Secret Order

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Secret Order is an actor's play, full of barbed lines, wry deliveries, and so little substance that the play revolves around exaggeration and half-truths. That said, no matter how well Bob Clyman arms them with lines, or Charles Towers removes all other distractions from their work, the play fails if the actors aren't all on their game, and Larry Pine has a ways to go before he's comfortable enough to play the confident Dr. Brock. Right now, he's not a strong enough father figure to make William Schumway (Dan Colman) fudge his cancer research so as to make the old man proud. And his affected delivery, all bluster, takes the bite out of the snubbed Saul Roth (Kenneth Tigar) and lessens the influence and impact of the ambitious undergraduate, Alice Curiton (Jessi Campbell). Given that Charles Tower's direction is to minimize the surroundings (there's really just a rotating metal workbench) and spotlight the actors, the show has moments where it soars, and moments where it's just hot air.

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Make Me A Song

photo: Carol Rosegg

Many of William Finn's most memorable songs are included in this 90 minute revue, and an able cast of four has been assembled to sing them (I especially liked Adam Heller, who never sounds a false note all evening, and Sally Wilfert, who has a pleasing creamy-smooth voice), but somehow the show adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The ante has been upped on this genre of show after the most recent Putting It Together revue of Sondheim songs and last season's Jacques Brel... at the Zipper, both of which found ways to use their respective composers' songbooks to suggest a narrative spine and to chart an emotional arc. Apart from an extended section of Falsettos numbers, the songs in this revue aren't sequenced in any meaningful way: it's simply a parade of numbers, marched out one after another. While the best of them are moving and effective ("Unlikely Lovers", which builds to four-part harmonizing, is very beautifully sung here) the show (which uses just a single piano to accompany the singers) feels at its least good like some cabaret room in the Catskills.

Archipelago

Photo/Joanna Wilson Photography

In "The Way Down," one of the ten short one-act, one-man playlets that make up the isolating spine of Archipelago, a boy named Danny (Nick Lewis) has jumped to his death, only to find that time now passes remarkably slow, allowing him enough clarity of thought to regret the choice he made. But playwright Richard Strand doesn't give Danny any room to develop, nor does he waste much more than Danny's three seconds to consider anything broader than the cheaply developed gimmick of the short play, and he dies without any catharsis at all. The rest of the plays largely follow suit, giving largely unimaginative glimpses into the lives of characters whom we meet too briefly to care much for. This is especially true of an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' "(A Diptych)" and for Davy Rothbart's "Scarface," which spends more time trying to convince us of its feelings through an anecdote about a bat than by giving us anything real to ground ourselves with. There are sparks of creativity in Shelia Callaghan's "Hold This," and in Brian Patrick Leahy's "Cranberry" (about a suicide artist who is literally going to leave her mark), and both the performances and the writing of Anton Dudley's "Up Here/In Here" and Erica Rosbe's "Orbit" are satisfying wholes. Along with the passably performed Beckett piece, "Act Without Words I," that makes the show about as even as you'd expect, a fifty-fifty mix of theater that demonstrates just how important it is for a show to eventually come together.

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Crime and Punishment

Photo/Courtesy of Writers' Theatre

Dostoevsky's classic novel makes an excellent transition to the stage in this dramatically and psychologically focused retelling of Crime and Punishment. From Eugene Lee's cramped set to Keith Parham's floodlights of truth and repression to Michael Halberstam's tightly mirrored direction to the elegant and subtle acting, the Writers' Theatre isn't being cruel, nor unusual (but not easy either); just exactly the sort of ninety-minute sentence one hopes for. Trapped alone on stage as the very real ghosts of his lover/confessor Sonia (Susan Bennett) and genial pursuer Porfiry Petrovich (John Judd) spin in and out through doors, Raskolnikov (Scott Parkinson) turns to us (and an overwhelmingly large Jesus-on-the-cross) for forgiveness. In clearly extracted (yet contradictingly human) monologues, our soft-spoken murderer tries to talk himself out of sin, justifying his work as theoretical and extraordinary, but fails, at last coming to terms with his self-inflicted sickness as he tries to answer the simplest of questions: "Why?" For us, the answer is much easier: because this is a profound production, stretched a bit in the middle, sure, but a haunting tale all the same.

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All About My Mother

**

Old Vic

London

According to IMDB, the film All About My Mother is 101 minutes long. This newly staged version of the Almodovar classic was at least 30 minutes longer. The extra stuff added is just extra stuff. Much like many of the screen-t0-stage adaptations of recent years, this story suffered from the square-peg-in-the-round-hole syndrome. Even though there are theatrical elements inherent to the story (we're often backstage at A Streetcar Named Desire), All About My Mother is cinematic any way you look at it. Almodovar's eye is as potent as his voice and to have well intentioned theater artists attempt to recreate his magic live onstage is a virtually unattainable feat. New monologues delivered directly to the audience left me confused and the constant location hopping made the play seem too busy and ungrounded. Another rabble of amazingly talented Brtitish actors give it their best, including the dry as gin Diana Rigg and the passionate Lesley Manville (pictured), but unfortunately without Almodovar's obsessive close-ups they were doomed to be ersatz to their cinematic counterparts . I paid 25 pounds to be reminded that I need to revisit the film.

A Thought About Raya

Photo/Ericka Heidrick

Few people right now are happy about losing their Broadway tickets, but I was ecstatic, since it gave me the opportunity to catch the limited run of The Debate Society's first play, A Thought About Raya. This play, based on the work of Daniil Kharms, also provides insight (if The Eaten Heart and the upcoming Untitled Auto Play are any indication) into the largely vignette-based plays of TDS. Raya is their most nonlinear, an experimental predecessor, but the looseness of the evening allows for great stage magic. Anything can happen on Oliver Butler's stage: Kharms's unpredictability enables it, as do Butler's collaborators, the wonderfully frazzled and excitable Hannah Bos and her straight man, the deliberate yet modest Paul Thureen. The years spent as a tight-knit company have only solidified the chemistry between performers, and their dedication to Butler's staging is impeccable, allowing for realism to abruptly turn to fantasy, as when Daniel (or Daniil), who is trying to write, suddenly finds that his arms have become literal utensils. Once the plastic curtain that divides us from the performers is ripped down, the show is an exciting romp through the absurd ideas that Daniel has covered the floor with. Each piece is wildly different from the next, and they erratically jump, loop back, and reverse themselves, just as with Kharms's own writing. It's quite enabling, so long as you stop looking for meaning: a stick of butter, swallowed in one scene and regurgitated later on, is just a stick of butter, with inherent comic value, and nothing more. Absurdism is, by nature, better suited to comedy than drama, but the melange of ideas allow TDS to dip into a little of everything, as with a tragic, almost balletic, drowning. In one moment, Bos and Thureen recounting a series of increasingly gory murders, all while gleefully shuffling around a suitcase in a vaudevillian jaunt; later, the two stand before us, silently appraising the audience in their attempt to follow the voiced-over directions on humor: "Stand silently until someone laughs." Few performers can get away with such stunts, but based on my experiences with TDS, I suspect they can get away with just about anything, and I'm happy to let them do so.