Category: Theater

Following the Northern Star is the second in Michael Gorman’s trilogy of plays about drug addiction in the New England fishing community. “A new Recovery model,” the playwright has explained, “emphasizes the return of the recovering addict to the community and the sharing of his or her story, as opposed to the anonymity model of Alcoholics Anonymous for instance.” (Emphasis mine.)

“Sharing of story” can mean two things, telling or showing. Telling, which may work brilliantly as therapy, isn’t generally what’s called for on the stage, where, not coincidentally, it’s called a “show.” The excellent opening scenes of this play indeed show much promise – but then, alas, the telling takes over.

The production takes full advantage of the large, versatile space of the La Mama Annex. The introductory scenes occur in a big pool of blue at some distance from the audience, and on a “bridge” far to the rear, but with the hall’s fine acoustics we have no trouble understanding the exposition. Three childhood friends play fishing-boat, but one, Robbie, is haunted by the specter of his alcoholic father. Then a couple of inland high school kids, Guy and Maria, banter winningly about their futures. Engineered by Gorman’s smart, hope-charged dialogue, these scenes brim with life.

Aided by haunting live music, the first act carries on into a present day in which the bookish Guy, shunning college, has followed his dream and begun to learn the trade of a commercial fisherman. The locals, including the charismatic but still troubled Robbie, live the stereotypically scrappy life of a hard-working, hard-drinking deep-sea fishing community. If Bruce Springsteen had grown up in a place like New Bedford he might have written characters like these. “Rich people,” Robbie says, “they can afford to fail. We have to succeed.”

But times are hard. While Robbie pursues his dreams of big catches, and recovers from the loss of more than one boat, his childhood friends Johnny and Therese both take jobs on land. Robbie, played with scabrous intensity by Michael Kimball, shares the spotlight with the set, most notably a wonderful, big rolling boat.

But the experimental goodies, which include cracks in the fourth wall and other conceptual elements, declamations, and dance, can’t rescue the thin plot. “I’m trying to make ends meet,” Therese says to her now-husband Robbie, “and you’re after the big score.” Throughout, adult Robbie’s psyche is revealed by explication, not action. The second act drags on and on; even the return of the delightful Maria (Ruth Coughlin) can’t save it. The sailor Ray (the excellent J. Paul Guimont), a heretofore minor character, launches into a gigantic monologue which, by the time it eventually goes somewhere, has thoroughly tried the viewer’s patience. The wretched extremes of emotion that flay Robbie, Johnny, Ray, and Therese as the plot unfolds feel unearned.

Maybe you need to have been to hell (and hopefully back), like the drug addicts who inspired the playwright, to get what’s going on here. But a play should create its own world, not demand familiarity with one that may be alien to most viewers. It’s fine to show us these miserable, drug-addicted men. But you have to make us care about them as people. The long speeches, drenched in moralizing and metaphors, left me impatient, wanting plot, dramatic interaction among the characters, something.

The staging is clever, interesting, and impressive. And, as evidenced by the first third of the play, Gorman can create vivid characters, and write snappy dialogue that walks the fine line between magic realism and real realism. In this play he has dragged men who’ve hit bottom onto the stage, kicking and screaming. But he hasn’t shown us how they got into such terrible trouble, or made us care about them.

Through Jan. 6 at La Mama.

Ben Rauch is Horace Vanderveer!!! Sounds corny, but this (mostly) one-man cabaret act is funny, sweet, and irresistibly entertaining. A superb singer and showman, Rauch puts all his talents into his never-say-die character – a struggling actor and Jersey boy with oversized teeth, a blindingly sunny attitude, and a resume – dotted with misspellings – filled with understudy roles with the likes of the Temple Shalom Players.

Utterly convinced of his superior talent and Broadway destiny, the unfailingly optimistic Horace gambols from center stage to the piano to the xylophone and back, supported by an excellent four-piece band and his own faintly absurd charisma. Tying together his numbers with funny bits of “autobiography,” Rauch uses the Horace character both to convey his love for Broadway musicals and to spoof them. Never breaking character – Horace speaks in a silly accent, something like a pastiche of Hollywood-Austrian, Low Countries, and Dr. Evil – Rauch/Horace convincingly works into his storyline a series of Broadway showstoppers from a variety of hit shows like Annie Get Your Gun, Godspell, Wicked, and Les Miserables. (His xylophone transcription from Rent is priceless – and I don’t even like Rent.)

Running about an hour and 20 minutes, the show has just the right length (and spunk) for a family audience. In fact Horace has a gaggle of teenage girls backing him up on stage during several numbers. Ben Rauch wrote the show himself, along with Melissa Rauch and Winston Beigel. Director Miles Phillips keeps the action nonstop, making it a crowd-pleaser all the way.

Reserve now – there are only two more chances to catch this show: Dec. 10 at 9 PM and Dec. 15 at 2 PM. At the Laurie Beechman Theater in the West Bank Cafe.

Just off Times Square, a perfect cast is bringing Scapin, Molière’s nutty reversal-of-fortune farce, to life with such antic gusto that the four walls of the tiny Turtle’s Shell Theater can hardly contain it.

Puppets, singalongs, balloon animals, mugging, pratfalls, paddlings – it could almost be a kids’ show, and you certainly could take your kids to this uproarious Scapin. It would be a heck of a lot cheaper and less stressful than a trip to FAO Schwarz or to see the Rockettes.

This is the world premiere of Scott McCrea’s new English translation of Molière’s 17th century comedy. The three-act Les Fourberies de Scapin (literally “Scapin’s Schemings” or “Scapin’s Impostures”) is here reshaped into an economical two-act form, with the title shortened as well but the story and the craziness intact.

The players are all very good, but more than that, they are perfectly cast, and superbly directed by Shawn Rozsa. Scapin is played by Spencer Aste, who inhabits the role of the scheming, social-climbing valet to the hilt. The misbehaving scions of two well-heeled families enlist the clever servant to help them out of their respective amorous predicaments. Playing the sons off the fathers, the weaselly Scapin finesses trick after trick, and just when you think his web of deceit is about to crash down on top of him, well – just remember this is a comedy, not a tragedy.

I mentioned that you could bring your kids. The enthusiastic and very talented cast turned the audience of adults at last night’s show into a gaggle of giddy oversized boys and girls. (I even caught one of my fellow reviewers laughing, and we’re a bunch of seriously gloomy gusses, let me tell you.) Priceless cartoonish touches dot the fast-moving plot, riding the shoulders of the broad physical comedy. A big one is the setting, which has been moved from cosmopolitan Naples to a small Italian town on a festival day. A musician-clown leads us through the proceedings as if we’re an audience at a tiny circus. (For a second I pictured Zampano, from Fellini’s La Strada, turned inside-out into a figure of delightful, rather than dark, amusement.)

A nervous Léandre (the tall, reedy Nico Evers-Swindell) pulls out a piece of knitting to calm his nerves. Later his father Geronte (a tiny, mincing John Freimann) emerges from a sack – fan first. The ladies, including the regal Hyacinte (Maya Rosewood) and the frisky Zerbinette (Catherine Wronowksi), mug shamelessly, as do the pure-at-heart Octave (Matt Luceno) and his sad-sack pal Silvestre (Jonathan M. Castro), while Octave’s father Argante (Roger Grunwald) limps stiffly about Keven Lock’s funhouse set, perpetually grouchy, pulling on his beard.

Commedia dell’arte, with its related forms, is far from moribund. We see its spirit alive and well in modern analogues, most often on television, in sketch shows like Kids in the Hall and British comedies like Absolutely Fabulous. But nothing beats the high-spirited hijinks of a play like Scapin seen live. This holiday season, revisit – or discover – Molière. Good for what ails ya, I promise.

Tickets are $18, online at TheaterMania or call (866) 811-4111. Through Dec. 22 at the Turtle’s Shell Theater, Times Square.

Reduce we all our lessons unto this:
To die, sweet Spenser, therefore live we all;
Spenser, all live to die, and rise to fall.

Though considerably abridged, this new production of Christopher Marlowe's historical masterwork is generally well played, dramatically sound, and true to the fatalistic moral (above) spoken by the tutor Baldock at the end of Act IV.

At that moment Edward, though still technically the reigning monarch of England, has gone on the run from his rebellious land barons, who've become sick of the frivolous King draining the treasury to favor his relatively low-born companions. Who is still loyal to Edward? Who will betray whom? As always in English history, what will France do? Characters switch sides and switch back, from motives both honorable (occasionally) and base (usually) in Marlowe's bloody tale of the scandalous early 14th century reign of Edward II, the Gay King.

Marlowe's play remains popular and vivid after more than 400 years for two reasons. It is a great play, with language that at times rivals Shakespeare's. As important, it is one of the few great works of classical literature whose protagonists are, essentially openly, homosexual. (Marlowe, probably gay himself, didn't make this up; the King's proclivities appear to have been generally acknowledged in his own time.) But this production wisely takes the amorous nature of Edward's relationship with the Gascon knight, Gaveston, as a given, and stresses the more proximate cause of his downfall: power politics.

Power, if not politics, was lacking at the start of the performance I saw. It was only the second night of the run, so the weakness was probably attributable to jitters; after a few scenes, the cast found its rhythm and the bulk of the play ran smoothly. Jason Summers portrayed Edward initially as something of a psychotic, sort of a Caligula without the brutality. His love for Gaveston seemed at first more obsessive than heartfelt, his subsequent grief rather mild and stately. But as the King's torturous downfall accelerated, Summers found the passion behind Edward's vanity, and he had several big, heartbreaking scenes. Torn by the barons' ultimate demand that he relinquish his crown, his wail – "No, no, no, no," wrenched the gut marvelously. As Marlowe's stage direction goes: The KING rageth. And he doth.

Nick Fondulis played Gaveston effectively as a sulky, childish rogue, even more vain than Edward and a flamboyant foil to the King's more tightly packed personality. He is a sensitive, showy brute who intrigues us without meriting our sympathy. Further over-the-topness came in the person of Spenser the Younger, whom Edward elevates to favor after Galveston's downfall, here played by Kristian Lazzaro with a shrill smarminess that amused at first but eventually grew a little tiresome. (Spenser the Elder was among a number of relatively minor characters dispensed with in this version.)

Casting women as several of the important lords (and having the characters played as women) worked nicely and even added a bit to the intricacies of the story's sexual politics. It also provided an opportunity for costume designer David Withrow to display his cleverness. All the costumes, in fact, were impressively inventive. Withrow combined an assortment of pieces of modern couture into garb that no one ever wore in real life but still suggested archaic courtly dress.

Neither a period nor a modern-dress Edward II, the production felt lifted out of time. Queen Isabella's purple dress was luridly beautiful; Gaveston's leather-and-chains outfit was a glorious sight gag; and the murderer Lightborn's terrifying get-up made the play's climactic killing all the more dreadful. (Cary Hite displayed notable range, appropriately chewing the scenery as the terrifying assassin and also as the cowed Bishop of Coventry.)

Royal announcements were staged as press conferences; amusing TV news broadcasts filled us in on some of the off-stage (or elided) action; a grand, modern-style conference table served as all-purpose scenery and furniture; and effective lighting and sound effects carried us neatly through battles and chases. Director Tom Berger has come up with a conception of the classic play that's both modern and true.

Through Dec. 16 at the 14th Street Y Theatre, 344 W. 14 St, NYC. Staged by the (re:) Directions Theatre. Tickets online or call (212) 868-4444.

Leslie Caveny’s experience writing for television is evident in her sparkling new comedy, Love of a Pig. Like a well-written sitcom episode, it boasts fast pacing, short, sharp exchanges, minimal time between laughs, and one dramatic decrescendo into touching quietude. What makes it special is that it extends the best features of scripted TV comedy over an hour-plus of live action, without losing focus or shine.

Also like a sitcom plot, the play is built upon a hackneyed premise. The aptly, drably named Jenny Brown (Dana Brooke), a twenty-something violin grad student, can’t get a date. There’s nothing wrong with her appearance or personality; rather, she’s locked in a cycle of low self-esteem and high self-consciousness that makes her an Invisible Girl when it comes to attracting Joe (Steven Strobel), a brooding, self-absorbed bassist, while blinding her to signals from a guy who does find her appealing.

Pretty common stuff. But Caveny, director D. H. Johnson, and the sprightly, almost scarily talented cast spin it into a perfect piece of salty-sweet fun.

The play is simultaneously an ensemble piece and a star turn for Dana Brooke, whose tour de force of a performance is a controlled explosion of emotional movements and colors. The other seven actors play a variety of roles, some more or less realistic, some clownish and even puppetlike – from barfly to mailman to fellow students to door (yes, door). David Nelson is delightfully squirmy as the bitter, over-sensitive music instructor, and Jenny Greer is hilarious as our heroine’s lightheaded teenage sister, but there are no weak links in the cast or the production as a whole.

Credit must go to the director for keeping the proceedings so peppery and brisk. Yet despite all the vigorous action, cute business, and a facile ending, there’s enough substance that you feel you’ve been in the company of real people with realistic problems, behaving just as kindly and cluelessly as your own friends and acquaintances.

Except these folks are funnier. Much, much funnier.

Wednesdays through Sundays through Oct. 28 at the 45th Street Theatre. Tickets online or call (212) 868-4444.

The prolific Bekah Brunstetter has written another fine play, and this time I can say that without any caveats. I Used to Write on Walls is funny, deep, innovative, and affecting on several levels. Brunstetter’s central skill of creating painfully real female characters is truly put to the test in this play, where there are seven of them and no ensemble scenes. She not only meets but surpasses her own test.

A lonely, fat policewoman, a suicidally insecure makeup artist, and a beautiful spoken-word performer all fall for a California surfer dude (Jeff Berg) who’s in New York City on a “rad, rad philosophical journey” to right humanity’s wrongs. Immature, untrustworthy, and stupid, the ridiculous Trevor is plainly nobody’s Mr. Right. Yet with an easy charm, good looks, and a few sweet words, he divests the women of their judgment as easily as he gets them out of their clothes.

Even Georgia (Levita Shaurice), the sharp, self-aware poet, can’t help wanting more from Trevor than he is obviously prepared to give. So maybe it’s not such a surprise that the overweight, 34-year-old Diane (Maggie Hamilton, with exquisite comic timing) falls for his sweet-talk. Or that self-hating Joanne (Darcie Champagne), whose debilitating anxiety visibly quivers just under her bubbly surface, clings, literally for dear life, to his childish optimism.

Trevor may be a two- and three-timing Lothario, and worse, but Berg invests the difficult role with a raw, scabrous humanity. His stereotypical faux-clever pronouncements and absurd insensitivity make us laugh as easily as he makes the women melt. When Joanne confesses, “I was gonna kill myself, right before we met,” his fascinated response is, “Really? How?”

But when he meets his match, in the person of the overripe, nutty, and possibly dangerous Mona (Ellen David), the blubbering little boy within is revealed. On stage a great deal of the time, Berg makes Trevor an entertaining and, against all odds, very human villain. The real enemy, Brunstetter is telling us, is the pressure women put on themselves to be and look perfect, and the too-often impossible dream of matching what you want with what you have.

Yet the playwright doesn’t heavy-handedly blame “society” or “male-dominated culture” for her women’s plight. Each in her own way, the women reveal their weaknesses; they are fully realized people at the mercy of a complexity of forces, some programmed right into their own natures.

Rachel Dorfman and Mary Round are very good in mother roles, and Chelsey Shannon persuades as eleven-year-old Anna, who represents, in a magical-realist sort of way, how women – at least in Brunstetter’s convincing vision – start out life: on one level, pure and innocent, but already bearing the ova of corrupton and disappointment. From Anna’s mother’s heartbreakingly funny toss-off line – “Don’t look directly at me, it burns” – through Diane’s sad and hilarious voicemail confession, the Fellini-esque tableau at the end of Act I, Trevor’s breakdown, and Georgia’s genuinely poetic, Chorus-like coda, I Used to Write on Walls is the work of a playwright coming into full mastery.

Thursdays through Saturdays through Oct. 27 at the Gene Frankel Theatre Underground, 24 Bond St. between Lafayette and Bowery, NYC. Tickets online or call 212-868-4444. Mature language and themes.

H. G. Brown’s new heist tale centers on Eddie Hajazi, a charmer with a cruel streak who needs a crew to help him pull off a big maritime heist. Played with sleazy suavity by Robert Funaro (known to many as Eugene Pontecorvo on The Sopranos), Eddie artfully appeals to the needs and the dreams of three local men. Mal (Robert Sheridan) is a former contraband runner gone straight, now trying to make a settled life for himself and his new wife, Bev (Vivienne Leheny), as a modest innkeeper. George (Gordon Silva) tends bar at Mal’s place, and Harley (Jack Rodgerson) is a piano-playing dockworker down on his luck. Three women complicate the scheme: the hardworking, morally centered Bev; Harley’s girl Alice (Kelli K. Barnett), an oversexed stripper with a heart of gold; and most of all, Bev’s friend Joyce (Kate Udall), a sultry newspaper writer.

Even these colorful characters are almost upstaged, early on, by Joseph Spirito’s spectacular set. Though Mal and Bev are slowly renovating the inn, the barroom where the action takes place is a character of its own. The stained wood sings with color and history, while the wall decor and the jukebox (stocked only with oldies) define a worn and comfortable sailors’ haven. Luckily, Brown’s snappy dialogue and director Stephen Sunderlin’s brisk staging keep us focused on the action.

Act I’s character introductions and set-up scenes boast a sprightly, slightly elevated dialogue that’s reminiscent of Lanford Wilson’s (think Hot L Baltimore), but delivered by the cast in a way that sometimes crosses the line from animated into hammy. It feels to me as if director and cast are a bit hamstrung (no pun intended) by an inconsistency of tone. The script is part gangsters-and-molls (think Key Largo) and part late 20th century TV comedy-drama. One wishes it would go all the way in one direction or the other. This flaw prevents the play rising above clever entertainment to become higher art.

Joyce, the writer, is the epitome of this conflict. Though Udall fleshes her out with a rich and funny performance, she’s an anachronism in a story that’s meant to take place in 1984. Some of her speeches feel like a nostalgic 1940s High Hollywood take on journalistic intrepidity. On the other hand, Udall and Barnett play out their scenes of drunken female bonding with vigorous humor, and both their characters attain a level of depth that’s a credit to their performances, the playwright’s skill with characterization, and the director’s vision.

I also found Eddie’s roguish appeal to the women difficult to credit. As played by Funari, his charm is so patently artificial that one would expect even a hard case like Alice to see right through it. The philosophical Mal and even the bitter Harley have no trouble discerning Eddie’s rascality, only casting their lot with him out of acknowledged greedy or desperate motivations. And Bev, the moral center of the play, wants no part of his scheming.

The show is quite entertaining despite those flaws. Its length and pacing are exactly right, and it has some wrenching moments – especially in the women’s scenes – where the raw underside of humanity is exposed to the wind and the sea spray that you can almost feel through the windows of the weathered barroom of the Carney Hook Marina Motel.

Through Oct. 21 at the Tada! Theater, 15 W. 28 St., NYC. Tickets online or call 212-352-3101 or 866-811-4111 (toll free).

Broadway stars Liz Larsen (Hairspray, Most Happy Fella) and Brad Oscar (The Producers) lead a deep and snappy ensemble in Noel Katz's new musical about the cast and crew of a 1950s TV variety show. Shades of The Dick Van Dyke Show, of course; but the center of gravity here is not the writer, but the star, Dottie Francis (Larsen), who mugs and chirps and pratfalls and Streisands through a bravura performance as a professional "funny girl" whose career, along with those of her long-running crew, is threatened by the pressure to name names at the McCarthy hearings.

The first act zips along on the glamour and good times of live television's golden age. Dottie, her director Gabe (Oscar), head writer Danny (a sad-eyed Jeff Talbott), and choreographer Donald (the swift-footed Dirk Lumbard) whip up skits and bits like they were cream pies. The team's peppery wit and talent, carried along on Katz's nimble lyrics and sweetly smart period music, engender what seems an endless font of joy for both creators and audience.

The only thorn in their side is the presence of the show's corporate sponsor – or, more precisely, a corporate nephew, Kenneth, played by Joshua James Campbell, who invests the part with a touching combination of goofiness and soul. But he's fallen for the ingenue Virginia Pepper (the delightful Shannon O'Bryan), so the team conspires to send the pair off to the Catskills on a fake scouting mission. That's the occasion for "Mountain Air," one of the many funny, brief, gusty, pointed musical numbers that push the story along through Act I.

Marc Bruni's staging flows brilliantly. At a couple of the scene transitions you almost catch your breath in appreciation, as if at an unexpected rhyme. Wendy Seyb's choreography takes advantage of the cast's energy and skill, and Larsen is just brilliant at "bad" dancing.

Act I ends with the clever "Court Jester," a song-and-dance number in which the team disguises a send-up of the McCarthy hearings as a manic tale from a mythical kingdom (Shades, here, of the Murder of Gonzaga in Hamlet. But there have been plays within plays – and shows about showbiz – for centuries. No reason to stop now).

The story, and with it the energy, peter out in Act II after the principals appear before McCarthy's committee. One successfully plays dumb; another names names; a third refuses to do so and hence can no longer work on the show. Without her essential team – the "good friends" of the title – Dottie can only soldier on miserably.

The plot gets wavy. An old performing partner of Dottie's (Lynne Wintersteller), trying to break into the new medium of TV, has, it turns out, appeared before the committee too – but was it her testimony, or the Jester sketch, that led to the subpoenaing of our heroes and heroine? I couldn't tell. More important, some of the story elements so winningly threaded through the first act just fray. While both Dottie and Danny are meted out some sort of moral fate, Oscar's Borscht Belt character – so jovially played and cannily developed – doesn't get one. The damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect of the McCarthy blacklists is explored a bit in Danny's denouement, but our emotional investment in Gabe gets no payoff, and we need that for symmetry and satisfaction.

We've also come to care about Kenneth and Virginia and their budding love story, but it's summarily dispensed with. Meanwhile the moral/political side of the story, earlier handled with a deft balance of reality and send-up in numbers like "You're a Red" and the court jester sequence, becomes heavy-handed in a number called "Some Kind of Hero," which lands with a thud as Katz's sense of balance deserts him along with his lyrical gifts.

Finally, the show ends indecisively. It feels like it needs either a big bittersweet finale, or some sort of shocking downer, but it gets neither, sullenly and suddenly closing up shop with a pout.

Such Good Friends as it stands is about three-fifths of a wonderful, old-style musical. Act I alone is worth the price of admission, and so is Larsen's performance. The whole cast is picture perfect (though Talbott's singing voice could use some technological boosting when it's paired with Oscar's stronger one). The music capably evokes the style and sensibility of the old standards of the period, and the simple and effective scene design comfortably houses the action, including Seyb's witty choreography. The sharp and sometimes brilliant dialogue, especially during the team's writing sessions, is still echoing in my ears.

One hopes the producers get the opportunity to punch up Act II and turn this into the smash it could be.

You can hear a few musical selections here.

Through Oct. 6 at the Julia Miles Theatre, 424 W. 55 St., NYC. Tickets (just $20) online at the New York Musical Theatre Festival website or call 212-352-3101.

“Remember: art above all.”

That was the credo in Clara Wieck’s childhood home, as her tyrannical father ruthlessly prepared his prodigy daughter for a career as a star concert pianist. (“No dolls for a budding virtuosa.”) Her marriage to and musical partnership with the brilliant but mentally ill composer and critic Robert Schumann, her lifelong friendship with Johannes Brahms, Clara’s own (now increasingly respected) compositions, and her perseverance in an exhausting, independent concert career through her many years of widow- and single-motherhood have made her both a romantic figure and a proto-feminist heroine.

Recent decades have seen growing recognition of Clara Schumann’s importance to musical history beyond her roles as interpreter and muse for two of the 19th century’s most important (male) composers. Clara literally takes center stage in Virtuosa, Diane Seymour’s excellent new play with music.

Katrina Ferguson, whose warm yet brittle intensity reminded me a little of Cherry Jones, gives a bravura portrayal of the pianist-composer from girlhood through the first 50 years of her long career. (Born in 1819, Schumann played her last public concert in 1891.) Ferguson’s riveting interpretation encompasses the gamut of human emotion and experience. She and director Bruce Roach have chosen a big, declamatory acting style that works perfectly for the demanding role, which calls for Ferguson, all by herself, to both dramatize and provide the exposition for an entire life story that features outsized (though historical) characters.

Ferguson is Clara most of the time, but she speaks as her father, and Robert Schumann, and Brahms, as needed. Even more impressively, she conjures them even in dramatic scenes where she is just Clara: protecting a less musically gifted sibling from an angry Herr Wieck; excitedly leading Schumann and Brahms on a hike through the countryside; reacting with careful sensitivity to an unexpected marriage proposal; and, most touchingly, paying a heartrending visit to an incapacitated Robert at the asylum where his increasing lunacy has forced her to send him. (His symptoms are now thought to have been caused by syphillis and mercury poisoning.)

Ferguson’s self-conscious, captivating, highly enjoyable performance is paired with live music by concert pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti. Dressed just like Acting Clara, Pianist Clara sits onstage at a grand piano, playing, at appropriate times in the text, works by both Schumanns as well as Brahms and Chopin. Some pieces are presented as at a concert; others function as a musical score. The acoustics in the boxy 45th Street Theatre were not ideal for piano music, especially the dense, arpeggiated tone clusters found in many of these Romantic works. But the composers’ passion and Franzetti’s interpretive skill both shone through. Especially powerful were selections from Robert Schumann’s Papillons Op. 2 and Carnaval Op. 9, and Brahms’s Scherzo Op. 4.

Seymour’s script smoothly incorporates diary entries along with dramatized scenes, as well as two simple conceits: Clara tranquilly recollecting her life, and the pianist addressing adoring audiences all over Europe. It all adds up to a gaudy, shamelessly theatrical work, hence a bit old-fashioned, but a compelling and crowd-pleasing way to tell this classic story: romantic, elevated, and true. “Art above all” – art, the great distiller of life.

Virtuosa was presented as part of the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival. (Performances 9/19 and 9/20 only.)

Television can contain everything and give us the whole universe. Voracious and all-encompassing, it conveys not only every kind of information, but every kind of experience – or at least audiovisual representations, which, for many experiences, are the only versions we’ll ever have. So – though I admit I’ve never had occasion to think about this before – it’s pretty hard to imagine a more difficult role for an actor to play… than a television.

A New Television Arrives, Finally demands a tour de force performance from its central figure, Television, and it got one from Emmy winner Tom Pelphrey last night. (On alternate nights, British actor Victor Villar-Hauser assumes the role instead.) Taking an absurd premise to stratospheric heights of excess, it is also the sort of work that defies standard critical rhetoric. That won’t stop me from wholeheartedly recommending this powerful, innovative play.

Playwright Kevin Mandel cites as inspirations David Rabe’s Hurlyburly – presumably for its characters’ attempts to find meaning in lives that seem empty – and Ionesco (shorthand for the Theater of the Absurd), an obvious source given the play’s loopy premise. But when he references Shakespeare, he’s not just paying the default homage to the Bard that all English-language playwrights can safely pay. Mandel’s theme may be an existential (what he calls “spiritual”) crisis, but his language is what gives the play its force, and he has created the perfect outlet for his roaring cyclone of words in the character of Television.

Played by Pelphrey with gargantuan presence and jaw-dropping chops, Television turns up at a small apartment where Man (played, last night, by the listed understudy, Ari Vigoda) lolls about nursing a supposed stomach flu that’s been keeping him home from work. Really, of course, it’s an existential affliction manifesting as depression, and as it turns out, his fiancee, Woman (Kate Russell), is sharing the crisis, but dealing with it by storming about and cursing the world rather than withdrawing from it.

The two clearly love one another on some level. But, unable to connect physically, they come alive only when the fascinating, maddening, inspiring, hurtful, demagogic, and, eventually, violently psychotic Television engages them. Spewing metaphysics-steeped information about science, sports, eroticism, nature, business, history, politics, personality, war, and most of all, Nonsense (you can hear the capital “N”), the red-suited Joker evokes enthusiasm and hope, first in Man, and then, expressed more desperately, in Woman. Like a crazed prophet, he captivates and provokes them with surrealistic tales of political groups who “champion the benefits of Nonsense” or embrace an anti-ambition platform; of desolation shattered by the approach of a “Love Armageddon”; of child abuse, rape, raw eroticism. (A couple of a certain age walked out of the theater at this point. Whether the whole scene turned them off, or just the gloating repetition of the word “vagina,” was unclear.)

Kate Russell as Woman, Tom Pelphrey as Television and Ari Vigoda as Man. Photos courtesy of DARR Publicity/David Gibbs.

Then he torments them with insults and picks at their wounds: “You ghosts,” he hollers, you “pathetic, trembling, ghastly cowards.” Egos crushed, they open up to him in a bizarre sort of new-age acting exercise, and finally succeed in physically connecting.

But the next morning…

No, you’ll have to see the play to find out whether things actually wrap up that neatly in the end. And unless you can’t handle the word “vagina,” see it you should. Though a bit overlong, it’s funny, a little dangerous, and blessed with glorious language. Pelphrey gives a ravishing performance. (I may try to see it again, on one of Villar-Hauser’s nights.) Russell is quietly real and, when called for, bitterly explosive as Woman; Vigoda (officially the understudy) is droll and touching as Man; and together the pair make a humble, scurrying sort of magic as they’re bullied, seduced, and, at least seemingly, elevated by the cataclysm called Television – that all-knowing, godlike entity who rules the living rooms, the rooms where we live, in the homes of all but the most contrary of us.

Written by Kevin Mandel, directed by Kevin Kittle. Get tickets online or call (800) 838-3006. Through September 30 at Theatre 54 in New York.

Bekah Brunstetter’s play To Nineveh was honored with a New York Innovative Theater award last year, and she is one of the many talented brains responsible for the recent f*ckplays extravaganza. Her new full-length drama, You May Go Now, is getting a bang-up staging this month at the 45th Street Theatre.

A work of psychological suspense fed by humor and fantasy, darkly and fluidly directed by Geordie Broadwater, the new play fascinates but sometimes confuses. Dottie is raising her teenage daughter Betty to be an avatar of the perfect 1950s housewife. Yet right away something’s clearly cockeyed: the time, apparently, is actually the Great Depression. And there’s a peculiar lesbian/child abuse thing going on (which never quite gels). Then, suddenly, Dottie is kicking Betty out of the house on her eighteenth birthday. All Betty has are a couple of suitcases, an accumulation of Stepford-worthy housewife training (“Speak in a low, soothing voice. Don’t ask him questions about his actions, or question his judgment or integrity”), and a final brittle word of advice:

“You will get off the bus and go to some sort of dining establishment and make eyes. Someone will find you.”

It’s like a horror movie: violent shoving, a snowstorm, desperate, monstrous banging on the door, and finally, silence – peace and quiet for Dottie, who has transformed before our eyes from tyrannically passive-aggressive mom to psychotic monster à la Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes.

In a beautifully crafted transition, suddenly it’s the present day – or is it the 70s? (Again, the time cues confuse.) In any case, the agile Ginger Eckert, who plays Dottie, is suddenly a modern woman who sits around the house trying to write a novel and can’t find her way around the kitchen. So, she’s now playing the grown-up Betty, a generation later – right? Or not. And why does her depressed husband Robert (Ben Vershbow) keep making funny, absurd entrances? And why does Betty come back the very next day, and why isn’t Dottie upset about it?

Melinda Helfrich and Ginger Eckert. Photo by Rachel Roberts.

Act II resolves some, though not all, of the mysteries. The play’s fault is that while it tells a deliciously meaty story, the bones of the plot could use some propping up or some further organization. In spite of that, it is effectively suspenseful. The sound design subtly sets the moods, and the lighting is brilliantly designed, especially during a late scene where Betty stays up all night reading a revelatory PowerPoint presentation on a ghostly-glowing Mac laptop, brought by Philip, a mysterious stranger Betty meets at the bus stop (Justin Blanchard, in a whisperingly intense performance). The changing colors on the screen light Betty’s face, and finally the sunrise shows redly through the kitchen window, lighting up long-hidden truths.

The production has many positives, but Melinda Helfrich’s funny, touching, and superbly focussed portrayal of Betty is its single greatest asset. The rest of the cast does have fine moments, and Eckert has much more: her adroit handling of what is, in all but actual fact, a dual role, is worthy of note. When Robert, devastated by bad medical news, proposes adopting a child, Dottie’s passive-aggressive refusal – mostly silent – is a marvel to behold. But Helfrich lights up the stage every moment she’s on it. Flitting about, hiding in the shadows like a small child, lighting up at Philip’s appearance, defending her mother from a perceived threat (who is Philip, anyway?), she’s a small revelation.

Upstairs at the 45th Street Theatre, through Sept. 29. Tickets at Theatermania or call (212) 352-3101 or, outside NYC, call toll-free (866) 811-4111.

I’m now officially the Theater Editor of Blogcritics, the fine online magazine where I have been posting my music and theater reviews and sundry spewings since (holy garbanzo beans, can it be???) 2004.

Drunk with power, I can now impose my tyrannical editorial will upon naked, quivering sentences written by other human beings in the fullness of their hearts. The gargantuan responsibility is hitting me like three-quarters of a ton of ancient Roman bricks. Perhaps a cup of coffee is called for.

The premise is right out of Playwrighting 101: kin gather after a death in the family, the past is dredged up, sparks fly. In the one-act variant, it’s two siblings who clash over past wrongs, and then, if they’re lucky, one or both shucks off a rotted skin and emerges into a fresh phase of life.

Something told me Corey Patrick’s take on this old trope would rise above cliché, and I was right. bombs in your mouth (sic) is a jewel of a play, laugh-out-loud funny and slyly touching.

Transparently directed by Joseph Ward, and beautifully acted by the author and the wonderful Cass Buggé, the play finds half-siblings Danny and Lilly reunited, after six years, in their Minnesota hometown upon their father’s death. Danny, who has taken care of the old man through a slow and painful mental decline, naturally resents Lilly for having decamped to New York for a glamorous advertising career.

The demon is in the details, which Patrick and Buggé slowly reveal during a series of scenes powered by alcohol, anger, infantile banter replayed from childhood, and a revelatory roll of toilet paper. The concept of the story may be tried and true, but the execution is thoroughly up-to-date. Most important, the actors inhabit their characters so thoroughly, and execute Patrick’s prickly, raunchy dialogue so seemingly instinctually, that there’s hardly a moment in which the audience feels detached from the action.

Cass Buggé and Corey Patrick in bombs in your mouth. Photo by John Scott.

Danny, the pugilistic, working-class Bob Newhart, and Cass, the nattily dressed and icily sexy Upper West Side stinging nettle, couldn’t be more different on the surface – they don’t even look related – but completely convince as a typical modern family distilled to the nth degree of humor. They have just one parent in common, and have taken very different paths, but retain their familial resentments and a hint of love in spite of themselves. Cass’s unexpected revelations about her mental state and her career and Danny’s tales of their father’s decline work as plot devices the way shocks and car chases do in a good action movie.

What we learn about the characters may be dimly rooted in the past, but the meaning behind the action is refreshingly present. The now, not the then, is what draws us in. That’s what makes Patrick’s take on this old story new. Brought to life in this excellent production, it’s the best two-character play I’ve seen since Trevor Ferguson’s Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?, and a distinct highlight of this year’s Fringe Festival.

At the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre in New York City. Performances through August 24. Tickets online at the Fringe website, or call 212-279-4488 or 888-FringeNYC (outside NY).