Social Message, Musical Mockery

Old-fashioned political storytelling and modern self-referential satire collide in Urinetown, the Musical. This witty, subversive show first made its mark at the New York International Fringe Festival, but it built enough momentum to take Broadway audiences and critics by storm during the 2001-2002 season, even stealing several major Tonys away from Thoroughly Modern Millie. The show lasted a miraculous two and a half years before going dark on the Great White Way. Now, the Gallery Players's recent incarnation proves it's quite the evergreen. Director Tom Wojtunik brings the show to Park Slope, though its setting is a "Gotham-like city, sometime after the Stink Years." Drought has allowed a corrupt alliance, led chiefly by corporate exec Caldwell B. Cladwell (Kim Shipley) and enforced by Officer Lockstock (Jon Frazier), to outlaw private toilets, charging all citizens for use of public facilities. Eventually, this brings about a revolution not unlike the rebellion against the empire in the Star Wars movies. The Han Solo of Urinetown is Bobby Strong (Joshua James Campbell), and his Princess Leia is the well-intentioned Hope Cladwell (Catia Ojeda), daughter of Caldwell B. The action escalates not long after Bobby and Hope recognize their affections for each another, when many of the other members of the rebellion catch on to her paternity and hold her hostage in a bartering power play.

Funny as it is, Urinetown echoes the socially conscious plays of the first half of the 20th century, particularly the work of Bertolt Brecht, the classic provocateur of self- and social reflection. Neither the show nor this production shies away from some serious undertones about absolute power and how easily citizens take what they have for granted. But with a clever score by Mark Hollmann and book by Greg Kotis (echoing The Threepenny Opera, which Kurt Weill wrote with Brecht), Urinetown packages itself in a far more palatable manner than most socially conscious works.

It does so by mocking other shows and theatrical conventions. Look carefully to see gentle ribbings of Fiddler on the Roof, Rent, Wicked, and, especially, Les Misérables (kudos to Ryan Kasprzak's winning choreography). No show, however, gets slammed by Urinetown more than Urinetown itself. Frazier, as Lockstock, also serves as the show's narrator, and throughout he lets the audience know that the show doesn't take itself seriously. "Welcome to Urinetown," he says. "Not the place, of course. The musical." Additionally, he admits that his character is safe from harm because, naturally, it cannot end without him.

Nor would one want it to. Frazier, with his dynamite baritone and perfectly timed sense of humor, is but one member of a highly professional production. Ojeda and Shipley share an amusing harmony as the conflicting Cladwells, and Campbell is a welcome discovery as the rebellion's charismatic leader. Kat Aberle succeeds in the deceptively simple—and sweet—role of Little Sally, the street urchin who has witnessed more than any little girl should.

One of the most compelling performances comes from Jennifer McCabe as Penelope Pennywise, one of the fools suffering Caldwell B. so gladly. Or does she? One of the charms of Urinetown is that while the story and music use many standard theatrical devices—a character proves not as harmful as expected; there's an eleventh-hour musical number reprise—it acknowledges these devices at every step, defining itself as a parable whose message is more important than the story that reels its audiences in.

And does it ever reel us in. So tight is Wojtunik's direction that every member of the excellent ensemble is completely focused in character and full of nuance, not just shtick. Perfect from start to finish, top to bottom, the Gallery Players's production doesn't just mock other great works of theater; it deserves a place in that canon all its own.

Brotherly Love

Footsteps and brandy bottles thump their way through The Brothers Karamazov, creating a rhythm of intimacy that might not have been easily accomplished in a space larger than the Mazer Theater. This quality combined with the musical choices and other sound effects forms a collectively effective soundtrack. The theater's intimacy also bolsters the production's other strong points. My first reaction to the set's wooden, muted tones was that I wanted to spend some time there, and because of the audience's proximity to the stage, I was able to. When the family members dine, we practically dine with them; when the brothers Alyosha (Nick Leshi), the monk, and Ivan (Joe Laureiro), the scholar, converse at a cafe, we are eavesdroppers. And when the third brother, Dmitri (Sean M. Grady), the free-living ex-soldier, tells Alyosha how he seduced his principled fiancée Katerina (Colette D'Antona), we are witness to both the riveting enacted flashback and the conspiratorial excitement with which he shares the tale.

It was during this scene that I began to be drawn into the story, but such moments in director Tal Aviezer's inspired theatricality unfortunately turned out to be an occasional occurrence in a nearly three-hour evening. Now if any play can merit the length of a Russian novel, it's probably one whose source material is literally a Russian novel. And it may be too much to expect that such a plotline could move quickly. But the length could have served to convey an epic piece in whose intricacies and detail an audience member becomes lost. Instead, it plods along, awkwardly paced and drowned in speeches. In the effort to cover every plot point and philosophical statement, the main ideas become diluted.

Certainly, the Red Monkey Theater Group has taken on an ambitious task. It could not have been easy to stage the complexities of this Dostoyevsky story, in which, after a long separation, the three Karamazov brothers are reunited, in part due to the plotting and whims of Feydor Karamazov (Mace Perlman), their lecherous, pleasure-seeking, alcoholic father—who also happens to be showering attentions on Grushenka (Angela Perri), the woman his son Dmitri loves.

As this happens, Ivan keeps a close watch on his mercurial father while contemplating leaving town again, and the elder monk, Father Zosima, tells a reluctant Alyosha that his proper place for the time being is outside the monastery and that he must re-enter his family's world. When the plot is exploded by a horrible, if apparently inevitable, crime, the characters are forced into a contemplation of the crime and their possible complicity in it.

Though almost all of the performances could have benefited from some shaping, the relationship between the brothers is conveyed nicely. The brothers have long lived apart, but when the rational Ivan—earnestly played by Joe Laureiro, declares resolutely that he loves his brother Alyosha, we know it to be true. Sean M. Grady exhibits the most range as Dmitri, a character who understands that he is in many ways a reflection of the father he despises. What is unfortunate is that while both Colette D'Antona and Angela Perri demonstrate crafted performances, they sometimes seem to be in a different play from the other characters.

The script, an adaptation by Carolyn J. Fuchs, could stand to be trimmed—at times it's repetitive and even contradictory. Some of these contradictions do have merit in offering clear glimpses into complex characters. When Feydor proclaims that "the Russian peasant needs beating" shortly after chastising the priests for living off the peasants' money, we see him for the empty, meanspirited person he is. And when Katerina says she loves Dmitri, though she knows he has treated her poorly, we know such things happen in life. But when, in an earlier scene, the same Katerina crassly demands, "Give me the money" immediately after having been described as both proud and delicate, it's just confusing. Such a line may work as irony in a novel, but it's a difficult problem for an actor to solve.

The director's notes in the program read, "The power of Dostoyevsky's words is such that they breach the barriers of time, language, and culture, straddling continental divides and over a hundred years of history, to, as Hamlet would say, 'hold the mirror up to nature.' " But it's not enough to have good intentions and strong source material. No doubt the story confronts pertinent modern issues about how to live, domestic crime, redemption, and the extent of familial bonds—and I respect the director for wanting to address them. I just would've liked to have seen myself in the mirror.

Old Friends

Irish college buddies Mick (Daniel Freedom Stewart) and Dermot (Gary Gregg) may have gotten older, but neither seems to have ever grown up. Mick, a charmer and womanizer, has a boring job but a lovely wife, whereas his socially awkward friend Dermot is a lonely postman always pining for companionship. Neither seems to have moved on from the best summer of their lives, the one right after college in 1989 when they secured visas to work as busboys in New York City. In the heartwarming and humorous character-driven play Trousers, written by Paul Meade and David Parnell and playing at 59E59 Theaters, Mick and Dermot are reunited 17 years after that summer, the last one they would spend together.

Completely out of the blue, Mick turns up on Dermot's doorstep with a suitcase full of clothes his ex-wife shredded before kicking him out of the house. Though much time has passed between them, Dermot immediately invites Mick to stay on his couch until he gets his life back together. Initially, their interaction is awkward and strained, but when Dermot starts to play a familiar old song on his record player, the two are on their feet and dancing to the same beat as if no time has passed.

Dermot is obviously a music enthusiast. His shelves are stuffed with hundreds of records, CD's, DVD's, cassettes, and music books, stacked high and positioned far enough apart from each other to create the illusion of a Manhattan skyline.

His lonesome existence adds a sad element to this comedy. We can see that he is a kind, likable, and fun person to be around, yet he consistently makes bad choices, hiding his head in the sand instead of dealing with his problems. Because his job ends in the early afternoon, Dermot spends most of his time thinking about a nurse named Linda whom he volunteered to D.J. for at a hospital fund-raiser. Until meeting Linda and reconnecting with Mick, Dermot's life was as empty as the symbolic green coffee mug lying on his table that he hopes to one day raise through the power of positive thinking.

But despite the underlying sadness in Dermot's life, the play never feels heavy, mainly because of the warm chemistry that Stewart and Gregg bring to their characters. Their silly conversations and goofy personalities are the glue that holds this story together.

At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that Mick's role in Dermot's life has not always been positive. Something happened in New York City to cause a rift between them, and the answer to this mystery has something to do with the plaid trousers they shared while clubbing in the Village. Oddly, Dermot has never thrown these trousers away, even though they have long since fallen out of style.

Fortunately, this mystery does nothing to damper the play's upbeat, feel-good mood. There is a joy in knowing that whatever separated these two so many years ago has not kept them from reuniting when they both need each other most. Time has not been able to change the fact that Mick and Dermot know, accept, and understand each another in a way no one else in the world has been able to.

George Patton once said, "Success is how high you bounce when you hit rock bottom." Meade and Parnell's production of Trousers shows us that with a friendship like Mick and Dermot's, you will always have a springboard waiting.

Mobster Rocker

In a 1971 interview, Sam Shepard famously remarked, "I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock 'n' roll star." Without a doubt, The Tooth of Crime is the play where he most actively pursues that goal. This "play with music in two acts" deliriously conflates and contorts two seemingly different career paths: that of rock 'n' roll musician and that of mobster. The story follows Hoss (Ray Wise), a mob boss and rock superstar whose career has reached its pinnacle. Bored by his success and worried about the small-time competition nipping at his heels, he wants to go on a "kill" (we later learn that this means to musically one-up someone) and seeks the advice of a seer named Starman (John-Andrew Morrison), who, along with his manager/lover/confidant Becky Lou (Jenna Vath), convinces Hoss to wait in his austere mansion to avoid making a mistake.

Unsatisfied, Hoss seeks the help of Galactic Jack (Charles Gideon Davis), a fast-talking D.J. who scientifically keeps track of who is on top of "the game" for mobster/musicians. Jack informs Hoss that he is the top rocker/killer around, but that there is a minor threat to his reign. Hoss jumps on the assertion that anyone could challenge him and begins to worry about the so-called "Gypsy killer." Finally, Hoss calls in his old partner in crime, Cheyenne (Cary Gant), to convince him to take their show back on the road after many years. After a tranquilizer from Doc (Raul Aranas) calms him, Cheyenne informs Hoss that a Gypsy killer by the name of Crow (Nick Denning) is gunning for his place.

The Tooth of Crime is not one of Shepard's best works. It spends far too long demonstrating Hoss's incapacity for action, and the entire first act consists of his repeatedly saying the same thing (I'm old, and my time at the top is nearly over) to an ever-revolving cast of characters who all try to quiet his fears, one after the other.

That said, La MaMa's revival does a wonderful job adding as much as possible to the starkly Greek-like text through excellent acting. Its efforts pay off, especially in the much more exciting second act, where Hoss battles Crow for control of his empire. The best part of the play comes halfway through the second act, where Hoss and Crow have a musical sound-off, much in the style of hip-hop competitions where each competitor takes turns verbally flaying his opponent.

Ray Wise adeptly plays the elder statesman whose time has come. In his ranting is the quiet resignation of someone who has been defeated by his own weariness. Jenne Vath is stellar as Becky Lou, especially late in the second act, where she performs a kind of theatrical exorcism of past demons. Nick Denning, as Crow, looks the part but seems a bit too geeky for an up-and-coming rock star.

The exceptional stage design by Bill Stabile features a large and slanting glass enclosure in which the band sits. The play itself is performed on top of the structure. The musicians are barely visible through tinted glass but can be fully heard as they play the original score written by Shepard himself, instead of the subsequent score written by T Bone Burnett, which Shepard generally prefers.

Despite a slow start, The Tooth of Crime rocks out, especially in the second act when the pace picks up considerably. For anyone who wants to be a rock 'n' roll star, it's a good place to pick up a few pointers.

Love Bites

It's October, and the scent of fall has brought about a taste for blood for several local theater companies. Among the horror-themed productions competing for your Halloween dollar this autumn is Heartbreak, the latest collaboration between Horse Trade Theater Group and its resident company, Edge of Insanity. This sprawling, vampire-on-vampire crime story has too many scenes and not enough blood (literally or otherwise), but an exotic cast and some quirky scriptwriter touches make it more than just your average overly ambitious Off-Off-Broadway show. The action starts in a bar in New Orleans, where a mysterious man broods over a glass of cranberry juice as the town is evacuating for Hurricane Katrina. He is there to see a friend, and one suspects that seriously unfinished business is at hand. A waitress throws herself at him for a ride, and he says that if he returns to the bar, she can ride with him.

Over the next several scenes, the stranger is nowhere to be seen, and instead we are in a world of vampires and prostitutes, a world that one would think is still pre-storm N'Awlins but, according to the script and press materials, is New York City. (It pays to read, obviously.) Location becomes irrelevant, as the focus is on a particularly nasty vamp named Sirius, whose insatiable bloodlust is upsetting the delicate human/vampire relations in the town. His "family" (the creatures of the night who sired and were sired by him) is angry, the vampire council (which governs the undead) is angry, and the slayers (who kill them) are expected to roll into town at any minute to stop Sirius's carnage.

The slayers do arrive about halfway through, in a nifty introductory scene set to the Backstreet Boys's "I Want It That Way." For those classicists upset about the idea of the protagonists arriving so late to the party, know that Steven, the mystery man from the first scene, is one of them, along with Trisha, a tough, wry brunette in the "Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer" mold, and a hilarious Shahrukh Khan (of Bollywood fame) wannabe named Neehad. They meet up with Helen, whose brother Andrew has been taken in and bitten by the bloodsuckers, and plan to save Andrew and kill Sirius. It's vamps versus humans, slayers, and other vamps as the dead bodies start piling up and characters begin to disappear.

To the producers' credit, the show sports a company large enough that only three parts are double-cast; however, two of the double-cast actors play large roles and don't do enough with their costuming to disguise the fact that the guys they play are not supposed to be identical twins. The function of this large ensemble is to have enough victims to sate the needs of the playwright, but it helps that the creators have assembled a melting pot's worth of ethnic diversity and performance styles for one of the more well-rounded casts below 14th Street (or, for that matter, above 14th Street).

As Sirius, Robert Yang has a great time with his Southern-accented vampire run amok. He's charming and dangerously unpredictable, and pulls off the crazy act with a respectable amount of showiness. Vedant Gokhale is all business as Sirius's "brother" Noah, and all silliness as the singing slayer Neehad. For the most part, the other actors are remarkably restrained and serious in their portrayals, though Solly Duran is effectively and frighteningly mercurial (if a bit slurry with her diction) as the lovelorn Fran.

Author/director Marc Morales tells a challengingly long and scene-change-filled story but seems to lack the production values and rehearsal time to make it work. The space was a black box with a few shoji screens and simple black furniture aided by colored lights, which worked for scenes in a basement, a bar, and a nightclub but didn't cut it at the abandoned amusement park that houses the slayers' hideout. (Even fairy lights strung up on the back wall to resemble a faraway Ferris wheel and roller coaster would have set up the location without the use of a fancy backdrop.) Lines were often lost by under-enunciating actors or blaringly loud music, and movement was a little too blocked. Most unfortunate, the final "battle" was barely seen; the characters spent more time talking about it before and afterward than actually doing it. Nobody likes a tease, guys.

With so many choices for spooky entertainment, a theater company's got to pull out all the stops with such a production. Despite its flaws, Heartbreak has promise, a few good gags, and a plot that keeps the audience tuned in. And for students, the price of a ticket is only a dollar more than that forgettable horror sequel that's in the theaters.

No Shrinking Flower

Deborah Louise Ortiz did not have an idyllic childhood. But in her sassy and poignant solo project Changing Violet, Ortiz—who both wrote and performs the piece—is a feisty force to be reckoned with. As Violet (her fictional alter ego), Ortiz outlines the years she spent growing up in the Bronx and Manhattan, where the only apparent constants were drugs and abuse. It's a perilous cycle, but Ortiz explores it with courageous honesty and conviction, deliberately locating other, more positive influences steadily humming in the background. To mitigate her heavy subject matter, Ortiz has framed her story within the makings of a disrupted fairy tale. When she first appears, she experiments with a more traditional opening. "Once upon a time," she intones, but then makes a face as if she's tasted something bitter. Instead, she divulges, "it all started with a song," as the strains of Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" launch us into her memories.

Indeed, under the adept direction of Terri Muuss, Ortiz virtually dances through her life, although her beatific smile and smooth movements belie the often violent and disturbing subject matter that follows. As the episodic scenes unfold, an eclectic grab bag of tunes (from hard rock to "The Brady Bunch") pipe in as the action moves through time and location.

Clad in a clingy black top and pants, Ortiz plucks various items of clothing from a clothesline, effectively playing dress-up to suggest her age and situation at seminal moments in Violet's life. Among other incarnations, we meet a young Violet in pigtails earnestly penning a letter to Santa Claus, a teenaged and romantic Violet obsessed with Elvis Presley, and a 20-something Violet in thrall to drugs and alcohol, desperately trying to block out life's misery.

Throughout, Violet resists the sexual advances of her increasingly abusive and drug-addicted father while persistently urging her mother to remove her from his influence. In a particularly compelling scene, Violet prepares for her wedding. "I feel just like Cinderella," she says with a sigh, but her new abusive husband perpetuates the cycle, leaving the young bride—who has abandoned a budding acting career—alone to care for their baby.

Although a few scenes are thinly drawn, for the most part Ortiz negotiates her material with grace and vigor. However, repeated instances of substance use and abuse fail to register as sensational—merely witnessing these actions is no longer as troubling as observing their harrowing aftereffects. Furthermore, the abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual) that Violet suffers, while frequently alluded to, could be examined in greater detail.

It would also help to see more of Violet's passion for performing, where her personality shines through most freely. One of the strongest scenes depicts Violet's first audition, where a Latino theater company immediately casts her against racial type (she is Puerto Rican, and asked to portray someone who is not). Here, Ortiz reveals Violet's spirit, humor, and moxie. Allowing more of these qualities to emerge would make Violet more vibrant—more of an actor than a reactor to the events in her life.

Ortiz is a captivating performer, and her deep, husky voice frequently erupts into a sandpapery laugh that is both brittle and endearing. She is a weathered yet wistful presence, and her generous delivery has an undeniable undercurrent of danger. Ortiz—who went on to become a performer and a playwright—fearlessly harnesses the spirit of a powerful woman just this side of disaster.

"When I dance, it helps me to forget," Violet confides, and her gyrations propel her away from a string of fallen Prince Charmings (her father, a boyfriend, even Elvis) as she searches for the little girl she left behind. It's astonishing that she (and Ortiz!) has endured this veritable lifetime of definitive experiences, and all before the age of 30. Dangerous Curves Productions (of which Ortiz is a partner) is devoted to helping women find their voices in theater, and Changing Violet—happy ending or not—is an enlightening contribution to that quest.

The Howling

Take Le Misanthrope, one of the most popular plays in the dramatic canon. Turn the protagonist into a werewolf. Write a sequel to that play, wherein this character takes revenge on his enemies by stalking them and slaughtering them like terrified rabbits. Also, make sure to write it in iambic pentameter with rhyming couplets. Good idea or bad idea? While it sounds like potential B-movie schlock, Le Lycanthrope mixes the right amount of satire and class to create an original and—surprisingly literary—interpretation of Moliere's French classic.

Le Lycanthrope is full of cleverness, from its title (lycanthropy is the condition of being, or thinking, that one is a werewolf) to the name of its co-production company: Loup Garou International ("loup garou" is the French term for werewolf). And what better situation to introduce this horror movie element into than one that claims that "men behave like wolves to each other"?

Written by Timothy McCown Reynolds, this story picks up after Moliere's play ends. Alceste, the misanthrope, has left Paris because he can't abide the shallow gossip and incessant flattery so prevalent in wealthy society. His decision to leave costs him his fiancée, but he is uncompromising in his values.

Le Lycanthrope opens on Halloween, with Alceste returning after several years alone in the woods. He is throwing a party and has invited both his friends and his enemies. Returning from the original play are Eliante, Philinte, Arsinoe, Clitandre, and Oronte.

Alceste's former lover, Celimene, is noticeably absent at the gathering, and Oronte has brought a new lady friend, the mysterious Alacoque. Alceste's guests ask him why he has returned, and why he seems so different. He shares his harrowing account of an attack by a strange wolf during a full moon; he survived and defeated the creature but is infected by the werewolf's curse. The partygoers have many reactions to this tale, but none believe it to be true. They soon find out that they should have paid more attention.

At its heart, the play is a well-researched, well-crafted homage to 17th-century comedy, full of bawdy humor and double entendres. The use of iambic pentameter was extremely ambitious on Reynolds's part, and he was able to insert contemporary idioms and comedy into many of the rhyming couplets. Occasionally, the actors seemed to struggle with the rhythmic mouthfuls. This occurred most often with the younger performers, in sections where the poetry got stilted. But the language didn't prove to be a problem for Alceste, as the part was performed by the playwright himself. He was clearly very at home with the character and the dialogue.

The play's biggest drawback is its length, with a running time of close to two and a half hours. Several scenes at the beginning of Act I dealt with lengthy exposition, both of the source material and of this new version. There was little physical activity during these scenes, and even with Reynolds's captivating stage presence, they tended to drag.

However, once clear of the establishing details, director Brendan Turk gave the show a more manageable tempo. He also drew strong performances from his entire cast, especially in the juicier (and bloodier) second act. Alceste's rivals, Clitandre and Oronte, formed a particularly noteworthy team: Bob Laine's Clitandre was giddy and shrill, while Joe Pindelski's Oronte was darker and more severe. Lovely costumes by Karen Flood were made even more sumptuous by Jeff Nash's resourceful lighting design. Nash used color and positioning to effectively add ambience to a simple, flexible set.

The subtitle for Le Lycanthrope is "A Revenge-Farce With a Monster-Movie Groove." It is clearly that. While best suited for an audience familiar with Moliere's comedy and an ear for metered verse, anyone looking for a fun treat to get in the Halloween spirit could check out this show and not feel tricked.

Punch and Circumstance: A World of Puppetry From Charleville-Mézières to Brooklyn

For most New York theatergoers, it's a challenge to get to a show if it's in Brooklyn, Queens, or even at an especially remote location on the Lower East Side. So for a Manhattanite like me, the incentive to travel to northeastern France to attend the 14th World Festival of Puppet Theaters had to be big. The deal was sealed not because I'd have the opportunity to study puppet and marionette theater more closely, or because I'd represent the United States at an international young theater critics seminar, or even to make use of the five years of French I took in middle and high school. Those things were part of it, but mostly I just wanted to eat some really good French bread.

Every three years, the town of Charleville-Mézières (most famous as the birthplace of the original angst-ridden teen poet, Arthur Rimbaud) is overrun by puppeteers. They fill the theaters, the hotels, and even the streets, where a tall person with an eagle eye can always catch a show. At this September's festival, more than 250 productions were going on; I saw 16 of them, plus snippets of sidewalk performances.

Prospective audiences should be aware that they'll need two things to get through the shows: a strong command of the French language and a strong pair of hands. While there are a handful of shows in English and some without text, it would be a shame to miss the country's own contributions. (I also attended some so-called "sans texte" shows, which did have important voice-overs in French.) The local theater patrons also give extended rounds of applause at the end of shows. It's not uncommon for the performers to take three or four curtain calls for an appreciative crowd, which can be frustrating for those who didn't like the show, or who just want to leave quickly at the end.

The most impressive shows at the festival were the following:

Spectacle Traditionnel (Theatre National des Marionnettes sur l'Eau; Vietnam), which incorporated a huge stage of water in a display of synchronized movement and rural life set to music. In Vietnam, water puppet shows have been performed since the 11th century, yet the show was just as beautiful, imaginative, and entertaining as it must have been a thousand years ago.

Vampyr (Stuffed Puppet; the Netherlands), a gothic tale of fathers, sons, and the undead set in a European campground. Puppeteer/actor Neville Tranter can manipulate and voice two puppets while acting as a third person in a scene, without skipping a beat. While the story line wasn't very strong, the performance and show design were fabulous. If John Waters decided to stage a second-rate Tim Burton tale with puppets, it would look like this.

Le Remède de Polichinelle (La Pendue; France), a traditional Punch (of Punch and Judy) story hosted by a lanky, motor-mouthed Frenchman with a mohawk. The traditional beats of a Punch show (including love, murder, and escape from the police) were all here, along with a subplot about the female marionnettiste's attempts to create a miracle elixir that will cure Punch of his devilish behavior. Children and adults were in fits over the show, which relied more on movement than on scripted dialogue. The puppeteers took their time with the action, allowing themselves to have fun with the puppets and take the events to exaggerated and hilarious levels.

The shows that didn't work out as well were often hindered by poor scripts and high concepts. A German production called Intimitäten (Intimate Things) by Iris Meinhardt was literally artistic navel-gazing, as a woman used a minicamera to project her insides onto voluminous petticoats as she discussed her search to know herself better as a person. An Italian production called L'oiseau de Feu (The Fire Bird) by Teatro Gioco Vita used way too much dance and not enough shadow puppetry in a wordless piece about love and captivity. (I knew that the show would be too long when it was listed at 50 minutes but a narrator explained the plot in less than two minutes.)

Energized by all of the imaginative puppet theater that's being done overseas, I decided to look into the local scene when I returned from France. I'd seen Avenue Q and The Lion King but was hoping that Off-Off-Broadway would offer its typical low-budget/highly inventive take on the genre. As luck would have it, I came back just in time for the September edition of Punch, a monthly puppet showcase at Galapagos Art Space curated by the Brooklyn-based puppet theater Drama of Works.

Featured in this installment were Matty Sidle's short puppet films (starring Unicycle Baby Guy), DoW's Sid & Nancy Punch & Judy, Ceili Clemens with a short shadow performance, the Josh and Tamra Show (puppet improv), and Exploding Puppet Productions with a scene from Die Hard: The Puppet Musical. The performances were all fairly short, which worked for some concepts better than others. ("Short films" and improv work best in small doses; a Punch show and a movie-based "puppet musical" get funnier the longer they run.)

The Josh and Tamra Show seemed to be the group most comfortable with its puppets; Josh (the puppeteer) was obviously enjoying playing with the vocal characterization and body language of his "actors." Ceili Clemens's shadow puppets were beautiful, and it was interesting to see them paired with an original song, but her presentation would have been more effective if she had sung and someone else had manipulated the shadows (or if the music had been prerecorded). Her singing was rushed, which made the movements rushed—a shame, since shadow puppets ought to linger on the screen longer so the audience has time to absorb and appreciate them.

Sid and Nancy (the “first couple” of punk) as Punch and Judy is a great concept, and Sid & Nancy Punch & Judy had a swell production design: a graffitied cardboard box as stage; two-dimensional, black and white, graphic novel-style drawings of the main characters; and hypodermic needles instead of bats. However, the scenes were weighed down by dialogue; more "show" and less "tell" would have made the action smarter and more interesting, and played to the puppets' strength (physicality) rather than their weakness (emotion).

One-note jokes were the theme of the Matty Sidle shorts and the Die Hard scene, with varying degrees of success. Unicycle Baby Guy is a bald-headed creature with a unicycle for a lower half that travels through space having brief encounters with other bizarre creatures. The shorts are filmed in black and white with intentionally fuzzy picture quality and last just long enough for the characters to use slang incorrectly and for UBG to be rejected or comforted by those he meets. Their humor is derived from the complete absurdity of the language and situations, and from their abbreviated length, since scenes seem to be cut off early and end abruptly, leaving audiences surprised and unsettled by what they just saw.

Die Hard: The Puppet Musical contains its concept in the title; the humor is in putting clichéd action dialogue into felt mouths and adding an unrequited love subplot that is addressed in song. It was unclear to me if this is being developed for a full-length project or will ultimately be presented in single-scene length to different audiences. The song was the best part of the scene—or, rather, the slide show of two terrorists engaging in different attacks that was shown during the song. The more the script strayed from the original film, the funnier it became.

On the whole, I was left with the impression that puppet theater is still very much in its infancy in New York. Theater companies have the means and ingenuity to create good-looking, unique puppets, but they haven't yet fully explored the possibilities of the form. At the World Festival of Puppet Theaters, there was only one American entry: Huber Marionettes, which provided the marionettes in the film Being John Malkovich.

While beautiful to look at and entertaining to watch, this was a very traditional show. Here's hoping that groups like the ones at Punch continue to develop and maybe add some American avant-garde puppet theater to the big stage in Charleville-Mézières.

Frog and Everyman

Anna Kiraly and Kuba Gontarczyk's Slow Ascent, a shadow puppet play accented with live action, is about one of those things that happens in the crazy world of corporate New York City. In spite of its title, it is anything but slow. Playing at the Theater for the New City as part of the Voice 4 Vision puppet theater festival, the show portrays a nameless Everyman who finds himself bored and nervous in his office building's elevator as it makes a dreadfully slow ascent. Stuck in this box, Everyman is confronted by a giant frog with a hysterical laugh eerily reminiscent of Peter Lorre. Frog, as this character wishes to be addressed, needs Everyman's help to fight a heroic battle to prevent the city's destruction by an earthquake of biblical proportions—that night. They must rendezvous after work, in the boiler room. Maybe it is a dream, or a fantasy—or not.

Kiraly and Gontarczyk tell an uncanny, amusing story, and their medium matches their message perfectly. Everyman, played with lovely physical subtlety by Kazu Nakamura, dances an eerie duet in a box-shaped white space with his two-dimensional, downsized "shadow" double: a translucent photograph of Nakamura in costume, disembodied and reassembled as a rod puppet, in a light box "elevator" car.

The light box is one of many different representations of the elevator that the show contains. Nakamura paces around on a white square mat that garishly stands out in the Theater for the New City's black box. It is a two-dimensional elevator space, and in it he seems as confined as a Marcel Marceau character feeling the boundaries of his invisible cube.

Photo rod puppets also represent Frog and a mysterious woman who crosses Everyman's path at work and wakes him from his dreams. The ascent and descent of the elevator is marked by a slow, perfectly vertical meteor trail of light streaking up and down the black pillar of a miniature skyscraper.

As Slow Ascent emphasizes, an elevator is a box in which stationary people are moved by an unseen external force. That is also an accurate definition of a puppet theater. Just as the corporate world drains color from its 9-to-5 denizens, so does Kiraly and Gontarczyk's transformation of Nakamura into his two-dimensional grayscale other self.

The only color in the show is the bright orange of the city in flames, in the Frog's apocalyptic vision, projected on the shadow theater screen. It is vivid and frightening, and takes on an alarming hyper-reality in contrast with the black, white, and gray world of the rest of the play.

Kiraly and Gontarczyk also take common phobias—of elevators and other enclosed spaces, frogs, earthquakes, and loneliness—and reproduce them in new, strange, and engaging forms. The incidental music, by Joemca, added to the mysticism of the proceedings, and the three puppeteers—Alissa Mello, Morgan Eckert, and Michael Kelly—keep the flat figures as animated as Nakamura is.

Slow Ascent uses puppetry, but it isn't your everyday Punch and Judy show. Kudos to Voice 4 Vision and Theater for the New City for bringing it to New York audiences.

For Artists at Voice 4 Vision, Puppetry Provides the Ideal Medium

What do you think of when you hear the word "puppets"? Bunraku? Punch and Judy? Jim Henson's Muppets, Mr. Rogers's hand-puppet royal family, or Tim Burton's Corpse Bride?

As those examples prove, puppet shows have engaged audiences of all ages and cultures, and the medium was and still is a part of pop culture. From Oct. 12-22, when the Voice 4 Vision puppet theater festival takes place at Theater for the New City, New Yorkers will have the rare chance to see a diverse selection of puppetry from around the country and the world, including Anna Kiraly's shadow puppet play Slow Ascent as well as The Traveler, a piece about vagabonds, traveling, and ghosts by the puppetry company Dramaton Theater.

Neither Kiraly nor Dramaton member Ken Berman began their artistic careers in puppetry: they both made serendipitous journeys to the medium. Kiraly began her career as a set designer in Europe and subsequently began designing puppets. She won a place in the prestigious NEA/TCG program for designers, jointly developed by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Theater Communications Group. She made contact with puppeteer Dan Hurlin, and he introduced her to the Puppet Lab at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, where she developed Slow Ascent. Kiraly continues to be strongly influenced by visual media, including visual art, film, architecture, and animation—the animation of Jan Svankmajer in particular.

Slow Ascent

Berman started out as an "unfocused" visual artist. His early work, he says, includes "strange kinetic object sculptures, portraits, and still lifes in a manner most commonly likened to Lucian Freud." At the same time, he played in "an angry punk-rock band" with his twin brother. Then, he "drew a marionette of a skeleton with a light bulb for a head, a halo of flies buzzing around the light." He and some friends formed a puppet performance collective called the Lost Art of Puppet Theater, which brought Berman's monster to life.

The first performance, he recalls, "satisfied every part of me," and puppetry became a key element in his subsequent work. After performing an early, short version of The Traveler at a Voice 4 Vision "puppet slam" open platform, Berman and Dramaton Theater developed the full-fledged version that you can see at this year's festival.

One of Berman's strongest influences is Victorian ghost stories. "They were written with a strong sense of psychology that symbolized the mysteries beyond the human psyche," he notes. In terms of visual style, his influences include German expressionism and surrealism. He also admires modern puppeteer Basil Twist, "because he uses atmosphere in the same way that we do—merging the environment—water, air, etc.—with the emotional and dramatic intention of the puppet."

For Kiraly, puppets are "works of art come alive"—or undead. A puppet, she says, "can look so real when animated" or "so abstract or lifeless," as Svankmajer often explores in his animations. "You see a lifeless puppet hanging, and then you see it assembled and animated, and as soon as it begins to move, you are ready to believe it's alive," she says.

Puppetry also allows experimentation with scale in ways that performances involving actors rarely do. In puppetry, Kiraly says, "you can play with scale to create dramatic compositions, more like in film shots. You choose your point of view, and it doesn't have to be fixed, as in theater."

She recalls that "designing puppets gave me a lot of freedom of expression." In this traditional art, she found room to innovate. She enjoyed "coming up with new types of puppets and experimenting with animation techniques." She also appreciates puppets' apparent ability to transcend limitations that human performers must observe. "Puppetry and animation are great genres," she observes, "because they don't even have to deal with as much reality as the physical body of the actors and its physical limitations."

In Slow Ascent, the puppets are shadow puppets— specifically, as Kiraly explains, "digital printouts of photo-realistic images." She thought they were "a perfect choice to show how dreams can be even more confusing when seemingly real," while shadow puppetry allows her to "explore the chemistry of opposites." For Kiraly, nearly any object can be transformed into a puppet, "anything from a bag to an elaborate marionette." As she points out, "It's what you want to say of how you 'animate' them that really counts."

Slow Ascent

Berman developed The Traveler because he wanted to say something about vagabonds, including wandering spirits, and human psychology. "Ghosts have always been a strange obsession with me in particular because they inhabit some world beyond ourselves," he says. "They are much more informed of the entire journey of life. Yet at the same time, ghosts are caught in a limbo that hinges on a singular event: they cannot move forward past their—or others'—transgressions. Dramaton's shows have always set up a series of questions about compulsions, passions, and self-discovery—in this way, I think the lexicon of ghosts and the supernatural is an extremely entertaining way to approach this subject matter."

Puppetry is a perfect medium for this theme, because "the disembodied figure" of the puppet "becomes metaphorical for the state of transience that the characters inhabit," Berman says. "Human actors simply cannot capture a concept so literally as a puppet."

Today, Kiraly points out, "puppets appear everywhere, from TV to Broadway shows and recently even the Metropolitan Opera. … It is getting the recognition it deserves, and artists are beginning to see how amazingly versatile puppetry is and how expressive puppets can be." At Theater for the New City during the next two weeks, you can see this versatility and expression firsthand.

Visit the Voice 4 Vision Website at http://www.voice4vision.org.

Death Watch

A clown, a playwright, and an actress wait to die in a Nazi hospital that, through the magic of theater, exists simultaneously in the present and the 1940's. A connection between Nazi Germany and the contemporary New York theater scene is a tricky and potentially offensive one to make, but Visible Theater's intrepid production of Krankenhaus Blues attempts it nonetheless. Krankenhaus brings together Fritz, Bruno, and Anka, three characters who have been selected for the Third Reich's scientific experiments on "lower-caste" citizens (two are physically disabled and one Jewish). Yet when we first meet Bruno, he is a homeless, out-of-work theater professional in today's New York. Bruno's first monologue recounts a dream of being imprisoned in a Nazi hospital called the Krankenhaus. Soon enough, he actually finds himself there, with little explanation. Nor is there really any need for one; playwright Sam Foreman has constructed a free-form narrative that seems more interested in characterization and style than temporal logic.

Bruno, Fritz, and Anka mull over their wasted careers, in both New York theater and Weimar theater, and they fall madly in and out of love with each other, almost at random. The scenes play out as vignettes, each one endeavoring to connect the plights of abused, forgotten people in both time periods. As characters are gradually killed off by a looming Nazi nurse (an uncredited cameo by Angela DeMatteo, Visible Theater's managing director), the others barely seem to remember them after they've gone.

The three-person cast skillfully conveys the play's farcical and bleak material, along with a few snatches of sung music that were chillingly composed and performed by solo violinist Helen Yee. As Anka, Christine Bruno comes off as both seductive and repellent—she is an institutionalized, handicapped woman who wishes her father had acted on his sexual attraction toward her. The role is no easy task for an actress, but Bruno merrily revels in such social taboos.

Joe Sims's performance as the clown Fritz is a unique exercise in compounding stereotypes. "I'm a crippled, black queer with a background in commedia and mime living in Nazi Germany," he says early in the play. "Everything about me is political." Fritz gets most of the show's laughs by deadpanning his lines, until his impassioned oration toward the end of the play, which Sims delivers with superb precision.

Bruno, played capriciously by the fast-talking Bill Green, serves as Foreman's mouthpiece for commenting on the Holocaust, the theater industry, and society in general. Also the closest thing to a "lead" in this play, the character energetically drives the action forward by suggesting playful activities (like acting out a skit) or making doomed sexual advances toward Anka.

Donna Mitchell's direction is subtle and crisp. There is no room for elaborate staging in the Dorothy Strelsin Theater. Coupled with this spatial limitation is the fact that some of the actors actually are disabled. This requires characters to cross the stage only when they absolutely must, and Mitchell and the cast make every physical movement count.

The theater's compact space also adds a lot to the piece's claustrophobia. Mitchell makes ample use of the theater's intimacy; characters can sit in seats with audience members and are free to address them directly.

Kimi Maeda's minimal scenic design is certainly effective, but I found myself wanting a more striking representation of the Krankenhaus. A few chairs and a small table suggest many things, and perhaps that was the idea: to accommodate the script's time jumping. But without a splash of signifying color or a distinct piece of furniture, the line between suggesting "anywhere" and suggesting "nowhere" becomes very thin.

Paul A. Jepson's lights are efficient but unremarkable; the theater's playing space is simply too limited, and the lighting grid is too close to the stage. The good news is that everyone had an up-close look at Kimi Maeda's richly detailed costumes. All three characters wear some variation of a striped, concentration camp uniform; Bruno's is faded and torn, Fritz wears the pants under his robe, and Anka's pants are cut off into shorts.

Unfortunately, Krankenhaus Blues suffers when Foreman indulges himself in the play's "theater commenting on theater" formula. As Fritz expresses in his final monologue, the play deals with homelessness, genocide, and incest, but the characters don't really reflect on those things; instead, they use them as tools for reflecting on theater and art. At the end, though, Fritz manages to deflate some—but not all—of the play's self-important pretensions by attacking the structure and style of the play itself.

Despite its heavy-handedness, Krankenhaus Blues is raucous in its political incorrectness and at times blazingly clever. The three-person cast deserves most of the credit for this production's vitality and zing.

Working Girl

As a financially comfortable woman, successful writer, and college graduate, social critic Barbara Ehreneich had no idea what to expect when she accepted an assignment to go undercover as a member of the working class. After all, she wondered, how hard could it be for someone with her credentials and education to wait tables? In Joan Holden's touching and comical dramatization of Ehreneich's best-selling nonfiction book Nickel and Dimed, we see just how difficult it really is. The play opens with failed attempts by Barbara (Margot Avery) to learn the computer ordering system in a fast-food restaurant called Kenny's, while the cook barks commands and impatient customers harass her for being too slow with their orders.

The stage is wonderfully constructed to lend itself to the diversity of Barbara's jobs. A stiff-looking cot sits in its center waiting to be tidied by Barbara and the other Economy Inn housekeepers. Behind that is a toilet she cleans as a Magic Maid, and to the left is a counter where she folds clothes as a Mall-Mart associate. But the most effective staging technique used to express the book's theme is the long, rectangular chalkboard suspended above the stage, where characters write the hourly wage Barbara is getting paid in each new job she undertakes.

Holden writes that "the story is both serious and funny," and the actors deliver on this premise, playing their multiple roles as minimum-wage workers with humor, wit, and charisma. A sassy housekeeper (Cherelle Cargill) works in slow motion, ridiculing Barbara for her speed when they get paid by the hour, not the room. Jeremy Beck plays several quirky characters, but is especially dead-on in his portrayal of a devout Mall-Mart manager who balks when Barbara writes that she moderately agrees with the statement "there's room in every corporation for a nonconformist."

Credit must also go to the live band, Chip Barrow, Paul Fess, and John D. Ivy, whose performances define the mood. When Barbara takes a second job to pay the rent, the musicians burst into an uplifting rendition of the Chumbawamba song "Tubthumping" ("I get knocked down, but I get up again") before blending into a slower and sadder "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up again" as Barbara joins the staff of a nursing home for a meager $7 an hour.

The song transitions are symbolic of the life the low-wage workers lead in this play, one that starts with optimism and hopes that are quickly crushed as reality sets in.

3Graces Theatre Company clearly has its heart in this production, even going so far as to have its actors live one week on a minimum-wage salary in New York City, restricting them to a budget of $11.16 a day for all purchases. The playbill is also filled with stories, quotes, comic strips, and statistics about the minimum wage and the federal poverty line.

Still, looking at the bright side of things, one of the playbill's comic strips helpfully points out that despite the hardships low-wage workers face, they can always take solace in the fact that "nobody will ever mug you for your paycheck."

Sister, Sister

It takes playwright Krista Vernoff just 80 minutes to capture nearly two centuries of the combined heartache, longing, and suffering endured by her sextet of female characters in the rich family drama Me, My Guitar and Don Henley, playing at the 14th Street Y. Vernoff—a television veteran who recently scored an Emmy nomination as head writer of Grey's Anatomy—has fashioned a moving evening that cannot be easily shoehorned into any particular genre or dismissed in a single sentence. It is complex, involved, and beguiling from start to finish. It is also, in the skillful hands of director Peter Paige (a stage and screen performer best known for Showtime's Queer as Folk), an impeccably guided production.

Leah (Tara Franklin) is a musician whose life has taken her up and down the West Coast, though she has always remained tethered to her dysfunctional, noncommunicative family. It takes a while to connect all the dots, but eventually Vernoff dispels any confusion by breaking down the fourth wall and doing the familial geometry. Leah is the product of her father, Bob (never seen onstage), and her mother, the ditsy, self-righteous Isis (Jennifer Dorr White). Bob and Isis were married after the birth of Leah's older sister, Janelle (Kaili Vernoff, the playwright's sister).

Complicating matters is the fact that Bob ran off with Isis after abandoning his girlfriend at the time, Judy (a wonderfully subtle SuEllen Estey), who was pregnant. Eventually, Judy gave birth to the responsible Sarah (Stephanie Nasteff), who never met her birth father or his new family until she was 13. By that time, however, Bob had divorced Isis, largely because he was not Janelle's father—a revelation Isis had no problem telling a 9-year-old Janelle. Although these events date back to 1969 (the play's events take place during the spring of 2001), their ramifications run deep, having sent the three half-sisters in divergent directions.

All roads converge back home in California, however, as Bob is diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The women reunite at his deathbed to make peace with him and each other, including Bob's current wife, Sunny (Mary Elaine Monti), a former stand-up comedian in a serious state of denial about her husband's health. All of the cast members take turns filling in details of their character's history and detailing their thoughts to the audience, and this confessional sensibility pays off.

Henley—the title comes from a song of his that Leah repeats during the show, saying, "There are three sides to every story/Yours, mine, and the cold, hard truth")—could have worked equally well as a teleplay, but the beauty of the show is that Vernoff's characters speak from the heart. The results are often for the worse, but her portrait of sad, angry, lonely, yearning people is a vital one and would be universal in any genre.

One major factor that makes Henley work is how meticulously crafted it is in everything that Paige and Krista Vernoff do. Seemingly throwaway lines and simple jokes are repeated later on, with disarming resonance. All of the actors remain onstage in character, even when not featured in the scene at hand: one can catch Dorr White as Isis ushering Estey, as the more wallflowerish Judy, to move aside so she can sit on her stool. These details do not take anything away from the show if missed, but they help energize it.

Of course, the stellar members of this distaff cast are to be commended as well. Franklin, with her distinctively sweet voice, does a wonderful job as the ringleader of this circus, caught in the middle of a passive-aggressive, lifelong war among her relatives. Nasteff, also an executive producer of the play, Estey, and Monti are all terrific at embodying their conflicted feelings; in this play, what the characters do not express is as important as what they do say. Dorr White and Kaili Vernoff, in particular, prove to be quite nimble in standout roles as strong women at odds with each other.

Paige ends this sentimental show by playing "The Rainbow Connection," a bittersweet rumination on the ties that bind that strikes a chord with everyone's inner child. It's the last, perfect choice in a show full of them.

Black and White

First produced in 1859, just two years before the dawn of the Civil War, Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon is a fascinating piece of theater history. It is an object of interest for a variety of reasons: the depiction of interracial romance in the age of slavery, the carefully balanced portrayal of North and South, and the first known onstage use of a camera, among them. A huge success at the time of its initial productions, the play is rarely performed now. This is in part because the tropes and structure of 19th-century melodrama lend the text a difficult to escape museum-theater mustiness. At its best, Alex Roe's production at the invaluable Metropolitan Playhouse overcame this creakiness, but it too often succumbed to the stiff formality of good-for-you art. Still, while "museum theater" is generally used as a derogatory term, museums are a crucial site of exploration for our shared cultural history.

The setting of the play is Terrebonne, a financially beleaguered plantation in Louisiana. Its owner having died, the plantation is about to be auctioned off in order to settle crippling debts. Mrs. Peyton (Wendy Merritt) is the widow of the judge who founded the plantation. Her nephew George (Michael Hardart) has recently arrived from Paris, where he has spent the past several years. Mrs. Peyton is worried about what will become of the life she has built at Terrebonne, and even more so about what will become of her remaining family members and slaves, for whom she has great affection.

Her greatest affection seems to be for Zoe (Margaret Loesser Robinson), the illegitimate daughter of the judge, whom Mrs. Peyton has graciously kept on as a member of the family. George is immediately attracted to Zoe, not realizing that she is an octoroon, the daughter of a slave woman who was herself of mixed race. It soon becomes clear that nearly every other man who passes through the plantation is smitten with her too.

Zoe's status as an object of forbidden desire drives the escalating crisis in the play. The villainous Jacob M'Closky (David Lamb), who has schemed his way to half-ownership of Terrabone, plans to buy the rest of the plantation at auction. Through a series of melodramatic devices, it is revealed that Zoe herself will be auctioned, her status as a freed woman invalidated by a legal complication and her chastity therefore threatened by M'Closky's machinations.

History lesson aside, the fun of the play is in the convoluted series of complications that drive the plot. Letters are found in hidden compartments, photographic evidence of a murder is discovered at the last possible moment, and romantic intrigues are pursued on wooded paths. Roe staged the action skillfully, never letting the small stage feel overcrowded by the large cast. The design elements, most notably Melissa Estro's costumes, effectively evoked the prewar South.

Stylistically, though, this production walked an uneasy line between the heightened theatricality of melodrama and a more naturalistic approach. The more successful moments were the larger ones. Women swooned and villains sneered. On the night I attended, several audience members were familiar enough with the form to add to the fun by audibly hissing when M'Closky revealed his despicable plot. Roe undoubtedly wanted us to feel for these characters and so toned down some of the more romantic scenes, but this resulted in an inconsistency of tone and pace.

The acting itself was somewhat uneven. Particularly strong were Wendy Merritt, charming as Mrs. Peyton, and Arthur Acuna as Wahnotee, a noble (but alcoholic) "savage." Acuna threw himself into the potentially offensive role with relish while winning both sympathy and laughter with the timing, grace, and physical discipline of an accomplished performer. Alia Chapman infused the relatively small role of Grace, one of Terrebonne's slaves, with a fierce focus and dignity. Mike Durkin, in an uneven performance as overseer Salem Scudder, delivered some of the production's finest moments.

A surprising number of the actors had trouble filling the intimate space vocally, and the dialect work was inconsistent. Several performers succumbed to the panicked flurry of overacting that tends to accompany barely remembered lines. I saw the opening night performance, and I am almost certain that this mostly strong cast will have settled more fully into their performances by now.

Despite its failings, The Octoroon remains a fascinating document of our cultural history and a chastening reminder that popular entertainment has often engaged courageously with the most difficult issues of any given time. This is the first installment of the Metropolitan Playhouse's "Black and White" season, a commendable project that deals not only with issues of race but also with the dangers and temptations of thinking about complex issues in absolute terms.

(A warning: the interesting program notes by dramaturge Peter Judd reveal the ending of the plot; you might not want to read them until after the show.)

Bodies and Minds In Motion: Visible Theater Merges the Personal and Political

New York magazine theater critic Jeremy McCarter recently lamented the lack of truly "political" theater in the city. Instead of well-calibrated incendiary writing, all too often he sees "issue" plays, dramas that reinforce liberal ideals while effectively preaching to the choir.

"A genuinely political play," he maintains, "does more than affirm. It doesn't ask for our attention, it demands our engagement—moral, emotional, and intellectual. Paradoxically, it draws us out of ourselves to take us into ourselves, forcing us to rethink what we think we know."

With the goal of "bringing the anarchy of life to the discipline of the stage," Visible Theater, founded in 2000 by Krista Smith, is a company with the resources and ideals to both demand and expand the attention of its audiences. Devoted to the development and deployment of ambitious, incisive, and inclusive theater projects, Visible is not content to merely present issues; instead, its members wrestle with preconceptions and misconceptions about the world, the country, and the body. In doing so, Visible has become not only one of New York's most provocative artistic companies but also one of its most nurturing.

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

A variety of grants and generous supporters have allowed Smith to focus on the intense acting training, script development, and workshops that are her chief priorities. ("My true love is the process, not the destination," she says.) Now, however, the company is poised to showcase two of its collaborative ventures simultaneously at the Abingdon Theater Complex this month: Krankenhaus Blues, a darkly comic play that had a successful run last year at the now closed Blue Heron Arts Center, and True Story Project: SEX!, a storytelling endeavor inspired and informed by real-life sexual experiences.

Krankenhaus Blues has become something of a showpiece for Visible, shaped within a lengthy gestation period of active collaboration. Sam Forman's play, an exploration of disability, genocide, and show business set against the backdrop of the Holocaust, reflects Smith's objective to make theater that will "allow silenced voices to speak and send a ripple of shared humanity into the universe." The production reunites director Donna Mitchell with actors Christine Bruno, Bill Green, and Joe Sims, who return to reprise their acclaimed performances. Helen Yee composed the original music, which she performs throughout the show.

Unlike the case with many Off-Off-Broadway productions, which are often thrown together in a few weeks, Visible has had the luxury of extended incubation periods, and Krankenhaus Blues was no exception. Smith, an actress, director, and vocal advocate for the disabled, originally commissioned the play from Forman with her company specifically in mind. Her proposal: a dramatic exploration of the treatment of the disabled in Germany during the Holocaust.

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

"She thought, and rightly so, that disabled people had been left out of a lot of the work that's been done about the Holocaust, and—to our knowledge—there hasn't been a play about disability and genocide produced in New York," says Forman, who spent time in Berlin to familiarize himself with the region's history and culture. A friend of Smith's, he worked for two years on the script, embellishing and tweaking the characters based on the cast's improvisational skills during an intense rehearsal period.

According to Mitchell, another friend who was invited into the project early on, the play focuses on the first (and lesser-documented) wave of Holocaust victims, which included the disabled, homosexuals, artists, and Gypsies—disenfranchised individuals who were snatched from their families and taken to German hospitals (called a Krankenhaus), where they were subjected to torture and experiments before being murdered.

Rather than compact the facts neatly into a strictly linear and prescriptive narrative, Forman took a broader, looser approach. "Donna didn't discourage me from bringing my own modern, New York, ironic sensibility to [the show]," Forman remembers. "We really tried to stay away from the historical docudrama and ended up instead with something much more personal and peculiar to our own experiences."

In this way, the creation of Krankenhaus Blues became an exercise in free association and artistic discovery for those involved. "Jokes, songs, dirty sex talk, agitprop, ghost stories, and personal memories" all found their way into this "odd hybrid of a world," says Forman. A skilled comic writer, he lets his humor percolate within the script as the action traverses back and forth through time, space, and consciousness.

As the performers and creative team compiled their stories and experiences, they generated a sense of history both shared and individual—a look at how a huge event (here, the Holocaust) can affect people's lives in such profound yet disparate ways. "I think the show gives people a lot to talk about: our individual relationships to history and world politics, people's sense of powerlessness, [and] the importance of human connection in this crazy and cruel world," Forman says. "The play deals a lot with feelings of alienation and 'otherness,' and people reaching out towards each other across the big, scary void."

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

He continues, "On a personal level, I think it's been important to write these roles for physically disabled actors that are a little 'outside the box.' I know a lot of disabled actors have been frustrated in the past with the sorts of roles that are usually available to them on the stage and screen, and I think a company like Visible is doing a very good thing by commissioning writers to create challenging material for these very talented actors."

Social exclusion certainly applies to the theater and entertainment industries, and Visible's performers—many of whom are disabled themselves—have both noted and appreciated Visible's commitment to acknowledging and celebrating their lives.

"I want people in the theater to see me onstage and have to completely re-evaluate what it means to be human," jokes Christine Bruno. (It's actually one of her lines in the play.) Bruno, who first met Smith when the two were students at the Actors Studio Drama School in the late 90's, plays Anka, an overwrought actress with a father fixation. And although she makes light of her character's lofty theatrical goals, Bruno's performance very directly challenges notions of reality and humanity as Anka sings and slinks her way into dialogue with the other characters.

For Bruno, who is disabled, Krankenhaus Blues presented an opportunity to expand audience members' experiences with disability. "I want them to understand that disabled people are much more similar to nondisabled people than they are different," she says. "We experience a full complement of emotions, not just sadness, longing, and the pursuit of our place in the world. We're neither victim nor inspiration. We can be funny, sexy, sexual, wacky, sarcastic, arrogant, rude, and messy—like everyone else."

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Categorizing people may be convenient, but labels imply limitations, even when created by ostensibly charitable institutions and individuals. Determined to complicate and disrupt troubling archetypes, "Visible is groundbreaking in that we are not working towards inclusion, we just are inclusive," Smith says.

And although such lengthy development periods can be prohibitive (in terms of regular ticket buyers, for example), it's still the only way Smith can imagine working. Her plans for the company are similarly nurturing and assiduous. She and her husband will continue to host artists' retreats outside New York (the last one was in Maine) and continue to foster dynamic work in the Visible LAB. Despite the company's successes, "I am not interested in expanding or building an empire," she vows. "Visible will just continue to be 'boutique-like' in its structure, focusing on cultivating artists and developing new works."

Visible's approach to theater sprang directly from Smith and Mitchell's experiences acting together in a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Improvisational in nature, the company primarily employs Konstantin Stanislavski's Active Analysis technique (along with selected theories from acting teacher Sanford Meisner and the Viewpoints technique) to provide a grounded yet spontaneous environment for its performers.

The Visible LAB, which meets weekly, offers artists an opportunity to experiment and refine their performances in a safe and supportive environment. "It is a holistic, integrative approach to freeing the instrument," Smith says, and participants work on preparation—including meditation and yoga—as well as scene study and improvisation work.

"Rehearsing a play in this manner brings a sense of organized chaos to the stage," Smith says. "It invites the actors to be spontaneous within the given circumstances of the play."

After attending a storytelling festival, Smith was prompted to incorporate that technique into Visible's work as well. True Story Project: SEX! is the third original production to evolve from the sharing of personal stories, and many of the tales were further developed within Visible's monthly Writing Circle.

"It was clear to me that autobiographical storytelling was an incredible vehicle for being heard and for connecting," Smith says. "The work is honest, bold, and incredibly moving."

Storytelling was also a vital component in the genesis of Krankenhaus Blues, and the actors were encouraged to explore their own experiences as they developed their characters.

Bruno, who also participates in the Visible LAB, compares her work in the LAB to the rehearsal process for Krankenhaus Blues, which, she says, was "built on a spirit of improvisation, relaxation, following impulses, and developing your artistry from a place of truth with an available body and an open mind and heart."

Joe Sims, who plays the sardonic clown Fritz in Krankenhaus Blues, became involved with Visible on a dare from a friend, who invited him to participate in a workshop for the True Story Project.

"I was totally blown away by what I found there," he remembers. "It really shattered my previous conceptions about acting and theater." His performance in Krankenhaus Blues marked his debut in a full-length production.

He also credits Visible for its commitment to exposing deeper truths onstage. "It's really hard to be honest about yourself," he says of his work in the True Story Project. And because Forman created Fritz with Sims specifically in mind, it is impossible for him to hide behind a truly "fictional" character. "In some ways it's tough going still," he says, "but Visible creates a space for working that is challenging but safe."

Sims, who is also disabled, savors the apocalyptic environment of Krankenhaus Blues. "The play takes place the moment before dying," he says, "but it's such a full moment. What led them up to that moment? What led them to the brink? That's so important, because those events should never be forgotten, lest we have to relive them again today."

The anachronism and irreverence of Krankenhaus Blues create much of its humor but also reveal the Holocaust as an extreme example of a very contemporary phenomenon: the way many people work to distance themselves from those who aren't "normal." As she discussed the show, director Mitchell was quick to point out the current cultural obsession with irony, and the ways in which many contemporary artistic projects take an ironic stance as a means of holding truth at arm's length. Sarcasm and self-referential humor, it seems, provide sturdy protection against facing reality directly and honestly.

In Krankenhaus Blues, irony becomes less of a shield and more of an instrument to strip characters down to their essential truths, exposing the audience's elementary expectations and, as critic Jeremy McCarter hoped, prompting them to "rethink what we think we know."

Although Visible may be one of the few companies to be creating political theater at this cultural moment, the focus remains more on inciting revolution within individual lives than on spectacular theatrics. Smith pursues change on a personal level—artist by artist, story by story. And it's theater that is meant to be not just watched or performed but lived.

"Visible Theater is one of the few theaters in the country that truly represents the full complement of what you see out on the street, at least in any big city," Bruno says. But, she adds, "it's not a disability-specific theater company. You'll see people of all colors, ethnicities, genders, sexual persuasions, disabled and nondisabled, mixing it up and living their lives."

Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Visit Visible Theater at http://www.visibletheatre.org.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

The work of Terayama Shuji, a Japanese playwright and filmmaker who died in 1983, has been widely neglected in the United States. Despite the controversies surrounding those works that did appear here, at venues like La MaMa and at various international theater and film festivals; despite his continuing cult figure status in Japan; and despite the museum bearing his name in Misawa City, he has remained a marginal figure in this country. His work—alternately nostalgic and iconoclastic, romantic and brutally transgressive—is considered by some to be simply too "Japanese" to be embraced in the States. Theater is not a mass medium, however, and the South Wing's new Death in Vacant Lot! doesn't need to capture the "public" imagination to achieve success on its own terms. DIVL! is based on Denen ni Shisu (variously translated as Death in the Fields, Death in the Country, and Cache Cache Pastoral), a 1974 film considered by many to be Terayama's masterpiece. Adapted, translated, and directed by South Wing Artistic Director Kameron Steele, it is a memorable calling card from a remarkable young company determined to carve itself a niche in 21st-century avant-garde theater.

Like the film on which it is based, DIVL! at first appears to be a surreal story about a young man, Lukas (Nate Schenkkan), and his frustrated desire to escape his provincial hometown. From a traveling circus to a midnight tryst with a next-door neighbor, Lukas's world is represented in a highly stylized and intensely theatrical manner. Actors play multiple roles, awaiting entrances and exchanging costume pieces in full view of the audience, stepping in and out of the onstage band, and providing sound effects for each other's mimed actions.

The plot and style explode, however, when it becomes clear that the play we are watching is the creation of the same man 30 years later (Chris Oden). The adult Lukas is making a film about his coming of age but is dissatisfied with and skeptical of the way his fictionalized past has been presented. (It is unclear why this wasn't reframed as a play within a play rather than a suspiciously play-like film within a play.) He dismisses his cast and sets out to examine his memories, and these framing moments are presented in a far more naturalistic style than the carnival-esque memory sequences.

The narrative threads twist together when child Lukas and adult Lukas confront each other and attempt to rewrite history by engaging in the unstable and creative process of memory. Young Lukas is sent back to act out more "accurate" scenes from the author's remembered past and, ultimately, to try to radically revise it. If author and character can fundamentally alter their shared memory, can they subsequently alter the present and future as well?

This all sounds like heady and potentially pretentious stuff, but, with very few exceptions, Steele keeps the action surprisingly entertaining even as he delves into the philosophical vagaries of Terayama's text. Often funny, occasionally frightening, and beautifully staged throughout, DIVL! takes full advantage of its excellent cast. The spectacular athleticism and seemingly boundless creativity of these actors is a testament to Steele's sure touch as a director and also to the impact of Suzuki and Viewpoints training methods on contemporary actors around the world. Standout performances included Schenkkan's wide-eyed Lukas, Jessica Green's hilarious and poignant Lady Inflatable, Jill A. Samuel's hysterically Freudian One Eye, and Catherine Friesen as the victimized and vengeful Rachel.

Mariana Marquez's spare light and set design are integrated seamlessly with the uncredited sound design to shape the rough but wonderful temporary space at 15 Nassau Street. The onstage band also composed original music for the production, working from J.A. Ceasar's soundtrack to the original film. The result is fascinating mix of rock opera and experimental/electronic music that creates a haunting atmosphere.

The South Wing's press materials are full of self-aggrandizing pronouncements and unapologetic name-dropping that attempt to place Steele among a pantheon of experimental theater artists ranging from Terayama to Tadashi Suzuki to Robert Wilson. But DIVL! makes enough of a statement on its own to merit significant attention.

Of all its many successes, the production's greatest achievement is to draw attention to the fact that all theater is site-specific and ephemeral. This play isn't set in a small town or on a film set: it's set in the theater in which it is performed. As characters onstage grapple with the violent tension between memory and history, the window behind them looks out onto the man-made canyons of lower Manhattan's financial district, just a few feet away from a great scar on the city's collective memory.

More than any abstractions evoked by projections of Terayama's tanka poems above the stage or musings about the loss of cultural innocence embedded in the press release, this window onto the outside world makes explicit the connection between the histories of individuals and the history of the world in which they live.

Culture Collision

Can racial identity overpower one's individuality? Has globalization already glossed over the subtle beauties of cultural diversity? Are all Korean people fundamentally evil? Glib questions like these are posed, evaluated, and ultimately dismissed in playwright Young Jean Lee's staggering and luminously defiant new play, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, which opened this week at the HERE Arts Center.

Lee also serves as director of this autobiographical production, which traces a somewhat dotted line through her own heritage as a Korean-American as the play ponders the strong, culturally Korean aspects of her upbringing. In counterpoint is the influence of American culture, in the form of an insipid and self-absorbed relationship between two white Americans. There is no real story line; instead, Lee presents us with chaotic impressions of Korean and American culture and repeatedly crams them into intensely funny scenes.

Representing her Korean side are three women clad in traditional schoolgirl chima jeogori dresses (vibrantly designed by Colleen Werthmann), who act out skits in Korean. This chorus only sporadically speaks or sings in English, but it is clear that the true nature of the women's revelry is much darker than their attitudes suggest. Nearly all of the blocking in these segments suggests self-destruction—a masochistic instinct that Lee quite angrily suggests might be present in all minorities.

Stuck in the middle of Lee's culture collision is a character named in the playbill as "Korean American," who has deep ties to both societies. This character, who addresses the audience directly, is clearly Lee's proxy. Dressed casually in jeans, Korean American (Becky Yamamoto) hilariously alternates between anger, submission, and apathy in her search for meaning.

The cast handles the irreverent material with ease. The obvious standouts are Yamamoto, who is adorable whether she is goofy or incensed, and Juliana Francis, who is captivating as the scatterbrained White Person 1. The chorus of Korean women, consisting of Jun Sky Kim, Haerry Kim, and Jennifer Lim, creatively depict a twisted version of Korea, one focused on mutilation, Christianity, and, well, America. Rounding out the cast is Brian Bickerstaff, who plays White Person 2 with appropriately graceless candor.

Eric Dyer and Jesse Hawley's scenic design effectively evokes a Buddhist temple: three unpainted wooden walls and a matching floor, complete with Zen gravel paths leading into the theater. The lighting design, also by Dyer, is subtle but highly effective. In another nod toward globalization, several rows of fluorescent lights flicker on and wash out the traditional Asian set when the white characters take the stage.

The play itself is beyond categorization, which Lee openly admits in the script. In one dance, set to "All I Want for Christmas," the Korean women mime numerous methods of suicide, each more horrifying than the last. This scene is the perfect illustration of the show as a whole; it seems to indicate some deep-seated self-loathing, yet it is presented with farcically overblown characterizations and dance routines, which are amusingly choreographed by Dean Moss.

Perhaps more interesting, Lee gives the last word to the white American characters. The last 20 minutes or so are devoted to Francis and Bickerstaff struggling to make their relationship survive in the face of disgust, alcoholism, and absurdity. Their romantic involvement is never completely clarified; we know they are living together, but whether they are married is left unanswered. Although they seem unable to part, they continually attack each other with hurtful verbal abuse and criticism of drinking habits. Quite quickly, however, they switch gears and speak adoring sonnets to each other.

This strange cycle causes so much turmoil that Francis's character dreams that the two have health insurance to pay for couple's counseling. In her dream, they "learn how to be humble and realistic." This seems to be a reversal from a speech made earlier in the play by Korean American, when she insists that all minorities hate white people yet secretly want to be them. Now we are presented with two white Americans yearning for the same traits that made Yamamoto's character detest her own race.

Granted, that is probably reading much further into Lee's breathtaking work than she would like. The reason the play is so enjoyable is that it surprises and shocks at every moment. The juxtaposition of culture and identity is so vivid that audiences can't help but laugh. Unique, sophisticated, and profound, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is exactly the sort of downtown gem of a play you hope to discover.

Lost

You've got to admire New York Theater Experiment for its ambition. Engaging its cast in improvisatory workshops, the company, for its latest production, explored how a group of Catholic schoolgirls might cope if they were suddenly stranded on an uninhabited island without food, shelter, or adult supervision. Its touchstone was Lord of the Flies, William Golding's novel in which a group of British schoolboys quickly descend into barbarism under those circumstances. The actors, working from a plot outline and character descriptions supplied by playwrights Laura Gale and Joseph Schultz, developed detailed character histories and then improvised scenes to generate the script. In the dark play that grew out of this collaboration, the nine teenage girls turn catty, selfish, and ultimately savage when left to their own devices after their plane crashes on the shores of a tropical island in the Pacific.

This unorthodox creative process no doubt gave the hard-working ensemble an uncommon personal investment in their roles. But it failed to produce characters with the depth, complexity, and psychological realism that would make us care about their fates. Fallen also falls prey to its own intensity. An unrelenting stew of power games, violence, sexual tension, and suicide, it wilts under its own heat. The addition of a few lighter or quieter moments might have brought some welcome temperature control.

Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, when the United States was absorbed in the Cold War. The two oldest girls, symbolizing liberal democracy and totalitarianism, do battle in the play, just as the two oldest boys do in the novel. The self-assured and sometimes imperious Becky (Meghan Love) initially becomes the group's leader when she musters the support of more girls than her conniving rival Hilary (Dana Berger) gets. But when Becky becomes the target of the group's growing frustration and despair, Hilary exploits shifting alliances and Becky's own neuroses to supplant her.

Standing out among this young cast of varying levels of talent, Berger plays the ruthless Hilary with relish as she coldly manipulates friendships to advance her own interests. Love finds appropriate notes of gentleness and steel in her portrayal of Becky. Shelly Stover, in the role of the plucky, sharp-tongued Julie B., demonstrates remarkable stage presence, though her character, like several others in the ensemble, does not always strike true to life.

The show's design is rudimentary, even by Off-Off-Broadway standards. Given D. Craig M. Napoliello's minimalist set, the lighting and sound must bear a much greater burden in conjuring a sense of place. Sound designer Ben Warner creates a compelling interlay of inner voices and ocean sounds in a crucial suicide scene, but otherwise he does merely serviceable work. Anjeanette Stokes's lighting neither conveys time of day nor distinguishes beach scenes from cave scenes. In one pivotal episode, the lights do not help create the illusion of a forest fire either.

Fallen mostly sticks to strict dramatic realism—with the nastiest violence effectively conducted within earshot offstage. The production gains resonance on those rare occasions when Schultz, serving double duty as director, deploys more obvious stagecraft. A case in point is the opening vignettes in which the entire cast freezes in a sequence of stark dramatic poses intended to convey the plane crash's aftermath. Unfortunately, these moments of dramatic liftoff only serve to underscore the long stretches in between.

Pats on the Back and Trophies Too: IT Awards Celebrate Off-Off Broadway

Working Man's Clothes's To Nineveh: A Modern Miracle, a contemporary retelling of several Old Testament stories, was the big winner at the second annual Innovative Theater (IT) Awards Sept. 18, taking home six awards, including Outstanding Production of a Play, Outstanding Director, and Outstanding Ensemble. Prospect Theater Company's Iron Curtain was named Outstanding Production of a Musical and also earned the award for costume design. Other multiple winners were T. Schreiber Studio (three) and La MaMa E.T.C. (two).

Cast of To Nineveh: A Modern Miracle
Photo Credit: Sans Peur Photography

The IT Awards ceremony, dedicated to honoring Off-Off-Broadway theater, took place in the Great Hall of historic Cooper Union. The venue, a cavernous basement theater where Abraham Lincoln reputedly once gave a speech, seemed appropriate for the Off-Off-Broadway crowd, a menagerie of artists accustomed to working in basements, storefronts, or wherever else they might conceivably create a performance space.

The return of the IT Awards marks an exciting moment for Off-Off-Broadway theater and for companies whose eccentric names (including Milk Can, Waterwell, Handcart, Vortex, Impetuous, Emerging Artists, and Andhow!) conjure up more creativity and intrigue than those of Broadway producers Nederlander, Shubert, Dodger, and Disney. Many winners were quick to thank the IT Awards, including Isaac Byrne, who was recognized as outstanding director. "When we work at this level, for little or no money," he said, "it helps to be validated and makes it all worthwhile."

This year's 151 nominations represented 49 productions from 40 different theater companies. Reflecting the ever-shifting terrain of the Off-Off-Broadway scene, only one individual nominee, Boo Killebrew of CollaborationTown, was also nominated in 2005. (Twelve theater companies had nominations both years.) As charismatic host Charles Busch remarked, Off-Off-Broadway theater may be impossible to define, but having an awards show is certainly a way of getting "a little bit closer."

The most important change Executive Directors Jason Bowcutt, Shay Gines, and Nick Micozzi made in their sophomore season is one of jurisdiction. Like last year, to be award-eligible a production was required to play a set number of performances with a budget of $40,000 or less and ticket prices of $30 or less. But this year, in an effort to better represent the fluctuating borders of Off-Off-Broadway theater and its practitioners, productions from Queens and Brooklyn were also up for consideration. This was timely for the Astoria Performing Arts Center's critically acclaimed production of the musical Forever Plaid, which earned three nominations.

Jason Bowcutt, Shay Gines, Nick Micozzi

The audience was younger and rowdier than the crowd at the Tony Awards, and its dress tended more toward cowboy boots, spiked hair, and sequins than black tie and tails. As pointed out by the lively and witty opening number, this is theater made by hardworking, talented people–who also have day jobs. Gleefully directed by Christopher Borg and cheekily performed by an uproarious and sizzling ensemble, the song paid fond tribute to the unglamorous realities of Off-Off-Broadway: venues with no air-conditioning, props constructed by actors, Equity showcases (in which actors don't get paid but are reimbursed for travel), and a lack of agents and publicists.

The audience laughed in commiseration. Throughout the night, there was a sense of "almost too good to be true" bewilderment, as artists seemed to wonder, Is this really an awards ceremony for us? This incredulity extended to the sophisticated award presentations, where anonymous-sounding voice-overs introduced nominees, whose photos (both a headshot and a production still) were projected on three screens. Those assembled couldn't help but snicker at the slick professionalism, a fancy presentation indeed for productions typically mounted on shoestring budgets.

An eclectic roster of artists dropped in to present awards. "You're all so damned innovative," purred actress Martha Plimpton, who presented the featured actor awards, and controversial composer Michael John LaChiusa announced the Outstanding Music Award. Downtown drag sensation Lypsinka gave the Outstanding Solo Performance Award to Margaux Laskey (size ate), who thanked her family for giving her so much material.

Lypsinka, presenter Outstanding Solo Performance
Photo Credit: David Anthony

Choreographer Jeff Calhoun, currently at work on the Broadway transfer of Grey Gardens, struggled just to make it to the ceremony. Apologizing for his raspy voice, Calhoun confessed that a nasty bout of strep throat had kept him home from rehearsal that day, but declared that he couldn't miss the IT Awards, where, he said with a wink, "size doesn't matter." He presented the Choreography/Movement Award to the Vampire Cowboys Theater Company's Marius Hanford, who thanked the IT Awards for acknowledging the importance and artistic integrity of fight choreography and stage combat.

Marius Hanford recipient of Outstanding Choreography/Movement

Photo Credit: David Anthony

Ben Vereen got a standing ovation when he appeared to present the 2006 Artistic Achievement Award to Tom O'Horgan, an Off-Off-Broadway pioneer who also revolutionized Broadway with his productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. A much respected and proficient theater artist, O'Horgan is the only director to have had four hit shows running on Broadway simultaneously, and yet he has never won a Tony. Vereen remembered that the legendary Bob Fosse called O'Horgan "my inspiration," and applauded the IT Awards for recognizing a man of genius. Vereen also commended the crowd for being artists with "the tenacity to tell the big boys, 'We're going to do theater anyway!' "

Ben Vereen
Photo Credit: David Anthony

Tom O'Horgan, recipient of Artistic Achievement Award
Photo Credit: David Anthony

There was a strong sense of nostalgia and passing the torch among the presenters. Tony-winning designer William Ivey Long handed the Outstanding Costume Design Award to former assistant Sidney Shannon, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, who presented the award for Outstanding Production of a Play, prophesied, "I was there; you'll be here."

Actress and playwright Lisa Kron, whose critically beloved play Well moved to Broadway last season, handed the award for Outstanding Performance Art to the New York Neo-Futurists for their production of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. The large troupe promptly turned their acceptance speech into a piece of performance art, as they simultaneously burst out into expressive and exultant 30-second speeches, indistinguishable from one another but overwhelmingly grateful as a whole. Veteran downtown performers Mary Testa, Jason Kravitz, and Marylouise Burke also presented awards, as did director and playwright Adam Rapp.

The 2006 Stewardship Award went to the Field, a resource center for independent performing artists that offers such services as peer feedback workshops, performance opportunities, creative retreats, career workshops, and computer access.

Backstage editor Leonard Jacobs presented the third and final honorary award, the 2006 Caffe Cino Fellowship, to the Vampire Cowboys, a nonprofit company that creates theater with a commitment to stage combat, dark comedy, and the mating of genres. Co-founder and Artistic Director Qui Nguyen and Managing Director Abby Marcus accepted the award and introduced several company members, who performed highly charged excerpts from their 2006 hit show Living Dead in Denmark.

The IT Awards voting process gives audiences input (their online votes count for 25 percent) while encouraging companies to see each other's shows. When a production submits itself for competition, three cast, crew, or production team members are required to go out and judge other productions. In this way, the creators hope to facilitate a greater sense of community and relationships among the many diverse (and busy) Off-Off-Broadway artists.

The attendance at Cooper Union was impressive but not sold out, yet those empty seats could be filled next year with more theater companies and artists eager to come together and celebrate their work. Off-Off-Broadway now has a seat at the awards table, and with awards come legitimacy, publicity, and, as Charles Busch reminded the audience, the chance to keep defining and redefining who they are and what they do.

Charles Busch
Photo Credit: David Flestcher Washington

For a full list of winners and hundreds of photos from the ceremony visit the New York Innovative Theater Awards website at http://www.nyitawards.org/anr/.

Girl Power!

The Australian import Virgins is actually a bit misleading, as this musical only partially addresses its titular subject matter. Presented at the New York Musical Theater Festival, it is really more of a triptych to reflect the diverse talents of its quintet of female leads, the equally talented Esther Hannaford, Rosemarie Harris, Verity Hunt-Ballard, Amanda Levy, and Kellie Rode. Musicians Mathew Frank and Dean Bryant (who also directs) have delivered this show from Down Under, with mixed results. The first act, "Virgin Wars," sets the tone for a juvenile show with its portrait of five crusading cheerleader types who tour praising the joys of abstinence. But there's more than meets the eye, as it turns out that several of these ladies may not be practicing exactly what they preach. Frank and Bryant's bubblegum pop tunes (very similar to the stylings of Off-Broadway's Altar Boys) serve the act well.

This type of fun gets distinctly older, though not exactly more mature, in the second act, "Girl on the Screen," in which an investigative journalist tries to go inside the world of a seedy sex site and finds herself intrigued by the very world she was trying to expose. It allows all the actresses to indulge in their sultry side, a marked difference from the high schoolers they portrayed just minutes ago. Clearly, all five are very talented and possess a lot of range, but this sketch (in which cast members even act out the computer icons of an instant message chat) is a little thin. It is also completely different in tone and subject matter from what the show marketed itself to be.

The same can be said of the third act, which makes Virgins an overlong revue instead of one solid piece. "Jumping the Q" is a fictional re-enactment of a pageant where four female contestants from war-torn, developing countries compete for Australian citizenship. Not only does that make the work feel remote for a U.S. audience, but the message of solidarity gets a little muddled, despite some catchy power ballads. These girls have great voices that should be heard, but perhaps when singing a more coherent tune.