PLAY: FRINGE, "The Commission"

The barbed-wire walls aren't the only constricting thing in The Commission: Steven Fechter's script is a fenced-in, all-too-tidy play about the very sloppy consequences of war and the myriad crimes that go along with it. Dreamscape Theater's production is fine but flat; there's not a lot of action in three-quarters of the play, and the circuitous talking is not justified by the script's backward-moving narrative. As a result, the first and last scenes are warm-ups and cool-downs for the meat of the play, the two scenes with Karl (Patrick Melville).

In the first of these scenes, Karl is a cool diplomat, trying to bypass a entrenched soldier with the use of increasingly trenchant language. This soldier, Ivan (Zack Calhoon) is apparently guarding a mass grave, and Karl will stop at nothing, no matter how hypocritically criminal, to expose the war crimes he's been investigating. Ivan shows up again in the fourth scene to beg Boba (Al Choy) for his daughter's Tulia's (Rena de Courcy) hand in marriage, but that scene's tangential, as is the first scene, that randomly puts Tulia in the same room as Paula (Susan Ferrara) for some light conversation. If these three scenes weren't so forgettable, the interplay between them might unlock some deeper understanding of the fractures of war, and the play might serve as a bone-setting tool that restores humanity (only to strip it from us once more).

However, it's only the third scene, a graphic confrontation between Paula and Karl, that sheds any light on the consequences of war. Ferrara and Melville are the stronger actors of the show, and they seem well matched here; furthermore, because director Sarah Gurfield strips them of their clothes, they have nothing to hide behind. Fechter's script bares its teeth here as well, from the vicious molars to the subtle, delayed wisdom teeth. It's also no surprise that the fangs come out at a moment when the play is furthest from the war: The Commission makes the biggest statement about objectivity and passivity by branding victimization and violence into what is otherwise a domestic scene. Look, it says: if we can do this in our own bedrooms, to those we supposedly love, what won't we do to those anonymous strangers we know nothing of and care nothing for?

PLAY: "Peasant"

Susan Ferrara's one-woman show, Peasant, looks like what it is--a workshop presentation--but it sounds so good, that I can't wait for her to flesh it out a little more. The issue with Peasant is that it's dramatically poor, so Ferrara is forced to mine her various characters for personality over substance. She plays up the comedy and theatricality of morphing from one character to another, and boils entire characters down to their sweet mannerisms, as with her childish description of Dracula: "I like Dracula because. I like Dracula because. He's very tall. And he wears black. And a cape. And he can fly. And. I like Dracula."

The most substantial character is her grandmother, Assunta, who (with sisters Rosalia and Lucia) makes the trip from Italy to America during the first World War. In the present, Assunta is a charmingly persistent matriarch who scolds and clucks her way around the stage; in the past, she delivers a grievous and poetic litany: "War took everything. Even the color green. Nothing but brown in San Marco. Southern Italy. Just dirt and rock. You think God forget color." After they reach Virginia, things get even harsher. Susan's grandfather, Francesco, works in the mines until he becomes a version of Dracula himself (or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man): "Day and night he work for years. Buried in dose mines. Til his skin was as smooth an' white as da coal was dark. You could see the blood move thru him. You could see his heart beat. Almost invisible, buried for years."

The title of the play comes from the ID badge pinned to the sisters upon arriving at Ellis Island ("Peasant"), and in its finest moments, the show is a warm reminder of our jumbled, collective pasts. The tried-and-true plot brings them from the Statue of Liberty to a sewing factory to a cramped tenement home, and it even throws in dramatic staples like a dead child. But the first-person narrative, the charm of Ferrara's telling, is what sells the story. With more work and a few props to take the burden off the strained scenes, Peasant will be very compelling. For now, you get the chance to see a raw story that's ambling, at a clipped pace, toward a deep meaning about where we all come from, and what we do when we get there.