So allow me to prognosticate. Coraline, the Off-Broadway musical based on Neil Gaiman’s children’s-book-turned-graphic-novel-turned-stop-action-film-turned-video-game, is surefire money in the bank for its producers, the not-for-profit MCC Theater and the commercially minded True Love Productions.

Coraline, playing to packed previews since May 6, opens June 1 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, riding a wave of positive press. Ticket demand has been so strong that even before the aforementioned goblins write their reviews, the closing has been extended to July 5.
Beyond the fantastical, frightening tale of a brave girl who locates a parallel universe on the other side of a door in her bleak, love-starved home, Coraline is also a well-hedged marketing bet. First among equals in its audience base are the hordes of horror hellions who have tracked Coraline’s every permutation.

Then there’s Coraline’s script, adapted with Gaiman’s blessing by David Greenspan, an Obie-winning actor-playwright who is a cult hero himself among downtown dramacrats. There’s also Leigh Silverman—the director who rocketed to fame helming Well, the Lisa Kron play that catapulted to Broadway from Off-Broadway in 2006, landing a Tony nomination for Coraline’s fourth asset: Jayne Houdyshell, the buoyant, jocund, 50-ish actress who is playing the titular 9-year-old.

But the fifth and most crucial element of the Coraline equation is its songs, composed by iconoclast composer-lyricist Stephin Merritt. With his untrained and haunting burr of a voice (even when he speaks), he’s best known for fronting the bands Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies and Future Bible Heroes. He is also an oddly repellent fellow. Several years ago, Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker tried branding him a racist, citing Merritt’s criticism of hip-hop; articles written earlier this decade that seemed indifferent to African-American artists and, finally, a conference at which Merritt called “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” (from the inarguably racist Disney film Song of the South) a “great song.”

Though Merritt is dry as a Noel Coward putdown and diminutive (he is five-foot-three), there’s little diminuendo about him. “I’m regularly upset by what people write about me,” he tells me, “especially when it’s intended as a compliment. I got so frustrated being called a ‘short, gay, indie rocker’ I gave up reading what people write.” Dead silence, then a rumble. “And what’s an ‘indie rocker’? And short—compared to whom? How is gay anyone’s business who isn’t going to be intimate with me? Why is that something you want to read in the first sentence? What people write in characterizing me isn’t what I am representing to the world.” He won’t be reading this article.

Luring Merritt to talk at all is a task worthy of brave Coraline, who must battle her Other Mother—played by Greenspan, who is known for assuming gender-bending roles—to finish the tale. Instructed to call Merritt at a certain time, he says he is busy. A gentle, benign, but firm “click” follows. Instructed to call at another time, Merritt, more Splenda now than splenetic, asks for five more minutes before the interview could begin. Pithy, staccato two- and three-word answers aren’t foreign to him.

Just as you either dig the Gothic archness of Merritt’s persona or you don’t, so it goes with his songs. Facile critics tag them as gloomy, but that is indeed facile. Instead, the trade they ply is luscious and brittle irony; again and again in his lyrics he returns to warm, almost romantic motifs—moon, eyes, rain. Though often rendered by ukulele, Merritt’s melodies are the genetic kin of folk music, drizzled with the salty tears of postmodern harmonies. (Instruments in Coraline are all keyboards, including one “tempered” to distort sound.)

For Coraline, Merritt’s main mission was to musicalize the girl’s grim, Gorey-esque world. Yet unlike Greenspan—whose describes his adaptation as “conflating and compressing” Gaiman’s novella—Merritt’s songs aren’t crushed with narrative guilt. “I see a tension between forces, fulfilling the immediate narrative and talking about the world in a way so it’s worthwhile for the audience,” he says in what for him passes as an expansive mood. “I wouldn’t want to do a hyperrealist play in which a character sings, ‘Gee, I have to go to the bathroom/ What a very nice bathroom/ Thank heaven I went to the bathroom.’ I prefer my songs outside narrative. Too much slavish attention to propelling narrative leaves too little space for the audience. How many Rodgers and Hammerstein love duets actually propel narrative? Like, one percent?”

Greenspan’s personality avoids such sarcastic riffs. “Stephin is a wonderfully cheerful person to work with, actually,” he says, offering possibly the best adverbial positioning in the entire history of English grammar. “He’s also hardworking, diligent and productive, and the first to laugh at things in rehearsal.” Opposites, it seems, attract: While Merritt may adore shivering bare-assed in windswept emotional corners, Greenspan’s preferred amusement park is not a mope factory. “Still,” he says, “we approached this material because it’s macabre and I think we both enjoy some of the spooky. Coraline’s supernatural element is quite enjoyable. Plus, the novel is witty to start with. It wasn’t like we were doing some piece on genocide.”

>Coraline
Through July 5, Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St. (betw. Bedford & Bleecker Sts.), 212-239-6200; times vary, $25-$75

Some people in journalism—and everyone in academia—consider it lame to mention Wikipedia. I hope I’ll be forgiven in this instance, as the word “disambiguation,” which springs up often on the site and refers to the process by which, say, a computer distinguishes between multiple meanings of the same word by dint of context and syntax, kept coming to mind during Telephone, the new play by poet Ariana Reines produced by the Foundry Theatre.

Directed with a teasing, mildly provocative hand by Ken Rus Schmoll, the play is inspired by Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book:Technology, Schizophrenia and Electric Speech, a philosophical inquiry into how wire communication disorients and reorients the user. Reines’ conceit is a meditative triptych probing how the same object, the telephone, can be defined differently through time— thus, “disambiguation.”

It begins with Alexander Graham Bell (Gibson Frazier) and Thomas A.Watson (Matthew Dellapina) appearing in a tableau redolent of the final, frightening moment of a horror film.Their dialogue is circular, and it quickly tests the mettle of the audience as Bell quizzes Watson as to the exact sequence of events that led to the fateful moment the telephone was proven to work.Their banter is jocular and scholarly, but it also has a tone that feels menacing, as if there’s something deeply disconcerting operating beneath it.Together the characters boast a music-hall quality: You expect some top-hat-and-cane action, a little soft-shoe or perhaps a thrilling barbershop trio before their stint on stage is complete.

Notably, Marsha Ginsberg’s set design consists entirely of a freestanding wall with a door. On the wall is the drawing of an owl— nice metaphorical touch—and what we are to believe was the first telephone.To give the dialogue energy and thrust, Schmoll directs Frazier and Dellapina to amble around the wall but at all times seemingly arbitrarily and without motivation; it’s as if we are to be prevented from developing a concrete sense as to where we are or what may have called these dotty men back to the room where history was made. Indeed, the actors are ordered, together or separately, to vanish behind the wall entirely for brief periods, as if they’re in a constant state of suspended inanimation. A dull, throbbing dramatic entropy descends as Bell and Watson indulge in cant—or was it Kant? But at least their chatter has a theme, a thread. In the darkness between the first and second scene, the wall rises.When the lights return, Miss St. (Birgit Huppuch)—yes, the same curious schizophrenic treated by Carl

Jung, who believed she had a telephone inside of her—is standing atop the table where the mockup telephone had been, and now Bell and Watson have gone behind the wall for good.What follows now is a monologue of colossal proportions: 20 minutes, if I had to make a guess, although it felt like 30 and might easily have been 15.What Miss St. says is genuinely unremarkable but for the fact that it’s a fugue for tin cans and a string. Just imagine everything a late 19th-century telephone operator might have heard in her ear during a month of work, reorganized and laid out as an unceasing assault of verbiage.

Huppuch, just to make it clear, indeed had to memorize this barrage of blather, so that bravura fear is what the scene finally becomes about. Bedecked in Carol Bailey’s Victorian-style dress (I’d have given her a bigger bustle), Huppuch intakes tremendous breaths like desperate, heaving gasps, and simply surrenders to the illogic of the words, managing to render moments of light and shade, of comedy and tragedy, inlaid with lots of irony as she just plows right through it. As an example of acting technique, it’s remarkably well done.The problem is that we intuit the point of the scene about midway through, and a language monsoon can only and enthrall and dowse you for only so long. Also, does the telephone make people schizophrenic? While we ponder that, it’s time for the capstone on the evening. Between the second and third scenes, the freestanding wall has been raised so it hangs perhaps seven or eight feet horizontally above the stage. In an example of lighting designer Tyler Micoleau’s inventiveness in the intimate confines of the Cherry Lane Theatre, the final scene consists of dimly lit tableaux that features all three of the actors. Overhead is heard a series of interlocking cell-phone calls in which people profess their love—or become highly needy about doing so. It is, at last, a 21st-century moment, with all the non-drama you can imagine.

Schmoll doesn’t ask the actors to gaze at their navels during this sequence, but given that we can only discern mild shadows and poses, we wouldn’t know it if they did. I’d offer an analysis of what the final scene means, but call waiting just clicked in. Bye.

> Telephone

Through Feb. 28. Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St. (betw. Bedford & Barrow Sts.), 212-989-2020; times vary, $30

Primary stages production of the whimsically named Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself) isn’t dedicated to Jack Foley, who forged many of the techniques for making sound on film, but it probably ought to be. Director Lisa Peterson has staged the play, first mounted at California’s South Coast Repertory and later at Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre, as a complete immersion into the meta-theatrical, and to thoroughly engaging effect.

The play by Donald Margulies (author of Sight Unseen and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Dinner with Friends) isn’t a watershed event; it’s more a comic bouffe than a reach for Wagnerian heights. But it’s a tasty truffle from an inventive dramatist gifted at sniffing around. Commissioned to write something for South Coast Rep’s series for young audiences, Margulies happened upon the historical fluke that was de Rougemont—his real name was Henri Louis Grin—and immediately realized it’s seriocomic potential.

Born in 1847, Grin spent his first halfcentury quite unremarkably, as a valet and butler for the upper classes. Supposedly, when he was 16, the actress Fanny Kemble, scion of a great theatrical family, hired him to be her footman.This allowed Grin, who was Swiss, to perfect his English and to travel the world. Much later, Grin acquired a vessel for pearl harvesting that was said to be lost at sea. It was really a half-truth—but true enough that subsequent events provided Grin with all the ingredients he needed to achieve fame.

In 1898, Grin reappeared in Britain and began publishing a series of autographical tales so outlandish they gripped the imagination of a gullible public. Some narratives followed his pearling expeditions; others detailed the 30odd years Grin claimed to have communed among the Aborigines in the Australian outback. Printing presses grew hotter as circulation steadily climbed, and soon Grin was a gentleman of note, the orb around which the average and the high-toned were equally itching to revolve. Alas for him, though, he was a late-Victorian Icarus, for cynics were soon so utterly piqued by him that they set about factchecking his yarns, finally debunking him entirely.The odd fellow whose finest achievement was abandoning his wife and children in deepest Oz was thus consigned to disgrace.

For Margulies, resurrecting the hoopla and revulsion that engulfed Grin is a means to an end: his initial stage direction calls for emphasizing the “very nature of artifice and storytelling” as much as the historical tale itself.This is why Grin serves as his own narrator and only calls himself de Rougemont.This is why Michael Countryman, one of our most beguiling journeyman actors, essays de Rougemont as a relentlessly good-natured and humble wizard of existence: an affable, relatable mortal to whom otherworldly scrapes, escapes and near-death experiences simply happened. And since it is dazzled by such an earnest, obliging man, the audience, whether versed or not in the truth of the matter, cannot help but invest in the fellow’s tootowering tales.What Margulies stirs in us is the same desire to believe in the fabulous—to believe in the fabulist, the infamous—that the Brits must have collectively experienced more than a century ago.

So we allow de Rougemont to regale us with memories of his childhood, ailing and under his mother’s care; we watch him, nave and clutching a volume of Shakespeare, embark on his first pearling expedition and find himself shipwrecked after a monumental typhoon.We observe him marooned but very much alive on a South Pacific island, accompanied by only his wits and his faithful dog; we follow him as he meets the frightened and aggressive Aborigines who eventually accept him into their fold, seeing in him something of a deity who finally marries one of their own. All of this narrative action is complemented by two actors—Donnetta Lavinia Grays and Jeremy Bobb—who race around the stage to play every secondary character, to hand off every prop, to provide every sound cue.

Were he standing solo atop the round, center-stage platform that represents most of Neil Patel’s set, Countryman would naturally be acclaimed for pulling off a tour de force. But it’s equally Grays and Bobb who foster the theatricality, the meta-theatricality, of Margulies and Peterson’s vision: Check out Grays as a sour captain of the pearling ship, and Bobb as the panting, trusty dog and an amused Queen Victoria. One could quibble with the occasional preciousness and cuteness of the piece, or one might express concerns over some stylistic inconsistencies that nearly send the play down the road to the Theater of the Ridiculous. But good storytelling is the goal, and the story, as de Rougemont might have said, must be told.

> Shipwrecked

Through Mar. 7, 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. (betw. Park & Madison Aves.), 212-279-4200; times vary, $20-$60.

Mary-Louise Parker, as Gabler, is picayune Something about Christopher Shinns adaptation of Hedda Gabler, the Henrik Ibsen play receiving a discordant revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is very 21st century stylistically.To the ear, the dialogue might seem 19th century, but notice the shorter sentences, the dollops of phrasing tighter than a tourniquet.

And heaven knows Mary-Louise Parker’s Hedda—a role often called the female Hamlet—is emotionally bleeding, connected to her vitriol in a very contemporary way. Just one thing stops all this from working: Henrik Ibsen.

As director Ian Rickson surely knows in the wake of this revival, Hedda Gabler is a late 19th-century play best realized with an early 20th-century dramaturgy in mind.To elaborate on this, consider the play’s events.

Hedda, a general’s daughter, is extremely spoiled and petulant. Ibsen, despite creating a razor-sharp character, only hints as to why this is. For the actress playing Hedda, the challenge is to color in the lines, to drop clues as to what makes her such a bitch.

Hedda only married a bland academic, Jorgen Tesman (a serviceable Michael Cerveris), whom she does not love, to toy with him.When Tesman’s erstwhile academic rival, Eljert Lvborg (a keen Paul Sparks), arrives, Hedda is orgasmic at the idea of making mischief, wedging herself between Eljert and her former schoolmate, earnest Thea Elvsted (a spasmodic Ana Reeder).

Were Hedda less enigmatic, Ibsen’s plot would make the play a potboiler. Eljert, for example, a now-dry alcoholic, has written a manuscript of such accomplishment, assisted by Thea, that it threatens Jorgen’s academic future. Not for Jorgen but simply for fun, Hedda taunts him with drink.When Judge Brack (a coy and clever Peter Stormare), who lusts after Hedda, throws a party attended by Eljert and Jorgen, Eljert falls off the wagon, visits a whorehouse and loses the manuscript.

Or so he thinks. Jorgen, busy with his Aunt Juliane (a stolid Helen Carey) and another aunt near death, finds the manuscript and leaves it with Hedda, thinking it secure.When Eljert visits, tearfully confessing he’s lost the manuscript, Hedda doesn’t hand it to him, she hands him a pistol and imbues him with every reason to do with it what comes unnaturally.

So we’re really talking about a mammoth she-bitch, and Parker’s conceit is to make Hedda an overripe nubile from Beverly Hills 90210: overindulged, sophomoric and soporific. It’s an error to play her without connecting Ibsen’s pre-feminist dots; to roll her eyes to indicate disgust in lieu of unearthing what makes a well-to-do lady lope like a loon. Hedda may hate the world, but Parker’s bag of tics is anachronistic, with double takes worthy of a Mike Nichols comedy and more mugging than a night in South Central Los Angeles.

Something about the rest of the cast is alluring but alienating.While Cerveris, as noted, makes a decent Jorgen, and has invested his performance with the kind of naturalism we associate with Ibsen and his ilk, it is jarring how Lois Markle, as the maid Berte, is all bulgy eyes and nervy-voiced, as if this was an Agatha Christie mystery. Reeder is skittish and ultimately, as the play ends, a sad figure, but Ivana Primorac’s hair design made her more Little Bo Peepish than sheepish. P.J. Harvey’s music was luxurious and louche, only amplifying that everything about this revival seems unintegrated.

Hedda Gabler opens with Parker bottomless on a sofa upstage. She’s mooning the audience, mooning the world, mooning the society that made her miserable. From an Ibsen viewpoint, it’s an unwise crack.

–
Hedda Gabler
Through Mar. 28, American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.), 212-719-9393; times vary, $66.50-$111.50.

By 1960, when The American Plan mostly occurs, Eva, who escaped Hitler’s Germany, has opted for a variation on the assimilation standard of many postwar Jews: She summers in the Catskills, but in her own home, not at the Concord, the Nevele or Grossinger’s. Evoked wispily by Jonathan Fensom’s scenic design, Eva’s home sits across a lake from one such hotel; it’s by swimming across such a lake that a squarejawed Adonis, Nick Lockridge, played by the enviably cheekboned Kieran Champion, arrives at the dock.There he meets Lily, Eva’s striking daughter played by Lily Rabe, but their dialogue is less cutesy than weird.

From Lily’s opening line to her role in the play’s sad, jarring ending 10 years later, suffice it to say that calling Lily neurotic is like calling Charles Manson disturbed. Lily says she suffers in agony under Eva’s smothering thumb; she’ll inherit a vast fortune on her 21st birthday; that the story behind her father’s death may not comport with what her mother wants others to believe. Or does it? Each character— save Eva’s maid Olivia, in a sublime, subliminal performance by Brenda Pressley—is and is not what they represent themselves to be. Nick is a correspondent for Time—or is he? The fruits of Eva’s investigation of him, in a brusque scene, suggests otherwise.Then again, what do we know of Eva? What do we believe when it comes to Eva’s reasons for preserving the blossoming union between her precious wallflower with a history of rebellion and this apparently well-bred star of the dance? In Act 2, Gil Harbison—handsome as Nick, but more cunning, courtesy of Austin Lysy—arrives.The result is that questions swirl once more around Nick, especially regarding the back-story he’d have Lily believe.

Greenberg’s title refers to the all-inclusive deals those Catskills hotels offered its guests, but in reality it’s a euphemism for the penchant of Americans to invent and reinvent ourselves, to keep a healthy, tender distance from the truth.

But here, too, Greenberg’s characters serve dual functions: to entertain and to distract. That’s why it’s not hard to be seduced by, for example, Ruehl’s pitch-perfect accent or how Grindley implies in his staging that something other than an employer-employee relationship may exist between Eva and Olivia.This is a play that telegraphs its twists if you know how to read the code:The revelation that Nick and Gil are also more than well-mannered, divine looking WASPs meandering through this Jewish jungle is detectible a mile away. It’s the way Gil acts on their secrets, history and truth that sustains us, not the story itself.

Indeed, the holes in the play and the mystifyingly staged final scene aside, the critical mistake of this revival—and it pains me to say it—is the miscast Rabe. As Lily, she shoulders a lightning-rod quality that keeps your eyes on her throughout the night, but the play requires an undercurrent of Jewishness that one would naturally expect of Eva’s child, and Rabe’s voice, for one thing, is debutante-atthe-club, not Deborah-at-the-shul. And she looks quite beautiful, but more like someone liable to be Nick’s sister, not a Semitic goddess with a family from hell.

> The American Plan

Through Mar. 15. Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. (betw. Broadway & Eighth Ave.), 212-239-6200; times vary, $56.50-$96.50.

Nick Campion and Lily Rabe inManhattan Theatre Club’s revival of The American Plan.

And The Cherry Orchard is certainly an auspicious start (The Winter’s Tale opens Feb. 20), a play yet again unveiled as a comedy with tragic tints, as Chekhov asserted. Mendes over-imposes his directorial will on the play, however, and so the balance is off. Had he not bullied the play so, its tragic currents would no doubt have risen organically to the surface.

The last 15 minutes of the play, when Mendes’ ideas clash with the actors’ impeccable impulses, is as painful as it is powerful.

This is one of those situations in which you want to the actors to know how stunning they are before confessing how much the evening misfires. As Ranevskaya, a landowner with hardly a ruble, Cusack is all delusion and grandeur, but not insane. So when Mendes renders a crucial Act 1 moment (she and Gaev, her brother, played by Paul Jesson, hear music that no one hears) like a sequence from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the result is maddening. Still, when Mendes oversteps, Tom Stoppard’s superb adaptation is there to root us back in Chekhov, although this version is very much his own as well. Ranevskaya, who has been abroad for five years, is so broke that her only real option— offered by the merchant Lopakhin, played cathartically by Beale—is to auction off the estate, divide it into parcels and chop down the family’s cherry orchard so summertime cottages may be built. Her clear unwillingness to face facts, very different from being insane, also infects the play’s other characters, including those whose secondary subplots represented Chekhov’s lighter touches.

In lesser presentations of the play, Lopakhin can be so tortured by the memory of his forefathers as serfs to Ranevskaya’s ancestors that when he announces that it is he who has bought the estate, The Cherry Orchard turns crass as a revenge play. Not so here: Beale is guilt-ridden, not haunted, by his fate and the effect is galvanizing. It’s left unexplored by the dialogue, but one terrific move on Mendes’ part is to have Lopakhin express his affection for Ranevskaya in a way that Chekhov likely never intended.

As Varya, Hall plays against type— homely—as Ranevskaya’s adopted daughter, hopelessly in love with Lopakhin. Here, too, Mendes’ scene overstretching isn’t bad:When Lopakhin tries to ask Varya for her hand, the timing is perfection and the soul of what this transcontinental theatrical experiment ought to be. As the perpetual student Trofimov, Hawke mimics his work in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia—voicing the intelligentsia’s ideas and spooking the bourgeoisie. As young manservant Yasha, Hamilton is the opposite—a cocksure buck who hates all things Russian. And as elderly Firs, a manservant born to serfdom and pining for it, Easton’s matchless gifts relegate Mendes’ missteps to what they really are: the fanciful excesses of a privileged career.

–
The Cherry Orchard
Through Mar. 28. BAM Harvey, 651 Fulton St. (at Rockwell Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; times vary, $36.50-126.50

It was widely reported that when Christian Hoff, the Tony-winner first cast as Joey in this revival, left the show due to a foot injury—or so goes the party line— Roundabout promoted a 27-year-old understudy, Matthew Risch, to the title role.This is in the long tradition of understudies getting their big break, and as always it’s the actor’s moment to sink or swim. Risch, however, bobs. He may dance angelically and sing swell, he may hawk beady eyes and raise smirky smiles, but Risch’s Joey isn’t the snake charmer that Pal Joey demands. He’s still learning the flute.

How nifty that Pal Joey also manages to be one of the most chic enterprises Roundabout has mounted in a long time.There’s an actual orchestra at Studio 54! And Paul Gemignani’s musical direction of the score, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, illustrates what an incandescent, melodic knockout it remains.

Risch also receives the kind of thespian support that underscores the generosity of the theater.Watch Stockard Channing as Vera Simpson, the wealthy older society dame who tethers Joey to her bosom like a ruby on a brooch. Her spot-on acting—the book has been wittily redone by Richard Greenberg, based on the original by John O’Hara, who penned the stories in The New Yorker that inspired the show—proves that this stage veteran’s gifts continue to radiate.

Channing’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” one of Pal Joey’s indelible ballads, equally embraces brass and rue, a glass of bitters on the eve of a love hangover.

To the degree Joey has one, his heart is never uncleaved; so the parallel love story involving him and shop-girl Linda English, nicely essayed by Jenny Fellner, gives Pal Joey its human touch. Like most else about his staging of this revival, director Joe Mantello arranges their scenes cleverly. Joey and Linda’s first duet, “I Could Write a Book,” not only sharpens their characters but also allows Hart’s lyrics to pop and crackle.

I could kvell over other elements—William Ivey Long’s subversively comic costumes, some sublime Graciela Daniele choreography.

But if Risch represents one end of the spectrum, Martha Plimpton—in the role of Gladys, the aging, sophistication-challenged showgirl—represents the other. Sassy, pissy Gladys is powered with enough enmity toward Joey to light up Cleveland.Their back story, after all, is the plot point that brings Pal Joey, which first opened on Broadway back in 1940, to its uncharacteristically cloudy end.

Plimpton’s big song is “Zip,” one of the best strip songs ever written, a punny wordfest that recalls the era when Gypsy Rose Lee stood unsheathed as queen of the vaudeville ecdysiasts.When Plimpton presses her sultry, gimlet-flavored alto into service, Pal Joey stops cold as she turns up the atmosphere into flames.That’s how it’s done, Mr. Risch— teaming technique with the totally tantalizing.

The flute is in your hands.The snake awaits.

–
Pal Joey
Through Mar. 1. Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.); times vary, $36.50-126.50

Such are the metaphors under girding Becky Shaw, the scorching, satisfying Gina Gionfriddo comedy that was commissioned by and premiered last year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and now is being re-mounted Off-Broadway by Second Stage Theatre. —

Continuing with the china shop metaphor, the play’s breakables are an elegant four-piece set needing a pair of scenes to be arranged. Suzanna (Emily Bergl) is the heartbroken daughter of Susan (Kelly Bishop), an ineffectual widow confronted by her honorary son, the caustic, unfeeling Max (David Wilson Barnes), about the family’s fast-fading finances and her late husband’s sexual peccadilloes. Although Suzanna and Max comport themselves like siblings (how Max came into the family is revealed superbly later on), he deeply loves Suzanna, despite some obvious intimacy issues. The scene ends with more of his withering sarcasm and the sexual consummation of their relationship.

During the dialogue leading to that moment, Max instructed Suzanna to quit grieving. It’s “instructed” because Max never suggests: as dynamically limned by Barnes, he barks, sneers and jeers, verbally abusing anyone defying him. So when we learn in the next scene that Suzanna heeded Max’s advice—meeting and marrying Andrew (Thomas Sadowski), a crunchy-granola male feminist and aspiring novelist, following a whirlwind courtship—it’s unsurprising. But it’s the fury and reeking disappointment within Max, next to be stoked by the title character, which shatters everything.

For now Gionfriddo’s play really begins. Suzanna and Andrew fix Max up with Becky Shaw (Annie Parisse), a pert and pretty admin from Andrew’s job without a car, money or prospects. If her name recalls Becky Sharp, the social-climbing lass from William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, who leaves a destructive trail among the morally dubious well to do, the coincidence is not coincidental. On their date, Max and Becky were robbed at gunpoint, had hotel-room sex and then Max offered Becky cash for her to leave.

Traumatized on multiple levels, Becky pesters Max for some kind of closure, but he characteristically resists. Andrew now steps in to console Becky, offering her the same solace he once gave Suzanna in her grief. Naturally, this alienates Suzanna, secretly elating Max.

Amid some of the most delightfully acid bickering since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Gionfriddo later stirs in Susan—whose unseen young lover is fostering yet more chaos—and soon it seems that the onus is on Becky for all the broken porcelain.

But the playwright, most of the actors and director Peter DuBois have other ideas—that’s why Becky Shaw may be a tapestry of clashing classes yet never feels didactic.

Barnes, Sadowski and Parisse were all in the Louisville run, and their work has grown more shaded and secure. Barnes is less shrill, thankfully, but just as savage—a shocking, rock-solid performance. Riding herd upon full lips and doey eyes, Sadowski is simpering and spineless but Gionfriddo has given Andrew a clearer character arc, so it’s never for naught. And what a tragicomic godsend Parisse is. With a voice like a bullet hitting glass and a svelte frame that undermines Becky’s loser-with-a-capital-L mentality, Parisse may act like a basket case but it’s beautiful one, with a latticework worth your investigation.

Dubois, Gionfriddo and casting director Mele Nagler are off their game in terms of Bergl and Bishop. Bergl’s close-cropped hair detracts from her character’s sensuality, but more than that, the actress was too often disconnected emotionally from her costars. Bishop won a Tony more than 30 years ago for creating the role of ice-queen Sheila in A Chorus Line, and at times you wondered if she was channeling her again. Still, there’s a late scene when Susan offers a flicker of warmth—enough, perhaps, to melt the icicles that have formed between these disintegrating nut jobs. But it’s too late, for the bull has left the store, destined for greener pastures.

Through Mar. 15, Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43rd St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.); times vary $70.

SOLID BUT ULTIMATELY forgettable playwrights need only create a few passable works to furnish us with a sense of who they are and why they write.

What distinguishes workmanlike scribes from great dramatists is that for the latter it takes many plays—a writing lifetime—for us to grasp their complete voice and vision.

The Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is one figure on the road to transcending the boxes into which we may too easily classify his work. In The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, both of which ran on Broadway, he served up a taste for blood-splattering savagery that proved cauterizing in an era in which little else fazed us.Were it not for a different kind of play like The Cripple of Inishmaan—McDonagh’s 1997 work currently being co-produced Off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theatre Company and Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company— we might pigeonhole him as one for whom gruesomeness is the holy grail. Like yet another McDonagh play—the Tony-winning The Beauty Queen of Leenane—Inishmaan allows us to consider him in multiple dimensions.

Here, McDonagh situates physical and emotional pain inside his central character, Billy, who Aaron Monaghan is portraying in one of those performances that acting students should catch at all costs. Billy is lame and deformed—an unfortunate fate in 1934 in the tiny, boring Irish town in which the play is set—but he doesn’t lack ambition, cunning or libido. Since birth, it seems, he’s been stuck inside the grim, gray grocery store run by adoptive aunts Kate and Eileen, played by Marie Mullen and Dearbhla Molloy, respectively, as old maids who’d shield Billy from the world rather than let him experience it. But experience it he must, so when Billy discovers that a documentary film crew is visiting nearby, he engages in an elaborate deception of those who ostensibly love him in order to try out for a role.To everyone’s astonishment, he’s successful (the play was inspired by the 1934 film Man of Aran); but that is not, in fact, the play’s point. Rather, it’s what occurs upon Billy’s return. Despite an Act II scene of cruel violence, director Garry Hynes’ staging is utterly masterful.

McDonagh’s gift with this play is to condemn the denizens of a town steeped in its provincialism while proudly parading everyone’s eccentricities. Local gossip Johnny- PateenMike is an abhorrent and blithering sleaze, but David Pearse plays him to sneering, sniveling heights. Helen, the local tomboy who Billy pines for, is delineated by Kerry Condon with abundant testosterone—watch for the scene with the eggs and prepare to squirm. Helen’s brother Bartley—casual dimwit, callow youth—is the keen consequence of Laurence Kinlan’s gentle character choices.

Andrew Connolly limns Babbybobby, a brooding boatman and widower who figures deeply, but unwittingly, into Billy’s scheme, with melancholy and menace. JohnnyPateen- Mike’s 90-year-old alcoholic mother, Mammy O’Dougal, is a dizzy brew offered by Patricia O’Connell. And John C.Vennema essays impervious Dr. McSharry with elegance.

But the star is McDonagh, who demonstrates with this 11-year-old play that human innards can serve as a metaphor, that he need not hurl chunks of literal gore into everything he writes. It’s not that he’s given up crafting drama from the injury man may inflict upon himself, but that we’re learning what he believes about the power of love, even if it’s contorted and backhanded. Inishmaan’s characters may not define love as we might, of course, but its there—under all the feckin’ cursing and, at the end, a tincture of Irish luck.

> The Cripple of Inishmaan

Through Mar. 1. Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-414-1377; times vary, $65.

Under the Radar Festival

Venue: The Public Theater

Dates: Jan. 7-Jan. 18

Head Honcho: Mark Russell

What He Does: “Basically I run around the world as much as I can and visit a lot of festivals. I even send some of my staff to see festivals and I look at a lot of DVDs. Very often the selection of a piece is from triangulation: someone sees something in Dublin and says it’s great, then so does this other person, then I watch the tape. It’s not my preferred way to program but it is one way it’s done.”

Early Favorite Show: Folk song freak out Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest

Dark Horse Show: The actors group therapy session of LIGA, 50% Reward & 50% Punishment

Obscure Pick for Production: An adaptation of the early Beckett novella First Love

Biggest Star Included: A cool, Korean adaptation of Georg Bchner’s superstar Woyzeck

Interesting Imports: Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First from the U.K.

Leave Mother Home For…: The sonic pseudonymity of Transition

Coil Festival

Venue: Performance Space 122

Dates: Jan. 9-Jan. 16

Head Honcho: Vallejo Gantner

What He Does: “When I arrived in New York I was looking at everything happening and trying to figure out how to give opportunities to companies whose work we’d presented who were also ready to tour. The APAP—Association of Performing Arts Presenters—conference is in January and it’s full of 10-minute showcases. I thought, well, this is silly—let’s create a concentrated festival at P.S. 122 that would attract international presenters and national presenters. So we just started doing it.”

Early Favorite Show: The American cultural paradiso Architecting

Dark Horse Show: Pirandello on ecstasy in the cinematic Welcome to Nowhere (Bullet Hole Road)

Obscure Pick for Production: The fucked-up family fun of Lewis Forever: Freak the Room

Biggest Star Included: An upending of Carl Th. Dreyer’s immortal 1928 film The Passion Project

Interesting Imports: Geisha from Israel

Leave Mother Home For…: The untruth-telling “original MILF” of Trash Warfare