The Bagel And The Rat

What stayed with me from my childhood reading of Saki was the sense of eerie irony, along with the threatening feeling of something wild lurking just beneath the veneer of civilization. What actually happened in the stories mattered less. But Toby Davies' stage adaptation of a selection of the stories has brought back both the mood and the materials, and made it clear to your humble reviewer, though he must shamefacedly admit to not having re-read Saki as an adult, that the tales retain their punch.

Mr. Davies has woven a number of Saki's short stories into a web of darkly funny, skit-like scenes, populated by an assortment of broadly drawn and eloquently written characters all played by four fabulously droll actors. The cast, like Mr. Davies, director Thomas Hescott, and, sadly, H. H. Munro (alias Saki) himself, won't be too familiar to American audiences – not, at any rate, as familiar as playwright Alan Ayckbourn, who is also represented at this year's "Brits Off Broadway" series at 59E59 Theaters. But do catch this production if you have a chance – it's a delight, and a fine introduction for those unfamiliar with Saki, who was born in 1870 and died fighting in World War One.

Dark and sometimes macabre materials, laid out with a humorous touch – that's Saki, and this play is faithful to the writer's tone. Animals star in many of the selected tales (Mr. Davies has drawn from ten). An ancient tiger is goaded via his own predatory instincts into becoming prey for two absurd British huntresses. A woman uses a tiny, tyrannical dog to lord it over her household. A cat learns to talk, but with disastrous consequences for his elegant self when the family that once adored him realizes with horror that "He's heard…everything…" And always there are the wolves of the title, baying and howling in the background (just one element of Tim Saward's effective sound design), advancing in literal fashion into more than one story, turning the haughty, hunting homo sapiens into the hunted.

Even when there's no animal per se there are predator and prey. In the very first story, a grifter tries to gull a smart-ass, who ends up betrayed not by actual gullibility but by an unexpected twist of fate. In the last, a violent end awaits two feuding neighbors, who have buried the hatchet only to fall victim to a literal manifestation of the old "if a tree falls in the forest" question. A malevolent core hums at the center of everything, taking on various guises: petty human deceit, real wild animals – or a vengeful Pan, jealously guarding the tribute left for him. Pan's appeaser is a gentleman who has taken a holiday in the country reluctantly, but adjusted rather more successfully to pagan ways than his jittery wife.

Cleverly constructed and gracefully directed – and superbly lit by Richard Howell – this devilish evening of theater is as enchanting as it is eerie, with many laughs, brilliant acting, and a number of effective goosebump moments. It, just like its source material, could have come from nowhere but Britain. "I suppose," says the con artist in the opening skit, "you think I've spun you quite the impossible yarn." But Saki isn't pulling the wool over our eyes. He's exposing bloody nature. "I've heard it said," declares the city gentleman, "that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them." Indeed. Saki meant to skewer Edwardian manners and mores. But when it comes to the human animal, things change very little, whatever century you're in or continent you're on. See this show, then go forth from the theater into the wilds of Midtown, and watch your back.

Wolves at the Window runs through Dec. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, NYC.

With the decline of the newspapers, mainstream coverage of Broadway and other New York theater has dwindled. The flip side is that there are fewer bigshot reviewers with inflated influence. In response, producers have become hip to the importance of bloggers to getting out advance word about new shows (and then reviewing them).

Today I had the opportunity to meet the all-star cast of the upcoming premiere of David Mamet's new play, Race. David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, the seemingly ageless Richard Thomas, and James Spader, who confessed that he hasn't done a play in decades, met us upstairs at Red-Eye Grill near Columbus Circle and answered questions about the play, the process, and their own backgrounds.

Understandably, they couldn't tell us anything about the plot. But as the new production of Oleanna reminds us, Mamet's work has a way of generating heat, and the very title of the new play seems to promise a controversial or at least highly thought-provoking evening. Besides, said Thomas, it's "so complex, so many perspectives – to talk about the plot would be reductive. A quick summation would make it seem much simpler than it is. It's about things that no one says. It's strong stuff. Provocative, but not shocking for the sake of being shocking."

“I play,” he was willing to squeeze out, "a man in a suit who's in a lot of trouble." And muttered something about lawyers.

Mamet is directing too, which has the benefit that "we don't have that struggle [to understand the writer's intention] because the man is in the room," as Washington put it. "The playwright and director aren't arguing," added Thomas.

About Mamet's famously exacting language, Spader noted that "you can't stumble your way through this material or be off by a syllable." Mamet loves patterns, and they can get ruined if anything like improvisation occurs. At the same time, the play is still being rewritten as the cast works through it in rehearsal, including tiny things like adding an "and," then changing the "and" to a "but" – those little patterns and sounds that mean so much in a Mamet script. And yes, if you're wondering, there's cursing, though Thomas complained, "I have only one 'fuck.'" ("Richard, you're married," Grier interjected.) "And I'm afraid if I don't say it right I might lose it."

While Grier and Thomas have done a good deal of theater in recent years, having left (respectively) In Living Color and The Waltons behind long ago. (For example, I saw Thomas in Michael Frayn's Democracy on Broadway a few years back.) Nearly all of Spader's career, however, has been in film (Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Crash) and TV (Boston Legal, The Practice), and "I'm really glad to be doing a play again after so many years," he said. Washington is best known for screen work as well (Ray, Fantastic Four), but told us that she "fell in love with acting doing theater. This is where I learned to be an actor."

About Race and David Mamet, she says, "The process is delightful and fun and challenging and creative, he's fantastic." Of course, actors have to say things like that. But this cast seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the play, and Thomas predicted that "there'll be a lot of talking about it after it's been seen."

Previews begin Nov. 16. Tickets are available at Telecharge.

Scheduled to close January 10 after a two-year run on Broadway, this lark of a production remains funny and fresh. Maria Aitken directs a versatile, bustling cast of four who play dozens of characters in a frequently hilarious yet loving sendup of Hitchcock’s famous 1935 thriller, paced like an extended Monty Python skit and delivered in a series of not very serious accents and silly walks. The cast is small but the business is booming; the quick character and setting changes are a nonstop delight, the Tony Awards for lighting and sound well deserved. Jolly good show.

Heidi Schreck's first full-length New York production peels the hardened hide of history off a corner of life in turn-of-the-century England – the turn of the 15th century, that is. It was a time when people with delusions and hallucinations were venerated as mystics and saints (rather like now), and when mobs, egged on by the priesthood, burned religious heretics at the stake – also pretty much just like some parts of the world today.

Ms. Schreck, a well-known downtown performer, has based her script very loosely on The Book of Margery Kempe, sometimes considered the first autobiography in English. Kempe was a middle class wife and mother who ran a brewery and had a vision of Jesus around the time of the birth of her first baby. The story focuses on her inner battle to keep herself spiritually "clean" despite being a married woman. She wanted to be a saint in the way a reality show participant wants to become a celebrity, but she lived under the scrutiny of an intolerant orthodoxy that forbade women from preaching, among other strictures.

Ms. Schreck's characters speak in a colloquial, mostly naturalistic American idiom, a good choice for two reasons. First, her 600-year-old story resounds powerfully into our own times. Second, the blunt language creates an immediacy which, juxtaposed with a whiff of the supernatural, forms a close, magnetic atmosphere.

At the same time, director Leigh Silverman and set designer Rachel Hauck make effective use of the Ohio Theatre's deep, decaying-church-like space. The baby spends most of the play in a cradle suspended high above stage right, rocked via a pulley operated by the Nurse (a funny and touching Tricia Rodley). Characters enter from unexpected angles. Solid-looking tables and benches and an overall brownness evoke the deadly inflexibility of the ruling religious authorities. Candlelight and Theresa Squire's rich, rough costumes create an effectively Medieval feeling.

A blustery Darren Goldstein plays Margery's longsuffering husband John with admirable balance, measuring an old-time male sense of privilege against a genuine love – both affectionate and carnal – for his sexy wife. Jeremy Shamos and Will Rogers are respectively sympathetic and darkly funny as the cautiously heretical Father Thomas and the earnest youth Jacob, two searchers who fall into Margery's charismatic orbit. Margery herself (Sofia Jean Gomez) has a charming late scene with the wonderful Marylouise Burke, who plays the elder mystic Juliana of Norwich with equal parts holy panache and down-home friendliness, a wise old spiritualist and a sweet old coot.

But the play belongs proudly to Margery, and we left the theater feeling that we personally knew this complex and fascinating woman. Ms. Gomez gives a suitably dangerous and sometimes screamingly funny performance. Put simply, she plays the hell out of her, and with a terrifying Hell (along with Purgatory and Heaven) ever-present in the anxieties of the age, this feels like exactly the Margery we ought to have. One can read a proto-feminist strand into this lusty and freethinking depiction of the character, but any sense of anachronism is made palatable – fun, in fact – by the script's unabashed honesty. The comic dialogue and the flow from scene to scene feel effortless.

The second star of the show, besides Ms. Gomez, is the language. Ms. Schreck cleverly fuses modern talk with old topics, and old phrasing creeps in at times like words from an ancestral tongue. In one of Margery's many manic moods, toying with her husband she mimes stabbing him with her keys, then bursts out,

"I'm teasing you! Don't look at me like that. I'm going to open the pantry with these and then I'll make us Fritters. Yum! I'll take yolks of eggs, add flour and ale and stir it together till it be thick. Then I'll take pared apples, cut them thin like wafers, lay them in the batter, fry them in butter and serve them forth!"

When, charmed in spite of himself, John embraces her, she grows suddenly serious: "John. We sin too much."

The urge to be and do good versus the lustiness of the human animal – it's the same basic struggle, whether couched in centuries-old religious doctrine or modern secular morality. With a firm hand steering her characters through their struggles, Ms. Schreck transports us to a distant but not so different world. Haunted House or Tunnel of Love? The creatures lurking within can be one and the same.

Creature runs through Nov. 21 at the Ohio Theatre. For tickets please visit Theatermania or call 866-811-4111. For more information and group rates call 646-336-8077.

Photos by Jim Baldassare.

Having missed Jeff Grow's award-winning show during the soloNOVA Arts Festival earlier this year, I was glad to get a chance to catch it in its limited return engagement at D-Lounge last night. But I found it hard to figure out just what to make of the performance, which mixes magic, mind reading, and storytelling.

Mr. Grow quickly establishes his warm, witty personality along with his sleight-of-hand skills. The tricks are old ones, but when done well they still work, no matter that Houdini was performing and improving upon the same types of illusions a century ago. In any case this act isn't about a succession of magic tricks; it's more of a meta-magic show. Between Mr. Grow's impressive demonstrations of manual dexterity and mental skill, we're treated to stories about classic street scams, peppered with topical references and swayed (and slowed) by plenty of audience participation.

The ultimate payoff is a real showstopper. Along the way, though, things periodically bog down. For an audience with little knowledge of the arts of the magician- mentalist, the narrative parts of the show may be more edifying than they were to me (I had read a biography of Houdini recently and much of what Mr. Grow talked about was familiar to me from the book).

I found it hard to tell how much of his seeming distraction and his rather scattershot presentation was shtick, intended to charm and distract the audience. Magicians' stock in trade, after all, is to make us focus on one thing and thus completely miss something else. But some of the hemming and hawing occurred not in the context of an illusion or trick, but of a story. This, I found myself thinking at various points, is just going nowhere. Not having looked carefully at the promotional material, I wasn't aware that there was a director, Jessi D. Hill. The show didn't seem directed. It seemed haphazard.

In the end it all does go somewhere, and I'm glad I attended. With a show that requires so much audience involvement, there's always going to be some variation, and perhaps this was an unusually slow-paced night. But I couldn't help feeling that tautening the show up would have significantly improved it.

On the other hand, maybe it's an advanced form of performance art which only highly evolved beings can fully appreciate and which therefore went over my head. Wouldn't be the first time.

Creating Illusion has two more performances, Oct. 23 and 30, 10 PM at D-Lounge, 101 E. 15 St. (at Union Square). It's a small space and it was packed last night, so getting tickets in advance would be a good idea. Visit Smarttix or call 212-868-4444.

Photo by Zack Brown.

A car horn, flies buzzing, a cheap-looking bed, a plastic, institutional ashtray – we're in a no-tell hotel somewhere in Manhattan. The real location of such a place would more likely be Queens or New Jersey, but let that go – Ghost Light isn't about reality. Quite the opposite, and doubly so. Desi Moreno-Penson's new thriller shoulders its way into the world of Hollywood and the theater, while trying to carry the weight of the occult as well (just in time for Halloween), thus tripping through our two most culturally potent lands of make-believe.

One of Ms. Moreno-Penson's goals here is to explore the desperate measures people will take to succeed, and what can happen to them when they overstep the bounds of sensitivity and sense in their quests. Treachery, sex, violence – how far can it go? It all starts plausibly enough. Natalie (the intense, vibrant Kate Benson) meets Brian (the excellent Bryant Mason) in the nameless hotel. Both married (to other people), they're here for some on-the-side action. The playwright has a good ear for the uncomfortable way people talk to each other over heavy subtext, and by the time the pair find their way to bed we think we've got a pretty good idea of their motives.

Mr. Mason, who was good when I saw him Raised in Captivity, really shines in the bigger, meatier role of Brian, who is after some no-strings sex with someone outside his circle. Despite his womanizing, his own self-image is that of a truly "nice guy" – so much so that the sincerity with which he insists "I'm a terrific person" is both funny and a little heartbreaking. For her part, the sensual but acerbic Natalie, who has spent time in a mental hospital, seems to be acting out her career frustrations on the more intimate stage of tawdry sex.

Natalie: You probably have enough women dancing for your pleasure out in L.A.

Brian: Not really. I'm not that attractive.

Natalie: That doesn't matter! Don't be so pathetic. Once you're successful, everything comes…That's it. It just COMES…

Once we know that Brian isn't just an actor but a Hollywood celebrity, the dynamic elasticizes. Who is taking advantage of whom, and why? Then Natalie sees something in the ceiling mirror that interrupts their coitus, and the macabre game is afoot. Mirrors mean a lot in this tale. A prominent feature of the neat set (by Jason Simms, fresh from the couldn't-be-more-different challenge of MilkMilkLemonade) is a wall mirror in which the audience sees vaguely distorted reflections of…the audience. It's a little creepy, and makes for effective foreshadowing.

Natalie, a struggling playwright, is not the only frustrated artist. An intrusive hotel security guard (the fine Hugh Sinclair) turns out to have a creative side too. Ironically, the one character who has achieved success in the land of make-believe, Brian, is the one who has nothing to hide (except from his wife). The others coruscate through multiple layers of reality and fantasy. The big reveal turns out to be stunningly implausible, but the nonstop forward motion of the play's climactic final third, the evocative verbal storytelling, and the flawless direction by José Zayas keep the vaguely confusing story moving along. Spooky lighting (by Evan Purcell) and sound (by David Margolin Lawson) contribute buzz and crackle to the action.

In the end Ghost Light doesn't fully succeed as horror. But it accomplished something rare for me: it made me feel like a kid afterwards, thinking through the plot, trying to work out what really happened and what underlay it all. The story isn't just fantastical; it also fails to make complete sense, at least to me. But in what matters most the play succeeds overall: it entertains and makes you think. It's a nice way to begin hacking your way into the Halloween season.

Ghost Light runs through Oct. 31 at the 59E59 Theaters. Get tickets online, call 212-279-4200, or visit the box office.

Photo: Carla Bellisio

Actress Hanna Cheek and writer-actor Clay McLeod Chapman continue their fruitful collaboration with a new edition of the long-running Pumpkin Pie Show monologue series, this time a solo shot for Ms. Cheek. Here, instead of unrelated monologues, we get three pieces that link up to portray the aftermath of a horrific event in the life of an American town that's only technically fictional.

Ms. Cheek, one of the downtown scene's leading lights, is a remarkable performer whose work continues to grow richer. Here she carefully delineates three distinct characters: a mother going through a mother's worst nightmare; a bookish high school student; and a second mother who shares the nightmare but from a very different point of view. Mr. Chapman's monologues rarely fail to grip in some way, but these taken together have a power greater than the sum of their parts.

Not just a series of absorbing sketches, Commencement builds until it takes the form of a multi-character drama with a real plot. While Mr. Chapman's pieces can be read as effective short stories, the Pumpkin Pie shows are as far from literary readings as Greek drama is from NPR's "Selected Shorts." Presented on stage, these serious stories deliver old-fashioned catharsis in a big way.

The small audience at last night's performance seemed restless at first, rustling things and shifting in their seats, perhaps from the shock of the unexpectedly wintry weather in the real world outside. But they quickly stiffened into rapt spectators as the first monologue progressed and the terrible situation of the townspeople slowly became clear. As the first mother, Ms. Cheek sits quaking like a person in the throes of withdrawal. Then, loosing her hair and slapping up a nervous smile, she becomes the insecure student who'd formed a secret friendship with the unseen main character whose actions have triggered the whole bad dream. Finally, as the second mother, she begins with studied calm, then explodes into mournful rage, and finally reaches a kind of closure through an unexpected confrontation. It's riveting stuff, and ghoulishly satisfying too.

The Pumpkin Pie Show: Commencement runs at UNDER St. Marks through Oct. 31. Tickets online or call 212-868-4444.

Renowned puppet artist and OBIE winner Hanne Tierney has worked with abstraction for many years, pioneering a kind of "theater without actors." The use of actual human figures, even in the form of puppets, is new in her work. My Life in a Nutshell, her new creation at HERE Arts Center, continues the center's Dream Music Puppetry Program created by Basil Twist. It features very cool life-sized burlap marionettes, deftly quickened from the side of the stage by Ms. Tierney and two other string-pulling operators.

Jane Wang's darkly humorous incidental music (sawing an upright bass, plinking a toy piano), Hannah Wasileski's projections, and Ms. Tierney's measured narration are among an assortment of clever elements that set an evocative mood and tell a story of a thwarted love triangle fraught with and followed by various complications, including lots of death. Unfortunately the story unfolds ponderously and fails to grip. It feels as though two opposing forces are pulling the piece into a confused state: partially abstract, partially human, it is not fully anything. One waits to be engaged, but is only tickled with a succession of amusing visuals and softly humorous lines, and then it's over. I found my mind wandering a number of times, even though the show was just 45 minutes long.

Though the human characters get puppet representation, they are granted only letters for names, one of many abstract and abstract-tending ideas threading through the story (the concept of the "love triangle" gets new meaning here). Though the figure of Death speaks and has a distinct personality, he is played not by an anthropomorphic puppet but by two connected line segments, like a compass or the detached leg of a giant spider, and curiously, this makes him more interesting than the unremarkable human characters; we wait to see what his two legs will do, where they'll point, whom they'll arch over – it's vaguely horrific.

One of the marionette characters, D, is an experimental artist who performs works of Gertrude Stein accompanied by bouncing Slinky-like spirals which may or may not be imaginary; again, the abstractions seem to have more interesting personalities than the people. They make us want to observe them more closely, to understand what they mean or at least sense something of what drives them.

The vision that drives Hanne Tierney and her co-conspirators has numerous fascinating conceptual facets, but has here resulted in something only intermittently interesting, and ultimately unsatisfying.

My Life in a Nutshell runs Tues.-Sun. through Oct. 25.  For more information visit www.here.org.

When I mentioned to a fellow theater writer that I was going to see the new Broadway production of Oleanna with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles, he moaned, "Oh, I'm so sick of that play."

My colleague may have seen David Mamet's sexual harassment drama one too many times, but his sentiment struck me as more representative of the feelings of a full-time theater maven than of those of an average theatergoer. The shocked reactions of the crowd at last night's performance bore me out.

In the play, a college student named Carol (Ms. Stiles) first comes to her pedantic, distracted professor (Mr. Pullman) for academic help, then files a sexual harassment complaint against him. Her perception of what has occurred in his office – all on stage, right in front of us – seems monstrously skewed, however. And as Ms. Stiles noted last night in a post-performance bloggers' Q&A session, Mamet's script also leaves open the possibility that Carol (backed by a somewhat mysterious group of "those who suffer what I suffer") has set out to target and entrap the professor from the beginning, though the actress has not chosen to specifically play it that way.

Distinct, shocked thrills went through the audience each time Carol's attacks on John were further revealed. She certainly appears villainous, but nothing is black and white in this tale. John is far from perfect. In trying to make his points, he has told stories from his own life that seem inappropriately personal for a teacher-student relationship; he has even offered to change her grade if she visits him for more tutoring. Also, as Carol's accusations have John on the verge of losing not only his career but his family, she evinces some sympathy for him, some second thoughts.

A post-show audience talkback session with a moderator and a panel of two attorneys brought out audience feelings just as strong as when the play was new in 1992. As one of the lawyer-panelists pointed out, public policy on sexual harassment was in its infancy then, affording little protection to men against abusive or frivolous harassment claims. But although the particulars of the case might be a little less realistic now, Mamet's play – at least in my opinion – was never meant to be entirely time-topical, despite its then straight-from-the-headlines theme. Its stychomythic, stream-of-consciousness dialogue, which at times reduced Mr. Pullman to chirps and groans, gives it a slightly hallucinogenic feel, and the mysterious "group" – the uncertainty of what's really going on behind Carol's complaints – reminds me more of a Margaret Atwood dystopia than a legal drama. And that's leaving aside the deep questions raised by the play about the purpose and value of academia. The sharp performances in this production bring out the Kafkaesque universality of the story. Whether in a democracy or a dictatorship, we're often at the mercy of forces we don't understand and over which we have no control.

I imagined Oleanna might seem dated in 2009. Several hundred audience members last night proved otherwise. Some of them may have been drawn by the Hollywood star power of the cast, but they left with much to think about.

Oleanna by David Mamet, directed by Doug Hughes and starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles, is now in previews. It opens October 11 at the Golden Theatre.

Photo by Craig Schwartz.