The Bagel And The Rat

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.