Though
no one who pays for tickets can be expected to sympathize, April is certainly
the cruelest month for theater critics. The deadline for the big annual theater
awards is May 1, and since Broadway producers cling to the cynical belief that
none of us voters possesses a memory, and thus no show more than four weeks old
has a chance at a nomination, April is crammed full of more openings than any
sane theatergoer could conceivably enjoy. The marathon of mediocrity itself removes
the impediment of sanity, of course, but that hardly works to anyone’s advantage.
Hope and good will are the first casualties of madness and fatigue, and the shortsighted
producers will never get it through their crania that they lose far more from
numbness and irritation in the end than they ever could from forgetfulness.

My
defense for several years has been to make sure that my April contains enough
Off-Broadway protein to carry me through all the expensive sugar. I’ll spare
everyone my cranky invective, then, for the likes of Bells Are Ringing,
Follies, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and that most specious of
protests against corrupt power ever written, anywhere, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. (No, I haven’t seen The Producers yet.) Entertaining shows
that, regardless of their faults, are actually worth an intelligent person’s
time deserve the attention more.

Urinetown!
The Musical is the dark-horse success story of the 1999 New York International
Fringe Festival–now reopened under John Rando’s crisp direction at the
marvelously dungeon-like American Theater of Actors, and backed by the deep-pocketed
Dodger Theatricals and a first-rate ensemble. This show also happens to be a specious
protest against corrupt power, but it’s so flippantly and hilariously self-conscious
about that speciousness that you root for it until the end, half-believing it
will redeem its flabby politics. The title is of course awful, and the story’s
premise absurd, but as long as charming and talented actors and singers acknowledge
that themselves, there must be more to it all. Right?

The
premise is that, in a futuristic Gotham that looks suspiciously like 1930s America
except that corporate execs get faxes, a 20-year drought has forced the government
to declare private bathrooms illegal. The filthy "public amenities"
are all operated by a private firm, Urine Good Company (UGC), which charges exorbitant
access fees and has elected officials on its payroll. The inevitable rebellion
happens, as does the inevitable love affair between the callow rebel leader and
the UGC president’s idealistic daughter, and you can fill in the rest. What’s
new is the terrific pop score by Mark Hollmann and dozens of gritty little self-deprecating
jokes by book-writer Greg Kotis, which keep renewing the audience’s patience.

Hollmann
has said in interviews that his models for Urinetown! were Marc Blitzstein’s
Cradle Will Rock and Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. As
anyone who’s seen one of its revivals can testify, however, Cradle Will
Rock reads as a hopelessly simplistic cartoon in the tv age (surely why its
content was mostly kept out of Tim Robbins’ movie of the same title, about
the first production), and so do most of Brecht’s parables. Ratcheting up
the self-consciousness is a good strategy for making such parables fly again,
but the underlying material has to be complex enough to bear the sharpened scrutiny.
Kotis’ strongest "commentators" are a toothily smarmy cop named
Lockstock and a hyperarticulate, smudgy-faced girl named Little Sally (superbly
played by Jeff McCarthy and Spencer Kayden), who say things like: "He’s
the hero of the show, she has to love him." No one else can live up to their
irony and cleverness, though, so the action keeps returning to its dreamy and
essentially innocuous ground state. Unfortunately, as Brecht sort of said, showing
that you know musicals are based on sentimental fluff and mind-deadening repetition
isn’t the same thing as changing that.

Troilus
and Cressida
By
William Shakespeare American Place Theater

Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida isn’t performed very often. Strangely enough,
though, just about every reputable Shakespeare director for the past 100 years
has declared a special interest in it. Now comic, now tragic, now recklessly satirical
regarding the self-involved cynics carrying on the Trojan war, it is burdened
by an abundance of long, rhetorically ornate speeches but is nevertheless one
of the most uncannily modern plays in the classical canon. Before the 20th century
it baffled nearly everyone. There is no reliable record of it ever being performed
in earlier eras, and some scholars believe that its scathingly satirical views
of power-brokers represented a rare, uncharacteristic flirtation with truly dangerous
political critique on the part of Shakespeare–possibly the reason why it
never entered the repertory of the Globe.

The
main question for production in our time, then, is how to give it an edge of political
danger and keep it sharp. Most often, the play has been made into an anti-war
statement; the Nazis banned it for its lampoon of nationalistic belligerence.
In the feminist era, though, it risks appearing misogynist, because one of its
central events is the betrayal of Troilus by young Cressida, who proves a "wanton"
after being traded to the Greeks in exchange for a Trojan general. The Berliner
Ensemble once turned this problem on its head by transforming the action into
a feminist protest: director Manfred Wekwerth made Troilus seem to betray Cressida
first, by agreeing too readily to her exchange for the general, and she was portrayed
as an unstable youngster driven to distraction by the men’s brutality.

In
this modest Theater for a New Audience (TFNA) production, the great Peter Hall,
founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has neglected to supply any such edge.
The production is in fact so meandering, sputtering and aimlessly designed that
I’m tempted to suggest that it would’ve been best put off until our
ersatz POTUS reveals what sort of replay of the Gulf War he plans to cook up in
time for the next election. As it stands, Hall leaves a sense of a missing center,
leaning too heavily on the talents of individual actors who are, alas, only occasionally
up to the test. At the same time, I hasten to add that a few performances are
excellent. Hall is one of the best guides alive to the speaking of Shakespeare’s
language, and rare as it is to see this play at all, it’s even rarer to hear
the unusually subtle and complex text spoken with such lucidity.

The
high point of the evening is Andrew Weems’ performance as Thersites, the
"deformed and scurrilous Greek" in whose mouth Shakespeare placed some
of the most fluid and incautious vituperation he ever wrote. Filthy and pudgy
with a strangely clouded eye, several missing fingers and a long, gruesome scar
across his bare belly, he doubles as the Prologue/narrator, loping and scuffling
across the circle of sand that serves as a stage, salivating over his insults
and throwing decomposed corpses about like surplus scrap in a junkyard. Weems
alone communicates the true depth of disgust in the work, but Philip Goodwin’s
Ulysses–another extremely difficult role–is also extraordinarily slimy,
striding on with a little plastic portfolio and employing his weirdly lolling
tongue in a continuous, insinuating stream of seedy wit and tactical plaintiveness.

The
biggest casting gaffe is Joey Kern, who is as wooden and phony as Troilus as he
was as one of the baby-stoners in TFNA’s Saved a few months ago. His
fatuousness shouldn’t be projected onto Tricia Paoluccio as Cressida, though
(as some critics have done), who is much more substantial and moving. She plays
the role as a sort of Shakespearean Ado Annie, just a cute Trojan girl who can’t
say "no," with a twinkle in her nubile eye and a precocious hunger to
start learning early how to manipulate men–which proves disastrous only because
her world isn’t a safe place for anyone but expert manipulators.

Also
strong and memorable are David Conrad’s commanding and charming Hector and
Tony Church’s unctuous Pandarus. As for Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes–depicting
the Greeks as road-weary, jackbooted bikers and the Trojans as barefoot, silk-draped
epicures–they’re like a thesis left unexplored, a visual non sequitur
that might have provided an interesting point of contrast (had Hall believed in
it) but is now merely distracting.

The
Dead Eye Boy
By
Angus MacLachlan MCC Theater

The
acting in The Dead Eye Boy–Angus MacLachlan’s three-hander about
a pair of former addicts trying to solidify their life together in the presence
of the woman’s extremely troubled 14-year-old son–is superb. It has
the same sort of gritty intensity the New Group’s casts had in their outstanding
Mike Leigh projects a few years ago, Ecstasy and Goose-Pimples.
That MacLachlan couldn’t figure out how to end his story doesn’t detract
from the creepy tenacity of the play’s first hour. Joseph Murphy and the
indie-film star Lili Taylor are terrific as the couple, and high-schooler Aaron
Himelstein is unforgettable as the boy. Directed by Susan Fenichell, this is a
punchy and prickly production that deserves to be seen.

With
this column, my nearly four-year tenure as theater critic for New York Press
comes to an end. Explaining to me that they feel "the theater is boring,"
the editors have decided that they no longer wish to devote regular space to it.
I therefore bid farewell to my readers and invite them to meet me wherever I land
in the future.

Like all Foreman’s
plays, Now That Communism Is Dead is less about a worldly situation than
a state of mind. His habit is to begin with his own preoccupations and obsessions,
and then write them large as a general condition. The topicality of this latest
title is thus a false come-on in a way, because it’s really an announcement
of a mental field, as was his title Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good in 1987.
The two works are similar in that they risk oblique reference to public issues
(and the settled allegorical readings that invites) in order to distill them
into a sort of diabolical conceptual soup in which the characters (and presumably
the rest of us as well) are compelled to swim as the heat is gradually turned
up by chefs who bear a curious resemblance to ourselves.

The action
in this new piece concerns the parallel anxieties of a pair of alter-ego characters
named Fred and Freddie. Fred, played by Jay Smith, has long brown hair and wears
a black leather skullcap, white pants with high lace-up boots and a white tux
shirt stuffed ridiculously with a pillow and wrapped with a bright red sash;
he looks like an orthodontist let loose in an opera wardrobe. Freddie, played
by the naturally stout Tony Torn, has long brown hair and wears a bejeweled
headband, a red nose, two-tone shoes, a black leather vest and a bright red
tie over an ordinary white shirt; he looks like a swishy biker with competing
Rocky Horror and Grateful Dead fantasies. Think Spinal Tap gone Soviet-chic.

Flanked by
a mostly female chorus in white knickers, facial veils, nylon-stocking head-wraps,
wire-rimmed glasses and black bras over bare bellies with reddened navels (the
sole man is bare-chested), Fred and Freddie play out a drama of artificial terror
and hysteria perpetuated by their own vaguely political, puckish provocations
and by occasional interjections by Foreman’s booming, Godlike voice: "Red
communism is dead"; "I am not a communist"; "There will
be no paradise here on Earth, my friend. Please stop dreaming of paradise, here
on Earth." With their general slacker-like obliviousness mitigated by bouts
of nervous lucidity, the men resemble human lab rats subjected to cruel cosmic
experiments that they reflexively duplicate themselves, while trapped in a "cage"
slightly less crammed full than the usual Foremanesque space but nevertheless
replete with the familiar strings, stripes, chalkboards, crumpled newspapers,
Hebrew letters, pillows and lampshades, as well as sandbags on pulleys, large
quotation marks in frames and what look like old photos of Russian intellectuals
with geometrically arranged bullet holes in their heads. Now and then a fleeting
action or a snatch of dialogue makes the pair seem briefly like categorical
opposites–say, liberal and conservative, ego and superego, exploiter and
exploited, destructive and constructive. But this impression never lasts more
than a moment. From the play’s first line, delivered by Freddie scrubbing
the floor on his knees ("Thank God this terrible job is almost finished,
cleaning up this left-over mess"), to the repeated references to abused
dogs and the idea of treating people like them, to a minor tussle over Freddie’s
"private shoes," to the periodic sprints across stage by people carrying
red flags, the audience is deliberately teased with invitations to pin everything
down to some specific political analysis. Trying to fix it that way, though,
is like trying to pick up wet watermelon seeds. The paradigm keeps changing
and, in any case, Foreman has no interest in illustrating static positions,
or in illustrating anything at all, for that matter.

His purpose,
as usual, is to produce a mutating and self-satirizing experience of a present-tense
shipwreck, which is why certain critics have knocked him over the years for
what they see as his political evasiveness. Anyone so inclined is bound to dislike
this piece as well. For my part, I find it a splendidly lucid enlargement of
a dismayingly familiar felt reality–what Foreman calls (in a program
note) the "nightmare" life we have now locked ourselves into without
preserving any opposing utopian dream, a life "in which selfish private
pleasure is promoted as the only safe haven…the Messiah never comes and violence
seems the only poetry available." The catch is, to appreciate this enlargement,
you have to feel it in the circus-like manner Foreman apparently does, which
means letting the piece work on you first on the plane of pure showmanship.

Torn gives
one of the best performances of his career as Freddie. Slipping disconcertingly
back and forth between an idiotic Texas drawl and a bored-grad-student mumble,
he works through a remarkable array of doughy-faced grins and sassy glowers
while halfheartedly complaining, ineffectually theorizing and sarcastically
boasting about his "powerful sarcasm." Smith, too, is superb, able
to bounce the verbal ball back to Freddie as if aware of his intentions and
reactions before he is. A head taller than Torn, he plays Fred as a sort of
fey, underconfident overseer who manages to blend both his phony Russian accent
and his insinuating, surfer-dude twang into cacophonous harmony with the show’s
profusion of recorded crashes, machine-gun blasts, whip snaps, rooster crows
and jazzy tape loops. The circus energy in this evening is as high as it ever
has been in Foreman’s theater.

Ontological
Theater at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th St. (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.),
533-4650, through April 29.

Paradise
Island
By
Benjie Aerenson

The story is
about an insidiously codependent mother and daughter named Emma and Terri, played
by Lynn Cohen and Adrienne Shelly, respectively, who go on a short gambling
getaway to the Bahamas, ostensibly to spend quality time together after Terri
has moved back in at age 32. They needle, ignore, bully and cajole each other,
grating familiarly on each other’s nerves, and successfully evade their
obvious major problem of parallel addiction (to booze and pills). Terri, a pretty
diabetic who binges on sweets, is also suicidally lonely. These are the type
of people whose adventures are limited to package vacations and dating services
and whose conversation rarely reaches beyond Oprah, Geraldo, jewelry and beauty
tips. For them, the O.J. trial, in progress during the play, is an expansion
of the universe.

Benjie Aerenson
clearly intended the women’s inarticulateness and uncomfortable silences
to read as a profound figure for lives wasted by limited horizons. Trouble is,
he didn’t see deeply enough into the causes of their emptiness to make
us care about its felt reality. At the early preview I saw, the actors were
having difficulty filling out their dull and repetitious interactions with enough
variety to maintain a sense of suspense. My guess is that they’ll improve
over the coming weeks. It’s hard to blame them for the basic vacuousness
of their clinically accurate but essentially uninsightful dialogue. Sometimes,
as Mrs. Freud ought to have said somewhere, an empty glass is just an empty
glass.

Theater at
St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 279-4200,
through Feb. 25.

The piece exudes
a merry indifference to the expectations raised by its familiar comic forms.
Tolan’s ruminative rompers seem to be saying that they already judge themselves
more harshly than anyone else ever could, so we should either appreciate the
implicit honesty of their clumsy probings and ambivalent gropings or go away.

The action
is set in a grimly cheery, pink-trimmed hotel room in a seaside New England
town, designed with dead-on, pseudo-B&B quaintness by Walt Spangler. Eight
of the nine characters are guests at a wedding there, though how they all know
each other and who has gotten married are treated as unimportant and never explained.
The characters pair off, start to get steamy, dive predictably under beds or
into closets when the inevitable interruptions come, and talk about their problems,
mostly unpredictably, with a digressively erudite vagueness. No one is ever
remotely disturbed by the fact that every farcical ruse is utterly obvious,
or that the promise of privacy in the room is nil at all times. There’s
a certain imperturbable core under the shenanigans that gives the comedy a peculiar
nonchalance.

Infidelity
hangs in the air like a general drizzle of restlessness that the wedding has
quickened, and everyone in the group is hyperconscious of it. The main problem,
it seems, is that they all wish they could muster more enthusiasm for it than
they have, which is why the farce keeps getting stalled and sidetracked. This
is a world of people too smart and seasoned to abandon themselves to transient
pleasures of any sort, so with them farce becomes a trope for a young people’s
game they’re sure they could still enjoy if only they didn’t see through
it so quickly. The territory is essentially the same as that in Donald Margulies’
Dinner with Friends, filtered through a funhouse mirror that blurs and
blunts the emotions. At one point, a couple’s peeling off of each other’s
clothes comes to a screeching halt because one of them has the simpleminded
gall to say, "I could love you."

The play is
too diffuse to gel around a central character, but the best candidate for protagonist
is Kate, a lovely poet, unhappy in her marriage, whose random swings between
voracious sensuality and remote abstraction are played superbly by Karen Young.
In the opening scene, Kate’s small talk with her friend Angie, a brash
bull-dyke who happens to have long, curly hair, a husband and kids, takes an
abrupt literary turn when Kate starts comparing herself to Woyzeck ("I’m
just limping in my heavy army boots, resentful, insane. I’m a tragic figure…")–whereupon
Angie pulls her into a hot kiss that she doesn’t immediately resist. Apart
from that kiss, unfortunately, Mary Testa, who plays Angie, displays no sympathetic
chemistry either with Young or anyone else in the cast.

The show soon
finds a steady tone, though (and picks up on its motif of anomalous erudition),
with the entrance of Hal (Robert Dorfman), a composer who left his wife three
years ago and has since become a novelist and taken up with a male music and
drama critic named Ben (David Greenspan). Hal had risen to modest respectability
with his music before he lost faith in his talent, partly due to hearing Alban
Berg’s opera Wozzeck, as he explains while using the bathroom to
wash off the drinks that his ex-wife Maureen keeps spilling on him. With his
avuncular, bushy-eyebrowed mien, Dorfman’s Hal seems briefly like the play’s
voice of sanity and objectivity–until the arrival of Ben and Maureen, that
is.

His two partners
both turn out to be amusing cartoons. Maureen (Laura Esterman) lurches in brandishing
her narcotics: a bright red drink to match her vampy red dress and a boombox
from which she greedily inhales snatches of Caruso. And Ben sashays in wearing
a puke-green suit–a Nixon-shouldered clown who constantly spouts pretentious
aperçus at no one in particular. Esterman and Greenspan deserve credit
for squeezing considerable sparkle and detail into these figures–she with
her odd mixture of hangdog poutiness and pitbull aggression, he with his slackjawed
deadpan and earnest, bony-handed gestures.

In the end,
though, Ben is too preposterous to be taken seriously as anyone’s partner,
which is why there’s no dramatic tension in Maureen’s mission to get
Hal into bed again. It’s also why Ben’s climactic speech explaining
his lifelong frustration that a critic is never "seen as a person,
a fellow person" ("I may as well go sell shoes") is a
dud despite Greenspan’s sizzling delivery.

The one wholly
convincing relationship is that between Kate and her mathematician husband Christopher
(Frank Wood), in whose room the action takes place and against whose damaged
"normalcy" all the extracurricular sexual activity is more or less
measured. Because of the constant interruptions, these two spend little time
interacting directly with each other, and each seems genuinely torn in different
sexual directions. They’re clearly still drawn to each other, though, and
Wood, with that droopy-eyed, long-suffering patience that’s become his
trademark, is the perfect foil for Young’s equivocal allure.

It’s too
bad Tolan settled for the old chestnut of incompatibility between artist and
nonartist as this couple’s main problem (each fears the other lacks real
respect and enthusiasm for his or her work). It’s also evasive for her
to make so much of the fluidity of sexual attraction and then wrap the plot
up in the neat and venerable bow of heterosexual marriage. (Kate has a brief
assignation with a sweet hunk she meets in the bar–charmingly played by
Gareth Saxe–but it comes to nothing.) At least the bow comes without a
sense of inevitability to it, though.

Interestingly
enough, Tolan delays the ending with a scene in which a gruff Russian lady named
Lily (Lola Pashalinski) comes in to do a bikini wax on Kate, which she’s
been expecting the entire play. At this point, Kate has recovered with absurd
dispatch from a desultory suicide attempt, most of Chris’ clothes have
been given away (don’t ask), and the room has cleared out so the couple
can finally talk. Lily is a cliche, describing herself as unshockable, gushing
with pride at the mention of Chekhov and Pushkin, scoffing at the idea that
anyone but Russians know what pain is while Kate yowls from the waxing process.
What’s touching here, though, is the couple’s accidental return to
the real wisdom of their bodies, as well as their recognition that their feelings
run deeper than farce and can’t be summed up with, say, quick quotes from
Berg or Pushkin (even if that does sometimes turn Kate on).

Crisply directed
by Brian Kulick, The Wax, for all its bumps, is the product of authentic
searching and, at 90 minutes without intermission, is never boring and often
memorably witty. Its biggest problem, I think, is Tolan’s failure to settle
down and focus on the subject of diffuseness, despite the impressive mileage
she gets out of undermining farce. At one point, Kate claims that she has never
"felt complete with anyone, not even myself or especially myself,"
and one has the feeling that Tolan’s bigger game was to explore this as
a general affliction. Hopefully, she’ll have the patience and concentration
to do it in her next play.

Playwrights
Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 279-4200, through Jan.
21.

Blue Heron
Arts Center, 123 E. 24th St. (betw. Park & Lexington Aves.), 749-3002, through
Jan. 28.

The critical
dope on Seussical has been that it tries to do too much in too glitzy
an idiom and ends up subverting the gentle and intimate spirit of the material.
That’s certainly true but not the whole story. I feel obligated to mention
that my eight-year-old son Oliver, who went with me, thoroughly enjoyed the
show, with the exception of the Cat in the Hat, which he thought was extraneous.
"He’s really just a man in the hat," quoth Oliver, piercing to
the heart of why the O’Donnell gambit will be little more than a p.r. blip,
regardless of what she does onstage.

Seussical
has a certain resilient charm, but none of it comes from its insipid feline
MC, whose irrelevant displays of generic shtick (pratfalling, shooting silly
string at the audience, interviewing a kid in a box seat like a talk-show host)
obviously stem from the producers’ nervousness that charm alone wouldn’t
sell tickets. The Cat is barely characterized as Seuss’ famous and beloved
trickster, the spirit of mischief when parents are away; he exists only to produce
sufficient cheap yuks to make people feel the show is as much fun as television.
Rosie to the rescue indeed.

Seussical’s
charm–such as it is–comes mostly from Kevin Chamberlin as Horton the
Elephant and a few other actors whose investment in Seuss’ world of innocent
discovery is strong and sincere enough to rise above all the razzle-dazzle of
vulgar overproduction. Portly, warm, affable and dressed in nothing more elaborate
than a gray, wrinkle-pattern, pajama-like outfit, Chamberlin is positively elephantine
before he even enacts Horton’s stories (of which more in a moment). His
genial spirit of plodding faithfulness and adventurousness is the best reason
to see the show.

Janine LaManna
is endearingly driven as Gertrude McFuzz, the bird who regrets her single tail
feather and who is inexplicably sweet on Horton here. A pure-voiced child actor
named Anthony Blair Hall does a fine job making a human being of the formulaically
written role of JoJo, an ostensibly naughty and lonely Who-kid who comes to
think of Horton as an intrepid alter ego. And Stephen Flaherty (best known for
composing the music in Ragtime) has provided the show with two memorable
songs (a multitude in today’s musical field): a sweet duet for JoJo and
Horton called "Alone in the Universe" and a ballad called "It’s
Possible," used to extol the marvels in McElligot’s pool and the powers
of the imagination.

The producers
alone know who is really responsible for the hodgepodge of a book as it currently
stands. Early on, the good doctor’s widow reportedly approved the strategy
of blending numerous Seuss stories rather than choosing a few for separate treatment,
but she certainly had no say in the power struggles prior to the New York opening
that resulted in key firings and emergency replacements. The result is a scattered,
unwhimsical and utterly forgettable mishmash that tries to paper over its senseless
spots with obscure incongruities, gratuitously rowdy songs and annoyingly busy
production numbers. If anyone can tell me what Green Eggs and Ham has
to do with military drilling, or why the Grinch stands muttering on a dais during
his single understated appearance, or what a chorus of sleek, buff men in skimpy
vests and tight leather pants has to do with the monkeys who torment Horton,
I’ll be grateful.

Which brings
me back to the subject of revolting politics. On top of everything else, the
committee at the helm of Seussical planted a crypto-pro-life message
at the center of this family event. Seuss wrote two different books about the
faithful Horton: Horton Hatches the Egg, in which the elephant spends
months obstinately sitting on an egg that an irresponsible bird has abandoned,
and Horton Hears a Who!, in which he guards a clover on which he alone
hears the voices of a minuscule people called Whos. In combining these stories,
the musical forces Horton to choose between his two charges, because the clover
is stolen from him and he can’t keep searching for it without endangering
the egg. Blithely and righteously, he thus chooses to value a single unborn
life over the vibrant, developed life of an entire populous town. On the subway
ride home, I proposed to Oliver that our family donate a chunk of our holiday-gift
money to NARAL this year.

Richard Rodgers
Theater, 226 W. 46th St. (betw. B’way & 8th Ave.), 307-4100.

The melodramatic
skeleton of the book is all there: the grim, early 19th-century, orphan childhood,
the job as a governess at Thornfield Hall, the near-marriage with the master
Edward Rochester, the revenge of the mad wife locked away in the attic, Jane’s
breathless escape and return after receiving a telepathic message. All the details
that lent psychological subtlety and nuance to this core, however, have been
carefully trimmed away, as if they were never of real interest. Ostensibly "plain"
Jane is played by the conspicuously pretty Marla Schaffel. She doesn’t
confront people here with the content of the books she has read, or reveal the
depth of her fantasies through florid descriptions, as Bronte’s Jane habitually
does. And her momentous life decisions are all simplified to black and white
non-choices.

Those who thwart
her are hateful villains from the second they appear, those who befriend her
kindly stereotypes. The only exceptions are the two male love interests: brooding,
Byronesque Rochester (Barbour) and the stiff Calvinist minister St. John Rivers
(Stephen R. Buntrock), whom book-writer Caird has inexplicably given the task
of caring for Jane’s dying rich aunt, Mrs. Reed. Perhaps this change was
intended to make Jane’s sudden financial inheritance near the end seem
less contrived (in the original, it comes not from that hated aunt but from
an uncle Jane never met). If so, this was a lot of trouble taken for nothing,
since the audience couldn’t care less about such plausibility questions
as their mushy minds are hurtling toward a foreordained happy ending, just as
no one cares about fine architectural principles while watching a marble negotiating
a marble run.

Brooks Atkinson
Theater, 256 W. 47th St. (betw. B’way & 8th Ave.), 307-4100.

McGinn/Cazale
Theater, 2162 Broadway (76th St.), 206-1515, through Dec.30.

I confess I
don’t know all of Ayckbourn’s 50-odd dramas, but I do know the most
famous and celebrated ones (including Absurd Person Singular and the
trilogy The Norman Conquests). Comic Potential is better than
any of them. It also contains the most astonishing performance by an actor currently
on view in New York.

The action
is set in the future, when television has become even dumber than it is today
and actors have been replaced wherever possible by robots called actoids. The
masses, it seems, either don’t notice the difference or don’t care,
requiring only programming technicians who know how to "put in the story
lines and tweak the emotions" (as a jaded director puts it). A young wannabe
comedy writer named Adam, whose rich uncle owns a tv studio, discovers that
a pretty blonde actoid there named JCF 31333 (Jacie Triplethree for short) is
different from the others–she shows creative initiative and something like
an original sense of humor–and he sets his mind on writing a special for
her. Writer and actoid soon fall in love, run away together, become tabloid
news, face dire obstacles to their love and art, and ultimately triumph after
delightfully absurd twists that shed surprising light on the nature of comedy
and originality.

I’ll come
back to the modest depths in the play. None of it would come off nearly so brightly
or intelligently without the actress Janie Dee, who, in this Manhattan Theater
Club production directed by John Tillinger, is reprising the role of Jacie she
originated in England. Dee is glitteringly precise and irresistibly endearing,
making a performance of enormous technical difficulty seem easy and natural.
She finds grace in mechanical body movements, melody and resonance in a restricted
vocal range, and the sweet humor of her character benefits crucially from the
support of Alexander Chaplin as Adam. Chaplin’s confident, Hugh-Grant-like
insouciance provides just the right charmingly worldly platform Dee needs to
make Jacie’s sincerity seem like poise rather than simple naivete. It’s
because her character is devoid of irony that it can come off as an object of
desire, a virtuosic clown and a child learning to be a human being from scratch,
all at once.

Ayckbourn has
wandered into trendy territory here, and he orients himself remarkably well.
His theme is anxiety at the interface of man and machine: an exceptional robot
wants to be human and rise above the boredom and meaninglessness of robotic
life, and this challenges the humans around her to live up to their purported
meaningfulness. Decades ago, the theater handled this theme routinely (in expressionistic
works such as Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine and Karel Capek’s
R.U.R.), but in our era it’s been almost entirely ceded to film
(think of Blade Runner and Bicentennial Man)–no doubt largely
because theater people assume that sci-fi effects onstage can’t compete
with those in film. Ayckbourn’s inspiration was to ignore the problem of
effects entirely (apart from acting). He treats his robot–who is, after
all, played by a human being–as a completely competent and qualified player
in a romantic comedy, and makes her "normalcy" in that context the
occasion for discerning thought on the essence of the comic.

Comedy, in
the play’s world, is a dying art. Adam, however, is a comic film buff who
first comes to the tv studio to meet one of his idols, Chandler Tate, a brilliant
old director who was long ago farmed out to make daytime soaps with actoids
after the studio decided his art was too expensive. Chandler’s alcoholic
corrosiveness is nicely captured by the actor Peter Michael Goetz. He is at
first wary of Adam, but the kid’s cheekiness melts through his defensive
cynicism and inertia, and he agrees to teach the youngsters a few basics of
the form: that comedy’s fundamentals are surprise and anger, for instance,
and that a comedian’s worst choice is always "the middle ground."

Ayckbourn thus
spells out a set of standards and definitions against which any comic play,
including this one, is to be measured, and then proceeds to demonstrate their
value without ever seeming to serve any masters other than laughter and his
situation’s comic truth. We hear, for instance, that surprise is never
a question of inventing the absolutely new (always an absurd concept in art)
but rather of finding variations on the old that the audience doesn’t expect.
Practically everything Jacie says and does is then a live demonstration of this–from
mouthing bromides when stuck for an answer to producing schmaltzy music (from
within her body) in emotionally fraught situations to throwing custard pies–all
her choices being hilarious variations on tired conventions. Even her romantic
appeal as an ingenue depends, flatteringly, on models from the past, since her
flawless memory of the behavior of the many other ingenues she has played and
seen is what enables her to judge what is surprising.

Is artistic
creativity, then, nothing more than a technical capacity that can be easily
taught to any advanced form of artificial intelligence? That question is here
to stay for the foreseeable future, and the wounded human pride behind it recalls
other ego-blows that have proven dangerous in the past. Think of the Inquisition’s
prosecution of Galileo, the Scopes monkey trial and the 1998 protests outside
the Manhattan Theater Club after Terrence McNally suggested in Corpus Christi
that Jesus might have been gay. On leaving Comic Potential, it occurred
to me that someone really ought to call the Christian League and let them know
that it includes a character named Adam who wants to mate with a non-human named
J.C. (!) and reads the Bible’s creation story to her in bed as a sort of
ersatz foreplay. The possible outrage wouldn’t teach us anything, but it’d
be a funny variation on an old theme that might nudge this delicious production
toward a longer run on or off Broadway.

Manhattan Theater
Club, 131 W. 55th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 581-1212, through Jan. 7.

The closest
the play comes to a genuinely written role is Robert, who learns of his wife
Emma’s affair with his best friend Jerry, then fails for years either to
leave her or to acknowledge his greater attraction to Jerry. Slattery does an
excellent job of papering over Robert’s massive denial with a sagacious
social pride and above-it-all fortitude. Schreiber makes the essentially dull
role of Jerry as absorbing as anyone could, filling out its passivity and thickness
with his splendid repertory of brooding glances and pouts. Binoche is also ideal
as Emma: a fluttering, wistful bundle of wasted sensual potential who never
sees that none of the men she attaches herself to are really interested in her.
On top of all this, Rob Howell’s set is eloquently spare and antiseptic–three
tall ivory walls adorned only with narrow, shuttered windows and different,
scanty furniture pieces for each scene. The only problem, really, is the play,
which, for all its intellectual diversion, still comes off as a world-class
author’s glib descent into surface, mood and strategy.

American Airlines
Theater, 227 W. 42nd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 719-9393, through Jan.
28.

I heard the
news that the partisan-for-life justices had spoken while on the way home from
Stephen Adly Guirgis’ powerful new prison drama Jesus Hopped the "A"
Train, whose tough questions about justice swam around in my head as I felt
my rage rising. One of the characters in Guirgis’ play is a public defender
who is green enough to pay more attention to what’s right than to what’s
literally "just," and her client pays the price with decades of undeserved
incarceration. Another character is a guard who seems to consider any inmate’s
incarceration proof that he has "renounced" his humanity, justifying
the guard’s cruelty as "the only justice that the families of your
victims are ever gonna get." The spirit of the recent election endgame–and,
I fear, of the whole coming presidency as well (the bogus olive branches on
both sides be damned)–is the spirit of that guard: an abdication of basic
principles rationalized as the harsh justice inherent in a cynical, unavoidable
game. I didn’t vote for Al Gore and don’t believe in his moral purity
any more than in Bush’s, but the fact that we will now never know the true
outcome of the 2000 election forces me and at least 50,158,094 others to spend
the next four years locked in a cage of mistrust and cynicism along with the
civilian equivalent of 49,820,518 gloating, self-righteous guards.

I mustn’t
insult Guirgis, though, by comparing his thinking too closely with that of the
GOP shills on the Supreme Court. This is a young, uneven work, but it is memorably
disturbing precisely because it doesn’t flatter or demonize anyone and
leaves all sides looking complexly human. It’s also given a crackling production
in this LAByrinth Theater Company production directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The action takes place mostly in a yard on Rikers Island, where inmates confined
to 23-hour lockdown are brought for an hour of sun and exercise each day–a
cheerless block of adjacent metal cages designed with fitting chilliness by
Narelle Sissons, with barbed wire on top, a judge-like guard’s chair upstage
and actual fencing on only the cages’ outer sides. Here Lucius Jenkins
(Ron Cephas Jones), a serial murderer awaiting extradition to Florida (which
wants to execute him), becomes the sole conversation partner (apart from his
lawyer) of Angel Cruz (John Ortiz), a kid facing murder charges for shooting
a cult leader.

The two inmates
are friendly at first–as much as the guard Valdez (David Zayas) will allow
them to be, that is–because Lucius, who has found Jesus in prison and become
a celebrity, comforts the terrified Angel with an irresistible mix of tender
compassion and gassy bromides about spiritual health. As soon as Angel feels
stronger, though, he considers himself better than Lucius, since Angel only
intended to wound the cult leader (in payback for kidnapping one of his close
friends), whereas Lucius sadistically killed eight people. Their exchanges about
accepting responsibility for these crimes grow more and more heated, with each
one pretending to deny the other any quarter while the audience sees that emotional
damage is indeed being done on both sides. Disillusioned Lucius ends up high
on heroin, not Jesus, at his execution, and Angel ends up getting his lawyer
disbarred and himself convicted of first-degree murder because of his bright
new ideas about squaring himself with God.

One of Guirgis’
cleverest strokes was to juxtapose this intense battle of consciences–fought
with stunning ferocity by Jones and Ortiz from behind their invisible cage-walls–with
interior monologues by Angel’s lawyer Mary Jane Hanrahan (Elizabeth Canavan)
and two guards, Valdez and D’Amico (Salvatore Inzerillo), who is fired
for his kindness to Lucius. These monologues connect the argument about personal
responsibility to the world of unconfined people, because they’re about
wise and foolish risks taken while trying to "do the right thing"
in ways institutions such as law courts can’t recognize. Some of these
speeches stretch the limits of what the characters would plausibly say, as do
many of Angel’s tirades. In general, though, the play is fascinatingly
unpredictable, marvelously stormy and blessedly devoid of facile moralizing,
leaving one free to hang almost any personally political ornaments on it one
chooses.

Which brings
me back to the election and my nausea at the way it ended without anyone even
considering "doing the right thing" or rising to the magnanimous gesture
in Angel’s, Mary Jane’s or D’Amico’s sense. It seems that
our cynicism and selfishness have led us to where we actually have no high public
officials capable of thinking in terms of a greater good when it isn’t
completely safe for them. Why, for instance, couldn’t Bill Clinton see
in early 1999 that a speech to the effect that, "Look, I did this, it was
wrong, and I’m sorry," would’ve nipped Monicagate in the bud?
Why couldn’t any of the impeachment hotheads admit that lying about an
affair, even under oath, isn’t sufficient reason to unseat a president?
And why couldn’t any of the five rash justices recognize that muscling
their boy through, Mafia-style, did more lasting damage to the judiciary and
the executive than allowing the Florida recounts to finish ever could have?
Go ahead and swallow the tranquilizing syrup about national reconciliation from
the media talking heads if you want. I’ll stick with the more forthright
hocus-pocus of theater made by people humble and courageous enough to examine
our cycle of corrosive cynicism without blowing smoke in my face.

East 13th St.
Theater, 136 E. 13th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 239-6200, through Dec.
31.

It would be
sweet, in light of this, to be able to declare Mark Lamos’ fine production
of Tiny Alice at Second Stage (it originated at Hartford Stage in 1998)
a thorough vindication for the author. It isn’t, its many pleasures notwithstanding.
When I first saw this play 20 years ago as a college kid ready to turn the world
upside down, I thought all the grownups who found it confusing were fuddy-duddies
unwilling to bother looking closely at the symbolism–which has to do with
the consequences of representing God in our own image and with life experienced
as perpetual disorientation within Chinese boxes. The symbolism now strikes
me as slightly hamfisted and insufficiently blended into the play’s other
purposes.

Tiny Alice
has several witty and clear characters and tight, clever scenes, but it nevertheless
comes off (today, at any rate) as a study in false starts. Now a story of sexual
intrigue likening religious ecstasy to physical gratification, now a melodramatic
mystery with huge sums of money in the balance, now a puppet play in which the
puppet occupying the model castle center stage in effect refuses to perform,
it feels unfulfilled on all these scores because the author is so busy inventing
portentous encryptions to flavor everything as a metaphysical play of ideas.

Richard Thomas
is a bit too doe-eyed for my taste as Brother Julian–the "lay"
brother whose chastity and life a cynical Cardinal decides to sacrifice in exchange
for a $20-billion donation to the church (raised from $2 billion in 1964). The
stress here is on the innocent victim at the expense of the eager martyr, and
the wannabe martyr’s speeches of justification are our only compelling
reason to care about his ecstasy. Tom Lacy, by contrast, is a paragon of awful,
pontificating pomposity as the Cardinal, and Stephen Rowe is also splendidly
scoffing and overweening as the lawyer named Lawyer; their catty opening scene
together establishing the obscure business "understanding" is one
of the show’s treats. John Michael Higgins is also fine as the jauntily
insouciant butler named Butler. And Laila Robins as the unthinkably rich Miss
Alice–she and Rowe are the two newcomers to the production–provides
the overall sensual glue that makes all Albee’s strands feel meshed. Icily
ravishing with a superbly controlled, deep voice and strong, sinewy limbs, she
plays Alice as the fantasy executioner, a sort of compassionate spider capable
of making you forget, sometimes, that you have no idea what devil’s bargain
she’s ominously facilitating.

Second Stage,
307 W. 43rd St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 246-4422, through Jan. 7.

The allure
of New York is that we have choices. If Joe Orton’s brilliant 1969 farce
What the Butler Saw doesn’t shake your pom-poms, you can just walk
four blocks and pay twice as much to see the revival of Richard O’Brien’s
1973 musical The Rocky Horror Show. You probably have a hunch which party
I belong to.

I’m not
so partisan that I can’t see how slick Christopher Ashley’s new version
of Rocky Horror is, though. Narrated by Dick Cavett with that bemused,
ironic dryness that has made him a tube icon, and featuring an amazingly pumped-up
lead performance by Tom Hewitt as Dr. Frank ’N’ Furter (the role originated
by Tim Curry), the show is pure candy–tacky and nugatory. It’s also
conveniently predigested, like a giant jawbreaker your big brother has sucked
on for a while and then passed over to you, after which you keep sucking on
it because you’re convinced it really is exploding new tastes in your mouth
every few minutes, as the wrapper claims.

Rocky Horror
was a stage musical before it became a cult movie, and the nature of the
cult was always decidedly theatrical, with spectators dressing up like the film’s
characters, memorizing the script and shouting obscene ad-lib retorts at the
screen. There was, then, some reason to believe that reviving the musical might
be worthwhile, beyond the fact that the first generation of kids who saw the
film dozens of times can now afford to be milked at Broadway prices. Unfortunately,
at the preview I attended, all the supposedly impromptu give-and-take with the
live actors was as pre-scripted as the moviegoers’ stale quips. People
waved flashlights and newspapers and threw water and confetti from the $10 prop
bags they’d bought in the lobby, and seemed happy to participate that way,
but the majority of the heckles clearly came from actors planted in the audience,
and the show’s pace and routine were never in any real danger of interruption.
The production, in other words, for all its glitzy new adornment and splendid
execution, is as essentially prefabricated and predictable as the celluloid-driven
experience it’s now inevitably copying.

In case you
tuned in late, Rocky Horror is about the sudden, shocking immersion of
a pencil-straight 1950s kid-couple, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, into the loose
sexual morality of the 1970s, rendered spuriously decadent by an extravagant
admixture of rock ’n’ roll, comic-book, sci-fi and horror movie simulacra.
After their car breaks down, the virginal Brad (Jarrod Emick) and Janet (Alice
Ripley) seek help at the secluded laboratory of the maniacal Dr. Frank ’N’
Furter, a transvestite-spy from the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania,
who proceeds to seduce them both. Meanwhile they witness the "birth"
of the doctor’s lab-created boy-toy, Rocky (Sebastian LeCause), the chainsaw-murder
of a fat biker named Eddie (Lea Delaria), and various other kinky shenanigans
by the incestuous brother-sister cronies Riff Raff (Raul Esparza) and Magenta
(Daphne Rubin-Vega). And in the end, everything is brought to half-baked climax
and conclusion by the unexpected visit of Eddie’s uncle, a crypto-Nazi
professor in a wheelchair (Delaria), and a rebellion by Riff Raff and Magenta.

There isn’t
really any fear or shock to the material anymore (if there ever was), and Ashley
crucially understood that the key to keeping the whole sweat-soaked air bubble
aloft is thus to maintain a nearly frenzied tempo for the entire two hours.
From the opening number, then, loosed like twin cannon shots by straight and
gay sex objects in identical usherette costumes (Rubin-Vega–the original
Mimi from Rent–paired with a shaved-head Joan Jett), to Hewitt’s
clamorous and flamboyant entrance in a glittering, phallic dumbwaiter-cum-spaceship,
to the reprise of "The Time Warp" added to the curtain call in response
to manufactured audience demand, the stage and its occupants swirl, spasm, lurch,
flash and recoil to the point where it’s unimaginable anyone could bear
any more. I tip my hat to set designer David Rockwell, who came up with numerous
visual paroxysms to match (an exploding proscenium, fold-away movie seats with
manikins, a beaker-bedecked catwalk that descends to form a sort of stage girdle)
in the most awkwardly constructed theater in New York.

Circle in the
Square, 1633 Broadway (50th St.), 239-6200, through Feb.25.

I won’t
try to divine what happened here. Critics are almost always wrong when they
try to guess in such circumstances without any inside scoop. It is bizarre,
though, to see an actor as smart and capable as Emery leisurely savoring glib
lines like, "Have you taken up transvestism? I’d no idea our marriage
teetered on the edge of fashion," as if she were dwelling on holy writ.
And it’s beyond comprehension how anyone as seasoned and resourceful as
Frechette, playing the out-of-control psychiatrist and government inspector
Dr. Rance, could sit motionless like a lump on a couch, opposite another motionless
actor, during the entirety of his pretentious disquisitions. In this or any
other farce, it should simply never occur to the audience to ask, say, why one
character doesn’t recognize another beneath a flimsy disguise, or why that
character agreed to disguise himself in the first place; such questions assert
themselves in this production all the time.

Acting and
directing aside, though, I’m saddened to discover that Butler, the
irreverent Orton’s greatest play, is also showing its age a bit these days.
The plot is set in motion by Dr. Prentice’s attempt to lie his way out
of being caught misbehaving with his new secretary, after first his wife and
then Dr. Rance barge into his seedy office. Everything snowballs from there,
with Rance declaring the secretary insane and jumping to dozens of other outrageous
conclusions based on his irrational mania for rational explanation and categorization.
The ideas behind this are still current and will no doubt remain so until we’re
all as dead as Orton and the irrational lover who murdered him. The problem
is that the satire’s immediate targets–the godlike arrogance of doctors
and the controlling patriarchal conceits of husbands, heads of state and males
in general–have altered a lot in three and a half decades. They still exist
but we no longer quake before them.

There are enough
deathless gems in Butler to keep it stageworthy well into posterity,
I suspect, given the right directorial adjustments to changing mores. (How many
plays, after all, can boast climaxes involving the miraculous retrieval of the
late Sir Winston Churchill’s missing member?) There’s no point in
even contemplating such adjustments, though, if you haven’t the basic,
furious knack of doing farce.

Theater at
St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 279-4200,
through Dec 10.

Crave
is apparently composed of parallel monologues by lonely, self-scrutinizing characters,
two male and two female, that only occasionally relate to one another, and these
are spoken at Axis by Brian Barnhart, David Guion, Kristin DiSpaltro and Deborah
Harry (of Blondie). I say "apparently" because it’s not entirely
clear that each of the voices is only one character, or that any of the characters
in fact knows any of the others. The actors stand beside one another on a dark
stage with eerie gobo patterns and speak with minimal movement and without interacting
as a dozen video monitors affixed to the ceiling show them in various circumstances,
sometimes restless and alone at home or in a bar, alone or interacting with
each other.

All this is
a puzzle one might be tempted to figure out if the script were as compelling
and original as the preshow journalism reported. As it happens, though, it is
full of whiny, sophomoric triteness ("My laughter is a bubble of despair"),
self-piteous cliches ("You can only kill yourself if you’re not already
dead"), Hallmark sentimentality ("I want to play hide-and-seek and
give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes") and pseudo-profound
word juxtapositions ("Yes. No. Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes")–all of
which use up one’s patience well before the final blackout. Let’s
hope Kane’s other plays bear out her reputation a little better than this
one.

Axis Theater,
1 Sheridan Square (7th Ave. S. & W. 4th St.), 807-9300, through Dec. 23.

Alice in
Bed By
Susan Sontag

The O’Neill and Williams
plays that made van Hove notorious in New York, let’s remember, were by
dead canonical authors, classics long in public circulation that were due for
radical freshening. Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed is a first play
that has never been seen in New York before. It’s extremely hard to see
the point of any premiere production that, in the name of free creativity and
open-minded collaboration, renders large swathes of a drama’s content incomprehensible.
As it happens, I have read Alice in Bed and seen it twice before–in
the 1993 world premiere in Berlin, directed by Robert Wilson, and the 1996 American
premiere in Cambridge, MA, directed by Bob McGrath. For more than half of van
Hove’s 75-minute staging, however, even I had no idea what was going on.

Sontag’s protagonist
is a conflation of two 19th-century Alices: the one invented by Lewis Carroll
who goes to Wonderland and the real-life Alice James, the brilliant and depressive
sister of William and Henry James, who became a neurasthenic invalid, rarely
left her bed and died young and unfulfilled, leaving a remarkable diary that
was published posthumously. The play thus riffs freely on fictional and historical
material, fusing a precocious child with a stunted adult, an explorer with a
recluse, and an external with an internal adventurer, in an elaborate meditation
on the relationship of female social identity to imagination and creative will.

With Alice planted center
stage in her bed most of the time, the action careens from realism with absurd
accents (clownish men named M1 and M2 deposit piles of mattresses on her, for
instance) to fantasy flashback (she visits her father, asks for permission to
kill herself and then unscrews and attacks his wooden leg) to compensatory imaginative
socializing (as in a tea party she hosts for Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson,
Kundry from Parsifal and Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, from Giselle).
All this and more adds up to a challenging puzzle in its own right, apart from
any interpretive staging decisions, which is why Robert Wilson’s quietly
modest approach (done on a sand floor with a plain cyclorama and only a few
simple wood-slat constructions as furniture) remains the most effective I’ve
seen, despite the ineptitude of its comedy and its irritatingly ponderous music.

Van Hove’s main conceit
is to transform the 12-character play into a two-hander–more accurately,
into a solo piece with one other live actor added near the end. Joan MacIntosh
(whose astonishing energy and spitfire emotional transformations were key to
the success of More Stately Mansions) presides as Alice, perched center
stage almost the entire time on a sort of surreal dentist’s chair molded
to the back of her body, as the other characters "visit" her in the
form of video images. There are no mattresses or clownish servants. She is surrounded
by a forest of suspended objects that she occasionally manipulates and that
float up and down when she sleeps (teapots, numerals, books, colored squares,
a leg), as well as by sleek metal rods rising from the floor and a gauze canopy
that descends to form a circular projection screen (design by Jan Versweyveld).

For about 10 or 15 minutes,
the pleasure of looking at this remarkable environment is admittedly enormous.
With her ghostly pallid face and huge round eyes, MacIntosh leaps straightaway
into a series of Jekyll-and-Hyde character switches that make it great fun to
think about the diminutive world she has created in her isolation. Now she is
a timid and mousy invalid, in the next breath a sadistic nurse demanding that
the invalid get up, then again the shy girl answering back. Unfortunately, this
solipsism turns out to be the only idea worthy of the name in the production–everything
and everyone around her is really just a figment of her brain. It quickly becomes
clear that van Hove has nothing else substantial in his pocket.

Her visit with her father,
for instance, is an encounter with a large black-and-white image of a man’s
face upstage whose mouth only occasionally moves in synchrony with his words
(sometimes it moves in slow motion, other times not at all, other times while
superimposed on an image of her face). Then essentially the same disorienting
techniques are used in triplicate and in color for the filmed visit of her brother
Henry (whom she calls Harry), utterly obscuring the emotional and psychological
content of the meeting (which Sontag endowed with a strangely tender passive-aggression
on both the characters’ parts). The self-important techno-gimmickry is
multiplied still further in the tea-party scene, making it all but impossible
for the audience to know who anyone is, much less what they’re talking
about: unidentifiable pretty people and images just spin about like patterns
in a kaleidoscope while MacIntosh tosses her head. And by the time Alice starts
sing-speaking and then chanting her words in the middle of a long monologue
describing an imaginary trip to Rome, van Hove seems to have abdicated entirely,
confessing his cluelessness in the face of a text that holds little interest
for him.

That’s probably an
exaggeration, but only a slight one. The beginning and end of the play clearly
interest him, allowing him to strike his single note boldly and then tease us
by suggesting it may have been a false one. In the penultimate scene, a preternaturally
perceptive, Shavian burglar enters, played by Jorre Vandenbussche, and draws
Alice temporarily out of her shell–a very touching episode given intense
sensuality by both actors. Too bad the audience is thoroughly annoyed and exhausted
by that point.

Which brings me back to
the question of what the point of the production might be. Sontag recently called
van Hove "one of the most important living directors," so I take it
she’s simply happy to give him her text and watch him work, whatever he
comes up with. She is known to take an enlightened, laissez-faire attitude toward
authorial authority, considering plays in production the property of their directors
and brushing off bad productions as incentives for other directors to do better.
Perhaps, then, under the circumstances, the only important uncertainty is whether
a decent director could conceivably come away from this production curious enough
about the text to want to do it again at all.

Cobb
By Lee
Blessing

There are three Ty Cobbs
on the stage, at three different ages, all ostensibly dead and looking back
on their common life as both a biographical narrative strategy and as part of
an effort to reassure themselves about that biography’s "greatness."
Acted with magnificent angry energy by Michael Cullen, Matthew Mabe and Michael
Sabatino, they argue back and forth about the proper measure of greatness while
describing events that are sometimes so violent and disgusting that their depiction
would surely have pulled the play into obscenity. The moment when they all pull
guns on each other is a sardonic gem that will stick in my memory for a long
time.

Also present is Oscar Charleston,
the great Negro League player known as the Black Cobb (acted with suave exaggerated
confidence by Clark Jackson), against whom Cobb himself avoided playing, the
drama suggests, giving him yet one more reason to doubt his true greatness after
death. Here as well, Blessing avoided the obvious pitfall, sanctimoniousness,
by dint of sheer intelligence (what Charleston says is always interesting in
its own right, never merely bait for Cobb), aided by the first-rate acting.
Joe Brancato’s production is quick (75 minutes), smooth, stubby, gruff
and abrasive all at once, just like its subject.