PLAY: "You People"

Be they religious, obese, foreign, rebellious, or illegal, they're still people first, and The Shalimar's latest production You People aims to remind us of that, whether it's by doing a few rock numbers or a few one-act plays. This approach, while a bit sloppy and not as put together as LA FEMME EST MORTE (or Why I Should Not F!%# My Son), succeeds at being a lot like a melting pot of ideas, and there isn't a bad play in the bunch.

The first playful piece is Josh Liveright's Deseret Desire, in which we see two lovers getting all worked up with some serious kissing. Unfortunately for John (Justin Okin), Desiree (Laurie Naughton) will only take things so far on account of her religious beliefs ("butt stuff" is apparently OK from time to time -- ah, the vagaries of interpretation), and thanks to director Camilo Fontecilla's clever direction (the two sit at a distance from one another, responding to each other's kisses without actually giving or receiving them), we can actually see his frustration. It isn't long before John's agreeing to marry her, bring his kid up in the Church, hell, go to church himself -- anything for God, ahem, sex -- which says a lot about how some people treat religion in this country, especially when the sheets come off.

The next piece, Sharyn Rothstein's Miss Morley's Revenge is a more straightforward piece, and while it's nothing we haven't seen before, it's always a pleasure to see someone stand up for themselves, even when it's through the gaze of an impenetrable smile. In this case, Marilyn Hardy (Dawn Evans) is one of those self-righteous offenders who suggests "diets" and "moderation" like they've never been considered before, and Laura Morley (Kelli Lynn Harrison) just smiles and nods, being endearingly sarcastic as she plots her revenge. It's not a particularly deep play, but R. J. Tolan directs it without any menace, making it ordinary enough to remind us of just how often this well-intentioned discrimination goes on.

In Nastaran Ahmadi's Splinter, the discrimination is a bit more opaque. Man (Charles Semine) is an Irish student whose visa in America is about to run out. Woman (Jen Taher) would rather he didn't, as she's in love with him, but despite her desperate offers to marry him, he doesn't want to stay: "Being in America's only fun if you're American." It's an insidious comment, especially since Jessi D. Hill directs him as being so well-adjusted, happy, and normal; if we can't make this sort of visitor like us (the air has a smell, he says), who will like us?

Taking a more comic approach to the same thought is Hilly Hicks Jr.'s Blanco, in which an illegal immigrant, Blanca (Nina Freeman) tries to Google her American dream, with the help of her electronics store friend, Daryl (Blaire Brooks). Their discovery, through a gay video chat site, is that in America, you can not only achieve anything, but you can be anyone, and be accepted for it. Samuel Buggeln uses two unnamed actors (Chris McKeon and Chip Brookes) to bring the open gates of the Internet to life, but manages also to achieve a level of solemnity when "El Blanco" and "Army Cock" reveal who they are when they're not dreaming.

The best piece of the night is Michael John Garces' Tostitos, which is a rather frightening glimpse at disaffected youth in this country. Red (Andres Munar) rides around the stage on a bike, snarling at everything, while his punk hanger-on, Annie (Jenny Gomez) follows on a skateboard. Tanya (Barrett Doss), a good girl, has unfortunately fallen for Red, and he berates her even as he takes free sodas and candies from her, refusing to make any emotional connection. When Tanya's father, Danny (Edwin Lee Gibson) shows up, the two violently collide, and the lack of respect and understanding on both sides is frighteningly palpable. May Adrales doesn't hold anything back in the physical staging of this piece, which means she doesn't attempt to explain or justify the way these characters behave, and the piece is better for its mysterious bursts of anger, its violent teasing, and its aggressive banter (all of which Mr. Garces has refined far better in this short piece than in his last disjointed play, Acts of Mercy).

The evening transitions through each of these plays with songs from Davide Beradi and Tommy Smith, but with the exception of the last number, "You People," which actually engages the audience, these songs serve only to give the cast enough time to change the sets, and simply aren't clear enough; the direction from Shoshona Currier and Joey Williamson doesn't help either, as the 80s costuming doesn't fit the modernity of the other pieces, nor does it really speak to those people -- what they're doing is too easily identified with, too much a part of our culture. But if the play's the thing, then You People's got it.

PLAY: "Chekhov's Chicks"

Ever since I dreamed of attending NYU's Gallatin program as a major in "The Philosophy and Psychology of Theater," the thought of theater's ability to really change one's perception and heal our ails -- if taken seriously -- has stuck with me, and consequently, is part of why I've stuck with it. That's why it was such a pleasure to attend Elizabeth Rosengren's Chekhov's Chicks, a play that mashes together several Chekhov plays and short stories in order to enlighten the audience about love and life. The production is quietly directed by Jewels Eubanks and sometimes (in that small, barely decorated Manhattan Theater Source space) comes across amateurishly, like a scene study class, but as a whole, it takes a delightfully active approach -- much like the "active love" of Ivanov -- until at last, after a full presentation of the short comic piece, The Bear, our hero is finally able to bear the pains in her heart.

The play begins by introducing us to the lesser known Anna Akimovna (Carolinne Messihi), a character from A Woman's Kingdom who suffers from loneliness and stress. Rather than sit around idly, she heads to a famous doctor -- Anton Chekhov (Chris Cotone) -- who quickly diagnoses the pain she feels in her heart: "I know that pain. There is nothing for it." Luckily, his muse, the actress Arkadina (Elizabeth Rosengren, who plays a kinder version of the Seagull matriarch) has another idea: what if she and her company perform some of the good doctor's plays, to see if those bold examples of life can't calm her aching heart.

Soon, we're watching the Three Sisters give the abject lesson that "people don't marry for love," but that "when you fall in love yourself, you realize nobody knows anything about it." A few moments later, Sasha (Taryn DeVito) is clarifying for Ivanov (Ramesh Ganeshram) that "The more you have to do for love, the better it is. I mean, the more you feel it." And in one of the more memorable scenes from Uncle Vanya, Yelena dreams of being that free-swimming mermaid, unfettered from dull marriage and able to love.

These excerpts are all sparsely directed and often have very little for them beyond the light of an artificial moon shining off the window, but they speak to the sort of love to be found crawling out of Chekhov's "comedies" (this joke is made more than a few times) and they do inspire a sort of hope in the hopelessness of fantasy love. But they lead the way for real resolution in The Bear, which is now imbued with enough context (like Homelife does for The Zoo Story) to make the presentation of what would otherwise simply be a lovesick farce into a really uplifting conclusion. More so, the audience is joined by the entire cast, and we can feel their excitement merging with that of the play -- in fact, Anna interrupts the performers several times with her own eagerness and hope, which makes the performance more thrilling.

Rosengren has pulled together a lot of Chekhov's better musings, and while these pieces often lose the tone of the plays (some of the actors are delivering surface readings only, with none of the subtext or real yearnings of these characters), this repurposing is smooth and emphatic in its own way. Then to end with a quoted example of my own, these chicks may occasionally be ugly ducklings, but they blossom at last into a beautiful swan.

PLAY: "Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations)"

Photo/Richard Termine

Will Eno's an excellent solipsist, and that helps him to be a great monologist, a writer of such specific dialog that he can trick the audience into soul-searching his every word. With Thom Pain, he found a droll enough actor in James Urbaniak that we wanted to drown in his reflexive thoughts and engage with his double-talk; but his new collection of short plays, Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations) eschews specificity of thought for grasping meditations on mortality, and while Brian Hutchison and Marisa Tomei are able to tone themselves down, for them, it seems reductive. Worse still, the five short plays that make up the show are redundancies of each other, starting with the excellently fresh "Behold The Coach, In a Blazer, Uninsured," and ending with the dismal "Oh, The Humanity," in which the characters dismiss the artifice of the stage as a cruel reflection of life ("And these are chairs. And that's it. And I don't know who I am.") but offer nothing in return.

While Oh, The Humanity seems a bit like laziness on the writer's part, I will say this: he's good at his shtick: "Don't speak your mind," says Coach, "and certainly never your heart." With these two useful dramatic narratives out of the way, Eno divulges information through the language itself, like David Foster Wallace, who calls himself, at times, a meta-belletrist. That's an accurate genre for Eno, who turns cadences into heartbeats. For instance, Coach frequently doubles himself (not pleonastically, as he thinks, for the excess of words are necessary to punctuate his doubt): "grown in-grown," "I don't know. In general. And, in particular, in particular," or "An endless gorgeous gorgeous endless loss. Which now is now over. And we have how many more left left to us to lose?" And yet, we are too often being told that this is a pitiable man; very rarely do we actually see it or actually feel it. The poem he reads ("My love is like a sunset, stunning, and then over,") reeks of a pretension that doesn't fit the coach, and even he aches for "a gentle little rhymey poem for the old boy with the clipboard and whistle."

From here, it's more of the same: "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rain" has a Lady and Gentleman overconfessing to the camera ("I am not, as I look around myself, currently bleeding"), getting laughs and sympathy from their eccentricities, not their actual characters, and in "Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently," a cry for help is politely phrased under the diplomatically removed commentary on an airline crash ("Gravity, we trust, was a factor"), and our unshakable hero looks for hope in the little things. (She doubles herself as well: "This was, by the way, an experienced experienced crew.") Even "The Bully Composition" is partly muted by Eno's style, although here the photographer and his assistant are at least being more direct, calling for us to be "more mortal, as much as you can stand," so that their own professionalism is at least an opportunity for us to feel, for us to make some discovery about ourselves. But Eno doesn't follow the same guidelines he sets out for us: "We should try and learn to look at each other harder," he says, but never actually looks at us for we are secondary to what he has already decided to exclaim. That's why the final piece, "Oh, The Humanity," comes as a real irritant: Eno acknowledges the space, acknowledges the audience, and then dismisses it. He's busy conjuring up a mystery, the one caused by "the relations . . . not between things."

So far as an evening at the theater goes, Oh, The Humanity is a pretty artificial one, and if it manages to peer for a moment into our souls, that's only because it speaks so eloquently about the things that we don't know how to say (even though this would never be the way we'd say them). We get Eno's delightful pleonasms, but like Coach, we want a gentle rhymey poem.

PLAY: "August: Osage County"

Photos/Joan Marcus

Tracy Letts' three-and-a-half-hour epic isn't just a comic dance around the prickly pear that is family; it's a full-blown, three-sheets-to-the-wind leap into a thorn bush. Admittedly, some of the wild taboos introduced here simply prick at the surface of things -- adultery, incest, pedophilia -- but that's because they're not the point. They're just bloody lubrication for the damaging stuff: addiction, control, and the way the world -- or at least one life -- ends.

Thankfully, Letts is a master of form. His previous play, Bug, was a claustrophobic affair between (mostly) two characters whose infectious paranoia brought an ever-present tension to the stage. August: Osage County takes more after the open O'Neill than the hidden Hitchcock, a grand, bitter, desperate glimpse of that great American idea: the Family. Todd Rosenthal's set is a menacing three-story house, one that dwarfs the characters, yet clusters them together into small and provocative spaces, and both Letts and director Anna D. Shapiro wring every ounce of tension from its distances, hazardous stairs, and darkness.

But the tension in August is a different beast than the compressed Bug: here, Letts belates the tension (thereby belaboring it, too) by making the arguments ridiculous ("Who calls them [Native Americans] that? They're no more native than me!" starts one; "Genocide always seems like a good idea at the time," ends another). The explosions are subverted into eccentric outbursts, and they quickly subside, filed away as quirks or jokes, as with Violet's self-medication: look at the wasted mother, listen to her nonsense, and then smile, grin, just bear it. In this way, Letts is able to let the action rise and fall without sacrificing his humor or his menace, and finds a rather endearing rhythm in this Oklahoma clan. And this constant, precarious fraying is the very point of the play: as one character puts it, "Dissipation is much worse than cataclysm." For the end of the world comes not with a bang, but with that whimper of mental illness, a living death in itself.

Barbara (Amy Morton), oldest daughter of the Weston family, suffers from that dissipation: she arrives at the family home in the wake of tragedy, supportive, sensitive husband and adorable daughter in tow. But it's not long before we see that Bill (Jeff Perry) is in the process of divorcing her for a young college student, and that Jean (Madeleine Martin, fresh from Californication, but just as precociously edgy) is a budding nymphomaniac who likes to smoke a certain bud. In fact, the more Barb tries to hold things together, the more she falls apart: when at last she physically wrestles control of the family away from her perfervid mother, she can't handle all the new issues that land on her plate. In fact, it's not long before Barb starts to resemble her mother: snapping at her sisters, walking around the house in a bathrobe, turning to alcohol. Things suddenly aren't quite as cut and dry as she (or we) suspected.

Nor are her sisters unaffected (in fact, there isn't a single family member who goes unscathed): middle sister Ivy (Sally Murphy) is carrying on an affair with her first cousin, Little Charles (Ian Barford), because he gives her understanding -- and no surprise, they're both stuck under domineering women. And the youngest, Karen (Mariann Mayberry) is just as desperately clinging to her love, Steve (Brian Kerwin), who, while far from a saint, can at least fulfill her perception of happiness (namely, a trip to Belize). As for their mother, Violet (Deanna Dunagan); she comes from another generation (laughingly, the Greatest Generation), and considering what physical horrors were inflicted on her as a child (think of claw hammers), the mental grief she inflicts on her children hardly registers as an injustice. The same goes for her sister, Mattie Fae (Rondi Reed), who thinks nothing of calling straight whiskey a "cocktail" or of pulling her husband, Charlie (Francis Guinan) around by the balls. Is it any wonder that Beverly (Dennis Letts), Violet's husband, vanishes?

The one complaint I can see levied against August: Osage County is that at times it is a little too loose; but honestly, that's just Letts making it easier to shake things up. It's also a complaint I don't share: the little details are just right, from an aunt's observations about her niece's breasts to a mother's moment of panic before returning home, and I wouldn't give up a single line in the interests of saving time. These scenes aren't superfluous, they're charming: it's hard to believe how stuffy their house is, but not when you've just heard the one about all the dead parakeets. Furthermore, these small, natural moments are what allow us to keep pace with the large, frantic scope of the show: it's what balances the negative attitudes of so many of these characters, what reminds us, time and time again, that it's never black and white.

PLAY: "Doris to Darlene, a cautionary valentine"

Photos/Joan Marcus

Jordan Harrison's new play, Doris to Darlene, a cautionary valentine has well-earned the latter half of its name: the writing is exceedingly cautious, often delivered in a omniscient third-person that allows the characters to be in a perpetual state of introspection. Harrison handles the language very well, squeezing character into the rare lines of actual dialogue -- like the showmanship of producer Vic Watts ("I want tiny little children to hemorrhage their hearts out"), the weird music teacher, Mr. Campani ("If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it"), or the frustrated Richard Wagner, trying to overcome writer's block ("What would a dragon sing . . . if it could sing?") -- but this theatrical format is incapable of whipping our emotions into anything resembling the vomit-inducing power of The Ring Cycle.

At times, Harrison speaks elegantly to the power of music, with Tom Nelis' Mr. Campani exciting us like the solipsistic conductor in Terrance McNally's Prelude and Liebestod. At others, as with Laura Heisler's overplayed sorrow as King Ludwig, the music is washed out by distant analysis. I admire what Harrison is reaching for in the three eras of storytelling (1865 Bavaria, 1960 doo-wop America, and present day), and even more so the way that director Les Waters spins the scenes in, like some DJ scratching on a rotating stage, remixing the actors into a variety of roles, and cutting them together with some nice orchestral cues. But I think that's showmanship more than a show: for instance, Doris (De'adre Aziza) is the least developed of the characters (Wagner and Ludwig already exist in our minds), and no sooner does she have a husband and career than she has lost both in a scene we can only imagine.

The real story goes to The Young Man (Tobias Segal), who tries to come into his sexuality by pursuing his teacher, Mr. Campani; for him, at least, the music is seen as a promising, tantalizing hope of something better. Black notes on a white page; what does it bring anybody? asks Harrison, in a far too poetic, and all too unresolved ending. I couldn't say; but at least I was keyed up through the show by the cleverness of it all.

Despite not liking the story itself, the structure, language, music, and acting are all reasons to check out this show, and so to that end, here's a little code to make it cheaper for you to form your own opinion. Use DDBL on the phone or at the box office by 12/11 and you can get yourself $45 tickets (instead of the normal $65). There's also a rush for younger theatergoers; I'd certainly advise that, especially as I don't see this play selling out any time soon.