Romero & Juliet

The Bard had it coming. All of the elements of Twelfth Night are perfectly suited for a zombie horror interpretation: morbid language, contagious insanity, and near-comical ignorance. The most enjoyable aspect of the Impetuous Theater Group's adaptation, 12th Night of the Living Dead, is that they not only take this unique approach, but pull it off with a stunning degree of commitment to the original work. Unlike the bloodbath that unfolds onstage, playwright Brian MacInnis Smallwood's adaptation is more like careful surgery than wild hacking, as he extracts only absolutely essential and appropriate parts. The synopsis generally remains the same: Viola disguises herself as a male, Cesario, creating a bizarre love triangle between herself, the lovelorn Orsino, and the mourning Lady Olivia. All the while, the show's pranksters, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria, down some wine and taunt the stiff steward, Malvolio.

Though Smallwood cuts many lines (nearly all of Viola's: as the first zombie, she's reduced to grunts and squeals for the entire show), what remains is strikingly smooth. He occasionally adds fresh updates to fit his subject (when Feste, the fool, exclaims "as if thy eldest son should be a fool; whose skull Jove cram with brains!" a nearby zombie echoes, "braaiiins!") and assigns some lines to different characters, but his version impressively uses most of Shakespeare's own words to tell a completely different tale.

In this interpretation, a giant green meteor has struck Viola and Sebastian's ship, pulling the vessel down and dragging the siblings apart. Viola washes up on the shores of Illyria, looking a bit pale and, well, different. She walks with a heavy limp and carries herself in a sort of post-lobotomy fashion. Apparently, the meteor has infused her with an insatiable appetite for human flesh – a hunger that is passed onto each of her victims.

One of the most amusing things about watching a Shakespearean comedy is feeling privy to an issue that the characters keep missing. In Twelfth Night, it is their failure to see beyond the gender disguises. This inability to notice unusual realities is also what made the recent zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead, so amusing. Like the people in that film, the untouched (that is, still human) characters in 12th Night… start out dangerously blind to the plague that's overtaking those around them.

As Sirs Toby and Andrew, Timothy J. Cox and Benjamin Ellis Fine are fantastic aloof fools, giggling and gamboling amidst the bloody scene. Fine portrays Andrew as an amusing kind of man-child with a nice blend of cockiness and cowardice. One moment he’s declaring a duel, the next he’s crying and rocking himself as he’s cradled in a friend’s arms.

Much of the show's hilarity surfaces when Shakespearean eloquence collides with the grit and gore of cult horror. As our Viola snarls and growls at the gate to Olivia's estate, and even bites Malvolio, Olivia's response (lifted directly from the original) becomes absurdly understated: "you began rudely."

The entire cast superbly navigates the unusual territory of spilled intestines and iambic pentameter. Tom Knutson makes Malvolio's transformation into a zombie a particular treat, as the conservative servant gradually loses his rigidity with progressively slumping posture and increasingly breathy, broken speech.

Special effects help the show blend dialogue fit for a production at The Globe with visuals fit for a zombie film by George A. Romero. Increased levels of gore are seamlessly woven into the story. The creepily comical flirting between Olivia and Viola-as-Cesario is a good example. Unaware of the present danger, Olivia takes the zombie Viola's aggression for passion and becomes quite attracted to her attacker.

Even when the zombie bites off her finger, Olivia is not deterred. In a clever spin on Shakespeare's original – which has Olivia sending Cesario a ring as a token of affection – this version has her sending the entire severed appendage.

The production's only weakness is its complete devotion to creating chaos. Often, the zombie groans completely drown out the dialogue. At other points, the action is so widely distributed across the stage that it's impossible to focus. The house, for example, actually has a bar to the side of the main stage. While it's a fitting setting for Toby and Andrew, the bar is located so far from the center that most of the audience cannot see it.

Although the plot centers on disorder, the success of this mash-up rides on its tight organization and nice balance between different genres. In one of show's best scenes, for example, zombie characters pause to have a "chat." While they groan at each other, they hold their lines on cards. The scene is funny and unique, as zombies are traditionally uncommunicative. Leave it to Shakespeare fans to find a way to give pop culture's most ineloquent monsters a method of articulating their thoughts.

Lost in the Funhouse

Before launching into “The Dreams of Laura Bush,” one of two-and-a-half monologues that constitute Wake Up!, Karen Finley took a moment to describe herself. As she walked from the downstage podium to the upstage desk, arranging papers and garments beneath a camera that projected image onto a screen behind her, she proclaimed: “I’m Joan Collins with a conscience.”

“I’m Britney Spears with an education.”

“I’m Liza Minelli with a Happy Family.”

These descriptions got laughs, of course, but none of them captures who Karen Finley is or, more accurately, who she presents herself to be.

After entering to applause on the night I saw her, Finley made some casual remarks to the audience, dedicating the evening’s performance to her students. Because the space is small, she had no need of a microphone, but a loud fan in the back of the audience area made it difficult to hear her. When someone complained she stepped forward and apologized, asked if the fan could be turned off, suggested that people move closer (“Oh here, this is an excellent seat,”) etc. After going through this apparently spontaneous exchange, however, Finley reassured us that we wouldn’t have any problem hearing her now that she was about to begin in earnest.

She was right. As she launched into her prologue, a short monologue about a woman who seeks out amputee veterans for sexual trysts, her voice was rich with chest resonance and easily filled the room. Was her somewhat discombobulated entrance, her initially timid voice, her attempt to quiet the room and bring the audience forward just an act, then? Or her occasional self-deprecating remarks about not being “that good an actress?” Figuring out how to read Karen Finley as a performer and as a persona are a significant part of the experience of watching Wake Up!

The two monologues that make up the body of this performance are “The Dreams of Laura Bush” and “The Passion of Terri Schiavo.” For the first of these, Finley speaks as our current First Lady, presenting pages from her personal dream diaries. The dreams range in subject matter from Condoleeza Rice having an affair with the President to Laura organizing a fictional “Dependent Film Festival” in Crawford, Texas, to a fragmented reimagining of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, to a sexual fantasy about Tony Blair. Other “dreams” are less cohesive or are just partial glimpses of images. The pages from the dream journal are drawings and sketches that Finley arranges on a desk and that are projected onto a screen behind her. The dreams form a house of mirrors of the Bush administration and of our current national moment.

In “The Passion of Terri Schiavo,” Finley steps in and out of several characters, each of them projecting their personal narratives and causes onto Schiavo’s body. Some of it is moving, some of it is funny, and some of it is intentionally offensive. The common thread between these voices is that all of them, under the guise of caring about Schiavo, are really airing their own passions, their own fears, their own guilt, looking to an image of a dying woman to be their information-age messiah. “I’ve never met her,” one of the characters says, “but I love her.” Ultimately, Finley conludes, "Terri needs her own reality TV show."

Despite Finley’s image as a polarizing figure, a reputation born from her famous court battle with the NEA in the early nineties, there is very little polemicism on display in Wake Up! Instead, it is a show by and about someone who is trying to make sense of our baffling political and cultural present. I was neither as taken with the performance as the woman to my left (another reviewer), who laughed uproariously for most of the evening, nor as puzzled as the man to my right (my guest for the evening), who wasn’t sure what to make of Finley at all. Instead, I felt a sympathy for an artist trying to work in a narrative form when the world she’s portraying seems to have lost its coherency. However, whether you love her, hate her, or are not sure what to make of her, you will leave Wake Up! with little doubt that there is no other performer quite like Karen Finley.

Fear Factor

Halloween is in the air, and in the spirit of the year’s scariest holiday comes Greg Oliver Bodine’s Wicked Tavern Tales, an adaptation of three terrifying Edgar Allan Poe stories. Bodine’s adaptation keeps most of Poe’s original work intact with only a few cuts and alterations to compress the tales into three short works that flow together well, with each one delivering its own special jolt of horror. The product of these edits is not a watered down text, but a celebration of all things spooky. Wicked Tavern Tales has a certain thrill ride quality about it; even the entrance to the theater resembles the inside of a creepy Disney ride. Walking through a dark curtain, audience members will find themselves standing in a long, dimly lit hallway guiding them towards two towering wooden doors. Outside these doors hangs an ominous sign reading, ''Wicked Tavern.''

Staging the play in a century-old venue such as Manhattan Theatre Source provides many wonderful possibilities for establishing a haunted atmosphere. The wooden floors are naturally creaky and the red brick walls legitimately worn by time. The candles and lanterns that illuminate Gregg Bellon’s eerie, dark set do not take us into another time, but deeper into the one in which this room was actually built.

The chills are racing up your spine even before Narrator/Barmaid (Libby Collins) appears onstage to signal a start to the action. She answers the audience as if we have just asked a question, a question regarding our desire to hear a ghost story. Collins holds a lantern towards the crowd to light various faces and inquire as to how well they know their friends/neighbors/husbands/wives. She asks, because the characters in Poe’s three short horror stories, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Black Cat, met their demise at the hands of those they trusted.

The Tell-Tale Heart is arguably one of Poe’s greatest known works, and the opportunity to see it performed live is a treat you won’t find in a Halloween bag. Nancy Sirianni plays the crazed narrator, Ms. Moore, a woman driven mad by the evil-looking left eye of her charge, Old Man (Michael Patrick Collins). Sirianni captures every tick and nuance of the memorable character Poe constructed; she is pleasant and attentive to her employer and cheerfully frank about her justification for plotting his murder. When she hears his terrified beating heart the theatre flashes red and the sound grows louder and louder, drawing us all into her world of madness.

The Cask of Amontillado also focuses on a grisly act of murder, this time at the hands of a jealous, scorned lover named Montressor (Kevin Shinnick). This piece is hindered by some period-specific language integral to the story’s foreshadowing that sometimes gets lost in the dialect. Fortunately, Shinnick and Ridley Parson, who plays Montressor’s friend, Fortunado, appear to sense this hurdle and compensate for it with many hand gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to indicate when something sinister is afoot. As Montressor proceeds to commit his final act of violence, it becomes disturbingly clear where the story is headed.

The night of horror concludes with The Black Cat, a segment filled with so many gruesome acts that one can see why it was saved for last. There is no topping the maniacal unwinding of Alfred (Ridley Parson) who matter-of-factly narrates the story from his cell on death row.

With these elements of horror, Wicked Tavern Tales is fun enough to exist solely as a holiday fare, but the eloquence of Poe’s language elevates it to something more. This play is not merely about shock value as the writing leaves you with thoughts and feelings to contemplate afterwards. However, you may want to hold off on such contemplation until after you have turned on all the lights.

Island of Pain

Sophocles’ Philoktetes is the only extant play on a story mentioned in Homer’s Iliad; it was tackled by Aeschylus and Euripides as well. Their versions are known because of 1st-century criticisms by Dion Chrysostom, who compared them. Each of the ancients gave the story his own spin, just as MacArthur Award winner John Jesurun does in his version, parts of which date from the 1993 and the first Gulf War. For instance, Sophocles alone features the character of Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, who is brought by Odysseus to the island of Lemnos to fetch Philoktetes and his bow and arrows. Without the archer and his weapon, which belonged to Heracles, the Greeks cannot take Troy. But Odysseus abandoned Philoktetes (usually spelled “Philoctetes,” and accented like “catastrophe”) on the voyage out, because the warrior was bitten by a poisonous snake; the suppurating wound in his foot stank so bad that the Greeks marooned him. That betrayal means Odysseus needs Neoptolemus to cozy up to the castaway and trick him into helping them.

Jesurun, who also directed and designed the set, eliminates the Chorus and other characters. On a bare stage lighted with generally soothing projections on the floor and the upstage wall—a sparkling swimming pool, tree branches swaying in the breeze, clouds floating by—the three antagonists meet and talk in this updated version. Philoktetes is isolated in a hotel on Lemnos, having been kicked out of the hospital on the other side of the island. The action is “an autopsy conducted by the cadaver,” the hero announces to the audience.

The plot here plays a poor second fiddle to Jesurun’s vivid language. The words veer from startlingly lyrical to crude vernacular. At times they have the beauty of a dark psalm:

“If I give you a brain full of black blood, You will rejoice and thank me for it, If I give you a three-headed son, You will jump for joy. If I give you testicles of salt, you will rejoice. If I rain thalidomide on your people, You will rejoice and thank me.”

But frequently this elliptical poetry just piles up frustratingly. “Jesus, make me into clear water,” says the suffering bowman. “Can’t you see I am covered in white powder, a toppled minaret, armless and close to starvation, lost in a sea of ventriloquy, the lithium at the end of the tunnel.”

The mention of Jesus is no accident. Religious words like “temple,” “transgression,” “crucified,” “salvation,” and “cross” recur, along with “hammer and nails.” But Jesurun blends Christian and pagan beliefs confusingly. “For we are blessed among women,” says Philoktetes, who claims to have been transformed into a woman on the island. Early on, though, he notes that he was self-born, and moreover, “My first-born son was my lover, born of me and only me.” Much of it sounds familiarly Greek, like Zeus shape-sifting to fornicate with Leda or Danaë. And late in the play comes a scene that echoes both St. Peter’s denial of Christ three times as well as Judas’s betrayal. Neoptolemus asks Philoktetes for a kiss twice, and Philoktetes asks Neoptolemus for one as well. The homoerotic scene has resonances of the garden of Gethsemane, but which is the Judas and which St. Peter is unclear.

That kind of muddle is unfortunately typical of this frequently inert play, which loses a listener in thickets of oblique dialogue and situations. The plot involving the bow, which is crucial in Sophocles, is dispensed with quickly; the language is the primary interest to the writer-director.

That’s reflected in the casting. The actors, dressed (by Ruth Pongstaphone) in dark, contemporary civilian clothes, have not been cast in a realistic way, but for their delivery of the language in clear diction and incantatory phrasing. Louis Cancelmi, for instance, is far too hale and handsome to be a battle-hardened soldier, wasting from disease for a decade, and the willowy, questioning Neoptolemus of Jason Lew doesn’t look like he has Achilles’ DNA. Will Badgett does lend Odysseus some of the harshness and taciturnity of a military man, but their common talent is to handle the language with restrained intensity that provides some dramatic tension. The primacy of language isn’t so bad if Jean Racine is writing the dialogue and the dramatic situations are clear, but here it misfires badly.

Back From the Future

Having seen, or, rather, heard, Radiotheatre's I>The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, I eagerly anticipated another installment in their current H.G. Wells Science Fiction Theatre Festival -- The Time Machine, now playing at 59E59 Theatres through November 4th. The climax and ending of this adaptation of Wells' 1895 classic The Time Machine, written and directed by Radiotheatre's chief innovator Dan Bianchi, packs a chilling punch. However, the whole is not up to Radiotheatre's usual level of suspense and immediacy, on account of a frame-and-flashback structure that situates most of the play in the hero's past experience.

The set-up takes its time, with the Time Traveller (Jerry Lazar), a mad scientist whose grief for his late wife is his life's unhealable wound, puttering about his living room in the company of three rather nondescript friends. He invents the Time Machine. They don't believe him. Finally, the moment we are waiting for arrives: the Traveller tests the Machine, with himself in the driver's seat.

Moments later, the Traveller returns. He has come from the very distant future, to tell a story of high drama from beyond the end of human history. Unfortunately, a lot of the danger is a bit minimized by the fact that the Traveller has returned safely to the past -- obviously racked by post-traumatic stress, but alive and physically well.

The one future character who is differentiated enough to invite concern, love interest Theena, is passive and communicates nonverbally, albeit like her counterpart Weena in Wells's prose.

More frustratingly, Theena is played not by a live voice (like Lota in Radiotheatre's Moreau), but by pre-recorded sounds. They are great, surreal sounds, by the masterful Radiotheatre regular Wes Shippee, but they still combine with Theena's limp pathos to make her seem something less than human. Or, given her uncertain Linnaean classification, something less than a sentient creature.

This dramaturgical structuring makes it seem as if the Traveller's travels, narrated by him in the past tense, are part of the past, not the future. Of course, that paradox is part of Wells's and Radiotheatre's point, and supports the play's exploration of the effect of the possibility of time travel on speculation about deterministic versus fatalist concepts of history.

The action picks up when the Time Traveller reveals that he is not through with travelling, and finds that his friends remain skeptical about his vision of the future. The end of the play is scary -- especially because it is more scientifically possible than almost any other science fiction conceit with which I am familiar.

In short, if you love Wells, "The Time Machine," or the sci-fi or horror genres, this dramatization will prove enjoyable. So program your own Time Machine for an evening before November 5th and blast off to 59E59.

Down To Earth

There are two stories going on in The Boycott. One features its writer, producer and one-woman star, Kathryn Blume, as herself, discussing her feelings about the general lack of attention shown to global warming and the little things Americans do every day that unknowingly harm the environment. The other story is the synopsis of a madcap screenplay that Blume wrote about a woman named Lyssa Stratton, who is campaigning for all women to go on a sex strike until the country takes global warming seriously. Blume originally wrote the screenplay with Hollywood stardom in mind (''dream casting: George Clooney'') but realizing the impracticality of this endeavor, decided instead to re-enact key scenes from the screenplay in front of a video camera and post the finished product on youtube. The Boycott interweaves personal monologues from Kathryn Blume’s actual life with her solo re-enactment of the youtube screenplay.

The result is a story that has way too much going on. Global warming is a real and pertinent issue and Blume has a lot to say about it, but her clear, heartfelt statements of the facts are more compelling than her frenzied re-telling of the fiction.

The story’s most passionate monologues are the ones that come from the depths of Bloom’s own experience; seeing a yoga center guzzling energy when their building is conducive to operating exclusively on solar power, and people in the supermarket who couldn’t care less whether their groceries are bagged in paper or plastic. There is a small tidbit about a time when Blume overheard a group of businessmen intelligently discussing global warming issues over dinner. The despair she feels at hearing their conversation end, ''basically, we’re screwed,'' drives her point home more than the entire retelling of the silly screenplay.

The screenplay, which reads like a mix between Austin Powers and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, suffers from too many personalities, many of which are too similar to be distinguishable. Blume switches from one character to the next by turning her head from side to side, but often her voice does not change enough for us to know who is who. She sounds like she knows what she is talking about, but the multi-character dialogue is recited at such a fast pace that it is hard to catch the gist, let alone the words.

This is a shame considering that Blume has some interesting knowledge to impart. When she sheds the screenplay and slips back into her own skin she is able to cleverly and comprehensibly articulate the damage we are doing to the environment, the most horrific example being the way our pollution has changed the way the planet looks from space.

During these scenes she often adopts a very casual tone, addressing the audience as if they are guests in her living room. In some instances, this laid back approach is cute and effectual, such as the scene where she turns on the house lights, waves at the audience and asks them to say hello to her camera. But when the tossing of a prop offstage goes awry she halts the narrative to giggle, ''Whoops that worked better in rehearsals.'' When the tone gets this informal it calls attention to the fact that we are watching an actor, not a character, and that takes us out of the story.

But all delusions of youtube fame and Hollywood grandeur aside, The Boycott has its heart in the right place, and when Bloom stops pretending to be five people at once and sits solemnly in a chair to deliver a slow, thoughtful speech about the Armageddon that awaits us if we don’t change our polluting ways, the message really hits home.

Those Pesky Martians

In 1938, Orson Welles directed a radio theatre adaptation of H.G. Wells's classic sci-fi horror novel The War of the Worlds. Some people turned on their radios in the middle of the broadcast, mistook the story for an actual news report on an actual, present, invasion of hostile Martians, and panicked. It seems silly, until you see, or, rather, hear, award-winning New York performance art company Radiotheatre's newest adaptation of The War of the Worlds, written and directed by Radiotheatre's chief innovator Dan Bianchi. The voice of the newscaster, reporting, he says, from the site of the Martian touchdown in Port Jefferson, Long Island, sounds hauntingly like an actual 1930s radio journalist. The sound effects easily suggest visuals, and the story is as horrific as in the original.

Radiotheatre's signature performance style -- on-book readings accompanied by vividly evocative, masterfully layered sounds effects and rousing, movie-score instrumental music -- makes the piece emotionally engaging and viscerally chilling while appearing a blatant theatrical illusion.

While communicating what all the fuss was about back in 1938, this adaptation also incorporates some distinctly modern, specifically post-9-11 touches. Its main concern is not how the humans resist the aliens as how the horror of murderous invasion changes them, causing widespread panic and making the nameless, Everyman hero, voiced by Frank Zilinyi, do something that, before the landing, would have seemed unthinkable. Part of Radiotheatre's HG Wells Science Fiction Theatre Festival, The War of the Worlds plays at 59E59 Theatres in repertoire with three other Radiotheatre pieces.

The cast wears a uniform of nondescript black clothes, and the set is almost as noncommunicative: a backlit sign that says "Radiotheatre," a pile of pseudo-antique travel trunks, a few portable flashing lights, and, enshrined on top of one of the trunks, a small photo of Orson Welles. The sound effects, on the other hand, are complex, paramount, and perfect. The Martians' mechanical walking "tripods" tramp into and out of earshot, their sinister machinery whirring, squeaking, and shrieking. Our hero runs through muck, cracks open creaky wooden doors, and scurries around his hiding places. Pounding music heightens the adrenaline rush and signals the approach of the dangerous Martians, and dangerously panicked people. Kinder music underscores the return of daylight, peace, and hope.

The large ensemble bring several distinct human characters to life. Supporting Zilinyi are Peter Iasillo as a Martian-shocked soldier who fantasises about a resistance movement based on the behaviour of New York City's rat population; Elizabeth Burke as the hero's rather naive wife; Cash Tilton as an ineffectual Senator; and Patrick O'Connor as an eccentric medical researcher.

Most compelling is the versatile R. Patrick Alberty, double-cast as the lone radio journalist who keeps reporting even when he fears he is the last human alive and an obnoxious minister who can't decide if the Martian's bright death ray is Satan or a vengeful yet radiant God.

Comparisons with the recent War of the Worlds film, starring Tom Cruise, are inevitable. The play engages with the issues of psychology, philosophy, and ethics that Wells incorporated into his tale; issues that the movie completely ignores.

Radiotheatre's The War of the Worlds concludes with an epilogue that alludes strongly to the world of the original broadcast, and the threat of imminent war that, in 1938, was anything but fantasy. This play should appeal to a range of audience: fans of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and American cultural history, but also anyone for whom daydreams and nightmares prove engrossing pieces of theatre.

Splatter-Fest

It might be the goriest interpretation of Aristotle yet. As the narrator, Brother Blood, explains the healing power of performance through catharsis (“When done properly, art can be used like surgery to extract the cancer from our collective psyches”), he demonstrates his theory on a poor, seemingly lobotomized victim, pulling out organs and entrails in a flash of blood and wild smiles. The problem with The Blood Brothers Present: PULP, a series of three short plays interwoven with several vignettes, is that there are just too many surgeons around the operating table. With five directors and five playwrights who seem to have differing visions, the show is inconsistent and disorganized. Though it pays homage to 50’s horror comics, its vibe is more thrown-together than throwback.

The series’ flaw is that it fails to devote itself completely to this genre. It’s a shame because when it does dive headfirst into the pulp world, and brings the comic book pages to life, the effect is quite thrilling. The first and last plays, Mac Rogers’s Best Served Cold and James Comtois’s Listening to Reason do a good job, crafting interesting back stories so that there’s suspenseful drama mixed with the gory payoffs. In language, pace, and tone, each feels like a tale from an earlier time. Both, for instance, have a derisive narrator (Brother Blood) whose all-knowing background commentary gives the plays an old-fashioned radio hour feel.

Both stories focus on plausible horrors: a jilted lover who’s come to gun down a homewrecker in Best Served Cold and the inner monologue of a serial killer in Listening to Reason. They also contain the strongest performances, including Anna Kull’s furiously heartbroken avenger in the former and Jessi Gotta’s superbly subtle turn as a disabled victim in the latter.

In a recent interview on NYTHEATRECAST, the show’s creators said that these two pieces were actually adapted from pulp horror comics, while the middle play, Qui Nguyen’s Dead Things Kill Nicely, is an original work. This changeup is quite obvious, as it disrupts the tone and pace set so well by the story that precedes it. Dead Things not only skips the effective narration, but also has a far goofier quality that detracts from any semblance of scary.

Nguyen’s piece has some of the evening’s funniest lines (a debate about the existence of zombies is amusing, thanks to the Grandma Addams-esque Stephanie Cox-Williams) and a fantastically gruesome finish (multiple decapitations! Evil Dead-style chainsaw hands!). However, the play’s refusal to take itself seriously as a story leads to an inability to take itself seriously as a production: with British accents that are distractingly bad and dialogue that often feels like it’s merely filler between jokes or violence, the play is too sloppy to be successful.

On the other hand, PULP’s production team has obviously put a lot of effort into special effects, which they execute exquisitely. All of the stories share a common love of gore, and while the splatter-fest is not quite at the bring-a-poncho level, severed limbs and slit throats abound. Even the most ridiculous cases of slit bowels or skinned backs look impressively realistic.

Another enjoyable aspect of the production is its soundtrack, which includes wonderful original music by Larry Lees as well as surprising offerings from familiar names. From the evil carnival-sounding suite that opens the show, to two wordless vignettes set to perfectly appropriate songs, the music is a delight. One short piece, about a camper who transforms himself into an insect, is told through the comically creepy song “Bugs” by, as I was later amused to learn, Pearl Jam.

With Halloween around the corner, PULP is written for those who crave a good bloodbath each October. But if such audiences are really looking to satisfy their fright fix, they might have better luck finding catharsis at the nearest haunted house.

The Return of Beebo Brinker

Beebo Brinker, the sulky, sexy, tortured and maddening butch heroine of Ann Bannon's 1950s lesbian pulp novels, lives in Greenwich Village. New York's oldest elevator operator, Beebo keeps a low profile when the cops raid the bars, but every femme in the Village knows her, or wants to. Bannon called her a cross between movie star Ingrid Bergman and athlete Johnny Weissmuller. For Bannon's readers, Beebo served as a tour guide to the strange, wonderful New York lesbian subculture and a fantasy lover. At the same time, Beebo's dark, violent, man-emulating and self-hating side revealed the dark side of Bannon's books: their persistent undercurrent of internalized homophobia. The Village is a great place to live, they suggest, but a girl would have to be a martyr to live there -- or else very, very brave. Beebo and her world are resurrected with eerie accuracy in Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman's The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, a stage adaptation of several of Bannon's books. Part pulp romp, part exploration of cultural history, the play concentrates on a love triangle between Beebo and two very femme women, estranged sorority sisters and lovers Laura Landon (what a romance-novel name!) and Beth Ayres, nee Cummings.

Laura comes to Greenwich Village to forget about Beth, who dumped her to marry a man. While Beebo falls for Laura, Beth resolves to leave her husband and children and travel cross-country to New York to find Laura and pick up where they left off.

Meanwhile, Laura's friend Jack, a forty-something gay man sick of deluding himself that rent boys love him, relies increasingly on Laura for platonic companionship. Soon, he is asking her to share his loneliness.

Yes, the characters are walking stereotypes. Jack is a particularly egregious example. However, the production garners laughter and exudes pain because Leigh Silverman's direction renders the entire world similarly melodramatic and unreal. The mise-en-scenes look ripped from the covers of Bannon's books. Laura (Marin Ireland) looks down, arching her back like a wilted sunflower, as straight roommate Marcie (Carolyn Bauemler) lounges on a bed, exposing one garish pink Doreen bra strap and turning her body downstage as if aware of an audience. Beebo (Anna Foss Wilson) leans against a wall in the bar surveying the scene with an intense gaze, fitting easily into the roles of both spectacle and voyeur.

Rachel Hauck's versatile minimalist set is dominated by a platform that functions as several beds and floors. This leaves it to Theresa Squire's costumes to establish the period. They do, with clarity, finesse, and fun, but without going overboard into parody or kitsch.

Beebo is suited up in men's style trousers and shirts and severely brushed-back, apparently Brylcreem'd hair. A few striking touches: tall boots and a red velvet vest, emphasise her beauty and iconoclasm, but also her tragic drive to control her world and its other women.

The other girls wear such 1950s staples as crinoline-stuffed skirts, belted sweaters, and pointy, bulky bras. Marcie in particular seems to have got her fashion sense from Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe.

The actors make up in technically precise character-acting for the characters' absence of depth. Each has a clearly defined walk, stance, and voice. There are two standouts, however. One is Bauemler in the sharply contrasting roles of Marcie, scary vamp Lili, and worldly, cynical romance novelist Nina Spicer, an homage to Bannon herself. The other is Wilson. Beebo spends much of the play merely watching the other characters, surveying her domain, but Wilson builds into even this a rage at her world that bursts through the cool exterior at just the right moments. Paradoxically, it is the fantastic Beebo who, of the play's principal characters, ultimately appears the most complex and self-contradictory, which is to say, the most genuinely human.

As a play with lesbian characters at front-and-centre, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is a rarity in New York theatre, even off-off-Broadway. It is a great piece of cultural archaeology and often riotously funny. At the same time, it is a play about people caught between difficult realities and often more difficult fantasies. They try to see through a maze of prejudice and self-denial to find out who they really are, and find the courage to live by the truths they discover.

Gunning for Hamlet

Mercy Thieves takes its title from a line in Hamlet describing a ship of pirates as “thieves of mercy,” an apt evocation of the brutal main characters, but this play owes more to Quentin Tarantino than to Shakespeare. The characters are ostensibly derived from Hamlet but what purpose this serves the story or the character development is unclear; one gets the feeling that the author has sought to lodge a weak plot in a canonic framework. Nevertheless, thanks to very strong performances and well-written dialogue, this gangster comedy achieves moments of high art and entertainment. We are introduced to the characters as we enter the theater: on the low-lit, curtainless stage the two players sit side by side, accompanied by a pair of legs stretched out on the floor from behind a bar. This pre-scene doesn’t do much to inform the plot, but the two main actors’ postures and attitudes already begin to establish their characters: Nick Stevenson as the smoldering DJ and Jeremy Waters as the ecstatic Mike. Both will be superb in their renderings of idiosyncratic hit men.

What structure there is in the plot is hopskotch: one step forward, two hops back fill us in on preceding stages in the story which, if played out chronologically, would reveal how empty the storyline is. The play traces one night in the lives of Mike and DJ, two hired thugs who have been given a mission: to find Harry. Harry proves to be elusive (he never actually appears onstage), and the two set off on a journey across Australia, unearthing and killing off their old friends and colleagues in their search. What Mercy Thieves really amounts to is a series of character sketches expressed through high and low-tech media and prop manipulations: from the large video screen backdrop where certain scenes unfold cinematically, to flashlight-driven chase numbers.

Director Craig Baldwin has done some interesting work in creating context for the frequent time and media shifts and in his efforts to convey violence and action on a small stage using simple means. Unfortunately, the overall effect is inconsistent and awkward. There are several car scenes that feature DJ driving a floating steering wheel while Mike fiddles with the radio dial or philosophizes. The two are seated in chairs behind an overturned table as the car. The effect is of two vaudevillians in a Model-T - not exactly noir. There is more vaudeville to come when Mike and DJ mime killing techniques; maybe this is a cool concept and it’s just poor miming, but the result is embarrassing.

Where the manipulation of time and context works, it works beautifully. The finest scene in the play is between Harry’s mother, Pru (brilliantly played by Victoria Roberts), DJ and Mike. DJ recalls his visit with Pru to Mike, as it actually unfolds. Mike asks questions from the future and, from the past—from her chair upstage—Pru rolls her eyes at Mike or gives him a cool stare. This simple treatment of gazes and stage positions succeeds where the props and screens collapse into gimmickry.

Throughout the play the level of performance is outstanding. Nico Evers-Swindell is excellent as he shifts between three characters; his Jimbo is one of the highlights of the play. Emma Jackson does a juicy “Sharon the Tart” and Paul Swinnerton is a perfect pub man, among other characters. Jeremy Waters dominates the stage with his explosive yet affable, murderous yet sensitive rendering of tender, homicidal Mike. Mercy Thieves may be on its way to Hollywood (the screenplay has been optioned), but it’s hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Waters in this role. The same could be said of the entire cast.

About a Boy

Sex is natural. Repression is bad. Ignorance is dangerous. Poverty is deadly. Patriarchy is oppressive. These and other less-than-revelatory assertions are at the heart of Good Heif, a coming-of-age tale with an avant-garde patina that is currently enjoying its premiere as part of the New Georges 2007-2008 season. Unfortunately, generally strong staging and admirable performances cannot save the text from its undercurrent of condescension and self-congratulation.

Formed in 1992, New Georges' mandate is to encourage the work of female theatre artists. Over the course of fifteen years, the company has produced a number of notable premieres and helped to launch the careers of an impressive array of aspiring playwrights. Given the company’s mission statement Good Heif is a self-consciously playful selection, as its narrative is structured around the sexual awakening of an adolescent male. The trials of a pubescent male in a patriarchal society, as rendered by a playwright and a director who are both women and presented by a famously feminist theatre company: this seems to have all the makings of a provocative, subversive piece of gender-political theater.

Instead, Brooklyn-based playwright Maggie Smith has written about “men” in a generalized “rural” setting, constructing the rural male as “other” in a way that feels dismissive and often mean-spirited. “If only these idiot characters of mine could see what I and my laudably sophisticated/liberated audience see, they would stop oppressing the earth, themselves, and each other,” she seems to say. To be fair, Smith is apparently aiming for something “universal” here, but universalizing often results in the reductive rather than the enlightening, and her play is no exception.

Good Heif is set on a vaguely defined barren landscape, rendered by set designer Lauren Helpern to look kind of like the cracked-desert photograph on the cover of Midnight Oil’s 1987 Blue Sky Mining. The characters dig into the dry earth, although they do not seem certain what it is they are digging for, and it is later revealed that they fear and suppress the rare instances of water bubbling to the surface. Off in the distance are trees with leaves, and what should be the promise of a more fertile life, but the desert locals demonize that place, calling it “over thar” and suspect that may be where the “divul” makes his home.

Lad (Christopher Ryan Richards) is alarmed to find that his body is changing and asks Pa (John McAdams) if he is becoming a man. The most visible sign of Lad’s impending manhood is the show’s primary visual gag: his persistent erection. Pa advises Lad to relieve his sexual longing with a heifer until he can find a suitable woman, and equates sex with digging into a hole in the ground. Ma (Barbara Pitts) is not to be told about these changes in her son; she is a hard-working but sickly woman and such news might push her over the edge.

Lad meets a mysterious feminine creature (April Matthis) who may or may not be the devil his parents have warned him about. She is from “over thar,” and while she doesn’t know what sex is either, she is far more open to finding out, and to exploring both Lad and the world with an open curiosity. Culture clashes, exorcisms, beatings, and coming-of-age ensue.

Director Sarah Cameron Sunde has crafted a visually compelling production and worked with her actors to create a cohesive and consistent ensemble. The performers in general are disciplined and energetic, committing to the seamless and concrete realization of this rather abstracted world. The program notes mention that Good Heif has had a long rehearsal process and incorporated a variety of techniques, and the admirable ensemble work onstage demonstrates the benefits of such a process.

All of this praiseworthy work, however, cannot obscure the intellectual laziness of the text. Smith has tried to infuse her play with a great deal of humor, but all of the jokes are ultimately at the expense of her characters. The audience are invited to laugh along with her as she chastises their ignorance and stubbornness; their fears are shown to be destructive, yes, but are also presented as so ridiculous and unfathomable that we simply judge their actions rather than seek solutions for change.

Publicity materials for Good Heif state that Smith’s “language is spare, simple and straightforward” but that “the life beneath the language is complicated, gnarled, and dangerous.” This may very well have been the intent of the play and the production, but there is little “complicated” or “dangerous” about inviting the audience to pat themselves on their backs for their enlightened views while laughing scornfully at those who live in fear of themselves, of each other, and of the world around them.

IT Awards Spread the Wealth as They Expand

Off-Off-Broadway celebrated itself at the third annual New York Innovative Theatre Awards. The ceremony, affectionately known as the IT awards, took place on September 24 at the Fashion Institute of Technology's Haft Auditorium, with more than 700 nominees and supporters in attendance. Though the ceremony, hosted by actress Julie Halston, included politicians (New York City Councilwoman Christine C. Quinn) and Tony-winners (Anika Noni Rose of Caroline, Or Change), the focus of the evening fell squarely on the shoulders of the hardworking artists who have entertained the Off-Off-Broadway community in the last year.

Unlike last year, when the production of To Nineveh swept most of the categories, the awards this year were spread out among multiple productions. Three shows -- CollaborationTown's 6969, LaMaMa Etc.'s Dancing vs. the Rat Experiment, and Rising Phoenix Repertory's Rules of the Universe -- walked away with three awards apiece. Additionally, three honorary awards were given out, to Doric Wilson, a founding father of the Off-Off-Broadway scene; to Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./New York); and to Rising Phoenix Repertory, which won a $1,000 grant as part of the Caffe Cino Fellowship award.

It was a big night for Daniel Talbott, who accepted the Caffe Cino award and also received the Outstanding Director award. "It's weird, since I'm an actor, but I have really bad stage fright when I have to speak in front of folks without a play to hide behind," he explained, after admitting to being shocked when he won the second award. Talbott praised the Rising Phoenix company. "The award honors everybody that's part of Rising Phoenix Rep and all the folks who worked on the show...We only had four or five days to put it up, and everyone was dedicated and on board from the beginning in every single way. It's a show I am really proud of."

Max Rosenak, an IT recipient for Outstanding Actor in a Leading Role for 6969, also praised his show. "The play is by far the most interesting play I have gotten to work on, and the part of John is the most fascinating character I've gotten to play. I knew from the first line of the first reading that it was going to be a really special experience, and it was. My scene partner, Ryan [Purcell] was fantastic to work with." Rosenak added that "it feels wonderful to be told that I did a good job. That's a rare experience."

Dan Safer was a double winner for both Outstanding Choreography/Movement and Outstanding Production of a Performance Art Piece for the innovative Rat Experiment. "Winning for choreography means a lot to me," he said, "because what Witness Relocation does falls outside of traditional categories, and there are purists who say what I do is 'not dance.' There was a lot of debate from critics, etc, when we did the show, on that subject. It was great to be recognized for making dances.

Additionally, he provided one of the evening's highlights by bounding up on stage on a piano bench that flipped over, though he emerged unharmed. "Can you imagine if I had knocked all my teeth out? Given what our work is like, I think it was actually quite appropriate that I did that." Safer also praised the LaMaMa company for their support.

One winner was not present during the ceremony. Susan Louise O'Connor was the recipient of Outstanding Lead Actress for the silent concerto but was busy performing at the New York Musical Theatre Festival. She found out that she won via text message during her show's intermission. "I'm so freaking honored to receive this award," she said later on. "I think the IT awards are such a great way to draw attention to and celebrate Off-Off Broadway."

Indeed, the reach of the IT Awards has grown impressively from each year to the next, with last year's inclusion of shows produced in Queens and this year's acceptance of shows produced in Brooklyn. One of these shows, Gallery Players' Urinetown: The Musical, was the recipient of the award for outstanding Production of a Musical. As the community continues to call attention to its own, everyone comes away a winner.

Chromosomes in Conflict

Although Rebekah Brunstetter’s new drama is subtitled "A Lady Play," the main character is Trevor, a hunky surfer played with artful cluelessness and earnest charm by Jeff Berg. Trevor is given to saying “rad” and to declaring that he’s on a God-directed mission; he's going to “solve all the problems in the world. One by one.” But first he has to finish his philosophy class. The play, a loosely connected series of vignettes, examines women’s relationships with men through Trevor, a sort of universal hookup. Brunstetter writes, as Swedish playwright August Strindberg did, with a sense that the two sexes will always be in disharmony. Her women, who vary in age, size, and race, all come off as needy or resentful. But since Trevor exhibits some of the obvious male shortcomings that women have complained about through the years, this is to be expected. He’s no good at commitment or remembering birthdays, and he often behaves like an irresponsible child, although he is a gentle lover and good in bed. Unlike the fierce competitors in a Strindberg play, both sides here start out enervated. Sexual satisfaction is possible, but there’s little emotional connection.

As Trevor’s liaisons are examined on April Bartlett’s simple set of a low central platform for indoor scenes and a green stage carpet for outdoors, the play straddles realism and absurdism. It veers from touching to wildly implausible, and from drama to comedy, with most of the humor at the man’s expense. (It’s unclear whether this schizoid aspect is the result of having co-directors, Isaac Byrne and Diana Basmajian.)

Brunstetter’s first scene, though, is contrived and off-putting. Anna, a child of 11, sings to herself a song with the line, “Gonna shed your placenta.” Anna is that old theatrical cliché, a child knowledgeable beyond her years, and she has gleaned information about her mother’s sex life that includes fellatio and periods. (Anna’s information supposedly comes through eavesdropping, although she knows more than the CIA would if mom’s bedroom had been bugged.) But when Anna yells, “I got my period! I’m on the rag!”—really, is it possible that she overheard that? Whose mother ever says that?

Rachel Dorfman exhibits patience and openness as Anna’s mother, but the character is plain creepy. She makes weird, jealous comments on her 11-year-old’s beauty and also barks instructions like “Don’t look directly at me. It burns.” It’s akin to watching Britney Spears playing mother to JonBenet Ramsey.

Brunstetter is more successful with Diane, a plump policewoman who claims to be 34 and much older than Trevor, who’s 25 (although the age difference between the actors is invisible). Diane is a decent woman but awkward, and Maggie Hamilton invests this crucial role with shy self-consciousness and a poignant vulnerability. She meets Trevor as he’s about to chalk a message on a wall; Diane acknowledges that she also used to write on walls. The implication is that Diane's wild spirit has been tamed. Diane and Trevor begin an unlikely affair, although Trevor has other women.

One of them is Joanne (Darcie Champagne), a cosmetician who meets Diane in a park and gives her a makeup lesson. And another is Georgia (Lavita Shaurice), a woman who periodically performs at a poetry slam on an open mike. Trevor has damaged both of them as well, although neither registers as strongly as Diane. Late in the play Trevor encounters an older woman, Mona, who’s both hilariously insane and truly frightening, and is played by Ellen David with the panache of Ruth Gordon. The scene also gives Berg the opportunity to show he can play fear and vulnerability and that his casting isn’t entirely based on the frequently displayed results of gym time and protein shakes.

The damage that men inflict on women is a meaty subject for drama, but Brunstetter’s approach is ultimately too loosely structured and too erratic in its tone to rate as either realism or absurdist satire.

Gangster Rap

It seems that, nowadays, the twentieth century is not to be looked to in reverence, or wonder, but in mockery. Plays that take place in a fixed point in recent time satirize the look and mindset of the era (a la Xanadu), and an original piece set in days of not-too-old makes as much of a statement about then as now." Grayce Productions' latest, Say Your Prayers, Mug!, puts a little too much effort into the joke and not enough faith in the material, resulting in a slightly forced show. In Say Your Prayers, Mug!, writer/co-director/actor Todd Michael dallies in two eras: New York in 1954 and in 1935. As he and Thom Brown portray Dottie Haines and Skip Rayburn, the glamorous married co-hosts of a '50s morning movie program, they seethe with dysfunction, stir up jealousy, and shamelessly hawk the products of their sponsors.

Their interplay is interspersed with scenes from the titular '30s gangster drama, in which police sergeant Dan Gargan tries to put away Sonny Rocco and his gang while also trying to resist the wiles of no-nonsense broad Platinum Kane. Their patter is stuffed five ways to Sunday with the rat-a-tat-tat slang of the era. (Playwright Michael clearly knows his way around a colloquialism.)

All of this winking self-awareness becomes wearying as the show wears on, especially since there are a few genuinely funny moments when bits of dialogue are played straight. Anyone who's ever seen a film that takes itself too seriously knows how humorous something can be when it's not trying. Granted, by writing something that could be deliberately construed as pompously amusing, one is trying - but not as hard as an actor affecting an overdone ethnic accent or a male performer playing too much the bitchy female. (For a master class in period acting by a man in a woman's role, see anything starring Charles Busch.)

Notable in the cast are Jimmy Blackman as Sgt. Gargan and Jill Yablon as Platinum Kane. Blackman's Humphrey Bogart-esque hangdog face and straight man delivery mostly triumph over the style of the piece. Jill Yablon has the requisite smoky voice and icy blonde demeanor of the love interest, and could pass for an actress of the era.

The show is set in a theater but relies too heavily on a theatrical style. Characters enter and exit awkwardly, rather than "appearing" in the way that they do on TV and in the movies. If style parody is the game, why not mimic the rigid blocking of single-camera films, or rely on the multi-camera staginess of the television program?

Besides the great use of jargon in the movie script, the one other aspect of the homage that is executed flawlessly is the costuming. David Zwiers has put together a great selection of glad rags, particularly Dottie Haines' fuschia dress and nightclub singer Kitty De Villiers' blue polka-dot number. All of the ladies' wigs are also perfectly selected.

The current trend in pop culture is that "sincerity is the new irony." It's now socially acceptable to admire something or someone outright, with a commentary-free homage. Were Say Your Prayers, Mug! to allow itself to be as sincere and as adoring as it clearly wants to be, the show would become more than a snarky look at our past, and instead be a sentimental look at ourselves.

Too Close for Comfort

Presenting challenging material onstage takes a certain amount of finesse. When discussing shows of this nature, one uses phrases like "selling" or "putting over" a concept to acknowledge the persuasiveness that is needed. It's important to respect the playwright's motives in creating this world while also respecting the audience's sensibilities by not sensationalizing the material any more than is warranted. In Wendy MacLeod's The House of Yes, the audience meets the Pascal family from suburban D.C.: single mother Mrs. Pascal and her children, the high-strung Jackie-O and college dropout Anthony. They are preparing for Thanksgiving, an oncoming hurricane, and the return of Marty (Jackie's twin brother) from New York with a surprise guest - his fiancee, Lesly.

This close-knit clan has seemingly little respect for boundaries or social mores, and harbors very dirty secrets indeed. But how does a director introduce them and their lifestyle in a realistic way while also giving the audience permission to be shocked and skeptical?

Samsara Theatre Company tries to play it safe in their production, now running at the Roy Arias Theatre. The actors are subtle, the sets are simple and the costumes are mild. But by underdoing it, the show loses all edge and comes off two-dimensionally. The text has a sense of Tennessee Williams as played by the Kennedys, but its lush theatricality is missed by all by Maire-Rose Pike, who, as Jackie-O, comes closest to connecting to the world of the play.

Pike's mellow voice and polished attractiveness suit her role, and while she seems a bit unfocused at the beginning, she finds her bearings as the show goes on. Of course, as the recipient of the most delicious lines in MacLeod's script, Pike is given ample opportunity to shine.

The other actors come off as flat, or affected, or wooden, or a combination thereof. There is no chemistry between the characters, making it unclear why Jackie-O and Lesly are so devoted to Marty, why Anthony is smitten by Lesly, and why anyone is protective of Jackie-O.

Director Jason Kane, perhaps fearful of chewing up the scenery in their intimate theater space, curbs these performances when he should have drawn them out. The actors also seem to have blocking issues, resulting in a broken wine glass at one performance that had theatergoers concerned about potential injury to two cast members during the climactic scene.

According to the program, Samsara Theatre Company has been formed to showcase the talents of its cast and crew. Certainly, The House of Yes, with its small ensemble and daring subject matter, is a good vehicle for this aim. It's unfortunate that this production did not allow itself to be bold enough to meet the company's goals. How can you expect to stand out from the crowd if you insist on blending in?

Poise and Prejudice

When staged on stage and screen, the stiff, formal dances that anchor many of Jane Austen's novels pull the characters through elliptical shapes that turn and revolve, threading them through various configurations and couplings. Hands (barely) touch and gazes (intensely) lock, but eventually—in a coy foreshadowing of the ebullient conclusion—everyone ends up with the person to whom he or she is best suited. For the most part, Emma sticks to the standard Austen formula: the heroine circles around her somewhat inscrutable true love, the requisite pratfalls ensue, yet all is resolved in the end. Joel Alden's musical reinvention of Emma (a selection of this year's New York Musical Theater Festival) is, for the most part, an enormously satisfying success. Briskly directed by Terry Berliner, the first act zips along with a graceful economy that would have made Austen proud, but in the second act, when the knotted conflicts begin to unwind, the action becomes a bit bloated. Still, an exquisite cast—led by the enthralling Leah Horowitz in the title role—makes this latest bit of Austen entertainment a delectable treat, especially for die-hard Austen lovers.

Like many of Austen's best-loved heroines, Emma is a woman ahead of her time: intelligent, witty, and fully capable of "forming her own opinions." What distinguishes the formidable Miss Woodhouse from the rest of the lot is her self-anointed gift for matchmaking. After successfully pairing off her governess, Emma takes the orphaned, lower-class Harriet under her wing. Through lessons in "posture, poise, and patience," she is determined to transform Harriet from country bumpkin into a fitting candidate for "a gentleman's wife." But Emma, so confident in reading the romantic patterns of others, is unable to see how she herself fits into the mix. She advises Harriet to pursue the solicitous clergyman Mr. Elton, while she sets her sights on the rakish Frank Churchill. Of course, things don't turn out as planned, and her old family friend Mr. Knightley hovers in the wings, patiently waiting out Emma's games so that he might make a proposition of his own.

Alden's score is well suited to his Austen endeavor—the songs are charming, if melodically repetitive, and they spool out harmlessly like the revolving wheel on a player-piano. He's written some nice harmonies for the strong-voiced cast, and he gives Horowitz ample opportunity to show off her floaty, silvery high notes in Emma's many solos.

But, without a doubt, the strongest music comes in the more animated characters' songs. As Emma's endearingly dim friend Miss Bates, Terry Palasz turns in a masterful comic performance in the peppy patter song "Jane Fairfax Wrote a Letter" (punctuated by the rhythmic snoring of her elderly mother, Mrs. Bates).

Likewise, the defiant "A Lady Stands Before You" is a spectacular showcase for the fantastic Kara Boyer. She brings such warmth and personality to the ever-agreeable Harriet that you never stop rooting for her from the moment she enters the stage. As the dependable Mr. Knightley, John Patrick Moore gives a refreshingly understated performance. Only Jesse Lawder and Ben Roseberry, as the sought-after Churchill and Elton, push the comedy schtick a bit too far.

It's quite a feat that Horowitz manages to hold her own among the superlative supporting players, and she makes the perfect Emma. A strong, fearless actress, she enacts Emma's cunning schemes with a subtle smirk and an artfully cocked eyebrow.

The spare production features clever props and costumes, including miniature houses that double as trunks. Berliner's direction is appropriately cheeky at times, with winks toward more modern conventions. I did find the anachronism of the men's costumes—jeans with period jackets and boots—a bit distracting.

As the calamities are slowly ironed out, the production loses the crispness of Austen's prose, and certain fuzzy plot points could be more clearly explicated in the last half-hour. Specifically, the secrets behind Churchill's bad reputation and the consequences of Emma's bad behavior toward Miss Bates are never clearly articulated.

Although I've read Austen's novels (and seen many of the films), this was my first time watching a stage adaptation, and there's much to be said for the experience. The live animation allows us to witness the full sting of Emma's grossly entitled behavior—her self-serving social conscience, her rather pompous demeanor, and her attempts to control Harriet ("She's almost the lady she has always wanted to be"). As a musical, Emma makes us privy to the visceral drama of class distinctions that, even through the alchemy of romance, stand firm. In Austen, personalities may clash and still make fine matches, but social spheres and pounds per year too often determine whom you can dance with.

Land of Plenty

In Sharyn Rothstein's A Good Farmer, a widowed farm owner named Bonnie (Chelsea Silverman) befriends a bright, young Mexican immigrant, Carla (Jacqueline Duprey), who has been working illegally on her farm for seven years. The play focuses on Bonnie's unenviable predicament, one that many farmers face with every major crop season: the need to hire cheap labor to farm the land, and the knowledge that no legal citizen would work for such low wages. Like most farmers in the area, Bonnie employs about a dozen illegal immigrants, gives them coffee in the morning, and carpools their kids to school, but pays them poorly and works them to the bone. Rothstein spends most of the play trying to humanize Bonnie, perhaps in an attempt to make her a protagonist in our eyes. But it doesn't feel right. It is hard to sympathize with a woman who knowingly exploits her workers, never gives them a day off, and then wonders which she fears more: seeing her fellow PTA moms captured, interrogated, and deported by Immigrations and Custom Enforcement or losing her crops if there is no one around to harvest them.

Most of Act 2 takes place in a flashback, where we meet Bonnie's good-humored but dying husband, David (Gerald McCullouch), and learn the hard luck details of Bonnie's life that have led her to reluctantly hire illegal workers. But the play spends too much time on this subject while a truly sympathetic character like Carla falls into the background, as does the overall issue of illegal immigration.

The playbill features an interview with Rothstein, where she says, "I wanted to write a play with a very smart, very strong woman at its center." She accomplished as much through Carla. She is intelligent, saucy, determined, and smarter than Bonnie, proving in many instances that she knows the world much better than those who are running it.

We are told that Bonnie and Carla are supposed to be friends, "best friends," according to the play's blurb, but that seems unlikely given the master/servant dynamic of their relationship. Duprey conveys that uncertainty in her acting; when she speaks to Bonnie, her tone is always cordial but never sincere. Her laughter is polite, almost strategic because she can see the way it makes Bonnie think that she might not be such a slave driver after all. When the two fight, Duprey's voice is strong and direct. She never loses her temper but often clenches her jaw as if she is biting her tongue.

There is a wonderfully telling scene where Bonnie first offers Carla the job of being a caregiver for her terminally ill husband, adding, only when pressed, that the job pays nothing and offers only food and lodging. When Carla balks at the offer, Bonnie snaps back, saying that she is being greedy and selfish to request anything in her position and that she should take what she can get and be grateful for it. A friendship laid on this foundation can only be a rocky one at best.

So who is the true villain in all of the illegal immigration controversy? Is it the government, which says you must be a legal citizen to work in this country? Is it Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, which rounds up immigrants who have been here for several years to send them back to the place they fled from? Or is it the farm and factory owners like Bonnie who knowingly hire illegal immigrants because they know they can work them harder and pay them less than someone with workers' rights?

A Good Farmer touches upon, but never fully explores any of these questions.

The Contents of Her Purse

The lights come up on a young man shaking a can of shaving cream. In the first of three shaving scenes, he gazes at himself in an invisible mirror positioned at about the third row of the audience and begins, with panache, to apply the foam to his nearly hairless chin. In each of the three scenes, due to a different interruption, the razor does not meet skin, and the foam is swabbed off with a towel. This disrupted act of self-observation and newly formed habit provides an ideal initiation to a terrific play about adolescent consciousness: David Holstein's True Genius, directed by Jill Sierchio. This is the story of a troubled 19-year-old boy's (Scooter) evolving relationship with his mother (Margaret), his imaginary younger brother (Jeffrey), his late father, his alcoholic therapist (Dr. Foyer), and his love interest (Lila). Dr. Foyer is called upon to help Scooter and his mother negotiate the father's emotional and intellectual legacy, but it's in the shrink's waiting room that the important work unfolds: Scooter meets the divine Lila, another teenage patient, who will draw him out of his delusions and fears. Props like the shaving cream, in the hands of this outstanding cast, organize the plot development and emblematize the emotional resonance of the characters' interactions.

A young girl unpacks her purse: a teen magazine, a pack of gummy worms (one bite, one thrown on the floor), a wallet, trinkets, a spoon, and a hammer (more on the hammer later). By the end of the play, Scooter, Lila, Margaret, and Dr. Foyer have all been unpacked, the contents of their psyches shaken out and dumped on the floor; picked through and eventually restored; inventoried but jumbled back into the dark chaos of the purse.

The boy and girl talk to one another's reflection in the shaving mirror from the opening scene. Staring at the "mirror" in perfect pantomime, Lila raises one arm and then the other, giggles in delight, then ducks to Scooter's other side. She lifts his left arm, then he sweeps his right hand around to cup her face and turn it toward him, away from the mirror. This animation of the adolescent conflict of self-regard and the attraction to the other risks heaviness, but these movements are so deftly choreographed and poignantly performed that the audience members become mirrored adolescents themselves.

These two young actors are remarkable in their own right, but it is a happy coincidence of styles and skills that brings them together on this stage. Perry Tiberio's performance as Scooter is coiled with explosiveness and craves the cool, irresistible charm of Regina Myers's Lila. These are beautifully crafted teenagers; it's hard to believe these actors have only a few years' distance from the age they portray. It's also a testament to their creative maturity that they have understood those years so well, so soon.

In the world of True Genius, adults are feckless but powerful; their whims have devastating consequences. Nancy Evans's performance as Margaret nails the adolescent's vision of a mother: alternately commanding and cajoling. Ken Scudder does his best to account for the makeup of the weakest character, the therapist, by veering between a boot camp counselor and a needy failure. The effect is cartoonish, but it works here because what we come to understand by the end of the play is that we have been transported to Scooter's exaggerated adolescent world: we have come to inhabit his "memoir"—the notebook he carries throughout the play.

So, in the same way that we can appreciate the sweet, shambling appearances of the imaginary younger brother, we see the therapist as a pathetic drunk and the mother as the all-powerful holder of secrets and keys to our fate. But in this version of his own story, Scooter finally contrives to extract a new truth from his mother, one that somehow transforms her into a more docile figure who, at the conclusion, promises to "cook more and take better care of you and the house." The abruptly happy ending is justified if we attribute authorship to Scooter. If, however, we choose to address Holstein as the author, we might prefer a less tidy conclusion.

To return to the hammer: It is in Lila's bag and is never put to use, never explained. There it is, on the cover of the playbill, but, to my knowledge, it's never accounted for in the play's action. This, I believe, is as it should be. Who can explain all the hardware in anyone's psyche? Why try to force the delicate ferocity of family and romantic relationships into reductive clarity? I found myself wishing that the imaginary brother, who disappeared when Scooter and his mother had their breakthroughs, would pop back out again at the end, hammer in hand, to break another garden gnome. (You'll have to see this play!)

Dark Magic

The legend of Dracula, as created by Bram Stoker in his 1898 novel, has captured international attention for over a century and inspired retellings in a variety of media, most notably film. But the book, to be honest, is a bit of a mess. It is unclear who the protagonist is, as the naïve Victorian lawyer Jonathan Harker dominates the first half of the story, while his wife, Mina, plays the leading role later. Stanton Wood's adaptation The Night of Nosferatu, produced by Rabbit Hole and directed by the brilliantly innovative Edward Elefterion, deals with that duality masterfully. Wood turns Stoker's structural problem into a brilliant metaphor for the title character's (after)life of "boundary crossing," which makes him attractive to the boundary-constrained Mina. Previously presented by Rabbit Hole as two plays, the work is even stronger as an amalgam of conflicting halves.

That is not just a metaphor: in the combined piece's first act, the actors all wear black, and it deals primarily with Mina's mental exploration of Nosferatu's castle and confrontation with the vampire, as she telepathically follows Jonathan on a business trip to Transylvania. In Act 2, they wear white, while Nosferatu becomes a stranger in the exposed world of Mina and Jonathan's society and invites Mina, incarcerated in an insane asylum, to break boundaries with him.

This reviewer was mildly annoyed by one aspect of an otherwise insightful script: the constant declarations, in the first part, that Romania is a country of darkness and superstition, where ghoulies make themselves right at home but human beings would not want to visit. Having been there and seen some remarkably innovative theater in the city of Sibiu's annual International Theater Festival, I think that Stoker's assumption needs some rethinking.

Most of the cast are veterans of Rabbit Hole's productions of the two parts. The major exception is the role of Mina, now played with a lot of steel and passion by Tatiana Gomberg, who, last year, shone as another Gothic heroine in Theater 1010's Northanger Abbey.

Matt Cody reprises his wonderful Midtown International Theatre Festival performance as Nosferatu. The tall actor's stooping walk, gratingly gritty voice, alternatingly threatening and pained expressions, and undercurrent of empathy make for a truly memorable performance. Cody's mannerisms allude to legendary actor Max Schreck's in F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu, but never merely mimic. As Harker, Paul C. Daily's Dudley Do-Right normalcy and naïveté contrast sharply with Mina's growing self-awareness and increasing identification with Nosferatu.

The humans' costumes are simple but effective, with the women's skirts suggesting the late-Victorian silhouette without going all out in period decoration. Nosferatu wears a long black overcoat that accentuates his hunched back. His hands and face are caked in white makeup, his ears are pointy, and his fingers are elongated into sharpened points, just like Schreck's. At the right moments, he and the other vampires display the obligatory weird teeth.

As in the previous presentations, the set consists of a black curtain. There are no props, and no recorded sound effects. The actors create the play's world with mime, manual and oral sound effects, and the creepy amber glare of hand-held lights. The revelation of Nosferatu in his coffin is accomplished by merely jerking back the curtain to reveal Cody, with artificially extended bleach-white hands crossed on his chest and a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression.

With mise-en-scene like this, Wood, Elefterion, and the cast make powerful dark magic. Rush to see it before the sun rises and it disappears.

Jeeves on Sunset Boulevard

The exclamation point in the title of this comedy is a good indicator of what's to come: strong emphasis delivered to otherwise pale material. The sparkling dynamism—perfectly executed exclamation points—of Gerrianne Raphael's performance as Gloria Desmond infuses an atmosphere of excitement into the formulaic plot, a mystery-comedy set in the 1930s. A mysterious stranger is invited to the elegant country home of aging film legend Gloria Desmond, where he encounters a lovely young countess, a substitute butler, and a priceless necklace. All the elements are in place for a Wodehousian adventure, and thanks to some strong performances, audiences won't be disappointed if like, this reviewer, they are devout P.G. Wodehouse fans. It's a great satisfaction to see a melodramatic doyenne like Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha, "the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth" (Wodehouse), come to life on the stage. Raphael's Gloria Desmond spins even weak dialogue into gold; every pose and verbal flourish is on the mark.

While the other performers are at risk of being outshone by the radiance of Raphael's performance, Marnie Klar and Adam Raynen largely rise to the demands of their roles as the imposters Lady Fortescue and Alfred the Butler. Klar manages to be alternately goofy and elegant as the occasion demands, while Raynen offers a consistent performance as an amiable butler—overly consistent, because the dual identity of his character offers missed opportunities for a more complex portrayal of the butler's criminal side. Harold Busby (Davis Hall), the mysterious stranger, is comically creepy in wig and fake moustache, props that nearly steal the show in the final scenes.

Playwright Norman Beim also directed, and some of his decisions seem to stem from a desire to compensate for the flatness of his dialogue and story arc. Some of the play's best moments revolve around sound effects: a dinner gong followed by jolting sounds that cause the characters to flinch compulsively; a dramatic strain of music that accompanies each mention of the Mandarin Necklace. But even these moments are formulaic—funny because they are somehow familiar from television effects?—and when the chorus from Carmina Burana fills the theater, the last crutch is in place.

The high point of the script unfolds when the mysterious Harold Busby confronts the butler and Lady Fortescue about the Mandarin Necklace. A game of throw-and-catch—or one-sided fetch—ensues with an exchange of aliases between Busby and the butler: "Willy the Weasel?" "Louis the Louse." "Louis the Louse?" "Winnie the Pooh." Lady Fortescue throws one in, "Spot the dog."

This verbal give-and-take will be echoed by the physical comings and goings of the necklace in later scenes. A nice conceit, but somehow I felt, once again, a sense of déjà vu. The danger of relying too heavily on formula is that everything becomes fraught with cliché. Especially within the confines of such a recognizable vehicle as a screwball Sunset Boulevard.