Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE FOREST, THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, THE KID, LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING and WHITE’S LIES.

Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky was the most well-known and successful playwright in Russia in his day (mid-19^th Century); but nowadays he is best known, at least in this country, as a sort of precursor to Chekhov. It’s easy to see why when viewing his The Forest, currently on view at CSC.

The play takes place at a country estate, much like those in The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya. Whereas Chekhov’s characters are clearly on the cusp of social change, Ostrovsky’s are an entrenched quasi-feudal upper class, and as such are a portrait of a culture whose denizens are blissfully unaware that a tsunami is going to hit them just a few decades later.

The central character in The Forest is a wealthy land owner named Raisa, played with her usual quirky aplomb by Dianne Weist. She fancies herself a benevolent individual; but in reality she’s a skinflint. She’s taken in an impoverished young man and plans to marry him off to her niece; but in actuality she has the hots for the guy herself (I guess you could say she’s a proto-cougar), and the niece wants to marry the daughter of a wealthy neighbor but can’t because she has no dowry. Into this mix strides Raisa’s long-lost nephew who, it turns out has been reduced to being an itinerant actor, and an impoverished one at that.

The play is long on exposition, but once you get by that it is intermittently enjoyable, a light social comedy with some very fine performances.

The Screwtape Letters, at the Westside Theatre, is a stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ epistolary novel about a senior member of the Devil’s staff issuing orders to his hapless nephew, a tempter-in-training who makes one rookie mistake after another in his quest to snag his first soul. Uncle Screwtape is a devilishly delightful fellow, particularly as played here by the wonderful Max McLean, until the end, when his nephew Wormwood pays the price for incompetence in the service of Our Lord Below.

This devilish take on salvation and temptation is great fun, whether or not you believe that Evil is an objective force fighting the forces of Good.

The New Group has a new musical on view at the Acorn Theatre, The Kid, based on a book by sex advice guru Dan Savage about the struggles of a gay couple to adopt a child. Eventually, they are chosen by an unwed, homeless teenaged girl; but the tension builds when there becomes a distinct possibility that she will renege.

The songs, by Andy Monroe (music) and Jeck Lechner (lyrics) service the story well, though none of them stand out on their own. The music is light, amiable, but not particularly memorable. What carries the evening is the witty/poignant book by Michael Zam, the inventive direction by Scott Elliott and the wonderful performances by the likes of Christopher Sieber and Lucas Steele as Our Heroes, the Fairy Father wannabes, and the ensemble, all of whom pay multiple roles.

This one is not a must-see; but it’s most enjoyable if you’re into the subject matter.

The Women’s Project has concluded its season with a fascinating drama, Lascivious Something, by Sheila Callaghan. We are in the impoverished Greek island home of August, an American, and Daphne, his young Greek wife. It is 1980. August, a former student activist in California in the 60’s, has dropped way, way out; when who should arrive but his former girlfriend and political partner Liza, after all these years. What does she want, and why is she here?

Ms. Callaghan employs a most unusual device several times, wherein she provides two alternative versions of a scene – the one the characters want to play, and the one they actually do play. I found this device fascinating; but I can see how some might find it annoying.

Be that as it may, director Daniella Topol’s cast if wonderful. Rob Campbell is a delightfully dissolute August and Dana Eskelson provides the right blend of determined and enigmatic as Liza. My fave, though, was Elizabeth Waterston as Daphne – sexy, strong but just a little bit vulnerable. This is a Future Star, no doubt about it.

Finally, I caught up with Ben Andron’s White’s Lies at New World Stages. I shall preface my remarks by saying that whenever I read terrible reviews for a play, this makes me curious to see it – to find out what it was that pissed ‘em off so. More often than not, I have found that the play that got slammed deserved a lot better. Also, I have lamented that pure out-and-out comedy is inevitably panned, usually unfairly. So, I was in a very positive frame of mind when I went to see White’s Lies. That lasted about 5 minutes.

This is a godawful play about a supposed high-powered divorce lawyer who beds a different woman practically every night. His mother tells him that she has terminal cancer (she comes to his office, For Some Strange Reason, to tell him this), and that her dying wish is that she have a grand child. Who should show up but an old flame from his college days who wants to hire him to handle her divorce. She hates him, has always hated him, but she figures he’s just the scumbag she needs to help her take her husband for all he’s worth. For Some Strange Reason, she brings along her daughter. Our Hero (well…) gets an idea. If the daughter will pose as his long-lost daughter who he didn’t know he had, Mom’s dying wish will be fulfilled. The Old Flame is resistant to this brilliant idea, until the lawyer offers to handle her case for free. The daughter, on the other hand, is All For It. Dad and daughter proceed to get to know each other, which inevitably (in this playwright’s world anyway), leads to sex. That’s about the time I ran out, ranting into the night.

This play is just one terrible joke and contrived situation after another. Here’s a for- instance: We are given to understand that the lawyer has a fabulous bachelor pad. We know this because his mother (played valiantly by Betty Buckley, of all people), who has constantly expressed her dismay at his many sexual conquests, says that he has such a nice apartment, she thought he might be gay. DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO YOU??? What I wanna know is, if this guy has such a great apartment, why does he only shtup his women at his office? Could it be that they’d need another set, and then how could his nebbishy partner constantly walk in on him when he’s with his latest babe (which is an attempted running joke)?

Man, would I like to know the story of how this turkey got produced. Could it be a vanity production of some sort, or is it just that the producers – Aaron Grant, Jana Robbins, Jeremy Hackman, Craig Haffner, Karl E. Held and something called “Sneaky Pete Productions” – have Absolutely No Taste Whatsoever? And, what the heck is a class act like Betty Buckley doing in this dreck?

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about FENCES, LEND ME A TENOR, SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM, PROMISES PROMISES, COLLECTED STORIES and my annual Tony Rant.

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Because of those doggone Tony Awards, Broadway openings come at us fast and furious this time of year. The lion’s share of Broadway shows open between mid-March and 1 May, in hopes of snagging Tony nominations, which they can then use to promote ticket sales while they wait to see if they win the Tony Roulette. Expect to see many closings in June, of shows whose number did not come up. 

Anyway, I usually, write about a cross-section of productions I have seen, from those on the Great White way all the way down to deepest, darkest Off Off Broadway. This week, it’s all about Broadway. 

The revival of the late August Wilson’s Fences, at the Cort Theatre, heads my list of must-sees. The original production starred James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, a former Negro Leagues baseball star who was too old when integration finally came and who now works as a garbage man. Troy is a complex character, a deeply flawed hero with a stormy relationship with his son, born of his resentment of both his youth and his athletic ability, a man who loves his wife but who just can’t resist tomcatting around with other women (Tiger Woods, anyone?). He is brilliantly embodied in this new production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play in a towering performance by Denzel Washington, one of our greatest actors. Washington’s performance is matched by that of Viola Davis as Troy’s wife, who consents to taking in a baby whom Troy has fathered with another woman (who dies in childbirth), but who informs her husband that from this moment on, he is a woman-less man. 

Kenny Leon’s production is flawless, and there is terrific supporting work from Wilson veteran Stephen McKinley Henderson as Troy’s friend Jim Bono and from Chris Chalk as the son. 

Don’t miss this great production of this great American play. 

I also recommend Stanley Tucci’s production of Ken Ludwig’s farce Lend Me A Tenor, about a Cleveland opera company which is forced to improvise when their visiting star Italian tenor drops dead (or so they think) on opening night. Lend Me a Tenor was the last of a long line of classic Broadway comedies, a genre which is now pretty much dead due to critical antipathy towards comedies which seek only to amuse. It is more than just amusing – it is hilarious. 

Tony Shalhoub is a scream as the manager of the opera company, as are Anthony LaPaglia as the tenor, Tito Morelli, and Jan Maxwell as his wife, who trusts him about as much as Elin now trusts Tiger; but all the performances are wonderful. 

Lend Me a Tenor is the best comedy on Broadway (well, it’s the only pure comedy on Broadway – thank you, cultural ayatollahs). 

Sondheim on Sondheim, Roundabout’s bio-revue about you-know-who at Studio 54 is, predictably, long on reverence and short on drama (it’s a revue, after all). It’s comprised of songs from Sondheim’s many shows, interspersed with filmed vignettes of Steve talking about his work. I love SS’s music; but for me, The Man’s talking about it and his life in general was the best part of this show. 

I found James Lapine’s staging to be rather rudimentary; but all the singers are mighty fine, though I guess I expected too much of Cabaret Legend Barbara Cook who is, I think, a few years past her expiration date. I was curious that Lapine included nothing from Pacific Overtures, nor does Sondheim talk about it during the vignettes. Strange …

 If you believe some critics (and at least one notoriously catty gossip columnist), the revival of PROMISES, PROMISES at the Broadway Theatre is a turkey. Well, it’s not. The production is a very clever send-up/pastiche of 60s dance and design, and Neil Simon’s book is still hilarious. Sure it’s gag-filled. And that’s a bad thing? 

To my mind, Sean Hayes is giving the best performance by a leading performer in a musical this season as a milquetoast of a man named Chuck Baxter who, before he knows it, finds himself practically homeless as a troupe of bosses at the insurance company where he toils away in oblivion take advantage of his eagerness to please by borrowing his apartment for trysts with their bimbos, one whom turns out to be the lady of Our Hero’s dreams. Ashford’s choreography is Just Plain Wonderful, as is Kristin Chenoweth as his Lady Love, Fran.  Katie Finneran, though, steals the show as a voracious barfly who scoops up Chuck, who has gone to a bar at the beginning of the second act to drown his sorrows when he realizes that Fran is having it off with the head of personnel, Sheldrake, in his own bed. Yuck! 

Promises, Promises is far better than Finian’s Rainbow, and deserved a Tony nomination in stead of that deservedly-departed o’turkey. 

Donald Margulies has had quite a season, what with not one but two plays appearing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Biltmore) on Broadway. Time Stands Still has been deservedly nominated for several awards, including the Tony for Best Play, and now Manhattan Theatre has brought back his Collected Stories, which appeared originally Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel (mighta been the De Lys then) about fifteen years ago, starring Uta Hagen. As I recall, Ms. Hagen gave a dark-hued performance, whereas here Linda Lavin plays it more droll, for laughs, as a creative writing professor who sees the defining moment of her personal life, her affair with the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, become fodder for a novel by her own assistant. 

At the De Lys/Lortel/Lortel/Whatever, Collected Stories packed a punch; at the Friedman, it just seems like a very attenuated one-act play, stretched to two hours. Sometimes, when plays move to Broadway, they seem magnified. Not this one. It shrunk. 

Finally, I have to say a few words about the Tony nominations. Good Lord: the incidental music in two plays was nominated for Best Original Score? And, as previously mentioned, how could Finian’s Rainbow have beaten out Promises, Promises? Overall, though, I think the nominations are fair, though like everyone else I have my list of egregious omissions, which are: 

Best Play: RACE

Best Play Revival: HAMLET and PRESENT LAUGHTER

Best Musical Revival: PROMISES, PROMISES. How could FINIAN’S    RAINBOW have beaten this out???

Best Leading Actor: Victor Garber, PRESENT LAUGHTER; Daniel Craig and Hugh  Jackman, A STEADY RAIN

Best Leading Actress: Laura Benanti, IN THE NEXT ROOM etc.

Best Featured Actor, play: Patrick Breen and Cotter Smith, NEXT FALL

Best Featured Actress, play, Connie Ray, NEXT FALL

Best Featured Actor, Musical: Quentin Earl Darrington, RAGTIME

Best Costume Design, Play: Jane Greenwood, PRESENT LAUGHTER. Can you believe  that this great designer has never won a Tony? 

In my I Agree Wholeheartedly column: kudos to the Tony nominators for not nominating Come Fly Away as “Best Musical.” You know why? It’s Not a Musical – it’s a ballet. As was Contact, which not only received a Tony Nomination but which actually won. Lord have mercy … 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about STUFFED AND UNSTRUNG, PHOENIX, THE ALIENS, AMERICAN IDIOT and BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON.

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If you like puppetry, comedy and audience participation, then Stuffed and Unstrung, at the Union Square Theatre, is for you. Created by the next generation of Henson puppeteers, it employs a puppet cast of seeming thousands, manipulated by six wonderful puppeteers, who take ideas thrown at them by their very enthusiastic audience and improvise hilarious scenes based on them. It’s Second City, done with puppets. 

A few times during the evening the intrepid cast takes a break from their improvising to recreate bits created years ago by Jim Henson. It’s amazing to see how far comic puppetry has come since then. 

If you like this sort of thing, be advised that nobody does it better. 

In a previous column, I told you about Scott Organ’s Phoenix, which I saw at this year’s Humana Festival. New York audiences have seen many plays over the past three decades which originated at Humana, but never so soon after the Festival’s conclusion. Frankly, I’m amazed that the author and his agent allowed Phoenix to be produced by the Barrow Group, where it is running through 3 May in an extremely “bare-bones” production, instead of holding out for a higher level offer. 

Although the production values are nil, Barrow Group’s production of this slight but very satisfying play is terrific. Director Seth Barish has highlighted the romantic comedy in the play and downplayed its political aspect – a wise move, as the play’s about a couple who have a one-night stand. She finds herself pregnant, so of course she is going to exercise who Right To Choose. He is incredibly supportive, even going with her to an abortion clinic; but then he changes his mind and pleads with her not to go through with it. In Louisville, the woman was a rather callous bitch; at the Barrow Group she was much more likeable. Both actors were very different from the Louisville cast, and both were excellent. 

I see this play as a very subtle anti-abortion play. Barish’s production shies away from that, making Phoenix more of a bittersweet love story. 

Annie Baker’s The Aliens has gotten some rave reviews, which is lucky for Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, whose last offering, Blind, was a bomb. The play’s about two slackers who spend all their time hanging out behind what appears to be a restaurant. When a teenaged kid who works there comes out to empty the garbage, they decide to adopt him into the slacker brotherhood. There’s not much more plot than that. Just a lot of wheel-spinning. 

The Aliens has actually been compared to Chekhov and Beckett; but it lacks a Chekhovian social context and is far too realistic for Beckett. The actors are most credible in their roles, but the play has been given an astoundingly languid touch by director Sam Gold, whose pregnant (nay, impregnable) pauses add at least an unnecessary half hour to what was for me an excruciatingly boring evening. 

American Idiot (at the St. James Theatre) and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (at the Public), two rock musicals which opened very close to each other, have been heralded as the Wave of the Future for musical theatre. Well, I doubt that; but I am delighted that both seem to be attracting a young audience. 

Of the two, I much preferred American Idiot, which is a staged version by Michael Mayer of an album by a neo-punk group called Green Day. Supposedly, it tells the story of three slackers. One flees suburbia and is sucked into the maelstrom of big city degradation. One goes off to war and gets shot up. One stays home and does nothing. Really, though, there’s about as much plot as in Movin’ Out.  But you don’t go to this show for the story. You go for the kick-ass music. Much of the lyrics are unintelligible, but I guess rock fans are used to that. And Mayer’s staging is incredibly inventive. 

As for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, this too employs a slacker sensibility to tell the story of our seventh President. Alex Timbers, who also directed the show, has made the book an odd amalgamation of Cliffs Notes history and Monty Python or SNL sketch comedy, not done particularly well. In fact, a lot of the acting is deliberately amateurish, which astounded me. Michael Friedman’s songs are I am told in the “emo” genre, whatever that is. I found both music and lyrics to be uninventive and uninteresting. 

In my opinion, both American Idiot and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson are incredibly over-praised, but if you’d rather be at a rock concert than to ever be caught dead at the theatre, maybe they’re more your kinda thing. 

 “It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about RED, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, THE COCKTAIL PARTY, I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET.

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Before I tell you about my reaction to Red, by John Logan, an import from London now playing at the Golden Theatre, I must admit my prejudice against almost all of “modern art,” and most especially abstract expressionism. I believe that hundreds of years from now, when people look back on our era, they’ll be dumbfounded that we actually thought the work created by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko was great art; indeed, art at all. So, that’s the frame of mind I had when I went in to see Red, a play about Rothko starring Alfred Molina.

 Red takes place in Rothko’s Manhattan studio in the late1950s. Rothko has received a huge commission to paint murals for a new restaurant, to be called The Four Seasons. He’s getting $35,000, which we are given to understand was a lot of money at that time.

Anyway, it’s such a big job that he needs an assistant, and the play begins on said assistant’s first day on the job, at the start of which he is informed by the imperious Rothko that he is an employee. Rothko is not his teacher, his mentor, his confidant – he’s his employer. That said, Rothko proceeds over the course of the next two years to browbeat this young man and to pontificate on a variety of subjects as they relate to the most important subject of all – Art; particularly his art. He’s particularly big on Nietsche. 

Finally, when the young assistant takes him on, assailing his boss for being a blowhard, ungenerous to the point of paranoia about any art by anyone else, Red becomes dramatically interesting. This takes place near the end of the 90-minute evening. Up until then, it’s all talk, talk, talk – much of it interesting, but little of it dramatic. 

What sustains the evening are the performances by Molina and by Eddie Redmayne as the assistant who, like Molina, has come over with the play from London. Both actors are great in their roles. Redmayne’s performance is “A star is born.” 

If you actually like “modern art,” this play might appeal to you. You’ll certainly learn a lot (maybe, more than you care to know) about one of its titans. 

Speaking of London imports, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES is back, at the Longacre Theatre, in a new production directed by Terry Johnson last season at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a hot hot hot venue in Southwark from which also sprang this season’s revival of A Little Night Music and last season’s (or was it the season before?) of Sunday in the Park with George. When it does musicals, Menier scales them down; hence, they cost much less; hence, commercial producers start salivating. 

This new version of the Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical features British classical actor Douglas Hodge as Albin, in a performance which won Hodge the Olivier Award last season. The rest of the cast is American, led by Kelsey Grammer as Georges. 

La Cage aux Folles (the club) is short on glam and long on grunge. I have to confess, I missed the glam. Grammer is charming as Georges. Reportedly, when Hodge has to go back to London in six months, Grammer is switching over to play Albin. I might go back and see this – he might be good in the role. As for Hodge, I appeare to be the lone dissenter in the chorus of praise for his performance. I found his high-pitched, nasal intonations to be more than a little annoying. What can I say? I just didn’t like him. As they say in Britain, he got on my tits. 

Critical opprobrium has made this La Cage aux Folles a hit hit hit, and the leading contenda for this year’s Tony Award for best musical revival. Frankly, I enjoyed Bye Bye Birdie more. 

There are two interesting revivals of rarely-performed plays on view at the Theatre Row multiplex. The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) has a superb revival of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, which has closed at the Beckett Theatre, and Keen Co.’s I Never Sang for My Father is at the Clurman. Of the two, I much preferred The Cocktail Party. 

Eliot straddles the world of the classic drawing room comedy and the much darker, more oblique world of Pinter. In the first act the play’s central character, Edward, is hosting a cocktail party for a bunch of his wife’s friends. His wife is off visiting a sick aunt. There is a mysterious uninvited guest, and in the second act we find out who he is. We also find out that in fact Edward’s marriage is on the rocks. What seems to be a deliberately superficial play about marriage becomes much more about salvation and redemption, with haunting overtones of Eliot’s own rocky marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. 

TACT’s Artistic Director Scott Alan Evans’ production is subtle and superb, and there are wonderful performances all around from his cast. The Cocktail Party is one of those Famous Plays more talked about than seen. I hope you had a chance to see it. It might not come this way again. 

Robert Anderson’s I Never Sang for My Father is a memory play, a la The Glass Menagerie, wherein a middle aged man tells us of his rocky relationship with his father, a crusty old coot who is not going gently into that good night. When we meet the parents, they are returning from Florida, where they winter. Mom is suffering from a range of health problems. Dad is physically fine but starting to fail mentally. Of course, he is in extreme denial about this. 

Aside from the annoying use of narrative to tell (rather than dramatize) the story, I Never Sang for My Father can be a tough sit, because we, too, are in denial about the inevitable decline of our parents. If we are geezers like the father in the play, Anderson exposes uncomfortable truths about the inevitability of The End which we’d rather not face. 

That said, Keen’s production, while extremely bare-bones, is pretty good. Marsha Mason and Keir Dullea are excellent as the parents. Ms. Mason exits the play after the first act (guess why?). I missed her. Dullea is infuriating/heartrending as he fights his son every step of the way, refusing to accept his fate, insisting that he’s fine, everything’s fine. 

Keen doesn’t make the case for I Never Sang for my Father as a Lost Classic, but it’s still worth seeing if you don’t mind being bummed out. 

By now, you must have heard all about how The Addams Family, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, is a turkey. Well, it’s not. It’s a perfectly enjoyable light entertainment which, uncannily, employs basically the same plot as does La Cage aux Folles: grown child (Wednesday, now 18) is getting married, to a nice young man whose parents are conservative, straight-laced mid-westerners (in the snobby world of New York, is there any other kind of mid-westerner?) who want to meet their future in-laws, so much of the plot concerns the Addams family’s mostly futile attempts to appear “normal.” 

Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth star as Gomez and Morticia, and they are both a hoot, as is Jackie Hoffman as a Grandma rather deranged from too many drugs in the 60s, and Kevin Chamberlin as a jolly Uncle Fester, in love with the moon. 

Critics have excoriated the show for being too cute, too sentimental. These are, by definition, bad bad bad, apparently. The Addams Family looks like it will succeed anyway. It’s selling tickets like it’s another Wicked – because of strong word of mouth. So: poo on you, Broadway critics! 

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET, at the Nederlander Theatre, is an import from Chicago. It uses an actual event, a jam session in Memphis’ Sun Records’ studio which included Roy Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. The first three are already big stars; Jerry Lee is a wannabe who shows up to try and get an audition with Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records. The other three drift in. Perkins has been overshadowed by Elvis, who shot to stardom after he performed Perkin’s “Blue Suede Shoes” on the Ed Sullivan Show, and is fiercely determined to climb back on top of the charts. Elvis, in tow with his girlfriend of the week, wants Phillips to join him at RCA, to whom Phillips sold his contract in order to save his label, because he believes only Sam understands that rock and roll is not a fad. Sam, meanwhile, is anxious about Cash, whose contract is expiring. Can he re-sign him? 

Million Dollar Quartet is rather thin dramatically but wonderful musically. The actors who portray the rockers look and sound amazingly like the originals, and are kick-ass musicians to boot. Robert Britton Lyons seethes with anger and determination as the de-throned King of Rockabilly, Carl Perkins, and you might think that you are actually watching Elvis, Cash and Lewis in the superb incarnations of, respectively, Eddie Lendenning, Lance Guest and Levi Kreis. My only quibble: what the heck is Hunter Foster doing in this show? He’s a gifted musical comedy performer in his own right. Here, he has no songs. Well, that’s all right, Ma – but imagine, say, his sister Sutton in a show in which everyone sings but her. Ridiculous.

“Who is this guy?”

For over thirty years Lawrence Harbison was in charge of new play acquisition for Samuel French, Inc., during which time his work on behalf of playwrights resulted in the first publication of such subsequent luminaries as Jane Martin, Don Nigro, Tina Howe, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, William Mastrosimone, Charles Fuller, and Ken Ludwig, among many others; and the acquisition of musicals such as Smoke of the Mountain, A…My Name Is Alice, Little Shop of Horrors and Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down.  He is a now a free-lance editor, primarily for Smith and Kraus, Inc., for whom he edits annual anthologies of best plays by new playwrights and women playwrights, best ten-minute plays and best monologues and scenes for men and for women. For many years he wrote a weekly column on his adventures in the theater for two Manhattan Newspapers, the Chelsea Clinton News and The Westsider. His new column, “On the Aisle with Larry,” is a weekly feature at www.smithandkraus.com.

He works with individual playwrights to help them develop their plays (see his website, www.playfixer.com). He has also served as literary manager or literary consultant for several theatres, such as Urban Stages and American Jewish Theatre. He is a member of both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk. He has served many times over the years as a judge and commentator for various national play contests and lectures regularly at colleges and universities. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan.

He is currently working on a book, Masters of the Contemporary American Drama.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York (and Waterbury, CT). This week, Larry tells you about THE IRISH CURSE, WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL, COME FLY AWAY, LOOPED, MIRACLE ON SOUTH DIVISION STREET.

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Apparently, Irish guys are notorious for their small, uh, tackle. That’s the premise of Martin Casella’s comedy The Irish Curse, now playing at the Soho Playhouse. We are in a NYC church, at a weekly support group meeting of men with unusually small shillelaghs, all of whom are of Irish descent, conducted by an Irish American priest. Tonight, there is a new man, a young Irishman recently over from the Old Sod, whose presence provides a reason for the other guys to talk about the group and why they are there. He is understandably reluctant to open up to the other fellas; but, finally, in the end he reveals that he is getting married in a few days, has never had sex with his bride to be, and is petrified of what she will say when she discovers his terribly embarrassing deficiency. 

This play is hilarious! The women in the audience seemed to find it even funnier than the men. Matt Lenz has done a superb job of directing, and there are uniformly wonderful performances. My fave was Austin Peck as a very macho NYC cop who’s gayer than Irish eyes, and Scott Jaeck, who plays the priest/moderator, who has a dirty little secret of his own. 

This one’s a don’t-miss. 

As is Australian playwright Andrew Bovell’s WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING, at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, which couldn’t be more different than Casella’s comedy. It’s a very complex drama about two families, spanning several generations, which goes back and forth in time between 1959 and 2039. 

The play can be kinda hard to follow; but stick with it. It’s very powerful, particularly as directed by David Cromer, who has quickly developed a reputation for directorial brilliance (he directed the revival of Our Town). Cromer’s cast is tremendous; particularly Victoria Clark, Mary Beth Hurt and Will Rogers, who plays a young man in search of his identity by searching for his father, who abandoned his family years before. 

When the Rain Stops Falling is one of the best plays, and best productions, of this very strong season. 

The Diary of a Teenage Girl at 3LD Art & Technology Center, is an adaptation by Marielle Heller of a comic book novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, which appears to be a roman á clef about a disturbed teenager who is sexually initiated by her mother’s boyfriend, eventually descending into drug addiction before finally coming out the other side. Ms. Heller plays the teenager, and she is superb, as are all of the cast, under the co-direction of Sarah Cameron Sunde and Rachel Eckerling, who have configured the theatre so that the audience sits in and around the action (which used to be called “environmental theatre”), and have made wonderful use of multi-media projections to give the feel of the original novel. 

This is not a very pleasant story; but it’s a brilliantly theatrical evening in the theatre. 

As is Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away, at the Marquis Theatre, a ballet (sort of a “dancical”) homage to the music of Frank Sinatra. Ms. Tharp has set the show in a nightclub, where the onstage orchestra seems only to play Sinatra songs. Sound designer Peter McBoyle has separated Sinatra’s vocal tracks from the original recordings, and they are played in tandem with the live orchestra, which works brilliantly and seamlessly. 

The choreography is, are you would expect from Ms. Tharp, astounding, and the whole evening is just plain sublimely beautiful. 

Matthew Lombardo’s Looped, which has just closed at the Lyceum Theatre, was of interest for the astounding impersonation of Tallulah Bankhead by Valerie Harper. The play took place in a recording studio, where Bankhead is supposed to be “looping” (i.e., recording a garbled line of dialogue) from her last film. Tallulah arrives late, of course, and proceeds to drink like a fish, snort cocaine and behave abominably, much to the chagrin of Danny, the guy who has been charged with getting the line properly looped, who reveals a Dark Secret of his own at the end of the play, obviously pandering to the gay element of the audience. 

You had to be a huge Tallulah Bankhead fan to enjoy this play, willing to cut slack to an extremely unpleasant, self-destructive woman. Predictably, the Club Members in the audience went nuts. As for me, although I enjoyed and appreciated Ms. Harper’s performance, I found Tallulah Bankhead a tough sit for two hours. 

Finally, I ventured up to Waterbury, Ct, to see a new play by Tom Dudzick entitled Miracle on South Division Street, produced by Seven Angels Theatre, about a Catholic family in a declining neighborhood in Buffalo whose claim to fame is that the Virgin Mary appeared many years ago in the barbershop owned by the deceased pater familias, who commemorated this miracle by building a statue of the Blessed Mother in his backyard. 

Miracle on South Division Street is the kind of realistic, sentimental comedy which audiences love and critics loathe. It’s “kitchen-sink realism,” which seeks to persuade us that we are looking through a Fourth Wall into a world much like our own, peopled with likeable, quirky characters like people we know or would like to know. It is a well-constructed and most endearing play, wonderfully directed by Joe Brancato, who originally staged the play at Penguin Rep, where he is Artistic Director. I loved it; but then, I’m not your usual critic. I have nothing against sentimental realism – as long as it’s done well, as it is here. 

I also have to say that I was extremely impressed with Seven Angels’ facility and production values. Those of you who think that “regional theatre” is inferior to what we have in NYC don’t know what you are talking about. 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about GIRLS IN TROUBLE, NEXT FALL, LENIN’S EMBALMERS, ALICE IN SLASHERLAND and CHING CHONG CHINAMAN. 

Jonathan Reynolds, who has lately been making quite a name for himself as a proponent of right wing politics in the theatre, has outdone himself with his latest, Girls in Trouble at the Flea Theatre. As we all know, women have an inalienable right to choose abortion, and anyone who takes on that viewpoint is at best a crank and at worst The Enemy. Reynolds has done just that in Girls in Trouble, and has been fielding angry verbal brickbats tossed at him by audience members at talk-backs after the performance. Talk about daring to walk into the lion’s den! 

The Flea likes to produce provocative plays. This one’s a doozy. It’s actually three inter-related one-acts. In the first a college student, whose father is a high official in the Kennedy administration, is driving a girl he has impregnated to get an (illegal) abortion. He gets lost, and when he finally arrives the abortionist, a black woman with a young daughter, has to rush things, with tragic consequences. In the second act, the abortionist’s daughter, now grown up, is performing at what appears to be a poetry slam, and reveals that she has gotten pregnant but plans to have an abortion just to stick it to her boyfriend, who has gone cold on her. The final act is the Main Event. In it, a TV chef who mixes politics in with her recipes finds herself confronted by a radical pro-life proponent, who gains entrance to her home by posing as the doctor who is performing an abortion for Our Heroine, who has too much going on in her life right now to deal with having and raising another child. The “doctor” turns out to be the woman from the poetry slam. What ensues is a knock-down drag-out debate about the ethics of abortion. Many people will consider the mere fact that this is even being debated onstage an outrage. Not me. I like a good argument. I only wish this part of Reynolds’ play were better— I found its resolution hard to believe. That said, Jim Simpson’s production is excellent, and the actors are terrific. 

Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall has transferred from Off Broadway to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre. God bless Elton John and his “partner,” David Furnish, who put up a big chunk of the dough for this transfer. Next Fall is a beautifully-written play about a gay odd couple, Adam and Luke. Adam is 40; Luke’s in his early 20s. Nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is that Luke is a sincere Christian, whereas Adam’s an atheist. Whoever heard of a gay play which takes Christianity seriously? 

When the play begins, Luke is in a coma after being hit by a car. His mother and father are at the hospital, along with friends Holly and Brandon. Adam’s there, too. Mom and Dad don’t know that Luke is gay. He never got around to coming out. While everyone waits for news about Luke, Nauffts takes us back in time to scenes which show when Luke and Adam met, when they fell in love, when they moved in together. These scenes develop the Christian vs. Atheist agon, as Adam finds much of what Luke believes hard to fathom. 

Naked Angels’ Off Broadway production, beautifully directed by Sheryl Kaller, has transferred intact, sans stars (just really good stage actors like Cotter Smith as Luke’s Dad, Connie Ray as his Mom and Patrick Breen as Adam). It’s a don’t-miss. Support the American Play on Broadway! 

For that matter, support the American play Off Broadway, too, where there have been several new openings of note, such as Vern Thiessen’s Lenin’s Embalmers at Ensemble Studio Theatre, a mordant farce (is that an oxymoron?) about the two Soviet scientists who came up with  way to embalm the instigator of the Russian Revolution but who subsequently ran afoul of Stalin and wound up in the Gulag. 

Billy Carden’s production starts out almost as pure Marx Brothers, and then proceeds to get darker and darker. It’s brilliant, as are Zach Grenier and Scott Sowers as the two embalmers, Richmond Hoxie as Stalin and Peter Maloney as Lenin, who’s dead but who pops up from time to time, often to tell pithy Soviet jokes. 

This one’s a don’t-miss.

As is Qui Nguyen’s latest, Alice in Slasherland, at Here. Nguyen specializes in campy send-ups of pop culture in the tradition of the Ridiculous Theatre Co., though Nguyen demonstrates time and again that camp doesn’t necessarily have to be gay. This is camp for straight people – young straight people, weaned on comic books and slasher and kung-fu films. 

Director Robert Ross Parker perfectly captures Nguyen’s outrageous style, as does his talented cast, several of whom I have seen and enjoyed before in other Nguyen plays, produced by his company, Vampire Cowboys. 

Alice in Slasherland is Great Fun. Even geezers like me can dig it. 

Sadly, Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman, produced by Pan Asian Rep at the West End Theatre, is not so much fun. It’s about a Chinese American family which has a Chinese immigrant living with them, imported by teenaged Upton to do his math homework so he can focus on an online video game he’s playing 24/7. 

Lee’s style reminded me of Nguyen’s – very broad and campy. Unfortunately, May Adrales has directed the play as if it were a bad TV sitcom, when the outrageousness such as that employed by a Robert Ross Parker would have been more effective. 

Pan Asian Rep is the granddaddy of Asian American theatre in New York. They’ve been around for over 30 years. Since then, other companies such as Ma-Yi and NAATCO have come along, and I would say their productions make Pan Asian’s look like amateur night – except that would give a bad name to the amateurs. There is a deep talent pool here of Asian actors. Howsacome Pan Asian Rep never seems to tap into it?

 “Who is this guy?” 

For over thirty years Lawrence Harbison was in charge of new play acquisition for Samuel French, Inc., during which time his work on behalf of playwrights resulted in the first publication of such subsequent luminaries as Jane Martin, Don Nigro, Tina Howe, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, William Mastrosimone, Charles Fuller, and Ken Ludwig, among many others; and the acquisition of musicals such as Smoke of the Mountain, A…My Name Is Alice, Little Shop of Horrors and Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down.  He is a now a free-lance editor, primarily for Smith and Kraus, Inc., for whom he edits annual anthologies of best plays by new playwrights and women playwrights, best ten-minute plays and best monologues and scenes for men and for women. For many years he wrote a weekly column on his adventures in the theater for two Manhattan Newspapers, the Chelsea Clinton News and The Westsider. His new column, “On the Aisle with Larry,” is a weekly feature at www.smithandkraus.com. 

He works with individual playwrights to help them develop their plays (see his website, www.playfixer.com). He has also served as literary manager or literary consultant for several theatres, such as Urban Stages and American Jewish Theatre. He is a member of both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk. He has served many times over the years as a judge and commentator for various national play contests and lectures regularly at colleges and universities. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan. 

He is currently working on a book, Masters of the Contemporary American Drama. 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in the theatre world. This week, Larry tells you about the HUMANA FESTIVAL.

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During a break in the Humana Festival of New American Plays, presented each spring by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Marc Masterson, ATL’s Artistic Director, conducted a panel discussion on the topic of ensemble-created theatre. Panelists included representatives from the companies which presented this kind of work at the Festival (the Rude Mechs from Texas and refugees from the defunct Theatre de la Jeune Lune, from Minneapolis), a guy who books it and a guy who funds it. During the discussion, Masterson announced that it is his intention to give a third of the slots at the Festival each year to this kind of theatre. From his point of view, this is an exciting new way of creating theatrical events; from the point of view of the vast majority of Festival attendees, these are wasted slots. 

Theatre is ephemeral enough as it is without presenting work which has been created by a company and which is specific to its members. What often results is theatre about the process of creating theatre, as was the case with the Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun, which tried hard to satirize theatre folks’ fascination with methodology, usually of one guru. In this case, a group of actors are trying to keep the memory of their deceased acting teacher alive by performing some of her acting exercises while they rehearse a version of A Streetcar Named Desire which eliminates the characters of Stanley, Stella, Blanche and Mitch. I guess this was supposed to be funny; but it wound up being mostly inane. About halfway through, two male members of the company walked in completely naked, each with a bunch of helium-filled balloons attached to his male member. Why? Nobody knows … 

Former Jeune Lune Artistic Director Dominique Serrand presented another ensemble work, Fissures (Lost and Found), which appeared to be about the fallibility of memory. It consisted of scenes and monologues in which the actors (I cannot call them “characters”) revealed, over and over again, that we often misremember the past. Oh really? Do tell…

This non-play was occasionally funny, but quickly become tedious once the audience realized that, in Gertrude Stein’s immortal phrase, there was no there there. 

I find it most unfortunate that a festival which was created to foster the new American play is now slotting non-plays like The Method Gun and Fissures. Fortunately, these ensemble events almost always are short. Unfortunately, they never have intermissions. So, a word to the wise: unless you are the sort of theatergoer who actually likes this kind of theatre, be sure to ask for a seat near the exit door, so you can ditch unobtrusively. 

On the plus-side, at least Masterson didn’t bring back Anne (The Emperor has no clothes) Bogart and her SHITTI Company this year. Thank heavens for small favors … 

Of the actual plays presented at Humana this year, most everybody liked Scott Organ’s Phoenix and Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Sirens; few liked Dan O’Brien’s The Cherry Sisters Revisited or Lisa Dillman’s Ground. The Cherry Sisters was about five sisters determined to break into Vaudeville. The problem is, they have no talent whatsoever. The play is much better in the second act, when the sisters do become successful (as Tiny Tim or Florence Foster Jenkins were successful), because then it turns dark. The first act is about how talentless  they are. It is very difficult to make deliberately bad performance anything other than Just Plain Bad, and director Andrew Leynse just couldn’t solve this problem with O’Brien’s play. He wasn’t helped much by his cast, none of whom were particularly effective. 

Ground was an interesting though flawed play about illegal immigration. Well – if it were about that it would have been much more interesting. It’s about a young woman who comes home to her recently-deceased father’s pecan farm on the Mexico/U.S. border. Chuy, a longtime farm hand, has been running the farm, and running illegals through the farm, much as dear old dead Dad did. Set against him is the leader of a vigilante group willing to take any measures to prevent illegals from getting across the border and who is trying to get control of the land, and a local border patrol cop of Mexican ancestry who goes by the gringo name “Carl” instead of his real name, Carlos. He’s just trying to do his job. This all leads to a tragic denouement. The problem with the play is that Ms. Dillman has made the dead Dad’s daughter the central character, but she’s not particularly interesting as she’s rather passive. The real central character should have been Chuy, who is shot accidentally by Coop, the right-winger vigilante. Then the play could have risen to the realm of a powerful tragedy, though it would have to have had a better production than the one Mr. Masterson has given it on the awkward, ugly, cheapie set by Scott Bradley. 

Phoenix was a two-hander about a man and woman who have a one-night stand. She gets pregnant. She is an unsympathetic character fairly oozing negativity and pessimism. He is a Nice Guy and the Eternal Optimist. She wants to get an abortion, which as we all know is solely her choice to make. He bends over backwards to be supportive; but eventually tries to persuade her not to do it which, of course, ends what could have been a sweet love story. Or does it? Organ not only subtly undermines the irrefutability of a Woman’s Right to Choose but asks some troubling questions about why the Contemporary Woman thinks carrying a baby to term, giving birth and committing to a family is just Too Much Of A Bummer. In other words, Phoenix was, for me, refreshingly politically incorrect. It was also very well-directed by Aaron Posner, with wonderful performances by Suli Holum and Trey Lyford. 

The Festival’s smash this year was Ms. Laufer’s Sirens, about a middle-aged couple, Sam and Rose Abrams, who don’t have much of a marriage anymore. She’s a ball-buster; he’s a wimp. Sam is a one-hit-wonder songwriter whose one hit was a song about Rose written in his 20s, which has paid the bills ever since. In search of inspiration, he has lately been trolling the internet looking to meet young women. Well, Sam and Rose book an Aegean cruise, during which Sam hears beautiful, ethereal singing (which sounds a lot like his famous song). He jumps overboard, and winds up on the Island of the Siren, whose song lures men to their deaths, as we know from the Odyssey. Sam has two choices – he can either have passionate sex with the Siren, after which he’ll die, or he can eschew the sex and starve to death. Well, it turns out that the Siren has become obsessed with a Game-Boy which washed up on her beach, and she plays it 24/7 – when she’s not luring men to their deaths. When its batteries die, she lets Sam escape in order to bring her more batteries. Back home, the widow Rose is preparing for a date with her college honey Richard, when who should show up but Sam. She goes off on the date anyway, dressed as a hot teenager. Richard shows up at their rendezvous looking exactly the same as he did 25 or 30 years ago (he’s played by a young actor who looks 20 but walks like he’s 50). Will Rose come to her senses? Will Sam stand up to her? Will the Siren ever get her batteries? 

Ms. Laufer has a wonderful theatrical imagination and a fine comic sense. Casey Stangl’s direction was delightfully inventive, and Mimi Lieber and Brian Russell were hilarious as Rose and Sam. Also terrific were Lindsey Wochley in three roles (including the Siren); and incredibly handsome young Ben Hollandsworth was a hoot as Richard. 

The Humana Festival is always great fun, even if all the plays aren’t all that great. Let us pray that Marc Masterson comes to his senses and stops giving away those valuable Humana slots to artsy-fartsy nonsense.

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“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about YANK,BRACK’S LAST BACHELOR PARTY, A LIE OF THE MIND, A BEHANDING IN SPOKANE  and EQUIVOCATION.

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Yank! a musical by David Zellnik (book & lyrics) and Joseph Zellnick (music) at the York Theatre Co., has a decidedly different take on the so-called “Greatest Generation.” It’s about gays in the military during World War II and focuses on a young gay man who finds the journal of a kindred spirit who served in the army in the Pacific arena in WWII, a young man named Stu who goes in sexually indeterminate but who realizes the truth about himself when he falls in love with a hunk named Mitch (also indeterminate) and then meets a sexually aggressive reporter named Artie who seduces him and then hires him to be his photographer so they can trot around interviewing and photographing servicemen and, of course, have sex all over the Pacific. 

My companion of the evening, a playwright who happens to be a Club Member himself, was a little uncomfortable with the stereotypical gay characters and felt that the show reinforced the belief that all gay guys just wanna have sex, even when they’re supposed to be doing something serious, like fighting a war; but we both agreed that the show grew stronger in the second act, when the real homophobic persecution began. 

The songs are for the most part charming, and Bobby Steggert is very winsome in the central role of Stu. Ivan Hernandez, apparently a straight guy, was totally believable as Mitch and Jeffry Denman was hilarious as the unapologetically sexually predatory Artie. 

Yank! has been extended into April and is well worth checking out – particularly if you’re a Member of the Club. 

Between acts of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler Judge Brack hosts a stag party in honor of Hedda’s husband, George Tesman. When Tesman comes home from this party, the sparks begin to fly, leading to the play’s tragic denouement. Sam Marks has envisioned what might have transpired at Brack’s soiree in his fascinating Brack’s Last Bachelor Party, produced by Babel Theatre Project at 59 E. 59 Theatre C. On hand are Brack, Tesman and Eilert Lovborg, whose manuscript Tesman finds increasingly disturbing. It’s a kind of 19^th Century “Future Shock,” and every time Lovborg reads from it Tesman is projected into the future, where he sees a wife who is a miserable, unhappy woman, played by the actress who will appear as Hedda in the play’s final scene. 

If you view Hedda Gabler as a harbinger of things to come this makes perfect sense. Marks cops out, though, when he finally leaves the party and brings Tesman home to his Hedda, transforming him from a stuffy 19^th Century husband to a contemporary Nice Guy, who comes home to his wife to try and work things out, when what was called for was Total War. The ending’s a cop-out. 

Nevertheless, the actors are terrific. This one is worth seeing. 

The New Group’s revival of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind, at the Acorn Theatre, has been wildly praised, and its run is completely sold out. I appear to be the solitary dissenter. I have seen the play twice now ( I saw the original production), and I still think it is a retread of themes and characters handled better in earlier Shepard plays, with a lot of wheel-spinning. Add to this the portentous/pretentious imitation-aboriginal music by Gaines and you just have a production that plays at times almost as a parody of Shepard-ism. 

The show is much better in the second act, though, and the performances, under Ethan Hawke’s direction, are excellent. Don’t beat yourself up, though, about not being able to get in to see it. 

After announcing about five years ago that he wasn’t going to write any more plays, Martin McDonagh has changed his mind, and the result is A Behanding in Spokane, at the Schoenfeld Theatre. This, too, feels like parody; but fortunately it’s pretty damn funny. It’s about a creepy old dude who has spent 47 years travelling the country in search of his lost hand, which was severed when he was 16 by a gang of hillbillies (in Spokane???) when they held his arm on a rail as a train ran over it. 

This is an admittedly ludicrous pretense for a play; but McDonagh milks it for all it’s worth, helped enormously by Christopher Walken as the one-handed dude. I doubt if there is any other actor who could have pulled this role off, because nobody does creepy/weird better than Walken. My problem with the play is that, in the end, it really isn’t about anything. It’s a great situation, with no meaning and, hence, no payoff. 

Finally, I saw one of the best plays and productions I have seen this season – Manhattan Theatre Club’s wonderful production of Bill Cain’s fascinating Equivocation, at City Center Stage One. 

King James’ Main Man Sir Robert Cecil wants to commission William Shakespeare to write a play based on a book supposedly by the King himself about the recent failed Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of radical Papists tried to blow up Parliament. Shakespeare’s company could use the money, and they are anxious to get on the King’s good side; so Shakespeare, who has never written a contemporary play, begins by interviewing the remaining few conspirators, who are being tortured in the Tower. What he finds out about the Gunpowder Plot will surprise you, though it will be no surprise that he never writes the play, realizing that if he does he and his company will be in deep trouble. Instead, he pulls out an unfinished play about a Scottish thane who murders his way to the Kingship of Scotland, throwing in some witches (the King loves witches). This mollifies King James, and Shakespeare and the guys escape a very sticky political wicket. 

Gerry Hynes’ production of this brilliant play is brilliant as well, as are John Pankow as Shakespeare (here called “Shagspeare”), Michael Countryman as Richard Burbage and as a Jesuit priest implicated in the Plot whose ability to equivocate cannot save him, and David Furr as an actor in the company who feels he should be playing better parts, a tortured conspirator and a creepily jolly, lusty King James. 

This one’s an absolute don’t-miss.

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“Who is this guy?For over thirty years Lawrence Harbison was in charge of new play acquisition for Samuel French, Inc., during which time his work on behalf of playwrights resulted in the first publication of such subsequent luminaries as Jane Martin, Don Nigro, Tina Howe, Theresa Rebeck, José Rivera, William Mastrosimone, Charles Fuller, and Ken Ludwig, among many others; and the acquisition of musicals such as Smoke of the Mountain, A…My Name Is Alice, Little Shop of Horrors and Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down.  He is a now a free-lance editor, primarily for Smith and Kraus, Inc., for whom he edits annual anthologies of best plays by new playwrights and women playwrights, best ten-minute plays and best monologues and scenes for men and for women. For many years he wrote a weekly column on his adventures in the theater for two Manhattan Newspapers, the Chelsea Clinton News and The Westsider. His new column, “On the Aisle with Larry,” is a weekly feature at www.smithandkraus.com. 

He works with individual playwrights to help them develop their plays (see his website, www.playfixer.com). He has also served as literary manager or literary consultant for several theatres, such as Urban Stages and American Jewish Theatre. He is a member of both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk. He has served many times over the years as a judge and commentator for various national play contests and lectures regularly at colleges and universities. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan. 

He is currently working on a book, Masters of the Contemporary American Drama. 

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about CLYBOURNE PARK, MEASURE FOR MEASURE, GOOD OL’ GIRLS, HARD TIMES, 4PLAY and BLIND.

 Bruce Norris, a former actor (I saw him several times at Circle Rep), has fast become one of our finest playwrights. All of his plays premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Co. and one, The Pain and the Itch, was a critical and popular success in 2006 at Playwrights Horizons, and I chose it for my annual Best New Playwrights Anthology. If you thought The Pain and the Itch was terrific, wait ‘til you get a load of his latest, Clybourne Park, which has just opened at Playwrights Horizons and which has already been extended.

Remember the Younger family from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun? They have bought a house in an all-white Chicago neighborhood, and a member of that neighborhood’s homeowners association, Karl Lindner, visits them to try and persuade them not to go through with this. Norris has set his play in that neighborhood, in the home that the Youngers have bought. In this first act, Lindner visits the sellers, Russ and Bev, to plead with them not to sell their house to a black family. Russ will not succumb to Lindner’s arguments, not because he is all that hot to promote racial justice but because he is going more than slightly bonkers living in the house where his son has recently killed himself.

 The second act flash-forwards fifty years. Clybourne Park is now, predictably, an all-black neighborhood. As blacks moved in, whites moved out. Now, a white family has moved into the house, and plans to renovate it into a “McMansion” – which might lead to “gentrification” – i.e., more white families moving into the neighborhood, thus driving up property values and pricing out black families who live there. A black man and his wife visit the white couple to plead with them not to go thorough with their plans.

 Jeremy Shamos and Annie Parisse play Lindner and his wife in the first act, and the white couple in the second. Both are extraordinary, as is FrankWood, who plays Russ. In fact, all the actors are wonderful, under Pam MacKinnon’s fine direction.

 Don’t miss this one!

 Theatre for a New Audience has a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Duke Theatre. The play is generally lumped together with Shakespeare’s comedies, but it is also known as a “problem play,” an appellation I have never fully understood. Anyway, director Arin Arbus has taken a somber approach to the play, emphasizing its angry satire of Puritan hypocrisy but undercutting the comedy.

 Jefferson Mays plays Duke Vincentio, who takes a sabbatical from his power to pass in disguise amongst his people in order to learn what is really going on in Venice. He lives his trusted aide Angelo in charge, who proceeds to actually enforce the laws to their letter and turns Venice into a puritanical totalitarian dictatorship.

 Mays is terrific as the Duke, and creepy Rocco Sisto is perfectly cast as Angelo. After that, the cast is some good, some not so good. Elizabeth Waterston is OK as Isabella, the novice nun who tried to save her brother Claudio, condemned to death for committing fornication, but she is vocally rather weak. Alfredo Nasciso plays the lowlife Lucio as a goodfella, which means he is just not funny, in a sardonic role which ought to provide much mirth.

I would say, do check out Measure for Measure, though. It is a solid, if uninspired, production of a play we rarely get to see; and Mays, one of our finest stage actors, is superb.

 Good Ol’ Girls, a new musical produced by Roundabout in the Black Box, is an odd hybrid of spirited New Country songs and confessional stories. The stories are adapted by Paul Ferguson from material by Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle. The songs are by Matraca Berg and Marshall Chapman, a team of top Nashville songwriters. The show tries hard to be sort of a combination of the caustic wit of A … My Name is Alice (which premiered in this very space years and years ago) and the down-home bonhomie of Pump Boys and Dinettes, but it just winds up being something of a downer.

 The songs are terrific, but the stories are all narrative monologues, and the evening just comes to a crashing halt whenever they start up. If they were funny, they might work; but these stories are almost all about very unhappy ladies. They are mostly bummers.

 The other problem is the performers, none of whom are real country singers. Which makes the whole evening sound rather bogus. You could skip this one.

 Pearl Theatre Co., now in residence at City Center State II, has a brilliant production up and running of Stephen Jeffreys’ dramatization of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. This seems to me an excellent choice, given the hard times we are currently experiencing.

The intrepid cast of six, under J. R. Sullivan’s inventive direction, play what seems like a cast of thousands in this story about the denizens of an industrial village in the north of England. There are the haves and the have-nots, caught in the grip repressive laws designed to keep them poor and subservient, and Dickens has a lot to say about the Industrial Age’s belief that the only things that matters are facts and figures. The novel, and the play, are an Ode to Joy, and to basic human compassion.

 The cast is uniformly wonderful. I enjoyed particularly Pearl veterans Bradford Cover, as a rapacious, soulless industrialist, T.J. Edwards as a local school teacher who believes only in the truth of facts and Sean McCall as his rebellious ne’er-do-well son.

 This one’s a don’t-miss!

 I also enjoyed the new Flying Karamazov Brothers’ goof at the Minetta Lane, called 4Play. Paul Magid, the sole original member of the group, a tall, pony-tailed Groucho of a guy, is still throwing them pins as well as he ever did, joined by three young guys who fill in ably for those Brothers now departed.

4Play is a hilarious mix of world-class juggling, goofy dancing and deliberately awful jokes. The little kids in the audience the night I attended the show loved it. These are some wild and crazy guys!

 Craig Wright’s new play, Blind, is a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. We are in the boudoir of Oedipus and Jocasta. Thebes is going to hell outside. Plagues, starvation, civil unrest – the works. Jocasta wants them to get the hell outta Dodge; Oedipus wants to stay.

 Since both characters know from the get-go that “the Gods” have brought all this misfortune on Thebes because Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother, this play lacks the climax of a tragic recognition, and is just mostly wheel-spinning until the King and Queen decide to have torrid sex on the floor, during which she blinds him and he strangles her. Kinky!

Wright’s language is in ineffective mix of the stately and the vulgar, and more than one time this leads to unintended laughs. Mostly, the two actors scream at each other. Of the two, Veanne Cox fares the best. Ordinarily cast in wry comic roles, here she displays the vocal chops and emotional depth of a fine dramatic actress. The Oedipus just comes off as a rather uninteresting juvenile.

I have often wished the Dramatists Guild would declare an Official Moratorium and modern adaptations of Greek tragedies. They never seem to work, mostly because these ancient plays have little in common with what we consider to be effective drama. Even our most abstract plays basically employ psychological realism in characterization.

Craig Wright is usually a wonderful writer, whose plays I have very much enjoyed in the past, but Blind is one of the most insufferable plays I have seen this season.

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CLYBOURNE PARK. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42^nd St.

            TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com 212-279-4200

MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Duke Theatre, 229 W. 42^nd St.

            TICKETS: www.dukeon42.org  646-223-3010

GOOD OL’ GIRLS. Black Box Theatre, Harold & Miriam Steinberg Center      for  Theatre., 111 W. 46^th St.

            TICKETS: www.theatremania.com 866-811-4111

HARD TIMES. City Center Stage II, 151 W. 55^th St.

            TICKETS: 212-581-1212

4PLAY. Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane

            TICKETS: www.ticketmaster.com 212-307-4100

BLIND. Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl.

            TICKETS: www.smarttix.com 212-868-4444

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Lawrence Harbison, our very own critic, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE COMMON AIR, AS YOU LIKE IT, TIME STANDS STILL, HAPPY NOW? ReENTRY, BLACK ANGELS OVER TUSKEGEE, and A CABLE FROM GIBRALTAR.

The Common Air, Alexander Lyras’ latest solo show at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker, is typical of this gifted performer’s work. Lyras, who co-writes his plays with Robert McGaskill, is a dark satirist, rather like Eric Bogosian. The Common Air is a series of interlocking monologues which buzz around a central event, in this case a purported terrorist attack on Kennedy airport which affects the days of disparate characters, from a manic middle-eastern cab driver with what he believes is a great idea for a reality TV show to a gay businessman to a war vet, etc., all of whose lives intersect in or near the airport. Lyras and McGaskill are brilliant writers, and Lyras is one heckuva performer.

The Common Air is several cuts above your usual one-man show.

And, Sam Mendes’ fascinating production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, at BAM’s Harvey Theatre, is several cuts about your usual Shakespearean production. This is part of the Bridge Project, wherein a repertory cast of American and British actors play Shakespeare at BAM and then in London (next up: The Tempest). There seems to be a trend a-borning to find dark undertones in Shakespeare’s comedies. Theatre for a New Audience has taken a similar tack with its fine production of Measure for Measure, which I will be writing about next week. Shakespearean production is, at best, a reflection not only of Shakespeare’s time but also of our own. It’s the winter of our discontent, even in the Forest of Arden.

The Duke’s court, where the play begins, is a dark, sinister place. We feel we are in a totalitarian state. When the action shifts to the Forest of Arden, we find not a sylvan glade, but a wintry, seemingly impenetrable forest, where the exiles shiver in the cold. It’s a novel concept, which works well though it does tend to undercut the laughs sometimes.

Mendes’ cast is superb. I particularly enjoyed Juliet Rylance’s perky Rosalind, Christian Camargo’s well-spoken yet insecure Orlando and Stephen Dillane’s archly pessimistic Jacques. Thomas Sadosky is excellent, too as Touchstone, and Alvin Epstein is very touching as old Adam.

This one’s a don’t-miss

As is Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still, produced by Manhattan Theatre Club at the Friedman Theatre on Broadway. Laura Linney and Brian D’Arcy James star as a couple who come home from the war only to war at home. She is a photographer who was almost killed in an IED explosion which killed her Iraqi translator. He is a journalist whose career is floundering and who wonders, what is the point of reporting incessantly the suffering of the victims of war? Also in the play are a photo editor and his much younger girlfriend.

Linney and D’Arcy James are very compelling in their roles, as is Alicia Silverstone in hers. Eric Bogosian is, as always, excellent but here he is playing a solid, rather nice guy; in other words, he does a fine job in a role that many other actors could have played. He is rather wasted, I thought. Daniel Sullivan, who seems to be one of the few directors who gets to direct plays on Broadway these days, has done his usual excellent work.

Time Stands Still is a fine new play by one of our best playwrights, and not to be missed.

Also not to be missed: Lucinda Coxon’s trenchant comedy Happy Now? produced by the always-reliable Primary Stages at 59 E. 59 Theatres. Coxon is a hot, up and coming British playwright. This is, to my knowledge, the first British play Primary Stages has ever produced. Since this production is “In Association With,” I assume it has been enhanced by commercial producers. To whom we should be grateful in this case. This is a terrific play about a woman who has a good career, a loving husband and two children, who can’t stop asking herself the Big Question: Is this all there is? Is this my life, my one and only life?

Liz Diamond, a fine director who most likely will never get to direct plays on Broadway since apparently only Sullivan and Doug Hughes qualify for that, has done a superb job with Coxon’s funny/poignant play, and Mary Bacon is giving a breakthrough performance as Kitty, Our Anti-Heroine. Everybody in the cast is wonderful, though I enjoyed most particularly Quentin Mare’s performance as Miles, a friend of Kitty’s husband who is an alcoholic. Seldom have I seen a stage drunk so convincing.

Again, this one’s a don’t-miss.

Emily Ackerman and KJ Sanchez, two refugees from The Civilians, have a Civilian-esque documentary play, Re-Entry, up and running at Urban Stages. They have interviewed Marines and their families and have put together an evening, largely comprised of monologues, about the harrowing experience of war, and about the difficulties of returning to civilian life. Sanchez has directed this with a gifted hand, and the evening features performances which are very strong; particularly, that of Joseph Harrell, a career Marine now turned actor who really is The Real Deal.

Re-Entry helps us to understand the sacrifices our service men and women make. It is not a pro or anti-war play. It accepts war as a given, and examines its effect on the combatants. It is riveting.

Layon Gray’s Black Angels Over Tuskegee, at the Theatre at St. Luke’s, is also a military drama. It tells the story of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, a squadron of Black fighter pilots who served in North Africa and Italy during World War II. The first act gives us six men at a testing center in Utah, where they hope to pass the examination which will get them into the war as pilots. The second act shows them during the war.

It’s a compelling story, tied together by lengthy expositional monologues by a man who turns out to be a descendant of one of the six airmen. The device pays off at the end, but along the way it just serves to halt the play in its tracks; or, rather, to ground the planes, as do numerous stories Gray gives his characters to tell, about Important Events which happened in the past. Had Gray pruned much of this expositional material an overlong play would have been much better. What makes me give this one a thumbs-up though are the terrific performances by the cast.

Finally, I saw Daniel Meltzer’s dark comedy A Cable from Gibraltar, at the Medicine Show Theatre, directed by Robert Kalfin. This is a suite of three related one-acts which focus on a somewhat archetypal Man and Woman. When we first meet them they are newborns in a hospital ward who try to understand the difference between “M” and “F.”

In the second act they become a couple while fishing, though they part when she receives a cable instructing her to travel to Gibraltar. In the final act they are two semi-senile generals on opposite sides of a conflict which has gone on forever, so long that no one remembers what started it.

A Cable from Gibraltar functions both as a comedy about the difficulty men and women have in communicating with each other and as a poignant meditation on the faultiness, and yet the persistence, of memory, written in an arch, faux British style which makes it seem somewhat like Samuel Beckett as adapted by Noel Coward, or perhaps vice-versa, and Kalfin has perfectly captured this odd style in his staging. His actors are excellent, too.

This one is definitely worth checking out.
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THE COMMON AIR. Theatres at 45 Bleecker, 45 Bleecker St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com 212-239-6200
AS YOU LIKE IT. BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
TICKETS: 718-636-4100
TIME STANDS STILL. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com 212-239-6200
HAPPY NOW? Primary Stages, 59 E. 59th St.
TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com 212-279-4200
Re-ENTRY. Urban Stages, 259 W. 30th St.
TICKETS: www.smarttix.com 212-868-4444
BLACK ANGELS OVER TUSKEGEE. St. Luke’s Theatre, 308 W. 46th St.
TICKETS: www.telecharge.com 212-239-6200
A CABLE FROM GIBRALTAR. Medicine Show Theatre, 549 W. 52nd St.
TICKETS: www.smarttix.com 212-868-4444

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will