Father Figure

The title of Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder’s play Fresh Kills doesn’t refer to any recent murders, but that doesn’t mean her characters aren’t up to some very bad things. Director Isaac Byrne navigates a performance of palpable tension to show the dark places to which some people are capable of going, but while he is adroit at bringing the what of the play to life, Wilder’s failure to provide the why makes for a frustrating, though not unrewarding, evening. Occasionally, a show starts off strong but loses steam. That is not the case here, however. Fresh essentially begins in medias res; it starts in the middle of the action. The play finds its characters at a dramatically compelling crossroads, but fails to explain how they got there or where they are headed. It’s a great middle, but still in search of a beginning and end, the dramatic equivalent of an Oreo cookie with only the marshmallow stuffing.

Fresh Kills, playing at 59E59 Theatres, actually refers to the name of the Staten Island town where blue collar family man Eddie (Robert Funaro) lives with his wife, Marie (Therese Plummer). As far as we can tell, Marie is a compassionate, understanding wife, still in love with her husband, whose main concerns seem to be raising their child, keeping their house up and paying their bills.

Which is why it comes as a surprise to find Eddie picking up Arnold (Todd Flaherty), an underage male hustler, in his pick-up truck after finding him in a gay chat room. Is Eddie acting out on latent homosexual urges? Is he depraved? Merely curious? Wilder never clues the audience in as to what has drawn Eddie to seek out Arnold in the first place, or for how long he has been trolling the websites.

Nor does she adequately explain what lands Arnold in Eddie’s car. It is difficult to make heads or tails of what transpires between Eddie and Arnold, because their encounters never add up to a full affair. Then, before you know it, Arnold has ingratiated himself into Eddie’s family. Without seeing or knowing too much about Arnold’s home life, it is impossible to take him at his word, and so we never know if he is looking for a substitute family to replace his own disappointing one, merely pursuing his own sexual impulses, or if he is a deranged sociopath.

Flaherty fits the role physically – the dodgy look in his eyes suggests danger and instability – but the actor has a habit of garbling many of his lines and not always making the dialogue his own. Funaro, on the other hand, overcomes Wilder’s script deficits to peel back the layers of a confused, flawed man. While Wilder never provides sufficient context to explain how Eddie lands himself in such a threatening situation, Funaro does a brilliant job of showing Eddie’s agony with his current plight. It is a performance that is completely open and honest. Plummer, meanwhile, matches Funaro scene for scene in a resourceful performance that constantly stretches beyond mere “beleaguered wife” stereotypes.

Jared Culverhouse rounds out the ensemble in the pivotal role of Nick, caught in the middle as both Eddie’s best friend and Marie’s brother. Nick is a sea of volcanic rage, protective of Eddie yet loyal to Marie. His work further energizes the whole play (very well-paced by Byrne), and his versatility – dancing between comic relief and vitriolic intensity – textures what otherwise could have been a one-note work.

Byrne is to be complemented for staging such an arresting work in an intimate space (the audience sits on either side of the truck in the center of the theater), and Jake Platt’s lighting design goes a long way toward establishing the mood. Nonetheless, Wilder’s structure leaves many questions unanswered in Fresh. Wilder wants to explore what happens to people who pursue interests that run far afoul of what is considered acceptable by mainstream society, yet there remains far more territory to excavate.

Fine Young Cannibal

The case of Jeffrey Dahmer horrified the nation in the early 1990s. Dahmer had raped and tortured 17 young male victims, dismembering and even cannibalizing some. Fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates, who has never shied away from sick violence, published a New Yorker short story, “Zombie,” based largely on Dahmer. Later, she expanded the narrative into a novella, told from the first-person point of view of “Quentin P.,” the semi-fictional killer. Of apparent and macabre interest to Ms. Oates was the fact that Dahmer had drilled holes through the skulls of several of his drugged victims and poured acid into their brains, attempting to create docile, sexual zombies. Bill Connington has adapted the novella to the stage. Mr. Connington’s psychopathic serial killer delivers a monologue with a mostly flat affect, much like a lobotomized patient or his ideal zombie. This may be useful to capture Quentin P.’s sheer incomprehensibility (ironically, extant footage of Dahmer interviews suggest that he had a personality, however dulled), but it does not always make for riveting theater.

Connington’s Quentin P. is a more palatable, sanitized version of Oates’ character and the play suffers for it. His adaptation doesn’t fully let us into the killer’s mind. It doesn’t give us a sense of why Quentin P., an intelligent and fairly educated man, could truly believe, for example, that inserting an ice pick through the eyes and into the brains of his victims would make them love him. It doesn’t help us fathom his capacity for absolute, unadulterated evil.

Whereas Oates’ novella slowly builds the action to the point for which the novel is named, Connington’s Quentin P. simply blurts much of it out at the beginning, rendering later shocks anticlimactic. And, where Oates’ character is a clear racist and drips with contempt for everyone from his father to his probation officer (in the book and play he has been convicted of a sexual offense, as had the real Dahmer), Mr. Connington’s Quentin P. is subdued, flattened. He’s not even all that scary and certainly not as frightening as Mr. Connington wants him to be. It’s almost as if he, himself, has been lobotomized.

Despite his clear familiarity with the part (Zombie debuted at last year’s New York International Fringe Festival), Mr. Connington seems squeamish in his role. In his attempt to strip a persona from Quentin P. and emulate a stereotypical psychopath, a la Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Mr. Connington enunciates words cautiously and self-consciously, sometimes inadvertently channeling Mrs. Doubtfire instead of Norman Bates. Mr. Connington permits himself the occasional outburst—for example, when Quentin P. grades his first four zombie-making attempts as “Fs”— but, rather than terrifying us these explosions make us grateful for the change of pace.

Props are sparse. There’s a small table, an overhead lamp, two chairs, and a chess set in front of which sits a mannequin. The mannequin is used to demonstrate Quentin P.’s bizarre love (and hatred) for his victims, his ice pick technique, and his sexual torture, but it wears thin after a while. I kept thinking how interesting it would have been to introduce, however briefly, Quentin’s father, or his probation officer, or some of the other minor characters from the novella, rather than having Quentin P. describe them in his monotonous voice. Thomas Caruso’s direction and Deidre Broderick’s sound design are fine, though perhaps a bit too prone to gimmickry, such as employing rumbles of thunder when Quentin P. utters something particularly creepy. Joel Silver’s lighting design is inventive and makes great use of shadows.

Mr. Connington tries hard; he really does. He should be commended for even approaching this difficult subject. Yet, he never truly immerses himself in the psychopathy of Quentin P., preferring to stand at its edges, testing the waters. Perhaps it’s an impossible task. Perhaps Oates has already found, in fiction, the best vehicle for this tale’s delivery.

Resistance is Futile

In his book The Blind Watchmaker, evolutionary biologist (and outspoken atheist) Richard Dawkins describes a theoretical process through which our “primeval soup” of proteins and DNA originally thrived by growing on a scaffolding of inorganic crystals. This notion that the first beginnings of organic life on Earth were nurtured into being by synthetic elements seems fitting when one thinks of how humans have reintegrated the synthetic into their lives – glass eyes, fake limbs, implanted boobs. Is this recent compulsion to make ourselves perfect through plastic really just nostalgia for those good ole’ developmental days? Regardless of motivations, the inevitable consequences of this shotgun marriage between biology and technology are at the heart of Universal Robots, Mac Rogers’ adventurous new take on Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R.. The original play’s title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots and it is often footnoted in science fiction anthologies for introducing the concept of robots and, in fact, the word “robot” to the world. Rogers’ version is equal parts historical drama and parable, expertly presenting the moral and political gray areas a servant class of robots would necessitate.

Czech playwright Capek is actually the main character of Universal Robots and the narrative follows the activist author (rendered with adequate intensity by David Ian Lee) through the peaks and valleys of Rogers’ alternate 20th century. When a gender-confused scientist named Rossum (Nancy Sirianni) invents robots in the early twenties, President Masaryk (David Lamberton) appoints Capek, his sister Jo, and their circle of coffee shop bohemians as the Czech ethical committee on the treatment and usage of robots. At first these humanoid robots are given a strict set of parameters to differentiate themselves from humans, such as alienating speech patterns and a rule preventing use of the first person pronoun “I.” However, as technology improves and there are calls for weaponized robots to suppress Nazi Germany, Rossum’s Universal Robots find themselves on the brink of consciousness and revolution.

If Rogers’ script has any weakness, it is the conceit that the audience is watching a troupe of acting robots “tell the story” of how they came to rule the world. Occasionally the cast chants religiously or breaks character to offer a bit of commentary – sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. The compelling narrative about Capek could easily stand on its own, but the frequent breaks and asides of this “storytelling” framework tend to subvert it.

Yet the story told deserves much praise. Rogers’ script could have been the clunky old “robots are people too” tirade seen so often in films like A. I. Artificial Intelligence or I, Robot, but instead it greets audiences with genuine characters like Capek’s sorrowful sister Jo (played faultlessly by Jennifer Gordan Thomas) and complex philosophical quandaries about whether pedophiles should be given child-shaped robots. Sure, one could parse out allusions to contemporary debates about war and genetics, but the true beauty here is the authenticity of Rogers’ re-imagined twentieth century – where robot-producing Czechoslovakia emerges as a world power. Supported by Rosemary Andress’ sharp, but restrained staging, Rogers’ robots believably progress from faceless mannequins to PTSD afflicted soldiers.

Universal Robots’ cast features many highly competent actors, but two performances stood out as truly outstanding. Ridley Parson infuses much humanity into his fearless portrayal of Baruch, a Jewish American advisor to FDR, who offers U.S. support for Czech President Masaryk to send combat-programmed robots into Nazi Germany. Baruch’s mission is a murky business and Parson doesn’t shy away from the moral implications. After soldiers, women and children in Germany have been efficiently “contained” by the robot army, it is clear that Baruch and Masaryk have exchanged one genocide for another.

Likewise, Jason Howard displays incredible nuance in robot Radius’ evolution from a crude automaton to a self-actualized, but deranged individual. In a tender scene when Jo asks Radius if he is able to embrace her, he affirms and Howard’s deadpan response is hilarious: “Do you wish to enact this scenario?” Through Howard’s performance, these charming encounters make the traumatized android’s eventual descent into madness all the more tragic. The robots’ affecting journey into sentience (and the parallel journey of those who manufactured them) is at once funny, stirring and horrifying.

While Rogers’s sci-fi fable concludes that Dawkins’ ever-evolving romance between the organic and the inorganic might end in heartbreak, he also suggests that inhuman robots could eventually learn to be humane. This leaves us with a final allegory, I suppose, about how all the things we make – like art, war, and love – have our best traits programmed into them.

Or how when you come right down to it… sigh… robots are people too.

Sword Play

With Soul Samurai, Vampire Cowboys have, once again, proven themselves masters of action-adventure theater. Having conquered sci-fi with last year’s hit, Fight Girl Battle World, writer-director team Qui Nguyen and Robert Ross Parker have joined forces with the Ma-Yi Theater Company to move into more badass territory: a bloody story of vengeance with elements of Blaxploitation, hip hop, and The Warriors mixed in. Set in an apocalyptic New York City overrun by rival gangs (worse news: some of them even have special powers!), Samurai tells the story of Dewdrop (Maureen Sebastian), a librarian-turned-warrior on a mission to take revenge on the gang that killed her lover (Bonnie Sherman). Ever the go-getter, Dewdrop takes on the gang – and anyone else that gets in her way – with just a sword, an attitude (she’s got some serious trash talk skills), and an adorable sidekick, Cert (Paco Tolson).

Even with such a dark premise, the show is infused with geeky glee. From the impromptu breakdancing to the witty battle banter and pop culture references, Samurai is ultimately a very playful presentation. Complementing the violent saga, there are puppets with Avenue Q-style attitude and other multimedia touches, such as a great stop-motion film about a forbidden love between a ninja and a samurai starring, naturally, pieces of fruit.

All playing multiple roles, the five-person ensemble nails the goofy-yet-hip style of Nguyen’s script. If high-flying faceoffs weren’t enough, Samurai’s got solid characters to back it up. For every perfect swordfight or sexy quip, there’s a hilarious moment of vulnerability (Cert’s wannabe bad-boy act never gets old) or self-awareness (a villain commenting on her own “kinkalicious” costume). Particularly successful are the scene-stealing Tolson and Jon Hoche, who adds hilarious swagger to his roles (his pimp-like gang leader and one-eyed preacher shouldn’t be missed). The show seems just as much fun for the actors as the audience. You can’t even fault them when they break into an accidental chuckle.

As with other Vampire Cowboys fare, Samurai is action-packed with fight scenes galore. While it sometimes seems on the verge of being too much, Nguyen’s choreography varies the moves and weapons enough (a knife to the eye was a personal favorite of mine) to keep things fresh. A cleverly-rendered car chase is also impressive. Whether hanging onto the hood of a swerving vehicle or slicing an enemy in two, Sebastian slides through her physically demanding performance with finesse.

The design team perfectly visualizes the show’s themes. The set, a gritty, graffiti-covered NYC, also serves as a prop. A storefront grate, for example, is not just a particularly inspired choice for a curtain, but is also used for surprise attacks and getaways. The costumes, too, match each character well: Cert, the comic relief, dons a hilariously tacky T-shirt and overalls, while our sexy heroine wears biker-chick battlegear that shows some skin.

There are some weak spots in the show. A villain’s origin story, for example, ends on a vague, confusing note. However, small inconsistencies do not ruin what is overall an extremely exciting piece of theater. See Samurai before it’s too late.

The Truth is Obvious and Ever Shifting

It is always interesting to see what a contemporary theater company will do with a classic play; to see how they will relate it to our current times or extend its themes to relate to us. At the start of One Year Lease's production of Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, a calm voice intones over the loudspeaker. It issues general etiquette instructions as well as suggestions for what to do in case of a fire. The instructions are banal — servants should stand to the side of the door while guests enter, when you hear the word "fire," you should touch the side of the stage — and provide a perfect pre-show setting for the play as a well as a subtle suggestion as to what the company has done with the show. While studying English, Ionesco was taken with the obviousness of the phrases and dialogues in his primer. He learned, though he already knew, that the floor was down, the ceiling was up. The result was The Bald Soprano, where two English couples, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Martin, get together for a dinner party. The stilted language at the beginning of the play: "There, it's nine o'clock. We've drunk the soup and eaten the fish and chips, and the English salad" soon gives way to silliness and nonsense, with, for instance, one set of couples pretending they had only just met, although they share the same bedroom, and same bed, and it seems, the same child. The play concludes with the characters shouting out non sequiturs such as “don't smooch my brooch!” and “the pope elopes! The pope's got no horoscope.” The shift is indicative of, as director Ianthe Demos notes, the collapse of the truths by which the characters live.

One Year Lease's production takes the collapse of truth one step further by performing The Bald Soprano as a structured improv. The world of The Bald Soprano is one in which "history has taken second place to the immediate and transitory. The result is a constant reconstruction of our reality." The text remains the same, yet the actors take subtle cues from each other so as to constantly change the physicality of the piece. A character leans, the others follow. A chair is raised, the others follow. This may be a production worth seeing several times, just so that one can see the shift in the show from night to night based on which cues are given and which are not.

The production is crisp and energetic, with the actors working together as a true ensemble. The stage is a circular platform surrounded by white curtains that the Maid and the Smiths snap open and shut. The costumes are prim and ever so proper, a perfect counterpoint for when the Smiths and Martins are rolling about on the floor, attempting to tear each others' eyes out. That said, the actor's physicality is impressive. Their movements are fluid, whether they brandishing their chairs as weapons or dragging themselves across the floor during a brutal fight. It is never clear who is the leader and who are the followers in the improvs or if they are in fact improvising at all.

The Bald Soprano is a pleasant reminder of the absurdity of life, and is particularly useful now when everything seems to have to be steeped in meaning. In light of that, it is often a delight to delight in the banal and One Year Lease certainly succeeds in finding the joy in nothing.

Homeless Boneyard

The homeless lie on bare mattresses and rumpled blankets beneath the A/C/E subway lines using cardboard boxes and crates as furniture. Their lives fall somewhere between harsh inescapable reality and whimsical drug induced fantasies filled with ghosts from their past. This pit of despair beckons to an articulate young college professor named Lambert (Clinton Faulkner) who says his heartbreak over a failed relationship has brought him to this place. However, his fellow sufferers believe there is more to his story. Leslie Lee’s bleak drama, The Book of Lambert is a strong, unflinching character study of six souls wasting their lives away in the shadowy corners of a subway station. When the play opens, each character stirs in his or her sleep, eventually stretching to life to reveal the events of the past that have anchored their present. The obstacles range from small faraway memories to unsettled insecurities to the most debilitating – neglect and disapproval from unloving parents.

The first act shows the depths to which each person has sunk while the second half provides some much needed hope, focusing on the characters' determination to break whatever it is that has chained them.

Joresa Blount plays a young pregnant woman named Bonnie who possesses hard edges but also a sympathetic center. She is prickly towards the world but still hopeful about getting back into it.

Sadrina Johnson gives a unique twist to Priscilla, an exotic dancer who has been used up and thrown out. Johnson is over-the-top when indulging in Princilla’s reckless wild side, but finds a poignant note of somber clarity when the fun winds down, forcing Pricilla to face herself.

The elders of the group, Otto and Zinth, are played by impressive stage veterans Arthur French and Gloria Sauvé respectively, each expertly capturing the nuances of a passionless marriage and the futility of enduring a doomed life merely waiting for its end.

And finally, there is Clancy (Howard L. Wieder), a self-professed “obstacle police” who tickets people and objects that obstruct anything from sunlight pouring through a window to boxes blocking cars from driving down the street. Clancy pretends to just be visiting until Lambert furiously and violently confronts him. With the eloquent phrasing of a polished academic he demands, “Tell me about the pain that has rotted your cerebellum and brought you to this homeless boneyard.”

But a poetic vernacular is not the only attribute distinguishing Lambert from the others in his company. His comrades clothe themselves in torn sweaters and unraveling rags, while Lambert is dressed in a stiff white-collared shirt half tucked inside of his slacks with a loosely knotted tie still dangling from his neck. It would appear that this man walked straight from a university classroom to a cardboard box.

Though everyone in the subway station has a story, Lambert’s situation is the only one that begs the question, “Why?” The others ended up in their miserable predicament through understandable means: broken homes, bad choices, and addictions to drugs. But Lambert chose this life, and continues to choose it with each new day. He has the best chance of leaving. The fact that he doesn’t is the tightly wound mystery at the heart of the story.

With this sizeable heaping of heavy subject matter, The Book of Lambert could easily feel as weighty as its characters' troubles. Fortunately, Lee keeps the action fast-paced, colorful, and at times even humorous.

Though the characters' obstacles are large and seemingly unresolvable, the play does conclude with a ray of promise. Those willing to face and conquer their problems have the potential to one day reclaim the lives and return to the light.

Only the Lonely

It takes no small measure of self-confidence, and perhaps even recklessness, to present one's own plays along with one from an acknowledged master—deliberately or not, inevitable comparisons are invited. The short plays of Alex Dinelaris, though often strong, just don’t measure up to William Saroyan’s brilliant one-act, Hello Out There, which Mr. Dinelaris has chosen to close the bill of American Rapture: The Lonely Soul of A Crowded Nation. Mr. Dinelaris also directs the plays, all six of which share the themes of isolation and despair. Spin Cycle, the opening piece, is about a psychopath (Brad Fryman) who finds a famous talk-show personality (Donovan Patton) drunk on a late-night commuter train and decides to murder him. The first scene is riveting as the television personality struggles to overcome his own stupor and come to grips with his situation. He offers his assailant money. But it’s not money the attacker wants; it’s the perverted fame that society bestows upon people who commit infamous and heinous acts: “One day they don’t exist, and the next day, everybody knows their name. I mean, even if it’s only for a week. An hour. A minute. They’ve been born.” This is fascinating stuff. Yet, Mr. Dinelaris either loses confidence or interest in his ability to explore this plot and the next two scenes devolve into typical episodes of The Shield and The Practice, replete with highly implausible legal proceedings and even an unhinged police officer, played with sadistic, convincing relish by William Laney.

The next play, Blind Date, is a cute and clever but slight comedy—a sketch, really—about two young people whose self-destructive alter egos follow them around on their first date and make them more nervous than they already are. Rain is a sparse, derivative melodrama, a la Ghost, about a woman (Jane Cortney) whose dead boyfriend (Donovan Patton) appears to her at what would have been their ten-year high school reunion.

Juggling Jacqueline and Forgiven are the most interesting offerings from Mr. Dinelaris. In Juggling Jacqueline, a grief-stricken young man visits his therapist in the hopes of getting over his mother’s death; in Forgiven a middle-aged prostitute, Molly (Jane Cortney) decides to visit a church and confess her sins for the first time in 18 years. Ms. Cortney, peppering Molly’s shame with defiance, turns in a strong performance in this monologue.

Saroyan’s 1941 one-act, Hello Out There has greater depth and richness than any of its predecessors on the bill. A good-hearted young drifter (Stewart Walker) sits in a rural Texas jail cell, falsely accused of raping a local woman. Lonely, he calls out in the darkness, and is answered by the jailhouse cook, Emily, a young, homely outcast. She informs the drifter that, after being knocked unconscious, he’s been moved from jail to jail because the woman’s husband and some of his friends are planning to lynch him. This fact sets up an almost unbearable tension as the drifter tries to convince the girl to find a way to get the jailhouse key.

Diánna Martin is stellar as the naïve, mistreated, and dreamy young girl, mesmerized by the drifter’s big city tales. The impact of the anxiety-provoking spare, dark set by Kathryn Veillette, foregrounding Mr. Walker and his jail cell, was regrettably diminished by the fact that the bars were easily wide enough for him to step through.

Though perhaps a bit overly fond of eighties pop soundtracks to set up his scenes, Mr. Dinelaris is a savvy director. Spin Cycle, for example, benefits from having a table on either side of the stage, one for interrogation and the other as part of a television studio. This keeps the action moving at a brisk pace. All of the plays demonstrate a similar economy and precision timing.

Despite strong performances by those mentioned and by Brad Fryman, American Rapture suffers from unevenness, a tendency toward sentimentality, and an unfortunate debt to well-worn movie and television plots.

For Love and Theater

Playwright Itamar Moses puts it quite nicely when he states that “a short play is like a single.” However, unlike a pop single, which can often become more popular than the longer album format, short plays tend to get relegated to the dust bin, pulled out for One-Act Festivals in the summertime, maybe, but otherwise, playwrights tend to become known only for their longer works. This is a shame as there many truly delightful short plays. Thankfully, the Flea Theater is producing five of Moses' short plays in an evening titled Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It). The Flea's downstairs space works well for the structure of the show — each play has its own section on the wide stage. A “Reader” guides the audience through the transitions and through the final play itself. The plays are thematically linked: they are about love. But not only just about love but about the inner workings of theater and perhaps how difficult it is for one to find love while working in theater. In the first play, “Chemistry Read,” a playwright is forced to watch the actor who stole his girlfriend audition for the lead role in his play. In “Authorial Intent,” the longest of the five plays, we are taken through the breakup of couple, first in regular format, then in highly theatrical and literary technical terms, then finally as the actors playing the actors stripped of their characters. “Untitled Short Play” is all about the writer's stress in attempting to write a scene for a couple at a cafe.

The plays all have charm and the actors are all very engaging and energized, but occasionally the meta- nature of the plays gets to be a bit much. “Untitled Short Play” is the most static of the plays, given that no action in the traditional sense occurs—it is a play “hijacked by its opening stage direction.” However, John Russo is vibrant as the Reader, hopping around the Flea's wide stage obsessing over what could possibly happen in the scene that never happens. One would like it if the “play” were to actually begin, but then again, the Reader is quite compelling and his complaints understandable.

The strongest of the plays is “Szinhaz,” which is structured as a talk show, with an actress, Marie, interviewing a brooding Russian director. The director, Istvan, only speaks Russian, or at least something that sounds Russian. Felipe Bonilla pulls off the “Russian” language, be it actual Russian or not, very well. Marie's attempts to translate Chekhov's titles from Russian to English are quite hilarious as well: The Garbage Bird and There are Sisters and There are Three of Them. “Szinhaz” deals with the relationship between what is created in the theater and what actually then begins to occur in real life: the way in which actors playing lovers occasionally fall in love offstage as well, as they have become so wrapped up in the emotions created for the theater.

Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) makes for an enjoyable night of theater, particularly for anyone on the “inside” of theater and for anyone who has ever been enchanted by love.

Living Walls

Before New York’s financial world caved in on itself, the most ubiquitous enemy to the city’s longtime residents was its series of aggressive redevelopment projects. Its five boroughs may have risen in stroller-friendliness over the past decade, but the family businesses and community-specific traditions that once characterized its neighborhoods have now given way to drug store chains and luxury condominiums. A collective need to resist gentrification prevails as New York’s defining cause of social activism, and consequently is reflected in art projects conceived within the city’s borders. Such is the case with redevelop (death valley), a frenzied blend of video, photography, spoken word, dance and music playing at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. The scope of the project is ambitious to the point of feeling exhausting as it attempts to use this mishmash of artistic genres to create a parallel between local redevelopment projects and the impact of ghost towns on the American psyche. In its strongest moments, redevelop (death valley) reads like a cleverly conceived museum installation, but its lack of narrative clarity does more to jumble the goals of the piece than to inspire moments of a-ha.

Five performers roam about the stage during its roughly hour-long running time, but for most of it they are literally upstaged by an assortment of hanging, translucent panels that serve as projection screens and obstruct the audience’s view. Isolating the company’s performers with a plastic wall and offering the audience a partial, distorted view is a strategic choice that appears to be designed to trigger frustration. Just as the endless construction of sterile condominiums muffles the spirit of a neighborhood, these white panels invoke our curiosity, ruthlessly control our viewpoint, and distance us from the flesh-and-blood element of the piece. The metaphor is effective, but its execution also keeps the audience at a needless distance.

While most of the video and still photography images projected onto the panels depict elements of the performance space itself, from the five dancers’ quivering legs and hands to extreme close-ups of light beams, windows and radiators, the work is also punctuated by two lengthier, pre-taped segments. An interview with a longtime Long Island City resident opens the first half of the work, and the second half in turn begins with a series of video clips, images and commentary depicting abandoned desert towns.

While the opening interview suffers from sloppy editing that makes its subject appear excessively long-winded, the second documentary segment is arguably the most affecting part of redevelop (death valley). There’s an unexpected beauty to its images of abandoned houses, stripped of everything valuable and blending, like fossils, into the landscape around them. In this segment one can’t always make out the voice of the interviewee, but as the recorded sound of a distant highway grows almost unsettlingly loud, these words lose their importance.

Perhaps the only clear arc in Rogers’s piece is the gradual removal of these obstructing screens. Its five characters occasionally shut out one another’s access to the audience by putting up additional panels, but as the piece draws to a close, they move these screens, one by one, onto a pile on the floor. As we begin to see the oblong, tile-walled room in its entirety, another memorable image is revealed: the five performers have gathered around a dinner table in the far end of the space, chatting and pouring glasses of wine underneath a yellow light. In the center of the room is a pile of unidentifiable rags, and in front of the audience a narrow beam of rain pours on an abandoned tea set. Even if one isn’t quite sure of the meaning of this visual moment, it's difficult to forget.

Although the visual and audio elements of the performance appear to be carefully orchestrated, its use of words is its most notable weakness. When the five characters speak, it’s often almost impossible to make out their words, and when one does hear them, their context is unclear. The performance also tries to make use of a variety of spoken-word recordings, including FDR’s fireside chats and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, but their meaning remains obscure and their presence only contributes to a viewer’s confusion.

It’s difficult, of course, to fault the Chocolate Factory’s artistic director Brian Rogers for his ambition, and I’m not sure that I would want to. Love them or hate them, works like redevelop (death valley) continue to challenge and expand the ways in which we perceive theater. The work itself may not always be relatable, but the artistic passion behind it certainly is.

A Lonely Hearts Club Band of One

“There are seven levels.” So says Paul McCartney anyway, upon discovering the true nature of reality the first time he smoked pot, which was with Bob Dylan. This and other fascinating, impromptu anecdotes make up the majority of johnpaulgeorgeringo, Dave Jay’s live action wiki of all things Beatle. And Paul is right – there are probably seven unique levels of enjoyment awaiting audiences in Jay’s magical mystery tour.

Level one – history. No other rock band can quite summon up feelings of weight and importance like the Beatles. No doubt, the legend of four working class blokes from Liverpool who, through pop and psychedelia, rocketed to the top of music charts is already a familiar one. But in his analysis, Jay takes great pleasure in scraping stories out of often-unrecalled nooks and crannies. That drummer Ringo Starr lived on canned beans while in India, for instance, or that the boys all had stripper girlfriends in Hamburg, Germany. More impressively, Jay’s interactive opus takes the form of a lively examination rather than a pedantic thesis. Real questions from audience members are required to prod “the band” into talking, so every yarn emerges genuinely from Jay’s comprehensive knowledge of Beatle trivia. The relaxed atmosphere the show creates is quite amazing, with theatergoers likely falling into two camps: those who simply forget that they’re not actually talking to the Beatles and those determined to trip Jay up in obscure minutia. Either way, it’s a blast.

The second level of enjoyment is performance – the sheer skill with which Jay executes artful dodges and mellow recollection. His precise characterizations of all four Beatles spring forth quite organically, even if Mr. Jay trends towards caricature. After all, history remembers these musicians as larger than life, so Jay doesn’t tarnish that image. He does well to work in broad, recognizable strokes; his George is quiet with a capital “Q” and his Paul is a high-pitched fruit loop.

Unsurprisingly, music is another pleasure here. During Q&A dry spells, Jay frequently grabs a guitar and plays. Some of the compositions are his originals, styled after Lennon and McCartney to good effect. This is a slippery slope, because there are probably some who would balk at the suggestion that Jay’s songs are of “Beatle quality.” But Jay covers his tracks, occasionally belting out quirky, but entertaining versions of Beatle material (Shhhh!). Standouts at the performance I attended were a version of “Yesterday” with “scrambled eggs” replacing the chorus and Ringo’s laughable attempt at “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

Those interested in more current gossip, ranging from Heather Mills to Lennon: The Musical will also find something to like in johnpaulgeorgeringo. Jay offers some nice reflections on how the band members and their legacies have been tainted over the years. If asked, Lennon will honestly confront allegations that he had a homosexual relationship with manager Brian Epstein or address his failures as a father. Sometimes, Jay’s decisive admissions were so blunt that audience members skeptically asked, “Really? Is that really true?”

It is also important to consider marketing when seeing a piece like this and its success; originating in last year’s Fringe Festival, johnpaulgeorgeringo is now making the rounds at comedy clubs (like Ha!) and Off-Broadway theaters. Jay and his co-creator Brad Calcaterra have successfully fashioned a low-maintenance event that is accessible to a wide audience. Everyone has at least marginal interest in the Beatles and their story. Predictably, each audience member at the performance I attended had at least one question – myself included. Perhaps the only disappointment in this respect was that this big, accessible audience wasn’t there. For a Saturday night at a midtown comedy club, it was shockingly unpopulated. (It seems even the Beatles aren’t immune to economic instability.) One wonders what a larger, rowdier audience might have coaxed out of Jay.

But I didn’t mind the intimate gathering, as it increased the profundity of casually hanging out with these iconic day-trippers. This is the sixth level I found appealing: the spiritual aspect of the show. For all its humble trappings – there are no tech or sound cues – the johnpaulgeorgeringo experience manages a complex simulacrum of closure. Even though you know it isn’t real, it is as if you can finally close the book on all those idle musings or dorm room arguments. “Wait, they’re not saying ‘I get high’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand?’” Or, “see, I told you – Yoko did eat George’s cookies!” In this Dave Jay proves a high artist, because his glib portrayal of these all-too familiar stories feels definitive.

And there is the final layer to Jay’s performance – the recognizable, but unknowable allure we each found the first time we heard John Lennon’s voice treated with an echo effect or the crackle of guitar in “Revolution.” Jay has all but bottled “Beatle” in a digestible one-hour container. In the words of Sgt. Pepper, “sit back and let the evening go.”

Scary Times Are Here Again...

So much of what defines terror can be summed up in one word: Atmosphere. Vagabond Theatre Ensemble’s production of The Wendigo, based on the story by Algernon Blackwood, has Atmosphere in spades. It is positively dripping in it, starting the moment you walk into the theater; from the dim lighting and snow crunching underfoot, to the air filled with smoke and spooky ambient sound, to the actor rocking back and forth onstage, clutching himself in what could be considered abject terror. The expectation established in those few minutes before the lights dim is that the audience is in for one roller-coaster thrill ride of a journey, and thankfully Vagabond delivers on their promise masterfully. The sound design was the first thing that really stuck out to this viewer. Designed by M.L. Dogg, the audience was subjected to creepy music, eerie ambient sounds, and sudden jolting noises in the best horror-film tradition. Combined with Brian Tovar’s brilliant lighting design, which really strived to do something a bit different from what one might expect, there was more than one moment of nearly jumping out of one’s seat.

The set was gorgeous, designed by Nicholas Vaughan, and evoked beautifully particular passages from the original story. The production was held together by projections created by Gino Barzizza, which not only served to fix the action in a particular time and place, but meshed all the other design elements nearly flawlessly. I say nearly, because the only thing that took me out of the play were the costumes, which were very pretty. Too pretty, in fact. Although costume designer Candice Thompson chose or built spectacular pieces, the pressed seams in the rugged adventurer’s pants kind of broke the illusion of these hardy men living out in the woods for several days, if not weeks. Everything was a little too clean, and could have used a bit of distressing, which can be understandably problematic with borrowed or rented costumes. Because of this, the piece that was the most believable was the ripped shirt belonging to the Native guide, Defago.

The play itself, written by Eric Sanders and directed by Matthew Hancock, was a fitting tribute to one of the masters of modern horror. The language flowed naturally, without having the stilted feel that some period pieces possess, and the actors seemed to relish every word. All of the performances were rock solid, with nary a weak link in the group.

The story is told in flashback, partly through the eyes of Simpson (played by Nick Merritt), a young man going on his first moose-hunting expedition in the wilds of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. He is accompanied by noted anthropoligist Doc (played by Erik Gratton), and their two trackers and wilderness experts, Hank (played by Graham Outerbridge) and Defago (played by Kurt Uy). Without saying too much, the men get separated in the woods and things go horribly wrong.

Although there were a couple of unintentionally humorous moments (most notably when a particular sound effect and the manner in which a couple of the actors were standing made it seem like they were relieving themselves, which was even funnier later in the play when Hank actually is supposed to be relieving himself), the overall vision and artful staging by director Matthew Hancock was quite stunning. Since this is my first exposure to his work, and it was on the shorter side (coming in at about 45 minutes), I would like to see if he can sustain this sort of intensity over a longer period of time; I have a feeling I would not be disappointed.

There are far too few adaptations of the great writers that actually do them justice out there, so when one comes along it should be greatly lauded. The Wendigo is one of these plays that is truly inspires the viewer either to pick up a book and read a great work, or pick up a pen and create one. At the very least, it should inspire you to double-check your doors and leave a light on.

Look Back in Awe

It was a logical choice to adapt E. L. Doctorow’s novel saluting Americana, Ragtime, for the Broadway musical stage in 1998. Doctorow’s ambitious tale, interweaving a prosperous New Rochelle WASP family, African-American servants and Eastern European immigrants during the early years of the 20th century was ripe for an introspective millennium audience. And the skilled team of Terrence McNally (who wrote the book), Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and Stephen Flaherty (music) was able to capture the pulse of the book, lovingly translating its ups and downs to rich musical effect. (All three won Tony Awards for their efforts). But how can one scale down such a show, big in every way, around the budget and size of an Off-Off-Broadway theater? Such a question does not seem to have deterred Tom Wojtunik, who directs Ragtime for the Astoria Performing Arts Center. Wojtunik makes such good use of his performance space in Astoria’s Good Shepherd United Methodist Church that one could easily think it was conceived for that exact space.

To give away much of the show’s plot would be as criminal as some of the more gut-wrenching acts that drive the show’s powerful three hours, so I’ll abstain. Instead I reflect upon the way that Doctorow has his stories intersect and entwines the lives of characters both fictional and historic (including activist Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini) seemingly with a minimum of effort.

Wojtunik builds upon these exchanges in a wonderfully literal way. Choreographer Ryan Kasprzak has the characters parade through the auditorium, moving throughout the audience (who are seated in five sections around a de facto thrust stage and also must face each other). In the first act, the characters from the three different groups find themselves integrated among each other; early in the more racially-charged second act, these characters march through the same movements, but in a more segregated manner. Wojtunik’s point is simple but profound: these characters represent us. Their problems are our problems, and we cannot escape them.

One of the elements that make Ragtime a rarity is that it is never simply one character’s musical. The central love story between Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (D. William Hughes) and his erstwhile paramour, Sarah (Janine Ayn Romano) has a ripple effect that forever alters the lives of her employer, Mother (Anna Lise Jensen), her Younger Brother (Ricky Oliver), and Tateh (Mark Gerrard), an enterprising Jewish immigrant whose paths keep crossing with that of Mother’s.

All of this may sound a bit dark, and while Ragtime has its heavy moments, it is also full of uplift, thanks to a catalog of songs that rank at the very top of the modern canon. Hughes and Romano have the unenviable task of taking on theater royalty in reprising the signature roles of Brian Stokes Mitchell and Audra McDonald, but they do so with absolute confidence. Witness Romano’s chilling take on “Your Daddy’s Son,” or their harmonic convergence on the show’s biggest number, the duet “On the Wheels of a Dream.”

Jensen also drives the show in her own right. Mother undergoes a sea change of emotional realizations throughout Ragtime, which the actress underscores with subtlety and grace. Jensen also has a gorgeous voice, put to great use in the number “Back to Before.” Rare is the actress who can take a few minutes of standing still and alone on stage and turn it into a command performance.

If Jensen provides the show’s heart, then Gerrard is every a bit its soul. Mother may just be waking up to the dangers in the world, but Tateh knows them all too well, and the actor’s full-bodied performance aches at both possibility and regret. The role of Younger Brother is the one that suffers the most in McNally’s adaptation from the novel, but Oliver makes every moment count. He is certainly an actor to keep an eye on. The show’s ensemble chorus also comes through time and again, particularly in such numbers as “He Wanted to Say” and “Till We Reach That Day.”

Ragtime is a technical marvel as for an Off-Off-Broadway show. Though Hughes had a few projection problems (particularly when singing “Make Them Hear You”) at the performance I attended, overall Kristyn R. Smith proves to be a resourceful sound designer. David Withrow’s costumes, too, are all first-rate. There is simply no weak link in this show under Wojtunik’s hand.

And all of the pieces come together to make for a harrowing, unforgettable night of theater. While this show is sturdy enough to be an evergreen, it is nearly impossible to watch Ragtime and not think about the nation’s specific historic moment. Passionate and bursting with talent, APAC’s production is a towering testament to the angels on whose shoulders we now stand.

Desperate Doings

Laugh, Damn Ya, Laugh! carries in its title a strong ambiguity: the promise in that repetition of “laugh” that humor will be forthcoming, and a curse that laughter isn’t happening. Unfortunately, it’s the curse that Walter Corwin’s strange “comedy” labors under, and it’s a heavy one. The play falls into three sections. In the set-up, Sam (Tony King), a formerly potent force in TV comedy production, and somehow the only person in America who can make people laugh, faces a crisis. Why? Reruns of his hit show, Sex in the Rural Areas (a cute, if obvious, reference to Sex and the City), have hit rock bottom: four viewers in the country, down in one week from 10.5 million. His explanation: “People are in church.” Now, why is a rerun the linchpin of humor across the entire country? And would it really air on a Sunday morning? Think about it. Reruns of Sex and the City may draw viewers, but its creators had better have moved on to something else to keep up their reputations. If Sam is such a comedy genius, he’d be worried about his latest creation, not one in reruns. And he’s hardly responsible for the program schedule. He reports to higher-ups known as “the seven samurai.”

Even so, Sam is a Type A personality (King invests him with sangfroid and stoic rationalism). He has fired Sybil (Jessica Day), a former dalliance and a brilliant comedy writer who specializes in social satire. Now he must lure her back. The despondent Sybil, in a robe and curlers, is discovered at home talking to a circle of chairs, whose occupants are the spirits of Oscar Wilde, George S. Kaufman, Aristophanes, George Bernard Shaw, and Woody Allen. She’s invited them with the expectation of Sam’s visit. Her character carries more than a little promise of looniness, but the scene quickly falls flat. Sam enters and explains to Sybil, “I put so much canned laughter into our shows, the machine broke.” So people aren’t laughing because there was too much canned laughter on the shows? Or is it because some “machine” that supplied the canned laughter broke? Or were the shows just not funny? Corwin’s writing is vague and sometimes impenetrable, and feels slapped together.

The midsection features Sam and Jess, his secretary (Samantha Mason), watching auditioners try to be funny—in particular Jack, played by Oliver Thrun, a lanky, bald fellow who injects vital energy into his scenes but is undermined by three laborious monologues that include potshots at historical figures (e.g., Jefferson: “His private life was nothing to write home about”). To be fair, the point is that even this comic genius Jack can’t produce laughter, but that point registers pretty quickly.

The final scene is a screamfest among three “characters”: Hap, the spirit of comedy, represented by a performer in a mask of the Brooklyn Bridge; Traj (tragedy, if you can’t guess), in a mask showing subway cars; and Victory Man (King again), limping in a tattered superhero costume with a “V” on his chest—he's Voteman. Had King not shown competence earlier on as Sam, one might be appalled to find his work so amateurish (as is much of the other acting). The women fare particularly badly under director Jonathan Weber, who doesn’t seemed to have challenged the writer about the many inconsistencies or given any shape to the scenes. Even Thrun and King, who both have strong, resonant voices, only give a glimmer of the promise they might deliver with better material.

Corwin has a weakness for showing off erudition that doesn’t advance the plot. Early scenes contain references to Greek tragedy, from the Furies to Thyestes, Sweeney Todd, and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But when the ghost of Oscar Wilde misquotes his own line from The Importance of Being Earnest, you know you’re in trouble.

Good to be Bad

What might it look like for a theater group to stage the worst plays it can imagine? In the case of You're Welcome, currently running at the Brick, it looks terrific. Dubbed "A Cycle of Bad Plays by The Debate Society," a Brooklyn theater group better known for magical literary adaptations than for campy lampoons, You're Welcome resonates with The Debate Society's signature off-kilter enthusiasm as the play cycle moves from theatrical disaster to theatrical disaster. The production opens with a self-described "very laughable sketch," The Bathroom. Ostensibly a farce in the manner of old timey drawing room (bathroom?) comedies, The Bathroom gets conveniently cut short due to a longwinded director's talk by an excellent Michael Cyril Creighton in the guise of a pleased Oliver Butler, who actually directs the show. Theatrical hi-jinx continues in A Thought About Ryan, perhaps the sharpest play of the evening, which is introduced by Paul Thureen as a play which tours "High Schools and Youth Centers all over everywhere near here." A cheeky nod at Debate Society play A Thought About Raya, here the titular Ryan is a teen killed when drinking and driving. You're Welcome's treatment of the genre's predictably awful conventions, including didactic monologues to dead friends, will tickle anyone ever made to sit through such skits, which traditionally make for both bad plays and ineffective teaching tools (so if you weren't made to watch one, and are now an alcoholic, don't worry.)

One of the nicest things about You're Welcome is the good humor with which the company undertakes its mockery. A Thought About Ryan is not so much a biting critique of well-intentioned educational theater groups as an indulgence in the peculiarities (rhyming mantras, pom-poms) that have come to define the genre. Similarly, The Bathroom revels in the absurdities of elaborate theatrical productions even as it satirizes them. Sure, The Debate Society is savvier than to require scene-length set changes ("Broadway 'Style' Scene Change" gets its own scene listing) or to rely on faulty technical equipment (a finicky fog machine figures heavily into the second half of the production), but indulging in such storied conventions is still a lot of fun. Happily, The Debate Society has the prowess to invoke bad theater and, winking and grinning, make it good.

As the evening progresses, the company makes its way through a staged reading (in which "reading" is more operative than "staged"), a series of playlets each centered around (yes) fog, and a contemporary play in which young adults ask themselves important questions (New York or San Francisco? Arts management or publishing?). Although You're Welcome is intentionally indulgent, Butler keeps the pace up as the production hops from play to play, and sometimes back again. Totaling just under seventy-five minutes, the self-professed bad plays cover an enormous amount of territory really well. Or perhaps, skillfully poorly. Sometimes it's good to be bad.

Last Writes

The Funeralogues, Stacy Mayer’s tragicomic solo show, is less about death than it is about how different people lament the dead differently. The show, which Mayer conceived with writer Robert Charles Gompers, lifts quotes from various peoples' eulogies, famous and little-known, real and fictional. And by virtue of being performed in a real place of worship (the Upper East Side’s All Souls Chapel), Funeralogues feels like an actual service. I know I left feeling lifted. Early on in the show and periodically throughout, Mayer acts out a fictionalized version of herself in order to trace her curiosity with death and the traditions attached to it. She recalls, in the voice and mindset of a five-year-old, a funeral she held for a Barbie doll as a child. She explains that she has crashed many a funeral and adopts the guise of various mourners she has met over the years. Mayer even performs her own hypothetical, idealized eulogy, in which she has lived a perfect, philanthropic existence.

Director Molly Marinik keeps the tone of Funeralogues on an even keel so that as Mayer’s vignettes veer off into more serious territory, the material never feels too manipulative or morose. The material certainly does, though, shift to the more serious side. Mayer portrays an elderly woman who has attended the funeral of thirteen siblings. She recites text from a member of The Casualty Assistance Calling Operations, eulogizing soldiers killed in Afghanistan (it falls on him to console the soldiers’ grieving parents). She quotes from a eulogy written for a deceased fireman by a Midwestern teacher. Mayer even remembers a prayer that her own grandfather distributed in life, later read at his funeral by the actress’s mother.

Perhaps one of the most moving and dramatically impressive moments of the Funeralogues occurs when Mayer takes on the role of an African-American man who read from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy for the several little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. Mayer’s diverse skills are on display throughout her show – she can play young, old, male, female, humor, grief, all with equal conviction.

The Funeralogues is structurally sound. Marinik has Mayer’s character speak with the other characters before inhabiting them. And it is to her and Marinik’s credit that every shift of character and scenario is done gracefully; the audience never suffers from whiplash on this clever ride. A show that could have easily felt bipolar instead feels amazingly coherent.

Marinik’s physical staging is also to be commended. The All Souls Chapel is a small performance space not ideally suited to theatrics. However, the director’s blocking kept Mayer moving around enough so that she never seems glued to the lectern in the center. As a result, the audience never gets a chance to feel restless and Marinik solves the problem of tricky sight lines. I very rarely had to lean around the woman seated in front of me to catch what Mayer was doing.

Additionally, several of the technical members of the Funeralogues crew are crucial to the experience. Lutin Tanner’s lighting goes a long way to helping Mayer achieve the play’s necessary funereal feel. Jim Lahti, the pianist, also does deft work.

More than anything, though, Funeralogues is Mayer’s show. Though this is a major showcase for the talent, she knows better than to ham it up. The actress has the talent and the timing, but she also has that something extra that separates the good from the extraordinary. There is an extra inimitable spark that makes her unendingly watchable for the duration of the show; she endears herself to the audience from the first moment she walks up to the lectern and has them in her thrall in each scenario until the play’s end.

The play itself is not perfect; I do not think that it would suffer by shaving off several later anecdotes Either way, the conclusion of The Funeralogues, which provides a bit of a twist, is certainly earned. The show is a meditation on life, love and death. And its star, Stacy Mayer, is the sweetest angel one could ever want to lead them to the pearly gates.

One in a Million

Who doesn’t move to New York to strike it rich? Whether you’re hunting for money, a job, or romance, making it in the city has always been all about luck and pluck, even in 1922. And when Millie Dillmount strides into town, she’s already got the pluck—she’s just ravenous for the luck. In 1967, the daffy film Thoroughly Modern Millie starred the chipper chirper Julie Andrews in the title role; the Tony-winning Broadway adaptation featured megawatt rising actress Sutton Foster, who, in a dazzling shot of luck, went from understudy to star during the show’s out-of-town tryout, stoking the hopes of struggling actresses toiling in temp jobs everywhere.

And now, in the footsteps of Andrews and Foster, comes Alison Luff, an eminently watchable young actress who more than fills Millie’s high heels—she makes them her own. A warm and welcome tonic for these cold winter months, the Gallery Players’ winning production of Thoroughly Modern Millie is a must-see mostly for her exuberant performance.

On Broadway, Millie more than filled out the massive Marquis Theatre with its zippy dance numbers and shiny scenery, so I was initially skeptical about how the show would work in a more intimate, Off-Off-Broadway-sized space. But tucked into this smaller venue, the show’s charms are only more obvious—there’s still plenty of dancing and gleaming grins galore, but the characters and the comedy are all the more vivid when viewed from a cozier seat.

A hybrid of classic Broadway storytelling and delectable new music—Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan wrote several terrific tunes to round out the film’s score—Millie was initially criticized for its relentless can-do attitude and traditional structure. The story is certainly a familiar one: Fresh from her “one-light” hometown in Kansas, Millie quickly reinvents herself with bobbed hair and a shorter hemline, and nothing can stand in her way—that is, of course, until she is mugged and loses her purse (and one of her shoes).

It’s this screwball sequence of highs and lows that makes us root for Millie, and the show also has an intriguing time-capsule quality to it. The self-proclaimed “modern” Millie is determined to make it on her own in the big city … by marrying her boss? As old-school as this may seem, the love vs. money decision at the center of Millie’s story often feels all too 21st-century modern (see “The Bachelor”). Millie’s choice hinges on two men: her playful, penniless pal Jimmy Smith, who keeps her laughing (and on her toes); or her elusive, inscrutable boss Trevor Graydon, who calls her “John” (and makes her swoon).

Like Millie, her comrades at the Hotel Priscilla are also making their perilous way as stenographers and actresses—that is, until they start mysteriously disappearing. It turns out that the manager, Mrs. Meers, sells orphaned girls into white slavery in southeast Asia. (“So sad to be all alone in the world,” she maniacally sympathizes.)

The white-slavery subplot veers between awkward and uncomfortable: Mrs. Meers is a failed actress (badly) playing the part of an Asian woman, and she keeps strict command over her two employees, Ching Ho and Bun Foo, who hope that she’ll rescue their mother from China. That Mrs. Meers “performs” the stereotype keeps it at a safe remove from reality, but Justine Campbell-Elliott’s rather lukewarm performance never gets quite big enough to show how Mrs. Meers is really, in fact, exploiting herself.

At the center of it all, Luff makes a thoroughly marvelous Millie—she shows us both Millie’s confidence and insecurity (sometimes simultaneously), and she nails the triple-threat demands of the role. She is both a confident dancer and an impeccable singer, but what makes Luff’s performance most distinctive is her natural, nervy sense of humor—particularly in her exchanges with office manager Miss Flannery (the scene-stealing Katie Kester), who joins her in the infectious tap-dancing tirade “Forget About the Boy.”

As a foil to Millie, the wealthy Miss Dorothy is looking for lower-class diversions—including “winter in Hell’s Kitchenette.” Played with panache by Amy Grass, Miss Dorothy is a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque coquette with a glossy head of curls, and Trevor Graydon (the excellent Andy Planck) immediately falls in love with her in (what else?) a witty send-up of operetta at its most overbearing. In his swoony, oafish romantic gestures, Planck uses his lush voice and expert comic timing to fantastic effect.

Jay Paranada and Roy Flores are immensely charming as the beholden brothers, and Debra Thais Evans turns in lovely vocals as jazz singer Muzzy Van Hossmere. Despite some vocal struggles, David Rossetti makes a sweet, affable Jimmy—and finds palpable chemistry with Luff.

The ensemble does excellent work with Katharine Pettit’s jazzy choreography, and director Neal Freeman has made some clever, cheeky choices that wink at the theater’s limitations: instead of fancy subtitles, the Hotel Priscilla’s bellhop (stage manager DaVonne Onassis Bacchus) appears with “Hotel Translation Service” placards. Bacchus also makes humorous cameos in several set changes, which earned some of the biggest laughs during the performance I attended.

Led by the plucky Luff, this Thoroughly Modern Millie is a scrappy fighter with personality. Merely surviving in New York sometimes takes everything you’ve got, but here it looks like fun—provided you’ve got the sense of humor (and a little bit of luck) to go with it.

A Woman's Work

Pioneering artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life spanned nearly a century. The mid-Westerner’s best-known paintings accomplished the feat of merging abstract and real images in conjuring the images of such inanimate objects as flowers, rocks, and animal bones, in addition to landscapes. After bringing her distinctly American style to Europe, she eventually settled in New Mexico later in her long life. It is at his point in her life that we meet O’Keeffe in Retrospective. This work was created as part of the InGenius workshop series at the Manhattan Theatre Source in the Village. Joan Tewkesbury, the beautiful mind behind the Robert Altman film Nashville, has written and directed this look at the personal gains and losses incurred by an artist.

Tandy Cronyn plays O’Keeffe, who spends much of the play talking to the ghost of her late husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Sam Tsoutsouvas), as she labors on an essay to write for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 retrospective on the man. Though these conversations, which often delve into heated arguments, are among the more enjoyable parts of the play, Tewkesbury saddles Cronyn with the unenviable task of carrying Retrospective largely through a series of monologues in which O’Keeffe bemoans what she has seen and done.

Retrospective is perhaps best suited for students of art and art history. Much of the show is reliant on some basic outside knowledge of the painter’s life and her work. A lot of the play centers on recollections and accusations between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, as they recall various affairs. For the art newcomer, however, this play can feel a little foreign, and even redundant as one tries to make sense of the leads’ marriage using context clues. To add to the confusion, occasional peripheral characters appear and re-appear with no real cause, adding to the disjointed feel of the play.

Cronyn does much to make Retrospective work. She makes every bit of O’Keeffe’s struggles – the woman’s body, sight, and creativity are all failing her – palpable. The entrance of a younger character, Frank (Michael Wolfe), a young potter who courts O’Keeffe despite the fact that he happens to be married, is a smart choice in that it helps break up the play and allows the audience to see a less guarded side of O’Keeffe. Personally, I wish that Tewkesbury had pushed this subplot further; both it and the character of Frank have more potential, and it could have shown further evidence of the artist’s vulnerability.

As the two men who alternate in O’Keefe’s life, both Tsoutsouvas and Wolfe are dynamic presences. I fully believed in Tsoutsouvas’ scenes with Cronyn that the two shared a history, and an intimacy, that she could feel long after his death. The actor also carefully measures Stieglitz’s volatile temper. Wolfe impresses as well, though since he has less to work with, I was left to wonder what the actor could do with a more enhanced role.

Ultimately though, Retrospective is a mixed bag, full of good intentions, excellent actors, and potential. With some further honing, Tewkesbury can make good on its promise.

Dressed To Impress

Imagine a governor who admits to hating funerals because they darken his wardrobe. Now imagine a governor who will not cancel a party for the Queen of England in a time of political unrest because he just sold South Jersey to pay for his dress. Imagine a governor who refuses to run from an angry mob arguing, “I’m not dressed for walking!” This man is Edward Hyde, also known as Lord Cornbury, the cross-dressing governor of New York and New Jersey who reigned in political office between 1702 and 1707. Hailing from England, Lord Cornbury (David Greenspan) is not the ideal choice for a political office. After accumulating a staggering debt, his advisor, Spinoza Dacosta, (Ken Kliban) begs him to at least consider paying back some of his creditors. Africa, (Ashley Bryant) his beautiful and sassy servant, scolds him for scaring a Dutch pastor’s son (Christian Pedersen) sent to spy on his behavior. He shocks the pious boy by confronting him in a long blue gown and wig of brown curls. “What?” he asks as the boy staggers backwards. “You don’t like blue?”

In his time, Lord Cornbury may not have been a popular politician, but in William M. Hoffman and Anthony Holland’s historical comedy, Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor, his charisma and conviction to his beliefs – wayward as they are – paint him in a more loveable light.

Greenspan has a playful nature and a charming magnetism. He appears to be having fun with his eccentric character, much to the credit of Holland and Hoffman’s witty dialogue, costume designer, Jeffrey Wallach’s exaggerated gowns and set designer, Mark Beard’s unique scenery all of which give him great material to have fun with.

Beard has created some amazing things with cardboard. His set pieces are painted with intricate details and cleverly paired with tangible objects to enhance their realistic appearance. For example, a barmaid picks a real towel off a cardboard bar and pulls a real glass out of a cardboard cabinet. But the finest set piece is the elaborate cardboard boat docked offstage that is later used for one of the best visual gags in the play.

Watching Greenspan glide across the stage draped in outrageous fashion designs also delivers a series of hilarious visuals. Wallach has dressed the flamboyant governor in huge puffy gowns with waistlines supported by baskets tied to each of his hips. His necklines glitter with an overabundance of tiny diamonds, and at one point, Greenspan wears a wig made entirely of flowers.

But despite these eye-popping costumes, the play examines more than just a former governor’s cross-dressing legacy. Cornbury: The Queen’s Governor spotlights a time in New York history that is very pivotal to the city’s evolution, a time when the English ruled much of the land and the Dutch lamented their small piece of the pie.

In a playbill article Hoffman points out that many people do not realize how “Dutch the city of New York was, and still is in some ways,” citing the names of Delancy Street, Van Cortland Park and Staten Island (once Staaten Eylandt) as a few examples.

And for all of Lord Cornbury’s cross-dressing antics he did embrace diversity, and encouraged the growth of a city where many nationalities could peacefully intertwine and thrive. The facts and hearsay surrounding his tumultuous reign as governor may have cast a shadow on the validity of his vision, but there is no ignoring that the New York we inhabit today still retains bits and pieces of the civilization he started centuries ago.

Artists at Work - and Play

Virginia Woolf’s one and only play, Freshwater, was written for and performed by her artist friends and family members in her sister Vanessa Bell’s London studio. The Women’s Project and SITI Company have joined forces to present its New York premiere, directed by Anne Bogart. The little-known script presents some real challenges, and the production does not quite rise to meet them. According to the program notes, the presenters’ goal is to bring the audience “delight during these uneasy times,” a perspective justified, in part, by Woolf’s own recollection of the original performance as an “unbuttoned, laughing evening.” Bogart’s direction emphasizes the play’s lightheartedness and wackiness at every opportunity. In her view, and apparently also the producers’, there is no hint of any darkness or purpose to its composition. However, while Freshwater is undeniably both less developed and lighter in tone than many of Woolf’s other works, this interpretation is overly simplified, and the production is the weaker for it.

For one thing, the text does have a clear point: it is about the ascension of the Modernist Bloomsbury Group over its, as of 1935, still considerably more established Romantic-era forebears. “Where shall we live?” the young ingenue Ellen Terry asks her strapping sailor lover. “In Bloomsbury,” he replies, where they will feast on bread and butter, sausages and kippers, and presumably have much better sex lives than Terry has had with her elderly husband. It also probes the conflict between artists’ need for creative introspection and their need for the companionship of other human beings, in order to both generate art and to experience personal happiness. Freshwater’s exploration of these two ideas can be related to those of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Young Jean Lee’s The Appeal, neither of which could be accurately described as frivolous plays.

In spite of all their efforts, not one of the artist characters in this play succeeds in creating anything from the beginning to the end of the play. Tennyson does nothing but read and reread poems he has already written; his one attempt at new composition is foiled. Watts is confounded by his picture’s central symbol, and Cameron’s photographs are ruined by Terry’s departure, a strong-willed donkey and other factors. In spite of the fact that these artists are supposed to be each other’s closest friends, they are incapable of listening to each other, much less assisting in solving each other’s various crises. The text is full of images of stasis and entrapment. The portrait of Terry is to be of her about to be crushed by a giant foot. The Camerons want to leave for India, but cannot until their coffins arrive – while this was a true incident in the real Camerons’ lives, its inclusion and ongoing repetition is eerie.

The acting style and staging are highly active and physicalized, as is typically the case in a Bogart/SITI production. There are moments when this direction works with the play, in the first act, particularly, when the whirling movements grind to a halt, and the characters stare at each other, grasping for an idea of what to do next, how to move forward with their lives. However, the energy of Freshwater lies primarily in its language, which is lush with imagery and wordplay that are consistently underexplored. If Bogart and her cast had paid as much attention to developing the spoken text as they did to the developing the piece’s physical vocabulary, it would be a much stronger production.

As it is, the actors are absorbed in their mission of presenting the play as if it is the lightest of all possible fictions. Frequently, their efforts are irritating. There are no developed stakes in this world to animate them. The role of teenage Ellen Terry is curiously miscast with a clearly much older actress. While Kelly Maurer does an admirable job of acting suitably girlish, she is a distracting choice. In case any viewers have missed the point that Freshwater is fun, they are hit over the head with anachronistic and wholly inappropriate punk rock music at the play’s conclusion.

On the other hand, the production’s visual design elements do an effective job of transposing a play conceived for an amateur home performance to an Off-Broadway environment. The quilted pastel curtain is a charming touch, and the costumes and wigs convey both the Victorian setting and the play’s inherent oddity. The stage is always well-lit and the lighting assists in creating an outdoor setting for the brief seaside scene.

Fans of Freshwater or Woolf’s other work may want to attend for the purpose of seeing a live performance of this rarely produced play. Fans of experimental theater or language-oriented plays are best off looking elsewhere.

The Media is the Message

With meta-news programs in the vein of The Daily Show and satirical press a la The Onion as much a part of the media establishment as they are its subversive critics, conversations about the state of American media are integral to political discourse. The years of the Bush Administration saw a number of political protests in the form of downtown theater productions, many of which tackled the subject of partisan press. Complaints of media bias, from people on all sides of the political spectrum, are as commonplace as media consumption; channeling that frustration into suave, startling theater is considerably more rare. The Spin Cycle, a collection of five thematically linked short plays by Jerrod Bogard, falls squarely into the category of plays that do exactly that. The five directors of each of the plays deftly locate terrific comedy in each of Bogard’s scripts. The program opens with Copper Green, a short play directed by Anthony Augello, in which a tourist family eyes the statue of liberty from the Staten Island Ferry while an Arab man looks on. A less sophisticated play would include bigotry and outright conflict; Copper Green merely presents quiet tension in the characters’ near-interactions. It’s an appropriate opening to each of the subsequent plays, which tend more toward critical observation than judgmental condemnation.

Copper Green is followed by Hedge, which features a pair of Hollywood devotees bemoaning the paparazzi even as they obsess over celebrity, irony earnestly embodied by Melissa Johnson and Lauren Bahlman, and Just Your Average G.I. Joe, in which a war vet explains the job of being a soldier. The short solo performance piece, which Bogard performs, has the most meandering scope of the plays that comprise The Spin Cycle. With direction by Kristin Skye Hoffman, the likable soldier's varied perspectives are appropriately grounded.

First Base Coach the penultimate show of the program, is the least explicitly related to media or politics, although it has a lot to do with innocence: a pair of school children, played by adult actors Hoffman and Ben Newman, figure out the ins and outs of rounding the bases. Adults playing children, especially children learning to practice the art of flirtation, risks coming across as either overly precious or uncomfortably inappropriate; First Base Coach does neither. Bogard’s script works in pop cultural references that are both wholly organic and wonderfully silly. Costume Consultant Hired Guns makes its best contribution to the evening by not putting Hoffman in pigtails, the most obnoxiously routine way of broadcasting a character’s little-girlness. This character is not a pigtailed sort of little girl, and Hoffman and Newman deserve a lot of credit for lending their characters heaps of specificity rather than playing vague children. The result is a touching, extremely funny scene that is a pleasure to watch.

Throughout the program, each of the short plays are threaded together with clips of segments from The Spin Cycle, a TV program styled after Fox news shows, hosted by the Bill O’Reilly-esque Dan Dillinger. Played with bombastic showmanship by Justin Ness, the Dillenger segments, directed by Brian Bernhard, succinctly link the short plays while demonstrating Bogard’s point about the tenuous relationship between partisan press and political truths.

Jerome Via Satellite, the final play of the evening, unites the mediated TV segments with live performance. The play depicts an episode of the news program as it unfolds live, with satellite feeds from an American living room and a U.S. military base in Iraq; the TV show purports to unite an overseas soldier with his family on the home front. Early on, it becomes clear that the news program is influencing the story as much as reporting it. As the play progresses, the full extent of the media manipulation becomes clear as the evening of plays climaxes with its strongest indictment of mediated politics. The large cast conveys a startling, powerful eeriness that is undone only when the script spells out exactly what has transpired.

Ness’ direction of the final piece renders the situation clear; exposition that occurs after unsettling revelations is not only unneeded but, in attempting to wrap up the story, weakens the effects of the evening’s most climactic moments. Until then, the plays do an impressive job of assuming a smart, savvy audience. Anyone interested in the intersections of pop culture and politics, and the media spin of it, will be happy to be part of it.