In Kate Fodor’s world, managing editor at American Cattle & Swine Magazine Meena (Marin Hinkle) hides in the old-lady underwear section of Bon Ton to cry during her breaks. When drug giant Pharma launches a trial of a new workplace depression medication, Meena is desperate enough to prostrate herself to researcher Phil (Stephen Kunken) for a chance to be included. From there, it’s just a sip and a swallow until Phil and Meena are in love just long enough to make the complications that follow particularly sad.

Fodor has a firm grasp of how people grapple with depression. Meena is frozen in place, unable to leave her job and disgusted with her previous dreams of writing prose poetry. Lacking ambition and, frankly, hope, Meena treads water until the new medication suddenly gives her another chance. The pills are beside the point here; what Meena and everyone for whom she serves as a stand-in need is a glimmer of something on the other side of the dark cloud that hangs over her head.

If RX is ultimately juggling more pills than Fodor and director Ethan McSweeny can keep in the air (Marylouise Burke appears for a few scenes as an elderly woman in Bon Ton, who might as well have “Unknowing Cancer Victim” scrawled across her forehead), Hinkle and Kunken’s performances as faltering, stumbling lovers add a dash of melancholy romance amid the pointed jokes about big pharmaceutical companies and workplace ennui.

Hinkle craftily makes Meena a jittery bundle of nerves, someone who looks as fragile as she feels, thereby putting off everyone around her and exacerbating her depression. And Kunken, as the gallant and tentative Phil, navigates the broken heart subplot with aplomb, never resorting to romcom shorthand. As Meena and Phil’s co-workers, Michael Bakkensen, Paul Niebanck and Elizabeth Rich keep their comedic support fresh and grounded, shying away from playing the stereotypes of their roles.

RX is a comedy—and certainly the audience roared with laughter throughout—but Fodor has hit upon some painful truths about our workaholic culture, truths that aren’t blunted by medication. For anyone who’s ever worked a job they loathed, RX will ring a little too true.

RX
Through March 3, 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. (betw. Park & Madison Aves.), www.59e59.org; $65.

Our Town: When did you realize you had a book?
Cristina Alger: I went to a law firm in the city as a corporate attorney. I started writing it right around the time the book takes place, which is fall 2008. And I went in the morning of September 18, which is the morning that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and it was a really, really surreal day. By 9 a.m., all of us were in the conference room and they told us about the Lehman file and said, “We don’t know if our firm is going to be here next week.” And I was thinking, “This is a really monumental moment in U.S. history. What an interesting time, for better or worse, especially to be on Wall Street.”
I thought, why not try to create a family that’s a window into that time in New York? Once I had a family I liked, I started crafting the plot. But I worked for about a year. And eventually, when I sold it, I totally rewrote it! [Laughs]

Was it always in the back of your mind that you’d write a book?
I was an English major in college and I always wanted to write but I guess just for practical reasons, I didn’t think of it as a real job and I didn’t dare do it. I was pretty entrenched in my law firm and I think I needed a creative release and it was just the kind of book I thought would be fun to read and I didn’t see anything like it on the shelf.

I’m assuming there are some lightly fictionalized portraits of real people here?
A lot of people ask me that. You start drawing from so many sources and they kind of become people in their own right. I think one of the fun parts of Dominick Dunne’s books is that some of them are so thinly disguised, you wonder how anyone invited him to a dinner party again! But I wanted my characters to feel real, so I kind of took a panopoly of real people and out them in a blender. And everything that happened on Wall Street at the time was so heavily watched; if you just regurgitated the news, there’d be nothing there.

Well, according to the blurbs and reviews, you’re the new Dominick Dunne!
I think the funniest blurb to me is “The book is equal shades Bernie Madoff and Jay McInerney,” which we got before Jay McInerney blurbed it. But I was like, “Oh God, I hope Jay McInerney doesn’t read that blurb and go, ‘She’s not nearly as good as me, I’m retracting my blurb immediately!’”

Was it always a given that the book would be set on the Upper East Side?
I have no imagination, so I’m good at writing what I know. I think the family in the book would probably be best suited for the Upper East Side, so it’s a natural fit. And it’s fun for me. When I started this, it was just for my own entertainment, so writing about where I grew up and where I live now was fun, I got to look at things with fresh eyes. It was just kind of a natural thing.

So is there really an absurd doorknob, like the one the Darlings mock in the book?
Oh! I was just walking down memory lane, and I saw this townhouse with poodle topiaries and this really enormous doorknob. And everything was so picture perfect it almost looked like no one could possibly live there. There are always little details that you have some story behind, and you realize no one else will pick up on. But every now and then someone does and it makes you happy!

Leopold Lowe and Peter Brouwer in 's Lost on the Natchez Trace.'s Photo: Kim T. Sharpe.

Dutifully (if somewhat didactic), Buttram presents both sides of the situation. Malcolm only sold Tom and his wife and son at auction because he was drunk; Tom isn’t an angry black man, but a grieving family man who is desperate to know what became of his wife. But as they parry and thrust, Buttram’s basic premise is stretched to the breaking point to fill 90 minutes, mostly via Malcolm’s repeated and vehement denials. Since the play would be ultimately pointless if Malcolm wasn’t guilty of what Tom accused him of, his protestations are met with resigned sighs and checks of our watches before Buttram moves on.

And moves on she does, straight into Southern Gothic, matched by the evocative set design from Andrew Lu that recreates the Spanish moss trailing trees of Southern swampland via ingeniously twisted ropes. As the play turns darker, Buttram tosses in some truly vivid descriptions of what drove Tom away from the plantation—and it’s nothing you ever saw in Gone with the Wind.

Unfortunately, given the tiny Abingdon stage and the small scale of Buttram’s play, director Kate Bushman can only do so much with the script—especially since Malcolm’s wounded leg renders him mostly immobile. As Tom, Leopold Lowe moves around enough for them both, leaping over and onto the rope branches and occasionally bursting into song. Peter Brouwer’s performance as Malcolm is mostly rooted in his bushy eyebrows, and too often turns shrill during his endless denials. By the time we arrive at the play’s twist—which Bushman telegraphed early on—it’s pretty obvious that Buttram has brought a clearly marked map to bear on Lost on the Natchez Trace. Knowing we’re comfortably on our way from Point A to Point B may be soothing, but it also distinctly lacks the element of surprise.

Lost on the Natchez Trace
Through Feb. 26, Abingdon Theatre, 312 W. 36th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), www.abingdontheatre.org.

Angelica Page and Jeffrey Carlson in 's Psycho Therapy's

The implausibilities mount early and often here, from Dorian’s abrupt appearance in place of Philip at Lily’s first session with Nancy (who, as a therapist, is dealing with issues of her own) to Strausser’s sudden reluctance to follow the thread of farce that was woven into the script from its beginning. The mistaken identities are quickly cleared up, even as the three doors of Michael V. Moore’s sleekly multi-purpose set keep slamming, and that’s a major mistake; Strausser fills the void with some half-hearted stabs at psycho babble that explain nothing about these wealthy, bored people.

“A Park Avenue cat,” is how Dorian and Philips describe Lily, and as played by Angelica Page, she’s certainly a lithe creature, with a Marilyn Monroe wobble and a socialite’s sheltering sunglasses. As Dorian and Philip, Jeffrey Carlson and Laurence Lau contribute smarmy sex and stolid confusion, respectively, while Jan Leslie Harding does what she can with a shrink who is battling a fondness for chocolate. But it’s a symptom of the entire production (which lost its director during rehearsals and delayed its opening by a week) that when Page begins to cry, our immediate thought isn’t of empathy or even of sympathy. It’s of the sheer technique that Page is carelessly wasting on such trite material.

Psycho Therapy
Through Feb. 25, Cherry Lane, 38 Commerce St. (at Barrow St.), www.cherrylanetheatre.org; $66.

Among other art, Maier’s walls are lined with Gray’s Obie Award and a photo of him in a Wooster production with co-star Willem Dafoe, alongside the requisite sagging bookshelves that any self-respecting editor’s apartment must feature.

Aside from awards and photos, Gray’s presence can also be found in the writing desk perched next to a window overlooking a deck, a set of Cambodian masks picked up during the filming of The Killing Fields, a Roland Joffé vehicle about the Khmer Rouge regime, and a threadbare armchair owned by Gray’s grandmother.

Still boasting its original wood floors, now worn smooth and polished by over a century of traffic, Maier’s living room is a brick-walled, tin-ceilinged throwback to the days when windows were heavy and space was a right, not a privilege. To prove that point, the room has not one but two couches.

Of course, living in an historical building does have its drawbacks. In addition to recalcitrant windows, there’s a distinct lack of lighting (a shaded bulb has been tied to a pipe to illuminate the small kitchen area) and all of the usual problems inherent in New York City buildings—from less-than-reliable plumbing to a Rear Window situation with Maier’s view; her neighbors keep their shades up and their lights on at all times.

Just blocks away from the hustle and bustle of Chinatown, Maier’s home is a surprisingly quiet respite from the noise of the city, the kind of apartment seen more on television sitcoms than in real estate hunts.

Because you’re cool, I want to ask: Did you ever have any reticence about writing a memoir when the publishing world is so glutted with them?
I think you either have to have a really original voice or you have to have a story that is insane and has never been told before. Or you have to have both. I would hope I have the combination. What sold it overall, in addition to having a pretty likable, accessible voice, was a story that involved me pissing in bowls. And my advice is if you can work defecation into your story in any way, people will love it. There’s gotta be some kind of a hook, and in my case, agoraphobia and the ways in which I acted out was the hook. It was very strange and specific and weird, and not something that strikes a whole lot of people, although it’s far more common than most folks would think. I tried really hard not to seem self-pitying in the book, but rather to seem kind of amused by my own struggle. Not to undermine anyone else’s pain but to try to find the humor in the really dark shit. I love reading authors who take really dark stuff and make it funny without making light of it.

And you’ve been telling these stories in your stand-up act for a while, right?
I have two different acts. I have the one I do in the comedy club, and that tends to be lighter stuff, sex and relationships and jobs I’ve had. And then, when I’m outside of the club setting, I’ll tell longer form stories and take more risks with stuff that might not be funny but is sad. If I were at Gotham Comedy Club, that would not be the appropriate place to tell these pissing in bowls and suicidal stories. And if I were doing a one-person show at, say, UCB, I would incorporate some of the darker material.

At what point did you decide to make the leap from the stage to writing a book?
My intent was always to use the live show to write a book proposal. Because writing is so lonely sometimes. I had a job at Sirius XM Radio and I would use all my vacation time to go to theaters around the country, and I would have a list of bullet points of stories I wanted to tell and I would experiment with different ways of telling them. And through that I was able to put together a book proposal. And I started in spring 2009 with the show and we sold the proposal in spring 2010 and we got a final version of the book ready to go in October or November of 2011. And now it’s being published in February 2012!

I found during the course of writing it I gained a real sense of confidence, but also a sense of over-confidence. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve traveled all over the place telling these stories and I’ve been holding down a job and doing all these things a stable adult does. And maybe I don’t need meds or therapy anymore.’ So I weaned myself off them and it worked really well for four months. And then there was a trigger. I was in a relationship and he moved to another continent, basically, and then having to finish and turn in this thing triggered a really deep depression. And finishing up this project meant that I couldn’t distract myself from these huge problems in my life that I hadn’t dealt with. But I had an amazing editor and agent who gave me some extra time while I finished this up at my parents’ house. And now I’m back on the medication. Tastes like freedom!

You’re touring with the book, too, right?
I am doing a nine-city tour—if you count Manhattan and Brooklyn as two. Which I will do. At each place I’ll have one other comedian there to do some comedy and I’ll do a combination of standup and stuff from the book. I love reading, but I’m not such a big fan of hearing someone read.

I was sure you were going to say the other comedian would be there to heckle you.
I would love that, if someone screamed during a really sad part, “You suck!” I’m Sicilian and I’m from New Jersey. I love a fight!

Meet Sara Benincasa at Housing Works (126 Crosby St.), 7 p.m., Feb. 16, with an open bar from 7–8 p.m. Do not heckle her.

The unnamed narrator, who abandoned his dissertation on the Millerite movement and their conviction that they would all ascend to heaven Oct. 22, 1844—sound familiar?—finds himself at his grandparents’ home in upstate New York, sorting through his recently deceased grandfather’s things, drinking and ruminating on the past. His mother was abandoned by his hippie father and spent the rest of her life with her twin sister, raising the narrator together and sending him to visit their parents every summer.

La Farge packs a lot of quirkiness into his 242 pages, from his grandfather’s neighbor, who salted the clouds to make it snow and turn his winter resort into a success, to a desperate search for a homeless man in San Francisco. The parts, however, are more engrossing than the whole; La Farge’s narrator is exactly the kind of overgrown Peter Pan who flees responsibility that movies have over-represented for the last decade.

What saves Luminous Airplanes is La Farge’s style, one that sprinkles truth among the catalog of historical failures by which his narrator is gradually consumed. “Something was wrong with Yesim’s imagination: it stored its kisses too close to its tears,” is a gorgeous and moving observation, one of many that prevent Luminous Airplanes from feeling like a retread.

Ultimately, one’s enjoyment of La Farge’s characters is entirely dependent on one’s saturation level for aimless narrators who falter when it comes time to make decisions. For anyone who isn’t tired of such men, Luminous Airplanes is a skillful, enjoyable read.

Book writer Ivan Menchell is the only person capable of ignoring the Oscar-winning and groundbreaking 1967 film (which starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway), preferring to tell the truth rather than Hollywood gloss. Unfortunately, that truth is dull (as is Menchell’s sole fictional addition, a lovelorn small-town sheriff pining for Bonnie), and instead of the movie’s emotional truth we get dry facts and a zig-zagging plot that doesn’t even unleash Bonnie and Clyde as a bank-robbing duo until the end of act one.

Gone, too, is the desperation that infused the movie, and, one assumes, the real-life Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. These young Texans (Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan, not particularly burnishing their resumes) are just dumb hicks who want to be Clara Bow and Billy the Kid. They may murder some lawmen, but that’s just foreplay for them. Menchell doesn’t  dig too deep into why they’re both so aroused by breaking the law; the Natural Born Killers musical version, which is surely only a matter of time, will have to wait.

Saddled with a bulky set from Tobin Ost that relies mainly on projections of film clips, newspaper headlines and scene-setting backdrops, director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun has little choice but to focus on moving his cast on and off the stage. He and Ost contribute some interesting moments—particularly when planks from the stage are removed for a baptism scene—but the focus is pointedly on getting everyone in place for their cues, which leaves the sour taste of start-stop in audiences’ mouths.

Osnes and Jordan’s chemistry is adequate enough, but they never seem truly dangerous or sympathetic or even Texan; Osnes’ Bonnie seems more like a Midwestern gal wandering around the shanties of West Dallas like she’s in a backstage musical, waiting for her big break. (She also sports a six-pack that Priscilla Queen of the Desert’s Nick Adams would kill for.) During group numbers like “Made in America,” chorus members may root for Bonnie and Clyde, but neither Menchell nor Calhoun have bothered to explore the parallels between the duo and their poverty-stricken era—let alone their folk hero status with that of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

As for the score, Frank Wildhorn and Don Black have written a generic Broadway score with gospel choruses and occasional banjos, none of which will remain with you after the curtain falls. The songs are so clunkily written (and titled) that the entire plot is laid bare in the Playbill’s song list.

Only Melissa van der Schyff, as Clyde’s hysterical, religious sister-in-law Blanche, commits to giving a real performance. That her performance is divisive can only be a credit to her in this broadly generic, we-aim-to-please musical retelling of bloody bank robbers. By the time Bonnie and Clyde clamber back into their car for the finale, their nihilism has been turned into affable, pre-ordained destiny: the Thelma and Louise of the Dust Bowl without the feminist commentary.

Bonnie & Clyde
Through Dec. 30, Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th. St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.),www.bonnieandclydebroadway.com; $71.50–$136.50.

There are, of course, more problems in this Classic Stage Company revival than just its leading lady, but hers is the mortal blow. Chekhov’s melancholy comedy about the loss of a family estate and the clash between the failing aristocracy and the newly empowered peasant is funnier in director Andrei Belgrader’s production than Chekhov’s plays are usually allowed to be, but it is amusing in a divertingly bizarre way.

Wiest’s pouty, girlish performance turns the whole tragic loss of the orchard into a remake of Gone with the Wind—if Suellen were in charge. Her Ranevskaya isn’t sentimental so much as scatterbrained; she seems mentally incapable of making a decision that could save the land. Wealthy former peasant Lopakhin (John Turturro, sounding more Brighton Beach than Russian) begs and pleads with her to turn her vast acreage into housing, but Wiest is too busy fluttering around and batting her eyelashes to pay much attention, a perfect avatar for the tonal blender into which Belgrader has tossed his actors.

How else to explain Roberta Maxwell’s satisfying but bizarre turn as the wry, biting Charlotta, performing magic tricks dressed like Cabaret’s MC? Or Josh Hamilton’s pointedly modern take on perpetual scholar Trofimov, airily announcing that he is above love? The performances run the gamut of styles, from the wistful pratfalls of Charlie Chaplin (Michael Urie as Epikhodov) to Daniel Davis’ Gaev, here a doddering uncle out of Evelyn Waugh. Not to mention there’s Belgrader’s bizarre staging of Lopakhin’s triumph, which involves ripping feathers out of the bottom of a chair with an obviously foam seat (you’ll spend the last 15 minutes sneezing as feathers continue to drift interminably).

Even the set design seems out of place. Santo Loquasto has contributed a round raised platform for the stage, but Belgrader often ignores its circumference and has his actors step off of it to perform. If the circle in CSC’s square doesn’t demarcate the room, then why have a stage at all?

Then again, if The Cherry Orchard is more funny than moving and the hard-nosed practicality of Lopakhin looks more appealing than the sentimentality of Ranevskaya and family towards her childhood home, why perform it at all?

The Cherry Orchard Through Jan. 8, 2012, Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), www.classicstage.org; $70–$125.

Things start off excruciatingly immediately, with the bitter monologue (there are a few lines delivered by other actors, but they’re just fodder) “End Days.” “End Days” is also the only work set in an actual bar, rendering the umbrella title even more ridiculous. Railing against the injustices of life for the better part of half an hour, Hoffman (Gordon MacDonald) never met a bar fly he couldn’t bully, nor a piece of bad news he couldn’t smack his lips over. Unmitigated bile is difficult to take, but Pepe’s insistence on dragging out the wisp of a play makes it unbearable; even MacDonald can only find so many shadings to a rageaholic.

Somehow even worse is the ’70s set “City Lights,” in which a misanthropic, misogynistic musician (Joey Slotnick) barrels into the lives of both a kindly cabbie (Rock Kohli) and a teary, freshly dumped schoolteacher (Aya Cash). He’s brusque and rude, when he’s not getting stoned and eating Oreos; she has serious issues with cursing. Yet, for some reason, she’s attracted enough to him to track down his apartment—a major mistake on her part that ends the first act on such an ugly note that one is sorely tempted to abandon the theater for a scalding shower.

The final installment, “Wayfarer’s Inn,” at least benefits from an accomplished comic performance from the reliable Clark Gregg (doing his best Clark Gregg) and a bustier impression of Melanie Griffith from Ana Reeder, as married man Buck and his date Gretchen. Along for a bizarre sushi dinner is Lucy (Amanda Quaid, looking and sounding out of place), who barks out a laugh at the thought that love might be more important than friendship. Lust, at least, seems more important than friendship for Buck, who has left his depressed friend Tony (Lenny Venito) at their hotel, with predictably unfortunate—and interminable—results.

Originally advertised as 90 minutes, during the preview process Happy Hour’s running time crept up to two-plus hours, easily attributable to Pepe’s insistence on wringing every possible beat out of awkward silences and the repetition of jokes that weren’t funny the first time, let alone the fifth (people struggle to unlock their door! Hilarious!). Even a cast of up-and-coming actors and established performers seem at a loss with these dingy men and women. At least at an actual happy hour, the cornered patron can self-medicate with booze while listening to the tales of woe from fellow drinkers. At Happy Hour, we have to grimace and bear it.

Happy Hour

Through Dec. 31, Peter Norton Space, 555 W. 42nd St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), www.atlantictheater.org; $65.