Among the Goliaths storming the New York City boards this year – Tony winners like Douglas Hodge, Shuler Hensley and Nathan Lane as well as marquee names like Alec Baldwin and Tom Hanks have or will graced the stage this season – one David has demonstrated remarkable staying power. In an understated, heartfelt performance that has drawn raves from critics and audiences alike, Ari Brand has become the toast of the town for his leading performance in Gordon Edelstein’s My Name is Asher Lev, currently playing the Westside Theater.

It’s a nice reversal for the humble Brand, whose career logline until earlier this season was, unfortunately, defined by a performance that never took place. Cast as an understudy in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, one of two plays (the other being Brighton Beach Memoirs) to run in rep as part of a Doc double bill, the production closed in its infancy, before anyone in his production ever even had a chance to bound to Broadway.

While other roles followed, including a memorable 59E59 gig as a jitter-filled groom in A.R. Gurney’s Black Tie, it’s his performance as the title character of Asher Lev that has proven to be the performer’s breakout. Brand demonstrates uncommon sensitivity in Aaron Posner’s adaptation of the Chaim Potok novel about the culture clash between a young artistic prodigy and his Hasidic family (his father is portrayed by Mark Nelson and his mother was originated by Jenny Powers; Ilana Levine has recently taken over the role) and community in 1950s Brooklyn. Unlike The Neil Simon Plays, the response to Asher Lev has been nearly rhapsodic. The show, which began last year in a limited engagement at the Long Wharf Theatre, has announced yet another extension, now running through September.

Which gives more audience members the chance to share Edelstein’s intimate experience. “The house lights are up in the beginning, and I can pretty much see everyone,” Brand says. “I feel connected to every single audience at every single show. It is a foreign world to almost all of our audiences. It’s essential that the audience understands my character and is engaged with the story.”

It’s a foreign world, but one with emotional connections to all walks of life. Poised and perceptive, Brand recognizes why the play seems to have such widespread appeal. “This story particularly was important for so many people of so many different backgrounds,” the actor explains. “It’s a story about growing up, coming of age and figuring out who you are, about teenagers trying to find their identities. It’s kind of amazing how many people have found the book. You expect Jewish people to, but we know there is a pastor from a black church recommending the show to the members of his choir. It speaks to gay black men in the South, to Mormon women. This is about a boy who is in deep conflict about his identity and what he knows himself to be – it’s a really universal story.”

However, Brand experienced none of his alter ego’s conflict growing up the child of two musicians in Greenwich Village. “I’ve never been in an Asher Lev situation,” the actor says. “I’ve always been privileged to have the support of a core group of people, including my family.”

In fact, if Asher Lev has any personal resonance for Brand, it’s because of how it parallels the life of his father, a concert pianist who passed away when Brand was six. “I’m much more telling my father’s story than my own. He was raised Orthodox in Jerusalem. He had a lot of conflict with his father about the restrictions that came along with being an Orthodox Jew and ended up leaving home to come to New York in the 1960s.

“Asher Lev is an only child, that’s a significant thing,” Brand adds with a laugh. “Maybe if he had had a brother who became an emissary, it might have been a little bit easier for him.”

Music was Brand’s first inspiration as well, and remains so. “I went to St. Ann’s, a progressive, arts-focused school,” he says, and acknowledges playing the guitar, drums, and bass and participating in chamber groups, classical and jazz bands. He also currently plays in a band called the New Facility. “But in college I realized that I loved being onstage and was encouraged to audition for department shows and friends’ shows, and it clicked. I realized that I loved what I was doing.” A friend’s mother helped him get an agent.

Brand is that most refreshing kind of talent, one that is both gracious and grateful. In fact, the more the actor speaks about his career to date, the more he uses the word “lucky.” He’s clearly appreciative for all of those around him (including his girlfriend, a doctoral candidate in Sociology at NYU) and for each of his opportunities, especially the current one. “It’s every actor’s dream to have your regional theater production move to New York for a commercial run.”

More information about My Name is Asher Lev can be found at http://www.asherlevtheplay.com/.

In The Aliens, the last original play of Annie Baker’s to run in New York, the playwright employed what I refer to as the “gotcha moment.” At one point, a character breaks from the measured, elliptical style with which he, like all the others, have been speaking, slowly clueing the audience in to who they are and why they are the way they are, with a blunt confessional statement that turns everything on its head. It is not a stunt, because all that has preceded it and all that follows has been earned. Used once, it packs a visceral wallop. But used several additional times in The Flick, Baker’s latest play which just opened at Playwrights Horizons, this device has now become one of the writer’s hallmark effects, and its overuse, among other choices employed in this play – a well-intentioned misfire that is equal parts promising and frustrating – suggest that Flick has not yet arrived at the final cut stage.

With just three original plays under her belt – Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation, and Aliens – Baker catapulted from promising voice to important talent in an instant. Her singular gifts lie in her observations, usually set somewhere in the small-town New England where she grew up, of socially stunted and broken people. In addition to that gotcha moment, she also employs devices like the awkward pause, hesitations, and repetitions to reflect the tentative and quirky links formed among strangers and the inherent but subtle power structures built within such relationships. Her plays, staged by the ubiquitous and similarly intuitive director Sam Gold (they also teamed up on last summer’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep), have hit the sensitive bull’s-eye on the intersection between the humor and heartbreak of human folly.

Baker introduces characters similar to the ones we’ve met before in her world in Flick, whose title comes from a run-down movie theater in Worcester County, Massachusetts. There’s Sam (downtown stalwart Matthew Maher), the 35-year-old nebbish who resents that 24-year-old Rose (Louisa Krause) gets the privilege of running the projection booth at the same time he quietly pines for her, and Avery (Aaron Clifton Moten), the 20-year-old cineaste who has taken up work at the Flick while on a sabbatical from Clark University, where his father is a professor. He’s a purist who has been drawn to the local theater because it is one of the remaining few houses to use a 35-millimeter projector, as he hates the trend of digital moviemaking. (The marvelous set designer David Zinn has fashioned the theater in all its dilapidated glory.)

Baker has buried plenty of golden nuggets here among the threesome’s quotidian chores as theatrical custodians and concessionaires. As Sam and Avery bicker over which films from the last decade matter (the former declares Avatar a masterpiece; a horrified Avery avers that there has been no such thing such Pulp Fiction), their subtle verbal and non-verbal tics shade in volumes about what draws each of these outcasts to the Flick. And as the grungy Rose overshares details of her own life to Avery, we learn she isn’t even aware of him after a while; she just craves an outlet.

Flick is a departure from Baker’s earlier catalog in ways big and small. It’s certainly epic in length, if not in ambition, as we’re alerted from the get-go by a musical interlude that runs several minutes in length. And Baker’s rhythmic sensibilities are bar none. But Baker seems to think she has accomplished more than meets the audience’s eye. The fundamental flaw in Flick – and despite the play’s attendant nuance and riches, this is, sadly, both a flawed play and a flawed production in its current form – is that none of the relationships between the three main characters is strong enough to support the themes of loyalty, betrayal and connection for which Baker strives for by play’s end. (Alex Hanna also appears as a couple of minor characters). Several of the play’s most noteworthy, illuminative moments – a one-sided telephone conversation, an impromptu hip-hop dance, several revelatory monologues – stand out as solo sequences rather than reflect any real sense of bonding.

In other ways, Baker seems to distrust her own narrative abilities, and Flick, which runs three hours and fifteen minutes (including just one hurried intermission), suffers from this lack of economy. A first act sequence in which Sam reacts to Rose’s surprising invitation of Avery to a film screening that’s a de facto date is priceless, benefiting from a perfect tableau on Gold’s part, and providing all the shorthand an audience needs about how each character feels; a subsequent scene in which Sam tries to explain his feelings to an unreceptive Rose feels, labored, amateurish and melodramatic. It’s unnecessary and slows down this overlong show. So, too, do late scenes involving the Flick’s transition to a modern, digital cineplex. Simply seeing characters in an ugly new corporate uniform (the busy Zinn’s costume design is appropriately unflattering for all characters involved) implicitly informs the audience what Baker’s characters go on to belabor. This is unfair. You don’t have to cater to the lowest common theatergoing denominator, but if you plan to tax audience patience, the rewards should pay off in dividends.

Flick is also physically clumsy. Gold obscures too much interaction in the upstage projection booth. And while Baker has peppered the play with myriad film-title-dropping, it’s hard to be sure whether they are random references thrown in or if they are carefully chosen films meant to elucidate her characters. What, for example, does Pulp Fiction specifically mean to Avery? We never learn. Why, too, does he whistle “Le Tourbillon” from Jules and Jim? It takes more than scribing two girls and a guy to earn comparison to that masterwork. In Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan and Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale, two earlier Playwrights Horizons shows that stand out as highlights of the current theatrical season, entwined literary references to mythology and Moby Dick, respectively, in a far more essential manner.

The cast, however, refuses to be weighted down by Flick’s narrative ambiguities. With perfectly understated physicality, Maher, an alum of this summer’s Vanya, telegraphs his frustration as one of those nice guys who seem invisible to most, and his humor emanates naturally from Sam’s disappointments. Krause is a perfect fit for Baker’s material, nailing every cadence of Rose’s lost, mercenary soul. And with a perfectly calibrated clipped delivery, Moten makes an incendiary New York stage debut. His Avery, still at a loss as to how to properly arm himself against a world of hurt and disregard, is heartbreaking.

And yet for all the careful emotional spelunking done by this superlative cast, Flick leaves their characters lost at sea, intuiting a tighter bond among these three merely coexisting souls than truly exists. For all the film titles thrown about, Baker has omitted the one that unfortunately, feels the most apt: Being There.

The Flick

Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. www.playwrightshorizons.org Thru April 7.

Photo by Hunter Canning

I’m not sure who has it worse in Trevor, the latest Lesser America comedy to nestle into downtown’s Theater for the New City: is it Morgan Fairchild, that B-list sex kitten of yesteryear, or Trevor, the animalistic former child star whose quest to be rediscovered drives the play?

It’s neither fair nor even accurate to describe Trevor as “animalistic,” really, as the central character in Nick Jones’ clever, subversive comedy is indeed, an animal. He’s a chimp, not a man, despite his resemblance to Steven Boyer, the terrifically malleable actor (as anyone who has seen him in such works as Hand to God and The Ugly One can attest) playing him for both laughs and pathos. I haven’t just spoiled anything, either. One learns early on about Trevor’s true nature. And Jones is right in providing such a disclosure upfront, as there are plenty of other gifts to be found in Trevor, lovingly nourished by director Moritz von Stuelpnagel.

It’s likely that most actors will relate to Trevor, as the struggle for work isn’t limited to any particular series or phylum. When he was younger, Trevor was a successful animal performer, traveling the live appearance circuit and starring in popular commercials, as well as a TV sitcom alongside Ms. Fairchild. But like with so many child stars, the aging process hasn’t been easy on Trevor, who lives at home with his “mother,” Sandra (Colleen Werthman) and stews in the memory of what he used to be, even as fellow chimp actor Oliver (an on-the-beat Nathaniel Kent) continues to prosper. Poor Trevor wants to work and be adulated once more, but alas, hardly anyone comes calling for the simian.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that Trevor is, you know, an animal. This is starting to cause trouble in the neighborhood. His neighbor Ashley (a wonderfully frustrated Amy Staats), a new mother, objects to the fact that Trevor drove himself to a local Dunkin’ Donuts to apply for a job. Sandra is rendered relatively ineffective as both manager and caregiver. She occasionally puts Trevor in a cage, though Ashley argues that he should spend all of his time there, as he is an unpredictable threat – and some of Trevor’s instinctive responses to situations, as employed by an indefatigable Boyer, support her argument. But then again, Trevor can often function like an independent adult.

Jones’ script sounds silly, but as with all productions from Lesser America, still a very young company, Trevor gets a layered production, buoyed by complex scenarios and a completely committed cast. Trevor has life dreams, but is hampered by himself and by others. Sandra wants the best for him, and is sometimes blinded by her confused love (Werthman, like Boyer, never condescends to cartoonish acting and instead creates real empathy). No one can effectively reach each other – Trevor even fails to recognize an Animal Control employee, mistakenly identifying him, Norma Desmond-style, as a TV producer. Stuelpnagel is a perfect match for Jones’ voice, which sometimes plants tongue in cheek but still finds a way to home in on universal concerns.  A streamlined show, Trevor toes the line between mordant humor and self-seriousness with aplomb. Sometimes it takes a chimp to shed real light on human nature.

Trevor

Theater for the New City. www.theaterforthenewcity.net. Thru March 17.

The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The Silence, an impeccably acted but ultimately un-engaging mystery.

Silence, adapted by Baran bo Odar from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel and denoting Odar’s feature directorial debut, is a then-and-now flick. We first see two men track down an eleven-year-old girl in a field; one murders her while the other looks on. Nearly a quarter-century later, another young girl vanishes in what appears to be a copycat crime, stringing together the lives of grieving family members, detectives, and killers alike, all of whom are broken in their own, not unfamiliar ways.

If Silence so far sounds fairly by-the-numbers, that’s because it is, in every sense of the genre, procedural. Odar’s script hits all the expected notes in dealing with the aftermath of a grisly crime, but the net result is less than symphonic. Loss and estrangement permeate pretty much the lives of everyone attached to this case, whose resolution seems pre-ordained thanks to the film’s overt preamble. David (Sebastian Blomberg) is the detective who becomes obsessed with solving the current case as a means of distracting himself from his own recent widowhood. Burghart Klaussner’s Krischan, meanwhile, cannot let go of the earlier, unsolved crime despite his retirement. “It was a real pain in the ass,” glibs Elena (Katrin Sass) about the loss of her daughter 23 years ago, a wound that Sass shows us still bleeds internally even as Elena maintains a stiff upper lip. Even the two murderers we first meet, Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) and Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring), remain affected by their crime as they go about their lives.

Silence is smart until it isn’t. The notion of the past constantly nipping at the heels of the present is not a revelation. And the idea of suffering and proximity to danger fails to cast a suspenseful shadow over his film, even as an innocent young child injures himself on a trampoline. (We get it: harm lurks around the corner for everyone. Let’s not get too carried away.) And it is eventually a mistake to focus on the inner lives of the film’s tangled web of characters instead of making the central mysteries more engrossing. Still, Odar wrestles wonderful performances from his ensemble. Blomberg, Möhring, and particularly Sass are all quite credible in rendering people whose lives have become untethered, showing what it is to be lost in plain sight.

Sympathy comes for all, but empathy has a more difficult time entering the room. Odar’s portrayal of quiet mourning is eventually too, well, silent for its own good. All of these characters behave in ways that are psychologically justified, but they suffer from a lack of exploration. And most are stoic, so while Odar steers clear of melodrama, there’s also a lack of any kind of dramatic potency to shepherd his story along. And since we know early on whom the perpetrators of at least one crime are, there is little suspense (the thorough explanation by one character of another’s motive provides an unnecessary denouement as well).  One roots for the film and its talented players onscreen and behind it, but Silence is a murder mystery that is all too clinical. Like the events of the film itself, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

The Silence is currently playing at Cinema Village.

Bodega Bay

Elisabeth Karlin’s play is an oddly comic hybrid of Flirting with Disaster and Winter’s Bone. Louise (Susan Louise O’Connor), is essentially an invisible woman, unattached and living in Staten Island with her brother Scottie (Brian McManamon) and whichever girlfriend he seems to have at the moment. We meet her as she has just bitten the bullet, opting to put her meth0addicted brother into a rehab clinic. But she meets funds, and sets out on a quest to find the mother who disappeared from their lives years earlier.

Bodega sends Louise’s Alice own the proverbial rabbit hole. With the help of a detective played by the wonderful Gerardo Rodriguez, Louise embarks on a cross-country trek to track down her mother, encountering a variety of eclectic ciphers who may possess clues as to her mother’s whereabouts, with a cast that also includes Peter Brouwer, Nancy Rodriguez, and Rae C. Wright essaying multiple roles, and director Sturgis Warner succeeds at always plugging deeper than caricature. Bodega is an oversize show for a theater as compact as the Abingdon – kudos to the cast for working within such a tight space and for never losing focus despite the distracting sound of plumbing coming from above. It’s the magnificent O’Connor, though, who carries Bodega and shades in all sorts of trepidation and joy as Louise learns more about herself. In the span of a mere two and a half hours, O’Connor transforms Louise from milquetoast to miracle worker. That’s quite a journey indeed.

Abingdon Theater, 312 36^th St. http://www.abingdontheatre.org/season/default.aspx. Through February 17.

Collision

I don’t pay much attention to pre-show hype. All the better to focus my review solely on what I what I see and not what was meant to be. But circumstance has made it nearly impossible to avoid the fact that Collision, Lyle Kessler’s new play being performed by The Amoralists at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, was intended to be more of a black comedy than the drama it now purports itself to be in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Either way, however, the show, directed by David Fofi and starring a superbly on point cast, offers plenty of commentary on the power of entitlement.

James Kautz is Grange and Nick Lawson is Bromley, two new university roommates, and it’s clear almost immediately that the seemingly laidback Grange knows just how to manipulate people into giving him what he wants, regardless of how little the end result may mean to him. Before long, Grange has bled his personality all over Alfred Schatz’s cleverly designed dorm room set and achieved guru status, amassing a small group of followers that include Bromley as well as sexually liberated fellow student Doe (Anna Stromberg) and philosophy professor Denton (Michael Cullen). Kessler’s commentary on the power of navel-gazing when it goes unchecked is astute and full of human comedy. Kautz is magnetic, dripping danger beneath Grange’s charismatic eagerness without being overly transparent – he recalls the young Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd. His co-stars also humanize what on the page could have been mere clay characters. It’s in the last twenty minutes, though, that the play sputters into something else that we might have seen coming but didn’t necessarily need. With a cast this good, Collision doesn’t need to end with a bang to end with a bang.

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place. www.collisiontheplay.com. Through Feb. 17.

The Vandal

Hamish Linklater has already demonstrated a wide range as an actor on the stage and small screen but he now reveals potential as a playwright as well with The Vandal, which just opened at the Flea Theater. Well-structured but with a substantially disappointing payoff, Vandal, directed by Jim Simpson, recommends Linklater as a promising student but one perhaps not quite ready for his diploma.

An unnamed Kingston, NY, woman (Deirdre O’Connell) waits alone at a bus stop until an imposing teen (Noah Robbins) bugs her with questions and then asks her to buy him some beer at a liquor store run by Zach Grenier. The first few reveals of Vandal are promising, exciting even. The incisive way the three characters can see through one another suggest a palpable energy that runs through the Flea and sends it down a path that lets us know we are in for more than just a rehash of The Zoo Story. Eventually, however, all three of these enigmatic fellows turn out to be in support of a story full of trickery, and that’s a shame, because Simpson’s actors do such a sterling job of grounding their parts in realism. O’Connell aches with the weary reserve of a woman just trying to get through life untethered. Grenier’s no-nonsense combativeness belies a tender heart. And Robbins toes the line between invasive youngster and intriguing soul quite admirably.

Equally admirable is David M. Barber’s set design, making deceptive use of the small stage space and casting a different tone on each of Linklater’s scenes. But for a show that starts off so ominously, the final taste is a little easily digestible. Like the residue from Boy’s Cool Ranch Doritos, Vandal should linger a bit longer.

Flea Theater, 41 White Street. www.theflea.org. Through Feb. 17.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Of all the many hard-hitting statements made by Martin Moran in All the Rage, the life-affirming one-man show authored by and starring the performer and which opened last night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, one statement stood out among his descriptions of those who have somehow been victimized or found themselves on the downside advantage. At one point, the engaging performer mentions that he is over fifty years old. And I was struck. Though it has no big set changes or intricately choreographed scenes, Rage is indeed a rigorous workout, and Moran guides his audience through the show with ease and a calming conviction that requires a kind of inner energy that not even most marathon runners half his age possess.

Not that Rage feels long – in fact, Moran’s reflective biography flies by as directed by Seth Barrish. It’s as riveting as was his first one-man show, The Tricky Part, also directed by Barrish.  Rage is not a sequel but in many ways an emotional catch-up piece to that 2004 Obie-winning work. That first show addressed the effects endured by Moran as a result of sexual abuse at a young age. Moran doesn’t avoid discussing those elements of his past, but he applies the lessons learned from his experience (and subsequent therapy) to other areas, both mentally and geographically. Moran’s current tale finds him facing a miserable stepmother in Las Vegas, a hermetic brother in the Denver of his youth, and even to South Africa. If it sounds like this show might be all over the place, fear not: the masterful Moran is very much in control at all times of his coherent show.

Barrish has staged Moran as though his audience were students in a classroom or (perhaps self-help?) lecture being taught by Moran. Set designer Mark Wendland has fashioned a desk, globe, blackboard, map, and overhead projector for the performer to use as tools illustrating his whereabouts for his stories. There all also lamps near these aides. In a noticeable but undistracting touch, Moran keeps turning off each lamp the second he is ready to move on from a specific anecdote. While this certainly cuts down on heat – and perhaps onstage electric bills – it also adds to the comforting feel of the show. (Russell H. Champa also designs effective lighting that cannot be operated onstage.) Despite the probing nature of Rage, Moran is like a post-modern Mr. Rogers. He may be taking us along scary terrain, but we are always assured that we will remain safe.

As Moran explains, his journey begins after a nasty confrontation with his stepmother at the funeral of his father sends him on a quest for greater purpose. He hilariously recounts how feeling a little empty weighed on him while performing on Broadway in Monty Python’s Spamalot and eventually led him to volunteer as a French-to-English translator for Siba, a refugee from Chad. Siba, who has undergone torture by guerillas and been separated from his family, knows of a kind of pain that pierces even deeper, some might argue, than Moran’s has. Moran relays the many lessons that Siba teaches him about acceptance and forgiveness, and how he applies those lessons in his own life, often with surprising results. Barrish lets his performer stroll out to sea without getting caught in any undertow; none of Moran’s tangents are actually that. What they are are chapters in the story of Moran’s continuing search for personal growth and self-actualization. And what they also are, more often than not, are quite hysterical.

What Rage also is, contrary to title, is a very measured show. Moran is wholly involving. He is generous with personal information without being self-aggrandizing. And he knows how not to cross the line into territory that might feel too personally threatening to his audience.  In All the Rage, Moran hits on universal feelings of loss, loneliness, confusion and anger. But his story remains, intoxicatingly, very much his own.

All the Rage

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, www.ticketcentral.com. Through Feb. 24.

Photo by Tristan Fuge

For all the talk of war – which conflicts in which the United States should be engaged, what rules apply to which groups of people who can and cannot serve – it is often easy for those of us sitting at a remove from the battlefield to remember that these discussions pertain to individuals, with beating hearts and loved ones standing alongside them and waiting for their return at the home front. Mat Smart’s aptly titled The Steadfast, now playing at TBG Theater, is an economical cornucopia that renders the political incredibly personal.

Smarts sly play, directed with keen understatement by Wes Grantom, traces the role of the American soldier from the Revolutionary War to the most recent battles in the Persian Gulf, a la Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle. At two and a half hours, however, Steadfast resists the impulse to reach for epic effect.  Still, do not be confused: size does matter. It’s just that instead, Smart’s nimbly woven kaleidoscope of vignettes creates a rich tapestry that emphasizes depth over length.

Among the stories within this saga: a 1950s mother (a wonderfully evocative Susan Greenhill) sits in front of a red oak tree planted by her son (Ben Kahre), before he died in the Korean War. In another example of filial devotion, a 1776 father (Brent Langdon) frets over the revolution his sons plan to assist against the British. In 2003, eighteen-year-old Private Tommy Kellar (Matt Dellapina) asks Lance Corporal Powell (Cloteal L. Horne), the only woman in the squad, to help him write the girlfriend he left behind back home. Powell, it turns out, has relationship strife all her own: she felt compelled to join the marines following 9/11 but not to inform her pacifist husband, Mark (Nick Mills), that she was doing so. In 1968, three young men (John Behlmann, Dellapina, and Alex Ubokudom) flee to Canada to dodge the Vietnam draft.  The Civil War is acknowledged by a vignette in which a runaway slave (David Ryan Smith) hopes to join the Union army.

Structurally and at times even thematically, Steadfast recalls Paula Vogel’s recent A Civil War Christmas, although the former is a tauter and more affecting work. It is one that also requires a bit of work on the part of its audience. Though Grantom’s ensemble is highly talented (and able to stitch humor and pathos together without manipulation), since actors play multiple parts, it can be difficult to discern which characters they might be playing. It can also be tricky to determine what current age a character might be, as some age, and not necessarily in chronological order. For example, and without giving too much away, one performer ages nearly a century over the course of scenes that bounce around. The fact that these scenes are scrambled instead of linear also takes some getting used to, and the narrative benefits significantly from a second viewing or a reading of the script for those lucky enough to access one or the other. Smart’s anthology, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, makes an important point about the souls who have served on any battlefield being forever linked by their valor. The Steadfast is an ambitious but necessary play that should not be missed.

The Steadfast

TBG Theater, 312 West 36th Street. www.smarttix.com. Thru Feb 3.

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Scarlett Johansson’s star turn in the recently-opened Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has been garnering plenty of attention, but another small-statured star playing a desperate woman can be found Off-Broadway. That would be Emmy-winner America Ferrera (late of Ugly Betty), playing a struggling single woman crippled by the current economic crisis in Laura Marks’ Bethany, now playing at New York’s City Center Stage II.

Directed with an effectively realistic hand by Gayle Taylor Upchurch for Women’s Project Theater, the 2009-set Bethany features Ferrera as Crystal, a middle-class worker who has become homeless and sneaks into an abandoned house. She’s not totally alone, however, as she soon meets fellow squatter Gary (Tobias Segal). The two strike up an amicable, if tentative, living arrangement that enables the two of them to play house when Crystal’s not toiling at her day job selling cars at a struggling Saturn dealership. Crystal’s world shatters even further when she learns that the dealership is going to close.

As options get scarcer and scarcer, desperation increases. What is most impressive about Marks, a recent graduate of the Juilliard playwriting program, however, are the choices that this writer makes around a sobering situation. Crystal’s straits may be dire, but her characters manage to imbue each of her scenes with a very human sense of humor that never feels like a reach or unearned, particular Emily Ackerman’s Shannon, Crystal’s fatigued-by-life boss, and Ken Marks (the husband of the playwright) as Charlie, a potential customer who peppers the play with motivational mini-monologues asserting such aphorisms as “We all have the power to manifest our own reality.”

But Crystal’s reality is bleak, and as Bethany ups her personal stakes, the play emerges more and more as a clever character study rather than a social commentary. Stripped of creature comforts and of dignity, both Gary and Crystal are animals doing their best to survive. Trying to convince a social worker (a fantastic Myra Lucretia Taylor) that she’s stable and solvent, Crystal buys a few household products and passes Gary off as a plumber. And just when she has curried audience favor by falling victim to Charlie’s own petty power games, Marks the playwright pulls the rug out from under us by showing just how connivingly resourceful Crystal can be when pushed. This is a play where actions are secondarily important to reactions, and Ferrera proves herself to have excellent stage instincts.

If there is one area that feels a little too simplistic, it is Marks’ portrayal of squatting itself, which gets short shrift. The idea that someone could really walk into an empty house, still powered by electricity, and go undiscovered, feels false and unexplored. In fact, it’s a little too farcical for a play as grounded in naturalism as it is by a great cast (that is also a reason why a climactic encounter feels too pantomimed to really work in Upchurch’s current staging). Segal, less manic than he has been in past performances, succeeds in making Gary a cipher but one with an accessible moral code. Marks the actor devilishly devours both his monologues and his scenes opposite Ferrara. And as Crystal, Ferrera takes great care to show just how smart and foolish someone can be at the same time. Luckily, that’s a tightrope neither Marks nor Upchurch have much trouble navigating.

Bethany

New York City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street. www.nycitycenter.org. Through Feb. 17.

Credit Guy Raz

At 34 years of age, Yossi may have a promising career going as a Tel Aviv cardiologist, but when it comes to matters of the heart for himself, the man is in stasis, a lonely heart who can be seen in Eytan Fox’s Yossi downloading porn and even seeking out online encounters (albeit with a significantly younger photo of himself). Yes, Yossi’s heart is still beating, but he doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do about it.

Yossi is the sequel to the 2002 Israeli film Yossi and Jagger, also directed by Fox and both times starring the subtle, sensitive Ohad Knoller. The first film told the bittersweet story of the clandestine relationship between Yossi, an Israeli Defence Force commander, and Lior, his brash seconds-in-command officer. While moving, the first Yossi was a relatively primitive film, narratively straightforward but emotionally compelling. It was, however, a crucial milestone in the portrayal of gay life in the Gaza strip.

A decade later, Yossi is single. He may not be closeted, but his life appears to be hermetically sealed, locked in a kind of self-exile. Yossi doesn’t tell us too much about what has happened in the intervening decade, but the sad-sack look on Yossi’s face and his nebbishy appearance fill in between the lines. The doctor deprives himself of fun, initially refusing a night out with a fellow doctor celebrating his imminent divorce. An encounter with a middle-aged patient also stirs something within the doctor, and provides a nice callback for those who have seen the original (for those who have not, I have been deliberately vague in this review). I do wish that writer Itay Segal had extended this rich portion of the film. While perhaps lacking in originality – it manages to summon emotions from crucial scenes in both Born on the Fourth of July and Brokeback Mountain – it acts as a catalyst, sending Yossi on a literal and metaphorical journey that pushes both borders and boundaries.

Yossi hits the road during the film’s second half, and at a rest stop, he encounters some restless soldiers who’ve just missed the bus back to their hotel. He offers them a ride, and, amid the young men’s dismissal of Yossi’s preferred music, the film – and its protagonist – fixates on one member of the group who demonstrates a familiarity and a respect for Yossi’s taste. He is Tom (Oz Zehavi), whom the other soldiers refer to as “homo,” not as a slur but as a term of endearment. Yossi, on a work-mandated leave, decides to stay at the same Eilat resort.

Here, Segal captures the changing international attitudes regarding sexuality through his two leads. Segal also uses the arts as its own reference tool. Yossi listens Gustav Mahler’s “Adagietto” in the car with the soldiers, and later, poolside, reads Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice(!). Savvy cineastes will pick up on the fact that director Luchino Visconti incorporated “Adagietto” in his film version of Venice. Yossi’s story parallels that of Venice’s own Gustav von Aschenbach, although in this case, it’s Zehavi’s Tom who does the pursuing. Tom is more open and aggressive than Yossi has ever been, and he pursues the schlubby older man both persistently and obviously. There isn’t much conflict here, only Yossi’s internal battle with himself, made apparent both by Fox’s  mise-en-scene  (choosing first to shoot Knoller from above and behind, then later focusing more and more on the man’s face) and Knoller’s own underplaying of Yossi’s painful, yet repressed, yearning to connect. Zehavi, in a gentle performance, is also quite compelling, as are Orly Silbersatz Banai and Shlomo Sadan in supporting roles. (Singers Keren Ann and Devendra Barnhart will also likely draw new fans due to their exposure here.)

The stakes here are both jaw-droppingly low and incredibly crucial. Yossi has little to do other than follow E. M. Forster’s famed edict atop Howards End: “Only connect.” And yet that is a tall order for the naturally inward Yossi. But the film eventually gets so bogged down with Yossi’s own issues that it forgets love and relationships face many other obstacles. It must be said that the movie, rich in so many ways, is nullifyingly simplistic in other ones. Many of the events that befall its protagonist ultimately feel too easy and unearned, and err towards the unconvincing. Yossi may, gratefully, finally choose life. But one still wishes that this sequel had a bit more pulsating within it.

Yossi is playing at the Elinor Bunim Monroe Film Center.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Fans of women-in-prison flicks should take note: Rob Ashford’s latest Broadway revival of the seminal Tennessee Williams work Cat on a Hot Tin Roof conjures up a woman who’s all boxed in.

The inmate in question is the inimitable Maggie Pollitt, better known as Maggie the Cat, the wantonly desperate woman conniving to reclaim the sexual spark and family fortune which first drew her to the tormented Brick, a fallen football star besotted by booze and ghosts from the past, as well as a few spirits who can only be found in bottle form. But beyond designer Christopher Oram’s cavernously cage-like bedroom set, there are other forces limiting the rich storytelling potential of these two long-suffering Southerners. Those would be their portrayers, Scarlett Johansson and Benjamin Walker, who, despite earnest intentions, wobble through their portrayals as would a drunk driver who’s just been pulled over and forced to do a sobriety test.

Unfortunately, Ashford makes for a lesser policeman when it comes to this Williams show, admittedly a protracted work but one that revels in its depiction of loneliness and liars. Williams’ entire first act is devoted to Maggie’s machinations to get a rise out of her husband – interpret that every which way you will – who seems more than a little attached to his late friend, Skipper. His language is rich and poetic, and requires a performer who can imbue his cadences with melodic cunning. Johansson, struggling with both her voice and her inconsistently calibrated Southern accent, cannot fit that bill. The actress, long a Maxim magazine favorite, has always been a Hollywood sex object, which makes her an understandable casting choice for a commercial run. But her sultriness has largely been a calculated marketing move rather than the organic result of on-screen sensuality, and in a role like Maggie, where she needs it the most, she falls flat. Cats, as the play declares, may land uninjured, but this one certainly does damage to her point of impact. Her scenes, saddled with a breathy and forced delivery, feel redundant and circular when they should begin to allow her claws to emerge. From the outset, her Maggie is so strong one wonders if she even needs a husband. There is no desperation to her – lines that should be beseeching become a mere lecture. And later scenes, as she plays a subtle bargaining game for dying Big Daddy’s money against her in-laws Gooper and Mae (a quite convincing Emily Bergl and Michael Park), lack the needed emotional leverage.

And what about those scenes with Big Daddy (Ciarán Hinds)? Ashford brings an inappropriate amount of tragedy at the notion of a family who will lie to the terminally ill paterfamilias to spare his feelings. This Cat fails to make the point of how lies can destroy more than they protect. While Debra Monk’s Big Mama is a proper blend of comic relief and period window dressing, Hinds is over-the-top, out of period, and oddly stylized in a goatee and with slicked-back hair. He’s so full of bombast that he never opens a window into Big Daddy’s hidden vulnerability.

And yet any production of Cat can be saved with a strong enough Brick – and yet Walker struggles to wrestle all of Brick’s conflicting emotions to the ground. Though the character must repress a litany of emotions – he’s a suicidal closet case – he still must telegraph his character’s yearning and frustrations. This Brick is oddly cold, lacking chemistry with both Hinds and Johansson. As with the character of Hal in the also recently-revived ‘50s relic Picnic, Ashford fetishizes Walker’s chiseled body. Before the actor even emerges from the Pollitt bathroom, steam pours in from offstage. That’s a cheap trick and a telltale sign of weakness in Cat. Its leading man and woman must first be capable of generating their own heat.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 West 46th Street. http://www.catonahottinroofbroadway.com/.  Through March 30.