Category: Theater

FringeNYC is here, this year with 201 shows over two weeks. That's right, 201 shows. I plunged right in, attending two full-length musicals last night.

The first seemed timely. With the parole of Charles Manson follower Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, the Manson murders are back in the news, and with the concurrent 40th anniversary of Woodstock it seems an opportune moment to reexamine the values and the meaning of the hippie movement – seriously or otherwise. So what could be more appropriate than "A Musical Exploitation of the Most Far-Out Cult Murders of the Psychedelic Era"?

The word "exploitation," rather than "exploration," clues us in that this is not going to be a serious take on the Manson phenomenon, and that's just fine – I'm all for entertainment in poor taste, if it's funny or interesting. And the first few scenes of Willy Nilly do play as an amusing send-up of both the hippie generation and the "squares" who feared them.

Released from prison, a slightly fictionalized Manson ("Willy," played energetically by Avery Pearson), begins casting his spell on young women. Meanwhile a character representing the prosecutor and Manson chronicler Vincent Bugliosi (played smartly by the playwright and composer Trav. S. D.) narrates, deadpanning lines like "he begins to recruit his harem, one 'chick' at a time" – heavy accent on the "chick." This is crude but funny stuff.

Presented with such enjoyable silliness, we're primed for funny songs as well. The show's first disappointment, then, is that the lyrics are often hard to make out, thanks to unclear amplification and the high volume of the on-stage acid-rock band.

Soon bigger problems arise. Once Willy's harem is complete, the story follows the familiar outline of the Manson Family's march through communal living and music-industry disappointment towards gruesome mass murder. But it turns out, unsurprisingly, that creating a comic version of Manson eliminates any sense of menace from the character. For comedy to succeed, there must be something, on the surface or beneath, to make us uneasy in some way. In this production there's not a whiff of suspense or fear.

Instead, director Jeff Lewonczyk festoons the stage with a big cast infused with manic energy; sight-gag props and colorful period costumes; and effective flower-power choreography (by Becky Byers and Mr. Lewonczyk). Certain comic turns, notably by Daryl Lathon and Mateo Moreno in multiple character roles, amuse and delight. But they sink quickly back into the overall purposelessness of the proceedings. The play aims to skewer the Sharon Tate-Roman Polanski circle as well, but with an instrument so blunt it only makes an ugly bruise, and by the time the Tate-LaBianca murders and the subsequent trial roll around the play has long since fallen apart. At the climax, intended (I think) to suggest the media frenzy around the trial, characters are desperately leaping about, even undressing, amidst a cacophony from the band – anything to find a way out.

Unfortunately, nothing can save this exercise in futile exuberance. Solid acting by many of the cast members, including Ms. Byers, Elizabeth Hope Williams, Adam Swiderski, Michael Criscuolo, and especially Hope Cartelli as Willy's original "old lady," can't save it. The band is fine, but it can't either. Nor can the vigorous, clever choreography, though it's the best thing about the show.

Better singing would have helped – it's generally mediocre – but not nearly enough. After the show I overheard one audience member saying that there were "not enough songs, but also too many songs." I know what he meant.

A better use of your musical dollar would be the flawed but enjoyable MoM, written and directed by Richard Caliban. In this "rock concert musical," five middle-aged suburban moms form a band for fun, only to be bludgeoned by unexpected success. The concert format, in which the women tell their raunchy tale through songs, narration, and just a couple of dramatic scenes, is both a strength and a weakness; it enables a direct connection with the audience, but the stage set, loaded with instruments and pedals, limits the possibilities for movement and drama.

Some of the cast members are musicians as well as actors, notably the always effervescent Stefanie Seskin, whom I know as the front person of the band Blue Number Nine. Yet as a band their musicianship is generally hesitant. (It would probably improve with more rehearsal.) This works fine for the first half of the show, when they are meant to be amateurs playing the local high school. When they become legitimate rock stars, though, supposedly playing stadiums, the not-a-real-band seams show too obviously.

What makes MoM an ultimately winning proposition are certain strong acting performances, especially from Ms. Seskin and the magnetic Jane Keitel, and the singing. Mr. Caliban can be prone to writing juvenile lyrics of the "some make us happy, some make us sad" ilk. But the hooks and punchlines are infectious and amusing (I won't give them away here), and the cast executes multi-part harmonies superbly. On a purely musical basis, then, there's much to enjoy in this show, and since it's loaded with songs, it's hard to go wrong.

FringeNYC runs through Aug. 29. Check the website for dates and times for these shows and the other 199.

Photo credit: Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors

Demonstrating that one is a triple threat in a theater the size of a closet sounds like a tough task. Kelly Samara, playwright, actor, and dancer – also choreographer, and creator of the music she dances to, which really makes her something like a quintuple threat – bravely gives it a go in her new one-woman show, and the result is a small triumph. Tense, gripping, funny, and surprisingly celebratory considering its subject, this hospital one-act is anything but maudlin, and hardly sentimental. Instead it's revealing, rough, and raging.

Dressed in an embarrassingly short hospital gown, Samara plays a hospital patient with an unspecified but worsening and apparently terminal illness. She breaks up a series of monologues with dance numbers that animate the violent psychology lurking behind the scenes.

To be precise, one of the scenes isn't exactly a monologue; in it she talks with an unseen, unheard friend whose chatty but emotion-fraught visit only underscores the gulf between the universe this long-term patient has both entered and created inside the hospital, and the forgetful outside world.

Wandering among various states – drugged, gossipy, fanciful, primally angry – Ms. Samara commands the space, developing her character with a mature, finely calibrated emotional control which lends weight to her script as well. The wordplay in the title isn't just a wee trick; it's an example of the play's wisely crafted language. "Amusement," she philosophizes, is just a cleaned-up word for "distraction." Common words take on entirely different casts when contemplated by a sickening patient confined to a hospital.

Ms. Samara trusts the audience to follow her, through words and movement, along her squirming evolution from impatience to eternal Patient. This trust makes the play an intensely satisfying experience (or "amusement"). So much so that the one time she doesn't trust us – when she concludes a monologue about iguanas and the difference between camouflage and invisibility by stating the obvious – is the one moment she disappoints a little.

As part of Manhattan Repertory Theatre's Summerfest 2009, Being Patient runs for three performances only, closing Friday Aug. 7. A powerful and well-tuned fusion of the many talents of a very crafty artist, it deserves further development and a longer run. In any case Kelly Samara has earned some significant attention.

Ever go to see a band, and the drums start motoring, the guitars crank up, the bass begins to thud, you feel your head starting to move up and down, and you're caught up in the feeling that you're about to be rocked… but then, as the song goes on, you find yourself waiting, and then you're still waiting, and the hook doesn't come… and they play another song, and then another, each one louder and more raucous than the last, and you realize that, although the band has all the raw energy it needs and more, and solid musicianship too, somehow… the songs just don't go anywhere? And yet the band keeps on playing, fruitlessly.

It can happen in theater too, and such is the case with Lavaman, Casey Wimpee's literally visceral new play, currently running through July 18 at the Ohio Theatre as part of Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory 2009 summer festival. The title character is an animated monster created by Arnie (Michael Mason) for his comic book—or, as he insists, "graphic novel." The live action is interspersed with a number of amusing Lavaman animations, but the one it opens with is the most telling: Lavaman's cartoon bout of painful, multicolored flatulence and diarrhea turns out to presage the play's logorrhea.

First it's Gill (Cole Wimpee), an alcoholic-turned-vegetarian with carpal tunnel syndrome and an aching back, who can't stop ranting and shouting about the punk rock band he used to have with Arnie's dead twin brother. (That's right, a dead twin brother. Everyone here has dead parent or sibling issues.) Gill, it seems at first, is supposed to be one of those Lanford Wilson-style flame-on characters who torches other people out of their complacency. But his voluble energy doesn't drive the plot or change anyone's life; there's mostly void around him–lots of sound and fury, not signifying much. The script has to rely too heavily on musical references and other pop-culture signifiers to score characterization points on stage or laughs from the audience.

Enter Dino (Adam Belvo), the third member of this sad triumvirate, a former bandmate who has "sold out" and gotten rich by day-trading (it's 1999). Dino is a larger-than-life personality, even more so than Gill. Dino’s own issues–his have both parental and sibling elements–have propelled him on a globe-trotting carnivorous rampage. Now he's back, hoping to celebrate his birthday with his old buddies in gruesome style. But Dino, like Lavaman, is a cartoon character; his preening and howling drive away any empathy we might have started to feel for stuck-in-the-past Gill or creatively blocked Arnie.

Told in a series of flashbacks, the story zeroes in on the events leading up to Dino's protracted, violent end. But unlike the punk rock songs the characters listen to and talk about, the play lacks a hook, for all its vehement verbosity and claustrophobic fury. In trying so hard to be provocative, this much too long play ends up provoking only exhaustion and a mild nausea.

Lavaman closes July 18. Soho Think Tank's Ice Factory 2009 continues through Aug. 15 at the Ohio Theatre, 66 Wooster St., NYC. For tickets please visit Smarttix or call 212-868-4444.

Photo by Kalli Newman.

Twisted is a modest, uneven, but often diverting collection of short one-acts. It opens with the most substantial and ambitious of the evening's five plays. In Matt Hanf's Teddy Knows Too Much, the hefty actor Peter Aguero deadpans the role of three-year-old Billy, whose toys—a plush bear, a Dick Cheney mask, a rubber duckie—are his only confidantes.

While these imaginative figures can be alternately understanding or sinister, the adults around Billy are universally insensitive. ("I think I'll wear the emerald earrings you got me for our last fight," wisecracks his mother, while his father considers leering at the violence in The Sopranos to constitute a valid "family night.") Billy fights back the only way he can: with ever-intensifying mischief.

The parents are written and played as such churlish, career-obsessed caricatures that the play tends to overstate its case; a small boy's imaginative world can be terrifying even in the kindliest of families. But Aguero's brash, funny performance and the lines Hanf gives him elevate the show above easy satire. "Being good is what is expected," philosophized the overgrown, biker-bearded toddler, "and what is expected is rarely rewarded."

Mark Harvey Levine's "The Kiss" is a slight but well-scripted scenario of two friends (Flor Bromley and Jonathan Reed Wexler, both very good) touching on feelings that haven't been touched on before. It's followed by two skits that dramatize comically bizarre what-if situations, in the style of Saturday Night Live skits. They're one-joke pieces, so I won't give away the jokes, but unlike some of the abovementioned TV skits, they're pretty funny—especially Justin Warner's "Head Games"—and they don't overstay their welcome; suffice it to say there's a garden shears, many pastries, and a very funny Lindsay Beecher as a teenage Salome.

Ms. Beecher returns as a coke-addicted exotic dancer for the evening's final play and its only real dud. In "Party Girl," a young man (Billy Fenderson) attending his cousin's bachelor party discovers that one of the strippers hired for the party (Becky Sterling) is… his girlfriend. Despite the pointed efforts of the talented cast, the play reads like a bloated drama-class exercise—its potentially interesting recipe turns out to be a pot of poorly cooked gruel. It's a downer of an end to an otherwise upbeat and amusing evening.

Twisted is the Rising Sun Performance Company's third annual one-act series. It plays at at UNDER St. Marks through July 26. Tickets at Smarttix or 212-868-4444, or at horseTRADE. Photos by David Anthony.

No one does bedroom farce like the British, and a fine example just blustered onto the New York stage with the Vital Theatre Company’s sharp new production of Robin Hawdon’s Perfect Wedding.

A man wakes up on his wedding morning in the hotel’s bridal suite with a naked woman he doesn’t know. Hilarity ensues, and a touching love story too. Teresa K. Pond’s sure-handed direction shapes Hawdon’s snappy dialogue, slapstick humor, and blurry maze of plot twists into a cheery evening of laughs and good feeling.

The dialogue has been slightly Americanized, but the British pedigree shows, not only in the door-slamming, under-skirt-hiding story, but in the occasional unnatural phrase (e.g. “very well”). However, 99 percent of the time, the actors (and the adaptation) hit just the right notes of absurdity, desperation, and overdoing it.

Elastic-faced Matt Johnson plays Bill, the panicked groom, with a sweetly expressive mixture of bug-eyed fear and little-boy-lostness. The beautiful Amber Bela Muse does a nice job with the straight role of the clueless bride, although there’s a late scene or two where she seems a little too calm for a bride on her wedding day.

The effervescent Dayna Graber threatens to steal the show as the wisecracking, mint-popping hotel housekeeper who gets caught up in the proceedings. But Tom (Fabio Pires in a very promising Off-Broadway debut) distracts us with his finely tuned fury upon discovering that Bill’s best man is by no means the only role he’s destined to play in this careening plot. And Kristi McCarson, in the initially thankless “other woman” role of Judy, captivates with her stark revelations in Act II.

Ms. McCarson also looks stunning in the wedding dress, which gets its own credit, being on loan from English couturier Jane Wilson-Marquis. If you like this wedding dress, you can go to site >> here which sells similar designs! It’s quite a gorgeous garment. I won’t give away how Judy ends up wearing it. Suffice it to say the bride’s mother (Ghana Leigh) is involved.

Enough. Whatever troubles you may bring with you into the theater, this crackerjack production will make you forget them, at least for a rollicking hour and forty-five minutes. Perfect Wedding plays at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, New York, through Aug. 2. Get tickets online or call (212) 579-0528.

Photos: Sun Productions, Inc.

Five humans, all with troubles, assemble at a Dunkin' Donuts wearing Halloween costumes. After raising money for their group home for the disabled, the three residents and two staffers coalesce into a bickering but affectionate group. On some level, as playwright Kristin Newbom demonstrates, the disabled and the staffers aren't so different. But that's about as much of a moral as can be extracted from the three scenes that comprise this compact one-act; Newbom's witty script is about as un-preachy as a play can get.

In large measure, the play is about money. First, it's physically present — the tables are covered with the dollar bills our heroes have raised and are counting. In fact, counting the money is the silent breathing action behind the play's dialogue. Second, money is constantly presenting itself in the abstract, as the characters worry about the group home's funding, their own financial situations, and whether they can take a dollar from the pile to buy a cup of coffee.

It's all very funny — bordering on the absurd, yet believable and touching. Jerry (Andrew Weems), who walks with crutches, is a philosophizing motormouth whose rampant fabricating hides a well of loneliness. Wheelchair-bound Shelly (Birgit Huppuch) gets a lot of the biggest laughs with a stream of innocent non sequiturs; revealing some of the circumstances of her life in quick, unexpected darts, she's the exposed heart of this makeshift family. Gary (Debargo Sanyal), who has a severe neuromuscular dystrophy and uses a motorized wheelchair, hardly says anything out loud, but we do learn, in a quite startling way, what has been occupying the mind inside his uncooperative body.

The staffers are in sadder states than their charges. Scott (Greg Keller), outwardly a handsome young man, suffers from crippling anxiety that leaves him hyperventilating and feeling like a "barren landscape" with a fire in his belly. Lonely Ann (Christina Kirk), a single mother, fights off creditors while nursing an unrequited crush on Scott.

The cast shines, Ken Rus Schmol directs smoothly, and Kirche Leigh Zeile's costumes are hilarious. But the real star of this show is the sparkling script. Ms. Newbom has a surefire sense of rhythm. Watching this play is like listening to a brilliant piece of music executed with precision and filled with surprises.

Telethon, the third and final play of Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks 2009, closes June 27.

Photo by Carl Skutsch. (L-R): Andrew Weems (Jerry), Birgit Huppuch (Shelly), and Greg Keller (Scott)

A chaotic apartment: dented beer cans, assorted musical instruments, dirty walls, kitschy objects strewn about. Another play about angsty twenty-somethings trying to decide what to do with their lives? Look again: the revolutionary banners and scrawled slogans add up to more than the stuff of typical college-age rebelliousness. So: a play about 1960s radicals? Look (and listen) yet again: it's 2009, iPods are everywhere, Barack Obama is President, and this is a play by the Amoralists. Hackneyed convention is not on the menu.

At the center of the tale is a reverse-Prodigal Son story. Billy (James Kautz), a drug-addicted revolutionary and the emotional focal point of an anarchic sexual foursome, receives a visit from his straight-arrow younger brother Evan (Nick Lawson). Though Billy is the one who is estranged from his family, Evan's manic, hilarious frat-boy wiggerspeak is as bizarre and incomprehensible to Billy's tribe as the group's four-way "marriage" and off-the-economic-grid lifestyle are to him and the outside world. But Evan quickly forms an attachment to Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore), the newest, youngest, and most honest member of the foursome. And when bad news arrives in Act Three, wrenching complications ensue.

Playwright Derek Ahonen has a finely tuned ear for the way his Communist-Anarchist-Environmentalist heroes and heroines talk. The play skewers their free-love and pop-psychology platitudes, while loving the characters to death at the same time. I say "the play" because while Mr. Ahonen may be responsible for the dialogue, the Amoralists truly are, as their mission statement proclaims, an "actor driven" company. It feels as if these actors were born to play these parts. The play is a perfect whole — not for a second is the theatrical spell broken.  And somehow the political and moral message survives all the mockery.

Matt Pilieci, who plays the volcanic, hyper-vital yet death-obsessed Wyatt, and Mr. Kautz are reprising their roles from the 2007 production. The impish Ms. Moore isn't, but she is just as perfectly locked into her role, and the same is true of the darkly focused Sarah Lemp, who plays Dear, the fourth member and the group's mother figure. Each of the four can dominate the stage in one way or another; together they're an ensemble of scary intensity, one minute boiling in anger, the next erupting in crazed funnyness, yet always, in their overcooked way, seeming to truly love one another.

As always in these apparently Utopian situations, there turns out to be a sugar daddy. Donavan (Malcolm Madera), the rich owner of the building, uses the money-losing restaurant Dear and Wyatt run downstairs as a tax write-off, paying them and their lovers in room and board. Since this is a New York City story, it isn't giving too much away to mention that the realities of real estate play a part in the plot. But the meat of the play is its acidic depiction of the fearsome foursome through the juggernaut of Act One, and the challenge posed to them by Evan's cynicism in the slower and slightly too preachy Act Two. When things begin to fall apart in Act Three, it feels inevitable; these characters are simply too big for the temporarily comfortable life they've created for themselves.

And the center, the emotionally volatile Billy, cannot hold. Running his radical newspaper, engaging in frantic phone conversations with his revolutionary compatriots in Mexico, defusing conflicts right and left, he is a fount of endless nervous energy, but at the same time he's frozen in place, an idealistic man out of time, powerless to effect real change in the world. When this paralysis manifests physically, Billy is reduced to a raw lump of feeling, like the horribly transformed fly-creature tumbling out of the transporter pod at the end of David Cronenberg's The Fly. It's a captivating moment, and it sends us reeling into the street feeling provoked, enlivened, even a little bit enlightened.

Pictured: Matthew Pilieci as Wyatt, Mandy Nicole Moore as Dawn and James Kautz as Billy.  Photo by Larry Cobra. 

The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side by The Amoralists runs through June 28 at P.S. 122.  Visit the P.S. 122 website for times and tickets or call 212-352-3101.

I have now seen all three productions in the inaugural series from the new tripartite Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear, comprised of three Off-Off Broadway companies which have economized by sharing production costs, space, and design teams, subsuming their individual identities as well.

From a technical standpoint, the operation has been a success. All three plays, for example, share one easily modifiable set (by the talented Elisha Schaefer). There's one publicist, one graphic designer, one technical team. All good.

As for the productions themselves, they're a mixed bag. David McGee's Mare Cognitum, reviewed last week, had some fine writing and very good performances, but sacrificed dramatic integrity for philosophical meandering.

Lenny Schwartz's Squiggy and the Goldfish is painted in brighter, childish colors, which lends weight to its theme of abuse, but it too suffers from a weakness of focus.

At the center of Squiggy is a brave, sharp performance by Josh Breslow as the title character. Abuse at the hands of his suicidal father has made him a cutter of long standing, though he's successfully hidden his scars from his ineffective, half-unmoored mother (Dana Aber). Terrorized by his cruel fiancée Veronica (the excellent Katrina Ylimaki) and her violent father (Jonathan Miles), Squiggy gets no relief even in his dreams, where a horror-movie psychiatrist and a nightstick-happy cop chase him through paranoid fantasies.

Salvation appears in the form of Blossom (Elyse Ault), a clerk at the pet shop where Squiggy goes to seek a cure for his excessively voluble goldfish, Goldie. This animal spirit, played with comic bluster by Eric C. Bailey, leads Squiggy through the this-is-your-life sequence that forms most of the action, and at first Goldie is a very funny beast. But Mr. Schwartz and the director, Michael Roderick, relegate him further and further into the background as they gradually reveal the story of Squiggy's unfortunate life. In the process we learn more about the women he loves as well – his mother, his fiancee, and then Blossom.

As they reveal themselves, the characters stimulate aches of recognition, but the effect is too often subverted by Recovery Movement catchphrases, characters stating the obvious to one another, and narrative inconsistencies. Goldie informs Squiggy he is to die in a week, but a revelation at the end seems to tell a different story. Mr. Breslow does absolutely all he can to keep the play centered, but he can do only so much.

Duncan Pflaster's Ore, or Or, the most successful of the three plays, also makes use of dream sequences, but here they are in the context of a well-rounded, coherent drama about relationships and racial identity. It is also staged with much starker realism than the other plays; though it's the same theater, we feel we're in an entirely new and somehow larger physical space. The crafty lighting and brittle, economical set create the illusion of more depth on stage, and Mr. Pflaster lights it up with an artfully constructed, well-aimed, and resonant story.

The action flows quickly, thanks to director Laura Moss, and that's good, because these characters have much to go through. The tale is essentially a classic love triangle, with the beefy Calvin Kanayama (E. Calvin Ahn) at the apex. He seems to love his new girlfriend, down-to-earth Debbie (Elizabeth Erwin), but lusts after the lithe and forward Tara (Clara Barton Green). Along the way he bonds with Sean (Shawn McLaughlin), Debbie's gay roommate, who, through no fault of his own, suffers from knowing more than he wants to about his friends' love lives. In creating a supportive and single "gay best friend," Mr. Pflaster flirts with cultural stereotype, but comes out pure, as Sean flowers into the most likable and vivid character of all.

The action skips deftly through one seriocomic situation after another. The mostly solid cast has fun with video games, food poisoning, Star Trek, and Sean's adventures as a substitute teacher. Periodically, a gong and some evocative shakuhachi music divert us into one of Calvin's dreams. These have been touched off by his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he's researching some gold figures that just might come from the legendary Yamashita's treasure. This sub-theme is an appealing, ornate framing device, though perhaps not totally necessary, as the imperfect, realistically rough-edged New Yorkers living their laughing, heartbreaking lives in front of us are intriguing enough by their plain selves. Still, without the dream sequences, we wouldn't have the lovely costumes and the great score, and they do provide some neatly dramatic moments as well, so who's complaining? The car may be a little used, but the paint job is smooth and the engine runs very well. Climb aboard; this is a worthwhile trip.

Squiggy and the Goldfish and Ore, or Or play in repertory through May 30 at the Workshop Theater, 312 W. 36 St., NYC. Tickets are only $12.

Like a chunk of green cheese with an emerald inside, this meditation on the power of imagination contains a hard, bright nugget.

Mare Cognitum follows three twenty-somethings reliving the wide-eyed excitement of intellectual discovery they experienced in college. Or rather, that's what the playwright himself, David McGee, seems to be indulging in.

There's promise in his effective opening scene, and dramatic flair in several other segments along the way. At the start, Lena (Devon Caraway) and Jeff (Kyle Thomas) can't see eye to eye about whether they should bother joining the anti-war protest marching past their apartment building. Jeff decries the crowd's lack of focus; Lena, too, casts a critical eye, but feels an urge to join her own passion to the masses'. Their compromise involves protesting at home without merging with the mob; "Nobody's listening to them either," sighs the withdrawn, Hamlet-like Kyle, "and at least we'll be warm."

Though the dialogue feels a little bloated, the actors' precise delivery and director Jesse Edward Rosbrow's smart staging keep the scene moving well. But when the third roommate, Thomas (Justin Howard), arrives home, ostensibly from a job interview, the play bogs down in a repetitious and overlong discussion of (Doubting) Thomas's nihilism and atheism.

When the friends act out the job interview, it's the first instance of a role-playing trick that works better during a few later scenes, when it's used more crisply to turn the living room into a classroom and (too much later) a rocket ship. The interview itself turns out to have been something else entirely; Thomas has been keeping a secret from his friends, a secret which leads to more college-coffeehouse discussion but little character development. Though poor vexed Thomas seems at first to be going against character to seek some kind of enlightenment, when the chance comes for him to really engage his imagination he retreats.  He's a tragic character in this sense, yet at the end he's right back where he started — just a guy looking for a job, not sure yet what he wants to do with his life.

The play's problem is that not enough happens. The characters' exchange of ideas can't carry 90 minutes of drama. When something does occur — notably, Lena's spiritual awakening, and at the end, a half-real trip to the Moon — the production springs to life. Lena's description of her church visit is a fine piece of writing, and Ms. Caraway brings it home brilliantly. It's one of the periods of focus that represent the promise of the play, which, tightened up, could be a powerful piece of theater.

Mr. Rosbrow, the director, cannot be much faulted for the play's problems, and the cast and crew are very good. Mr. Walters' Jeff sulks and whines a lot, sometimes becoming tiresome, but at certain moments he holds tension like a grieving tiger, switching personae with ferocity when the grudging script gives him the chance.  For her part, Ms. Caraway's sharp, exhilarating performance is worth the price of admission; she's fixedly present at all times, making it hard to look away from her.

Yet even when the playwright has focused his intentions and brought us someplace exciting, he tries his best to sabotage the mission by inserting a squabble about the sexist nature of language ("one giant leap for mankind"). The actors, and the rest of the talent involved in this production, are too good for that.

Theatre of the Small-Eyed Bear, which is presenting Mare Cognitum in repertory at the Workshop Theater through May 30, is an amalgam of three erstwhile companies: Theatre of the Expendable, Small Pond Entertainment, and Cross-Eyed Bear Productions. They have not only joined forces, but taken the risky step of ditching their individual company names to create the new, combined group, which is sharing costs, space, and design teams. This production is part of GET S.O.M.!, their first repertory effort. It’s a promising start; I’ll be reporting on the other two productions soon.

Context-free, on a bare stage with a bright light shining in the audience's eyes, a young man and a young woman exchange secrets. He speaks in flamboyant metaphors.  She's charmingly down-to-earth. It's clever and amusing, then takes an unexpected, grim turn; the actors (the talented Joe Stipek and Kari Warchock) have us right in the palms of their love-sweaty hands.

Cut to young Eugene at home. It turns out he's a rich boy, attended by manacled female servants. Nelson, an avuncular friend, takes him in hand, the (deliberately?) bad acting begins, and Go-Go Killers! never recovers. There's no way to sugarcoat it: this is a terrible play, and director Rachel Klein, who did better work with All Kinds of Shifty Villains (another genre piece) last year, seems to have no idea what to do with it.

In and around a post-global-warming New York, rival girl gangs compete to murder the rich men who are enslaving their sisters. One gang captures Eugene and Nelson and drags them before the Queen, played by Leasen Almquist, in her underground lair.  Ms. Almquist is a pro, but utterly at sea in a role that's so nonsensical playwright Sean Gill has to have her explain it in a monologue. Along the way, the gang and their captives spend an interminable, poorly paced night quarreling, getting bitten by snakes, and alternately assaulting and making out with an offensively stereotyped fellow called The Wop who seems to have stuttered in from a completely different play. It's all very difficult to suffer through.

Ms. Klein is obviously drawn to stage works that play with the devices and customs of genre pictures and mannered theater traditions. With All Kinds of Shifty Villains it was noir films and circus clowning. Go-Go Killers! is meant to evoke a number of B-movie genres, especially girl-gang flicks and those manic movies that featured go-go boots and hot pants — all-American MST3K fare, in other words. This sort of thing can make for spectacular theater, as Soul Samurai proved a few months back.

But in this case, evoking is as much as the play can manage. Interspersing clumsy, overlong scenes with less-than-crackerjack go-go-inspired dance numbers does not automatically create a re-imagining, an homage, or even a parody. Those good-bad movies of yore had stories one could follow, silly though they might have been. They had bad acting, too, but the New York stage creates higher expectations than did low-budget films of the 1950s and 60s. Go-Go Killers! boasts some good dancers and nifty costumes, but little else.

Go-Go Killers! runs through May 23 at the Sage Theater, 711 Seventh Ave., NYC, through May 30. Tickets at Smarttix.

I’m not one of those critics who like to wail about the decline of innovative theater in New York. Sure, things are tough for arts organizations of all kinds and certainly for independent theater groups, and you have to be especially tough to make it in our beloved Big Wormy Apple. But that’s always been true. From where I sit — and I sit in a lot of hard, cramped seats — the pool of talent here is deep, wide, and well-nourished. The wonder is that so many extremely talented people do so much so well for so little reward.

To go with its jigsaw-puzzle structure and precision dialogue, Adam Szymkowicz’s fine psychological comedy-drama Pretty Theft has pathos, sharp humor, a dash of horror, dancing, and many scene changes. It’s the kind of play that demands an exceptional production, and that’s just what it gets at the Access Theatre on lower Broadway. In her first full-fledged directing job for the Flux Theatre Ensemble, Angela Astle maneuvers Szymkowicz’s expertly drawn characters and their incisive, insightful scenes with the finesse of a chess grandmaster.

As the audience files in, ballerinas are warming up in a dance studio crafted from a couple of rails, a mirrored board, a lot of space, and a lot of mauve. The dancers eventually take on multiple functions: interpretive spirits, figures of beauty and gladness, a Greek chorus. But at the start they quickly make way for what seems a graceless story. Shy Allegra (the splendid Marnie Schulenburg), just out of high school and headed for Dartmouth, is persuaded by her voluble, desperately flirtatious schoolmate Suzy (the exquisitely expressive Maria Portman Kelly) to join her in a summer job as a caregiver at a group home for troubled adults. Here Allegra bonds with Joe, a formerly high-functioning autistic man who’s been stashed in the home after the death of his doting father.

As in classic fairy tales, no one here has functional parents. Allegra’s father is dying in the hospital while her mother sits at home staring at the TV, resentful and withdrawn. It’s no wonder she suffers from the stereotypical teenage ailment of roadkill-low self-esteem, and to makes matters worse, her oafish boyfriend (an effective and funny Zach Robidas) is primed to dump her.

Joe responds to Allegra as to no other member of the staff, but their fractured friendship is no occasion for a heartwarming tale of personal growth and lessons sweetly learned; Szymkowicz is far too perceptive and subtle for such after-school-special tripe. When Allegra’s supervisor at the home calls her a natural — “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?” — the phoniness of the adult world is made plain to her; we feel her disillusionment at discovering the emptiness at the heart of things.

Thanks to the film Rain Man and various books, the autistic savant has become a fixture in popular culture. He’s an easy tragic figure because he shares so much with us “normals” yet can’t be one of us. But Szymkowicz doesn’t use Joe (ably portrayed by Brian Pracht) as a disposable needle for injecting self-awareness lessons into our heroine. Joe is a solid character, even a tragic figure in his own right. Just like Allegra and Suzy, he’s insecure and fragile, and lacks useful parental figures. Just like them, he’s treated unfairly by a world that professes to care but doesn’t understand him. And just like them he makes us laugh at unexpected moments.

While Joe’s fate darkens, the girls hit the road and fall victim to Marco, an icily charismatic thief who comes to their “rescue” when the road trip sours. Yet we’re never more than a step away from the light. Not the light of redemption, exactly, but the light that emanates from the uncomplicated power of beauty. Anything pretty, Marco philosophizes creepily, must be “wrong.” But in the end a wiser Allegra insists, albeit in a small voice, that it’s not so.

There’s a little Jack Nicholson danger in Todd d’Amour’s Marco. For the better part of the play’s 90-plus edgy minutes he’s making slithery time with a small-town waitress in a side plot that runs its own course, then converges with the main line with a click that suddenly seems inevitable. The technical sureness of Heather Cohn’s set pays big dividends, as the ballet barres become the coffee shop counter, a bed-sized platform skilfully portrays several different rooms, and cubes outfitted with handy cloth pouches and that clever mirrored platform do most of the rest of the scenery work. The lighting (Andy Fritsch) and sound (Kevin Fuller) are equally effective in creating the shifting locations and moods: a lunatic asylum, a repair shop, Marco’s date-rape lair, a dream sequence that’s a small tour-de-force.

So the play is a good deal more than the riff on theft promised by the title. Robbed of his livelihood, Joe fills his empty spaces by swiping supplies and toting them around in a box. Suzy purloins her mother’s car, her friend’s boyfriend, and entire displays of beauty supplies. Marco claims to steal for a living, though what he actually takes from people turns out to be something of a surprise. But everything taken is also needed, even if some needs are evil. Szymkowicz’s brilliant stroke is to paint the evil that men do right into the pretty rainbow of yearning that defines humanity. And all with a twinkle, a laugh, a pirouette, and a shiver.

Pretty Theft is presented by the Flux Theatre and runs through May 17 at the Access Theater Gallery, 380 Broadway.

The Management has become known for dark comedies with an element of magic realism, and Dorothy Fortenberry’s Caitlin and the Swan (at UNDER St. Marks through May 2) is no exception. Director Joshua Conkel illuminates the curious psychological world of Fortenberry’s imagination, in which the animalistic metaphors of women’s sex lives become flesh and blood. Led by her worldly friends and her own exploratory spirit, naïve Caitlin (the excellent Marguerite French) plumbs the mysteries of fulfillment with charm, if little subtlety. (This isn’t a subtle play.) Dancer Elliott T. Reiland scores as the fantastical animals, both graceful and gruff, and Jake Aron strikes a delicate balance between innocence and abandon as Bastian, a cerebral high schooler who becomes Caitlin’s confidante. Rigid questionnaires and tests play the foil to the forces of imagination — Bastian prepares for the SATs, while the women mock a sociology survey about “work-life balance.” Uneven acting and visible opening-night jitters made Thursday’s show less than all it could have been, but the performances in this enjoyable one-act should cohere to match the pointed fun of its conceits.

'80s rock, with its hair bands, codpieced lead singers, and rainbow-bright guitar heroes, was all about excess and pomp. It was hard to take seriously then; today it's experienced as gaudy kitsch. But as with all genres of pop music, catchy songs were what made bands like Journey, Poison, and Night Ranger popular in the first place, so these bands are as ripe for the Broadway treatment as popsters of any other era.

After successful runs in Los Angeles and off-Broadway, Rock of Ages has crash-landed at the Brooks Atkinson — noisy, flashy, and most of all, funny. The creators of the show smartly decided to play it entirely for laughs, and the result is an evening of pure escapist fun, exactly what a city weary of bad news needs.

The book, by Chris D'Arienzo, tells a story so self-consciously cliched it can't help bursting out of its boy-meets-girl envelope and turning on itself with in-jokes and outrageous mugging. Mitchell Jarvis, in a Jack Black-like turn, plays Lonny, a sound man at a rock club on the Sunset Strip who also functions as the narrator. "I wanted to explore deep and thoughtful theater," he complains late in the proceedings, but instead was hired for a show with "poop jokes and Whitesnake songs."

When aspiring rock star Drew (Constantine Maroulis), the taller, masculine member of the show's star-crossed pair, denies having referred to ingenue Sherrie (Amy Spanger) as a mere "friend," Lonny pops out of a side doorway to remind him, "Actually, you did." The show is loaded with self-reference and toilet humor; there's really nothing going on beneath the music and dancing and horsing around. But the action and the fun never stop, and they're all we need. This show is pure visceral experience. What it's about is the music.

The cast sings extremely well, and the band is kickass. This was undoubtedly the first and only time I'll ever actually enjoy hearing Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Never has REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling" been so perfectly apropos as here, dramatizing a new-found gay love. Vocally, the show's finest musical moment is a duet by Drew and Sherrie of Damn Yankees' "Can You Take Me High Enough."

But the biggest applause was for a showstopping number built around Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," sung by Wesley Taylor as Franz. Franz is the flouncy son of a German developer who wants to replace the Strip's trashy but vibrant clubs with sterile strip malls. Defying his humorless, fun-crushing dad, Franz represents — nothing, actually, except a breakout role for the delightful Mr. Taylor. There's no depth here. It is what it is: surface sheen, happy noise, and songs with pounding hooks that you just can't get out of your head. Need a break from it all? Hop in your Speedwagon and Journey across the river Styx to 47th Street.

Rock of Ages plays until the final countdown at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47 St., NYC.

Patrick Stewart is a tough act to follow, but Hipgnosis isn't afraid: they've plunged into the roughened seas of the Lower East Side with one of New York's first Macbeths since Rupert Goold brought Mr. Stewart and Kate Fleetwood to our fair city for a brief reign of terror, first at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then on Broadway.

This is also probably the first Manhattan Macbeth since another foul, bloody reign ended and a new, unusually dark-skinned thane became the hopeful leader of a violent nation. This color-neutral Macbeth, with the great Julian Rozzell in the title role, seems especially appropriate today. We tend to think of the play as being about lust for and corruption of power, about tyranny, cruelty and comeuppance, but this production seems to stress the fate of Scotland as much as it does those of its individual characters.

"I think our country sinks beneath the yoke," cries Malcolm as he and Macduff hatch their plan to take down the freshly minted tyrant; "It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds." The two vengeful warriors shout through this crucial scene — too much so — as if to pound home the message that their mission is infinitely larger than themselves.

A good Macbeth must have, at minimum, a good Macbeth. The Hipgnosis team has tapped Mr. Rozzell, a founding member of the group and an actor of great range, magnetism, and subtlety. Lanky and sinewy, he prowls and arches over the stage, which is actually a brightly lit pit like a wrestling ring. As Macbeth battles conscience and guilt, sometimes reduced to crawling like a bug on the scuffed and bloodied white floor, the lights never dim. It's meant to suggest the broad-daylight productions of Shakespeare's time, with all atmosphere and suspense generated purely by the words and action.

Mostly, it works. The able cast is co-anchored by Elizabeth Mirarchi as a diminutive, highly focused Lady Macbeth and Richard Ugino as Banquo, both Hipgnosis regulars who shone in very different lights in The Caucasian Chalk Circle last year. Under John Castro's straightforward direction the characters march simply from scene to scene, stolidly pushing Shakespeare's inexorable story towards its fated conclusion.

The gauzy witches are a little scary and a little funny, their white wrappings vaguely resembling the nurses' outfits of the Stewart production; the banquet scene with Banquo's ghost is played partially (and I think intentionally) for laughs, a choice which ironically pays off by deepening our feeling for Macbeth's pain. Only occasionally, as in the build-up to Macbeth's downfall, when scenes fly by in quick succession, does the lack of scenery and lighting seem to strand the actors in an uncomfortable, Beckettian limbo.

This production can't help but labor in the shadow of its titanic predecessor. But, avoiding any temptation to bend Shakespeare out of shape for the sake of originality, the Hipgnosis group has realized a stirring, straight-up Macbeth. Mr. Rozzell's performance, with its youthful, blazing, and animalistic intensity, alone makes this production worth seeing, and there's a good deal more as well.

Macbeth runs through April 19th at the Flamboyan Theatre, Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St., NYC. Tickets at Smarttix or call 212-868-4444. Photo courtesy of David Gibbs/DARR Publicity.

Written in 1893, Mrs. Warren's Profession wasn't publicly staged in England until over 30 years later. Its frank (though euphemistically phrased) treatment of prostitution was the obvious reason for the play's suppression, but its truly modern subject was the newly developing role and rights of working women. It's a testament to both Shaw's brilliance, and to the slow, fitful progress of societal change, that the play still feels pretty current.

The present production by BOO-Arts at Manhattan Theatre Source does very well by Shaw. Director Kathleen O'Neill, founder and director of the company, creates a pleasing, almost earthy sense of intimacy by placing the audience on two sides of the action. Shaw's dialogue is supremely fluent and expertly whittled, but also somewhat heightened; staging the play so that we're practically embracing the cast pulls a modern American audience into the action and helps make everything seem quite natural. Ms. O'Neill has grasped both the essential characteristics and the depths of Shaw's characters: not only the pivots of the story — the middle-aged madam of the title and her independent-minded daughter Vivie — but the four class-conscious men orbiting the women.

All the roles are very well cast, though some of the British accents are more successful than others; the excellent James Dutton, who plays Vivie's young, ne'er-do-well boyfriend/boy toy, has an advantage here, being British-born. His lounging, lunging, cynical Frank Gardner is like a prancing Wodehouse fop made suddenly self-aware. Broadway veteran Joy Franz is a magnificent Mrs. Warren, commanding the stage, revealing her history to her daughter with power and grace and pathos. Ashton Crosby is a delightfully humorous Rev. Gardner. Joseph Francini is an effective Praed, the aesthete of the group, and David Palmer Brown has a grand time with the meatier role of Sir George Crofts, who initially appears to be a cad and blowhard but turns out to be rather more, and less.

Caralyn Kozlowski is a wonder as Vivie, completely disappearing into her complex character, biting down on emotions, then opening up just enough for us to read her precisely, controlling herself and controlling the men with the only real power she has: her determination. She makes us laugh even as she faces the serious conundrum of woman's lot.

Including intermission, the play runs two and a half hours, but it zips by. It's actually one of Shaw's shorter plays, and as such it's done more often than some; still, this is a fairly unusual opportunity to see a top-notch staging with an excellent cast in an intimate setting. Mrs. Warren's Profession runs through April 18 at Manhattan Theatre Source.

David Feldshuh's Miss Evers' Boys has been around for 17 years, most notably in its 1997 Emmy-winning TV adaptation. But in the current production by the Red Fern Theatre Company it still feels as fresh as a spring rain.

The dazzling cast has something to do with this. Their superb performances, under the more than able direction of Melanie Moyer Williams, flesh out the disturbing story that Mr. Feldshuh's script tells so achingly.

Beginning in 1932, a government program which became known as the infamous Tuskegee experiment subjected a group of syphilitic African-American men in Alabama to a cruel study. Told they were being treated for their "bad blood," they were in fact denied treatment. The crude medicines of the time — and later, more egregiously, the lifesaving new drug penicillin — were withheld from the men, so doctors could study the ravages of the disease over time and determine whether blacks and whites were affected the same way.

Given this nightmarish scenario, with its numerous victims and its overtones of eugenics, the script is remarkably evenhanded. Feldshuh's central insight was to focus on the character of Eunice Evers, a selfless nurse who, believing she is doing her best for the men, wins their trust and cares for them through their years of illness and suffering. Framing the action, which takes place at the outset of the study and then fourteen years later, are snatches of Nurse Evers' testimony before Congress in 1972 when the whole horrid affair came to light.

Played with the utmost grace by Nedra McClyde, who was excellent in Victor Woo and TBA and gets a well-deserved central role here, Nurse Evers initially trusts the doctors running the study. She is so strongly animated by her calling that she never starts a family of her own; the men become her charges, and she comes to love them dearly. But as Nurse Evers loses faith and the anguish of her inner conflict grows, Ms. McClyde makes us feel both utter sorrow and powerful admiration for the character.

Though the racial attitudes depicted in the play are no longer dominant in our culture, the play remains vivid because its underlying themes are timeless. Conflicting loyalties and man's inhumanity to man never go out of style. More specifically, evidence of our nation's painful racial history lingers everywhere.  The play also has many old-fashioned virtues that have retained their effectiveness since the dawn of theater: lots of drama, painful scenes, funny ones, and colorful characters with complex personalities and distinct, sometimes exaggerated traits.

There's the sharp, mistrustful rebel, the high-spirited hoofer with dreams of stardom, the superstitious farmer quailing before the march of progress, and the illiterate elder with homespun wisdom. Played respectively by Garrett Lee Hendricks, Jason Donnell Bush, Marty Austin Lamar, and veteran David Pendleton, these men suffer separately and together through scenes of excruciating "treatment," joyful song and dance, agonizing decision-making, abnegation, struggle, and occasionally grace. They're a terrific ensemble, and each has beautifully-played individual scenes as well. The doctors too, both white and black, are, like Miss Evers, complicated people, dedicated professionals who believe they are doing right. They just can't see (in the case of the white doctor, played by Alex C. Ferrill), or overcome (in the case of the black doctor, played by the imposing Evander Duck), the twistedness of the situation in which they find themselves.

The stars seem to have aligned for this production: excellent actors perfectly cast, with a director who knows just how to seize on the strengths of Feldshuh's scenecraft. The show may be a little slow going at a few points and unnecessarily heavy on the pathos at the end, but the brilliant talent collected here has no trouble wiping the floor with these minor flaws. This Miss Evers' Boys is a triumph. It plays Thursdays through Sundays through April 5 at the Shell Theatre in the Times Square Arts Center, 300 W. 43 St. Tickets at Ovation Tix online or call 212-352-3101. A portion of the proceeds from this Red Fern Theatre Company production goes to benefit the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation. Photo by Nathan Johnson.

In 1845 Frederick Douglass, already a famed abolitionist though not yet 30, sailed for Europe aboard a ship called the Cambria. Fleeing hostile forces in the United States who were making his activities difficult (to say the least), he received a hero's welcome in Ireland from crowds of sympathetic, long-suffering Irish Catholics familiar with his career and his recently published autobiography.

Douglass spent six months in Ireland, finding there the morale boost he needed to continue his crusade. I spent an hour and a half at the Irish Arts Center in New York on St. Patrick's day, getting my first taste of Donal O'Kelly's work. The Cambria concerns not Douglass's time in Europe but the ocean voyage itself. He and director Raymond Keane bring it to life as a richly fictionalized tale of colorful figures and high drama at sea. Embodied by Mr. O'Kelly and Sorcha Fox — both superb actors — these people are by turns amusing, inspiring, and a little scary.

Some of the characters are more faceted than others. Mr. O'Kelly's Douglass, always calm and dignified, is (no pun intended) the least "colorful" of all, the quiet eye at the center of the storm. His power is all in his words, but they are all he needs, some written for him by the playwright, others taken directly from Douglass's own eloquent works. Yet he's not without complexity; sent down to steerage when his first-class neighbor complains about the proximity of a black man, he observes, without sore indignation, "I feel at home among the mishmash of nationalities."

More violent personalities dance around him. A lively abolitionist, given a pitch-perfect American accent by Ms. Fox, is insufferably righteous. Ms. Fox also depicts a delightful little girl who refuses to believe that her new friend "Mr. Johnson" (Douglass incognito) is not a minstrel. She also plays male characters with complete conviction.

The skipper, the rueful son of a slave ship captain, has an evocative and gloriously staged (if perhaps not quite earned) Act Two revelation. A Southern slaveholder, also played by Mr. O'Kelly, makes an effective villain; if I were ignorant of American history I'd accuse the playwright of creating a caricature, but alas, the plantation owner's blind paternalism and cruelty were all too endemic; his descent into seething animal hatred feels both comical and real on a level deeper than realism.

Mr. O'Kelly's language is worthy of the mantle of the great Irish dramatists of the past — warm, poetic, funny, pained, sprightly yet always faintly weighted, but never bitter. "Never been at sea? You must have been mighty contented with your life on land." "Imagine not knowing your birthday." "Beware the Quaker choir ladies."

This play provides one of those concentrated, magical experiences one hopes for every time one takes one's seat in a theater. The Cambria had a limited run through Sunday, March 22 at the Donaghy Theatre at the Irish Arts Center in New York City.

Molière's Tartuffe is not one of those classic plays that need a lot of exegesis for the benefit of contemporary audiences. Though it dates from the 1660s, its vivid characters, uproarious humor, and theme of hypocrisy and scamming remain thoroughly understandable across the centuries. Nevertheless, many adaptations and "modernizations" that go beyond mere translation have been created and produced for English-speaking audiences, some in prose, some in rhyming verse like the original French. Richard Wilbur, Christopher Hampton, and many others have tried their hands.

Jeff Cohen's new rhyming-verse version is set in America during the Great Depression. His program notes relate this choice to the present economic crisis and in particular the breathtakingly audacious confidence men, like Bernie Madoff, who've had their part in it. I'd argue that Tartuffe's scheming is more akin to a different type of confidence game, that of the televangelists. Either way, though, the game is to separate a gull from his money (and/or position), not necessarily by lying to him, but always by taking advantage of one of his innate character traits, whether greed, insecurity, or something else.

Either way, too, Tartuffe is a play for our time, wherever and whenever one sets it, and Mr. Cohen understands this. His verse is primarily conversational, but it is elevated where it needs to be (as in some of Tartuffe's flowery outbursts, and the speeches of the prim, moralizing Cléante, mincingly portrayed by Brian Linden, who was so wickedly foppish in The Country Wife two years ago) — elevated, however, not into self-conscious poetics, but into the tones and rhythms of high comedy, especially American comedy, the line that runs from vaudeville through the great TV sitcoms of the 1950s.

To "fund" his vision of the play, Mr. Cohen, who also directed, has at hand an embarrassment of riches in the form of a superb cast. The production's publicity stresses the presence of Christina DeCicco, who plays Elmire, the sexy young wife of Orgon, Tartuffe's central victim. Ms. DeCicco is indeed excellent: agile, beautiful, and delightfully funny, she even gets to show off her singing voice in one hilarious moment (she played Glinda in the national tour of Wicked and it's no wonder).

But she is matched by the two male leads, Keith Buterbaugh as Orgon and the rubber-faced Tom Ford in the title role, and by Deanna Henson as the fiery maid Dorine, who is actually the household glue. Ms. Henson's command of the speedy verbosity required of her by Mr. Cohen's gushing script and rapid pacing is most impressive. Mr. Ford's Tartuffe is truly demonic — he's the very model of duplicity, utterly qualm-free about his plot to take control of his mark's fortunes, and equally bald-faced in his lust for Elmire even as he gleefully looks forward to marrying Orgon's lisping daughter Marianne.

Katia Asche plays Marianne as a pretend-innocent with a flair for emotional manipulation — one comes to feel that in different circumstances, she'd make a good female Tartuffe-in-training, though unlike that master manipulator, she is capable of love. Her paramour, the mock-heroic Valère (Rob Maitner), is funny and even a little touching, riding to the rescue in his preppy sweater. Susan Jeffries is exquisite as the hapless family matriarch, and Mr. Buterbaugh portrays her son, Orgon, as so willfully blind to Tartuffe's maleficence that we gape in amused horror. Ably representing righteous indignation is Aaron Costa Ganis as Orgon's wronged, stuttering son Damis, while Jasper Soffer makes a properly snooty Bailiff.

Mr. Cohen makes good use of the high, boxy space of @Seaport! with its big staircase; the effective, pastel set is by Alex Distler, while a couple of Anne E. Grosz's perfectly pitched period costumes are almost characters in themselves. Trying hard, I can squeeze out a small complaint about what seem to be references to Giuliani-Bloomberg era New York in the final scene with the Cop (Mark DeFrancis) — more concern for cops than the poor, etc. — but I'm reaching.

Speaking of cops and robbers, it's almost criminal that you only have to pay off-off-Broadway prices for the level of talent on display here. Go quickly, there are too few performances and not many seats at each.

Tartuffe runs through March 29 at @Seaport!, 210 Front St., across from South Street Seaport, NYC. Presented by Dog Run Rep. Tickets at Smarttix or call (212) 868-4444.

Photos by Erica Parise. 1) Tom Ford as Tartuffe and Deanna Henson as Dorine. 2) Christina DeCicco as Elmire and Keith Buterbaugh as Orgon.