Edward Albee's Occupant

photo: Carol Rosegg

Who's afraid of Louise Nevelson? I dare wonder if Edward Albee is, since his tribute to the sculptor so gingerly tip-toes around her that she typically comes off as no more fleah and blood than a statue. We watch her interviewed in the afterlife as if for a magazine article: the interviewer once in a rare while offers a weak challenge but the gloves never come off. He's there to say 'what happened next" and "tell us more" while the great lady talks in quotation marks. Despite the deadly dull conceit, the play has the intrinsic interest of one great artist paying homage to another, even if it is an Inside The Actors Studio gloss job. As Nevelson, Mercedes Ruehl gives a fiercely intelligent, technically proficient but somehow wearying performance. She's an actress reaching to play an eccentric, when what is desperately needed is an eccentric actress.

A Dangerous Personality

Photo/Monique Carboni

There's very little tension in Sallie Bingham's A Dangerous Personality, a major dramatic stumbling block that the show never quite manages to get over. However, Martin Platt's clever direction manages to pull off a comedy instead, a fittingly ironic fate for the late Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, whose struggle to establish the Theosophical Society ended with her being debunked as a fraudulent mystic. From the gilded yet frayed Lamasery (richly designed by Bill Clarke) to a sweltering house in the Hindu Quarter of Bombay, characters keep standing up for New Age idealism (religion without the Church) only to ultimately stoop to comedy. Theater's a bit of a trick, anyway, and for what it's worth, the finale proves that Mrs. Bingham has something up her sleeve after all.

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Suspicious Package

I never thought I'd end up in acting in a show with The Playgoer, but thanks to Gyda Arber's pleasantly interactive "iPod noir," Suspicious Package, I spent 45 minutes running around Williamsburg in a felt hat, tailing a sleazy producer and chatting up a seductive heiress and her sexy showgirl sister. Each of the four roles has its own voice-over, but mine (the detective's) proved to be an amusing mash-up of stereotypes and witty one-liners ("She was a tarantula on angel's food cake"), and Aaron Baker's voiceover, fitting the golden age of radio, not only provided my backstory with plenty of boozing and gambling, but got me in full-on gumshoe mode. I'm a fast walker, so I wound up with some spare time between scenes (each "actor" meets the other "actors," one by one, by following the on-screen cues on their Zune Media Players): however, sitting on various stoops, looking out at the modern, fast-changing Brooklyn streets, listening to classic radio rebroadcasts, I didn't mind at all. I was too busy enjoying the unique experience.

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The Hired Man

Photo/Tristram Kenton

Whatever Melvin Bragg's lost in his condensed adaptation of his epic The Hired Man has been partially made up for thanks to Howard Goodall's music, a lively bunch of chorus numbers and operatically light chamber music solos that nonetheless pack a punch. But director Daniel Buckroyd is all business, and substitutes intimacy for tableaux, ending up with more of a revue than a musical. In truth, the rapid pace of Act II, which jumps from Katie Howell's airy "You'll Never See The Sun" to the talented Richard Colvin's moral aria, "What Would You Say To Your Son?" and from David Stothard's unyielding, unionizing "Men of Stone," to, of course, the ensemble's "War." It's not smooth enough to excuse the melodrama of a collapsed coal mine or a sudden illness, but the finale's resolution of all those counter-melodies shows that for all its ups and downs, all that hard work is ultimately worth it.

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Frequency Hopping

photo: Dixie Sheridan

The latest show at 3LD makes smart, artful use of technology: besides the moving projections both behind and in front of the playing area, there are automated musical instruments from floor to ceiling on either side of the stage. The resulting effect, which sometimes makes it seem as if the actors are inside a giant gadget, is of high visual interest and thematic validity but it's also a little distancing, and the script (by Elyse Singer, who also directed this production) lacks the needed drive to mitigate that. Nonetheless, the fact-based story here (in which movie star Heddy Lamar, privvy to Nazi secrets, seduces American composer George Antheil into brainstorming a technology to foil German missiles) holds our attention anyhow, especially when it uses the technology-rich environment to illustrate moments that would be impossible to dramatize on a traditional stage. The play makes gender-politics hay out of the gap between Lamarr's public sex symbol status and her private high-minded passions - for that reason I was reminded more than once of Insignificance, which imagines a get-together between Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein - but the show's style of presentation cries out for a larger unifying theme than that.

Benefactors

Michael Frayn's 1984 play Benefactors holds up pretty well today, even with Folding Chair Classical Theater's low-budget performance. Despite drinking from empty glasses, the lead performances from James Arden and Lisa Blankenship (as the good-hearted Kitzingers) are full of nuance, from David's frustrating sincerity to Jane's repressed and slow-boiling opinions. And although director Marcus Geduld loses some focus with his poor musical cues, he does pretty well with the material at hand, keeping the parallel between building towers and relationships upright, and keeping the darker thoughts about what it means to "help" someone (who has that right?) in the corner of every politely worded thought. I'm more uncertain about Ian Gould, who appears here almost exactly as he did in When Is a Clock: his over-enunciation places his accent in a different play, and he plays creepiness so overtly that it's hard to ever take him seriously. The only thing that shouldn't be natural in Benefactors are the monologued asides that, truth be told, are so smoothly inserted by the cast that they keep the action moving without becoming expository. The real benefit, however, will come when the melodrama is reduced.