Other sexy acrobatic pairings include Strip, featuring Duo Sergio (Sergey Petrov and Sergey Dubovyk), who wear matching cotton briefs while performing acrobatic stunts; if the Big Apple Circus’ Huesca brothers embraced their homoeroticism, their work might look like this. A similarly breathtaking pairing, the misnomer Finale, occurs at the close of the first act, and features a fifties-esque roller routine by The Willers (“roller-skating acrobats” Jean-Pierre and Wanda Poissonnet).

It’s tempting to call Absinthe a cabaret, but, save for a few belted renditions of ballads sung by catsuit-clad Kaye Tuckerman, musical acts are few and far between; accompaniment is always canned. The presence of a band would enhance the show tremendously; watching the production, it’s hard not to long for one.

Instead, the emphasis of Absinthe is squarely on banter and bodies, both of which provide stunning entertainment. The terrifically weird Julie Atlas Muz is especially great in Moon River, a burlesque act involving an enormous rubbery bubble that manages to be reminiscent of both Glinda the Good Witch and a pregnancy ultrasound, but sexy. Really.

This year marks the traveling Spiegelworld’s third summer in New York, and its second featuring the Absinthe variety show. The performance runs an hour and forty-five minutes, and fans who want to make a full night of the event can pair the show with dinner and drinks at Speigelworld’s restaurant and bar (though be warned, pricey drinks match the steep tickets) or catch another production in the Spiegeltent, which houses several shows a night (some produced by Spiegelworld, others by local groups like the New York International Fringe Festival). For a decadent night of bawdy glamor, there is literally nothing like it.

Life and Times

Founded in 1992, The Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America is a major presenter of dramatic material emphasizing Chinese history and the Chinese immigrant experience. Under the leadership of accomplished artistic director Joanna Chan, the theater has produced work important not just to the Asian American community, for which it serves a central role, but to the New York theater community as a whole. As an artist, Chan has written, adapted and directed over fifty productions that have enjoyed presentation across the globe. Chan’s latest play, Forbidden City West, produced by the Yangtze Rep and currently running at Theater for the New City, won’t count among its successes. Part bio-play, part book musical, part variety show, the production fails at achieving any semblance of stylistic unity or dramatic import.

Forbidden City West aims to tell the story of legendary Chinese-American performer Jadin Wong, who headlined at the San Francisco nightclub from which the play takes its title. Photographed on the cover of Life Magazine in 1940 and achieving international success at a time when Chinese-American performers seldom did, Wong came to symbolize the performative exoticism of the Orient for white America. Later in life, she ran a talent agency specializing in Asian-American actors, and in doing so became a mentor to new generations of Asian-American artists.

The real-life Jadin (pronounced jayDEEN) sounds like a compelling, complicated woman, but as portrayed by Debbie Wong (in her youth) and Ji Lian Wang (in her later years), she comes across as startlingly one-note. Wong’s Jadin is consistently spunky, confident, and a bit remorseful; Wang’s is kind, instructive, and a bit remorseful. The curiosity of the elder Jadin developing an accent that she never had in her youth is not nearly so troublesome as the fact that, though the production spans Jadin’s life from childhood well into her eighties, at no point do we see any real depth of character. The problem lies in large part with the script: though it depicts Jadin in a number of what ought to be high stakes situations (delivering her infant brother, parachuting into the black forest during WWII, fighting racism in the performance world), there are depressingly few moments of actual dramatic action. Without conflict or character development, Forbidden City West renders what must have been a fascinating life unnecessarily dull.

Although Forbidden City West bills itself as a musical, its songs (with music by Gregory Frederick and lyrics by Chan) seldom advance the plot. Instead, variety show-like, they provide musical interludes: a tap dance, an Italian aria, a comic karate number. Perhaps the numbers are intended as an homage to the nightclub from which the play takes its title, but even the full-company numbers fail to sparkle with the energy needed to justify their presence.

The play would benefit from a tighter focus on the life of its protagonist, but instead the slow-paced production meanders far and wide. Its scope includes numerous scenes of Jadin’s mother as a young girl (singing in Chinese and reading in English) and of immigrant Chinese men (complaining about the state of their world), which provide context but not much more. A single scene of each might suffice; instead they reappear throughout the production with little new to offer each time. Similarly, the elder Jadin’s relationship with an aspiring writer (he must learn to make his screenplays marketable rather than political) accomplish in four scenes what a cleaner script could accomplish in two.

It’s easy to understand why Chan felt drawn to create a production centered on the life of Jaydin Wong. Forbidden City West serves as a reminder that compelling source material isn’t enough to save a production.

Three's Company

A Perfect Couple, Brooke Behrman's sharp new play, is currently running at the DR2 Theatre under the auspices of WET, where Sasha Eden and Victoria Pettibone produce a single fully mounted production a year. For a theater aiming to improve representation of women in the arts, A Perfect Couple is a perfect choice. The production opens to Emma (Annie McNamara), alone onstage, fixing breakfast in her best friends’ kitchen (designed with elegant simplicity by Neil Patel). When Isaac (James Waterston) stumbles in, Emma plops berries into his mouth; when Amy (Dana Eskelson) enters, she rests her arms on Emma’s shoulders. Under the smart direction of Maria Mileaf, the affectionate intimacy with which the good friends reach for one another is less a form of flirtation than of familiarity.

If McNamara works a bit too hard at playing the quirky, perpetually single city girl, maybe it’s because Emma herself is performing that role for her domesticated friends. As twenty-somethings in Manhattan, the threesome led similar lives. Now, as they reach 40, Amy and Isaac have become engaged and moved upstate. They worry that Emma is lonely and outgrowing her urban life; Emma worries that as they befriend couples and families, she’ll no longer be included. But A Perfect Couple is not simply a story of friends with divergent lives caught in a game of city mouse/ country mouse.

Over the course of the weekend, they find themselves questioning not just how they can maintain relevance in each other’s lives, but how they have fit together throughout their shared history. The title of the play alludes not only to the notion of a perfectly matched pair (which could refer to any coupling of characters), but to “perfect” in the numeric sense of the word: a perfect couple means exactly two.

Their lives, the friends realize, have never been so simple. Amy worries that 15 years ago Emma and Isaac were in love (even if they didn’t know it), and maybe are still (even if they don’t know it). It’s unclear whether she is more distressed by the possibility that her fiancé loves her best friend or that her best friend is closer to her fiancé than to her. So invested are they in one another that extricating the details of who means what to whom proves almost impossible.

In a lesser play, the hinted infidelities would be fully realized. Emma and Isaac would have an affair and someone (anyone) would make out with the cute, considerably younger boy next door (Elan Moss-Bachrach, who nails the easy charm and chillaxed confidence of a male liberal arts grad). What separates A Perfect Couple from less sophisticated scripts a la Sex and the City is its refusal to indulge in easy payoff.

Instead, the would-be trysts remain remote, not only un-acted upon, but nearly unacknowledged. It’s a lovely if risky choice that will frustrate audience members who prefer explicit action to circular discussion fueled by fraught emotional conflict. Tensions arise as much from the course the characters’ lives have taken as from the courses they haven’t. The hesitancy and confusion with which they approach a crucial juncture of their lives is as heartbreaking as it is intelligent.

Coming of age following the sexual revolution of the 60’s and the consciousness-raising of the 70’s, the characters spent their young adulthood enjoying the relaxed gender roles and independence of twenty-something Manhattanites at the end of the 20th century. “We didn’t have anything else to do besides be together,” recalls Amy of their all-day Sunday brunches, "All three of us. We were falling in love."

The play spares audiences an academic lecture on third-wave feminism, instead allowing Amy and Emma to casually compare their lives to their mothers (whom they agree have not ended up well) and the women of their mothers' generation (whose options were perhaps less complicated, if more codified). Yet even as their freewheeling young adulthood has left them uncertain how to transition into a middle-age with traditional adult relationships, they look back on it fondly.

“The three of us were a pair,” says Emma, “For a while.” Times change.

You Can't Take It With You

Medieval morality plays, instructive texts intended to convince audiences to lead more pious lives, served as a sort of early prototype for the after-school special. At the outset of the classic morality play Everyman, God sends Death to summon the title character. Unprepared for a reckoning with God, Every asks to bring someone along on the journey, only to discover that friends, family, and material goods – everything Everyman thought important – refuse to come along, and that ultimately, only good deeds can follow man beyond the grave. Fittingly, the current production at Looking Glass Theatre, which purports to produce theater while “exploring a female vision,” features a female Every (Charlotte Purser). That raises the question of how shifting the gender of a character intended as a prototype for all humanity affects a story. Under director Shari Johnson, the answer is: not much. Save its gender-bending casting, this is a production that allows the text to speak for itself, without grafting contemporary choices or questions onto it.

When it works, it does so because the themes of the 500-plus-year-old-play continue to resonate today. Though the play is steeped in the rhetoric and beliefs of Medieval Catholicism, as a parable, it favors universal abstraction over explicit cultural specificities. Each of the characters (Fellowship, Knowledge, Good Deeds, etc) is a personified form of an abstract idea.

The Looking Glass production opens majestically, with several cast members performing the role of God as a choral recitation. Calling down to the audience from above the stage, they appear to the audience as a formless celestial being wrapped in lighting designer Rachelle Beckerman’s awesome gold pinpricks of light. Once the action of the play becomes earthbound, so do the actors. Scenic designer Wheeler Kincaid’s set is covered in brown ropes and sack cloth; costume designer Mark Richard Caswell has outfitted the actors in earth-toned ensembles evocative of the Middle Ages.

Performing a singular quality poses an interesting acting challenge; The Looking Glass production would be stronger if Johnson had the cast meet it more uniformly. At times, the actors nail the personification of the ideas they embody, as when Kimberlee Walker portrays Strength with a buoyant confidence and Anne Gill depicts Discretion by carefully parsing her thoughts. Elsewhere, embodiment of a performative quality takes a backseat to pure enthusiasm performing; Megan Gaffney’s Knowledge is bursting with earnest energy but never comes across as, well, knowledgeable. The production is at its best in scenes that embrace the play’s explicitly instructive nature while remaining mindful of its details. Phillip Chavira and Jonah Dill-D’Ascoli in particular stand out as Kindred and Cousin, achieving a familial rapport while taking real pleasure in the presentationalism of their roles. It would be nice to see that balance of qualities elsewhere in the production.

The power of the morality tale in the Middle Ages surely derived, in part, from the steadfast belief of the performers in the profundity of their message. Yet, a sense of urgency and weighty import is absent from this production. In its place is a faithful presentation of a historic text. History buffs should take note.

Beyond TKTS: A User’s Guide to Cheap Theater Tix

When the Off-Off-Broadway movement exploded onto the New York theater scene in the 1960s, it went with the territory that noncommercial theater would be affordable theater. The reputation stuck: to this day, the affordability of downtown theater is often touted as one of its greatest selling points. Yet, with production costs on the rise, downtown ticket prices are also moving upwards. Even $15-20 tickets can quickly add up for anyone who sees a lot of plays.

The TKTS booths, which provide great same-day discounts to pricey Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, have long been a popular starting point for anyone seeking discount tickets. When the Theatre Development Fund opened its first TKTS booth in 1973, TDF was a newly-formed organization aiming to bolster New York theater revenue by increasing their audience numbers. Today, long lines of tourists and hometown theater lovers alike wait eagerly outside the two booths, now located in Times Square and South Street Seaport, which offer phenomenal discounts of 25-50% to some of New York's most popular Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.

Navigating discount tickets to less prominent productions can be trickier, in part because downtown discount programs tend to be less centralized. There are, however, a plethora of discounted tickets available Off- and Off-Off-Broadway for enterprising (broke) theatergoers. These range from special cheap ticket performance nights held at individual theater companies to more traditional reduced rates for students and seniors, as well as promotional mailing lists and standard rush tickets.

Sundays in particular have become a great night for cheap theater. This season, SoHo Rep instituted the cheapest discount ticket program in town. On Sunday nights, all mainstage productions cost just 99 cents. Interested audience members would do well to purchase the 99 cent tickets in advance, as the performances have been known to sell out fast. Also special this season, The Joyce, founded as a dance theater 25 years ago, currently offers $25 Sunday evening tickets in honor of its anniversary season.

Another great Sunday theater option is New York Theatre Workshop, where regularly priced tickets range from $55 to $75, placing NYTW on the expensive end of the downtown ticket continuum (across the street, Off-Off- stalwart La MaMa has never raised its ticket prices above $20). To keep its programming accessible to all theatergoers, five years ago NYTW instituted CheapTix Sundays, through which all Sunday performances cost $20. These cash-only tickets are available only at the NYTW box office; however, unlike similarly priced rush tickets, CheapTix may be purchased in advance. NYTW Marketing Director Cathy Popowytsch notes that edgier productions, like the Elevator Repair Service's The Sound and The Fury (April Seventh, 1928), currently playing at the Workshop, tend to be especially popular with CheapTix audiences. Sunday performances attract a slightly different demographic than the theater does other nights. "The audience tends to be younger on Sunday evenings," Popowytsch notes, "but we also get many senior citizens."

Students and seniors can also find cheap tickets through a number of rush ticket programs targeted especially at their unique demographics. A comprensive list of student and senior discounts available for current productions is maintained by nytheatre.com at www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/discounts.php. Interested participants should note that, unlike theaters with official cheap ticket nights, these tickets are often sold only on the day of the performance. This is especially true of programs geared toward students. Some venues, such as The Vineyard Theatre, which maintains a $20 student rush program, reserve a limited number of student rush tickets to sell at each performance. Other venues, like Playwrights Horizons, simply turn any unsold tickets into rush tickets an hour before curtain, when student tickets are priced at $15. For student tickets, remember to bring along a student ID.

In recent years, a number of theaters have expanded student rush tickets to include wider demographics. Perhaps in part because twenty-somethings have long realized they could just hold onto their old college ID cards in order to take advantage of student discounts, and partly as a way to bring younger audiences into the theater, several theaters around town offer discounts aimed at young audiences. In addition to its $15 student rush program, for example, Playwrights Horizons runs HOTtix, $20 tickets for twenty-something theatergoers, based on availability an hour before each performance. Other theaters offer rush tickets to all theatergoers regardless of age, including The Public Theater, where Rush Tix are available to the general public an hour before each downtown performance. When planning a last-minute trip to the theater, investigating the production's rush ticket policy is never a bad idea. Because rush tickets are based on availability, they are always something of a gamble, so it's a good idea to arrive early, especially when rushing a particularly popular production. Some savvy rushers find it helpful to phone the theater's box office before setting out.

For anyone willing to sift through email, several mailing lists that compile promotional discounts are enormously useful. The TheaterMania Insiders Club sends regular emails detailing discounts to both commercial and independent theater productions. While the Insiders Club is free of charge, for fees starting at $99, members may join TheaterMania's Gold Club, which offers discounts and occasional comp tickets to Broadway productions. Information on both programs, as well as well as general discount ticket information, is available at TheaterMania.com.

Other good promotional email lists include Ticket Central's Student No Rush Program, which allows students to reserve tickets for preview performances of Ticket Central productions (www.ticketcentral.com/snr_home.asp) and Goldstar (www.goldstar.com) which offers discounts to live performances and events for about the price of a movie. Goldstar weekly emails offer discounts to an incredible array of events, the diversity of which make it unlikely that all of the Goldstar performance discounts will appeal to all Goldstar members. The fantastic deals Goldstar currently offers, including half price tickets to both trippy performance art spectacle Fuerzabruta and Disney on Broadway's sugary Mary Poppins, make the emails well worth perusing each week.

As a slightly longer-term solution, audience members who are particularly fond of the work of downtown theater companies and venues may find it helpful to visit these organizations' websites and sign up for their individual email lists. Many use these lists to offer their fans discounts or even free admission to previews and performances early in the run of a new production.

Signature Theatre, meanwhile, has taken a different approach to discounting tickets. Rather than include promotional offers on mailing lists or offer select discount ticket nights, Signature accepted funding from Time Warner to greatly reduce the cost of all tickets at every performance. What began in 2005 as a program through which, in honor of Signature's 15th anniversary, all tickets cost just $15, has today become the Signature Ticket Initiative, which pledges to keep all tickets to $20 through 2010. While naysayers express concern over the potential effects of corporate sponsorship on art, Signature proudly points to the program's successes. According to audience surveys, the Signature Ticket Initiative has resulted in consistently sold-out houses as well as 30% of audience members identifying as under 35 years old. The surveys also show that half of all audience members have not previously attended a production at Signature, indicating the discounted ticket programs, in addition to benefiting young theatergoers, benefit theaters as well.

At NYTW, Popowytsch concurs. She finds that, rather than detract from full-price ticket sales, the CheapTix program brings in a different audience. "It is helping us get new people through our doors," she says.

Myself and I

With its large cast, meandering plot, amalgamation of performance styles, and musical numbers accompanied by piano and guitar, Me, Kirk Wood Bromley’s new play at the SoHo Tank, often feels campy – summer campy. It’s a play that would work well at an outdoor ampetheater on a woodsy campus. Under the direction of Alec Duffy, Me is the kind of charmingly weird production that parents would come to see their children in because, well, they pretty much have to. Or do they? Parent-child relationships are at the heart of the production, which press materials call “a theatrical mediation on self-identity,” though it might be more apt (though just as awkward) to describe it as a meditation on the self-conception of conception. And birth. And childrearing. A lot of imaginative thought and diligent research has gone into this ambitious project – dramaturg Joe Pindelski’s program notes on theories of pregnancy and placenta provide particularly useful contextualization – but unfortunately, when rendered onstage, those ideas are seldom cogent.

The production opens to the thirteen-member cast entering the stage dressed as a sort of museum guide team, with small name tags pinned to each of their blazers. Whatever is printed on the nametags is too tiny to read, but that may be the point: in this moment, they all play Me. “The Earth is my Womb” they sing, as they enter the space carrying small black flashlights. The twin themes of environmentalism and gestation form two major components of the play: a series of poetic, post-modern pontifications on the self, and an adaptation of the Chinese Yangtze River Dolphin story, which tells of a mythological woman drowned by her father.

As the white dolphin Baije, Sarah Melinda Engelke brings confident enthusiasm and a clear sense of purpose to what could be a confusing role. Although, for purposes of the story, her identity is not always clear, Engelke lends Baije an otherworldly sparkle that alerts audiences to the character’s power. Her scenes with Drew Cortese and Brenda Withers, who deliver disciplined performances as the myth’s parental figures, are especially strong in the second act, when the characters – and, by extension, the audience – begin to understand their world. It would be helpful if such clarity came sooner.

The carefully calibrated depiction of myth contrasts wildly to the rest of the production, which is packed with unabashedly over-the-top performances (Bob Laine portrays the character “Dad” with the Southernest of Southern accents), cheeky meta-theatricality (cast members frequently offer one another acting suggestions) and dreamscape-like silliness (parents embodied as a giant sponge and hammerhead shark, costumed by the immensely imaginative Karen Flood). Yet, rather than work in tandem with the dolphin myth to create a cohesive whole, the larger-than-life flourishes and adornments of these scenes overwhelm the myth’s stylized simplicity.

Composer John Gideon’s musical numbers help weave together the disparate elements of the production. So do scenes in which the full company comes together as "Me" for poetic exchanges of semi-related dialogue. These scenes are entertaining depictions of the complex, often conflicting concerns of the self. “I wonder if that one guy responded to my email,” says one cast member; another wonders, “are my gestures of need sufficiently aloof?”

A plethora of puns undercut potential preciousness of these scenes, but in a production two and a half hours long, even the cleverest wordplay grows tiresome. Still, fans of Bromley’s work should make sure to see the production, not only for his signature punning, but for the insight that Me provides into the mind of the prolific playwright.

Simon and Juliette

Upon entering the York Theatre, located inside Saint Peter’s Church, theatergoers will find a space that resembles a photo gallery as much as a church or a theater. Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project features photographs shot by child survivors of the Rwandan genocide. The exhibit provides contextualization for Sonja Linden’s play, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda, a fictional account of one such child. Produced by the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, the production opens to a young woman, silhouetted against a background bathed in bright yellow light, loudly and clearly describing the night her family was killed. From there, the play moves to a London refugee center which Simon, her writing teacher, describes as “industrial” and to her bleak hostel bedroom. Both settings, as conceived by light designer Tony Mulanix and set designer Rohit Kapoor, are made up of grays. With the guidance of Simon, Juliette spends the duration of the play learning to speak truth to horror, and, as she does, color is gradually reintroduced to her world.

“It’s the personal story that will make people really understand what went on,” explains Simon, as he urges Juliette to rewrite her historical examination of the genocide as a personal account. By exploring large scale human atrocities through a two-character play, Sonja, who based the play in part on her relationship with a young woman she met while working with Rwandan refugees, is clearly attempting to heed the advice she has her character say. Yet, despite the fully realized, decidedly entertaining performances delivered by both actors, there is not enough in the text to move either character beyond convenient archetype.

The production purports to educate audiences about the Rwandan genocide, but those atrocities take a backseat to the budding friendship between Simon and Juliette, which forms the heart of the story. That Juliette has survived a unique horror has little bearing on the familiar tale of a flawed but kindly mentor guiding a scarred protégé to regain her own voice. With some textual tweaking, Juliette could become a survivor of gang violence or child abuse, and the essence of the story would go unchanged. That may be director Elise Stone’s point – that underneath, we’re really all just the same – but the lack of specificity feels inappropriate and misguided.

Susan Heyward nails the role of Juliette with a spunky sense of self and a bravely upturned chin, while Joseph J. Menino lends Simon a bemused smile and heartfelt confidence in his new friend. Much of the sweet humor created by their relationship is of the cultural misunderstanding variety common to immigrant experiences (he thinks how impressed she must be by his car; she notes that it’s not as nice as her father’s). As they’re relationship grows, Simon becomes conscious of his own ignorance and takes it upon himself to learn about the genocide his pupil survived. Still, his newfound awareness of key dates in Rwandan history hardly constitutes “a lot” as Juliette comments near the end of the play. The problem is emblematic of the entire production; in its attempts to be universal, the production sacrifices a level of detail that might have made it genuinely enlightening.

At best, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document… will serve as a surprisingly upbeat hour and a half that celebrates survival while inspiring audiences to educate themselves further on global human rights atrocities. With cute humor and likable characters, it’s hard to think of another play about genocide as pleasant to watch as this one.

While most of the play focuses on Simon helping Juliette to find the words for her testimony, she helps him with his writing as well. He finds her story so inspirational that the poems he writes about her, we are told, are the first masterful pieces of writing he’s completed in years. It appears that Sonja was likewise touched by her experiences working with refugee populations; I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document… is the playwright’s version of her character’s poems. If she had a teacher like Simon urging her toward specificity, her writing might improve as much her characters’ does.

Uncensored

“I burn a candle in the window till dawn,” wrote a young Anna Akhmatova in 1912, "there’s no one at all I miss.” At twenty-two, the woman who would go on to become Russia’s cherished twentieth century poet had published her first book. As the century progressed, and her early acclaimed love poems gave way to musings on national terror, she would come to miss a great deal. Akhmatova led a life ripe with dramatic tensions that Rebecca Schull examines in her new play On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhmatova, an homage to the poet. Romantically linked to several prominent national figures, Akhmatova found her love life deeply affected by Russia’s tumultuous politics. Lenin executed her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumiliov, in 1921. Her third husband, art historian Nikolai Punin, died in a labor camp. She also saw her son repeatedly arrested and sent to the camps despite her tireless efforts to have him released, and many of her close friends and members of her literary circle were executed, imprisoned, or exiled, as their writing, like hers, became censored material.

The greatest accomplishment of On Naked Soil lies in its spot-on dramatic realization of the tone of Akhmatova’s poetry itself. Political and personal hardships make for dynamic art, yet Akhmatova’s short verses, with their simple syntax and strict meter, resist indulgent melodrama. Her work is astonishing for what the poet Joseph Brodsky called its “note of controlled terror” and it is precisely that note which On Naked Soil strikes so remarkably.

The three-character play features Schull in the title role, as it moves back and forth between the late 1930’s and the late 1960’s, and depicts Akhmatova in dialogue with her friends Nadezhda Mendelstam (Lenore Loveman) and Lydia Chukovskaya (Sue Cremin), a young writer who chronicled their meetings. Early scenes between Anna and Lydia come off a bit like convenient devices through which to relate the life story of the great poet; she has only to respond to the questions of her congenial protégé.

Later, these early exchanges are mimicked when Lydia comes to the apartment to memorize verse in secret as Anna relates bland stories of her childhood, lest anyone listen and become suspicious. The tense scene articulates the danger of merely writing down controversial words – and the power of Akmatova’s poetry – with a whisper rather than a scream. What sets Anna and Lydia’s exchanges apart from more formulaic writing about mentor relationships in times of crisis is how they allow audiences to become acquainted with Akhmatova: neither a proud prima donna nor humbled wise woman. In response to Lydia’s longing for a way to cope with a missing husband and endangered child, she tells her: “It’s very simple. I have no advice for you.” They drink a lot of tea and talk about the past. That’s in keeping with the spirit of Akhmatova’s poems, which favor description over prescription, and under the direction of Susan Einhorn, even exposition is fraught with a sense of imminent danger.

Given that, as a writer, Akhmatova rejected the symbolist movement, it’s appropriate that a play about her life depicts her through realism. Even when the characters speak in Akhmatova’s verse, they do so as realistically drawn characters reciting beautifully memorized poems, not characters using language as a form of dislocation. That contrasts to Schull’s performative recordings of Akmatova’s poetry that sometimes play over scene transitions; escape from the grey world of the play comes through its use of mixed media. Aaron Rhyne’s video projections include both photographic images of the characters’ real-life counterparts as wells as surreal footage of their memories. Portions of Akmatova’s texts are projected both over video images and directly onto the enormous storm clouds that form the backdrop of Ursula Belden’s scenic design.

At best, the projections and the play work in tandem to create a sense of both historical import and artistic truth, as in a rare moment of Anna alone onstage, collapsing into choked sobs. As she weeps, her writing is projected against the back wall; her private hysteria never overwhelms the steadfast nature of her writing. Rather than dramatize the personal turmoil that fueled the restrained power of her poetry, On Naked Soil uses mixed media to examine the fundamental tensions between the writer’s life and work.

Distilling a famous poet’s personal history and her poems, along with the course of 20th century Russian history, into a three character play is no small undertaking, and at times On Naked Soil is difficult to follow. Audiences would do well to look over the helpful program notes, which include a chronology of the play’s events. Yet, both newcomers to Akhmatova and longtime fans will likely come away from the production inspired by its source material – and eager to become more familiar with it.

Potty Talk

If all performance toys with the boundaries of public and private space, Ladies & Gents, currently playing at (yes) the public bathrooms by the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, does so with a unique impudence. It’s site specific theater at its cheekiest. Publicity materials bill the Irish play, an Edinburgh Fringe Festival hit, as a “live noir thriller” and indeed, moments of the production are truly frightening. It’s hard to imagine the play’s chills sweeping over its audiences were they seated in a cozy proscenium or black box. In a lesser production, the public-bathrooms-as-theatrical-stage concept would be a cute gimmick. In Ladies & Gents , written and directed by Paul Walker, it is crucial to the performance.

Ladies & Gents is a production ripe with ambiguities. The location feels at once dirty and dank (the cavernous public toilets are dimly lit by Sinead McKenna’s effectively earie light design) yet grandiosely gorgeous (the Bethesda Fountain, not to mention Central Park, rivals any Broadway house in terms of presentational beauty). A period piece (it’s based on a 1957 Dublin tabloid scandal), the play is fortuitously prescient (the scandal centers on tawdry politicians caught with prostitutes). Such dichotomies smoothly support the plot, which deals with double standards of class and gender in a society whose sharp social stratification leads to twin dangers of repressed desire and remorseless fury.

The disciplined ensemble masters naturalism necessary for a thriller that places actors literally a breath away from the audience. At the same time, they never sacrifice an otherworldliness appropriate both to the period of the piece and to the noir genre. The actors’ success is no small feat: the production requires them to run each scene six times over the course of a single evening.

Ladies & Gents embraces variables from the first moments of the production, when audience members are handed colored slips of paper. Black paper indicates beginning the performance in the men’s room; white paper the ladies’ room. After approximately twenty minutes, each scene concludes and audiences switch bathrooms in order to see the other scene. Both of the scenes raise questions which the subsequent scene answers. Still, the order in which audiences view the scenes inherently affects their experience of the production, going so far as to potentially alter how scary the thriller really is.

But the variables welcomed by the performance experiment don’t end with running order. To name a few: how does the seven o’clock performance, with the sun not yet set, differ from the nine o’clock, when the park is empty? How would rain affect the production? Snow? How might theatre-goers whose groups are split by the colored cards perceive the play differently than couples watching the play together? Is a men’s room filled predominantly with women different from a group made up of mostly men?

Although these issues will likely be explored many times over the course of the play’s two-week run, the performance space is small: only the actors will learn the answers first-hand. They will have earned the knowledge. Everyone else will have to be satisfied by a single performance. When that performance is a sharp, polished play staged in public bathroom, it’s hard not to be.

Boom Town

From cowboy movies of the Wild West to space age science fiction novels, new frontiers have long provided effective backdrops for dramatic storytelling. Spanning the years 1982 to 1992, Jonathan Wallace's new play shapeshifter, directed by Glory Sims Bowen, sets a family drama against the frontier of computer software development. The dotcom boom, which spawned enormous change in everything from corporate culture to sense of community to conceptions of cool, ought to serve as an engagingly fraught environment in which to contemplate adaptation. Yet Wallace's text never succeeds in mining the implications of the bourgeoning field for all they are worth. Early in the production, one gets the feeling that were the Malloys a family of cabinetmakers or chemists, shapeshifter would be no more or less effective.

What might have been a fascinating study in the human metaphors implicit in software design instead becomes merely a standard family drama: a story of how a blandly dysfunctional childhood (dad died; mom went nuts) haunts the siblings throughout their adult lives. The Malloys are textbook cases of sibling pecking order. Liam (Shane Jerome), the eldest sibling, brims with business acumen and bitter entitlement while Deirdre (Shelley Virginia), the baby of the family, is a creative thinker and resolutely antiestablishment. Awkward middle child Aidan (V. Orion Delwaterman) finds himself torn between the two.

Happily, the production is remarkably well cast. As the grown siblings, Jerome, Virginia and Delwaterman convey subtle familial characteristics underneath each character's nicely developed idiosynchracies. Interestingly, the change the Malloys' experience over the years is most apparent as reflected in the women who love them. Deirdre's girlfriend Victoria (Yvonne Roen) and Liam's girlfriend Darcy (Jennifer Boehm) initially appear as two-dimensional comic clichés (an angry dyke and a ditzy actress, respectivly). Both Roen and Boehm demonstrate considerable skill in transforming their roles into genuinely compelling characters.

Set on a beach in Mantauk, the play requires a feeling of outdoorsy openness. For a play staged in the intimate TBG Arts Center Studio Theatre, that presents a challenge which scenic designer Stephanie Tucci meets admirably: the entire space is painted in seascape blues. Ryan Metzler's light design enhances the feeling of openess. Costumes, designed by David Thompson, help indicate both passage of time and character quirks. That Liam's socks continually match his preppy shirts is a particularly inspired touch.

The play is at its best during the dramatic outbursts and emotional meltdowns that serve as centerpieces to each of the play’s three acts. Bowen adeptly finds the precise comedy that keeps the scenes from dissolving into full-blown melodrama without sacrificing their intensity or dramatic import. The implication that this is a family only truly at home when at furious odds with itself, however, does not make up for the uneven hesitancy of the scenes that surround the explosions.

Frustratingly, the script often requires that multiple characters remain present even amidst intensely personal conflict between just two of them. Though that impropriety is occasionally acknowledged (“you have a wonderful sense of time and place,” scoffs Liam to Darcy at the end of Act II), Wallace ought to have tried simply granting his characters exits. Instead, the production has long periods in which actors are forced to stare politely into space on a stage far too intimate for their passivity to feel plausible.

Anyone interested in a new play’s depiction of American family drama should find in shapeshifter a pleasant evening at the theater. Those seeking a meditation on the implications of dotcom culture will have to keep waiting.

After the Storm

If crisis lends itself well to drama, it’s not hard to imagine the variety of plays that might come out of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, from an epic a la Angels in America, for example, that would follow a diverse group of individuals as they respond to the crisis, to a Titanic-style melodrama, perhaps, about a plucky Louisiana debutante and her tragic gang-leader lover. But just two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, with much of the devastated areas still in states of deep disrepair, we’re not yet ready for a sweeping epic. The disaster itself is still too close, the extent of its overreaching effects still too unknown. That uncertainty does not mean, of course, that contemporary playwrights can’t or shouldn’t create new works dealing with the horrors of the hurricane. Playwright Beau Willimon takes a smart approach to the task in his short new drama Lower Ninth, currently playing at the Flea Theater, by maintaining an extremely tight focus on three characters immediately following the storm.

Even the physical landscape of the play is small: Lower Ninth opens with Malcolm (James McDaniel) and E-Z (Gaius Charles) trapped on a rooftop, praying over a body wrapped in garbage bags, and awaiting rescue. Their shingled roof, by set designer Donyale Werle, provides enough levels to create interesting stage pictures without undermining the feeling of entrapment so fundamental to the piece.

E-Z and Malcolm wait out the heat on the roof, stranded with a body and a Bible, and spend much of the play contemplating each. They run through a series of expected tropes (“I’m happy you found God. But I wanna know when God is gonna find us”) that, while not exactly original or enlightening, carry the characters along on their quests for literal and spiritual salvation that make up the backbone of the play.

The actors, all accomplished film and television stars, fit right at home within the play’s focused scope, crafting natural characters with nuanced fears and desperations. Their ease with the material – and one another – allows for the welcome humor and surprising lightness that pervade much of the piece. McDaniel’s Malcolm evokes kind authority as a drug addict turned patriarch to Charles’ E-Z, a matter-of-fact teenager trying hard to act tough, though Charles never quite reaches the levels of anger that E-Z supposedly exudes. In his brief scene as Lowboy, Gbenga Akinnagbe imbues his character with a groundedness that appropriately resists the scene’s potential sentimentality.

Save for a few choice moments, director Daniel Goldstein brings out playfulness in the text. In doing so, he both isolates the play’s scenes of true horror and permits the characters to come across as endearingly sympathetic. In a drama like Lower Ninth, with a focus on an intimate group of characters literally struggling for survival, it’s important that we want, as an audience, to root for them. We do.

Some of the play’s most poignant moments occur not during the scenes themselves but in the interludes between them. Rather than traditional fades to black to distinguish between scenes, Lower Ninth scenes are divided by the actors arranging themselves into new positions beneath dimmed lights, underscored by a single trumpet. The music, composed by Aaron Meicht, lends the play an appropriate Creole feel while making what would otherwise be numerous transitions into their own complete moments. Goldstein does not shy away from holding such moments longer than might seem absolutely necessary, and the results are arrestingly evocative of the endless waiting the characters face. They have no relief from it, and the transitions keep the audience from experiencing that release either.

Audiences, of course, will be able to escape the world once the play ends. It might not leave them with much to talk about, but it will provide them likable characters to watch in an impossibly difficult situation for the brief seventy minutes of the play’s duration. What the future holds for the victims of the storm is, as for their real life counterparts, uncertain.

I Am Woman, Hear Me Rap

“What are you, a feminazi?” Florida comedian Suzanne Willet’s answer, in the form of a solo-performance piece, is a resounding yes. Dressed in black, wielding a riding crop, and speaking in a cartoonish German accent, the title character of The Feminazi is a personification of the misogynist term. It’s a neat tactic of reclamation, if not always a successfully comedic one.

At the Players Theater in the Village through May fourth, The Feminazi flanks its title character with three women, all portrayed by Willet: Fran (“the older woman”), Sarah ("the middle class white female”), and the Virgin Mary(“a Jewish mother”). Each of the characters struggles with a unique feminist issue: maintaining cultural visibility (Fran), balancing family and career (Sarah), questioning how to best raise a child (Virgin Mary). In keeping with the conventions of solo performance, each character lives in a different area of the stage, with shifts in lighting, designed by Janna Mattioli, separating the scenes.

Of the four characters, only the Virgin Mary addresses the audience in direct-confessional style, alternating between motherly boastfulness over her son’s successes and anxious concern over his struggles. Willet imbues the Virgin’s scenes with large doses of sweetly amusing anachronism that grow tiresome over the duration of the performance.

In contrast to the Virgin Mary’s direct address, Sarah and Fran’s scenes are consciously performative musical acts. Sarah’s scenes take place at a series of singer-songwriter open mic nights that span her college days through her arrival at middle age; Fran’ scenes are set at a rally in Florida, where she endeavors to bring visibility to the plight of older women in America through motivational speeches and rap music. Filled with impassioned rage, Fran serves as an interesting counterpoint to Sarah, whose tentative complaints (“I'm a middle class white female/ I smile when I hear crap”) form the heart of her music.

With both women, Willet has given herself a challenge: characters who love to sing their hearts out, despite the fact that the size of their hearts is considerably greater than breadth of their musical abilities. It’s clear that Willet loves these characters, and even at their goofiest – or especially then – treats them with the utmost respect. She belts out Fran’s fiery bad rhymes (“that Coldwater Creek/ Prints that make you freak/ And hey, LL Bean/ Drop the aquamarine”) with abandon. At best, the absurdity of their music, and the painstaking intensity with which they perform it, is itself entertaining. One imagines these are women with YouTube followings.

Of course, YouTube clips last only a few minutes. Even with Sarah’s maturing into motherhood and Fran’s struggles to persevere in the face of adversity, their stories, as told through their music, rarely feel worthy of full-length performance. Nor, unfortunately, does the Feminazi herself, as she goes about her mission instructing the audience in the disenfranchised state of women and purports to suss out and condemn “sexist pigs.”

Along the way, the Feminazi treats audiences to a humorously angry deconstruction of Snow White (“Even if you are small, if you are a white male, you will still be the power structure of the story!”) and a tamely phallic consumption of a banana: techniques as tired, oversimplified and silly as the notion of a feminazi itself.

At just eighty minutes, the production feels long: each of the characters would benefit from more concise scenes. Still, moments of the production are bound to delight. All of the women Willet portrays possess an endearing earnestness and a goofy form of self-expression that make them hard not to like.

Audiences will be particularly engaged in the Feminazi’s scenes, which utilize a lot of audience interaction. Yet ultimately her audience affects her more deeply than she affects it: by the end of the performance, the Feminazi is openly flirting with a male audience member. That abrupt shift feels artificial and unneeded. Instead, it would be a welcome change if Willet allowed the Feminazi to contemplate the space that exists between the wild extremes of man-hating fury and school-girlish crushes: to stop talking about feminazis and start talking about feminism.

Stripped

Promoting her latest pop conservative book, Ann Coulter asserted that children of single mothers grow up to be "strippers, rapists and murderers.” The suspect validity of that statement aside, her conflation of rape and murder (crimes!) with stripping (not a crime!) went unremarked upon during her interview on Hannity & Colmes last month. Fittingly, That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, the latest from provocative playwright Sheila Callaghan, addresses such incongruities by featuring heroines who are strippers turned murder-rapists. A loopy meditation on rape culture, That Pretty Pretty is sometimes shrewd and sometimes silly. The play makes its points elliptically rather than directly and has a lot of fun with its own conceit: a screenwriter works through his own gendered emotional baggage while harboring under the delusion that he is creating a feminist screenplay. It’s a sneaky device that allows the play’s loosely connected scenes to cover a wide array of styles, excuses textual inconsistencies, and permits plot lines to wholly change course at whim. The mutability of the play’s world will frustrate audience members eager to know the rules from the get-go; better to sit back and enjoy its horrific humor while allowing the play to explain itself.

Callaghan is an inventive playwright most at home in goofy scenes that build toward incisive political statements. In the hands of director Kip Fagan, who understands exactly what Callaghan is getting at, the misogynist fantasy that women (or certain types of women) are criminally sexy and vicious beyond redemption is broad comedy. The production also takes satirical aim at the notion that male artists who perceive themselves as sensitive have a free pass at writing female (and male) characters however they please.

The versatile cast shifts with boundless energy between genres that range from high comedy to kooky melodrama to torture porn and back again. Connecting the diverse styles is the fact that they are all performed in virtual quotation marks, with the threads of every scene threatening to unravel at any moment. That they don't is a credit to Fagen, who trusts Callaghan's script enough that, without losing control of the production, he pushes each scene to its edges of cohesion. Doing so underscores all the fun with an effective sense of unease. It's as quietly unsettling as the play's subject matter is blatantly upsetting.

In addition to its impressively broad, boldly stylized sequences, That Pretty Pretty contains moments of realism. The realistic scenes, which feature screenwriter Owen and his buddy Rodney, help separate the real world (set primarily in a hotel room) with the scenes that exist within Owen's screenplay (set in a hotel room, a posh restaurant, a mud wrestling pit, and a wartime hospital, among other locations) in its various stages of development. That concept is enhanced by Narelle Sission's set design, which depicts a fully rendered, identifiably generic hotel room. Various set pieces (a fancy chandelier, a tarp) drop in and out of that generic space to suggest the play's more outlandish settings.

Inside the hotel room, the Owen/Rodney scenes get the narrative job done, but offer little in the way of dramatic insight or fresh perspectives of gender and power. Callaghan is more in her element in the compellingly outrageous segments that comprise the play's most indelible scenes. Part of the pleasure of the play comes from the sacrilege of seeing vile subject matter treated as light farce, yet there are no cheap laughs in That Pretty Pretty and little is included for shock value alone. Rather than confrontationally attack audiences, the production invites audience members to delight in its squirm-inducing irreverence. The ability to wildly push boundaries without sacrificing its warmth make That Pretty Pretty a welcome piece of powerful theater.

Crimes of the Tart

Anyone who complains that downtown theatre consists mainly of intimate straight plays in black box theatres with minimal sets would do well to check out The Jack of Tarts: A Bittersweet Musical. With its sixteen member production team, seventeen musical numbers, eighteen cast members, a live orchestra and countless glittery pastries, the campy extravaganza is anything but small-scale. Every aspect of the performance, from its design scheme to its performance style, is highly exaggerated, yet playwrights Chris Tanner and Eric Wallach, who also directs, keep the plotlines of their adult-themed fairy tale relatively simple. The kingdom of Tartannia is trapped in the grips of a despotic queen (Lance Cruce) who has imprisoned her son Jack (Tanner) in a dungeon where he is forced to bake tarts that drive the commoners mad - until his complicity is threatened by two wronged heroines: Agnes (Michael Lynch) who longs for vengeance and Annabel Lee (Julie Atlas Muz) who longs for Jack.

Throw in some scrappily insane peasants, royal guards with a penchant for S&M, a couple of campy cohorts of the queen, and references ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Edgar Allan Poe, and the plot is decorated if not exactly thickened. No matter: thin plot points are waved off with a wink and a shrug (“you would think these two would have been stopped before they could hatch a plan” deadpans an excellent Richard Spore as narrator Big Daddy, “…I still don’t know how that happened”).

Still, there is a fine line between campy self-mockery and unpolished performance, and The Jack of Tarts walks both sides of it. Comprised largely of veteran Village drag queens and recent college graduates, the cast clearly has a lot of fun but their performances are often hesitant. While they form an impressively cohesive ensemble, surprisingly few cast members seize what could be standout moments appropriate to a production so consciously performative, and as a result the pace drags.

The musical numbers feel well-rehearsed, yet the music is not particularly memorable and the lyrics are at times difficult to understand. Choreography, by Wallach, gets the job done but doesn’t go much beyond that. An exception is Annabel’s Arrival choreographed and performed by Muz. The scene is a particularly lovely moment of lightness enhanced by design elements, which are simple yet enormous. At its best moments, all aspects of the production embody those qualities and it would be great if there were more of them.

Throughout the production, the design scheme is instrumental in evoking the world of Tartannia. Garry Haye’s impressive set looms large in the small theatre. Zsamira Sol Ronquillo’s wig and makeup design adds far more than a flourish to Becky Hubbert’s fun costumes. Perhaps most importantly, the titular tarts are spectacular. Given that they make the characters completely nuts, it's important that they look great. They do.

From the opening of the play, every inch of La MaMa’s first floor theatre is packed with style and flavor. Literally: upon entering the space, audiences find cast members serving pastries. The extension of the performance into the audience, which continues periodically throughout the production, is limited enough to be noninvasive while successfully making the entire performance space into the play’s world. Such a warm invitation to join in the fun helps keep the audience patient during the performance's weaker moments.

At its best, The Jack of Tarts is an irreverent romp that celebrates the ridiculous while asking heartfelt questions about irresponsible leadership and those who follow it. The play's final scene, when those questions become most prescient, is among the finest of the production. It’s worth the wait.

Playing Roles While Others Eat Them

Two characters sitting across a café table: anyone who has ever attended a short play festival or worked on partner scenes in an acting class is probably familiar with the format. Etiquette, by Anton Hampton and Silvia Mercuriali of the international Rotozaza company, is undeniably a café play. A ticket to the production requires not watching the performance, however, but enacting it. Of the many diverse offerings in The Public’s Under the Radar Festival, Etiquette perhaps most literally embodies the Festival’s name. Staged at a single table in the East Village’s bustling Veselka Café, Etiquette takes place under the radar of most of Veselka’s patrons. And though the table reserved for the production is next to a window, there is little to alert passersby to the fact that those sitting at it are engaged in anything other than typical café conversation.

A closer inspection would breed suspicion: both patrons wear headphones (separate instructions inform each participant as to what to say and do) and instead of food, the table is lined with a number of unusual miniature objects. If most café plays are staged with bare bones sets and adhere to realism, Etiquette reverses the convention. Set in a live café, the instructions that participants receive at times force them to forgo realism entirely.

Abandoning realism while in a “real” environment enhances the playfulness of the experiment. It also raises serious questions about what constitutes performance, both onstage and in daily life. How formalized need a performance be in order for it to be considered theatre?

That the characters which the production asks participants to play are specific and gendered, with exact lines and precise gestures, provides the project many of its formal elements. But if those around the performance are unaware that it is taking place, then the participants perform their roles solely for one another. Within the play, however, the characters themselves appear to perform for each other as well. In that respect alone, the project engages multiple levels of performativity – and requires participants to engage in them as well.

If everyone around the performance is indeed unaware of it – and that’s a significant if – it certainly does not mean that the participants are unaware of the public sphere of their performance. Staging the play in a setting not traditionally theatrical yet explicitly public is a key aspect of elevating the experiment to a level of theatricality, as opposed to a game of childlike make believe or simple role playing. To what extent does the presence of others affect an intimate moment?

A café is ideally suited to such an experiment in that it provides a unique balance of public and private space. The presence of uninitiated strangers is intimidating and can make participants feel self-conscious. At the same time, the strangers’ close proximity yet lack of attention has the potential to be deeply liberating, even thrilling, for the participants.

Etiquette is influenced by Godard’s 1962 film Vivre sa vie, and Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House, both groundbreaking works that examine women’s struggles for agency, and familiarity with them will enhance participants’ experience of Etiquette. Yet even participants without knowledge of the source material will find aspects of the play that resonate with them. Anyone who has ever sat across from a stranger in a café – or who has sat in a café and people-watched – will recognize the situation enough to feel comfortable in it.

The only absolutely essential quality for participants to bring to the piece is a willingness to spend half an hour engaged in a quirky performance experiment. For those who are game, the project will be a delightfully unique, entertaining exercise in communication. After half an hour of asking participants to blindly follow instructions and providing them with words to say, Etiquette will leave them with a lot to talk about.

Ham and Cheese and Storytelling

Upon entering the performance space for No Dice, a former indoor playground in Tribeca, audience members have to make a choice: ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly? This is just the first of several questions posed by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s exuberant new production. With its emphasis on engaging audiences through a close examination of everyday life, the experimental company is a good match for Soho Rep, which aims to produce unconventional theater that embraces performer/audience relationships. No Dice, with an original development process and a performance style at once vivacious and intimate, succeeds on both accounts.

Nearly everything about No Dice is ambitiously innovative, beginning with its script: there isn’t one. Or, rather, there is no written script from which the actors work. Instead, the text of the four-hour play comes from over a hundred hours of recorded phone conversations conducted with family and friends of creators Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, directors of both Nature Theater of Oklahoma and No Dice. Rather than memorizing transcriptions, the actors listen to the conversations, which loosely focus on livelihood, life aspirations, and the nature of storytelling, on headphones.

That technique calls to mind the work of playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith, who creates texts from interviews and trains herself to recreate her subjects’ speech by listening to their recordings. But with ridiculously goofy accents and overemphasized intonation, Anne Gridley, Robert M. Johnson, and Zachary Oberzan are not listening to their source material in an attempt at realism.

Likewise, whereas Smith edits her work in an attempt to examine dramatic revelations about her subjects’ lives, the conversation selections depicted in No Dice reveal a collection of people mired in the mundane. Therein lies a central enigma of the play: within the drawn-out caricatures, the daily lives of the people who inspired them become startlingly evident.

No Dice’s ensemble of dedicated actors appears to have a boundless store of comedic energy. The highly stylized nature of their performance extends into their movement, which involves seemingly random sequences of incongruous gestures, as well as their simple yet outlandish costumes. From wigs to facial hair to funny hats, a spirit of play pervades nearly every aspect of the piece.

Among the few components of the production not infused with a sense of playfulness are the words themselves. From a discussion of how many office breaks cubicle dwellers are permitted to chats about indulgence in alcohol, the ordinary concerns articulated by the performers contrast with their exaggerated performance style and raises interesting questions about what is – and isn’t – required in order to make entertainment out of the everyday.

Designer Peter Nigrini’s set, which features rich green curtains hung over ionic columns and adorned with gold comedy and tragedy masks, contrasts with the space’s florescent lights and padded walls, providing a nice frame for the production’s investigation of theatricality. A found space, as opposed to a conventional theater, is an important component of the play, though there is little about this particular space that feels organic or inextricable from the production.

For the majority of the performance, audience and actors are in the same light, an effect that creates an intimate atmosphere, not an intimidating one, largely because of the warmth of the performers. In addition to the three main actors, Thomas Hummel and Kristen Worrall appear onstage off and on throughout the production, sometimes playing music and mostly staying silent. Their presence is essential to the ambience of the play. Hummel’s perpetually shocked expression and Worrall’s pinched concern make the actors appear less alone within the world of their performance while making that world more accessible to the audience.

The intimacy of the production is further enhanced by Liska and Copper, who do everything from appearing briefly onstage to making sandwiches to introducing the production. Audiences should note that when Liska jokes in the curtain speech that they’ve saved the best parts for the second act, he isn’t really kidding. Not that the first act is lacking. On the contrary, the first act feels like a complete play in and of itself, and for a less ambitious company, it would be.

At nearly four hours, No Dice is a demanding production. It helps that the second act utilizes a lot of repetition, guiding audiences through the material while leaving ample room for contemplation. Then, just when the repetition begins to grow old, everything changes. The final moments of the production, in addition to granting audience members welcome insight into the creation of the piece, are transcendently joyous.

Were it shorter, funny costumes and exaggerated diction would make No Dice a charmingly off-kilter comedy. Creating such a lengthy production forces audiences to either engage more deeply with the material or check out completely. Audiences interested in the former will find themselves richly rewarded.

Christmas Special

What is it about the holidays that lends so easily to excess? With marathons of Christmas movies on television and Christmas music dominating radio stations, it is only fitting that experimental theater have its own version of a holiday-themed marathon. The Brick Theater, with a history of producing innovative festivals, makes a fitting home for such a production. Anyone looking for a crash introduction to talented writers and directors of contemporary downtown theater would do well to check out The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee: Second Coming. The excess of the cheekily-titled marathon, which features twelve one-acts divided into two programs (the “MARYS” and the “JOSEPHS”, as when The Brick produced a similar program in 2005) comes from an amalgamation of different styles and themes. In a shift away from the material excesses that often accompany the holidays, the emphasis of these barebones plays is squarely on the texts; most design elements go uncredited in the program.

When the plays do use strong design choices, it is usually to good effect, as in Robert Saietta’s Uncomplicated, the first play of the JOSEPH program (9pm Thursdays and Saturdays, 7pm Fridays), which takes place in the home of Wendy, whose living room is as full of clutter as her life is of complication. Under the tight direction of Buddy Peoples, Uncomplicated opens to Wendy’s ex-boyfriend Peter (Peter Lettre) sneaking in to deliver her a Christmas present. Her new girlfriend Tink calls him “a pedantic windbag,” a description Lettre takes to heart in his portrayal of Peter, while also lending him a drunken desperation that makes clear what Wendy may have once seen in him. Even Tink, played with confident pluck by Jessica Hedrick, senses that there is more to him than his jealous stalker tendencies. At the center point of the triangle, Alana Jackler successfully creates a character not frequently seen in popular media: a smart woman who is both likable and stable while leaving open the possibility that she struggles with her sexuality.

From there, the JOSEPH program makes a leap into absurdism that continues – and develops – over the course of the evening. The whimsy begins with Mack Schloff’s The Revellers, a charmingly quirky riff on how a couple’s energy and heat affects its compatibility. Key (Brick Associate Artistic Director Jeff Lewonczyk, who also directs) suspects his girlfriend Con (Brick Associate Artistic Director Hope Cartelli) of harboring a secret crush on Ed, a fellow guest at their holiday party. She admits that he's right: she keeps imagining their names together at the top of an envelope.

The Revellers continues in brief sections over the course of the program that moves quickly enough to keep the gimmick from growing stale while also creating the rhythms of the endless string of holiday parties that the characters attend: “It’s more than just a circuit,” complains Key of the Christmas party rounds, “It’s practically a grid!” When the story of Key and Con concludes, it does so with the best placed light cue of the marathon.

Eric Bland’s the aptly titled Mother Mary Come to Me, the third play of the program, poses unspoken questions concerning the importance of Mary’s virginity. Directed by Scott Eckert, the mixed-media piece provides welcome variation in the marathon’s performance style. A newly widowed father to Baby Jesus, Joseph’s anachronistic courtship of Mary – he meets her jogging in Prospect Park – is projected onscreen, while their real-life counterparts wait onstage, effectively dwarfed by their larger than life images.

The sketch-comedy style of the video, which is captioned with Mary’s self-affirming narration, contrasts with the characters' quiet onstage presence. With Michael Cera-esque awkwardness, Brian Barrett’s Joseph makes uncomfortable attempts at foreplay and talks about “real sex” while Siobhan Doherty’s clear-eyed Mary worries about Jesus, asleep in the next room.

The following one-act, And the Spirit of Christmas Passed, takes contemporary controversial issues of global warming and military families of perpetually absent servicemen, and draws them out to extremes. Set in a climate-changed future on Christmas Eve, the play features a talented cast (Nancy Lee Russell, Rufus L. Tureem, and Meghan V, Tusing) that commits admirably to bizarre circumstances not fully elucidated by David Barth’s direction of Jakob Holder’s ambling script.

The following play is among the more imaginatively absurd of the marathon. Trayf, written by Matthew Freeman and directed by Kyle Ancowitz, features what perhaps no play has before: a drunken, depressed rabbi relaying the story of Hanukah to a gigantic lobster bent on a conversion to Judaism. The incessantly cheery lobster (Mathew Trumbull) seated beside a disgruntled, disheveled rabbi (David DelGrosso) makes for an entertaining premise that wears thin by the time lobster Jim lights the Hanukah menorah and ends the play.

The JOSEPH program concludes with the marathon’s most stylized play. Performed largely in song, Sincerely, Raven Harte, by Emily Conbere with music by Michael Sendrow, depicts a man with a troubled family life attempting to write a Christmas newsletter. A chorus of masked, Christmas sweater-clad women (Bekah Coulter, Nicole Stefonek, and Lisa Zapol) create a rich balance of comedic and creepy which, under the direction of Dominic D’Andrea, pervades much of the piece. The effect is at once disturbing and uplifting, an impressive achievement and a refreshingly complex note on which to end the JOSEPH plays.

The MARY program (7pm Thursdays and Saturdays, 9pm Fridays), with more diverse styles of performance, doesn’t build toward a climactic absurdist point as do the JOSEPH plays, rather, the MARY evening provides a smattering of performance styles on a variety of holiday themes. On opening night, a stalled MTA train prevented the presentation of one of the plays (Carolyn Raship’s A Bender Family Christmas, directed by Daniel McKleinfeld), and likely threw off the balance of the evening; it’s clear that curators Lewonczyk and Michael Gardner, Artistic Director of the Brick, have put a lot of thought into the running order of the plays.

The MARY plays open with Jason Craig’s The Baby Jesus Conversation, which Gardner directs. Two young men in jeans, sneakers and sweaters (Tom Lipinsky and Randall Middleton) spend the short play earnestly exchanging their wacky ideas and suspect reminisces about the nature of the Christ child. The strange, energetic chat from otherwise normal-seeming young men sets an appropriate tone for the evening.

Boyish enthusiasm continues in Qui Nguyen Action Jesus, which features apostles Judas and Peter (Gregg Mozgala and Chris Smith) plotting a second demise of Jesus (a cartwheeling Jason Liebman). With pop-cultural references ranging from Superman to the Wizard of Oz, Action Jesus is the Christ story as influenced by tough guy action flicks. Such a premise has the potential to come across as awkward sketch comedy, but director Michael Lew understands exactly what Nguyen is getting at, and expertly paces the production, eliciting performances from the actors that are both vengeful and goofy.

From there, the program takes a softer turn with Jason Grote’s A Christmas Carol, directed by Shannon Sindelar. The solo performance piece has a senile Scrooge recount the events from the evening of Dickens’ story, expertly delivered with subtle desperation and longing by Ralph Pochoda. The production does more than use a narrator suffering from dementia to prompt audiences to question the validity of the Christmas classic. The play narrows the focus of A Christmas Carol in order to pose quiet, pointed questions about the story’s use of capitalism. It’s a welcome thought piece amidst the high energy, zany program.

A Christmas Carol is followed by Marc Spitz’s Marshmallow World, which brings a literal return to the craziness. Set in a support group, the play features a collection of colorful oddballs all suffering from “sonic” addiction. Victor (Brick Technical Director Ian Hill, who also directs, in addition to serving as marathon light designer and tech director) is among the group’s more senior members and seems strangely sweet given his criminal record, substance abuse, and obsession with NPR’s Terry Gross. Meanwhile, Angel (Alyssa Simon) yearns for a better sense of aesthetics as she tries to move beyond her love of bad music at intimate moments, while Ray (Aaron Baker) fears a particular infamous string of notes. All three deliver comedic performances that embrace their characters’ quirks while resisting the urge to play them as simply insane.

From the beginning, however, audience attention is drawn to Boris (Jason Liebman), who sits alone in a corner hiding in a black hoodie and looking as though he wants to disappear. Fortunately, he instead reveals why he has come: he’s a religious Jew obsessed with Christmas music. As Boris, Liebman is at once deeply distraught and charmingly amusing. Elsewhere in the program, Liebman is engaging as anachronistic Biblical thugs, and it’s fun to see him succeed here at something different.

The MARY program closes with Eric Sanders’ Hollow Hallow, a dark play set on a U.S. military base in Iraq on Christmas Eve. Directed by Jake Witlen, Hollow Hallow utilizes a neat bit of audience interaction that, as this reviewer can personally testify, raises interesting questions about boundaries, power, and empathy. Yet the American soldiers (Alec Beard, Gavin Star Kendall, and Joyce Miller) fail to exude the disciplined authority that one might expect of them. They deliver committed performances that make their characters seem more like cruel kids stabbing at power than like trained members of the U.S. military. That may be part of the point, but the production would be stronger if it showed how the characters’ military identities relate to their acts of unbridled fury.

After moments of terror, Hollow Hallow ends on a startlingly warm note that effectively emphasizes the discontinuities of celebrating a cheerful holiday season during wartime. It’s a surprising ending to both the play and the program as whole and it works. With its twelve different plays, such juxtapositions are part of the delight of The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee. Anyone seeking an unconventional take on the holiday marathon will not be disappointed.

Prancing and Pawing

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. Or do you? Jeff Goode’s comedy The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, staged by the Dysfunctional Theatre Company, takes audiences to would-be familiar North Pole territory and twists the terrain: Santa Claus is a pervert. Though best known for original work, the Dysfunctional Theatre Company has produced The Eight: Reindeer Monologues each holiday season since 2005. With its playful characters and simple structure –- a series of tell-all style monologues from the reindeer who pull Santa’s sleigh -– the The Eight: Reindeer Monologues makes a smart annual Christmas special for a company dedicated to irreverent ensemble material.

The cozy North Pole dive bar where the play is set enhances the production’s sense of festive seediness. The North Hole (designed by Jason Unfried, who appears on stage as a disturbingly funny Donner) features a cluster of tables, a fully stocked bar, and, in keeping with the holiday spirit, bits and pieces of clever Christmas décor. An erect blow up palm tree strung with lights is a particularly inspired touch.

Over the course of the play, each reindeer seizes an opportunity to head to the front of the bar in order to fix a drink and reveal to the audience his or her unique perspective on the crises at hand: Vixen has accused Santa Claus of sexually assaulting her. Will the scandal bring about the downfall of Santa Claus, and, by extension, the end of Christmas itself? More importantly, should it? Among the members of Santa’s prestigious sleigh team, vocal and opinionated employees who have a lot at stake, it all depends on whom you ask.

Dasher (Robert Brown, who also directs) is a Hawaiian shirted, baseball-capped yes-man proud to lead Santa’s team. As Dasher, Brown displays dumfounded agitation toward the members of the sleigh team who question Santa’s integrity, yet lacks the charisma required for the leadership skills that the character so desperately wishes he had.

Rachel Groundy stands out as Blitzen, a feminist reindeer deeply troubled by the rampant corruption in Santa’s workshop. She delivers Blitzen’s direct address with a delicate thoughtfulness that is as much a rallying cry as it is an articulate examination of right and wrong. Groundy nails the demeanor of a smart young activist who has had just enough to drink that the she is delighted at an opportunity to deliver an enthusiastic lecture to anyone present.

Not all of the performers maintain the high energy levels needed to sustain an atmosphere of juicy scandal. Still, at 75 minutes, the production clips along at an appropriately brisk pace.

The Eight: Reindeer Monologues has sufficient references to classic Christmas stories, especially the 1964 stop-animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to delight theater goers immersing themselves in the holiday spirit and all of the entertainment – plays, movies, music – that the season brings. For those suffering from an overdose of holiday festivities or anyone seeking refuge from requisite holiday cheer, the production’s adult-themed version of the sugary reindeer story will provide welcome relief.

Thus, the darkly comedic scandal that divides the reindeer community can, ironically, unite the characters’ real-life, human counterparts. For holiday enthusiasts and cynics who are looking for a Christmas play that they can enjoy together, The Eight: Reindeer Monologues would make for a fun evening.

Fictional Authenticity

In Mary Brigit Poppleton is Writing a Memoir, an energetic new play by Madeline Walter, the title character, played by a vivacious Allison Altman, decides to fake teenage pregnancy as fodder for a memoir and as her opportunity to burst free from a mundane world. As long as her ruse holds up, so does the play. Under the nimble direction of Heidi Handelsman, the first act bounces along as Mary Brigit undertakes her mission: fake a pregnancy, gain her family's attention, and write a bestseller. The ensemble delivers stylized performances in keeping with Heather Cohn's set, which uses a series of candy-colored tables on wheels to form everything from school desks to a dining room table. Mary Brigit occasionally reads aloud from her memoir; its arch language contrasts with the play's pop-cultural sensibility and lends insight into her desire to be part of a grandiose world.

Handelsman keeps the material light and the pace up, never overemphasizing Mary Brigit's rhetorical questions ("Am I pregnant...Does it matter?") and providing space for the audience to recognize the ridiculousness of the situation. Her father's rapid succession of clichéd reactions ("Congratulations! -- I'll beat you! -- I'll beat him!") embodies the play's irreverent questioning of authenticity.

The second act sends Mary Brigit from her hometown in Ohio to Fire Island, New York. There, she falls in with teenagers who teach her to abandon her fantasy life. It's exactly what the play does not need.

Once Mary Brigit gives up the pregnancy hoax, the play falls apart. The first act's colorful tables give way to barebones realism as Mary Brigit learns to become one of the gang. By the time her new friends let her know that she need not join them in smoking pot and gleefully suggest they all get some candy and Coca-Cola, Mary Brigit Poppleton is Writing a Memoir has become the after-school special that the first act sends up.

In the play's press materials, Walter says she wrote the play in part to create a strong female character, but the second act has Mary Brigit join a history of female characters who require a charismatic, grounded man to rescue them from their own neuroses. That's a shame because Mary Brigit's quirkiness is the source of her charm.

NOTE: This play appears as part of the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival

Crying Wolf

If second-wave feminist performance artists had video technology in the 1970s, their work would likely have resembled the opening of She Wolves: Women in Sex, Death, and Rebirth. Written and performed by Raquel Almazan, this powerfully visual production consists of nine vignettes, each depicting a different fierce woman. In the opening sequence, The Ritual, Almazan appears as Wolf Woman, dressed in furs that don’t obscure her body. Her prerecorded voice reverberates over the sound system as she skulks around the stage, releasing unironic, intensely committed howls. At times she joins with the recorded voice in telling of woman-as-wolf mythology and relating a history of taming women to a history of taming wolves.

Wolf Woman carries with her a bag of women’s bones; presumably the subsequent vignettes depict the women to whom the bones belonged. The next scenes feature strong, intriguingly weird female characters, including Dainty Lady, dressed in roller-skates and a crinoline, coquettishly waving a small fan; The Reporter perched atop a TV screen broadcasting scenes of wolves; and The Virgin Stripper violently deflating a blow-up doll.

Too few of the vignettes, however, exhibit the raw, underlying animalism expected from the wolf metaphor. Instead, the consistently strong visual images provide the evening’s connective tissue, starting with the first sequence in which a video montage behind Wolf Woman depicts Almazan in a Victorian home (writing with a quill, rushing down stairs, staring out windows and into mirrors), looking trapped and desperate. It’s an interesting juxtaposition with the taut, ferocious wolf that she plays onstage.

Director/choreographer Dora Arreola, with the help of lighting effects by Oveta Clinton and costumes by Francesca Mirabella, has a sharp eye for clean visual images that pop out in the busy mixed-media piece. The video art, designed by Tatiana Sainz, never achieves the magnificence of these onstage images.

A virtuosic physical performer, Almazan's Buhtoh-inspired movement lends strength and specificity to each of the women she portrays, just as she modulates her accent, rhythm and pace of speech.

A performance that uses mixed media to address wide-ranging issues of femininity runs the risk of losing audiences in a vague, frenetic world, but the discipline with which Alvarez embodies each character grounds this bold piece.