PLAY: "The Piano Teacher"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

At first glance, Julia Cho's new play The Piano Teacher, seems to be a quaint solo show, the tale of an old woman, Mrs. K. (an electrifyingly frail Elizabeth Franz), who once was a piano teacher and now is alone. The mood is cozy, as evoked by Derek McLane's roomy and well-worn living room, and Kate Whoriskey's direction is neighborly and familiar: Mrs. K. opens the play, apologizing for her rudeness, by offering the entire front row some cookies. And yet, there's a sense of foreboding; something not quite right in the air (although that might just be the savvy theatergoer playing to the expectation of drama). When Mrs. K. picks up the phone and starts dialing her former students, just to talk with someone (the rest of the time, she "travels vicariously" by watching television), we feel that at last our expectations will be rewarded. But no, it's just another deceptively cordial conversation between teacher and former student, Mary Fields (Carmen M. Herlihy), a seemingly well-adjusted mother of two.

But then the phone rings. And no one answers her. The phone rings. Breathing on the other end. The phone rings, and she curses "motherfucker" at it, then apologizes, "You see what you made me say?" Silence. Here at last is that ominous something, with Hitchcockian menace, and suddenly her room looks more like a lion's den than a den, circled by lurking darkness, a darkness -- the savvy theatergoer suddenly notices -- that has been there all along. David Weiner's clever, subtle shifts -- a small flare on the ringing phone, a light accent to jar against a gentler reality -- that lighting has been the very thing threatening us since minute one.

As The Piano Teacher continues, Julia Cho uses a dramatic judo against us (like her peer Adam Bock), making us fear everything in the absence of familiar evil. When Mary Fields shows up at Mrs. K.'s doorstep, taking her up on that visit, we expect her to pull a knife. When she starts talking about Mr. K., and the time she used to spend doing the crossword with him before lessons, there's the fear that those happy memories are not what they expected. And when another ex-student, Michael (John Boyd) drops by a few hours later, we're waiting for him to take revenge for the molestation that surely went on behind Mrs. K.'s back. The real truth, as it often is, is far worse, so much so that when Michael starts to actually flip out, pulling the cord out of the wall, he loses his menace and becomes a caricature of madness -- this we expect; this we can deal with.

In the eerie final moments of the play, Kate Whoriskey gives us a glimpse into that unseen horror, but only a delicately suggestive one. A kitchen, and a man hidden behind a newspaper, and the lights rising higher and higher. Mrs. K. sits in her chair, picturing it, trying to tell the story she wants to remember, trying to say that all is "beautiful," but she can't. The words stick in her mouth, just like this image rests with the viewer, and with a slow succumbing to darkness, The Piano Teacher ends, pp.

PLAY: "The Eight: Reindeer Monologues"

Screw the eggnog: these reindeer are into the hard stuff. If you thought the worst that Santa's reindeer would have to deal with this year were ice tornadoes (something the lead reindeer, Dasher [Robert Brown], will proudly boast about), then you're in for a nasty little treat. You see, Santa's been playing with "the jolly old elf," and if you listen to Cupid (Peter Schuyler), the only openly gay reindeer (his intro is the Electric Six song, "Gay Bar"), then you'll understand the horror of meeting his red and white member: "There's big Santa, little Santa, big Santa, little Santa," he squeals.

Of course, Santa's not just into the children on his lap -- having scarred them into repression (yes, warns the dutiful Blitzen [Rachel Grundy], trama's the reason kids stop believing in Santa) he now turns his attention to his reindeer. In particular, when he gets into a certain "mood" in the workshop, he likes to rape anything that moves -- like Vixen (Jennifer Gill) -- or to abuse the less capable of his staff, like Rudolph, Donner's retarded son. And so you'll get to hear a very depressed Donner (Jason Unfried) talk about his deal with the red-coated devil (there's a reason Santa and Satan share the same letters). If that's not enough, you can hear Hollywood (Geoffrey Warren Barnes III) brag about his upcoming motion picture -- the one that will put that Claymation crap to rest -- or you can hear the apathy of Dancer (Theresa Unfried) or the apologia of Comet (Amy Overman), a doe so forgiving that even her curses are "H-E-double hockey sticks."

That's all you'll get, though: Jeff Goode's play doesn't actually make any judgments or resolve any issues. It just pokes fun at a large number of issues, like religion (Comet stops being a Muslim because she's afraid to tell them that she delivers toys for the "good little infidel boys," and Dancer, the Jewish reindeer, wonders if she can get off when Hanukkah falls on the 24th), sexuality (Cupid's particular fetish is for the sadomasochism of Santa's whip or the way a buck's antlers gore him during oral), and morality (Donner whores out his son for a taste of success, and Vixen almost seems convinced that her own lifestyle choices justified Santa's rape). As such, the play is a series of over-the-top surprises that pervert our perceptions, and is a good match for the Dysfunctional Theatre Company.

This year, however, the third time isn't the charm. Most of the cast has been in the show before (playing other reindeer), and some of them seem tired of it. Each of the eight ultimately stands alone (although others occasionally drink in the background), and only a few of the reindeer have personalities that really command attention. The play becomes grounded only in the jokes, not the flimsy characters, which makes sense, since there's no direction, only performing. Set pieces give the actors a place to play, but nothing brings these pieces together, and so the show is ultimately a little disappointing, even with all the laughs.

PLAY: "Atomic Farmgirl"

Your three sisters always make you the bashful horse, or have you go as the tepee for their Indian princesses; you live on a large farm, for which you care or know little about; your town is so small that everyone shares a party line; it's the year 1966; and, oh yeah, you live about 100 miles downwind of a nuclear power plant that's gone unregulated for years. So it's no surprise that your father gets thyroid cancer -- like you and the rest of your sisters -- and then, twelve years after recovering, comes down with a brain hemorrhage from all that rerouted blood. Or that your neighbors -- crushes and all -- start dying, moving, or both. Welcome to the world of Atomic Farmgirl, a epic by C. Denby Swanson adapted from Teri Hein's identically titled memoir. (And why not? It's a catchy title.)

However, it's not the largeness of the tale -- a story that travels from a 1952 medical emergency to a 1966 less-than-idyllic childhood to a 1978 college awakening and an eventual 1991 deposition -- that makes Atomic Farmgirl worth seeing. It's not the performances either, which range from the excellent Maria McConville to the suitable Melissa Condren to the often grating Kathleen O'Grady. Rather, it's the comic little details -- like how neighbor Mona sees herself as patriotic because there's a tumor in her head the size of a baseball -- or the wry anecdotes about how a lactose intolerance saved them from death as they had to switch from the cow's unknowingly irradiated milk to bottled milk. (From a milk-bottle shaped building, no less; a fact Teri gloats about as being one of those things you can get away with in a town like hers.) Such facts make for an entertaining account, and help to ground the play even as it jumps forward and back in time.

If only Swanson had stuck with adapting the memoir. In her haste to switch narrative viewpoints in the different times -- to give us a fuller, richer picture of the times -- she creates a bunch of theatrically shallow devices. That's right: ghosts. They all serve structural purposes; these phantasms (despite their substance) don't just apparate out of the blue. But for such a weighty topic, already leaden as much with history as with the radioactive iodine-121, is it really necessary to add in two Native American ghosts, Whiet-Alks (Karen Kitz) and Chief Qualchan (Dennis Gagomiros)? The parallel between them and their farming contemporaries, Teri Hein (Condren) and Ralph Hein (Hamilton Clancy) seems unnecessary (i.e., myths have little place in the Atomic Age). It also takes away from the hallucinations of Teri's guilt-riddled daughter, Dolores (O'Grady), who gets a visitation from an old crush, Greg Hahner (Brad Coolidge). These ghosts do everything from comically crash a coffee party to travel back in time, Christmas Carol-like, and it makes the fine, natural balance of the play more than a little tipsy. It also stretches the play out (close to three hours, all told), which would be fine if all this extra pith didn't detract from the essence of the source material.

The other place Atomic Farmgirl falters is in the presentation of the family drama. This is a low-budget production, at 78th Street Lab, and it is still in development, but even so, I've seen better work from The Drilling Company before. As is, it isn't always clear who some of the double-cast actors are: David Marantz, for instance, plays two surly farmhands (Leonard Zehm and Ed Brewer), and we're often guessing which is which until the text cues us in. Furthermore, the heart of this show -- the childhood and reunion of sisters Cheryl (Jane Guyer), Marsha (Vanessa Leigh Davis), Tracy, and Kathleen -- misses more than a few beats in the acting department. It's most noticeable in the earlier years, when the sisters play at being horses: where they should be free, they are instead fettered by what seems to be embarrassment, and that takes away from the innocence that is so integral to sympathizing with this nuclear plight.

You'll note, though, that I still say Atomic Farmgirl is worth seeing. Even through production flaws, the script itself stands up very well as a representation of life not just on a farm, but in the '60s, with the shadow of a Cold War hanging frigidly in the noontime sun. The seeds of an excellent play exist in the memoir, and Ms. Swanson (along with collaborating director Brooke Brod) has harvested most of it: there's just too much chaff in the field.

PLAY: "Local Story"

Bubba sits beneath a cobweb of bells, pasting newspaper articles on the wall so as to remember the past, but more specifically, to do something active enough to snap out of his lovesick stupor. His sister, Amory, wants him to leave the house -- it's been three years since D'lady left him for his best friend and now roommate, Jimmy -- but he can hardly move. He's preoccupied -- "devoted to whatever it is he's studying -- but there's no form to his research, no direction." And that puts him in pretty much the same place as the playwright, Kirsten Palmer, an otherwise talented writer (Departures) who seems to be somewhere else throughout her own play, Local Story. One moment, characters are in Montana, three years ago, telling dream stories about their lives, and the next they're in town, reunited without a moment's pause. And while Susanna L. Harris takes the direction along for the ride, using dramatic shifts in lighting to literally bleed from evening to morning and scene to scene, it only confuses the claustrophobic set to have characters sitting idly through other, entirely disconnected, moments. The devotion is to home (the one that's where the heart is), but the research is loose and fragmentary, and the direction is clumped and massed together, never specific as we'd like.

This goes for the cast as well, a group filled with generalities both in the script and in their acting. Travis York, often cast as a thuggish sad-sack, holds up the best, at least consistent in his funk (and genuinely surprised by the things that smack him out of it), but even still seems unsure of what he needs. Havilah Brewster has a few moments of dashed hope and sudden grief when her character, Amory, realizes she cannot have a baby, but she buries that emotion in irrationally curt rage. As for the romantic couple, Keira Keely plays Betsy too much as a dream, so ungrounded that when she asks, "Pity me now?" the answer is a resounding no, and Mark David Watson (her beau, Jimmy) doesn't seem as consumed by love as much as by desperation. I'd be struggling to find some way to justify that part too; one moment, he's wise beyond his years in dealing with his childish roommate, the next he's petulant and dense.

The play is also fraught with a bunch of unexplained phenomenon: Roy sees ghosts, Betsy receives gifts that drop from the sky like manna, and D'lady (Sarah Kate Jackson) casually struts around without ever being taken to task for her arrogant seductions. It clashes with the very real moments: girls doing laundry, sitting on the porch, lying down on the bed, clacking on the typewriter, and as a result, Local Story never finds a voice for itself. That's sort of the problem with writing a play that deals, in large part, with the idea of entropy: when idleness is your theme, it's hard to find action and obstacles large enough to maintain anyone's interest. Especially when those characters continue to peer ever inward, refusing to connect.

PLAY: "dai (enough)"

A British newscaster walks through a sea of empty chairs and empty tables, reporting to her unseen camera crew on the wide variety of characters to be found here, a bustling cafe in Jerusalem. She's here to explore the "Israeli plight," and before long, she's found an interesting interview subject. A brief change of clothing, and Iris Bahr is now an American actress doing research for a part she's totally thrilled to be playing, a Jewish girl so beautiful that a suicide bomber falls for her. ("Let's just say there's a sex scene, but no sequel," she blithely says.) But before her career can blow up (and there's a lot of this violent punning), the cafe is blown up by a less-than-Hollywood bomber, the lights fade, screams rise, and Iris Bahr rewinds to do it all over again, this time as an Israeli man.

Dai (enough) is a cleverly transposed solo show that views the last few minutes of ten different characters. The rigid structure alone is a reflection of the lock-step tension in Israel, but the far more chilling effect is that the explosions grow expected, and repetitive. These lives are momentary breaks from a limbo of destruction, and for all the comedy that Bahr lends them, there's always something inescapably bleak over their shoulder. Even the ghostly set, littered with scraps of clothing and haunted by a giant black arch, enforces this terror. Bahr can claim all she likes that she didn't want to make a political play, but the staging (and choice of character; there's only one Palestinian) cries otherwise.

At the same time, these aren't polemic characters, and with the exception of a very busy and opinionated Jewish mother ("How many people must die for these [Arab] monsters?"), they're not really polarizing, either. Instead, Mrs. Bahr manages to capture the nuance of different lifestyles in Jerusalem, from the Russian prostitute who "don't give shit" about the problems to the ecstasy dealer out to throw a "party for peace." She embodies the snooty socialite, visiting her homeland with designer sunglasses and feeling like "the Queen of England," just as easily as she becomes a gay German furniture dealer, blindly following the love of his life. (There's some good writing here, too; the German, depressed, begins to make discomfiting furniture that expresses his angst -- like a table with an edge so sharp, it'll slit your wrists if you lean on it.)

But what the show lacks are sympathetic characters. It isn't until the end of the play that we meet our entry point, an orphaned American girl who has volunteered to serve in the Israeli army. Neither Jewish nor American, she is still alone, trying desperately to find herself, and not just the "Americocky" person they label her as. She speaks of making human connections, of how it must be nice to feel suffocated by someone who loves you, and her nervous yearnings earn her the tragic ending that eludes so many of these other briefly glimpsed people.

Dai (enough) is a strong production that makes a nice transition from the Culture Project to the 47th Street Theatre, and although it cheats the narrative to make a point (these "interviews" can't all be taking place at the same time), that end justifies the means. It's also thoroughly grounded by Bahr's plot, which neatly frames a series of parallels within the full-circle arc of the play, all while remaining so casually chatty. The routine explosions aren't subtle, but they masks all of the unspoken words (and those that will now never be able to be said), and those are subtle. These are all real people, flaws and all, and by resurrecting their ghosts each night, Iris Bahr is making the biggest political statement of all: that it's time to lay the violence to rest.