PLAY: "Washing Machine"

Photo/Ben Kato

Fist in the Pocket sure chose the right play to premiere their company with: Jason Stuart's stunning Washing Machine is equal parts creepy and charming, innocent and premeditated, choreographed and raw. In turn, Jason Stuart chose the right director for his work, his co-developer, Michael Chamberlin, who uses industrial minimalism to keep the focus on the story: What may or may not have happened to those involved in the washing machine drowning of a five-year-old girl. Chamberlin, then, chose the right actor to perform this demanding solo piece: Dana Berger launches herself into this role with enthusiasm and curiosity, yet always manages to pivot as crisply as the light design into each new character with a fresh tone, perspective, and rhythm.

In this melding of director, playwright, and actress, Washing Machine is able to cycle through a variety of styles. Brendan McCall's interpretive choreography goes from the euphoric first breath in the machine to the shuddering (yet still strangely beautiful) final asphyxiation. Akiko Kosaka's intimidatingly postmodern plastic representation of the washing machine and the hanging goldfish bags that keep the water so tantalizingly separate provides a space for exploration. Ben Kato's lighting takes on a personality of its own as it flickers from harsh to psychedelic, and the music (ebbing from techno to the climax of The Who's "Baba O'Reilly") ominously swells out of Elizabeth Rhodes' sound design.

The beautiful but barren aesthetic allows Ms. Berger to operate with athletic grace, springboarding from character to character before eventually diving into the murky depth of the play. In one scene, she's a rigid insurance claims adjuster, clinging to her cigarette for dear life; in the next, she's a slouching, bitter old man who always manages to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She has to play not only the unfortunate child (whose tongue sticks out first in curiosity and later in a swollen, muffled scream), but the unfortunate young mother who, as if in a trance, stands gaping for 21 seconds before smashing the glass with a rock. Stuart and Chamberlin don't provide any answers to the girl's tragic death, so it's up to Berger to form connections with the characters, and her familiarity with them (even an abnormally young post-pubescent boy) allows her to be shockingly direct with the audience.

Washing Machine is, not surprisingly, a very clean production of a sadly dirty story. It's an hour-long glimpse at an otherwise unnoticed ripple in the pool of life. But unlike the chore with which it's associated, this production is anything but perfunctory; it more resembles perfection.

PLAY: "Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays"

Alan Ayckbourn has been criticized for not being the most substantive of playwrights, but has anybody ever stopped to consider how much fun his mindless comic romps can be? Ateh Theater Group's production of Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays isn't worried about anything more than entertainment and the glimmering hope of a happy ending, and because of that, its over-the-top ensemble takes empty characters and fills them with excitement.

Director Carlton Ward's greatest success is in transforming the saccharine of this children's play into the type of high-fructose corn syrup that's appealing to the twenty-something crowd looking for something different to do at 10:30 on a Friday night. Unlike the recently revived Intimate Exchanges, which changes each night, but in a predetermined way, Mr. A's Amazing Maze Plays spends half its time establishing the farcical character, and then indulges in a live "Choose Your Own Adventure," where the audience can democratically choose where to send our brave hero, Suzy, and her chipper dog, Neville. (Our rowdy audience, high on life and drunk on booze, managed to kill them both, although our twin narrators were kind enough to give us a second chance.)

The play (like the majority of the "rooms" our characters explore in the mansion of the villainous, voice-stealing Mr. Accousticus) is rather empty, and as I'd mentioned previously, so are the characters. What fills the show, then, is the delightful emoting of the ensemble cast: as Ms. Passerby, Elizabeth Neptune can't just stumble drunkenly around, she has to roll down the "steps" of the chashama theater, into the audience. Ryan Tresser, as Mr. Accousticus, doesn't just have an overblown accent: his revealing costumes and drawn-out movements are larger than life, too. Madeleine Maby, the Mother, mispronounceceses her words with gusto and runs her house like a charming terror, and Suzy and Neville (Alexis Malone and Charley Layton) never miss a chance to castigate the audience with their eyes whenever we mistreat them. (Given a choice between "a room filled with toys" and a deep dark chute that "I wouldn't go down for any reason, ever," our masochistic audience chose the latter.)

The show works best as futurism: the actors squabble over who gets to play which role, the narrators (Sara Montgomery and Ben Wood) keep the show moving smoothly through the audience bits, and there are more than a few moments of laughter overtaking the actors. Plus, when has adding a British accent (to people who are clearly not British) ever not been funny? Everybody at Mr. A's ends up having a great time, from the cast and crew to audience too.

PLAY: "Goodbye April, Hello May"

Ethan Lipton's new play, Goodbye April, Hello May, too closely resembles the lives of its characters. These five roommates live in a city kept awake only by the constant sound of bombs breaking over Coney Island; their lives are awkward fumblings for security and companionship. The show lives on a stage kept awake only by the steady stream of Lipton's satirical 22nd century; once the shock value of those ideas fade, all that's left are the awkward stagings of director Patrick McNulty, fumbling for something deeper than the jokey surface.

Truth be told, the play is far too subtle to be properly satirical (unlike Pig Farm), and not thematically distinct enough to support itself on language (as with God's Ear). Lipton slips in references to the now-literal prostitution of PR work and McNulty swaddles Frank in a different gauze to demonstrate the dangers of teaching kindergarten, but the sections that truly work have Frank explicitly describing how he had to shoot a seven-year-old student: "Give me a fucking star, Frank," he says, describing the girl: "The animal." I use the two plays above as examples because the cast features Bill Coelius and Gibson Frazier, both of whom are restrained here, plodding around a dimly lit kitchen in their underwear or pessimistically talking about the idea of painting with gray. The mood is as cold as Eben Levy's accompanying techno music, which is why even a ridiculous wedding dance ends up looking more uncomfortably epileptic than hysterically spastic.

While the flaws above are due to direction, Lipton's main concern should be the lack of conflict. Goodbye April, Hello May is about alienation--of sisters, of the fifth wheel, of couples--but that doesn't give the production carte blanche to stay distanced. The text is just maddeningly casual: Frank is passive about his girlfriend Paula's late hours at a hospital, nobody seems upset when Paula is horribly burned by a firebomb (she recovers after a few jokes at her expense), and while Kelly Mares' perkiness as Irene is a nice balance for Coelius' Eeyore-like Tom, their love-at-first-desperation doesn't have much of an opportunity to develop. The one choking moment in the show comes from Albert Aeed, who plays the lonely ex-drug-dealer Harry; as he recounts the various jobs he's settled into--a list that just keeps going--he suddenly cracks with the realization of how little it all means.

Lipton's ideas are solid, but the story doesn't drive anywhere, which may be why the play idles out into an intermission despite being only ninety minutes long. After catching a breath, it feebly tries to make a point about the outdoors as opposed to the city. Unfortunately, McNulty's blocking makes the opposite point: by juxtaposing both lifestyles atop one another (hard to do otherwise when the stage is encircled by the audience), it just looks like life is alienating, period.

PLAY: "AntiGravity: The 2007 Tour"

Admittedly, I'm still a young'un, but watching the deft and fearless performers of AntiGravity soar, glide, slide, and hang from various contraptions in the air made me feel like a kid again. It's the giddy feeling of vicarious vertigo, the velocity of the vertiginous feats, and the rush of fresh air through the massive Hammerstein Ballroom as a performer does a mini-bungee onto a platform mere yards behind you, and then dances himself defiantly up into the air--the most graceful set of jerky movements you've ever seen.

That's how Christopher Harrison's "epic" compilation of sixteen years of work appears, too. While it's hardly gracefully put together--there's a lot of low-impact dance and minor acrobatics to stitch together the larger numbers--and while it's a little repetitive for a "best of" collection (the same high-hanging grips, but with bold new surfaces!), this is just a bit of turbulence, a jerky dip that leads, time after time after time, into--assuming heaven is still up, up, up--grace.

Narrative is replaced with atmosphere, and big bass-thumping beats from techno, pop, and modern music get the audience excited about what they're watching. The one issue is that the women, while excitingly scantily clad, aren't nearly as exciting to watch as the men, who--in addition to being able to hit the same vertical splits as the ladies--can also use physical strength to "defy" physics, as in the two show-stoppers, "Four Poster Fantasies" and "Strength Bruts." The former is a synchronized, three-dimensional gymnastic dance around a cube of poles that astonishes: when the women take to the cube, they're still far more talented than you or I, but their choreography takes on more of a pole dance. In the latter, two men do what is called an "acroduet," but is actually more like one man lifting the other as effortlessly as a five-pound weight (assume, for a moment, that this is effortless for you) and then using him to suspend yourself in awkward contortions that contradict all logic. (I'm given to hyperbole here: obviously they're obeying the push-and-pull of physics, but who would choose science over the Look-Ma-No-Strings-Attached approach?)

In comparison to these stripped-down pieces, AntiGravity actually uses a lot of props. Some, like a skit with Segways and roller-skates ("TechnoRiders on Cruise Control") have the feel of a parking lot taken over by teenagers. Others, like a spinning bungee-wheel ("Bungee Love") look like they'd be great to dare your friends to do on spring break. But the interlocking series of a metal frame, wire hula-hoops, and women spinning forty feet in the air ("Girl Power") or the sideways flips that happen when a wall comes between two trampolines ("X-Dream") are truly fantastic, taking on the surreal sense of a fantasy, tantalizingly aloft and just within reach.

They'll be back against in Spring 2008--what goes up out of NYC must come down into NYC. Given that scientific assurance, the only question left is: will you?

FILM: "Live Free or Die Hard"

So what's John McClane doing in a Tom Clancy novel? (Or more accurately, a Wired article from 1997.) Kicking ass and taking names, or taking names and kicking ass, i.e., inserting smirks and exuding confidence, replacing exposition with crude panache, and keeping that action hero spirit alive (at least until Indiana Jones IV). He'd better, because the stakes are higher than ever. There's no office, airport, or city at stake this time: America itself is held hostage by a bunch of cyber-terrorists running a "fire sale" (everything must go). And yeah, they've got a member of his family hostage again. Bruce Willis, as McClane, has been through it all before, so when he's scared, it looks more like he's excited to be back. Glad to see you, John, but there are plenty of flaws.

First off, Live Free or Die Hard suffers from its sprawling, disconnected set pieces (Die Hard with a Vengeance kept the octane up with the whole aspect of a game, not to mention the far more engaging set of villains). And while Mark Bombeck has successfully written McClane as (appropriately) a "Timex watch in a digital age," director Len Wiseman makes even the scars look too slick and modern: there's none of the gritty charm of the previous Die Hard films (perhaps because this is the first PG-13 installment). The first shootout, an assassination attempt on Matthew Farrell that McClane gets in the middle of, is at least set in a grimy apartment in the middle of the night, but from there on, technology takes over, both in the plot and the cinematography.

John's targets are also bigger, this time around. John's narrowly escaped being blown up with helicopters (Die Hard), planes (Die Hard 2), and trucks (Die Hard with a Vengeance) before, but he's never really been the one to do it, and there's a distinct lack of fisticuffs. There's also a distinct lack of charisma between hero and villain, not to mention villain and villain and hero and hero, so the only thing to watch "Die Hard 4.0" for is Bruce Willis: Justin Long is an unfortunate sidekick, a prepubescently poor substitute for Samuel L. Jackson (no Reginald VelJohnson), and the villanous Timothy Olyphant gapes and winces more with indigestion or boredom than anything inspiringly evil. (Still not sure what Maggie Q is doing here.)

A revitalized Willis is a decent reason to watch, and let's face it -- flaws, especially logical ones, never really hurt a summer blockbuster before. Those wooden actors are going to be dead in a few minutes anyway. We can ignore the fact that John doesn't kill all the bad guys, or that even after all the phones go dead, an OnStar-like car security system still puts our heroes through to a patient operator. We can accept the lackluster conclusion, if only because McClane utters that expletive and hyphen-heavy catchphrase one last time. Yeah, that's right, readers: yippee-ki-yay.