PLAY: "Good Heif"

Photo/Jim Baldassare

Good Heif, a new play by Maggie Smith, takes place in a timeless, arid wasteland, where sons, their pa's, their pa's pa's, their pa's pa's pa's, and all all's spend or spent their lives diggin'. They do so without question, entrenched in an unnamed pain that they overcome by becoming inured to it. The pleasure of sex is now the violence of "fuck," a euphemistic "diggin'" that Pa (a gruff and believable John McAdams) suggests the growing Lad (Christopher Ryan Richards) attend to with any ol' heifer. Sex is a fragile dust-thing, like the rest of their limbo existence, and Ma (Barbara Pitts) refuses to even acknowledge it ("ya plant an appley seed and then it grows and so do ye--Everyone knows"). In fact, she won't even touch her family, and Pa and Lad can only watch her darkly comic seizures, yelling at her to get up, a resilience that qualifies Ma as "a good woman." No surprise then that there's no God here, just a Devil that they must pray away.

This reluctant emotion, this closeted heart, makes Good Heif itself into an arid wasteland. Overly stylized and lost in metaphor, the script may beat to the same measured staccato of the diggin', but it isn't bearing any fruit either, and once it outgrows the incipient laughs, it thuds. As farce, such methodical emphasis works (as in Greg Kotis's Pig Farm); it works as an emotional substitute, too (as in New George's last production, Jenny Schwartz's God's Ear). To make overbearing language represent something far subtler, however: that's a real trick. Sarah Cameron Sunde manages to sustain the pace for a while by reducing the acting to stark physical movements. But clockwork scenes, already drilled short by the (James) Ellroy-like language, have a weakness: their gears tend to gum up in intense, shriveling heat of an unflinching poet.

From the two-foot long erection in Lad's pants and the discovery of wet, soft, bubbling holes in the earth, it seems clear that Smith means to deal with sexual maturation versus the stubborn religious mores of previous generations. But Lad is too weak a character to rebel, which leads to another character, the horned Ol' Heif (April Matthis), who represents either a wily devil or a faun-like manifestation of Lad's subconscious need for the female touch. She, crawling across midnight rocks with crevasses gleaming with glowstick light, is playful freedom; he, stiff-backed and waddling like a pencil, wears a corset around his hips and is repressed "normal." But these moments between Lad and Ol' Heif are too dreamlike to give an easy answer, and the play lives up to its own credo: "Work is what livin's for." Good Heif is work, and while it's work filled with life, it ends up simply being work and work alone.

PLAY: "God's Ear"

Language is all the spectacle we need. English's forced protestations, easy convolutions, logical revolutions, and verbal tantalizations are full-throttle in Jenny Schwartz's comic drama, God's Ear. New Georges has done well in the past at tapping artists who are fully utilizing rhythm to tell a story (past productions include Sheila Callaghan's excellent Dead City, and Lisa D'Amour's Anna Bella Eema), and Schwartz is a perfect match for them. The fast-paced repetition of David Ives' Sure Thing colliding with the linguistic sparring of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead makes for the surface; her own lively imagination (both the Tooth Fairy and G.I. Joe are interlocutors in this production) is what lends the text its groove and its edge.

But there is more to to this cavalcade of language than simple logorrhea. Mel begins the play trying to explain the difference between "critical" and "crucial" to her husband, Ted, in regards to the health of their son, Sam. In short gasps of muted suffering, Mel can only dance around the words, and Ted, grief-stricken, makes for a willing participant as he slowly distances himself from the wife he cannot come to terms with. While Mel remains at home, caring for their six-year-old daughter Lanie, Ted flees to the nameless Lenoras of airport lounges or the aptly generic Guys who frequent sports bars and sing songs about what can't be sold on eBay. These characters share a surreal sincerity brought to life by Schwartz's quirky and repetitious humor, and God's Ear is entertaining because of the truth clinging to the fascinatingly facile jokes.

As the play progresses, the words become like music, and not just in the interstitial songs. The staccato desperation, the pleading falsetto, the unexpectedly shrill shrieks, these notes strum directly on the heartstrings. The fabulous cast are virtuosos of their own voices, but they also command equally fine performances from their partners, and I expect that Anne Kauffman's masterful direction brought a lot of cohesion to this difficult script. Kris Stone's whimsical set, a combination of pop-up book and Rubik's cube (all trap-doors and compartments), adds a grounding for the type of world where Schwartz's language runs free, and the fantasy costumes of GI Joe and The Tooth Fairy excuse the unmistakable clash between God's mind and God's ear.

There are segments of God's Ear that could do with a little paring, and Schwartz could be a little less obfuscating when it comes to the tragedy beneath the tumultuous text. But there's nothing wrong with a play that demands our attention as much as our sympathy, and the forceful contrivance of language here does more to liven the stage than anything Disney can throw at us. In the end, we are what we say we are, the products of our own stories, and the tight, powerful narrative, tangled as it may be, is one hell of a dramatic web.