THEATER: Red Dog Howls

Photo/Joan Marcus

The thing you need to know about Red Dog Howls, before you get frustrated or restless, is that Alexander Dinelaris is deliberately pacing his play in a fashion that will pay off, to spectacular results, by the finale. To that end, the bland narrative device through which Michael Kiriakos (Alfredo Narciso) addresses the audience -- often to repeat, foreshadow, or stress things you've just or are about to see -- can be forgiven. Likewise Dinelaris's insistence on cryptic exchanges between Michael and his so-underutilized-she-might-as-well-have-been-written-out-of-the-play wife, Gabriella (Florencia Lozano): it's the opposite of exposition. Here, characters dance, Lost-like, around things they would normally address by name -- the contents of a mysterious letter, a person's identity -- although, thankfully, never for very long. The point, ultimately, is that Michael is spending the play finding, after his father's death, a connection to his Armenian past that he never knew, thanks to his stumbling upon a believed-to-be-dead grandmother, Rose (Kathleen Chalfant).

And lo, Chalfant is amazing, a real treasure of the stage. Though she's playing a mysterious and heavily accented woman who insists on stitching strange names onto baby pillows, never eating in company, and trying to prepare her grandson mentally and physically for something horrific -- "You must be strong" -- she's at the same time almost always sympathetic and relateable, if not entirely understandable. Chalfant gets the best of both worlds in this character, too, for she inhabits the peculiar physicality of both this 91-year-old woman and her secret reservoir of strength, such that Rose can bring Michael to a stalemate when arm-wrestling him. Whether you want to call this a riddle wrapped in a nutshell or whatever, you can't keep your eyes off of her, you can't keep your heart from leaping out to her, and you can't stop listening to her -- even when, as the subject matter turns to the atrocities of the Armenian genocides, you might want to.

This Howl is not a Ginsburg-like explosion; it's a slow-burning keening that shifts from a growl to a wail to an all-too-intelligible guttural sound. And as it is a play both about identity and forgiveness, it more than earns both: despite a few early and only perhaps semi-flawed scenes (depending on your perspective), this is a production -- and a performance -- that will live screaming within you.

THEATER: Job

Photo/Hunter Canning

It doesn't feel particularly ambitious or adventurous of Thomas Bradshaw to adapt the biblical story of Job to the stage -- even the title, Job, is straightforward, and there's material excerpted straight from the New International Version of the Bible -- and yet it's certainly within his shock-theater wheelhouse, with each new deprivation graphically brought to life by director Benjamin H. Kamine in the Flea's intimate downstairs theater. If there's a somewhat paint-by-numbers-like approach to the material, which skips between Job's classically themed and God's contemporary, comic scenes, it's at least been painted with vibrant colors, thanks to a committed cast -- in particular a gleefully against-type "Uncle" Satan (Stephen Stout) and soulful Job (Sean McIntyre) -- and some clever staging, which includes not only Michael Wieser's compelling fight choreography but also Joya Powell's tribal dance sequences and Justin Tyme's dirt, bone, and blood makeup and special effects.

There's also an interesting effect in the way Job has been compressed into running a little under an hour while at the same time featuring expansive scenes of violence, as when Job's son Joshua (Jaspal Binning) strangles and then rapes his sister Rachel (Jennifer Tsay). (For an example of Bradshaw's "humor," note that two villagers later comment that this wasn't technically "rape," as Rachel was already dead at the time.) Given the story's use as a scared-straight parable about god's mercy and vengeance, I can tell you that Bradshaw's unyielding physical version seems far more effective than the page's limp warnings.

Still, while Bradshaw interjects a little modern humor and opinion into the proceedings, thanks largely to the conversations between a clearly flawed God (Ugo Chukwu) and his bickering children Jesus (Grant Harrison) and Dionysus (Eric Folks), the majority of the show is dominated by the sight of one man's suffering. Job succeeds, then, on its own merits, but that may be a Pyrrhic victory for downtown audiences looking for a little more depth and insight in their dramas.

THEATER: Mary Broome

For my first review back after an unusually long "vacation," and for a show being produced by the normally wonderful Mint Theater Company, I wish I had more positive things to write. But this dull, uninspiring, and often muddled revival of 1911's Mary Broome should have been swept back into the closet it was buried in. The supposedly scandalous "upstairs/downstairs" relationship between feckless, prodigal Leonard Timbrell (Roderick Hill) and the except-for-this-one-instance-entirely-wholesome maid Mary Broome (Janie Brookshire) will be relevant only to those most die-hard Downton Abbey fans. Even then, playwright Allan Monkhouse's poorly sketched scenarios -- almost all of which leave the action offstage -- are more likely to bore than titillate, especially with their monotonous lessons on propriety, as blustered by Leonard's father, Edward (Graeme Malcolm), and the cloyingly snobbish (and heartless) portrayals of Leonard's siblings, Ada and Edgar (Katie Fabel and Rod Brogan), to say nothing of his soon-to-be sister-in-law, Sheila Ray (Julie Jesneck).

The insubstantial plot is only worsened by Jonathan Bank's direction, which races so quickly through each act (the entire production, with intermission, is well under two hours) that even the cast trips up on their arguments. Roger Hanna's blatant set makes little sense either: while the family portraits that limn the stage may fit the pomp and circumstance of the first two acts, the choice to reverse them in the third (just as the family has turned their back on Leonard, so have the people in the paintings) is a distractingly cheap joke, as the portraits have no place in Mary's shabby home. The same goes for the fourth and final act, which changes the pictures again: symbolic or not, it's a counterproductive embellishment, one that takes away from the gravity of Mary's loss. Monkhouse is already all over the place -- just look at the aimlessly comedic introduction of Mary's parents in Act III (Jill Tanner and the delightful understudy, Peter Cormican) -- Bank can't afford to also meander. 

All this might hold up if at least the characters changed, but either the actors are incapable of shifting or the script itself (the more likely culprit) shortchanges them of any real growth. Roderick Hill's Leonard is a fast-talking, amoral rascal: he does a fine, albeit increasingly bland and irksome, job of it. Janie Brookshire's Mary, on the other hand, is all too accommodating, matter-of-factly marrying Leonard after his father makes him "do the right thing" by the pregnant maid ("Well, I want to marry someone"), just as calmly allowing him to run off and neglect their child, and ultimately not even blaming him for their child's death. Instead, she abruptly announces that she's taking off with a milkman: this is neither a drama nor a comedy, it's a theatrical checklist. Finally, there's Leonard's mother, Mrs. Timbrell (Kristin Griffith), whom Leonard keeps insisting is exactly like him -- a wild, rebellious creature. If only. Mary Broome is in dire need of a live wire; instead, it's stuck with stiff, dry broom thistles. 

THEATER: 3C

Photo/Joan Marcus

Why are sitcoms so popular in America? Perhaps it's because nothing bad ever really seems to happen, at least nothing that can't be shrugged off and reset by the end of the episode. David Adjmi's intriguing remix of Three's Company, 3C, takes the opposite approach: nothing good happens, and the powerful spate of laughter that serves as the climax of the show is quickly followed, and ultimately stifled, by a deadening silence. 

The sitcom conventions are all there, most notably in the outlandish landlords, mentally unbalanced Mrs. Wicker (Kate Buddeke) and horrifically racist Mr. Wicker (Bill Buell). But the thematic structure of the play can be summed up by its subversion: a massive series of comic misunderstandings lead the fastidious florist Linda (Hannah Cabell) to first believe that their Night at the Roxbury-like neighbor Terry (Eddie Cahill) is sticking his dick in the nose of her ditsy, promiscuous roommate Connie (Anna Chlumsky) -- they're actually doing coke. ("How can I feel good when I have all of this white stuff coming out of my nostrils?") Her prudishness makes it difficult to explain this to her new roommate, Brad (Jake Silbermann), which leads him to believe that she's figured out that he's actually gay -- not just pretend gay, to fool the landlords -- an issue that makes her condemnations -- "I'm sick, you're making me sick to my stomach" -- wound him even more. Likewise, when Connie comforts this former Vietnam soldier, trying to get him to confront his trauma, he mistakes her solidarity as a confession that she's a lesbian: "Just today I was with someone [at the beach]. It felt nice. I love getting all wet." 

Jackson Gay does a terrific job of staging all the beats of this production: pratfalls for clumsy Brad ("Is there some sort of insupportable weight you're carrying?"), striking one-liners for Connie ("I just get lonely and needy. Boy, I hope I don't get raped!"), and a whole series of elaborate dance sequences choreographed by Deney Terrio that express the ways in which Linda attempts to get out of the body that she feels trapped in. Gay's also absolutely brutal and unrelenting in the pacing, so when Mr. Wicker abruptly starts masturbating an unwilling Linda, or when Terry's "faggot" teasing turns violent, the shifts are shocking, as if the characters in a Nickelodeon cartoon abruptly started acting as if they were in an HBO drama. The cast, without exception, is exceptional, with particular attention given to Cabell and Chlumsky, who get the lion's share of reversals and breakdowns. 

The best example of Adjimi's technique can be seen in a simple game called "Faces," which Brad and Linda play in an attempt to cheer each other up (or, more literally, to mask their true feelings). One person calls out an emotion, the other person displays it: elated, anxious. But whereas a sitcom might leave things at this level -- broad strokes of showing, not telling -- Adjimi digs deeper, demands more: carefree, with an undercurrent of fanaticism. These are things that shouldn't -- can't, really -- go together, and yet these contradictions are part of the all-too-human condition. Is it any surprise that Linda breaks down for real after attempting to convey "Anguish, with an undercurrent of sexiness"? That could just as easily be her life, or at least, it could be, if she only had the confidence to embrace her looks. 

Don't dismiss 3C, then, as being simple or silly, although it is, at times, both those things. If you like, you're welcome to try to laugh it all off -- surely we've come a long way since this 1978 setting -- but you'll most likely find, as these unlikely roommates do, that we're terrifyingly stuck in some ugly conventions and some uglier lies. Tune in, turn on, don't drop out.

THEATER: The Bad and the Better

Photo/Monica Simoes

"I'll have like this different level thing going for me where like the revolutionaries are all sentimental lovers and they all die because of it. It'll really just be a story about love but it'll be somewhat disguised as a cautionary tale about the hypocrisies of extreme principles." So says Venus (David Nash), a man who once wrote a play about anarchists, "The Sad Singers on Stanton Street," and who now hopes to use the impressionable and irrepressible young Faye (Anna Stromberg) to help him gain entree (and authenticity) to her anarchist friends: organizers Justice (James Kautz) and Charity (Selene Beretta); hacker Scotty (Nick Lawson) and his peaceful, foreign lover Edmond (Chris Wharton); and the violent revolutionary Inez (Regina Blandon) and her punk-poseur beau Nino (Byron Anthony). Oh, adds Venus, he'll have to avoid guns ("Nobody likes gun death on stage") and large casts, since the only thing producers hate more than expensive blanks is a big cast.

As you can probably guess -- considering that Derek Ahonen, resident playwright of the Amoralists, is best known for his arrestingly good anarchist-lite family drama The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, his comically exaggerated, somewhat cautionary tales of love (Happy in the Poorhouse, Amerissiah), and his epic-in-size casts -- Venus's speech is both a foreshadowing device and a tongue-in-cheek commentary. And like The Bad and the Better itself, it's filled with angst, layers, absurdity, and -- the beating heart beneath it all -- truth. If it's not exactly subtle, who cares: Ahonen's an angry, ambitious, and intense playwright, and you can't be explosive without being a bit messy, too. And, to be fair, the political machinations of the super-rich -- represented here by developer Zorn (Clyde Baldo) -- and legislative idiocy of our representatives -- seen here as the dodo-like Eugene Moretti (David Lanson), who's more concerned with comedy than policy -- aren't exactly subtle in the real world, either. 

As The Bad and the Better continues, the stakes grow increasingly high (and almost implausibly interconnected, except that Ahonen's working in extremes): Venus is actually an undercover NYPD officer, looking to entrap the anarchists, and his girlfriend Matilda (Cassandra Paras), who runs a cop bar, isn't always understanding of his duties and absences. Venus's brother, Ricky (William Apps), is a washed-up detective, whose nagging wife and teenager daughter (Judy Merrick and Sarah Roy) are driving him to have an affair with his all-too-pliable (and stalker-like) secretary, Miss Hollis (Sarah Lemp), all of which is distracting him from properly investigating a string of odd murder-suicides that may be connected to Zorn. And then there's Julio (Jordan Tisdale), a new cop who's obsessed with Rick's "legendary" killing of three robbers, even though their unloaded guns are what shunted to a remote detective position in the first place. 

Given the scope, it's hard to say whether the play would be improved by trimming some of the excesses (a lengthy conversation between three oafish cops about how to keep a woman from cheating on you) or if those excesses are the play itself -- after all, as Eugene puts it in a campaign advertisement, we're all familiar with those movies that are so bad they become good. And, above all else, shouldn't a play about anarchists be, you know, a little chaotic? It's all at least presently nicely, with scenes layered atop other scenes both in the script and through resident designer Alfred Schatz's set, which conflates a bar, office, bookstore, and several alleyways into a singular space. But while Daniel Aukin manages to keep up the energy nicely (to the point where it appears he's been working with veteran Amoralists like Lemp and Lawson all along), a few too many scenes wind up veiled in darkness, something that worked in the more sedentary 4000 Miles, but less so in the hectic The Bad and the Better. Then again, the final image he works into the play is a good one: the road for good, bad, and better intentions is paved with bodies, no?

The Bad and the Better is profane without quite being profound and too antic to ever feel authentic, but it's interesting, often uproarious, and always entertaining. Those lured in by the title or reputation of the company will not be disappointed.