A Bumpy Flight on the Bird Machine

Despite its charming and appealing design and puppetry work, Concrete Temple Theatre’s Bird Machine never quite takes flight. The featured puppets evoke the expected sense of wonder and delight, but the script and basic production flaws prevent it from really soaring. This interesting “puppetical” features a script that plays out like the book of a musical with periodic interludes of puppetry inserted like songs. The story centers around an Imperial groundskeeper, Vince (Michael Tomlinson), in a fantasy medieval world who tells a story to a group of orphaned children about his own culpability in their parents’ murders.

Vince’s story takes us fifteen years into the past, to a birthday gift challenge issued by the Emperor (Jo Jo Hristova). Vince and his friend Leo (Carlo Adinolfi) are competing to present the Emperor with the most delightful and appropriate gift in order to earn the coveted position of Imperial Architect.

Leo, in a nod to Leonardo Di Vinci’s legacy, constructs a flying machine by observing the flight of birds. Vince builds the Emperor a small jewel garden that projects a garden, woodland animals and falling snow. Eventually the contest spirals into tragedy and Vince launches a bitter campaign to seek revenge on the Emperor for his indifference and smug sense of privilege.

Tomlinson, Adinolfi and Hristova bring some inventive humor to the thin fable. Tomlinson, in particular, reaches for a genuine emotional center for his villainous, yet deeply sympathetic character. His opening monologue starts the evening off well, and his presence and beautiful voice are continually striking as the performance progresses.

Hristova is also a standout with her delightfully self-obsessed Emperor. She brings big, over-the-top energy and a sense of fun that is exactly right. Adinolfi has several scenes working with puppet partners in which his physicality is very engrossing.

Six puppeteers (Brian Carson, Ayako Dean, Leat Klingman, Megan O’Brien, Zdenko Slobodnik and Stacey Weingarten) in black masks create a magical world of transformation and grace. They turn a miniature town into functional furniture before your eyes, manipulate gorgeous skeletal birds to create migrating flocks, and believably depict large crowds of fearful peasants with tiny paper doll style puppets.

Despite all the bewitching interludes of splendid craftsmanship, the show never manages to be as engaging as it should be. There is no real emotional involvement with any of the characters and confused and disjointed dialogue mars the generally solid performances.

The real disappointment is the lack of smart pacing that manages to make a one hour show feel endless. Director Renee Philippi slows the action down continually with long transitions and unnecessarily drawn-out dead spaces. The enchantment of the puppets wears off when weighted down by the deadly tempo.

Theater-goers with a special interest in puppetry, who like their puppets to have more romance and intelligence than Kermit, the Fraggles, and Bert and Ernie, will find a lot to like in Bird Machine. But it is a rough flight for anyone looking for sharp and satisfying theatre.

For tickets and showtimes, consult the Concrete Temple Theatre’s website at www.concretetempletheatre.com.

Sympathy for Mass Suicide

The Laboratory Theater’s entry into The Brick Theater’s Antidepressant Festival, Le Mirage, is a rich and rewarding exploration of the vicious extremities of faith and outlier thought systems where religion is nothing but a fatal intellectual virus. Le Mirage dramatizes the story of an intricately ritualized, self-annihilating religious sect, The Order of the Solar Temple, using pre-existing theological tracts and dissonant choreography. The text of the hour-long performance piece is taken from lecture transcripts and texts published by this bizarre French Canadian extremist group.

The cult’s beliefs incorporated a confluence of the rituals of ancient esoteric secret societies (like the Knights of the Templar and the Rosicrucian society), Holy Grail legends and fervent ecological purification ideals. The end goal of this sinister theology was to persuade the cult members to purify themselves by transmitting their soul to the planet Jupiter via mass suicide and ritual murder.

The cult’s history is bloody and malignant. In 1994, one of the group’s founders allegedly labeled the infant son of a follower the antichrist and ordered that the baby be stabbed to death with a wooden stake. The cult members obeyed with enthusiasm and shortly thereafter began a series of “Jupiter transit ceremonies” that ultimately left behind 74 bodies, neatly arranged in star patterns.

Since plastic supermarket bags were a symbol of the ecological pollution the Order believed was corrupting humanity, many of the suicides involved members tying the bags around their necks to suffocate slowly.

A talented and beautifully committed trio of actors (Corey Dargel, Sheila Donovan and Oleg Dubson) convey a range of vivid impressions within the taut, abstract framework constructed by director Yvan Greenberg. The trio portray a fictitious Las Vegas chapter of The Order in the last stages of preparation for departure to Jupiter.

The cast’s French-accented readings of the Order’s writings are underscored with a satisfying soundtrack (designed by Greenberg) that includes ethereal New Age music (composed by François B. Nouvel-Ậgel, Richard Wagner and Gabriel Fauré), bursts of jolting static and ominous rhythmic pounding.

The easy choice in a production of this sort would be a didactic condemnation of the group that dismisses the feverous devotees as aberrational lunatics. But the immediacy the actors bring to their recitations and the purposeful purposelessness of their intriguing ritual dances somehow make the cultists’ piteous need for connection sympathetic. These lunatics come across as real people willing to believe that a personal invitation to a degrading death will erase lifetimes of unfilled longing.

Moments in the performance suggest that the Laboratory Theater is working to be inheritors of 1950s beat poets. During a long section at the beginning to the piece, the cadence of their voices and the hypnotic movement are slow to transform into deeper forms and Audrey Hepburn’s endless beat poet parody in Funny Face comes unpleasantly to mind. And the elements the group incorporates to depict the Las Vegas setting are never interesting and consistently unbeneficial. But once the structure coalesces into a decidedly sinister invitation to join the Order on a journey to “a new world made of other times, other heavens” it is hard to look away.

Dargel, Donovan and Dubson are compellingly genuine through the piece, and the final images of the cult's painfully deliberate suicides are especially searing and potent. The lasts few minutes of their performances will haunt you long after you leave the theater.

Le Mirage is an unforgettable and chilling experience of religious fervency that should not be missed during its short festival run.

For tickets and showtimes, consult The Brick Theater’s Antidepressant Festival website at www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.

Arsenic Kills Me

Arsenic may not have a place in everyone’s cup of tea, but Horse Trade and the Dysfunctional Theatre Company serve up a wickedly delicious brew with their production of Joseph Kesselring’s chestnut Arsenic and Old Lace. Director Eric Chase has assembled an outstanding cast who manage to make even the most dated material in the 1939-penned farce fresh and enjoyable. Of course it is hard to figure out why anyone would stage this community theater warhorse in the heart of the hip East Village. I suppose the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Kesserlring’s writing of this classic is reason enough. And if the play seems out-of-place and slightly irrelevant today, the faithful direction and the true-to-period acting make it a satisfying look back at an edgy black comedy from the 1930s.

The tightly constructed plot revolves around the nefarious murdering duo Abby and Martha Brewster (Marilyn Duryea and Vivian Meisner, respectively), sisters who lure lonely men to their home pretending to have a room for rent. Vivian serves the men an elderberry wine concoction made from her own recipe. “For a gallon of elderberry wine, I take one teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide.”

On the day that he becomes engaged to the girl-next-door, Elaine (Jennifer Gill), the Brewsters’ nephew Mortimer (Rob Brown) discovers a freshly killed body hidden in the window seat at his aunts’ home. A brother that believes he is Teddy Roosevelt (Teddy played by Peter Schuyler) and a brother recently escaped from an institute for the criminally insane (Jonathan played by Justin Plowman) add further madcap mania to fill out the three acts of the play.

Jonathan and his accomplice Dr. Einstein (Ron Bopst) show up with a dead body of their own to be rid of, and the case of mistaken corpses keeps everyone entertainingly baffled. A dizzy swirl of police officers, a prospective lodger, and visiting doctors swell the cast size to an impressive thirteen. Notably, there is not a single false note in Chase’s casting. Even the small detail, repeated in the script, of Jonathan bearing a resemblance to Boris Karloff is happily met in Plowman’s scowling mug.

Duryea and Meisner anchor the show with wonderfully understated and nostalgic presences. Duryea and Meisner effectively invoke a sense of aging Victorian matrons with old, classic movie voices and expressive hauteur. It is a wonderful treat to see women over 50 on the stage, as that seems rarer than seven-legged frog sightings, unless, of course, said actresses are terrible. But Duryea and Meisner never disappoint and remain luminous highlights of the production.

Equally effective, Rob Brown seems lifted from a screwball 30s or 40s comedy as Mortimer Brewster. Mortimer, an unwilling drama critic who delivers scathing reviews to Broadway dramas, finds himself caught up in a private, domestic drama that leaves him dizzy and desperate. Brown plays Mortimer’s bewilderment and frantic aimlessness to brilliant comic effect. Plowman and Bopst are delectable in their roles as bumbling villains who invade the house, unwelcome, and insinuate themselves by force of will. Gill’s spunky take on the forgettable, miffed girlfriend Elaine and her charming 40s mannerisms are a welcome and lively surprise. And Yanni Walker makes magic as the drunken Officer O’Hara, a frustrated playwright/policeman who forces Mortimer to listen to the plot of an outrageously implausible and painfully long idea for a play.

Chase pads two of the play’s smaller roles, Officer Brophy (Michael DeRensis) and Officer Klein (Craig Peterson) with a sort of narration that starts the play off with a slapstick turn-off-the-cell phones speech and act closers and introductions that are surprisingly effective. DiRensis and Peterson sell these bits with panache and personal charm. They must be charming, because padding a two and half hour play is usually deadly and infuriating.

If you are anxious to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the penning of a seminal American dark comedy (and who isn’t?), Arsenic and Old Lace is a satisfying, nostalgic indulgence that shouldn’t be missed.

For tickets and showtimes, consult SmartTix at www.smarttix.com .

The Good Whistleblower’s Mother Wears Out Her Welcome

Theatre Askew’s entry into The Brick’s Antidepressant Festival features an amazingly able company of actors that manages to create a memorable performance with a forgettable script. The Tale of the Good Whistleblower of Chaillot’s Caucasian Mother and Her Other Children of a Lesser Marriage Chalk Circle is an ambitious, musical attempt to meld characters and themes from Brecht, Albee, the musical Mame, Giraudoux and about a dozen other sources with an ironic tirade against the pharmaceutical industry.

Playwright Stan Richardson begins the evening fairly promisingly as we meet a delightfully droll set of family and friends dealing with the overdose of John. John is a character we never meet and find out little about because everyone in his life is amusingly and compulsively self-absorbed. Ensemble members Tim Cusack, Matt Steiner, Sara Alvarez and Brandon Uranowitz make this opening scene one of the highlights of the evening.

The dialogue in this section, and some dialogue sprinkled occasionally throughout the rest of the musical, is sparkling and sharp. But, Richardson wanders off into less impressive comedic landscapes as we get further into his labyrinthine plot.

Reverend Cindy (Joanna Parson) is awkwardly introduced as a guitar playing narrator. The unfortunate Parson valiantly tries to entertain the audience with an extended one-sided conversation with her belligerent guitar which falls depressingly flat. Debbie Troché, who is introduced as John’s Mom, tries desperately to sell an unlikable character who does strange things to an increasingly indifferent audience. Actually, that is not just for the character of Mom, poor Troché does this all night.

Reverend Cindy then begins to sing a nice ballad (written by Rachel Peters, and providing a delicious sense of fun and camp to Parson's otherwise thankless role) about the eponymous whistleblower and his mother. The origins of the evils of the big pharma industry are explored with an 1800’s apothecary, Dennis Courage (Cusak) who runs the largest “medicants” supply company in his native Chaillot and perhaps the world. He is happily giving free drugs to the rich and gouging the poor until a trio of Gods (Steiner, Alvarez and Uranowitcz) visits him and offers to sneak him into heaven if he can only give the poor a break on their rabies and syphilis treatments.

Cusack does an admirable job when called upon to perform an interpretive ballet about tortured lovers to convince the company’s board to show mercy to the poverty-stricken. Then Troché is re-introduced as “Mame Courage,” an uncomfortable meld of the mad woman of Chaillot, Mother Courage and Auntie Mame.

Troché’s character becomes the focus of an increasingly dissolving narrative. She spends long moments taking straining dumps into a large planter on stage (not really defecating, but a soundtrack of dissonant farts helps fool the ear), spouts lines like “By Saint Bab’s quim!” repeatedly, and ends up somehow living with a bear in a cave and bleating like a goat. Troché, a gifted and laudably willing performer, almost succeeds in pulling all this together (believe it or not) but the material is eventually unsalvageable.

Steiner, Alvarez and Uranowitz manage to spin feces-covered straw into gold several times with their appearances as Oopse, Krapp and Fuckk – Dennis’ triplet step-siblings who speak only in unison. There is really no weak link in the fine ensemble of actors. The script, however, lets them down so often, the main dramatic question in the play becomes, “How did they convince these actors to do this?”

The Tale of the Good Whistleblower’s . . . might entertain fans of bizarre scatological humor and the winning cast and inventive musical score are endearing. But though it is certainly a wild ride and an utterly unique journey, it doesn’t really take you any place you want to go.

For tickets and showtimes, consult The Brick Theater’s Antidepressant Festival website at www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.

I Need Directions to Heaven

Despite a fascinating historic subject, Equilicuá Producciones’ New York premiere of Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s Way to Heaven gets lost along the road due to casting, directorial, and occasional writing problems. The script has moments of tremendous beauty and profundity, but the production team should have stopped to ask for directions on this circuitous trip to paradise. For subject matter, Mayorga could not have reached higher or tackled a more satisfyingly dramatic story. The play presents fragments of personal stories around the Theresienstadt concentration camp run by the Nazis during World War II. When the Danish government insists on sending the Red Cross in to evaluate conditions at Theresienstadt, the Nazis revamp the camp into a public relations tool to convince the world that the concentration camps for Jewish and political prisoners are innocuous little villages with balloon sellers in the town square, quaint little synagogues, orchestras playing daily, and joyous inmates.

This historically accurate deception concealed the fact that inmates were constantly being shipped to extermination camps at Auschwitz, over a quarter of the inmates were dying of hunger or disease-- and of the 15,000 Jewish children that were enrolled in Theresienstadt’s fake schools, art programs, and sports leagues, less than 100 would survive the war.

The play is structured into five scenes, the first of which is the weakest, getting the evening off to a rocky start. Shawn Parr plays the Danish Red Cross worker who tours the camp and signs an extremely rosy report on the conditions of the inmates. Unfortunately the script gives him and the audience no clue who he is talking to. He recites an oral history of his experiences that has all the charm and character of a high school text book entry. Inexplicably he is wearing an overcoat and plaid pajamas, which contributes to a bewildering lack of context and place. And while Parr has a nice speaking voice, that doesn’t really compensate for a lack of character and notable line problems.

The second scene contains the largest cast. Their energy, and the most inventive staging of the evening from director Matthew Earnest, liven things up a bit. The ensemble plays camp inmates called upon to perform bogus village-life scenes, scripted by the camp commandant. Ten-year-old Samantha Rahn (The Girl) is the clear, luminous stand out. Rahn has an extraordinary presence and composure for such a young actress. She was transplanted from the American premiere of the play in Raleigh, NC. The only other exquisitely cast actor in the play is another transplant from the same production, Francisco Reyes (The Commandant).

Reyes takes welcome center stage in scene three, delivering a riveting monologue to an unseen Red Cross worker with all the oily charm of a seasoned bureaucratic grifter. The script provides Reyes the opportunity to shine that it denied Parr. There is never a doubt who Reyes is talking to, where he is, or what lies beneath the surface his charming, lying, well-met exterior. Reyes is picture perfect as a Nazi poster boy for maniacal artifice and seductive guile.

Scene four features a duologue between Reyes’ Commandant and Mark Farr as the camp’s Jewish mayor, Gershom Gottfried. Reyes continues to deliver, but his philosophy-obsessed, theater-loving Commandant does not find an adequate foil in Farr. Farr’s Gottfried is clearly the emotional heart of the play. He is given the tortured power to decide which inmates will be “cast” in the production and which will be sent for extermination. But, Earnest could hardly have found a less tortured or tragic-looking actor. Farr is a pleasant, placid-looking, even-keeled man who never sells the idea that he is suffering crippling moral dilemmas. His helpless fury over being forced to send children to gas chambers looks a bit more like a petulant sulk over losing a squash game at the gym. The last scene, the emotional climax delivered as a monologue by Farr, falls flat on this lack of expressiveness. Rahn, however, does a nice job bringing some pathos to the final moments as a doomed child about to be swallowed by the Nazi death machine.

The Way to Heaven presents an interesting look at this little known curiosity of World War II history, and the performances by Rahn and Reyes manage to be very haunting. But, fair warning, the road to heaven is a little bumpy. Seat belts recommended.

For tickets and showtimes, consult the show’s website at www.waytoheaventheplay.com.

Autonomantastic!

Historic con artists, gothic ghosts, duplicitous chess-playing automatons, slapstick-infused 18th century Austrian royalty, and ingeniously used pop-up books are just a few of the wondrous delights that intersect in Bond Street Theatre’s The Mechanical. Writer and director Michael McGuigan has created an endlessly inventive experience with an outstanding ensemble of actors in his sprawling historical and fantastical epic. The kaleidoscopic script centers around a mechanical hoax that toured Europe and America between 1770 and 1854. Known as The Turk, this Automaton Chess Player was invented to amuse Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and consisted of a box and a metal mannequin dressed to resemble a Turkish mystic. An accomplished chess player hid inside the box and made chess moves for the “thinking automaton,” defeating the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. McGuigan’s script combines the historical Turk with a re-imagined working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In the play, Mary Shelley’s ghost discovers that her legacy is endangered because the Creature resurrected by her Victor Frankenstein deserts her story and hides inside the automaton as the master chess player. She enters the world of her own, and McGuigan’s, fantasy to bodily possess characters and try to lure the Creature back into the plot of her own novel.

The actors in the ensemble create all the magic and mystery required with their highly physical and expressively energetic performances. In particular Joanna Sherman and Anna Zastrow are called upon to serve as exotic scenic elements, dancing sailors, Austrian and French royalty, and slapstick narrators straight out of a classic Three Stooges episode. Sherman and Zastrow make their diverse roles look effortless with impressive athleticism and the precise, physical specificity of Ninja masters or, well, at least, veteran vaudeville jugglers.

Meghan Frank is also delightful in a dual role (Mary Shelley’s ghost and Victor Frankenstein’s wife Elizabeth). She is referred to in the play as “quite beautiful, quite charming, and quite possibly deranged.” That seems to fit Frank’s evocative gothic creepiness and her aura of restrained mania.

Frank also served as the designer of a gorgeous puppet made of book pages (portraying the drowned little girl, whose death is blamed on the Creature). And with McGuigan, she designed projections that run throughout the play and provide fascinating context and ambience for the play.

Actors who can be magically captivating during long scenes where they have no lines but grunts—and do so working under a head wrapping that binds their face into grotesqueries—deserve special rewards in heaven. Joshua Wynter, as the Creature, turns his own body into passionate sculpture and embodies a deliciously sinister but compellingly vulnerable bundle of resurrected flesh.

McGuigan’s direction is the real star of the evening, though. The scope of vision for the play is broad and dazzling. The enchanting physicality of the choreographed transitions, the skillful use of puppets and flowing scenic elements, and the surprise introduction of pop-up books with miniatures of set pieces—it all combines into a uniquely exciting and charming journey.

Costume designer Carla Bellisio and a wonderful soundscape (uncredited) also contribute greatly to the allure of the piece.

McGuigan’s script, however, suffers a bit in comparison with the other outstanding design and performance work on the production. While the first act is almost entirely absorbing, the second act loses focus quickly. An unfortunate decision to bookend the script with an unnecessary sub-plot about a theatrical renovation contributes to a sense of messiness and makes the ending of the play seem drawn out. There are also a few moments where it feels as if McGuigan is writing a research paper on The Turk and not a dramatic portrayal.

For theater-goers who like a sense of adventure to their drama and the warm feeling of falling into a meticulously crafted (if occasionally over-sprawling) fantasy world, The Mechanical is certain to impress and entertain.

For tickets and showtimes, consult the venue’s website at www.theaterforthenewcity.net .

Triumphant Celtic Revival

Four-plus hours of early 20th century drama may not sound like your idea of a great way to spend a weekend, but the inventive and intrepid Irish Repertory Theatre has put together a production that might just change your mind. Presented over two evenings, The Yeats Project is comprised of eight fully-staged one act plays by William Butler Yeats. During the Rep’s Yeats festival, all of Yeats' plays (26 in total) will grace the Irish Rep stage as either readings or full productions from April 8 to May 3. The evening billed as Cycle A features Yeats’ very first play, The Countess Cathleen; The Cat and the Moon; and On Baile’s Strand. Irish Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Charlotte Moore directs all three plays.

The Countess Cathleen is a quaint morality tale with Faustian overtones set in “olden times” Ireland. Given the benign quality of the script, it comes as something of a shock to find out that, when first produced in Dublin by Yeats in 1899, dozens of police officers were called to the theater to repel protesters, a Catholic Cardinal and Catholic students signed vehement protests, and the local newspaper wrote vicious condemnations daily. All of this took place because the play’s saintly Countess Cathleen, who sells her soul to save the starving populace, is spared by God at the end of the play. In 1899, when you sold your soul to the devil, it was unacceptable to expect (or depict) any outcome but the worst. A play about a merciful God who forgave the sin was blasphemous and unacceptable.

In a modern context, the text seems almost whimsically virtuous. Terry Donnelly (Countess Cathleen) and Fiana Tiobin (Oona, her nurse) manage to imbue their performances with enough urgency and reality to keep the play from sliding into melodrama, and Patrick Fitzgerald’s delightfully manic demon enlivens things. Director Moore creates a rather static world, and the actors seem uncomfortably placed at times. But a large scrim at the back of the theater featuring an outstanding series of projections by designer Jan Hartley provides context and enhances the mood of the play with gorgeous Irish landscapes and castle interiors.

One of Yeats’ prose comedies follows, The Cat and the Moon, which features an increasingly likeable Fitzgerald as a blind beggar and Sean Gormley as his crippled companion. The men have come to a saint’s shrine to beg for cures for their afflictions and end up descending into delightfully entertaining squabbles over injustices, imagined and real, that they have committed against one another. Justin Stoney, Amanda Sprecher, and William J. Ward are introduced as a wandering troupe of musicians and quickly become on of the major high points in the production. This trio play pipes, lutes, violins and drums to great effect in plays throughout the two nights. In particular, Stoney dazzles on a simple recorder-style pipe and sings Irish folk songs as if he were born to do nothing else.

About On Baile’s Strand, Yeats said, in his notes to Notes to Poems 1899-1905, that it “must always be a little overcomplicated when played by itself. And that is something of an understatement. The play is part of a cycle of five plays Yeats wrote about the legendary Irish king Cuchulain. It is play of great lyrical power and prowess, but demands a lot of the audience. The play discusses at length the political pressures of the emerging unification of feudal Ireland and is burdened with a lot of exposition for a rather simple story. Cuchulain once loved a fierce Scottish queen who has sent her son to her court to kill him. At its best, the play feels like one of Shakespeare’s lesser known history plays. Kevin Collins manages some riveting moments as King Cuchulain, despite having some of the most cumbersome dialogue. And Stoney creates a menacing yet still deeply-touching character with The Young Man.

Cycle B, the second evening, includes The Land of Heart’s Desire, directed by Moore, and four plays directed by producing director Ciarán O’Reilly: The Pot of Broth; Purgatory, A Full Moon in March, and Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

The Land of Heart’s Desire was, during Yeats’ lifetime, his most-produced play. It is easy to see the charm of this simply presented fairytale about an newly-married Irish country girl who is seduced away from hearth and home by a wicked fairy child. Standout Fiona Tobin, as the young wife’s bitterly complaining mother-in-law Bridget, delivers a wonderfully realized and recognizable Irish shrew. Ward (Bridget’s husband Maurteen) and Peter Cormican (as a hapless Catholic priest Father Hart) are also superb and make the language sing as they try to persuade the young wife not to run off with the fairies. Director Moore slightly deflates the energy in the play by introducing the supernatural element, in the form of Sprecher (the Fairy Child) rather bluntly. Although Sprecher is a likeable young actress, skipping onstage in something that looks like an Ice Capades outfit and proclaiming yourself a fairy child only works well in drag shows.

One of the festival highlights is introduced next, The Pot of Broth. This exuberant and joyous comedy is laugh out loud funny from the first moment, when Donnelly (Sibby) runs across stage screaming bloody murder and energetically chasing down a bedraggled chicken. The play is a simple Irish folk story in which a Tramp stops by the house of a miserly woman and tricks her into feeding him dinner using nothing but his wits and a bucket-load of artful lies. Fitzgerald could not be better as The Tramp. Blessed with tremendous charm and more than his share of brash Irish blarney, Fitzgerald fills his role with an oily obsequiousness that is pure pleasure to watch. Equally delightful, as the miserly and domineering Sibby, Donnelly evokes huge laughs from the audience with every screech and avaricious glance. She is truly an actress at the top of her game. Completing the festival’s best cast, Cormican, as Sibby’s long-suffering husband John, balances her fiery energy with a placidity and slyness that is richly rewarding.

Purgatory is an interesting play that combines a chilling Irish ghost story with elements of the Biblical Isaac and Abraham story. An Old Man (Corrigan) tells his son, Boy (Stoney), the story of his parents’ disastrous marriage and the tragic consequences of their misalliance. Jan Hartley’s wonderful projection of an old Irish manor house helps tell the story in dramatic fashion. However, the actors seem to be trapped in a plodding moroseness that overshadows the complexity of the language. It does not come off as an evolving character study of an initially likeable but ultimately sinister character, but more like the final brooding confession of a melodrama villain.

The lavish and beautifully directed fourth play of the evening, A Full Moon in March, is one of Yeats’ most fully developed ‘dancer plays.’ Although there are dances in several of his plays, the ‘dancer plays’ are classified thusly based on their integral use of dance, masks, ritual, Japanese Noh elements, and experimentation with movement. A Full Moon in March plays on the Salome story and features a cold Queen (Amanda Quaid) who has offered her hand in marriage as the prize in a competition to determine the best singer in the realm. When a grotesque Swineherd (Collins) enters her bedchamber to compete, he learns that she uses the competition as an excuse to cut off the head of competitors that offend her. This is because she is “cruel as the winter of virginity.” The antidote to her cruelty is a consumptive, passionate dance with the swineherd’s severed head, wherein his blood might enter and fertilize her barren womb. The action is underscored with beautiful songs and music by our traveling minstrels (Stoney, Sprecher, and Ward).

A Full Moon in March is the most fully realized play in the festival, and you feel as if Yeats might have sat in and overseen rehearsals. The immediacy and accessibility for modern audiences comes as something of a surprise after the earlier plays, with their quaint and old-fashioned air. Special kudos to costume designer David Toser for the heightened and passionate look of this piece. Quaid is fantastically ferocious and brings just the right balance of harshness and fragility. Collins is utterly transformed by a brilliantly creepy mask from designer Bob Flanagan. Director O’Reilly deserves tremendous credit for seamlessly pulling off an extremely challenging script.

The closing play for Cycle B is, appropriately, the play Yeats received the most critical success with, Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The Cathleen Ni Houlihan mentioned in the title refers to an Irish queen who, in song, represents Ireland itself. The play is set during the 1798 Irish rebellion, which was aided by the French. The plays opens showing us a happy Irish household preparing for the wedding of their young son Michael (Collins). His father (Ward) has eager plans for the bride money. His mother (Donnelly) hopes to send his brother (Stoney) to the priesthood with their new wealth. His brother is looking forward to a puppy the bride has promised him. Into this house enters a strange woman in a dark cloak, Tobin, beautifully vibrant, as Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Cathleen speaks darkly about losing her “four beautiful fields” and about how she can’t return home because there are “too many strangers in the house.” The mother and father see only a strange old woman in need of charity. But Michael and the audience begin to realize the woman is Ireland herself. When the French troops land, Michael must chose between domestic tranquility and fighting for his beloved Ireland.

The politics are as relevant and the emotions just as stirring today as when Yeats wrote Cathleen Ni Houlihan. It is sparsely staged and subtlety performed, choices which contribute to the simplicity and strength of the message. All in all, the play is a rousing conclusion to a truly epic and largely successful adventure in dramatic revival. Yeats would be proud.

A festival pass good for one admission to all Yeats Projects events is $100. Single tickets to both Cycle A and Cycle B performances are $65 and $55. For more information and a detailed calendar of events visit http://www.irishrep.org.