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