The first moment in Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, which marks Jane Fonda’s return to Broadway after 46 years, occurs not on stage but in the audience. Musical director Diane Walsh enters, bows and sits graciously at a grand piano, house left. She begins playing the sweet and unremarkable waltz by Austrian music publisher Anton Diabelli that inspired Ludwig von Beethoven to write 33 variations on Diabelli’s theme, and apparently inspired Kaufman to compose his probing if problematic play. 33 Variations really asks a simple question: Given the banality of Diabelli’s waltz, why did Beethoven bother?

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Courtesy of Off-Off-Broadway’s Black Henna Productions, Harvey Fierstein’s Tony-winning play Torch Song Trilogy is running in Manhattan for the first time since its Broadway mounting ended in 1985. Playing Arnold Beckoff—a Jewish drag queen in the pre-AIDS New York City of the late 1970s and early ’80s—transformed Fierstein from a downtown doyen into the gravel-voiced monarch of gaydom. For actor Cas Marino, who plays Arnold in this revival, the experience is about fate and big balls.

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Michael Cerveris was a working actor—but a Broadway nobody—when he booked an audition for a stage version of The Who’s Tommy back in 1992. He was playing a minor role in a revival of Richard II in L.A. (Kelsey Grammer had the title role), and musical-theater performing wasn’t high on his priority list. Still, he was a fan of The Who and had a history of playing in bands, “so when they said they wanted me to sing a rock song, I brought my guitar and auditioned with ‘Young Americans’ by David Bowie,” he says. “I mean, no way was I having some rehearsal pianist trying to accompany me.”

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“Nothing offends me,” claims Alex Borstein, who voices the role of Lois on Family Guy and will appear at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 24 and 25 with the show’s full cast—Seth Green, Mike Henry, Mila Kunis and show creator Seth MacFarlane—for a concert reading of two episodes, backed by a 40-piece orchestra.

“I mean, I think rape and Holocaust jokes are hilarious.”

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Arthur Miller, pillar of American post-World War II playwriting, poet of naturalism who long sought an American equivalent to Greek tragedy, interpreted by Brecht? Who’d dare attempt it? For the Broadway revival of All My Sons, Simon McBurney of the acclaimed Complicité theater company, that’s who. Amazingly, it works.

The actors enter en masse, and star John Lithgow announces, script in hand, the play’s name and the initial stage directions. There’s signage (a Brecht hallmark), including moving projections by Finn Ross that aren’t just visually arresting but remove any complacency from your system. Perhaps it’s jarring or even strange to notice the actors sitting to the sides of the action when not in a scene, or set and costumes, designed by Tom Pye, deliberately stuffed with symbolism. But McBurney’s view is comprehensive, deep as it is wide, and its effects and residues generate some cauterizing moments.

But let’s also be honest: no one is paying Broadway prices for a Brecht experiment. All My Sons was Miller’s breakthrough play, written right before Death of a Salesman, and this story of an airplane-parts manufacturer who passive-aggressively permitted defective cylinders be shipped, killing 21 flymen and perhaps his own son, and who allowed his business partner to be convicted for the crime, is a tight morality play with thriller aspects. No, the reason people will go is how the four key roles are cast.

As Joe, the aging manufacturer who guilt is submerged beneath bravado, Lithgow is transfixing. As his wife, Kate, unable to acknowledge their eldest son is dead, Dianne Weist is a psychological thrashing machine—furious and sweet, sarcastic and beneficent. The couple’s younger, more idealistic son, Chris, played with vivacity, wit and mood by Patrick Wilson, worships Joe. Yet three years after the death of the older son, Chris is boldly courting his brother’s girl, Ann, who isn’t played by Katie Holmes so much as she is heaved, shouted and hoisted around. Holmes has little stage experience and it shows. I didn’t say she lacks talent: it’s an on-stage security, an ability to dwell in dark places, not browse through them, that she really needs.

Brecht is known for his “alienation effect,” and in that sense, Holmes certainly keeps it all at mind’s length, estranged from McBurney’s eye-opening sojourn into the soul of American tragedy. Fortunately there are three majestic pillars—more if you count the phenomenal supporting cast—to prop it up.

Through Jan. 11, Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St. (betw. B’way & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $61.50-116.50.

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Why did Teddy Bergman, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Woodshed Collective, situate his ambitious production of Caridad Svich’s Twelve Ophelias within the vast and creepy bowels of the McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg?

Maybe it’s ghosts. Svich’s play, after all, is practically suffuse with them, much in the same way that Shakespeare’s original Hamlet asks the title character—and audiences—to believe that he’s acting upon his dead father’s dictates. Bergman makes a statement by plunking the play into a comparatively tiny sliver of the long-neglected hulk, which was touted as the world’s largest public pool when Robert Moses and Fiorello LaGuardia opened it in 1936. Sense, if you can, the ghosts of yesteryear’s happy kiddies.

The play begins when Ophelia—the lovely and otherworldly Pepper Binkley—pops out of a dark brown plastic puddle at the center of the performance area, a mini-pool resembling nothing so much as primordial muck. As she wanders, we wonder: Could this be the “muddy death” that Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, describes in Hamlet? In the brittle lyrical landscape Svich constructs, whisking us off to the afterlife for Ophelia, Shakespeare’s most famous suicide hardly seems out of character.

Besides, everything is so different now. Just as those Depression-era children are now wisps of memory, so too are Ophelia’s recollections of the Elsinore court—back when she was merely a girl, perhaps bipolar, and smitten with the melancholy Dane. And Gertrude—played by a sulky, sullen Kate Benson—is a Machiavellian she-bitch running a brothel. Even Hamlet is in an altered state: Played by Dan Cozzens as a wild-haired galoot, the boy who would be king has dissipated his charms, appeal and even his name. Now he’s the Rude Boy, and despite his inability to keep his hands off Ophelia, he eventually finds ways to illustrate his moniker.

Hamlet’s friend Horatio, meanwhile, is a smidgen more moral. Played by Ben Beckley, the character’s name has been reduced to H, as in hotshot, the dude thinks nothing of gut-punching or wrestling Rude Boy down to keep him subservient. And then there are Hamlet’s other pals, those fools Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, their names miniaturized to R and G and shrunk down to playing cackling choristers and kibitzers. Their identities are further blurred by Grace McLean’s bouncy R and Preston Martin’s flitty G, each one a cheeky experiment in gender bending.

The reason Ophelia can’t smell anything rotten in Denmark is because she’s in Appalachia, or so the actors’ grimy accents make clear. It’s where she finds Mina—a floozy in Daisy Duke short-shorts worn by Jocelyn Kuritsky—parading her libido around like the barn’s cockiest hen.

Picture all this in a play that breezes through the basics of Hamlet and Twelve Ophelias may seem like a deconstructed masterstroke. In many ways, it is. The final element is the Jones Street Boys, a thrumming local band whose styles shift from rock to soul to rockabilly, all set to Svich’s lyrics. Unfortunately, the tunes are too much honky, too little tonk—Bergman hasn’t really tamed the acoustics of a space never intended for live performance. (The empty pool is also being used for concerts with reconstruction to begin next year.)

As you struggle to hear the tunes, they nevertheless act like scepters of mood that anoint the scene, full of genius dissonant harmonies but a garbled effect on the narrative. It can be thrilling when summer winds kick up and you taste moisture in the air, or it can simply confuse.

For all of Bergman’s whimsical, fantastical staging concepts—a windswept love shack for Gertrude’s boudoir, a rickety river pier—the question isn’t whether there are 11 more Ophelias meandering around this playhouse purgatory. It’s whether the ghosts of the pool are chattering too cacophonously for us to fully receive their message.

Through Aug. 22. McCarren Park Pool, Lorimer St. at Bayard St., Williamsburg. Free.



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The following review is brought to you by our sponsor, the International Association of Professional Spoilers, always dedicated to the ruination of your evening.

In the final scene of Stitching, Anthony Neilson’s two-hander about a couple that should never have been a couple, the female, Abby, played by spitfire Israeli actress Meital Dohan, reveals that she’s done something to her privates that’s a horrific form of genital mutilation. Not that there’s any genital mutilation that isn’t degrading and demoralizing, but Abby’s is disturbing to an exponential degree—among the worst of the tribal rites you read about in U.N. reports and news accounts.

Other critics have paused at this point in their reviews to announce they’ll go not one step further with descriptions of Abby’s abhorrent action. That’s fine and fair, but if you can read English, you’ll figure out what Abby does by the very title of Neilson’s play. I only mention this because it underscores one of the play’s problems—it too often favors superficial obviousness when limning key narrative blanks would do.

By the time Abby reveals her sewn-up crotch to her boyfriend Stuart—essayed with keen wit and well-grounded irony by Gian Murray Gianino—we’ve witnessed scenes from the lives of this pair skirt back and forth in time. Stitching’s first scene finds them battling the major crisis of their relationship—her unwanted, unexpected pregnancy; the second shows us Stuart bringing her back to his modest studio apartment for the first time (superb set and lighting by Garin Marshall) and paying her for sex.

We learn Abby’s a student, but that’s about it. Otherwise, there’s precious little information conveyed about her background or his, and nothing about his profession, although we presume he must have a job of some kind or he couldn’t afford to hire her. Her naiveté is laid bare, if you will, when she announces she’ll charge less for intercourse than oral sex and less for oral sex than for a hand-job. Abby’s a piece of work—we know that.

We also learn that Stuart achieved his first orgasm while thumbing through war photography. That, in turn, helps us understand why rough sex with Abby turns him on so much. But why does Abby like it, and where does her raging self-hatred—and outward anger—come from? (Indeed, if her neurosis isn’t extreme self-hatred, why would she sew up her vagina?) Dohan is intense, fiery, sexy, and given to the hot alluring pout, but because Abby is such a glibly written character, it’s impossible to accept her as real. British critic Aleks Sierz has coined the term “In-Yer-Face Theatre” to explain this style of play, but it’s seems more like in-your-dreams to me: I don’t know what Stuart sees in Abby that makes him doggedly transform her from being a prostitute into a girlfriend.

Director Timothy Haskell makes some shrewd choices and some mystifying ones. He allows the actors to play each scene as an autonomous dramatic event, with its own emotional peaks and troughs; each could stand as its own one-act or Webisode. Neilson’s time-bending structure lends itself to this modus operandi, but here’s the thing: Even when the chronology inside the world of a play has been fractured, the experience of watching it is always on the forward march.

Haskell also has the unenviable task of having to stage a monologue for Stuart near the end of the play. It’s the only case of direct address in the piece, and as such it’s a dramatically false, if perfectly wrought, moment. We’ve spent 70 minutes watching these romantic dunderheads illustrate that they can’t live with each other, without each other, or with themselves. No wonder, then, the title.

Through July 19. The Wild Project, 195 E. 3rd St. (betw. Avenue A & B), 212-352-3101; Mon.-Tues. 7; Wed.-Sat. 8; Sat. 2, $10-$45.



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One perk of theater criticism is you’re often given the script for a play that’s been off the scene. That certainly applies to Marc Camoletti’s Boeing Boeing, which ran on Broadway for 19 days in 1965 and fell off the radar faster than you can say Bermuda Triangle. True, the sex-farce-loving Brits kept it going-going for over seven years during the swinging ’60s, and the Guinness Book of World Records, in the early ’90s, proclaimed it the most-performed French play on earth. (Camoletti, who was French, died in 2003.) But in America, the play has long been going-going-gone.

Broadway, you see, has traditionally been unfriendly to farce, especially the libidinous kind. Maybe it’s the difficulty U.S. actors have adjusting their Method-centric technique to the idea of flying in and out of doors for no reason but to make us laugh, or of making exclamations like “She’s back!” seem believable. Maybe it’s because realism-weaned American audiences resist suspending their disbelief to such a farcical degree.

But with director Matthew Warchus’ new, pure-genius revival of Boeing Boeing transferred from the West End to Broadway, a sea change in attitude is in order. The subtitle—“a nonstop comedy”—may be a bit misleading (more on that later), but Boeing Boeing is a caterwauling scream of insanity. I wish it a first-class, smooth flight.

The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford plays Bernard, an American bachelor and businessman living in Paris who is constitutionally incapable of romantic commitment. He’s so averse that he’s engaged to three “air hostesses”: Gloria (Kathryn Hahn), a perky, free-spirited American; Gabriella (Gina Gershon), a sultry, earthy Italian; and Gretchen (Mary McCormack), a tall, domineering German. Any unwanted collisions are averted because Bernard has memorized all their flight timetables. As long as schedules stay consistent, no one gets hurt. Yet, as this is farce, pain is inevitable.

The unforeseen arrival of Bernard’s long-lost friend Robert—played by a long-faced Mark Rylance as a laser beam of deadpan delight—coincides with the schedules of all three women changing, thus initiating the action. Indeed, the only thing standing between Bernard’s arrangement and total disaster is Robert, who the women, for various reasons, hit on as well as hit, kiss as well as kiss off. The scene in which Bernard realizes the jig could be up is one of the most artfully delivered pure-farce moments in recent Broadway history, only topped by the physical pratfalls Rylance suffers through—his testicles pulverized, a beanbag to his head, or being hurled by that manic Germanic giantess.

All of which cruelly amuses Bernard’s snickering maid Berthe, who the peerless Christine Baranski transforms from an insult machine into a centrifugal farce all her own. Entombed in mannish clothing, a pixie wig, and glaring behind black plastic spectacles stolen from Beat poets, Berthe’s contempt for the lunacy about her is a combustible keg ever ready to explode. Seven doors swing open and shut on Rob Howell’s swanky white set (allowing the mod, color-coded costumes to pop), but the one leading to the kitchen, with the porthole window, is what gives Baranski the funniest take of the night.

The sweat-drenched Whitford essays the beleaguered straight man’s authentic joie de vivre, slipping into a quivering skip-step whenever a new complication threatens Bernard’s well-calibrated world. While perhaps too old to play the swinger—Whitford looks more like a booty-hungry divorcé—he’s guided superbly by Warchus, whose staging is elegant as a mathematical proof. The director’s one worrisome choice is when, cued by the script, he permits Whitford and Rylance a serious scene or two and the energy flags. All right, they both need a second to breathe, but the script does say “nonstop.” Still, what’s an airplane ride without turbulence?

Open run. Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), NYC. 212-239-6200; $26.50-99.50.

Photo by Joan Marcus



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You had to sympathize with the technical crew, which doggedly called cues from a corner of the huge rectangular space where 3-Legged Dog’s premiere of Charles Mee’s Fire Island—another grueling and fractured narrative by the playwright—is currently on display. From beach chairs and cushions for audience members to sit in, to tubs of cold beer ready for fishing from icy waters, to two colossal screens showing high-definition films of scenes that are also performed live, the anything-can-happen atmosphere was left entirely in the crew’s capable hands.

Along the shorter walls of the space, meanwhile, stood another pair of giant screens; 3-Legged Dog’s website explains that these utilize a technology called the Eyeliner that displays images not only in high-definition but also in three-dimensions, amplifying the otherworldliness of the overall environment.

Let me note at this point that Fire Island, for all of its flimsiness and faults, has the virtue of being the kind of play in which you never feel like you’ll miss something crucial if you have to answer nature’s call. Mee’s patchwork of vignettes—largely a meditation on the vagaries of heterosexual love on a spit of land world-famous for its historic relationship to the gay community—is as blissfully unstructured as a Sunday in July.

So when one audience member, ostensibly wanting to relieve his bladder (and his boredom, I suspect), got up to visit the men’s room, no one thought twice. Taking a route that discreetly led him behind one of the Eyeliner screens, he collided violently with it, causing a sound blast like crackling metal and causing distortion to whatever absurd onscreen image happened to be seen on it in that moment.

Cut to a shot of the technical crew, immobilized from shock, hands literally plastered to their cheeks like mugging Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. You could see dollar signs register in their eyes as grant money from who knows where slipped from their grasp.
But hey, at least this incident represented some drama, which is considerably more than one can say for the dramatically barren Fire Island. Ever since his haunting and evocative Another Person is a Foreign Country back in 1991, I’ve enjoyed Mee’s work. But lately, with Signature Theatre Company’s odd and disappointing season of new Mee plays and now this, I’m beginning to think his lauded collage-based writing style has become more pose than probe, more pretense than perceptive.

As staged by 3-Legged Dog artistic director Kevin Cunningham, if there’s any overall thrust to Fire Island, it’s about appealing to your sense of novelty: selling hot dogs, hamburgers and sausage patties before and after the show; having much of the onstage dialogue echo the dialogue on screen; having the actors, such as one wielding a knife, play scenes inches from your lounging, beer-swilling face.

But as someone who’s enjoyed many weekends on Cherry Grove, I found it nothing less than offensive for Mee to devote most of his play to straight people, and boring ones at that (the opening on-screen credits give a big, wet thank-you kiss to the community). The result is that although the energetic 13-actor cast is most game for anything Cunningham or Mee might have them do—pulling each other’s pants down, cooing at a table, lecturing us about religiosity and love—Fire Island feels nothing like the Fire Island I adore.

Even if the piece took place—on stage or screen—in one of the other two-dozen-plus Fire Island areas that aren’t linked to the gay world, you have to question the general raison d’etre: a filmed sequence with a naked woman interrupting a shower with her boyfriend to pee; a live sequence in which a man proposes to a woman before their apparent first date. Compared to all this, the presence of an onstage band—especially Albert Kuvezin, a Tuvan throat singer—was music to my ears. Or maybe that was the crash.

Through May 3. 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St. (below Rector St.), 212-352-3101; $30.



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What’s that joke about Jackson Pollock—the punch line is whatever you say it is? Annie Dorsen’s cute but pointless Democracy in America sits in a similar ken. The “project” began last fall when the audience at Joe’s Pub was told they could pay whatever they like—a few dollars, a few thousand dollars—for words or phrases, design elements, personal or political messages, or absurd non-sequiturs to be interpolated into the script. In fact, whatever people paid for would be the script.

Dorsen, perhaps more familiar currently as the director of Broadway’s Passing Strange, admits in her program notes to being inspired by de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which more than 150 years after its initial publication can still offer powerful insights into the American psyche. Sent stateside by the French government to investigate how republican government was functioning, de Tocqueville was both puzzled and intrigued by how, even in spite of what Dorsen calls “the self-interested and competing actions of lots and lots of individuals,” a nation could manage to still cohere and thrive. Searching for a theatrical mode by which to address de Tocqueville’s query, Dorsen also launched buydemocracy.com, thus ensuring that anyone with a dollar and a dream could partake in a literal auctioning off of stage time and space.

Ideally, then, Democracy in America would have been a colorful democratic experiment, one with a capitalist hue. Practically, though, the work is derailed by the sheer arbitrariness of its disconnected pieces.

As an LCD screen displays the moments people paid for and their prices (check your program, too, for it lists everything in order), actors Okwui Okpokwasili, Anthony Torn and Philippa Kaye play their “roles” with all the perfunctory and unimpassioned acquiescence of minimum-wage Wal-Mart workers. Preston D. wants a fart sound? Thanks for $5, pal. And thanks to you, Philip C., for $8 so the phrase “Parker Posey is the worst actress ever” could be heard. How sweet of Heidi R. to pay $75 so the name Claudine could be cooed 20 times; how equally sweet that Torn kisses Kaye’s arms between murmuring each one. And hey, Jason W.: thanks for shelling out $10 for 33 1/3 seconds of silence.

Remember when Le Parker Meridien charged $1,000 for a “zillion dollar omelet”? Well, John C., of perhaps more modest means, coughed up $100 for us to hear his parody of “Que Sera Sera”—“Que Suri Suri,” with paeans to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes—out loud. And as for you, Gregory M., was it really worth paying $200 to have a tapioca-filled duck fall from the ceiling to the floor and explode? Don’t worry: It wasn’t as disturbing as Nathan P.’s request. For $5, he paid for “The word ‘nigger’ did not start will not end with Seinfeld’s Kramer…it started and it will end with one person only…you!!!” to be spoken. That’s the same amount Daniel S. paid for a plastic dinosaur to receive an onstage rim job.

Anyway, back to Dorsen’s program notes, for there’s something disingenuous about her claim to being uninterested in commenting on “the state of our nation, our culture or our politics.” For one thing, as not all the actions in the program were performed, we can assume there’s some selection process behind the work. Also, by featuring two Abu Ghraib images (one labeled “This is theater,” one labeled “This is not theater”), Dorsen validates Erika M.’s $100 expenditure and perhaps exposes a bit of her own ideas as well. That’s at least preferable to having none at all.

>Through April 20. P.S. 122, 150 1st Ave. (at E. 9th St.), 212-352-3101; $20.

photo by Justin Bernhaut



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