Rattlers

Photo/Justin Hoch

The second part of the Angel Eaters trilogy finds Johnna Adams at the top of her game, starting with a box full of rattlesnakes and a madcap kidnapping, jumping to a creepy encounter between a local undertaker and a drunk husband who share the same love, and flipping with a Southern Gothic romance between a young boy and a grieving mother. Jerry Ruiz jumps neatly between the three disparate parts of this play--a trilogy on the micro level--but what really makes this play is that for all the plot, the emphasis is on the characters first. (The cast is outstanding, too.) When she's not rushing, Adams has a terrific voice, and her stories work on multiple levels: as her characters grow more and more desperate, we see clearly that there's no price we won't pay to get back the ones we love.

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Made in Poland

Photo/Carol Rosegg

There's a Holden Caulfield anger brewing inside Bogus (Kit Williamson), and if you can't tell from the way he slams his iron pipe against the metal scaffolding that metaphorically represents his life as an unfinished construction site, he's got the words "Fuck Off" tattooed across his forehead. Was something lost in Alissa Valles's transition? It's possible: there's no American parallel for the strange devotion and peace these characters all find in Krzysztof Krawczyk, a real pop singer. But even the universal pursuit of love doesn't come across; Jackson Gay's direction is turned up so loud (and yet the action is still clearly faked) that it's all drowned out. The anarchist impulses of Fight Club were at least directed by broader statements about society, but Przemyslaw Wojcieszek's writing is focused so narrowly on a punk/sharpskin aesthetic that it's impossible to get inside Bogus's head, or to extract something resonant from him. "How does one live?" is a question well worth exploring; unfortunately, that tattoo on Bogus's head seems to be the answer--at the least, those big, black, gothic letters prevent us from seeing anything else.

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Clay

The first production from LCT3, Lincoln Center's initiative to offer new works from emerging artists at commonly affordable prices ($20), is a solo hip-hop musical by and performed by 24 year-old Matt Sax. I wish I liked it more. Or, frankly, at all. While LCT should be commended for stepping outside the cultural box, and Sax clearly has a talent for bustin' rhymes, Clay is deficient as a piece of theatrical writing, lacking discernible conflict until halfway through the show. Sax isn't especially accomplished at delineating character either, and the story he means to tell here of a dysfunctional suburban home life comes off rather whiny when set to a music form that grew out of urban marginalization. While the piece has been given the best staging that could be hoped for (under Eric Rosen's direction) the show's only urgency comes from the hope that its hip-hop music is potential bait for new audiences. But it'd been far better if said new audiences had seen BASH'd earlier this year, a show which ably put rap and hip-hop to stageworthy use in service of legitimate, well-crafted musical theatre.

Angel Eaters

Photo/Justin Hoch

Though it's the first part of a trilogy, Angel Eaters stands pretty well on its own, a Carnivale-like play set in 1937 that mixes mysticism with the family drama of the cursed Hollister family. There isn't much development, but there's a lot of action, as two con men (Gregory Waller and Isaiah Tanenbaum) get more than they bargain for when they promise to resurrect Myrtle's (Catherine Michele Porter) husband, wholly unaware that one of her daughters, Joanne (the marvelous Marnie Schulenberg), really can. Jessi D. Hill uses space and Jennifer Rathbone's lighting to evoke a plausible atmosphere, but when characters start flipping their motivations simply to keep the plot moving, things get a little out of hand. It's still an intriguing play, but it's really the mark of good direction (and better pacing) that we enjoy spending time being entertained by largely soulless characters.

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Mindgame

What are we to make of Mindgame, Anthony Horowitz's new play? Taken as a farce, it can, at times, be delightful, with a particularly hammy Keith Carradine working us up as Doctor Farquar, head of a notorious mental institution, and Kathleen McNenny as a belabored nurse. ("I'm sorry," she intones, "I was a bit tied up," and we know the cut of that jib.) But I'm told Horowitz's novel was a thriller, and taken in that vein, Ken Russell has directed a limp, dead thing, with plot twists obvious from a mile away simply because we know something must happen. This is the play Lee Godart thinks he's in, at least, playing the straight reporter, Mark Styler, without a shred of humor or self-awareness. The result is Poe's The Mansion of Madness desperately trying to be Ira Levin's fantastic Deathtrap, a play which valued motivation over the convenience of plot. Farces about serial killers may not work, but there are a few cuts that at least stand out: "He does not think that anything is the matter with him because one of the problems with him is that he does not believe there is anything wrong with him." The playwright is suffering from this delusion, and he has created this bit of psychotherapy at our expense: try the shock treatment instead, it doesn't last as long.

Arias With A Twist

Except for when he's vocally channeling Billie Holiday with dead-on accuracy, cross-dressed chanteuse Joey Arias can look and sound like the gender-bent answer to Yma Sumac who came from outer space. He's a distinct one-of-a-kind creation whose sounds are often fascinating. In puppetmaster Basil Twist he's found a collaborator whose sensibilities are as distinct as his own, and their creative union has produced a little gem of an evening filled with modestly-scaled theatrical pleasures that delight and tickle the imagination. From Arias' dramatic entrance - bound upright on a metal circle and performing Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" while puppets of aliens gather around him - you're transported to a place you haven't been before, except maybe in the late '70's with Klaus Nomi (who Arias backed way back then). There's a thin narrative thread that I'd prefer wasn't there at all - the show's infrequent spoken segments diminish the oddly magical world of the songs with what feels like old school gay-bar diversion - but essentially the show is an artfully presented, visually entrancing concert as imaginative as it is entertaining.