Teenage Monkey Business

Adolescence has never made for particularly pretty subject matter. On television, children usually rapidly age from cute cherub to mature teenager, somehow skipping a crucial stage in the natural aging process. One's naturally changing body only makes an occasional appearance as a subplot on the Disney Channel or WB. And filmdom's closest portrayal of puberty as metaphor remains...Teen Wolf? This is true, and one might expect to find a similar comedic metaphor in Gorilla Man, which just opened at P.S. 122. The latest play by Obie winner Kyle Jarrow is part horror show and part rock opera but all camp, and for rather lowbrow humor, director Habib Azar has assembled a high-caliber company. There aren't very many lessons to learn along the way, but ultimately it is a not much different animal from the aforementioned film and its sequel.

Jarrow (onstage as the Piano Player) narrates this musical, with Perry Silver (the Drummer) helping him reference the show's own plot devices and genre elements. Fourteen-year-old Billy (Jason Fuchs) awakens to find he has started growing immense amounts of fur on the back of his hands. When he confronts his mother (a wonderfully game Stephanie Bast), he discovers that he is actually the product of a tryst between her and the Gorilla Man (Matt Walton), a hirsute beast with a penchant for gruesome murders. Billy learns that it is his destiny to follow in that path. When she is unable to kill her son, Mother, as she is known, casts him out.

Billy runs into several interesting people in this darkly comic, Wizard of Oz-like bildungsroman. These characters include a fortuneteller, a politician, a prison guard, a truck driver, and a vagrant, all portrayed by Burl Moseley and Nell Mooney. These characters, Jarrow instructs the audience, serve to teach Billy about such topics as forgiveness, fate, fear, failure, and fatherhood.

But whether taken merely on a surface level or as metaphor, Gorilla, with its not-quite-artful song lyrics and instructional storytelling, lacks oomph in the message department. The play hits on the notion of individuality, of loving who you are and not trying to run away from it, but never delves particularly deep into that idea.

Only at play's end does Jarrow provide any kind of resolution, in arguing in favor of free will over both nature and nurture. He espouses the idea that Billy does not necessarily have to succumb to his father's murderous fate. But the play just ties a nice ribbon at the end, directly telling its audience that it believes in free will more than the formative forces of genetics and one's upbringing. It would have been more impressive had Jarrow demonstrated this theme a little more consistently throughout the show.

Additionally, while it was a smart choice to limit the production to one act

Historical Crossroads

Seasoned by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Paris of the 1840s was, not unlike 80 years later, a magnet for artists, intellectuals, and radicals from across Europe. It was a decade when the world was out of balance: a crisis of the old society coincided with a crisis of the new, spawning great political and cultural ferment. Among those drawn to the city in that decade were three lions of 19th-century German history: Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, and poet Heinriche Heine. Working in the tradition of such cerebral, history-minded playwrights as Michael Frayne and Tom Stoppard, American literary critic and essayist Jonathan Leaf imagines the interaction of these three men in The Germans in Paris, an intriguing though tendentious play about the dueling of men and their ideas that is based loosely on actual events.

In fact, two actual duels

Bountiful Harvests

In the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, a winter solstice ritual has survived, one that has existed since before the rise of Christianity. A special meal is made consisting of 12 dishes, all meatless and dairyless, and is proffered to any human, animal, or spirit (living and dead) who wishes to join in the festivities, in the hopes that the next year will be healthy and the harvest successful. The master of the house repeats his invitation three times: "If you don't want to come and taste all our delicious dishes, if you won't come when we invite you, then don't come when we don't call you!" This ritual, along with the songs and incantations that accompany it (called koliadas), was studied by director Virlana Tkacz for the past two winters in Ukraine. The result is the Yara Arts Group's Koliada: Twelve Dishes at La MaMa. The piece integrates these traditional songs and practices with contemporary texts and theatrical techniques, generating an engaging and resonant evening of performance.

The imagery and themes of Koliada can be quite beautiful and moving. Anyone with a sense of family ritual and heritage will be taken in by the opening, during which an older woman, a matriarchal figure, prepares her meal, mutters to herself what has yet to be done, explains how she creates a dish, and sings quietly to herself the koliadas traditional to the occasion.

The design of the show, by Tkacz and Watuko Ueno, is simple and brilliant. They have taken the first-floor theater at La MaMa, a very deep space, and used it lengthwise, allowing for busy, expansive action. There is also little audience seating, making the event extremely intimate and involving. The paper-thin back wall of the set contains faint images of vegetables and grains, and also creates mysterious shadows made by company members moving behind it. A series of three long wooden tables make up the furnishings, evocative of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" (coincidentally enough, the setting of a Passover seder, the meal of the Jewish holiday that involves cooking a large amount for family and friends, as well as inviting any outsiders, along with the prophet Elijah, to partake if they wish).

The cast members then weave their way through 12 vignettes, meditations on the food, ritual, and renewal through poetry, movement, and song. The company members portray all the different figures that inhabit the ritualistic space: townspeople, spirits of animals and storms, and the recently deceased.

The staging doesn't do justice to the poetry by Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, however. Poetry is an extremely tricky art to translate to the stage, in terms of both direction and performance. The company simply doesn't give this beautiful text the reverence it deserves, which often makes it seem anachronistic and incongruous with the action. The different dimensions of the group's exploration don't mesh well in general, but this makes the poetry in particular stick out and suffer.

But the koliadas, especially when sung in the original Ukrainian, are charming and haunting. A special treat is Ukrainian musicians Ivan Zelenchuk and Dmytro Tafiychuk, who accompany the cast at times with their voices, fiddle, and an amazing mountain horn called the trembita. The two musicians, who are working to preserve and document the koliadas in their town of Kryvorivnia, are a tremendous complement to the piece.

Toward the conclusion of Koliada, the wooden tables are pushed right up to the audience, and the company welcomes you to their home. You are even invited to try some kutia, a sweet dish containing wheat, poppy seeds, and honey. This great feeling of familial belonging makes for a warm finale.

Ultimately, the traditions and ideas behind Koliada: Twelve Dishes are far more intriguing than the performance itself, but the themes and imagery that the performance conjures up make it a unique and touching theatrical experience.

Shooting Up the Charts

There are two basic camps in the debate over art's purpose. The first, basically idealist, argues that art should enlighten. The artist's sacred duty is to present the truth of our reality, or, at the least, the truth of the artist's reality, no matter how bleak or brutal. The second camp, however, tends more toward escapism. It contends that reality in all its misery is ever-present. Why use art to deliver a second dose of it when art is the only means most people have to momentarily step out of it?

In Marc Spitz's new comedy, The Name of This Play Is Talking Heads, now playing at Under St. Marks, the two factions again take up this never-ending skirmish. The difference here, as opposed to the debates that ceaselessly appear in publications and programs devoted to the arts, is that one of the two parties has the added rejoinder of a loaded firearm.

The battlefield, appropriately enough, is the studio of a TV music channel where a typically vapid segment, called the "Top 100 Most Rockatrocious Moments in Rock History," is being taped. (Think of such watersheds of vulgarity as Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his teenaged cousin, or the revelation that Michael Jackson's penis is multicolored, to use just two of the examples Spitz himself cheerily points up.)

The idealist thrown into this escapist stronghold is Pete (Brian Reilly), a writer for Headphones magazine. Initially under the impression that he has been invited on the show to share his knowledge of music and the culture surrounding it, he is quickly disillusioned when he sees the channel's staple comedian, Frankie (Matt Higgins), being force-fed his opinions by Tom (James Eason), the show's director. However, Pete's disillusionment quickly gives way to outright rebellion

Faith and Dreams

Faith is an awfully open-ended subject on which to base a play. Faith in God, faith in relationships, faith that human beings are essentially good

Beauty Is Skin Deep

Stunning. Illuminating. Touching. Powerful. These are just a few of the words that come to mind when describing the experimental dance piece Skins, playing at the historic La MaMa Theatre. Even without specific characters or a linear plot, Skins tells an amazingly human and compassionate story through its unifying themes about body image, self-expression, and the societal pressures that shape and change us. This piece is based on the poetry of Elizabeth Ingraham, whose work has also inspired a series of life-sized female "skin" sculptures that can be seen hanging in La MaMa's lobby. Throughout the play, a compilation of Ingraham's poems is recited over a sound system as the words come to life onstage through music, dancing, light, and scenery.

Between poems, the dancing is underscored by hypnotically beautiful music performed live

Rethinking Shakespeare

Many half-finished quotes that have adhered to my mind through the years were first introduced in Macbeth. Lines like "Is that a dagger...," "Out, damned spot...," or "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." offer a good reason to revisit Shakespeare's play. In a new twist, C.A.G.E. Theatre Company's production has set it not in the usual medieval Scotland but in Scotland in 2005. At first, this version seems to be a smart route for director Michael Hagins to take. The space at the Impact Theatre in Brooklyn is rather small. On a stage of that size, the production team does not have the luxury of elaborate sets and costumes that would take up an enormous amount of space. Before the lights dim, the audience is introduced to three ladies

Deal With the Devil

Don Juan in Chicago begins with Don Juan in his 16th-century Spanish castle mixing potions and chanting Latin in hopes of conjuring up the Devil, until he is interrupted by his faithful servant, Leporello. Concerned about his master's well-being, Leporello attempts to convince Don Juan to give up his intellectual pursuits in favor of wining, dining, and women. But the not-yet-legendary lover harbors no concern for momentary desires of the flesh. A 30-year-old virgin, Don Juan has only one thing on his mind: immortality. With immortality, he surmises, it would be possible to discover the answers to all of life's questions, and he would take his place as the greatest of all history's thinkers.

Upon eventually succeeding in bringing Mephistopheles to the mortal plain, Don Juan declares his heart's desire, and the Devil agrees to give Don Juan (and unlucky Leporello) life eternal, with one condition: that Don Juan agrees to seduce a different woman every day before the clock strikes midnight. The deal is sealed in blood, and thus begins Don Juan's legendary sexual escapades. Comedic antics and dramatic moments ensue as four centuries of lies, love, and infidelity eventually culminate in one chaotic evening.

As the title character, Michael Poignand displays a wide range of talents as he transforms himself from the na

Love Those One-Acts

Like a vacation fling, a one-act play can either be long remembered for its delicate and thrilling touch, or quickly forgotten should it go awry. But when you've got six back-to-back one-acts, all dealing with the transient nature of love, chances are good that at least one will leave a lasting impression. Scenes From a Distance, the fourth production at the Jan Hus Playhouse, was a foolproof rendezvous before the actors even took the stage. The evening featured three one-acts ("English Made Simple," "Bolero," and "Seven Menus") by comedic genius David Ives and three more from playwrights Mary Miller ("The Ferris Wheel"), Sean O'Donnel ("I Just Wanted to Say"), and the 2005 recipient of the John Steinbeck Award for Literature, Joe Pintauro ("Fur Hat").

Though Ives's name likely brought in much of the audience, it was Pintauro's "Fur Hat" that generated the most guffaws. Director Elaine Connolly seemed aware that this might be the case, as the one-acts were lined up like a strategic baseball roster. "The Ferris Wheel" got the evening off to a solid and competent start, "I Just Wanted to Say" and "Bolero" were only meant to get on base, and "Fur Hat" grand-slammed.

"Fur Hat" is the story of a chance meeting in a university caf

Hero Worship

Kevin Augustine's puppets are incredible creatures. Their intricacies are many, with fine facial features and clever physical manipulations that lend them a super-reality. Their carefully chiseled, slightly askew contours make them simultaneously disturbing and melancholic. And with the fine-tuned coordination of Augustine and his fellow puppeteers (Laura Emmanuel, Sophie Nimmanit, and Matthew Riggs), the characters come to life in an astounding manner. Add to the list of characters a luminescent butterfly and a book that attempts to fly from its reader's hand, and Augustine has created a magical world in which anything goes, a world particular to puppetry and to Augustine's work in particular.

This is what makes the shortsightedness of Big Top Machine such a shame. Augustine is one of the greatest puppet artisans working today, but the text of the piece is ultimately uninteresting and banal. The story revolves around Stan (Augustine), who, in an effort to escape his estranged wife and alcoholic tendencies, does what almost everyone has considered doing at one point or another

Deadly Games

The cloudy difference between fantasy and reality is the subject of Jeff Tabnick's new play, I Found Her Tied to My Bed, an hourlong one-act about the fine line between true romantic love and ritualistic murder. Lounging around a set dominated by nothing more than a large bed, two young female roommates play games of love and death, pressing each other's buttons until they have no choice but to make their fantasies a reality or look elsewhere for someone to share the rent with. This spare but affecting production, playing every Wednesday night at Under St. Mark's until the end of the month, examines a not-so-healthy relationship between two roommates, sometime lovers, and occasional murder accomplices.

"I'm not a lesbian. I'm a killer," says Jan (played by the severe Shannon Kirk), a rebellious nurse at a retirement facility, who has taken to amusing herself at work by speeding up the turnover rate at the facility's critical wing. A pair of damp cloths her only tool, she views herself as something between an avenging angel and an agent of mercy, killing in a seeming act of euthanasia only the sickest patients

Henry IV, Part One: Much Humor, Less Horror

Of all of Shakespeare's histories, I like the two Henry IV plays the best, for their jarring combination of ribald humor and bloody horror. Over the last few years, I have appreciated them even more for their uncanny parallels to present political realities. Here we see a world leader's son spending his youth in debauchery, then turning about-face to assume his father's mantle, self-righteous in his sense of destiny. Here we see soldiers dying in a war that should never have happened, its perpetrator deceived and manipulated by his advisers. Here we see ordinary people, in taverns where they drink and in battlefields where they die, sacrificing their own destinies for another man's. And here we see the occasional extraordinary old drunk who speaks the truth better than a ruler or a Rumsfeld: "What is honor? A word."

These parallels are not lost on director Marc Silberschatz, whose troupe, Twenty Feet Productions, is presenting in repertory the eight plays that ponder the devastating Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York in 14th- and 15th-century Britain and France. The cycle, Silberschatz says, shows how "a diseased morality acts on a people like a cancer." Retelling this story "gives us a chance to examine what we are doing today" in our own domestic and international affairs.

Whether this marathon makes the present-day connection is best evaluated by those who, like the 12 actors themselves, had the stamina to take in the entire experience. With only two plays to go on, I can report that Richard II, reviewed elsewhere on this site, effectively portrays the diseased morality that initiated nearly a hundred years of bloodshed. The actors do not have to use neckties or cigars to demonstrate how easily a vain and cocksure leader can be toppled by cunning and venal opponents. The subsequent play, Henry IV Part One, is rocky and rushed, though the effects of the growing cancer remain clear.

The secret of a good Henry IV is in maintaining a perfect balance between the comic and the tragic, but in this production the comic wins hands down.

Richard Brundage commands the stage as literature's most lovable philosopher-drunk, Sir John Falstaff. In Richard II, Brundage plays the dominating Duke of York with incongruous timidity, but here you get a real Falstaff, savoring each juicy line like an epicure tasting wine, rolling the words delightedly around the tongue with deliberate pace and timing, moving and gesturing effortlessly.

Alas, he has an inadequate match in Albert Aeed as Prince Hal, the king's heir. Admittedly, this is a difficult role for any actor

From Scavenger to Mail-Order Bride

Smoke billows up through lofty ridges of puckered mauve fabric in which garbage nestles in a phantasmagoric rendering of Smokey Mountain, a massive dump on the outskirts of Manila that provided sustenance of sorts to 20,000 Filipino scavengers. At ground level, in complementary colors, are the study and bedroom of a real estate broker's upscale Park Slope apartment. This inventive set by Dan Kuchar depicts the twin poles of Linda Faigao-Hall's The Female Heart, an ambitious new play that follows Adelfa (played with aplomb by Rona Figueroa) in her journey from scavenger to Starbucks employee to college grad to mail-order bride.

While the political message is hammered home where a light tapping would have done the trick, the playwright manages to seed enough compelling details in Adelfa's story to sustain our attention. Director Jamie Roberts's sure-footed blocking plus the work of her talented design team help smooth the play's leaps through time and space.

We learn about Smokey Mountain, which was demolished in 1993 to make way for a never-built housing development, through the clunky device of spot news reporting by an Australian journalist, wittily portrayed by Sean Sutherland, who interviews Adelfa's brother Anghel (Victor Lirio) at the dump in 1992 in the play's opening scene and returns to the site nine years later in the final scene.

In between those expository bookends, Faigao-Hall vividly dramatizes the mercilessness of poverty, the forces that drive immigration, the miscues and incongruities between Filipino and U.S. culture, and how profoundly important the money sent by migrant relatives is for families back home. What she doesn't do as effectively, alas, is create convincing, multidimensional characters, despite the laudable efforts of the cast.

The play's title comes from the Tagalog phrase for a man or woman with a tender heart. Adelfa and her brother share that quality. Through an extended flashback, we learn that Anghel secretly took a job as a dancer in a male sex club to finance his family's escape from Smokey and pay his sister's way through college. But when Anghel falls seriously ill, it is Adelfa's turn to sacrifice in order to pay for his medical care. Adelfa and her mother decide that marriage to a rich American his surname, they happily note, is Golden�is the best choice among unappealing options.

The Female Heart picks up momentum even as the plot grows less plausible when the main action shifts to Brooklyn. Roger Golden (Tim Davis), a good-looking businessman in his 30s, turns out to be controlling and prone to angry eruptions, but penitent and self-reflective at other moments. Adelfa not only accepts her plight, negotiating larger and larger sums of money from Golden as the relationship becomes more confining and brutal, but appears to fall in love with him.

By play's end, things have come full circle. As his sister's letters and phone calls dry up, Anghel recalls the family's final day at the dump, when the three danced with hopeful glee, as the happiest day of his life. "My dear Adelfa, don't send any more things," he writes. "They're just things, Adelfa. Stuff. And it always comes down to this. Someday they'll be garbage."

The Obscenity Heard 'Round the World

When used correctly, the profane actually serves a very sacred social function, one that is too often lost in the shock of the profanity itself: it forcibly tears away the veil of unthinking habit and empty tradition. In this sense, French playwright Alfred Jarry was a master of the profane. Indeed, his finest creation, the infamous Pa Ubu of the play Ubu Roi, is nothing but a vessel for all that Jarry considered base and cowardly in humanity. (Appropriately enough, Ubu's famous first line in that play is simply, "Puh-shit.") Yet Elizabeth Swados's sharp new musical Jabu, based on Jarry's life and using healthy portions of his Ubu play cycle as illustration, shows us just why this high priest of blasphemy is still so sacred to modern theater.

From his childhood in Laval, France, in the late 1800's through his bohemian life in Paris and a rather messy self-destruction

Funny Men

Clowns have been a vital influence for some of the avant-garde's greatest thinkers: Antonin Artaud had a fixation on the Marx Brothers; Samuel Beckett greatly admired such silent film comics as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. It's inevitable, then, that the experimental theater returns now and then to the grand tradition of clowning to walk a tremendously complex line

Grace and Good Deeds

The waiting periods during major conflicts and tragedies will often strip off layers of character to reveal our vulnerable and solitary selves. But while the conversations that go on during these periods may feel particularly important and profound, they don't necessarily make for good theater. Waiting: A Trilogy, the third play from Brooklyn Heights journalist and playwright Paulanne Simmons, falls short of its goal by relying too heavily on dire situations and the characters' backgrounds to deliver an underdeveloped theme.

In the three disconnected scenes, three characters go out of their way to do something nice for somebody else, supposedly connecting the ideas of serving a higher power and earthly goodness. In a hospital, a Christian Scientist attempts to comfort a co-worker who is waiting for the results of her husband's brain surgery. At a bus stop, a young schoolteacher refuses to leave the scene of an accident to ensure that her cab driver isn't unjustly blamed. And in a high-rise office building, an Orthodox Jew risks his life during a terrorist attack to wait for help with a wheelchair-bound friend.

All compelling ideas for scenes, but in the end, there's nothing to hold on to. Taking its own leap of faith, Waiting falls back on the assigned spirituality of its characters to give the performances a sense of grace. While Simmons set out to explore the connections between spirituality and good deeds, she doesn't go deep enough with the characters, nor do some of the actors.

In the first scene, Deborah Paulter (Brenda, the Christian Scientist) and Stephanie Lynn Hakun (Ethel) set a bizarre and contradictory precedent in the very bare hospital waiting room, which consisted of only a bench and a table. Paulter's Brenda was ebullient, if slightly overacted, in contrast with a hesitant and awkward Hakun, who proved in the second scene that her glaring mid-sentence stutters were not intended as part of any one character.

Also in that scene, a booming Patrick Toon (cab driver Mohammad Abdul al-Aziz Medani) and Pierre O'Farrell (a too blatantly racist bus driver, Vinnie) have it out over a bus-cab collision, and Hakun, as the cab's passenger Heidi, steps in to defend Abdul. When a police officer (Joe Salgo) winds up taking Heidi's word rather than condemning the foreign taxi driver (as he says he normally would), the scene winds up feeling like a sugar-frosted morality lesson.

In the final and most powerful scene, Toon (Aaron) and O'Farrell (Tom) did achieve the degree of stripped-down humanity that the script called for, but it was far too late in the production to provoke a reconsideration of the play itself. Toon, O'Farrell, and Salgo, each in dual roles, might have grounded the production with solid performances, but they could not rescue it from its acute case of oversimplification.

The script also has characters revealing intimate details and personal anecdotes far too detailed for a slice-of-life trilogy. And while there were moments of comic relief, they wound up feeling inserted like keys into the wrong locks of the wrong doors. For serious drama to open itself to humor, the audience needs to be emotionally invested first.

No one likes to wait, much less watch other people wait. The lesson here is that if you're going to make an audience watch characters wait, the waiting needs to be pretty damn significant.

Mean Street

I live on Baxter Street, only a few blocks north of the historic Five Points in lower Manhattan, so when a musical depicting that area during its heyday came to my attention, my interest was piqued. Sure, the area known in the mid-1850s for its prostitution and gambling, racial intermingling and bawdy theater scene has entered the public consciousness thanks to the Martin Scorsese blockbuster film Gangs of New York, but perhaps this musical could add a bit of nuance to all of the Hollywood hype. The Baxter Street depicted here seems a lawless, almost Darwinian place, where street fights and accidental murders are fodder for street-corner gossip and the well bred come to gawk at the lowborn as a form of entertainment. It's evident that playwright Barbara Kahn

Leave Them Wanting More

Before I went to see The World of John Wallowitch, I didn't know that John Wallowitch is a New York City cabaret icon who has had everybody from Tony Bennett to Margaret Whiting record his songs. I wasn't aware that Andy Warhol created the cover for his first album. And I had no idea that Tosos II, the theater company that produced The World of John Wallowitch, practically founded Off-Off-Broadway and the gay theater movement. But I didn't need to know any of that to enjoy the show.

The show is a musical revue, stringing together 16 songs spanning the breadth of Wallowitch's career. There is no plot, and there are no characters to interfere with the audience's drinking (due to a two-drink minimum) and toe tapping. Plus, there are heavy doses of wit, sarcasm, and charm.

The show started off a bit slow. The first few songs were enjoyable, but failed to grab my attention. But Heather Olt soon had me doubling over with laughter with her rendition of "Dutch Ecology." The song itself is extremely sexually suggestive, tap-dancing along the line dividing naughty and dirty without ever crossing over. Yet Olt performed with such straight-faced na

Richard II: The Journey Begins

It is almost impossible to comprehend what has been happening at the West Park Presbyterian Church on Amsterdam Avenue at 86th Street this month. The entire eight-play Wars of the Roses cycle of Shakespeare's histories (Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, Henry VI Parts One, Two, and Three, and Richard III), cut minimally, is being performed in repertory six days a week, with three plays on Saturdays, through March 4. And 12 actors do it all.

This sweeping project comes from twentysomething Marc Silberschatz, who founded the company, Twenty Feet Productions, just two years ago and last season cut his teeth on the two parts of Henry IV in collaboration with the York Shakespeare Company. In addition to directing all the plays, he assumes the title role in the Henry VI trilogy, plays subordinate roles in the other plays, handles publicity, and sometimes sells tickets at the door. Total budget: $8,000.

One immediately thinks all this cannot possibly be good. It is hard enough to mount one respectable production with twice as many players and a hundred times the budget. But judging from Richard II, the one play I have seen thus far, the results are quite astounding. The reason is that this mammoth effort runs on the power of the plays themselves and on the passion and perspicacity of the actors presenting them.

There are no sets; the church is set enough, with its spacious sanctuary, elevated and carved-wood preaching area, and balcony. The lighting is basically off-and-on. The costumes range from thrift-shop to clothes-closet. No pyrotechnics, no revolving stages, no pheromonal attractants, no haute couture. But who needs all that folderol anyway, those strained attempts to contemporize, contextualize, distract, disguise? It is the words, and the knowing movement around the words, that make Shakespeare work. And it works here.

The actors, mostly young, are unpaid. They rehearsed all eight plays together as a unit, four to five hours a day, five days a week, for four months. Each actor plays 20 or more parts in the cycle, and when the same character appears in succeeding plays, the actor retains the role throughout.

Oh yes, and one more thing: the casting is gender-neutral. Among the major figures, for example, King Henry IV is played by a woman, Queen Margaret of Anjou by a man.

Richard II is a good place for the theatergoer to start this remarkable journey, both because its subject is the king whose vanity and avarice precipitated the devastating hundred-year Wars of the Roses between the related houses of Lancaster and York that the eight plays encompass, and because it is the most poetically pure of the cycle. With no big battle scenes, no comic relief, and written entirely in verse, it challenges the actors to bring the characters alive by virtue of their interpretation of the text alone. And by and large, they do it.

Seth Duerr, an experienced Shakespearean, commanding in stature and physically expressive, plays King Richard forcefully, if perhaps too cautiously. The precipitous crumbling of a seemingly invincible personality calls for a turnaround much more drastic than he offers.

Bending gender, Kymberly Tuttle is cast in the crucial role of Henry Bolingbroke, who deposes his cousin Richard and takes the crown for himself as Henry IV. Steely, sober, calculating, brutal, Tuttle portrays him rightly. However, she's over a head shorter than her rival, with short blond hair and a face to die for, and dressed in form-fitting black to boot. She thus challenges the willing suspension of one's disbelief. Yet there is something convincing about her, and only later did I realize what it is: she bears a certain resemblance to...Hillary Clinton. This may work after all.

Of the three other women taking men's roles, Nicole Maggi as Henry Percy the Elder affords a dash more belief. She's built tough, looks tough, and acts tough, like an NYPD cop. But even her best efforts at masculinity are sometimes thwarted in competition with the bushy-bearded and impetuous Ryan Patrick Ervin as Percy's up-and-coming son Hotspur.

Kristin Woodburn

Shaw to the Core

Worries about the ethics of policing the rest of the world? Concerns about scandals in our leaders' personal lives? Discomfort with the growing role of money and big business in politics? Sounds like a laundry list for a modern American political critic, doesn't it? It might be surprising to learn that this airing of dirty political laundry (and prediction of the future) was done by George Bernard Shaw in The Apple Cart, first published over 75 years ago, in 1929. His "political extravaganza" is being produced by Theater Ten Ten, and if you're a fan of the intricate playing of "the great game" of politics, then this uncannily pertinent classic may be worth taking a look at. Of course, Shaw's vision of the future in The Apple Cart sometimes flies a little wide of the mark. His future world has its share of misconceived predictions and even has a few features that are downright laughable today, such as the economic and military clout wielded by the League of Nations. Beyond just amusement, though, it's fascinating to look back at our past as seen in an earlier era's sense of the future, both for the perhaps understandable mistakes and, even more so, for the odd moments of eerie accuracy.

Shaw's fictional future chronicles the delicate maneuverings of the British cabinet and monarchy during a day of "crisis" for the country. King Magnus (Nicholas Martin-Smith) has offended the government by bringing his charismatic personality into an active role in politics. The debate rages over who truly rules in this democracy: the king, the government, the businessmen, or perhaps even (gasp) the people. Led by the prime minister (Damian Buzzerio), the bizarrely eccentric cabinet issues an ultimatum to the king, demanding that he become a constitutional monarch who only rubber-stamps legislation and lets his cabinet run the country "in the best interests of the people." If he refuses, they threaten to expose details of his less than saintly personal life to the press.

The Apple Cart is pure Shaw, top to bottom: the ideas fly thick and fast, while the dialogue slows to a crawl, with speeches bulky enough to choke a hungry elephant. Call it a comedy of ideologies