Lloyd Rose

TALKING TO THE DEAD

Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

By Barbara Weisberg. HarperSanFrancisco. 324 pp. $24.95 The tables started tapping in Hydesville, N.Y., in 1848. The apparent mediums were Maggie and Kate Fox, 14 and 11 respectively, who in March of that year began to "communicate" with supposed spirits that had been knocking on the floor and walls of their house for the past two weeks. Forty years later, the sisters declared it had all been a hoax. In Talking to the Dead, Barbara Weisberg illustrates that this seemingly simple account of fakery and gullibility is in fact mesmerizingly complex. The Fox sisters' story itself has been written about several times; Weisberg's innovation is to examine it as social history, an approach that enriches the familiar story and raises it above the level of simple hoax. In 1848, Edgar Allan Poe had one more year to live; Neptune had recently been discovered; revolution threatened in Europe; and the railroad was still transforming American life. The Civil War was 13 years away, and Weisberg points out that the Fox family (including a brother and another sister) were anti-slavery in their sentiments and counted as close friends the Quaker social radicals Amy and Isaac Post, who ran a station on the Underground Railroad.

Modern readers may be surprised to learn how closely spiritualism (as the Fox sisters' practice came to be called) was allied with movements such as abolitionism and women's rights. Yet even into this century, the nutty and the progressive have often shared a bed. The area of New York State around Hydesville was the '60s San Francisco of its day, seething with utopian, socially experimental ways of living and daringly liberal politics. As in the '60s, participation was by no means limited to cranks. Frederick Douglass (on whom Maggie seems to have had a mild crush) attended seances. So did Poe's literary executor, Rufus Griswold, and Horace ("Go West, young man!") Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune.

It's easy today to sneer at spiritualism, and it was easy for many people then, too. But Weisberg's interest is in those who believed. The 19th century had its share of hellfire Christianity, but it was also when the idea of God as essentially a nice guy rather than a stern judge was beginning to take hold in the middle classes. Spiritualism went one step further: Though the movement sincerely espoused belief in the biblical deity, in practice He tended to slip out of the picture. None of the dead relatives contacted by the bereaved seemed to be in anything like hell -- or heaven, for that matter. They appeared to exist in a friendly, if rather bland, place. Spiritualism had created an afterlife without judgment or salvation or, by extension, God. The 19th century wasn't squeamish about death. There was a lot of it around, mostly among young children (There was almost no family in which at least one child didn't make it to adolescence.) Disease was often virulent. People died at home and were laid out in the parlor. As photography advanced, portraits of the dead in their coffins became a vogue. It was only a step from this homey attitude toward the deceased to attempting to contact them.

The era saw many mediums, but the Fox sisters were an uncharacteristically provocative phenomenon. Before performing in public, they were taken into private rooms, stripped and searched -- always by ladies, but the gentlemen waiting outside could visualize what was happening. And sometimes men tested the sisters by holding their ankles or arms. Young and virginal, Kate and Maggie nonetheless appeared on stage, usually the prerogative only of actresses, who were assumed to be little above prostitutes. This good-girl/bad- girl sexual aura seems to have been strong stuff.

So, how did the sisters fake it? Throughout their career, some skeptics postulated that Maggie and Kate were doing no more than cracking their unusually flexible joints to provide the coded messages from "beyond." This turned out to be the case. Still, for Weisberg and the reader, the question lingers: What was really going on in the sisters' minds? Were they only pranksters? Forty years is a long time to carry on a joke, even if you have been trapped by it. Con artists? They didn't make much money from their trade. Crazy? Both sisters suffered from terrible headaches and what, from the little evidence we have, might have been a mild manic-depressive syndrome, but they clearly weren't psychotic. At the end, they claimed they'd always been frauds, driven on by their exploitative older sister (and sometime mystic) Leah. Yet there are indications that something more complicated was going on, that at least at times they half-believed in the reality of the spirits whose appearances they were faking. Weisberg leaves that question, and its implications about the complexity of human motive, wisely open.

Lloyd Rose is a former theater critic for The Post.


Jerusalem Post

03-30-1998

City (Odessa Stories), which opened Thursday night at Washington's Kennedy Center, is an adaptation of five short stories and one short play by Isaac Babel. Though spoken in Hebrew, this production by Israel's Gesher Theater is provided with simultaneous translation into English. Babel's stories, and play, deal with life in Odessa just before the Russian Revolution, primarily the colorful, shady life of the gangsters of the period - sharply dressed young men who plot their heists between prayers in the local synagogue.

This material is rich without being theatrical - that is, great details and very little dramatic movement. City is story-theater, which means the delights are largely in the telling.

Director Yevgeny Arye stages the evening on a glass and wrought-iron set that suggests a 19th-century train station. The characters often slide on and off on platforms that resemble railroad handcars. A raised-grid platform provides opportunities for the actors to stumble theatrically over railings. A largely brass band occupies one area of the stage.

The evening unfolds as a series of tales shared by photographer Hershkovich (Yevgeny Terletsky) and matchmaker Arye-Leyb (Boris Achanov), sitting on a detritus-strewn Black Sea beach. The stories are sketches of Odessa life, not plot-heavy narratives, and they adapt to theatrical treatment somewhat shakily.

One dealing with young Isaac's experience of a pogrom and another about a chaste meeting between Hershkovich and a prostitute (Natalya Voitulevich-Manor) are the most successful because they are the most emotional. The actors involved - particularly Yevgenya Dodina as 11-year-old Isaac - perform with exquisite emotional clarity and grace.

Half the stories deal with the career of young gangster Benya Krik (the sardonically stylish Igor Mirkurbanov), whom we first meet while he's being enthusiastically serviced by a prostitute. Krik's saga is something of a tall story and has the repetition and simplicity of a folk tale. After he marries the daughter of old gangster Froim Grach (Yevgeny Gamburg), he has to deal with the midlife crisis of his father, Mendel (Leonid Kanevsky). The old reprobate has fallen for a gentile prostitute (played by amusingly sexy Efrat Ben-Zur) and plans to sell the family business and run away with her. Benya and his brothers beat the old man up, and that's the end of that. Subsequently, Benya turns a bungled robbery into a triumph by staging a Mafia-style funeral, complete with his singing of an aria from Puccini.

As a cynical, loving vision of a lost world, City has many strengths. As a theatrical piece, it's a little clumsy and overlong, though imaginatively staged and beautifully acted.

Copyright 1998 Jerusalem Post. All Rights Reserved



NEW THIS WEEK

CONRACK - (Through April 26 at Ford's Theatre)

A talented cast of African-American children help enliven this musical story of a teacher on a barrier island off South Carolina. The children are fine performers; it's not their fault they're being used as much for their adorableness as their skills. - Lloyd Rose

LONG AFTER LOVE - (By Pacific Bridge Theatre through March 22 at the Sackler Gallery's Ripley Center)

This trio of short No plays by Yukio Mishima is a nice introduction to that writer's fervid romantic imagination and to some of the ideas of No, the most stylized and non-Western of theatrical forms. With their characters, plot and conflict, Mishima's plays don't exactly adhere to that form, but they borrow many of the No staging ideas. The dancer Shizumi performs the middle play, based on the legend of the beauty Kamachi, with movement, dance and chant, and quite beautifully. - L.R.

THE MILLIONAIRESS - (Through April 5 at Washington Stage Guild)

This long, not-exactly-knee-slapping satire by Shaw takes as its subject that money makes the world go round. Helen Hedman plays "the richest heiress in England" and a most obnoxious and self-centered bulldozer of a woman. Intending to divorce her narcissistic-jock husband (Scott Morgan), she is smitten with an Egyptian doctor (Rick Foucheux). Although the actors, especially Jon Tindle as a sarcastic solicitor and Nick Olcott as a nerdy, foodaholic suitor, have their amusing moments, Shaw does not make things easy for them in their exaggerated roles. The play's four acts come across as set pieces rather than building blocks to a satisfying climax and resolution. - Pamela Sommers

PUMP BOYS AND DINETTES - (Through May 30 at the Kennedy Center's Encore Cabaret)

From some of the team that brought you "Oil City Symphony," this celebration of country-and-western music isn't as satirical but it's pleasant and amusing, particularly when Mark Hardwick performs as the strong silent geeky L. M., who plays bitter blues with lyrics such as "I may be a retread, but I ain't no spare." Affectionate and entertaining. - L.R.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT - (Through April 5 at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater)

Basically, Stacy Keach amounts to the whole show in Rupert Holmes's thriller about a financier trapped in his high-tech office. And what more could you ask for? - L.R.

THOSE SWEET CARESSES - (Through March 28 at Source Theatre)

A comedy about wife-beating? Yes, and with a sad, troubled ending. Lucy Tom Lehrer's first play is funny, well-observed and honest. As the elderly sisters who trap a wife-abuser in their genteel parlor, Nancy Grosshans and Susan Lynn Ross are pretty terrific. - L.R.

THE WIZARD OF HIP - (Through April 5 at Studio Theatre)

Thomas W. Jones II is a perpetual motion machine in his one-man show. If his mouth isn't moving, his limber body is, and when they're functioning simultaneously, it's an exhilarating, almost dizzying experience. Without polarizing the audience, he reaches out to black and white members with improvised remarks. It's not until the lights come up that one realizes the material itself - Catholic school, Mom and his first sexual encounter - is far from cutting edge. - P.S. @Slug: N36MIN

THEATER Last week to catch Christopher Borg in Guise Theatre's much-extended production of "The Only Worse Thing You Could Have Told Me . . ." The title is the only obvious thing about this show, in which Borg creates a number of characters and explores a number of attitudes about being gay in America.

-- Lloyd Rose Church Street Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW, through March 1. Wednesdays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. $21. 301-738-7073. POP Africville was the name of Canada's oldest urban black community, which was near Halifax, Nova Scotia, until its inhabitants were relocated and the 120-year-old community was leveled in the late '60s under the rubric of urban renewal. Africville's history is immediate and personal for Canadian jazz pianist and composer Joe Sealy -- he's descended from the community's founding families and his father was born there in 1910 -- so it's hardly surprising that he would compose a work bearing the title "Africville Suite." After all, each of its 80 homes had either a piano or organ and royalty did pass through: One tune, "Duke's in Town," honors an Ellington visit (his second wife, Mildred, was born in Africville), while "Brown Bomber" celebrates boxer Joe Louis. Other pieces evoke village landmarks or events and Africville's history of self-reliance. -- Richard Harrington Canadian Embassy theater, 501 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Tomorrow at 7 p.m. Admission is free but reservations are required. 202-682-7727. DANCE Bale Folclorico da Bahia rattled Lisner's rafters last spring, and this year a second performance of the 30-member Brazilian troupe has been added. The group, Brazil's only professional folk dance company, performs works springing from African, Indian and Portuguese influences. They put something of a slick gloss on tradition, with lots of high-flying kicks and an emphasis on theatrical flash rather than authenticity. But what they may lack in soul they make up in muscle. -- Sarah Kaufman Lisner Auditorium, 730 21st St. NW. Today at 3 p.m. $12.50-$25. 202-994-1500. CLASSICAL We're going to be hearing a lot of Schubert this year -- 1997 marks the bicentennial of the composer's birth -- and what more appropriate place to listen than the Austrian Embassy? Baritone Jerome Barry and pianist George Peachey will team up for a selection of songs from "Die Schoene Muellerin," "Winterreise" and "Schwanengesang," as well as for some uncollected masterpieces such as "Erlkoenig." Those who appreciate anniversaries will want to know that this recital takes place on Schubert's actual 200th birthday, but we never need an excuse to listen to this composer. -- Tim Page At the Chancery of the Embassy of Austria, 3524 International Court NW. Tuesday at 8 p.m. $24. 202-625-2361. FILM Paul Wegener's 1920 film "The Golem" is a classic of German expressionism and the horror genre: Its titular creature -- mystically created from clay by a rabbi in 16th-century Prague to defend that city's Jews against pogroms -- rebels and turns into "a monster without a soul" until getting his just deserts at the hands of a child. Wegener himself portrayed the hulking Golem, clearly influencing Boris Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's monster 11 years later. The technology of the times mandated that "The Golem" be a film without a soundtrack, though live piano music was often attached to its screenings. Guitarist Gary Lucas -- who has worked with artists as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Lou Reed and Captain Beefheart -- created a new score for "The Golem" and introduced it at the 1989 BAM Next Wave Festival. One German critic called the eerily dissonant sci-fi score "overwhelming" and dubbed Lucas, whose playing incorporates rock, jazz, blues, folk and classical, "the Semitic reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix." Lucas will perform his score when "The Golem" is screened Saturday at the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center. -- Richard Harrington At the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center's Cecile Goldman Theater, 1529 16th St. NW. Saturday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. $13. 202-518-9400, Ext. 249.

HAMLET - (Through Jan. 10 at the Shakespeare Theatre)

A straightforward, deeply satisfying production of Shakespeare's masterpiece. Michael Kahn's direction is intelligent, visually beautiful, unfussy, heartfelt. Tom Hulce is a fine, tough-minded, humorous Hamlet: You really feel a twinge when he dies. - Lloyd Rose

SAND MOUNTAIN - (Through Dec. 13 at Round House Theatre)

This evening of two one-acts by Romulus Linney is canned Americana. Linney's Appalachia is a folksy, poetical place that might have been dreamed up by Disney. Director Edward Morgan and his cast work hard to pull things up, but the material keeps dragging them down. - L.R.



NEW THIS WEEK

ABUNDANCE - (At Signature Theatre through April 23)

Beth Henley has again created a weird little universe, this time projected onto the vast expanses of the American West. When two 19th-century mail-order brides and their spouses end up moving in with each other in Wyoming, things go on from there in a crazy, funny and nasty way. You keep watching this entertaining, refreshingly bizarre production to see how awry things will go. - Lloyd Rose

TOM CAYLER & CLAIRE PORTER - (At Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Sunday)

The first installment of Woolly Mammoth's spring series of performance artists features Tom Cayler in "Men Die Sooner" and Claire Porter in "Portables." Cayler is a straight white man who can laugh at himself. He knows that man is an absurd, naked animal doomed to oblivion, performing existential comedy without the highbrow edge. Where Cayler is terrified, Porter is placid. Without overmuch wit, she points out discrepancies between words and acts in a routine that looks like an acting exercise. But her silent piece about getting drunk in a restaurant is enchanting and Chaplinesque. - L.R.

Joe Sears in a dress is a National Living Treasure of American theater. Half of the "Greater Tuna" team, this time he's skirted up as a plucky Southern landlady; his "Tuna" helper Jaston Williams plays the eponymous hero of Larry Shue's sweet-natured, funny farce. He's a shy Englishman who finds a new identity, including brains, charm and resourcefulness, while pretending to be a "foreigner" who can't speak English. Goofy but winning, Williams becomes a clown-hero, who proves evil is not merely powerless but ridiculous. - L.R.

LOOKING FOR GUENEVERE - (At D.C. Arts Center through April 2)

A meditative dialogue on the heroine of Arthurian legend, poet Rose Solari's "play" is more a multimedia performance piece than drama. There are beautiful painted backdrops and two inventive movement artists, who shadow actresses Solari and Johari M. Rashad (and occasionally make the small stage seem cluttered). Although the narrative lacks drive, the ultimate message - that Guenevere's role as an abbess after a life of passion was a positive choice - is convincingly delivered and surprisingly uplifting. - Jeanne Cooper

PEACE AND QUIET - (By Horizons Theatre at Gunston Arts Center through April 9)

They may be family, but everyone's a stranger at the table in this domestic drama written and directed by Kristen Kann. Maia DeSanti feelingly portrays a bright, unhappy teen who's starving herself as a response to her uncommunicative, judgmental parents (coolly played by Diane Linton and John Dow). The dramatic resolution may be murky, but Kann's depiction of emotional impasse rings true and there are also bright lights in the supporting roles. - J.C.

THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG - (At the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater through April 10)

Assimilation takes a light punch in the nose in Wendy Wasserstein's play about three women's romantic lives. High-powered banker Sara (Mariette Hartley) is celebrating her 54th birthday in her ritzy London flat with her two sisters: Gorgeous (Caroline Aaron), an uninhibited radio talk show therapist whose marriage is having problems, and Pfeni (Joan McMurtrey), a globe-trotting journalist with a bisexual boyfriend. Sara's relationship with a nasty right-winger is a setup for having a Jewish fake-fur manufacturer (Charles Cioffi) become her new boyfriend. The cast is amusing and professional, and so is the writing, but nothing is memorable. - L.R.

STARS IN THE MORNING SKY - (At MetroStage through April 13)

In 1980, Russian prostitutes were rounded up and sent to the countryside before the Moscow Olympics. Alexander Galin's play gives this neo-Potemkin story additional twists: The women's holding pen is on the grounds of an insane asylum, and the warden's son - a police officer - falls in love with a relatively untarnished working girl. The absurdist tragicomedy is part melancholy Chekhov, part women's prison movie; although No Curtain Theatre director Jiri Fisher (in a co-production with MetroStage) overall handles the shifts in tone well, there is a noticeable disparity in the cast's style, particularly volume. - J.C.

THE WASH - (At Studio Theatre through April 10)

Graceful, subtle and moving, Philip Kan Gotanda's play tells the story of a disintegrating marriage with such tact that it's more powerful than Strindbergian fireworks. Masi (Nobu McCarthy) has separated from her husband (Alberto Isaac), but returns weekly to do his laundry. He considers it the latest in a series of blows that include a Japanese-American internment camp stay during World War II; their two daughters don't know what to make of their liberated mom. Director Joy Zinoman has drawn fine ensemble work with remarkable performances from McCarthy and Isaac. - L.R.

THE WEDDING BAND - (At Round House Theatre through April 10)

Alice Childress's story of an interracial love affair, set in 1918 South Carolina, was written in 1967; the audience thus sees the material through double lenses. Today the play seems almost touchingly evenhanded in its treatment of its characters, even the weak and villainous whites. The script's strength is in the female supporting characters, juicy roles that Jewell Robinson, Gwendolyn Briley-Strand, Paula Gruskiewicz, Faith Potts and Roz Fox seize with high spirits. Jennifer L. Nelson's direction is full of small, enlivening touches. - L.R.

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Article date:
May 20, 1994
Author:
Lloyd Rose ; Jeanne Cooper ; Pamela Sommers
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THE BALTIMORE WALTZ - (At Studio Theatre through June 12)

Bracingly audacious and ambitious, Paula Vogel's bitter comedy is a hallucinatory, satirical, angry, fantastical outpouring of a woman's helpless grief over her brother, who's dying of AIDS. Kyle Donnelly's direction is just about perfect, unfettered and breathatkingly sustained. Sarah Marshall is pixilated, funny and piercingly moving as sister Anna; Stevie Ray Dallimore has a relaxed, warm stage presence as her brother; and J. Fred Shiffman is inspired in numerous roles. - Lloyd Rose

MISALLIANCE - (At Washington Stage Guild through June 5)

Less interested in teaching than trying out a range of social ideas through some very funny and full-blooded characters, George Bernard Shaw liberally applies his usual epigrammatic wit in "Misalliance," a comedy of social, familial and romantic mismatches. More indefatigable than his audience, Shaw still entertains even as he exhausts, and the Guild's designers and cast seem well-suited for his frisky sense of farce. Alan Wade and Kristina Smith are especially charming as an underwear tycoon with high ideals and low yearnings and his daughter who's waiting for "something to happen," which it does, in spades. - Jeanne Cooper

THE MISANTHROPE - (At Round House Theatre through June 5)

Swift, stylish and laugh-out-loud funny about sums up this successful production of Moliere's classic, treated with a mixture of looseness and respect and set at an all-night Hollywood coke party in the late '80s. However much translator Neil Bartlett (who did Arena's "School for Wives") violates the letter of the script, the spirit comes triumphantly, hilariously through. Ponytailed Jerry Whiddon is the judgmental malcontent Alceste, a screenwriter, in love with vixenish starlet Celimene (Carol Monda). With a spry cast, Daniel Fish's skillful direction and Moliere's satiric genius, this is an irresistible night in the theater. - L.R.

THE COCKBURN RITUALS - (Through May 9 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre)

"It's CO-burn!" the beleaguered doctor hero (Buzz Mauro) keeps telling people, but they're not listening; they're too engrossed in the chaos of the hospital where Cockburn works, where a mysterious patient lies unspeaking in the hallway (Daniel R. Escobar, in a poetic, dreamlike performance), dying of a previously unknown disease. The year is 1985, in case you're wondering what the disease is. The play is focused on more than AIDS - author John Strand's larger subject is the disorganized heartlessness of contemporary health care, a hot topic if there was one. There's no plot to "Cockburn," just attitude. Strand has several great targets: the collapse of our faith in technology, the inhumanity shown the critically ill, the insanity of bureaucracy. Maybe he has too many, because he flails around and doesn't really hit any of them very hard. - Lloyd Rose

CRUSHED TOMATOES/CALIFORNIA COWBOYS - (Through May 2 at Source Theatre)

Plays can go through several workshops and still not find a successful ending, but at least with one-acts, the need for a dramatic payoff is less. And as Source's current pairing proves, the charm of good directing, strong acting and clever dialogue can compensate for a lot. Donna DiNovelli's "Crushed Tomatoes," which opens the double bill, never seems sure of where it's going. Catholic schooling, adolescence, Italian-American family life and the threat of nuclear war are all dropped into a darkly comic centrifuge, but the contrived ending will leave you wondering - what was that all about? Ernie Joselovitz fares better with "California Cowboy," which offers less quirkiness and more intimacy. Bookish Barney Neuwald (Robert Zalkind) is 12 years old when the new man in his mother's life, sensitive cowpoke Sandy (Brian Deenihan), teaches him to eat chili dogs, catch fish and ride a horse. The drama has a gentle episodic momentum, which subsides rather quickly. But in its way, "Cowboy" is as lingering as the overheard strains of the mournful "The Tennessee Waltz."

- Jeanne Cooper

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN - (Through May 2 by Chamber Theatre at Church Street Theatre)

Instead of breathing new life into Eugene O'Neill's classic, director Nick Olcott and cast tend to it with the same reverential, nurturing impulse celebrated in its heroine Josie Hogan. In the early 1920s, Josie (M. J. Karmi) is managing a small farm in Connecticut with her irascible Irish father (Peter Gil). She hides her affection and virginity from both her father and their landlord, alcoholic Jim Tyrone (Wynn Hollingsworth), under a bluster of sexual boasts and satiric retorts. But in his hour of need, she reveals her true, forgiving self to Jim, cushioning his head on her bosom in a Pieta`- like tableau. Karmi plays Josie smart but straight, although her brogue needs toning down to contrast with Gil's appropriately sly leprechaun act. Hollingsworth gives the most nuanced performance, perhaps since Jim is the least noble. What's missing here in an otherwise luminous revival is a sense of risk, of new perspective. - J.C.

MOTHER COURAGE - (Through May 16 at Shakespeare Theatre)

This is a fierce, controlled, poetry-of-iron production of Bertolt Brecht's anti-war masterpiece, which is progenitor of the whole tragedy-with-jokes genre, the politics-as-vaudeville entertainment and arguably the book-musical. It's set in the 17th century's Thirty Years' War, wherein Mother Courage (Pat Carroll in a heroically unself-conscious tour de force) follows the war, feeding off the need of both sides for food, clothing and drink. Director Michael Kahn draws immense strength and simplicity from Hanif Kureishi's ("My Beautiful Laundrette") acid, colloquial translation/adaptation, which brings out the play's nasty humor very strongly and has a surprisingly lyrical edge. - L.R.

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New This Week BLACK NO MORE -- (At Arena Stage through June 7)

The central premise of this free adaptation by journalist-playwright Syl Jones of a 1931 novel by the cantankerous Harlem Renaissance figure George Schuyler is the invention of a machine that will turn black people white, allowing Max Disher (Gregory Simmons) to become Matthew Fisher and infiltrate a white supremacist organization for his own purposes. Even that short description indicates the minefield of potential offensiveness that the show, stylishly directed by Tazewell Thompson, dances over. Schuyler was a seriously mean writer, and there's bitterness in his satire, but Jones's stage version of Schuyler's book is a genial, can't-we-all-get-along? mockery of white racial insanity. The suave ringmaster of this satirical carnival is Wendell Wright as the inventor of the Erace-o-lator, Dr. Junius Crookman. Though he has a great crazy smile, Wright exudes an ironic calm that makes him, hilariously, the sanest-seeming person in the play. As a play about race in which there's no mention of affirmative action, welfare reform or debates about crime, "Black No More" takes place in something of a social vacuum. Though audacious and brave, it's not so much politically incorrect as politically irrelevant. -- Lloyd Rose EXILE IN JERUSALEM -- (At Theatre J through May 26) In this earnest two-character piece, Timothy Flynn and Celeste Lawson are acting their hearts out, but they can't forge a connection that isn't there. Playwright Motti Lerner's tale is based on the last years of Else Lasker-Schuler (Lawson), a Jewish romantic poet who fled Nazi Germany for Palestine. Arriving in Jerusalem, she meets another German-Jew refugee -- Werner (Flynn), once a promising literary scholar and critic who has long esteemed her work, and who now sells toiletries to make a living. Together they embark upon a plan to publish her poetry in Jerusalem. Enter the Issue: a rift between Jews descended from Old European values and those identifying with more modern ones. A house divided is full of dramatic possibilities, but Lerner doesn't put the division into conflict. Lawson's Else is proud, vain, childish, melodramatic, but vitally alive. Flynn's Werner, meanwhile, is stiff, priggish and repressed. They play marvelously well off each other. While director Lee Mikeska Gardner has finely wrought a number of individual moments, she hasn't been able to clarify the larger, unfocused picture Lerner stuck her with. -- William Triplett VISITATIONS -- (At Psychic Ghost Theatre, indefinitely) In the converted space of a building in Wheaton where a Gypsy fortune teller once plied her cons, the Psychic Ghost Theatre has materialized. There, Barry Taylor and partner Susan Kang levitate, float glasses and dice, pull a scarf through a pole, make a pigeon turn into confetti -- all within 15 feet of the audience (the theater only holds 18). (Note that noone under 21 is admitted.) The opportunity to see magic done this close is a luxury. Psychic Ghost Theatre's show is in three parts. The first is a more or less straightforward exhibition of conjuring. The second is the re-creation of a 19th-century "spirit cabinet." The third is a seance, complete with Ouija board and maleficent spirit. Close as you're sitting, you can't catch any of the tricks. It all looks like . . . well, like magic. -- L.R.

PASSIONE D'AMORE Not rated, 1981, Italian with English subtitles, 117 minutes, Kino Home Video, $24.95. Ettore Scola's "Passione d'Amore" is as maddening and compelling as the stage show derived from it, Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning "Passion." The disturbing plot, in which a young cavalry officer abandons his lush ladylove for the homely and sickly Fosca, is almost exactly the same in both film and musical, and poses the same problems for the audience. The story is presented as a fable about spiritual vs. physical love: Though the young officer (Bernard Giraudeau) is initially repulsed by Fosca (the rivetingly ugly Valeria D'Obici), he succumbs to the magnificence of her passion for him. But the manipulative, clinging Fosca doesn't have much of a spiritual side. There's no inner beauty to triumph over the outer ugliness, and when the officer responds to her, he seems masochistic and peculiar. In previews of "Passion," audiences laughed at Fosca's scenes. "Passione d'Amore" is less inadvertently ridiculous because Scola emphasizes the morbid possibilities in romance -- the movie is full of images of death, and D'Obici's skull-like head suggests the vampire count in the great silent film "Nosferatu." But the director is fighting the story line. When the officer succumbs to Fosca's deathbed charms, it's not convincing, just creepy and unsatisfying. Still, there's something about the movie -- you can't laugh it off. It gets under your skin.

-- Lloyd Rose

THE NEXT KARATE KID PG, 1994, 107 minutes, Columbia/TriStar Home Video, closed-captioned, $96.95. What is the sound of one hand clapping? The audience giving it up for this movie. The fourth film in the series has a new director, Chris Cain, and a female Kid, Hilary Swank, but otherwise it reprises the formula established by John G. Avildsen in 1984: A troubled teen conquers self-doubt and the local bullies with the help of an enigmatic karate teacher. Noriyuki "Pat" Morita revisits the role of Mr. Miyagi, a dwarfish martial arts master who finds a new pupil in 17-year-old Julie (Swank), the granddaughter of the old war buddy who saved Miyagi's life. Since her parents' deaths, the surly teen has lived with her grandmother. Miyagi suggests that Granny move to his house in California while he stays in Boston to care for the girl. Naturally, Granny agrees. And before you can say fasten your black belts, it's gonna be a bumpy story line, Miyagi is helping Julie finesse her stork maneuver.

-- Rita Kempley

JASON'S LYRIC R (also available unrated), 1994, 120 minutes, Polygram Video, closed-captioned, $94.99.

"Jason's Lyric" is a three-sided love story, but it's also a movie about the entanglements of the past. Directed by Doug McHenry from a powerful script by Bobby Smith Jr., this impressive debut has at its center the relationship between two radically different grown-up brothers. The older Jason (Allen Payne) is a soft-spoken, serious young man who sticks close to home and takes care of his mother (Suzzanne Douglas). By contrast, Joshua (Bokeem Woodbine) can't stay out of trouble. An alcoholic with a sullen, explosive personality, he lurches from one personal disaster to another. When Joshua is released from prison, Jason tries to put him under his protective wing. But though Jason struggles to set his brother straight, it soon becomes clear that Joshua is beyond his help. It is in laying out this bond between the siblings that McHenry shows his greatest sensitivity. The family's problems began when the boys' father, Maddog (played with raging passion by Forest Whitaker), returned from Vietnam with a drinking problem. One night when he became violent with their mother, the boys came to her rescue, and a deadly shot was fired. Smith and McHenry don't reveal which brother killed Maddog until the very end of the film, but considering how devastating the incident was to both their lives, it hardly matters who actually pulled the trigger. In the end, "Jason's Lyric" is as much a ghost story as it is a romance or a tale of two brothers. -- Hal Hinson

RICHARD II - (Through Oct. 31 at Shakespeare Theatre)

Director Michael Kahn and his star, Richard Thomas, have found the sly comedy hiding in the tragedy of "Richard II." Wherein the title role is traditionally played as a man who is always posing, always acting, the wit in this production is in the way Kahn and Thomas push the theatrical metaphor, turning Edward Gero's Bolingbroke - the man who takes Richard's crown and sets in motion the events that become the Wars of the Roses - into a would-be star who is nearly acted off his own political stage.

- Lloyd Rose

EDGAR ALLAN POE His Life and Legacy By Jeffrey Meyers Scribners. 348 pp. $30

AFTER Kenneth Silverman's masterful Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance was another Poe biography really necessary? And so soon? Well, yes, for a couple of reasons. One is that Poe was an unusually complex personality who led a dramatic - not to say lurid - life, the sort of character who needs to be examined from different points of view. The other is that, until Silverman's book, Poe biography was pretty poor stuff, either condemnatory or romanticizing. Jeffrey Meyers's Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy is an addition to the relatively new field of what one might call adult Poe biography.

Poe was a writer who led a life that seems eerily appropriate to his art. He is famous, of course, for his tales of terror and spooky poetry (though he also invented the detective story, and in his day was best known as a critic): shuddery narratives full of beautiful women rising from their tombs while their nervous, morbid lovers go mad. He's also famous for his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia (who died of tuberculosis when she was 24), his wild drinking fits, his abject poverty and his mysterious death (after being missing for several days, he was found drunk and dying in Baltimore). He named as his executor a man who happened to hate him, who then brought out an edition of Poe's works accompanied by a biographical introduction full of defamatory lies and errors. This was Rufus W. Griswold, whose pernicious influence survives today in the vague idea the reading public has that Poe was some sort of degenerate and loony.

Actually, though his life is extremely well-documented (through his letters and others people's memoirs), it's difficult to ascertain what precisely was the matter with Poe. At one time or another, and sometimes simultaneously, he showed symptoms of alcoholism, manic depression, temporal lobe epilepsy and paranoia - not to mention sheer cussedness. As a personality, he was thin-skinned, splenetic, histrionic, needy, self-defeating and quarrelsome, though also possessed, when he felt the need, of charm and wit.

Untangling Poe's self-destructiveness from his bad luck is the daunting primary task of any Poe biographer. Meyers matter of factly lays a lot of the blame on Poe's alcoholism, which continually brought to the surface his underlying defects of character and mind. Meyers is sympathetic but dispassionate towards his subject, which strikes me as exactly the right approach towards such a difficult man.

This biography isn't as strongly and bracingly demythologizing as Silverman's, but Meyers has his points to make. He's one of the few modern commentators to insist that Poe had "normal" sexual urges and acted on them (the received wisdom is that, if not actually impotent, Poe was little interested in the physical side of love), and he supports this with passages from Poe's writings that suggest an understanding of passion.

The chief virtue of Meyers's book, though, is his final chapter on Poe's literary influence. The eccentric and morbid poet would seem to occupy a fringe position in literature, but as Meyers demonstrates, he left his mark on the work of writers as dissimilar as Arthur Conan Doyle and Vladimir Nabokov, not to mention Dostoevski, Kipling, Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald (Meyers's explication of the similarities between "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is especially fascinating). Not only the modern horror story, but science fiction, the adventure tale and studies of psychological aberration begin with Poe. This has all been known, but it's particularly impressive to see Poe's various literary children gathered together and discussed in a single place.

I find Meyers a little "nice" about Poe's work on occasion, giving a reading here or there that seems more pleasant than the author intended. Of the famous lines from "Annabel Lee" - "And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling - my darling - my life and my bride,/ In her sepuchre there by the sea - / In her tomb by the sounding sea" - he writes that the poet "demonstrates his morbid devotion to {her} memory by sleeping next to her grave." This is not exactly what the poem says. But then, what it does say is ambiguous. Poe's life is as open to interpretation as his work, which is why a new biography of him is always worth something. -

Lloyd Rose is the theater critic for the Washington Post.

Anyone not already depressed about the state of race relations in America can trot over to Arena Stage for a shot of misery. Keith Glover's "Coming of the Hurricane," which opened last night, is the story of an ex-slave and former fighter, symbolically named Crixus (Keith Randolph Smith), whose efforts to make a life for himself during Reconstruction are, unsurprisingly, destroyed by racist whites. If that isn't unhappy enough, when Crixus has an unplanned, private meeting with the white fighter Hurricane (Bill Christ) whom he is to challenge in the ring, the two men actually bond -- but as warrior to warrior, killers under the skin. Not the fire, but the boxing ring next time.

Crixus and an old friend from slave days, Shadow Jack (Wendell Wright), work for Stolkes (Terrence Currier) in his store. The fight promoter Bigelow (a suave Damien Leake) persuades Crixus to take on a bout with the young West Indian boxer Cayman (Chad L. Coleman). Crixus is supposed to throw the fight. He agrees only because with the money from the illicit bets he and Jack can buy Stolkes's store, and Crixus's wife, Kazarah (Linda Powell), who longs for better things, will be pleased.

However, life, in the form of white people, intervenes disastrously. Crixus finds himself even more in debt, and therefore forced to go up against Hurricane, a Southerner who tours the country knocking down black fighters in revenge for the Civil War. Hurricane and Crixus recognize each other as superior men, above the common herd, brothers doomed to an ultra-masculine destiny.

This Nietzschean camaraderie of two supermen takes the play into a different area from the racial conflict that's been dramatized so far, and it never really comes back. Is Crixus fated to perish because he's a black man in a white world, or because, beyond race, he's a superior man in a world of timid weaklings, black and white? Does his doom lie in his circumstances or his character? Possibly Glover means for the answer to be both, but as soon as Hurricane is seen to be the only one in the play who is near Crixus's equal, the black-white contrast and conflict grow cloudy. Meant to be a tragic hero, Crixus becomes instead a cosmic victim.

The play's climactic scene is the battle between Crixus and Hurricane. It's less racially charged than it might be because Hurricane clearly has such admiration for Crixus. And there are intractable problems in staging a fight on stage that director Marion McClinton -- despite valiant help from fight director David S. Leong and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes -- hasn't solved. After nearly two acts of talk about the horrendous fighting Crixus has endured in the past, the audience is then shown a stylized choreographed fight in which the combatants go for 50 bare-knuckled rounds but the actors, of course, have nary a mark on them and don't even breathe very heavily. Possibly this problem is unavoidable, but it's still a dramatic letdown.

Glover also falls into the usual cliche of boxing plays or movies: the idea that brute force and killer instinct are what really count in the ring, that man the fighter is man the animal. (This was Martin Scorsese's point in "Raging Bull.") You'd think Ali, all grace and brain, had never fought. Early in the play, Crixus mocks the young boxer Cayman for his training, rules and personal detachment, and for a while you expect to see this contrast between the two men worked out dramatically. But then Cayman fades into a supporting character and Crixus and Hurricane are left to go at each other like, well, like raging bulls.

Smith, made up with horrifying scars, is a fierce, smoldering stage presence. In general, the cast works hard, but the play keeps slipping out from under them. As Kazarah, Powell has to be torn between Crixus and Cayman in Act 1, and then be seen to have decided on Crixus in Act 2. She has a nice speech explaining this, but her dramatic moment -- when she makes her choice -- takes place offstage during intermission, and the character is made to seem vacillating. Similarly, Shadow Jack is written as shifting back and forth between a man of wisdom and a cowardly weakling, and Wright just has to follow the contradictory role wherever it goes. McClinton provides a lot of power with his direction, but he can't overcome the script's fundamental wobbliness.

The Coming of the Hurricane, by Keith Glover. Directed by Marion McClinton. Set, Michael Philippi. Costumes, Paul Tazewell. Sound, JR Conklin. With Michael Goodwin. At Arena Stage through Feb. 18. 202-488-3300. JUMP INFORMATION APPENDED FROM FILE N:\NEP\DAYS\012696\01260178.NVT Page: F01 Art: BY STAN BAROUH Meeting his match: Keith Randolph Smith, top, and Bill Christ. ST JUMP INFORMATION APPENDED FROM FILE N:\NEP\DAYS\012696\01260182.NVT Page: F01 Headline: Theater; Main Hed Goes Here; `Hurricane' Byline: Lloyd Rose Washington Post Staff Writer ST

Anyone not already depressed about the state of race relations in America can trot over to Arena Stage for a shot of misery. Keith Glover's "Coming of the Hurricane," which opened last night, is the story of an ex-slave and former fighter, symbolically named Crixus (Keith Randolph Smith), whose efforts to make a life for himself during Reconstruction are, unsurprisingly, destroyed by racist whites. If that isn't unhappy enough, when Crixus has an unplanned, private meeting with the white fighter Hurricane (Bill Christ) whom he is to challenge in the ring, the two men actually bond -- but as warrior to warrior, killers under the skin. Not the fire, but the boxing ring next time.

Crixus and an old friend from slave days, Shadow Jack (Wendell Wright), work for Stolkes (Terrence Currier) in his store. The fight promoter Bigelow (a suave Damien Leake) persuades Crixus to take on a bout with the young West Indian boxer Cayman (Chad L. Coleman). Crixus is supposed to throw the fight. He agrees only because with the money from the illicit bets he and Jack can buy Stolkes's store, and Crixus's wife, Kazarah (Linda Powell), who longs for better things, will be pleased.

However, life, in the form of white people, intervenes disastrously. Crixus finds himself even more in debt, and therefore forced to go up against Hurricane, a Southerner who tours the country knocking down black fighters in revenge for the Civil War. Hurricane and Crixus recognize each other as superior men, above the common herd, brothers doomed to an ultra-masculine destiny.

This Nietzschean camaraderie of two supermen takes the play into a different area from the racial conflict that's been dramatized so far, and it never really comes back. Is Crixus fated to perish because he's a black man in a white world, or because, beyond race, he's a superior man in a world of timid weaklings, black and white? Does his doom lie in his circumstances or his character? Possibly Glover means for the answer to be both, but as soon as Hurricane is seen to be the only one in the play who is near Crixus's equal, the black-white contrast and conflict grow cloudy. Meant to be a tragic hero, Crixus becomes instead a cosmic victim.

The play's climactic scene is the battle between Crixus and Hurricane. It's less racially charged than it might be because Hurricane clearly has such admiration for Crixus. And there are intractable problems in staging a fight on stage that director Marion McClinton -- despite valiant help from fight director David S. Leong and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes -- hasn't solved. After nearly two acts of talk about the horrendous fighting Crixus has endured in the past, the audience is then shown a stylized choreographed fight in which the combatants go for 50 bare-knuckled rounds but the actors, of course, have nary a mark on them and don't even breathe very heavily. Possibly this problem is unavoidable, but it's still a dramatic letdown.

Glover also falls into the usual cliche of boxing plays or movies: the idea that brute force and killer instinct are what really count in the ring, that man the fighter is man the animal. (This was Martin Scorsese's point in "Raging Bull.") You'd think Ali, all grace and brain, had never fought. Early in the play, Crixus mocks the young boxer Cayman for his training, rules and personal detachment, and for a while you expect to see this contrast between the two men worked out dramatically. But then Cayman fades into a supporting character and Crixus and Hurricane are left to go at each other like, well, like raging bulls.

Smith, made up with horrifying scars, is a fierce, smoldering stage presence. In general, the cast works hard, but the play keeps slipping out from under them. As Kazarah, Powell has to be torn between Crixus and Cayman in Act I, and then be seen to have decided on Crixus in Act II. She has a nice speech explaining this, but her dramatic moment -- when she makes her choice -- takes place offstage during intermission, and the character is made to seem vacillating. Similarly, Shadow Jack is written as shifting back and forth between a man of wisdom and a cowardly weakling, and Wright just has to follow the contradictory role wherever it goes. McClinton provides a lot of power with his direction, but he can't overcome the script's fundamental wobbliness.

The Coming of the Hurricane, by Keith Glover. Directed by Marion McClinton. Set, Michael Philippi. Costumes, Paul Tazewell. Sound, JR Conklin. With Michael Goodwin. At Arena Stage through Feb. 18. 202-488-3300.

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Mini Reviews New This Week

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF -- (At Rep Stage in Columbia through Sunday and at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore from May 15 through June 7) Tennessee Williams's fevered mess of a play has one of the most powerful second acts in all of American drama. The current joint production by Rep Stage and Everyman Theatre wrings every inch of emotional tension from Act 2, largely as a result of Timmy Ray James's bold performance as Big Daddy. The problems of Acts 1 and 3 are left looming like dark clouds, but I doubt any production could do much better. The story unfolds in Big Daddy's palatial plantation home on the night of his 65th birthday. Favored son Brick (Kyle Prue), an aging college athlete, refuses to join the festivities, and also refuses to have anything to do with his wife, Maggie (Shannon Parks), who's desperate to do at least one thing with him. The question that drives the action for two solid hours: What is Brick's problem? Director Vincent Lancisi has done an admirable job focusing as much as possible on Big Daddy, the character with the most dramatic weight. James takes a big risk, leading with Big Daddy's cruelty, pushing it in everyone's face. In the end this is a strong, affecting production, primarily because of Lancisi, who has realized that not just Maggie but everybody is up there barefoot on that hot tin roof of lies. -- William Triplett RACING DEMON -- (At the Olney Theatre Center through June 21) David Hare's play examines moral and spiritual bankruptcy in the Anglican Church, not an institution everyone is going to be vitally interested in. But as always, Hare has written strong acting parts, and director Jim Petosa has filled these with strong actors. Lionel Espy (Traber Burns), the priest of a church in South London, has come to consider the daily problems of his poor parish more important than the liturgy, and certainly more important than the desires of its few remaining middle-class members. Church officials, in the person of the bishop of Southwark (avuncular, arrogant Conrad Feininger), hatch a conspiracy designed to get rid of this priest who is just too good and cares too much for the poor. Hare isn't a thinker, to put it politely, and he can't bring intellectual clarity to his scripts. But no one ever said Hare couldn't write scenes. There are some doozies here. Possibly the most annoying thing about "Racing Demon" is Hare's refusal or inability to admit that the religious impulse exists and deserves attention. He may think he's making a fierce attack on organized religion, but the audience is just likely to conclude that Espy is in the wrong job. If he doesn't like the mystical element in Christianity, then he should leave the church and go into social work.-- Lloyd Rose RAGTIME - (At the National Theatre through Aug. 7) This adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel is raw, passionate and unfailingly melodic -- one of the most satisfying new musicals in years. Stephen Flaherty's music -- and there is a lot of it -- is rangy and muscular, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens has largely captured the outsize hungers and dreams at work in the story. Much credit also goes to the fine cast and the inventive director, Frank Galati. Doctorow's brilliant work on early 20th-century America would seem a little plot-heavy for a musical, weaving together as it does the lives of three families -- WASP, Jewish immigrant and black -- while providing cameos for such real-life figures as Booker T. Washington, Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini. But playwright Terrence McNally has fashioned a nearly seamless book that delineates the distrust and interdependence that have always characterized the American melting pot. "Ragtime" is an American pageant, openhearted, funny and large. It asks peculiarly American questions. And here at century's ebb, there is something ineffably moving in its look back at our once and future yearnings. -- Chip Crews

al Shakespeare Company at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater through Sunday)

The eponymous hero (Joseph Mydell) is leading a merry life until a visit from a mysterious woman in white (Josette Bushell-Mingo) who turns out to be Death. The script's very simplicity results in a relentless, inevitable power, as Everyman takes his final journey to the grave. Who will go with him on his final terrible journey? Don't count on amiable but shallow Fellowship (Edward Woodall), who's up for drinking and sex and will even offer his services as an accesory to murder, but who isn't taking any downer trips to the dirt bed. Good Deeds (Myra McFadyen) would like to help, but Everyman has so neglected her that she's too weak to walk. Though the production has two directors (Marcello Magni, and Kathryn Hunter, who directed the film "Orlando"), I've rarely seen anything as intensely personal and peculiar. The images are bizarre yet mysteriously right. The evening is always on the edge of embarrassing or losing a skeptical modern audience, and part of the reason it never does is the central performance of Mydell, an actor with a frank, unaffected stage presence who gains near-tragic intensity as he draws nearer to death. This unusual production of this strangely powerful play is surreal, funny, devout and ultimately sublime. -- Lloyd Rose

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The reviews are in (and they're mostly scathing) for McNally's 'Christi'.

Article from:
The Boston Herald
Article date:
October 15, 1998
Author:
Medrek, T.J.
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Terrence McNally is surely a playwright with enough name recognition and enough hit shows ("Master Class," "Love! Valour! Compassion!") under his belt to merit national attention. But Tuesday's opening of his new play, "Corpus Christi," got far more attention than - most critics apparently agreed - it deserved.

The play, a depiction of a modern-day Christ figure as gay, has been attracting protesters objecting to the production by the Manhattan Theatre Club and mostly scathing reviews from most of the nation's major newspapers.

New York Daily News critic Fintan O'Toole began his by writing, "The cranks and bigots who can condemn Terrence McNally's controversial 'gay Jesus' play without having seen it don't realize how lucky they are."

When the play was originally announced, the Manhattan Theatre Club was deluged with protests and, reportedly, death threats.

The production was swiftly canceled for security reasons, the company said. But then the First Amendment-based protests began, shaming the MTC into returning the play to its season lineup. With it came tight security, including metal detectors. This led the New York Times' Ben Brantley to open his review with this telling line: "The excitement stops right after the metal detectors."

"Corpus Christi" offered critics a field day for one-liners. Lawson Taitte wrote in the Dallas Morning News, "After all the fuss, 'Corpus Christi' turns out to be 'Godspell' for gay folks." And Lloyd Rose, in the Washington Post, wrote, "It would be impossible to take the play as seriously as it takes itself."

Taitte went so far as to write, "Seeing the actual show makes you wonder whether the company hadn't been using the initial protests (against the play) as an excuse to dump an embarrassingly thin script."

By contrast, David Patrick Stearns offered a generally positive review in USA Today: "If for only two hours, the play allows gays ownership of a story often used by Christian groups to further an anti-gay political stance. There's something deeply calming about that."

Boston Herald theater critic Terry Byrne had good things to say about the play's first act - while describing the second act as "lame."

" 'Corpus Christi' is a passion play, which is not the same as a passionate play," Byrne wrote.

The Boston Globe, as of yesterday, was one of the few major daily newspapers which had not reviewed the show.

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CAMILLE -- (At the Olney Theatre Center through Sept. 20)

Director Richard Romagnoli has worked his magic again. A banal story you assumed you knew down to the ground turns out to have sinew and bite and, most surprisingly of all, genuine emotional power. Alexandre Dumas fils' potboiler tells the story of Marguerite Gautier (Jan Maxwell), a k a the Lady of the Camellias (she uses red or white ones to signal her availability to her lovers), a Parisian courtesan who lives only for giddy pleasure. Then she meets Armand Duval (Tyson Lien), who offers her true love. They have a few months of happiness, then Duval Sr. (Richard Bauer) convinces Marguerite that she must leave the young man for his family's own good, so she makes Armand think she is unfaithful, when really her heart is breaking, and . . . you get the idea. Things end very unhappily. Maxwell's is an absolutely ruthless performance, shorn of flourishes, in places devastatingly affecting. Armand is a difficult role -- the character tends to come off as an immature puppy -- but Romagnoli has cast it well. Lien is not only tall and good-looking, he can also act. Bauer is superb as Armand's father. This isn't one of his showy performances; it's quiet and reptilian. Romagnoli has combined psychologically realistic acting with highly abstract design and visual effects worthy of opera. At once swooningly theatrical and emotionally honest, this "Camille" doesn't have to jerk tears. It earns them.-- Lloyd Rose FOOTLOOSE -- (At the Kennedy Center through Sept. 20)

Based on the 1984 movie, in which Kevin Bacon played a city kid who brought dance to the teenagers of a repressed Midwestern town, this new musical is directed by Walter Bobbie, the wizard of "Chicago," but to far less impressive effect. Ren McCormack (Jeremy Kushnier) and his mother, Ethel (Catherine Cox), leave Chicago after her divorce and go to live with relatives in Bomont, Anystate, U.S.A. (possibly Indiana). The small town is under the thumb of the rigid preacher Shaw Moore (Martin Vidnovic) who, owing to the traffic death of his son on the way home from a dance, has pushed a ban on all dancing through the town council. This silly plot didn't stop the movie from becoming a hit, and for a while it looks as if it won't stop the musical either. The opening song, "Footloose" (carried over from the movie), where Ren dances with his friends in Chicago, is a dazzler. But when we get to Bomont, where dancing isn't allowed and so the numbers have to be contrived, things start to sputter. This isn't Bobbie's fault. His direction is furiously inventive, sometimes brilliant. But the thin, derivative score (mostly by Tim Snow, with lyrics by Dean Pitchford) doesn't give him anything substantial in which to base his effects. Dramatically, "Footloose" is pieced together from different scraps of American pop myth: the misunderstood James Dean adolescent, the only-kids-get-it attitude of '50s teen horror movies, the naive wholesomeness of "American Graffiti." In the end, "Footloose" is just a collection of really square music videos. -- L.R. GREAT EXPECTATIONS, THE MUSICAL -- ( By Interact Theatre Company at Folger Elizabethan Theatre through Sept. 26)

It isn't much of a musical, but this production has a low-key, cozy appeal. First staged in England in 1975, the show suffers from a trivial and derivative score by Hal Shaper and Cyril Ornadel. But Shaper's book, though it only skims from the novel by Charles Dickens, retains some of the author's robustness and dramatic punch. Our hero is the orphan Pip (Derek Kahn Thompson as the boy, Mark Aldrich as the adult), brought up by his loving uncle and shrewish aunt to pursue the uncle's trade of blacksmithing. Then, when he is a young man, Pip unexpectedly becomes the recipient of a mysterious bequest from an anonymous patron and suddenly has "great expectations." He blows them. Given money and the opportunity to acquire "smart" friends in London, Pip turns into an unbearable little snob. And of course he wants the one thing his money can't buy: the love of the beautiful, heartless Estella (Greta Pemberton and Michele Mulitz alternate as the girl; Johanna Gerry plays the adult). The muscular plot is a pleasure in itself in this age of wan, near-eventless narratives, and there's something particularly satisfying about seeing it all crammed onto the Folger Elizabethan Theatre's tiny stage: You really get the abundance, the generosity, of Dickens's art. This production, shabby around the edges but unpretentious and homey, serves the thin material well. And there are strong performances from the unaffected Thompson, brisk Dori Legg as the servant Biddy, and Aldrich (who captures Pip's vacillating selfishness well). As the saturnine lawyer Mr. Jaggers, the urbanely skillful Ralph Cosham steals every scene he's in. Catherine Flye's direction is spirited, and she shows an impressive ability to move lots of people gracefully around the cramped Elizabethan Theatre stage. Whatever its shortcomings, this is a warm, welcoming production with some of the hospitable plenitude of its great source. -- L.R. A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC -- (At Signature Theatre through Oct. 4)

This Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical combines Sondheim's sophisticated, slightly alienated musical genius with the ordinary pleasures of romantic musical comedy with almost breathtaking grace. The plot is a romantic and sexual roundelay. The widowed lawyer Fredrik Egerman (John Herrera) has made a second marriage to the 18-year-old Anne (Stephanie Waters), a marriage she modestly keeps refusing to consummate. While Fredrik tries to learn patience, his repressed son Henrik (Robb McKindles) nurses a secret love for Anne, who is too naive to understand that the boisterous way she teases him is a form of flirting. Fredrik was once the lover of the great actress Desiree Armfeldt (Patricia Pearce Gentry), and when she returns to town on a tour, he renews their relationship for one night. Matters are complicated by her arrogant, dim-witted lover Count Malcolm (Christopher Flint), who responds jealously to Fredrik and sends his wife Charlotte (the blissfully sardonic Donna Migliaccio) to tell Anne about Fredrik's infidelity. Somehow everyone ends up spending the weekend together at Desiree's mother's country estate. Matters combust. The European world-weary attitude toward sexuality fits Sondheim's acrid and worldly sensibility. The tensile, sensual score is his most sheerly beautiful. By and large the cast seems to be slightly intimidated by the show, pushing themselves to be up to it. The exceptions are Migliaccio and Herrera. I don't think I've ever seen Migliaccio better. She's so witty and commanding that Charlotte overpowers her romantic rival Desiree in a way that sets the show off-balance. Herrera is relaxed, subtle, funny, rueful and adult. There isn't anything really wrong with the production. It's perfectly pleasant. It's just unexciting. Frank Lombardi has directed a Classic, which isn't the same as directing the show itself.

-- L.R.

FOOTLOOSE -- (At the Kennedy Center through Sept. 20)

Based on the 1984 movie, in which Kevin Bacon played a city kid who brought dance to the teenagers of a repressed midwestern town, this new musical is directed by Walter Bobbie, the wizard of "Chicago," but to far less impressive effect. Ren McCormack (Jeremy Kushnier) and his mother, Ethel (Catherine Cox), leave Chicago after her divorce and go to live with relatives in Bomont, Anystate, U.S.A. (possibly Indiana). The small town is under the thumb of the rigid preacher Shaw Moore (Martin Vidnovic), who, owing to the traffic death of his son on the way home from a dance, has pushed a ban on all dancing through the town council. This silly plot didn't stop the movie from becoming a hit, and for a while it looks as if it won't stop the musical either. The opening song, "Footloose" (carried over from the movie), where Ren dances with his friends in Chicago, is a dazzler. But when we get to Bomont, where dancing isn't allowed and so the numbers have to be contrived, things start to sputter. This isn't Bobbie's fault. His direction is furiously inventive, sometimes brilliant. But the thin, derivative score (mostly by Tim Snow, with lyrics by Dean Pitchford) doesn't give him anything substantial in which to base his effects. Dramatically, "Footloose" is pieced together from different scraps of American pop myth: the misunderstood James Dean adolescent, the only-kids-get-it attitude of '50s teen horror movies, the naive wholesomeness of "American Graffiti." In the end, "Footloose" is just a collection of really square music videos.

-- Lloyd Rose

TWELFTH NIGHT -- (At the Folger Theatre through Sunday)

In a homage to the way Shakespeare was originally staged, the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express is devoted to bare-bones productions - - no lighting, much doubling of roles, minimal costumes, audience interaction. Its "Twelfth Night," cut to two hours, is almost completely reduced to its comic elements. Fortunately, those elements are pretty hilarious. Shipwrecked in a strange land and believing her twin brother, Sebastian, drowned, Viola (Becky Peters) disguises herself as a boy and obtains a position in the household of Duke Orsino (John Maness). The Duke is sick with love for the Countess Olivia (Lisa McCormick), who disdains him but falls for the disguised Viola. Meanwhile, Viola pines for the Duke. Olivia's sponging kinsman Sir Toby Belch (James Beard) is trying to marry her off to his silly twit friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Patrick Fitzgerald). He and Sir Andrew and Olivia's personal maid, Maria (David McCallum, who also plays Sebastian), and the jester, Feste (Jon Preston), carouse a great deal, which arouses the priggish ire of Olivia's strait-laced steward, Malvolio (Jeff Brick). In revenge, they play a trick on him by convincing him that Olivia secretly loves him. The SSE actors are all young and most of them are relatively inexperienced. This means that the individual performances in the company's productions always vary widely. Fortunately, this "Twelfth Night" has something that other, more sophisticated productions often don't get: a couple of natural comics playing the delicious roles of Aguecheek and Malvolio. And at one point the players lead the audience in a sing-along. This boisterous chipperness is typical of the evening. Only in Preston's lovely haunting melodies to the lyrics of Shakespeare's songs do we get any of the darker, more wistful and resigned, tones of the play.

-- Lloyd Rose

BARBER OF SEVILLE -- By the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center through Jan. 25)

Everything anyone has ever learned about the subtle art of comedy is in Rossini's "Barber of Seville." A good deal of credit must be given the original source, the French playwright Beaumarchais, who penned the famous trilogy of plays about Figaro and the Almaviva family. The production, which is returning after a five-year absence, is shared with two other companies, Opera Omaha and the Minnesota Opera. The lead tenor -- a native of Malta who has won honors at Placido Domingo's operatic star-search contest, the Operalia -- is a rare discovery: Joseph Calleja is a true light tenor whose tone is ample and distinctive, not strangulated or wispy. He sings a beautiful line and even managed to sing with an affected lisp in the second-act disguise scene. He makes Almaviva a sympathetic character, an exceptional accomplishment given the count's limited attractions (wealth, youth and a raging libido). Calleja is surrounded by strong colleagues, a fine Figaro played with puppy-dog insouciance by Alfredo Daza and a petulant Rosina sung with force and clearly articulated passage work (in the upper part of the voice) by soprano Angeles Blancas. But it's everyone you don't see onstage who must be called to account for a production that could be screwed to a tighter pitch, bumped up to a higher degree of both musical polish and theatrical zaniness.

-- P.K.

BLAST! -- (At the Kennedy Center Opera House through Jan. 14)

"Blast!" raises the question of whether a high-tech halftime show can make it on Broadway. (It's scheduled for a 10-week engagement starting in April.) If the answer is yes, then the theater is dead. "Blast!" In "Blast!", the crowd is treated to the spectacle of horn players doing handsprings, to a trombonist on a unicycle, to the sight of a trumpeter playing a ballad while balancing on a chair suspended 15 feet above the stage, and to a chorus (singing Aaron Copland's "Simple Gifts") executing the kind of crisp arm movements and hip twists that you could get clever fifth-graders to do. The four-man creative team (George Pinney, James Prime, Jonathan Vanderkolff and producer-artistic director James Mason) seems bent on reaching the MTV crowd. The young performers, in black jeans, tank tops and so forth, preen like narcissistic pop stars. And from time to time, they play terrific music. The show also features some fancy drumming, though without the infectious rhythms, crackerjack deadpan comedy and continual sense of discovery that made the percussion show "Stomp" such a delight. The show's third component, after the horns and drums, is flag twirling, and what can you say about flag twirling? You begin to wonder why "Blast!" is so antsy, and though part of the answer lies in the show's "outdoor pageant" roots, it's hard to escape the thought that the creative team has decided that modern audiences are antsy and won't sit still without the gimmicks. It's an insult.

-- Nelson Pressley

CHESAPEAKE -- (At Source Theatre through Jan. 20)

Holly Twyford is playing the role of a performance artist named Kerr who performs naked, but that's not what "Chesapeake" is about. Playing five roles, Twyford is in top form, which is very good form indeed, and Lee Blessing's script is loopily inventive. Kerr, who tastefully disrobes before small, select audiences while reciting the Song of Solomon, is targeted by right-wing southern senator Thurm Pooley -- a satirical name worthy of Dickens -- as someone who wastes the public's tax dollars on filth. (Kerr's stuff doesn't sound filthy, though it does sound as if it might be a waste of money.) Kerr, naturally, doesn't see it that way. Incensed at having her artistic life ruined, she plans to kidnap Pooley's beloved dog, a Chesapeake Bay retriever named Lucky (or sometimes Rat), retrain the animal so that he metamorphoses from pet to hunting dog, and then return the new, improved version. Things don't exactly work out as planned. Joe Banno directs with mischievous high energy, abetted by Brian Keating's witty sound, and he guides Twyford with an obvious appreciation of her gifts. She plays not only Kerr and Lucky but Pooley, Mrs. P and Pooley's perky young aide. And her dog is terrific: not at all condescended to or cuted up, but imagined and entered. This is a one-woman show, but there's not just one person up on the stage.

-- L.R.

FAUST -- (At Stanislavsky Theater Studio at the Church Street Theater through Jan. 28)

You could possibly go the rest of your life without having another chance to see Goethe's "Faust," Parts 1 and 2, of which the Stanislavsky Theater Studio is doing an adaptation at the Church Street Theater. You'll almost certainly go the rest of your life without seeing a more perfect Mephistopheles than Paata Tsikurishvili's wry, elegant and vicious tempter. Conjured from a heap of writing demons, Tsikurishvili's lean, black-clothed Devil is cloaked with a silver spider's web, a net to snare unwary souls, a sticky trap in which he himself is eternally caught. In Goethe's version of the medieval Faust legend about the scholar who sells his soul to the Devil, the world-weary Faust turns to black magic when the ordinary sciences fail him. Faust is the first modern existential quester, post-moral despite the poem's deference to Christianity, the man whose ultimate God is his own will. Fool that he is, Faust makes the mistake of falling in love with a simple village girl, Gretchen. Her ruin follows. Faust goes on to commit noble deeds and monstrous crimes. In the end, the vision of the pure Gretchen -- "the eternal feminine" -- saves him. As always with STS, this production is filled with extraordinary theatrical moments -- effects that are part image, part movement, part narrative. Andrei Malaev-Babel is a bit of a pedantic prig as the old scholar, but when Faust regains his youth the actor becomes a warm-eyed, romantic interest, a fawn in the forest of love. The Devil tends to take over in these soul-war dramas, and that's what happens here. And the way this production has been directed -- by Tsikurishvili and Malaev-Babel, with Irina Tsikurishvili's astonishing movement-design making her as much a third director as a choreographer -- Mephistopheles, not Faust, is the real magician.

-- L.R.

HELLCAB -- (At Source Theatre through Jan. 20)

The hellions at Cherry Red Productions have found themselves a suitable Christmas play in Will Kern's grungy saga of a Chicago cab driver's day on the job. The parade of twisted humanity that passes through the driver's cab entertains the audience at Source Theatre (where "Hellcab" is running late nights on weekends), but it gets the driver down. His funk provokes the inevitable: a little poignancy and earnest holiday reflection. Kern's show is an interesting collection of offbeat characters. Six actors play the nearly 30 passengers who filter through the cab (two benches in a crude auto frame by set designer David Ghatan), while a seventh -- Craig Housenick -- turns in a low-key, cranky performance as the unnamed driver. His fares range from crack-heads and sex fiends to a religious couple headed to church at dawn on Thursday morning, and the main appeal of the play is watching director Ian Allen's ensemble slide from one character to another. "Hellcab" rises and falls on the strength of each characterization, and while there are clinkers, there are enough winners to keep you hooked.

-- N.P.

K2 -- (At Arena Stage through Jan. 28)

The script of "K2," is contrived and full of cliches, but Wendy C. Goldberg'sproduction is still riveting. In darkness, bells chime like cracking ice, then the sound mutates into a pagan percussion and chanting. Allen Lee Hughes's faint crimson dawn begins to glow against a wall of ice -- the sheer side of the world's second- highest peak, K2. Despite its rosiness, the light is heatless, heartless. The two climbers revealed lying unconscious on a ledge are in a place that does not care. Ming Cho Lee'sArena set for "K2" is a mercilessly vertical white cliff, soaring up out of sight and plunging down into an invisible abyss, up from which cold mist drifts. If there was ever a justification of the realistic set, this is it. Somehow, Lee and his builders have managed to solve the usual Styrofoam-snow problem (too fluffy and dusty as snow, too squeaky as ice), and this awful, lifeless precipice is horribly convincing. In an astutely disturbing touch, Goldberg has the first man to wake initially peer, very carefully, down and then, even more timidly, up. If the men's situation gets you in the gut, the production will probably work for you, especially as it's terrifically acted by Craig Wallace and Rick Holmes. But if you don't link imaginatively with the primal terror of it all, the problems with Patrick Meyers's script will keep jouncing you out of your willing suspension of disbelief. The two men are, of course, exact opposites in temperament. In spite of the deadly threat, time is allowed for the characters to deliver long, cheesily philosophical or artily "poetic" monologues. They realize ultimate truths about themselves and learn neat little moral lessons. I never for a moment believed in these men. But I did believe in that mountain.

-- L.R.

THE MOST FABULOUS STORY EVER TOLD -- (At Source Theatre through Sunday)

The first half of "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told" is hilarious. The second is mawkish slop. Paul Rudnick's (screenwriter for "In and Out") play is half a spit-take on the Old Testament and half a modern-day comedy/drama about a pair of lovers coming to terms with suffering and faith (at Christmas, no less). As it begins, Adam (Ty Hreben) awakes in Paradise. "This garden is fabulous!" Adam exults, and well it should be, since God, a k a the stage manager (Lynn Chavis) has created it to a disco version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (a k a the "2001" theme). Adam thinks Steve (Ian LeValley) is pretty fabulous, too, and so are hands and lips and other nifty body parts. Everything would be perfect if Steve weren't so avid to know everything. Though not exactly a sin, Steve's curiosity gets the lovers thrown out of Eden. Out in a slightly more real world, they meet Jane and Mabel (pixieish and pugnacious Kerri Rambow and willowy, spacey Jennifer Phillips). Carefree nudity ends, though Jane insists she only wears clothes because she needs pockets. The flood comes. Bunnies in rain slickers dance onto the Ark. It's tasteless, it's stupid, it's indefensible, it's really really funny. Act 2 is an embarrassment. Adam and Steve are throwing a Christmas party, attended by a token Mormon (Kathleen Coons), a lesbian cable- access television rabbi in a wheelchair (Barbara Pinolini), Mabel and a pregnant Jane, a sardonic WASP (Sampson) and a gay go-go dancer (Joshua Marmer). AIDS is dragged in for seriousness. Director Jeff Keenan keeps things lively throughout, hitting the jokes just hard enough, keeping the mawkish moments as dry as possible. All the actors are charming. It's the play that's annoying.

-- L.R.

PLAY ON! -- (At Arena Stage's Fichandler Theater through Sunday)

"If music be the food of love, play on," Duke Orsino commands in "Twelfth Night" -- and director Sheldon Epps has obeyed, splicing Shakespeare's story to another Duke -- Ellington -- to create the boisterous hybrid "Play On!" Though Ellington is one of the greatest 20th-century composers, "Play On!" isn't exactly a case of the modern genius embracing the Renaissance one in joyous partnership. Only the sketchiest elements of Shakespeare's plot remain in Cheryl L. West's adaptation. Shipwrecked Viola, marooned on the coast of Illyria, becomes songwriting country girl Vy (Alexandra Foucard), come to 1940s Harlem to be a star. Vy's uncle, Jester (Clinton Derricks- Carroll), knowing that songwriting is a man's occupation, dresses Vy as a boy to help her career along. Soon she is a go-between for the lovesick Duke (David Jennings), who has lost his creative spark, and his scornful muse, Cotton Club diva Lady Liv (Nikki Crawford). While Vy pines for Duke, Liv falls for Vy. Plus, in a swerve from the play, the Malvolio figure, Rev (Richard Allen) -- Liv's uptight manager -- secretly loves his haughty employer. The screwball comedy West's made out of "Twelfth Night" has real sweetness. But the charmingly cliched love story, with its simple misunderstandings simply resolved, has little connection with the brilliant, multihued complexity of Ellington's music. The choreography by Mercedes Ellington (the Duke's granddaughter) is spirited but unimaginative. Happily, the singers -- from the sweet-toned Jennings to the exuberant Julia Lema (Miss Mary) -- are another story.

-- L.R.

SHEAR MADNESS -- (At the Kennedy Center Theater Lab indefinitely)

This long-running theatrical ball of fluff is a weird marriage of sitcom, whodunit and audience participation project set in a garish beauty salon. The action revolves around six characters who find themselves involved in a murder mystery. Though the humor is often painfully cheap and the acting a tad overdone, spectators can't help but perk up when asked to grill the suspects and choose the ending.

-- Pamela Sommers

ZASTROZZI -- (At the District of Columbia Arts Center through Jan. 20)

"A man's got to know his limitations," Clint Eastwood snarled in one of his avenging angel movies. In Project Y's production of George F. Walker's 1979 "Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline," the title character says the same sort of thing in the same sort of circumstance: He kills his opponent stylishly, then murmurs, "You understood what was in your heart. But you did not know your limitations." Zastrozzi is like Dirty Harry with a brain. He's amoral, a destroyer bent on weeding out the synthetic and the weak in the name of strengthening society. The plot, set in 19th-century Europe, involves Zastrozzi's pursuit of Verezzi, a blithely grinning Christian who doubles as a moronic artist, protected by a virtuous and ordinary man named Victor. Zastrozzi is a cliche of the Evil Genius, so smart that everything except destruction bores him. Surely there is an original way to play this sort of figure, but Jonathon Church opts for the tried and true, showing up with a cold stare, a shaved head and a goatee, clipping off his syllables like a James Bond bad guy. Still, each time the drama threatens to get tedious, Walker jazzes things up, and as he does, director Michole Biancosino's production begins to find its own cool appeal. The moral question doesn't tighten its grip on you as it does in Walker's best plays. But though the drama errs on the side of pretension, Walker is apparently incapable of being boring.

-- N.P.

The playwright and director Alan Ayckbourn runs his own theater in Yorkshire, roughly 250 miles north of London. But he is far from provincial. According to the jacket blurb of The Crafty Art of Playmaking (Palgrave, $22.95), he is "the most performed of all living playwrights." This puts him ahead of even the enormously popular Neil Simon (to whom Ayckbourn is often, rather stupidly, compared), owing partly, no doubt, to Ayckbourn's proficiency: His dramatic output presently stands at 71. He's been produced at the Royal National Theatre, in the West End, on Broadway and at innumerable regional theaters (including, in Washington, the Round House Theater and Arena Stage).

With this slender book, Ayckbourn may have invented his own genre - - the memoir of work. Many, many directors and playwrights have written their memoirs, but these have usually been as much about their lives as their craft: "I was inspired at the age of 10, traumatized at the age of 11"; "So then Larry -- as he insisted I call him -- said to me. . . ." The Crafty Art of Playmaking, though witty throughout, is a practical and disciplined look at what is, despite its reputation for excess, the practical and disciplined art of the theater.

"Pragmatic" is the word Ayckbourn uses to describe his approaches to writing and directing, and in that spirit his book is organized as a list of "Obvious Rules." The first is, "Never look down on comedy or regard it as the poor cousin of drama." There may be some slight defensiveness in this, Ayckbourn being a comic playwright. If so, he has earned the right. Writing almost brutally incisive and unsparing plays that happen to be hilarious, and taking the suburban middle classes for his subject, he has had to look up the nostrils of a theater establishment snobbishly devoted to overtly political plays by writers who Care Deeply. The heartlessly funny Ayckbourn is merely brilliant about human nature.

For anyone who loves the theater from the far side of the footlights, this is a wonderful introduction to backstage reality. After 44 years at his profession, Ayckbourn knows what he's talking about. He can be theoretical -- as when, comparing fawning worship of a flamboyant artistic leader (think Orson Welles) with society's following of political leaders, he notes that theater is "life writ somewhat smaller." He can be technically shrewd, as when he points out that in an arena setting, with the audience on all sides, "the floor is the backdrop." He demonstrates his desert-dry humor when he tells the story of how the line "I can't say I'm very taken with this marmalade" was changed in an American adaptation to "This marmalade's a freak-out." And he is always wise about the craft, and art, he loves.

Lloyd Rose is a former theater critic of The Washington Post.

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KEROUAC -- (At Studio Theatre Secondstage through Aug. 16)

Set in a 1950s Greenwich Village dive, complete with bartender, waitresses and a singing quartet backed by a hot combo, the evening is a lyrical reminiscence emanating like a bluesy sax solo from Jack Kerouac's mind. Kerouac (Jeff Johnson) serves alternately as narrator, guide, emcee and hero in his journey from small-town square to big-name writer and, ultimately, full-time artist. Along the way you meet his fellow travelers -- the young Allen Ginsberg (Tony Gudell) and Neal Cassady (Jonathan Bailey), as well as William S. Burroughs (Joe Wildermuth), who, you suspect, was never young. You see how the lives of the four main characters influenced their work, which influenced their lives, which influenced their work, which -- you get the idea. Director Keith Alan Baker, who also conceived the show, wants you steeped in the culture. It works, but Baker's admiration for these men robs them of any depth. Johnson's Kerouac, as you might expect, is awfully darn likable -- charming even in his self-absorption. Bailey's Cassady is another fun-loving crazy (never mind the human wreckage he left everywhere he went). Ginsberg and Burroughs are sketched so thinly that Gudell and Wildermuth have to rely more on striking an attitude than developing a character. If you want more on the principals you'll have to read their books (which to an extent the show makes you want to do). -- William Triplett
PRESENT LAUGHTER -- (At the Olney Theater through Sunday)

Noel Coward took a satirical swipe at himself in this very satisfying, old- fashioned comedy about the tribulations of the charming, histrionic, absurd star Garry Essendine. Essendine (Tony Rizzoli) is in the final stages of organizing a play tour in Africa when his life begins to become unduly complicated. A debutante he's flirted with a bit too heavily (Holly Twyford) has developed a major crush on him. So, more ambiguously, has an opinionated, possibly insane young playwright (Sean Arbuckle). His producers, Morris (Michael Russoto) and Hugo (James Slaughter), are both in love with the same woman, Joanna (Hope Chernov) -- who is setting her cap for Essendine. Complications pile up until it seems the play must collapse, and in a way it does. At the point of maximum confusion and tension, Essendine suddenly gives everyone a lecture about how to behave, and things rather improbably straighten out. Director John Going has gathered a solid, funny cast. Coward presents Essendine as an innocent who, despite his carryings-on, just wants the best for everyone. It's a measure of Coward's immense talent that even with this central dishonesty, "Present Laughter" is such a funny, frequently delightful play. -- Lloyd Rose PSYCHIC GHOST THEATRE -- (At Psychic Ghost Theatre, indefinitely)

In the converted space of a building in Wheaton where a Gypsy fortune teller once plied her cons, the Psychic Ghost Theatre has materialized. There, on weekends only, Barry Taylor and partner Susan Kang levitate, float glasses and dice, pull a scarf through a pole, make a pigeon turn into confetti -- all within 15 feet of the audience (the theater only holds 18). (Note that no one under 18 is admitted.) The opportunity to see magic done this close is a luxury. The show, entitled "Visitations," is in three parts. The first is a more or less straightforward exhibition of conjuring. The second is the re-creation of a 19th-century "spirit cabinet." The third is a seance, complete with Ouija board and maleficent spirit. Close as you're sitting, you can't catch any of the tricks. It all looks like . . . well, like magic.-- L.R. RAGTIME -- (At the National Theatre through Friday)



Wrapping up the season will be Loomer's ``Expecting Isabel'' (Aug. 3-27, 2000), which was commissioned by the Taper. The play, which had its world premiere last year in Washington, D.C., was described by Washington Post reviewer Lloyd Rose as a ``smart, funny'' and ``poignant'' ``comic horror story about modern middle-class life.''

PSYCHIC GHOST THEATRE -- (At Psychic Ghost Theatre through Nov. 26)

In the converted space of a building in Wheaton where a Gypsy fortune teller once plied her cons, the Psychic Ghost Theatre has materialized. There, Barry Taylor and partner Susan Kang levitate, float glasses and dice, pull a scarf through a pole, make a pigeon turn into confetti -- all within 15 feet of the audience. (Note that no one younger than 18 is admitted.) The opportunity to see magic done this close is a luxury. Psychic Ghost Theatre's show is in three parts. The first is a more or less straightforward exhibition of conjuring. The second is the re-creation of a 19th-century "spirit cabinet." The third is a seance, complete with Ouija board and maleficent spirit. Close as you're sitting, you can't catch any of the tricks. It all looks like . . . well, like magic.

-- Lloyd Rose

THE SUBSTANCE OF FIRE (PG-13, 102 minutes) -- Ron Rifkin had a theater triumph in the role of Holocaust-survivor Isaac Geldhart in "The Substance of Fire," and you can see why in this movie of the play. The preservation of his performance is the only reason to see the film, though, and even his performance is limited by the fact that it's in this particular script. Jon Robin Baitz has rewritten the Jewish father-son play yet again. Geldhart, a book publisher, is a monster who mistreats his children shamefully, but Baitz keeps letting us know that we can't blame the guy -- after all, he went through the Holocaust! Never mind all the survivors who didn't make their children's lives hell -- like racism in "Fences" and capitalism in "Death of a Salesman," the Holocaust excuses anything Geldhart does on the grounds that he's suffered more than his children ever possibly could. But his second son, Martin (Timothy Hutton), goes him one better: He's not just the only child who is willing to move in and care for Pop when the old man gets senile, he dies taking care of him, having neglected his own health for the sake of filial loyalty. The whole thing plays like some dreadful masochistic, self-pity fantasy. In a small role, the once-great English stage actor Roger Rees proves one more time that he can play Brit snots better than anyone. Contains strong language. At the Cineplex Odeon Outer Circle. -- Lloyd Rose

MauriceHines is terrific in the title role of "Jelly's Last Jam," which opens tonight at the Warner. Assured, stylish, a marvelous dancer, he is, as the saying goes, every inch a star. When he and Savion Glover, as Jelly's younger self, dance together it's sheer theater magic. So is George C. Wolfe's directing, glitzy to the nth power. And of course there's the wonderful music, by Jelly Roll Morton himself (supplemented by traditional blues and Luther Henderson). Yet the piece -- created as well as directed by Wolfe -- is odd: It's one long rant against Morton for being a traitor to his race.

Caption only.

NEW THIS WEEK RAISED IN CAPTIVITY -- (At the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through June 22)

This play by Nicky Silver, master of comic angst, is suffer, suffer, suffer, quip, quip, quip, suffer, suffer, suffer, quip, quip, quip. But Silver is no smiling-through-the-tears writer, though; his characters quip not to keep from crying but to keep themselves from committing homicide on the nearest handy target. Still, in spite of a crackerjack production directed by Howard Shalwitz, this isn't Silver at his best. It has his wit, insanity and willingness to plunge to extremes, but it also has his weakness for linking various comic diatribes and scenes into a play. In the past, Silver has sometimes pulled the rabbit out of the hat at the very last minute. The terrific cast is led by Nancy Robinette, in not one but two roles, Naomi Jacobson, Steven Dawn and Mitchell Hebert.

The touring production of "42nd Street" at the Warner Theatre is without affection, irony, wit or much evidence of talent. It still has that great score by Harry Warren and Al Dubin that includes "Lullaby of Broadway," "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," "We're in the Money" and "You're Getting to Be a Habit With Me." There is also lots of tap dancing, none of it very interesting. This is not the Gower Champion-choreographed version that wowed Broadway more than a decade ago.

The book of "42nd Street" is the source of show biz cliches so durable they've become myths. Inexperienced ingenue Peggy Sawyer (Rebecca Christine Kupka) becomes a star when aging diva Dorothy Brock (Michelle Felten) breaks her ankle. Peggy is guided by histrionic, larger-than-life producer-director Julian Marsh (Robert Sheridan), wooed by beaming tenor Billy Lawlor (Marc Kessler, who looks as if neither his heart nor any other part of his body is in the task) and befriended by a bevy of leggy chorines.

The performers mug and posture and ham it up charmlessly. Even local hero James Kronzer's set is uninspired and generic. This is a tired show.

42nd Street. Music by Harry Warren. Lyrics by Al Dubin. Book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble. Directed and choreographed by Tony Parise. Lights, Mary Jo Dondlinger; sound, Kevin Higley; costumes, Nanzi Adzima. With Christopher Dauphinee, Kathy Halenda, Na

In "Direct From Broadway," which opened last night at the Kennedy Center, Tony winners Debbie Gravitte ("Jerome Robbins' Broadway") and Michael McGuire ("Les Miserables") belt out numbers from vintage and recent musicals. They have big voices and are crowd-pleasing performers, and if the evening has no surprises, it holds no real disappointments either.

From Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim, Gravitte and McGuire sweep through the Broadway decades. The song selections aren't just from the greatest-hits list. Gravitte sings "I Want to Be a Rockette" from the relatively unknown "Kicks," and the duo perform the seldom-heard "Hey There Good Times" from "I Love My Wife." Such '80s and '90s shows as "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Beauty and the Beast" are also represented.

Gravitte delivers a silky, sexy "Mr. Monotony," an Irving Berlin song rescued especially for "Jerome Robbins' Broadway." McGuire (who won his Tony for the role of Enjoltras) tackles the big Jean Valjean number from "Les Miserables," "Bring Him Home." The only slip of the evening is McGuire's version of "Ya Got Trouble" from "The Music Man." He's fine, but Robert Preston, whose performance is preserved on film, was sensational. A male performer who tries to follow him faces the same impossible odds as a female performer who dares to sing "Over the Rainbow."

Direct From Broadway, directed and staged by Lara Teeter and Clifford Bell; musical director, Michael Orland; production designer, Marcia Mad

The fairies are always trouble.

Whenever a production or film of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is announced, a single worrying thought may shoot into the regular theatergoer's mind: "I hope the fairies aren't embarrassing." Vain hope. I'm trying to think of a production in which they weren't embarrassing.

A movie of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" made in this golden era of technology might be expected to use new tools to solve the problem. But no. In the current film version, they spend some of their time buzzing around as tiny bits of light, an image that goes back to 1903 with Tinker Bell in the play "Peter Pan." But Tink is a nonspeaking role, and Puck and company are quite the opposite - so we finally have to see them in the flesh. The film's fairies certainly aren't the worst I've ever seen. As Puck, Stanley Tucci has been modeled on Pan, sporting bitty horns. Tucci is a very relaxed, grounded actor when he wants to be, and though his Puck has an urban wise-guy air that's a bit at odds with the role, at least he's not leaping around trying to act like a sprite. The other male fairies are cast in the same satyr/faun mode, but the actresses are decked out in enough gauze and sequins and glitter for a Christmas display window at Macy's. They're meant to be sexy, even earthy, but they sport precious little wire-and-gauze wings or wear tall, two-handled Grecian-style pots on their heads. - n n In Shakespeare's day, city dwellers were less likely to believe in fairies than country people were - somewhat like the way it is with aliens today. But everyone knew the folklore, what fairies were supposed to be. And they weren't supposed to be very nice. No one is quite sure of the origins of fairy belief, but many scholars speculate the spirits were what was left of the old pre- Christian gods. The average person who thought they were real would have been extremely disinclined to run into one. A fairy was more likely to curse you or kill you or spirit you away for a lover or servant than to bestow any kindly gifts. This concept of fairies was eclipsed in the 18th and early 19th centuries by literary fairy tales: Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb. But it survived in folk tales and made its way back into educated consciousness in 1812 in the grim work of the Brothers Grimm, whose tales were rife with cruelty, death, mutilation and blood. Interestingly, the Victorians, whom we smugly think of as hysterically addicted to the nice and the safe, made a stab at combining the two types.

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Jon Spelman, who coordinated "Tall Tales, White Lies, Local Color and Monumental Views," an evening of local tales that opened Thursday at the Kennedy Center, is a superb storyteller. You appreciate him even more after listening to the raconteurs to whom he has graciously given precedence in this production, none of whom has his presence, wit, timing or narrative creativity.

"Tall Tales" is meant to give the audience a glimpse of the "other" -- i.e., not white-collar, political, bureaucratic -- Washington. This turns out to be a Washington composed of the usual PC suspects: blacks, women, Latinos, gays. But none of them has much new to say. Black women, unsurprisingly, face racist condescension. Gays are trying to forge a new definition for manhood. Latinos face racist condescension. An unarticulated smug assumption hangs over the evening -- that these stories and their tellers come to the ivory- tower audience to bear witness to the "real world." Well, I guess it is the real world: It's dull enough.

Storytelling as an art doesn't, thankfully, have an exact definition, but I don't think you'd be wrong to say that the audience should want to keep listening. In general, this means that a story goes somewhere, illuminates a subject, has a point. "Tall Tales" is just a selection of details strung together. There's a slightly repellent undertone to the proceedings -- as if the tellers and their stories didn't have to be interesting because, not being straight and/ or white, they're "exotic."

Actually, aside from Spelman, there is a straight, white guy present -- Eugene McCarthy, poet, raconteur, sometime politician. McCarthy tells a terrific story, but then he has a great subject: Lyndon Johnson. Seems Johnson used to drive visiting politicians across his prairie land to his ranch house, and on the way they'd pass a herd of deer Johnson kept especially for these occasions, and the guest would be expected to shoot one. Poor Hubert Humphrey didn't want to, but he did. And somehow Johnson made sure Humphrey shot a second one as well. Humphrey's whole political ruin is in that tale.

Tall Tales, White Lies, Local Color and Monumental Views, organized and overseen by Jon Spelman. Consulting director, Howard Shalwitz. Lights, Jeff Grandel. With Quique Aviles, Peter DiMuro, Jamal Koram, Namu Lwanga, Eugene McCarthy, Robbie McCauley, Rome Quezada and Jon Spelman. At the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Thursdays through Sundays, through Feb. 26.

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"The Potting Shed," which opened at the Washington Stage Guild on Saturday, plays like a psychoanalytic thriller. In Graham Greene's drama, James (Bill Largess), the second son of the militantly atheistic Callifer clan, is treated as a pariah by the rest of the family, and this seems to have something to do with the fact that he has no memory of anything that happened to him before the age of 14. It also seems to have something to do with the potting shed at the bottom of the Callifer garden, an ordinary enough building that everyone mysteriously avoids.

Greene's scenario for "The Third Man" is justly regarded as a masterpiece of screenwriting, and his screenplays for "The Fallen Idol" and "Our Man in Havana" too are brisk, witty, darkly funny, morally disturbing, concerned with the question of evil. As a playwright, though, he treads with a leaden foot, and the Stage Guild production, respectful of the text as it is, doesn't bring fresh energy to the slowly worked-out proceedings.

This is a play in which lots and lots of conversations take place among genteel upper-middle-class folk in a series of rooms. It would be completely deadly if Graham weren't such a clever mystery writer. He gets us so curious about James's lost memory that we're willing to sit through a certain number of dry dramatic patches in order to discover what happened. Seems that there's another Callifer outcast - - James's Uncle William, a priest, who lost his faith about the same time James's memory failed. Could the two be connected? Was Greene a Catholic apologist? Yes and yes.

For non-Christians, the precepts that undergird the play may be too esoteric for the drama to make a lot of sense. Unlike Greene's screenplays and novels, which deal with evil in the human soul, "The Potting Shed" ventures into areas that some will regard as miraculous and others as supernatural. Greene's talent for depicting human moral folly isn't much called for in what is essentially a fable, and the characters seem designed to present his thesis rather than teach us anything about how individual human beings may relate, or fail to relate, to God.

Largess is tortured in a befuddled, very English way, and as Uncle William, Conrad Feininger has some intense and bitter moments. But in general, under Michael Haney's rather stolid direction, this is not one of the Stage Guild's more strongly acted productions. The technical support, from William Pucilowsky's costumes to Carl F. Gudenius's mission-style furnished set, is, as always with this company, excellent.

The Potting Shed by Graham Greene. Directed by Michael Haney. With Alan Woodward, Sarah Stevenson, Laura Giannarelli, Jean Schertler, John Dow, Susan Patz McInerney, Edwin Hammond, Barbara Rappaport, Linda Kenyon. At the Washington Stage Guild through April 2.

What's a mother to do? As Nora, the beleaguered heroine of the comedy "Escape From Happiness," which opened Monday at the Round House Theatre, Nancy Robinette presides over a worrisome brood. Her eldest daughter, Elizabeth (Jane Beard), is a high-powered lawyer working herself to death. The middle daughter, Mary Ann (Sarah Marshall), is given to saying things like, "Please be nice to me: I've made so much progress in the last few months." And the youngest daughter, Gail (Elizabeth Kitsos), the most "normal," has just found her husband, Junior (Steve Hadnagy), beaten bloody on the kitchen floor.

Nora gets Gail to ask Junior whether he's dying ("He might lie to me. I'm his mother-in-law"), and when he says he is, she pinches his infant daughter so her wails will guilt-trip Dad into living. Nora is used to coping: For 10 years she's been putting up with her husband, Tom (Tom Quinn), by pretending he's a complete stranger who just happens to live in her house.

We're back in the strange world of playwright George Walker, where humor and horror waltz drunkenly around in each other's arms. As in "Criminals in Love" and "Love and Anger," both previous Round House productions, Walker's characters are alternately whimsical and vicious, and they despair of making sense, much less a good life, out of society's ugliness. But they try. Hilariously. Even more than Walker's other plays, "Escape From Happiness" bounds from one lunatic comic moment after another. On opening night, scene after scene was interrupted by applause.

The plot is a crime mystery -- Junior is apparently mixed up with drug running -- but the story is about a family trying to make peace with itself. The daughters all have problems with Dad, though unlike Nora they can at least acknowledge who he is. Junior's shady adventures threaten his new baby. Mary Ann keeps leaving her husband and coming to drive her sisters and Mom crazy. Everyone is so upset and self-absorbed that any discussion of a problem circles into eddies of nonsense. Fortunately there is always someone with a gun -- either criminal or cop -- to burst in and get their minds focused.

There isn't a bad role in this crazy, sweet, brutal melodrama, and the actors appear to be having the time of their lives. As the thuggish father and son who beat Junior, Mitchell Patrick and Jim Grollman are funny enough to warrant a play of their own. Hadnagy is so laid-back that part of Junior's mind appears to be permanently asleep. As a mismatched pair of cops, Marty Lodge and Dori Legg play off each other like Punch and Judy. Robinette and Marshall are at their zany best. And Beard makes a comic triumph of Elizabeth, the workaholic-cum-sadist who has a spectacular nervous breakdown center stage.

Director Daniel DeRaey balances all the disparate tonal elements so that the production is simultaneously touching and alarming, funny and disturbing. He makes especially inspired use of the kitchen table, a huge prop that he uses as if it were beanbag-light. Jos. B. Musumeci Jr.'s kitchen set is convincingly worn and stained, and the sound design, by DeRaey and Neil McFadden, is wittily appropriate, as are Rosemary Pardee's costumes. The Round House has made a specialty of bringing Walker's tough, funny, thoughtful work to Washington audiences, and we're the luckier for it.

Escape From Happiness, by George F. Walker. Directed by Daniel DeRaey. At the Round House through April 16.

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Signature Theatre has done it again, opening its season with a high-spirited and beautiful production of Stephen Sondheim's fractured fairy tale "Into the Woods."

The show, which opened Sunday night, is staged not so much in the round as in the oval, with the audience seated on the longer sides, facing one another. The intimacy of the theater is a real plus. This "Into the Woods" doesn't have the hollow echo of pretension that haunted the Broadway version; it cozies up to you, playful rather than strenuous, poignant rather than over-emoted.

Sondheim being Sondheim, this is a vinegary take on the old fairy tales. In the first act, Sondheim and his frequent collaborator James Lapine send up Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood, Jack and the Beanstalk and other stories, weaving them together in a way that doesn't make much narrative sense but makes for gloriously witty songs.Sondheim and Lapine mock the familiar stories rather gently but with considerable cleverness. Everything ends as it should and the characters all prepare to live happily ever after.

Act 2 explores what happens after the happily-ever-after, and while the show hardly falls apart - the second-act songs include some of Sondheim's loveliest - it does fall somewhat flat. The characters aren't so satisfied with what they have, after all, and they're rather sour.

Rapunzel exhibits post-traumatic stress disorder from having been locked in a tower most of her life. Cinderella's prince needs new female worlds to conquer: As he explains to Cinderella, "I was raised to be charming, not sincere." The widow of the giant Jack killed is on the rampage and keeps stepping on various characters (sound designer Ted Jenkins provides hilarious crunching noises for these unfortunate incidents). The characters who aren't squashed need to learn to pull together, and by the time they get to the song "Your Fault" the evening begins to feel like a morale-building Outward Bound session: lots of uplift, lots of trees.

These problems, which are intrinsic to the script, were glaring in the New York production, which almost felt like two different shows. At Signature, owing to our closeness to the performers, the emotionally minor-key second act doesn't seem too small. No one has to strain to project complex, quiet emotions over the footlights. The second act becomes conversational, as if Sondheim were personally addressing each member of the audience.

As he's demonstrated in previous seasons with "Sweeney Todd," "Assassins" and "Company," director Eric D. Schaeffer seems to have some sort of mystical nervous-system meld with Sondheim. The joining of director and show here is seamless. Schaeffer can direct jokes one instant and dark emotional scenes the next, and he sweeps the colorfully clad actors around in patterns that echo and extend the music. His work here is vital and exuberant, as if he'd just discovered musical theater and what splendid fun it can be.

The high points of the show are very high. They include the Wolf's (Christopher A. Flint) lustful "Hello, Little Girl," sung to Red Ridinghood (the delightfully pithy and eccentric Megan Lawrence). Wearing a resplendent vest that parts to reveal his furry, very animal lower quarters, this wolf is as randy as a Tex Avery cartoon.

The two princes (Flint again, and Michael Sharp) feel sorry for themselves in the satiric duet "Agony." The Witch (Donna Lillard Migliaccio, in fine fettle) belts out the despairing, wrathful "The Last Midnight." The Baker's Wife (April Harr), seduced and abandoned by the charming but insincere prince, wanders alone in the woods, singing the plaintive, sadder-but-wiser "Moments in the Woods." Though they have no music, Cinderella's evil stepmother and two sisty uglers (the marvelously overdone Dianne M. Stone, Elizabeth Ann Eunice and Laura K. Stark, by turns sulky and sour) liven things up whenever they lurch onto the stage.

The performers can't just sing; they're lively and funny as well. With such a large and talented cast, only a few can be picked out for mention: Migliaccio, Harr, Flint, Lawrence. Jim C. Ferris is a plainspoken and affecting Baker. Lyle Smythers gets laughs from no part at all as Cinderella's stepfather. Terrence Crummitt is a benign and innocent Jack.

I don't know how Signature does what it does on such a minuscule budget, but there is absolutely nothing shoestring about this production. From Jenkins's sound to Peter J. Zakutansky and Phil Harris's makeup (which includes a wolf) to Pamela McFarland's sumptuous and amusing costumes (one hat boasts a bird's nest with multicolored eggs) to Janet Dell Russell's props, everything in this show is first-class.

The penultimate song in "Into the Woods" is the melodic, comforting "No One Is Alone" (sung by Ferris). I never really believe Sondheim when he's being uplifting, but the song is lovely. Just like the whole production.

Into the Woods, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine. Directed by Eric D. Schaeffer. Musical direction by Jon Kalbfleisch; set, Lou Stancari; lighting, John Burchett. Also featuring Buzz Mauro, Mary Payne Lawson, Jean Cantrell, Lisa Lockhart, Mary L. Gresock, David Frable, Richard Stone, Lori Lentner, Mimi Brennan. At Signature Theatre through Oct. 1.

At the begining of the second act of the Studio Theatre production of "Rhinoceros," J. Fred Shiffman turns into the eponymous beast -- and frankly, what more could any theatergoer ask for? Ionesco's famous absurdist comedy, which opened Saturday, is dated and laborious, but it has that one great transformation scene to shoot things toward the theatrical stratosphere, and the payoff is more than worth sitting through the slower parts of the evening.

"Rhinoceros" mildly satirizes the conformism of the '50s -- the man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit culture. The hero is Stanley Berenger (TJ Edwards), who is having a hard time being a cog in the corporate machine. Unlike his spiffed-up fellow office workers, particularly his overachieving friend John (Shiffman), Stanley is rumpled and dreamy, a stop-and-smell-the-flowers kind of guy in a high-speed, concrete-paved world. He is properly ashamed of his failings, but not enough to do anything about them. Mostly he just drinks.

Stanley's adventures begin one day when, as he has brunch with John, a rhinoceros (or possibly two) appears in the street and tramples a cat. The next day at the office, everyone argues about the reality of the creatures until it turns out that an absent co-worker has become one (he shows up late for work and demolishes the office staircase). Later that day Stanley visits John and finds him sick in bed, suffering from a bad headache and a compulsion to eat houseplants. . . .

The play is like a more benign version of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers." In the movie everyone turns into pods; in the play, they turn into rhinoceroses. With both stories, an audience can fill in whatever it wants -- communism, fascism, bourgeois conformity -- as the source of the creeping, transforming plague that turns everyone into the same thing. For Ionesco, the animal nature of the transformation is important: He sees humanity sliding back to the level of the beasts, unquestioning dumb brutes.

This central theatrical metaphor has some problems -- mainly that, whereas no one wants to be a pod, it sounds as if it might be rather fun to be a rhinoceros. Running destructively amok, the creatures are manifestations of the id -- preferable, somehow, to the repressed, rigid humans they were. It's hard to see the rhinocerification of society as a complete tragedy.

Some sort of similar problems are at work in the character of John. He's supposed to be the most compulsively conforming of them all, a tense, humorless fellow -- someone for, say, William Hurt to play. But the character has to mutate before our eyes into a rhinoceros, and so the role is always cast with some grand eccentric - - Zero Mostel is the most famous John -- who is unconvincing in the buttoned-up opening scenes.

Shiffman, resplendent in a double-breasted lilac suit, suffers a little from this problem. From the moment he peers haughtily in through a cafe window to see whether Stanley has yet arrived, he's an exhilaratingly peculiar presence, dandyish, high-strung, self- absorbed. The opening scene between Stanley and John isn't very successful -- Edwards, who can be a very funny actor (as he most recently proved in Arena's "Misalliance"), works too hard to keep up with the rather stale archness of the dialogue, and he and Shiffman don't have any rapport. You don't for a moment believe they're friends.

But Edwards gets funnier as Stanley becomes more and more put- upon, and he and Shiffman partner each other beautifully in the transformation scene. Shyly bewildered, comically helpless, full of absolutely useless good intentions, Edwards's Stanley watches and dodges as his friend begins to lurch, snort, snuffle, paw and make a meal of a cactus. Shiffman performs quicksilver shifts from "normalcy" and hypochondria to animal appetite: "I have to have something to eat," he declares and walks over Edwards to get to a plant. His bestial nature burbles up and takes him over, as if he were channeling for some primordial behemoth, and his whole body shivers, responding to the animal coming through the skin. It's the sort of performance in which comedy and an odd sort of beauty are mysteriously mixed.

Proclaiming the virtues of becoming an animal, John strikes a Nietzschean note: "We have to get beyond morality. Nature has its laws. Morality is unreal." Arguing for the individual, Stanley exclaims that becoming a rhinoceros is "a herd thing! It's a sickness!" He protests in vain. Soon his boss and his office mates are hurtling through the streets, and only he and his true love, Daisy (Holly Rudkin), hold the barricades for humanity.

Joy Zinoman has directed in a sprightly style that prods the tired script into a skip, and the supporting actors try their hardest to wring laughs from the clumsy jokes that dramaturge Serge Seiden has attempted, with mixed success, to update (the rhinoceroses represent Republicans, etc.). Russell Metheney has designed a beautiful, airy raw pine set, and Mary Ann Powell's costumes are deliciously absurd. No one can quite overcome the limitations of the script -- but where the script is great, Shiffman provides a great performance.

Rhinoceros, by Eugene Ionesco. Directed by Joy Zinoman. Lights, Daniel MacLean Wagner; sound, Gil Thompson and David Maddox. With Tom Kearney, Lawrence Redmond, Harry A. Winter, Brigid Cleary, Lillian Lee Butler and Elizabeth Miller. At the Studio Theatre through April 9.

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Though they've worked in Washington for well over a decade, the ethereally funny Nancy Robinette and the ferociously comic Sarah Marshall appear onstage together for the first timein the new Round House production of "Escape From Happiness." It's a consummation for which I have devoutly been wishing for a number of years, though I must confess that my fantasy vehicle for them was "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Who played whom would have been a question, though.

The obvious casting is the frazzled, faintly apologetic Robinette as bedridden Blanche, the Joan Crawford part, and the wild-eyed Marshall as nutzoid Baby Jane, the Bette Davis role. On the other hand, Marshall has a splinterable fragility that would be perfect for Blanche, and Robinette is capable of a sly, matter-of-fact sadism that would bubble unsettlingly out of her gentle-voiced Baby Jane. So many wonderful -- if somewhat perverse -- possibilities in both pairings!

Happily, "Escape From Happiness" has plenty of wonderful perversity on its own. Robinette plays Nora, the matriarch of a family that might be defined as more distressed than dysfunctional, and Marshall is the loopiest of her daughters, Mary Ann. Nora looks after her family by dispensing helpful advice. When asked to call 911 again after having called once, she explains, "No, you can't do that. It annoys them. Also they get confused and suspicious. I've heard terrible stories about their confusion. We'll just have to hope and pray a reliable person took my call."

Perhaps understandably, Mary Ann is an advice junkie, only she turns to Clare, "my therapist and my friend," with whose help she reinvents herself on a regular basis. At the beginning of the play she is delightedly aflutter that her elder sister, Elizabeth (Jane Beard, in a terrific comic performance of her own), is, according to Clare, a lesbian. Impressed, she considers becoming one herself. "When did she become lesbiantic?" she muses. "Is that a word? Use it in a sentence." When it turns out that Elizabeth sleeps with both men and women, Mary Ann is appalled: "Mom, I have something to tell you. Elizabeth is not a lesbian. Elizabeth will sleep with anyone. She hasn't made any hard decisions at all!"

"You're an awful lot like your mother," another character tells Mary Ann, who responds: "A chip off the old block. Yeah. Sort of. What do you mean?" It feels like theater karma that in their first show together, Marshall and Robinette should be related in a yeah- sort-of-what-do-you-mean? way. They're both fine dramatic actresses with a gift for comedy, lunacy and the magically unexpected. Yet they make a beguiling pair of opposites: Robinette cloudy, Marshall steely; Robinette's voice something from the string section (perhaps a viola), Marshall's definitely brass (possibly a cornet); Robinette adrift, Marshall focused; Robinette unnerving you by the uncensored fluidity of her feelings, Marshall overcoming you with sheer emotional power. Marshall slams into comic targets, demolishing them; Robinette surrounds them with a miasma of uncertainty, smothering them. They're perfect as mother and daughter because only near- relations are ever that perfectly opposite.

Marshallis short and feisty-looking with bright, bright blue eyes and a wide mouth. (A few years ago, when she wore her hair cut short and spiky, she was almost a dead ringer for enfant terrible Peter Sellars.) Robinette is taller and finer-boned, with soft dark eyes and frizzy hair that seems like a manifestation of her nerve endings. She's a more ditheringly nervous presence than Marshall, for whom high-strung equals drawn-bow. They don't give off the same sort of energy at all, yet it's almost always possible to imagine one of them playing a role the other has succeeded in (Marshall as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," Robinette as the insane mother in "The Rise and Fall of Little Voice"). Though they've never acted together before, they have acted successively in the same role: the female lead in Christopher Durang's mad monologues "Laughing Wild" at the Studio Secondstage. I saw Marshall in the part, and she was focused yet insane, her face wrenched into an expression that indicated she was either about to cry or about to kill somebody. I asked a theater-going friend who saw Robinette what she was like. "Sad," he replied. "Deeply sad." But crazy, of course? "Oh yes."

Thereis a sadness to Robinette: A soft cloud of sorrow floats around her, threatening to rain emotion. What frees it from self- pity and makes it funny is Robinette's unstated but sublime confidence that if problems arise, they are with the world, not her. If anyone were listening to her, things could be straightened out; her polite melancholy comes from the fact that nobody is listening to her. At all. Ever. To deal with this, she has developed elliptical modes of attack -- sidling, rather than charging, in for the blow. In "Fat Men in Skirts," she slipped the innocuous line "Enjoy the pasta" into another character's side like a knife.

In serious roles, her melancholy gives her poignancy. It's why you can feel for her termagant Martha in "Virginia Woolf," and why she was so painfully effective as the wasted-life heroine of "Through the Leaves." And it invests her with a bruised sensuality, a worn, life- lived sexual quality that one associates with European women.

Marshall is often cast as a powerhouse seducer, the sort of woman who strips with glee and advances on her prey. Men freeze like rabbits caught in the glare of those blue eyes. She's appalling in these roles, of course -- as she should be -- but also weirdly sexy, the way people can be when they might explode any minute. There's a nothing-to-lose quality in both her stage lust and her humor -- it's very funny, but also kind of scary. In a tragic role like the lead in "Elektra," she can go what should be too far and then, astonishingly, keep going, hitting ever-higher degrees of intensity until you squirm, as if the performance might burn you.

Her flip side is rather childlike. She was excellent as the tough, lonely girl heroines of "A Taste of Honey" and "When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout." She's a little withdrawn in these roles, self-protective, as if she'd been hit one time too many. She can also devolve into a sweet and maddening infantile persona -- wide-eyed and nervously innocent. Mary Ann is a character in this style. So was her completely triumphant achievement -- she claimed the role against all comers, past and future -- as Piglet in "Winnie the Pooh."

"Realistic?" says Mary Ann at one point. "Oh. I think I know what you mean. We've tried that. It doesn't seem to work for us." Realism is overrated in acting too. It's a movie-TV deformation that we now rate the only acceptable style. Fortunately there are actresses such as Marshall and Robinette to remind us that drab accuracy isn't everything, who brings such extremes of sensitivity, power, craziness to roles that their characterizations verge on the surreal. Their acting has the ineffable, irresistible force of dreams.

Yesterday at Sardi's Restaurant, at the unlikely hour of 8:30 a.m. (Sardi's doesn't even serve breakfast), Broadway's embarrassing dearth of new musicals was acknowledged by the Tony Awards.

Kathleen Turner and Jeremy Irons were announcing this year's nominees, but when they came to Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score, there was only one in each category: "Sunset Boulevard," the latest from Andrew Lloyd Webber. So, nearly a month before the June 4 awards ceremony, we already know what's inside two envelopes.

For Best Musical, "Sunset" has only one competitor, the nostalgic rock-and-roll revue "Smokey Joe's Cafe." Those were the only new musicals to open this season. Two big revivals, "Show Boat" and "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," qualified for nominations in other categories, including Best Director.

In all, "Show Boat" received the most nominations with 10, and "Sunset" got nine. Among straight plays, the London import "Indiscretions" was nominated for nine awards, including Best Play, and the adaptation of Henry James's novel "The Heiress" for seven.

Modern American playwriting was represented solely by Terrence McNally's much-praised "Love! Valour! Compassion!," which garnered five nominations including Best Play. Emily Mann's adaptation of the memoir "Having Our Say" was also nominated for Best Play, and two other awards.

The fourth nominee for Best Play was another British import: Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," also nominated for Best Scenic Design and Best Lighting Design. Ralph Fiennes's "Hamlet" was nominated for Best Revival of a Play, with a Best Actor nomination going to Fiennes. He's up against Brian Bedford for "The Moliere Comedies," Roger Rees for "Indiscretions" and -- at last, an American! -- the inestimable Joe Sears for his variety of (mostly female) roles in "A Tuna Christmas."

Leading Actress in a Play nominations went to Mary Alice for "Having Our Say," Eileen Atkins for "Indiscretions," Cherry Jones for "The Heiress" and Helen Mirren in "A Month in the Country."

Four actors were nominated for Best Performance in a Musical: Matthew Broderick for "How to Succeed," Alan Campbell for "Sunset Boulevard" and both Mark Jacoby and John McMartin for "Show Boat." For Best Performance by an Actress, the nominations were Glenn Close for "Sunset Boulevard" and Rebecca Luker for "Show Boat."

The Nominees

Nominations for the 1995 Tony Awards:

BEST PLAY -- "Arcadia," "Having Our Say," "Indiscretions," "Love! Valour! Compassion!"

BEST MUSICAL -- "Smokey Joe's Cafe," "Sunset Boulevard"

BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY -- "Hamlet," "The Heiress," "The Moliere Comedies," "The Rose Tattoo"

BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL -- "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," "Show Boat"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A PLAY -- Brian Bedford, "The Moliere Comedies"; Ralph Fiennes, "Hamlet"; Roger Rees, "Indiscretions"; Joe Sears, "A Tuna Christmas"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A PLAY -- Mary Alice, "Having Our Say"; Eileen Atkins, "Indiscretions"; Cherry Jones, "The Heiress"; Helen Mirren, "A Month in the Country"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTOR IN A MUSICAL -- Matthew Broderick, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"; Alan Campbell, "Sunset Boulevard"; Mark Jacoby, "Show Boat"; John McMartin, "Show Boat"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A LEADING ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL -- Glenn Close, "Sunset Boulevard"; Rebecca Luker, "Show Boat"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY -- Stephen Bogardus, "Love! Valour! Compassion!"; John Glover, "Love! Valour! Compassion!"; Anthony Heald, "Love! Valour! Compassion!"; Jude Law, "Indiscretions"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY -- Suzanne Bertish, "The Moliere Comedies"; Cynthia Nixon, "Indiscretions"; Mercedes Ruehl, "The Shadow Box"; Frances Sternhagen, "The Heiress"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL -- Michel Bell, "Show Boat"; Joel Blum, "Show Boat"; Victor Trent Cook, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"; George Hearn, "Sunset Boulevard"

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL -- Gretha Boston, "Show Boat"; Brenda Braxton, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"; B.J. Crosby, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"; DeLee Lively, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"

BEST SCENIC DESIGN -- John Lee Beatty, "The Heiress"; Stephen Brimson Lewis, "Indiscretions"; John Napier, "Sunset Boulevard"; Mark Thompson, "Arcadia"

BEST COSTUME DESIGN -- Jane Greenwood, "The Heiress"; Florence Klotz, "Show Boat"; Stephen Brimson Lewis, "Indiscretions"; Anthony Powell, "Sunset Boulevard"

BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY -- Gerald Guiterrez, "The Heiress"; Emily Mann, "Having Our Say"; Joe Mantello, "Love! Valour! Compassion!"; Sean Mathias, "Indiscretions"

BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL -- Des McAnuff, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"; Trevor Nunn, "Sunset Boulevard"; Harold Prince, "Show Boat"; Jerry Zaks, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"

BEST LIGHTING DESIGN -- Andrew Bridge, "Sunset Boulevard"; Beverly Emmons, "The Heiress"; Mark Henderson, "Indiscretions"; Paul Pyant, "Arcadia"

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY -- Bob Avian, "Sunset Boulevard"; Wayne Cilento, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"; Joey McKneely, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"; Susan Stroman, "Show Boat"

"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!" cries Hugh Nees, as the ham actor Valere, when he tears out first one eye then the other and flings them - splat! - at the back wall while the audience laughs helplessly. "La Bete," which opened Saturday night at the Source, is one of the nuttiest, most interesting things to hit the Washington boards in quite a while. Nothing about it should work, really, yet it becomes more than the sum of its mismatched parts. It's a folly, a curio.

Part satire of the theater, part celebration of the theater, part joke, part lament and all ambition, David Hirson's play is, first off, in verse, rollicking couplets without much poetry but with a lot of ... well, rollick. Second, it's a period piece: set in the 18th- century French court, where Elomire, the leader of a group of actors patronized by the prince, attempts to resist his sponsor's attempt to foist a sycophantic boor, Valere, into the troupe. Third, the whole first act - and there are only two - is essentially a long, maniacal monologue (in couplets, in couplets!) by Valere, in which he astonishes Elomire and another actor, Bejart - not to mention the audience - with his vanity, windiness, unflappable self-regard, weirdness and general tastelessness: At one point, he breaks off in mid-speech to point out that Bejart is a hunchback and goes on to wonder why he never noticed when Bejart is onstage.

As you might have guessed, Valere is a punishingly impossible role, yet Nees, who doesn't really have either the technique or the experience for it, is captivating, skipping and strutting about the stage like a teddy bear on nitrous oxide. In his most extreme moments, Nees is like something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon; at his most wonderful extreme moments, he specifically suggests Elmer Fudd. His performance has a raucous cartoon energy, and also a real sweetness. Nees can neigh when he laughs, vamp, leap, posture - but he couldn't pull off the role if there weren't something unforced and liberated at the center of his gyrations, a floating lightness.

The first act is really just Valere horrifying his fellow actors. In Act II, the prince shows up, and Elomire tries to get Valere to disgrace himself in the royal opinion by putting on one of his plays. Valere has a whole repertoire - including one I was dying to see called "Death by Cheese" - but the one he performs, with the help of Elomire's troupe, is a fable about two brothers in which the shallow, silly, pleasant one triumphs, while the serious one, a philosopher, perishes in want and ignominy. It's impossible to tell if we're supposed to consider this play-within-the-play "good" or "bad," but it has a couple of sublime moments, especially one in which an actor (Brian Diggs) decides he can play a prop chicken and throws himself enthusiastically into the role.

In the end, of course, the boorish Valere's silly play presages Elomire's fate. The prince prefers the fool to the artist, and Elomire, deserted by his troupe, is driven from the court. After all the lunacy, the ending is surprisingly affecting. At its heart, "La Bete" is poignant, slightly Chekhovian - the coarse triumph over the subtle and power goes its way, indifferent to human virtue or feeling.

Neither the play nor the production is perfect, by any means. Hirson tries jokes that don't work at all, including a bunch involving a maid who speaks only in words that rhyme with "blue." Though Elomire is meant to be an equal and foil to Valere, the character doesn't get nearly as much space, and his speech defending art is dull after Valere's antic fancy. Similarly, John Lescault seems a little constricted by the role of Elomire, and the rest of the cast is unremarkable, though Kryztov Lindquist has his vain moments as the prince. Randye Hoeflich has directed the cast to act the lunacy lunatically - if it weren't for Nees's lyrical edge, the evening would be strident.

But James Kronzer has designed an "Alice in Wonderland" set, with leaning doors and walls and an off-kilter chandelier. And in the true Lewis Carroll spirit, Valere writes on the clean white walls words he has made up and prefers to use in place of such homely nouns as "chair." He's a fool and a jerk, yet his anarchy is an artist's anarchy: There's more life in it than in Elomire's speeches. "La Bete" doesn't make easy points about art, virtue and power; Hirson leaves us to worry at the thorny questions ourselves. It's flattering to sit through a play by a writer who so clearly thinks his audience has brains.

La Bete, by David Hirson. Directed by Randye Hoeflich. Set, James Kronzer; lights, William A. Price III; costume design, Gwenth West; sound, Neil McFadden. With Hugh Nees, John Lescault, Kryztov Lindquist, Brian Diggs, Allyson Currin, Gary Telles and Emily Townley. At the Source Theatre through Feb. 6.

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There is so much that is splendid about the Shakespeare Theatre production of "Antony and Cleopatra," which opened Sunday, that when it collapses in the second act, the disappointment is almost physically painful.

For the first half of the evening, director Ron Daniels and his cast have the great, difficult play excitingly under control. Helen Carey is a sensual, witty Cleopatra, hot-hearted, cool-headed and all woman. Tom Hewitt makes a vital, intelligent, humorous Antony. Negotiating with Octavius Caesar (Wallace Acton) and the generals Lepidus (Emery Battis) and Pompey (Craig Wallace), he not only towers over them physically but exudes what I can only describe as a warm, engaging arrogance. He and Carey understand how funny parts of the play are, and they skillfully play it as a comedy of imperial manners as well as a tragedy.

The character of Antony is the "problem" in this play: Running back and forth between his duty as a soldier and his passion for Cleopatra, he can seem vacillating and weak. Hewitt and Daniels transform Antony's inability to choose into a passion to get as much from life as possible, elevating his appetite to the level of hubris. He feels, experiences, wants too much -- more than lesser mortals dare. That's his tragedy. His adjunct, Enobarbus (Edward Gero), is an earthy, no-nonsense type, Sancho Panza to Antony's Don Quixote. Gero plays him well -- it's good to see him lolling around after all those roles that demanded he bear himself with noble deportment. Enobarbus has more sense than Antony, he's more of a realist, and he doesn't fool himself -- but his very sanity limits him. Antony, the quixotic dreamer, is the hero here. Daniels's direction is a disciplined mix of stylized, formal staging and naturalistic emotions, and he uses the contrasting styles for theatrical tension. Part of the excitement of this sort of staging is that it's in such danger of suddenly, embarrassingly being crushed by its own excess. Michael Yeargan's set, with its gigantic statues of cat-goddesses and neon-outlined pyramid, is always just on the edge of not working -- and Gabriel Berry's outre costumes sometimes tumble over that edge. But by and large Daniels maintains the tautness to wonderful effect: The play is both mythic and intimate. The drinking-party scene that ends the first act is stunning, and so is an eerie sequence in which Antony's soldiers hear the god Hercules leaving the earth, and them (Bruce Odland's sound here, as throughout, is magnificent). The scenes are emotionally rich. There's more terrific listening in this production than I've seen on stage in a long time. (David Sabin, as Maecenas, has a great, completely silent, moment hearing an account of Cleopatra's arrival on her barge.) The small roles -- Starla Benford's lively Charmian, Floyd King's asp-delivering farmer, Michael Solomon's Eros, Antony's loyal aide -- are as thought-out and well-realized as the larger ones. Daniels's work with Acton is particularly shrewd. They make Octavius intelligent and determined, but also rigid and repressed. At the roisterous drinking party, Octavius sits stiffly while the men around him get pie-eyed. He's enough of a good sport finally to drink, and enough of a regular guy to hold his liquor, but his heart isn't in it. Acton gives an odd, wistful edge to the character -- Octavius clearly admires Antony and rather wishes he were in his league as a man and soldier, but he's resigned to his limitations. This is not a guy who wastes time mooning over the impossible when he has an empire to take over. Acton's characterization, which works so marvelously when you're watching it, comes up short when the offstage machinations of Octavius are later revealed. The man you've seen doesn't seem quite capable of Machiavellian intrigue. Similarly, it's hard to believe that Battis's charming, sensible Lepidus -- another man aware of his own limitations -- is the toady others describe him as. Daniels hasn't helped the actors pull all of the pieces of the characters together, which leads to occasional bewildering surprises in the plot turns, as a person we think of as one way turns out to act another. The plot twists like a kite's tail in the second act, when Antony rejects Cleopatra, then adores her, is now with Octavius, now against him, now losing battles, now winning them, now apparently crazy, now still a brilliant general. It's fatally unclear whether Cleopatra is on his side or looking out for herself, or some combination of both. The choice to make Antony go a little crazy is supported by the text, but it doesn't work here -- he spins off into his own world, making it impossible to understand what's supposed to be happening. Everyone keeps on acting, but the play isn't going anywhere. It gets back to its feet with Cleopatra's death scene, which the actress rises to imperially. In the past year, Helen Carey has turned in superb performances as Lady Macbeth, as the voracious Lady Politic Would-Be in "Volpone," as the vicious, powerful Queen Margaret in "Henry VI." Her Cleopatra joins this company of heroic performances. It would be a complete triumph if the production and play didn't fall away from and strand her in the second act. It's still a personal triumph. The acting equivalent of a great athlete, she's gone four for four. Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ron Daniels. Lights, James F. Ingalls; movement choreography, Karma Camp; fights, Brad Alan Waller; music, Bruce Odland. With C.J. Wilson, Ryan Artzberger, Brett Porter, Makela Spielman, James J. Lawless, Andrew Long, Allen Gilmore, Mark Heimann, Opal Alladin, Peter Joshua Burroughs. At the Shakespeare Theatre through Jan. 19. Call 202-393-2700.

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Christopher Lane clip-clops his way into the audience's heart as Paris the cowboy in the curious, charming musical "Steak!," which opened Wednesday night at the Church Street Theater under the auspices of Consenting Adults Theatre Company. Like his fellow cattle drivers -- and the all-woman vegetarian gang that rustles cows to save them -- Paris rides a stick horse with an endearingly hand- painted head, and this creature stamps, snorts, backs up, sidles and at one exciting moment even rears. The show itself is as irresistibly goofy and playful.

The work of local talents David Maddox (music) and Elizabeth Pringle and Christi Stewart-Brown (book and lyrics), "Steak!" sounds as if it would be a PC nightmare with its tale of vegetarian cowgals vs. manly meat-eating cowguys. Instead it's lyrical and odd, a long shaggy-dog story of a show in which the laughs come in unexpected places. As if in a Shakespearean comedy, the characters wander in a wilderness -- a desert here rather than a forest -- and have adventures in mistaken identity before each ends up with his or her own true love.

Paris, a cowboy poet (though not a very good one), rides with the boss's son, Dallas (Randy Howk), who is having trouble living up to his dad's expectations; the gross Houston (Ian LeValley), who brings new meaning to the word "cowpoke"; the sensitive and chivalrous Austin (David Fendig), who has a secret to hide; and Phillipe (Kevin Roach), the underappreciated French cook who can't get the boys to eat anything more complicated than rare T-bone.

On the distaff side, there's Bambi-Jo (Jennifer Gerdts), a wild child who was raised by deer; the ex-slave Betty-Bob (Pat Dade); ill- tempered, sexually confused Dusty-Lou (Nanna Ingvarsson); the half- Indian Rainbow (Kelli Cruz); and Squash (Deb Gottesman), the Yiddish- speaking cook, who isn't finding life on the Western plains all that stimulating. They rescue cattle being driven to slaughter, though what they do with them remains a little vague (set them free on the prairie to be killed by coyotes?).

But there's rarely been a show in which the plot mattered less. Basically the veggies-vs.-meaties conflict stands in for the battle of the sexes; and in classic comic fashion, each side realizes that a little change of menu now and then might be a good thing. Though it makes room for couplings of all kinds, "Steak!" isn't ideological but romantic. It meanders along rather than galloping, but after a while you realize that the rhythm isn't really slow, just giddy and moonstruck.

Maddox's songs are sweet-tuned and lively, and occasionally -- as with "Learnin' to Sleep," a duet between Austin and Betty-Bob -- quite beautiful. The terrific choreography is by Richard Dorton, who sends the cast twirling, sliding and romping all over the stage.

The voices aren't always all they should be, but occasionally, as with Dade and Gerdts, they're all you could wish for, and there isn't anyone onstage who can't deliver a number. Particularly notable and funny are Gottesman as the eccentric cook; Michael Rodgers as Bruce, the leather-bound barboy of dominatrix Miss Libby (Lisette LeCompte); Lane, who as Paris seems to have one eyebrow permanently etched in an arch; and LeValley, who isn't a very threatening villain but sure can dance.

David Jackson has directed with affection and wit, a beguiling combination. "Steak!" takes longer than it should to get going, but once it's up to speed it doesn't move quite like anything else you've ever seen. It's a curiosity, one of a kind, its own peculiar and pleasant thing.

Steak!, book and lyrics by Elizabeth Pringle and Christi Stewart- Brown, music by David Maddox. Directed by David Jackson; music direction, Deborah Wicks LaPuma; set, Bob Justis; lighting, Marianne Meadows; costumes, Susan Anderson. At the Church Street Theater through July 30.

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"This town is ruled over by an elite corps of snobs," declares Mary Todd Lincoln (Nancy Grosshans) in the one-woman show "Very Truly Yours, Mary Lincoln," which the Washington Shakespeare Company opened Thursday. The line gets a laugh, of course, since the more things change, the more they remain the same. There are little nuggets of smart political observation scattered throughout the show, which playwright Nancy Nilsson based on and sometimes took directly from Mrs. Lincoln's letters. But on the whole, Mrs. Lincoln was rather dull, at least in Nilsson's rendering, and so is the evening.

Mary Lincoln addresses us while preparing to leave for a night out with her husband -- at Ford's Theatre, of course. The audience is aware of this tragic irony throughout the show, though it doesn't actually affect the way we react to the script, since the impression is that the heroine would have chattered on in this banal way any old night of her life.

The usual biographical points are trotted out: the early deaths of two of the Lincolns' sons, Mary's (deserved) reputation for extravagance, Lincoln's depression, the vicious political climate of Washington during the Civil War. Mrs. Lincoln seems under some sort of nameless stress -- periodically she becomes emotional and flustered -- but we get no real insight into her.

Grosshans is a coquettish and confiding first lady. Some of her remarks are refreshingly pithy, as when she refers unapologetically to Grant as "a butcher. . . . He killed two of our boys for every one of theirs." And some have an eerie modern echo: Of one of her mistakes she says, "I had evil advisers," the 19th-century equivalent of "Mistakes were made." And what recent White House wife would not nod in weary recognition when Mary claims, "In my position, one suffers many unpleasantries."

The Lincolns' marriage must have been a complex one: She has long been reviled as a nut case, but whatever her faults, she can't have found it easy being married to a manic-depressive political genius. In Nilsson's script, though, the two are still lovebirds after 23 years of wedded life, in spite of tiffs now and then. Everything is sweet and a little sad, which is a legitimate take on the Lincolns, but not a very compelling one.

Very Truly Yours, Mary Lincoln, by Nancy Nilsson. Directed by Robert Grosshans. Lights, Benjamin Hay; costumes, Peg Sante. Washington Shakespeare Company at the Clark Street Playhouse through Sept. 17.

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In "Slavs!" playwright Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") mourns the death of the Soviet Union and the socialist ideal. The most powerful scene in the play, which opened Sunday at the Studio Theatre, takes place in a Siberian hospital that has a children's ward filled with "mutants," the results of unsupervised nuclear tests in the '50s. Showing a bureaucrat an 8-year-old girl who cannot speak, Dr. Bruevich (Sarah Marshall) demands to know "how this came to pass, how any of this came to pass, in a socialist country, in the world's first socialist country."

Good question, but not one Kushner seems interested in answering. "Slavs!" isn't a critique of socialism, or even of human nature, just a long sigh of regret over this latest historical collapse of idealism. There are jokes here, and a lot of easy emotionalism about some of the horrors of totalitarianism, but there's nothing that could pass for analysis, or even for thought.

The play opens in 1985 with Politburo members arguing about the future of the country. Popolitipov (Michael Tolaydo) believes that all failures come from the war between the forward-looking mind and the "conservative" heart, while Prelapsarianov (Joseph Scolaro) comes to the revelation that the revolution failed because "God is a Menshevik!" This is an antic, funny scene, but as it goes on and on and no real political argument develops, you begin to suspect that, like a lot of funny writers, Kushner is apt to plug in an easy joke to get out of tackling a difficult thought.

Some of the jokes are terrific. There's a warehouse in which the brains of the great Soviet dead are archived in jars, guarded by the sullen, discontented Katherina Serafima (Isabel Keating), who occasionally, out of boredom, shakes them like snow globes. There's a great shaggy-dog story with a bottle of vodka as the punch line. But the only daring joke -- the kind that hurts you at the same time it makes you laugh -- is at the opening of the play's third scene, when a bureaucrat (Richard Pilcher) repeats until it's pure nonsense the phrase "Hello, little girl" to a sick and silent child (Emily Houck). This hospital sequence is the only part of "Slavs!" with any emotional depth. Even if you find Kushner's use of the sure-fire device of a suffering child cynically manipulative (and the casting of such a beautiful girl almost as cynical: The suffering ugly don't wring as much sympathy), this scene is terrible and affecting.

This is to some extent in spite of Kushner as well as because of him. Dr. Bruevich, the head of the clinic, is a Voice of Humanity role with no character content, and Marshall lacks her usual intensity. She has to argue with Pilcher's soulless bureaucrat, another underwritten character who is presented as whimsical at the beginning of the play yet is inexplicably sinister here. The scene does contain one character: the sick child's mother, a role in which Nancy Robinette is ferocious and incandescent.

Daniel De Raey's production is often beautiful and is, in the main, very well acted (Keating is a bit out of control as the maniacally slutty brain-guard). The production is technically lovely, from James Kronzer's set with its windows of broken glass that may be ice to Kaye Voyce's wonderfully lumpen costumes. Kushner has a theatrical sense -- as opposed to a dramatic one -- and "Slavs!" is showy and jokey; in the hospital scene, it's considerably more than that. But in the end, all it tells us is that Kushner's heart is in the right place. If you want more than that from a political play, you need to wait for the next production of Shaw or Brecht.

Slavs!, by Tony Kushner. Directed by Daniel De Raey. Lights, Tom Sturge; sound, Gil Thompson and Ron Oshima. At the Studio Theatre through Oct. 8.

Ibsen's last completed play, "John Gabriel Borkman," is unwieldy, poetic, a little insane. At the Theater of the First Amendment, Rick Davis has boldly tackled this difficult near-masterpiece, but though he gets a brooding, ironic performance from Ralph Cosham in the title role, the major supporting roles of Borkman's wife and her sister aren't played strongly enough for the evening ever to get on its theatrical feet.

Ibsen's plays are often set in those great, cold houses where the inhabitants are trapped together for months and months by the lethal Norwegian winter, and "Borkman" takes place in a mansion on a mountain, a place so huge that Borkman and his estranged wife, Gunhild (Pamela Ritchard Brown), have lived there without seeing each other for eight years. Also on hand are Borkman's sister-in-law Ella (Mary Starnes), the woman he should have married, and his son Erhart (Kyle Prue), who is just coming into young manhood and is tired of being stuck in this haunted palace.

Borkman is a fallen man, a visionary capitalist destroyed when, his ideas stretching beyond his means, he embezzled from the bank that employed him. Now he broods alone in the upper stories of his vast house, plotting his comeback, while downstairs Ella and Gunhild, who once fought over him, vie for the loyalties of Erhart. It's an unstable, unhealthy setup, and as the play unfolds, things fall apart.

Davis is visually inventive, and he's got a great collaborator in set designer Jason Rubin. The Borkman house is a stark, featureless white space, the actors sitting off to the side in ornate 19th- century chairs, like automatons waiting to be called to life. Borkman's attic lair is an incredible place, above which Rubin has hung a totally unrealistic, totally appropriate planetary mass of iron ore, which has a shimmering, moonlike disc of white continually whirling near its edge. This metallic mass is actually the sun of Borkman's dark world, for -- obsessed with earthly power and in love with the ores that lie buried beneath the snow -- he's none other than the Troll King, mighty but cold as any stone.

Borkman prefigures the Nietzschean "superman," whose will was his only moral guide and whose hunger for life was itself the source of life. In Ibsen's work, these astonishing creatures always destroy themselves, throwing themselves on their own fire -- when Borkman decides to reenter the world, he discovers that it has no place for him. The dueling women -- monsters in their own right -- no longer have any real use for him, and his son, desperate for life, deserts him.

"John Gabriel Borkman" isn't really a successful play. It's a static piece, more poem than drama; its power lies in the force of its central character, not its rather weak story. Cosham gives a stern, unsentimental performance that doesn't lack for sardonic humor. His Borkman is mercilessly selfish, which is what makes him free from the petty moral concerns of society and the grasping emotional need of the women in his life. He's a waldganger, a wolf who walks alone.

In the role of the merry widow who rescues Erhart, Naomi Jacobson is sensual and sparkling. Prue does as well as can be expected with the woefully underwritten role of Erhart. Harry Winter is touching as Borkman's old colleague Foldal, a man who can roll with life's punches. Brown and Starnes strive hard to fill the roles of the victim-harpies of the Borkman household, but they're not up to it, and Cosham spends much of the play essentially acting in a vacuum. In a way, this fits the isolated character, cut off from his fellow beings, but it would have been better to see the actor supported in his lofty, lonely flight.

John Gabriel Borkman, by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Rick Davis. Lights, David R. Zemmels; sound, Mark Anduss; costumes, Howard Vincent Kurtz. With Madeleine Mager. At the Theater of the First Amendment, George Mason University, through Oct. 1.

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As befits a work from a rock group famous for destroying its instruments onstage, "The Who's Tommy" is smashing. You can cavil with the changes composer-lyricist Pete Townshend and director Des McAnuff have made in the material; you can reflect that the show isn't very dramatic; you can object to the Broadway slickening of the orchestration and the whole concept. But on its own terms as a theater piece, the show, which opened last night at the Kennedy Center, is ferociously successful. It's a thriller.

MTV meets Vegas in McAnuff's pictorial staging, a series of hyperkinetic illustrations to the songs, but something else is going on too. The spirit of echt-highbrow director Robert Wilson hovers over this production, occasionally manifesting in such Wilsonian trademarks as a couple of hanging chairs, or an apple-green door suspended in space.

Like Wilson, McAnuff uses the width and depth of the stage as a 3-D canvas, placing his performers in evocative patterns that are continually kaleidoscoping, in Wayne Cilento's superb choreography, into new patterns. Much has been made of "Tommy" being a "multimedia" show, but what's exciting isn't the video or the lights or the exploding pinball table - all of which are standard rock concert fare - but the way McAnuff orchestrates them into such penetrating, peculiarly beautiful stage images. In this he has an invaluable partner in set designer John Arnone, whose work is cleanly efficient yet visually lush, and in Wendall K. Harrington, who designed the projections to throw on Arnone's screens. David C. Woolard's costumes are wittily perfect, particularly the dandyish zoot-style suits for the Teddy Boys. Then there are Townshend's songs, which were always great rock-and-roll but emerge in this new treatment as deeply personal broadcasts from an inner wasteland, as personal in their way as John Lennon's rawly revealing album "Plastic Ono Band."

Struck hysterically deaf and blind when he sees his father kill his mother's lover, 4-year-old Tommy (Caitlin Newman) is abused by both his odious Uncle Ernie (Stephen Lee Anderson) and his sadistic Cousin Kevin (Michael Arnold).

McAnuff stylizes these persecutions, but it's still hard to watch the silent, unseeing child being lifted and handled like a toy by his tormentors. This is creepy, disturbing stuff - and it has an autobiographical force that neither the original 1969 recording nor Ken Russell's 1975 film delivered.

As a child, Townshend lived with a grandmother he describes as abusive, and he has said that a couple of years of his memory from this period are just plain missing. The latest fad in psychological thought claims that Freud had it all wrong, that trauma doesn't cause amnesia. But like Freudian theory, of which it's an imaginative rock representation, "Tommy" has the force of poetic truth.

Townshend brings more obvious personal experience - as a rock star - to his ironic depiction of the adult Tommy's (Steve Isaacs) life as a pinball wizard superstar. The 1969 "Tommy" depicts his adoration in religious terms - he has disciples who lead him to the pinball machine. This has all been cut, and it's just as well. Rock star identification with genius is a '60s cliche that needs to be retired.

Townshend's other changes are more problematic. The original "Tommy" has a downbeat, cynical ending. When Tommy's followers demand to know how they can achieve his state of transcendence, he explains that they just have to give up sight, hearing and speech: "So put in your earplugs/ Pull on your shades/ And you know where to put the cork!" Faced with having to sacrifice, the crowds scorn and desert him.

In the stage version, however, Tommy informs his fans that his desire was always to be more like them: "Normal." They don't want to hear this either, and neither may the audience. The lyric "Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go" is "Tommy's" mantra, and it's more angrily convincing than Tommy's new, sweet appreciation of the joys of everyday experience.

Considering how overwhelmingly high-tech the show is, the performers emerge strongly. Isaacs, dreamy as the future Tommy who haunts his younger self, is a little too mild to play the arrogant superstar convincingly, but he has a fine, strong voice with the necessary range. As the Gypsy, Kennya Ramsey tries hard but fails to erase the iconic image of Tina Turner as the film's Acid Queen. Arnold is a sprightly, nasty, funny Cousin Kevin, and Anderson rather pitiable as Uncle Ernie. Christy Tarr and Jordan Leeds also do good work as Tommy's well-meaning, unhappy parents.

"Come to my house/ See what it's been like for me," Tommy sings to his fans, and all you can think is: But it's been horrible. His family unit includes a murderer, a child molester and a sadist. Still, he embraces them in forgiveness. And in the end, while it's possible to find fault with this sentimental choice of Townshend's, it's difficult to begrudge it. There's a lot of pain in "Tommy," and Townshend's new final scene suggests that middle age (he's 49 now) may finally have brought some peace to a tormented man.

The Who's Tommy, music and lyrics by Pete Townshend, book by Pete Townshend and Des McAnuff. Directed by Des McAnuff. Set, John Arnone; lights, Chris Parry; costumes, David C. Woolard; projections, Wendall K. Harrington; sound, Steve Canyon Kennedy; orchestrations, Steve Margoshes; special effects, Gregory Meeh; flying by Foy. With Brent Black, Brett Levenson, Hilary Morse. At the Kennedy Center Opera House through Jan. 22.

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Tall and gorgeous, Kelly McGillis looks like a Pre-Raphaelite Amazon in the production of "All's Well That Ends Well" that opened last night at the Shakespeare Theatre. What makes her performance as Helena -- the crossed-in-love heroine -- so winning is that she invests the character with modesty and diffidence. Her Helena is an irresistibly charming contradiction, a shy goddess.

Helena is in love with Bertram, Count of Rossillion (Paul Michael Valley). Unfortunately, he doesn't know she exists, and is a jerk besides. "All's Well That Ends Well" is known as one of Shakespeare's problem plays, and the problem is Bertram. When Helena cures the illness of the King of France (Ted van Griethuysen) and the grateful monarch awards her Bertram's hand, the young count snobbishly rejects her as merely a poor physician's daughter. When the king endowsher with a fortune and the wedding proceeds, Bertram runs away to the wars with his scoundrelly friend Parolles (Philip Goodwin). Then he behaves caddishly with a local virgin. Meanwhile, poor patient Helena is bending wit and will to land this extremely unpromising cold fish.

The story has some folk-tale elements in the tests Helena passes to win her true love, and director Laird Williamson has emphasized this with his stylized direction. He treats the play as a fable and fairy tale. The characters wander among unrealistic settings in which a large, solid wooden wheel and a somewhat smaller wooden sphere play their parts. Helena, befriended by Bertram's mother, the Countess (DeAnn Mears), and the Widow Capilet (Caitlin O'Connell) and her ladies, represents the world of women, presented here as garlanded, draperied nymphs and ideal mother figures. Helena, beauty and healer, combines both elements. Bertram turns to the warrior world of men, but is disappointed when Parolles turns out to be a rascal. Luckily for him, Helena has stayed true, and fool though he is, he gets a happy ending.

But does Helena? Are we the audience to take her getting her heart's desire as a happy ending or not? The play has been presented both ways, and Williamson opts for happiness. He gets a lot of help from Valley, who has a native sweetness and plays Bertram as naive and wrongheaded rather than a pill. He clearly responds to Helena, he just doesn't want to be pushed around by the king and his mother. Neither he nor Williamson can do anything about the scene in which, just before he's reconciled with Helena, he abuses and lies about an innocent young woman, Diana (Carol Halstead), but Valley plays the scene as if Bertram were confused and panicky and manages to slide over its more unpleasant aspects.

The Shakespeare Theatre company is shown off to great advantage here. Van Griethuysen is a down-to-earth, good-hearted King of France. Floyd King is in high form as the melancholy, acid-tongued Fool, Lavatch. Emery Battis is funny, warm and altogether delightful as the skeptical old courtier Lafew (it's a Gielgudish turn). Wallace Acton is comically wry and exasperated as a soldier who helps get the goods on Parolles. And Goodwin, sporting long dark hair that gives him more than a passing resemblance to Captain Hook, is a stitch as the vain and sneaky Parolles.

As the women who help Helena, Mears, O'Connell and Halstead are all excellent, and Grainne Cassidy makes a strong, amusing impression as O'Connell's friend. As the soldierly Dumaine brothers, Rob Nagle and Stevie Ray Dallimore are extremely funny, proving the old saw that with big enough actors there are no small roles.

Not all of Williamson's staging ideas work. There are way too many mysterious draped, masked figures for my taste, looming portentously in and out of the scenes. Are they ghosts, medieval mimes, what? Andrew V. Yelusich's set and costumes are a little fussy and overwrought in a way that characterizes the whole production at its weakest. But Williamson succeeds in making us accept this knotty, somewhat unpleasant play as a comedy, and that alone is an impressive achievement.

All's Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Laird Williamson. Lights, Don Darnutzer; music, Catherine MacDonald; musical staging, Karma Camp. With David Sabin, Jason Patrick Bowcutt, Ben Rolly, Bodde Bauer, Nanette Savard, Elliot Dash, John Pasha, Kit Halliday, Kent Gasser, R. Scott Williams. Through March 24 at the Shakespeare Theatre, 202-393-2700.

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Poseidon was the ocean god who hated the hero Odysseus and thwarted his journey home from the Trojan War for 10 long years, so it's fitting that Derek Walcott's poetic drama "The Odyssey," which opened Friday night at Arena Stage, is a magnificent poem of the sea. Walcott's home is the island of St. Lucia, and his sensual appreciation of the Caribbean waters laps imagistically through his Homer-inspired drama. The ocean is here in all its forms: now whispering with surf, now blinding with reflected sunlight, now seething with storm - yielding up mermaids and the ghosts of drowned sailors.

When director Douglas C. Wager's production of Walcott's watery, sun-drenched, windblown epic is good, it's very very good. Walcott has recast the Cyclops as a Big-Brother-is-watching-you ogre called "The Eye," and Wager, costume designer Paul Tazewell and actor Richard Bauer have really reimagined this monster. Grotesquely fat, clad in vaguely military-looking black leather, with a single lens as big as a saucer dominating his face, The Eye is both insectlike and infantile. Inviting Odysseus (Casey Biggs) to dine, he lounges on his back like a corrupt Roman emperor while offering his guest fondued pieces of his former shipmates.

There are other shivery moments. When Odysseus has a vision of his dead mother (played by Helen Carey), she appears with her gray hair all awry, nude under a plastic raincoat. It's a creepy, near-obscene image, suitable for Hades. Other ghosts parade by, including Achilles (M.E. Hart), bounding, as Walcott puts it, "like a stag" over the Elysian Fields, and the slaughtered Agamemnon (Ralph Cosham), wrapped in the blood-soaked net in which he died.

Circe (Stephanie Pope) is a voodoo queen, wearing a brassiere that would make Madonna gape (it looks as if it's made from two silvered rhino horns). She and her assistant temptresses are colorful carnival figures, half funny, half lewd. Wager's staging is at its best when, as here, he can bring some outrageousness and humor to the proceedings.

For much of the evening though - and at three hours, it's a long evening - Wager's antic imagination is curiously subdued. Walcott's poetry seems almost to have cowed him - he directs as if he has too much respect for the material to have fun with it. The play's early scenes of Athena (Pamela Nyberg) advising Odysseus's son Telemachus (Teagle F. Bougere), and of the faithful wife Penelope (Cordelia Gonza'lez) weaving and unweaving her father's shroud to keep her ardent suitors at bay, illustrate the text rather than dramatize it. The action is hard to follow, and the scenes don't appear to have any shape.

Wager relies fairly heavily on dance to express the story and move it along (his model may be Mnouchkine's version of "Les Atrides," which was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music two years ago). This makes a lot of sense in terms of style - this is a once-upon-a-time play, and the last thing we want is naturalistic staging. But when you ask movement to do this much for a production, you want dancers who can really move, and what Wager has is actors who have been taught some graceful, simple choreography. They're not clumsy, but they're not compelling either; the narrative slows down just when it should be getting light-footed.

"The Odyssey" was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. For some reason - maybe it's all those productions of "Julius Caesar" - English actors can run around in ancient costume and seem perfectly at home. In this production, although Tazewell's work is often beautiful, the characters sometimes look as if they were at a costume party thrown by Fellini.

The cast is solid, but this is the kind of production where the performances take second place to the director's vision and sweep. Bauer's eccentricity and Pope's beauty resonate through their scenes in a way that transcends, or maybe just bypasses, acting, but everyone else gets stuck competing with the stunning visuals. The cast has another problem - the in-the-round Fichandler space. As Arena's Shakespeare productions have demonstrated, poetry in the round, with the actors having to pace and turn so that each side of the audience can hear the verse, tends to get garbled and lost. I've never seen a director solve this problem at Arena; it may simply be insurmountable.

There are moments of great beauty and invention here. Set designer Thomas Lynch and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes work with Wager to create a raft tossing on the sea (an effect that got applause). Penelope's vile suitors, all clothed in red, fall to Odysseus's vengeance and lie like heaps of bloody clothes. At the very beginning of the evening, when you come into the theater, the stage, painted red, is empty except for a small toy horse that is also, of course, the Trojan Horse. It's a magical image, and it's a shame the production doesn't live up to it more often.

The Odyssey, by Derek Walcott. Music for songs by Galt MacDermot. Directed by Douglas C. Wager. Sound and additional music, Michael Keck; dance consultant, Carol La Chapelle; fights, David S. Leong. With Wendell Wright, Marilyn Coleman, Gary Sloan, Henry Strozier, T J Edwards, Kristina Nielsen, Michael W. Howell. At Arena Stage through Nov. 6.

You can't fault the Studio Theatre Secondstage for ambition with the production of Caryl Churchill's "Mad Forest" that opened over the weekend.

An examination of the events surrounding the Christmas 1989 overthrow of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the play was researched by Churchill in Romania a few months after the deposition. She wrote two more-or-less traditional acts concerning the Vladu and Antonescu families. Between them is a central documentary-style act in which characters who do not appear elsewhere in the play talk directly to the audience about their experiences during the violence. In the Secondstage production, this is the most affecting and interesting segment of the evening.

Plot is nothing, situation everything. The working-class Vladu family includes an electrician father (Hugh Walthall), a bus driver mother (Susan Lynn Ross), an engineer son (Christopher Walker), a nurse daughter (Madeleine Burke) and a schoolteacher daughter (Rhea Seehorn). Even with all those workers, deprivation is a daily fact of life. The opening scene is a lovely, speechless encounter in which the daughters triumphantly bring home American cigarettes and four eggs and the ashamed father doesn't want to take them.

Lucia, the schoolteacher, is engaged to an American, a move that has put her family under political observation and ruined her sister Florina's relationship with Radu Antonescu (Waleed F. Zuaiter). The Antonescus are a social cut above the Vladus; father Mihai (Morris Chalick) is an architect who has worked on Ceausescu's folly, the gigantic People's Palace, and mother Flavia (Mary Battiata) a teacher who dutifully recites the party line. Churchill must have put in this class difference deliberately, but neither script nor production makes much of it.

All through the first act, people wonder whether "it" is beginning. "It" finally does, with shooting in the night, the army taking the side of the people, and Ceausescu and his wife captured, tried and shot. But by Act 2, Radu is complaining, "The revolution has been stolen!" and a head wound patient in a hospital (Ben Rolly) hectors other patients by demanding, "Did we have a revolution or a putsch?"

Good question. Did Ion Iliescu, the leader of the National Salvation Front, just use popular unrest as a screen for an old-fashioned military coup? No one in the play is sure. Things are much better materially -- there is enough food -- but spiritually the characters remain troubled.

In her self-consciously stylized fashion, Churchill examines family, class, men and women, communication, political opportunism and compromise, the place of religion in the state and the meaning of revolution. She is not much interested in how human beings actually behave -- ideas and theatrical images are her concern. This puts a particular burden on the actors that the cast of this production isn't up to carrying, though under Serge Seiden's direction everyone tries hard. Seiden has a nice eye and much of the production -- staged "on site" in a bare-brick-walled warehouse -- looks moodily atmospheric. But he can't help his actors bring the play alive.

The point of the Secondstage productions is to give performers with limited experience a chance to develop onstage. Looked at one way, throwing them into a fiendishly difficult play like this one is a challenge and good for them. Looked at another, it's homicidal. Either way, the results for the audience are likely to be problematic.

Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill. Directed by Serge Seiden. Set, Giorgios Tsappas; lighting, Marianne Meadows and Peter Joyce; costumes, Shu T'ing Chen; sound, Mark Anduss; props, Elizabeth Brown; scenic artist, Larry Baldine. With Paul Danaceau, Lenny Granger, Rosemary Regan, Larry Baldine, Kila Burton, Steve Carpenter, Len Childers, Andrew Price, Andre C. Stone, Stas Wronka. At the Studio Theatre Secondstage through Aug. 11. Call 202-332-3300.

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Ed Gero's heavy-souled selfish Faustus and Timmy Ray James's cool, ruthless Mephastophilis are two good reasons to see the "Dr. Faustus" that opened this past weekend at the Theater of the First Amendment. Other good reasons are Hugh Nees as Mephastophilis's boss, Lucifer, Lawrence Redmond as assistant Devil Beelzebub, Marty Lodge as the Chorus and Jon Tindle as Faustus's pretentious servant. But the production is seriously marred by the casting of undertrained George Mason students and recent graduates in supporting roles. And its design is so overconceived that it frequently pushes its way into your attention when you'd rather be attending to the actors.

Christopher Marlowe's famous tragedy, the first dramatization of Faust's pact with the Devil, is hardly ever done, and this production demonstrates why. Marlowe's poetry is forceful and magnificent, but it doesn't have the psychological complexity and suppleness of Shakespeare. Rhetorical rather than dramatic, the speeches hold us by the force of the author's imagery and imagination but never lose a certain static quality.

Presence and a gift for dramatic delivery are what an actor needs for this play, and fortunately Gero has plenty of both. As Faustus, he seems both restless and sullen, his dark eyes aglint with the desire to take everything he can get and then some. He has the theatrical weight to make you believe the scholarly Faustus is a genius -- a necessity, since the character behaves like a fool. The script never quite explains why he sells his soul so easily for a mere 24 extra years of all-powerful life, and periodically Gero has to run onstage in a panic, threatening to repent for no immediate reason. James's Mephastophilis, sardonic yet dignified, always lures him back -- though the actor's humorous exasperation lets you know it's a tiring job. So much work for one little soul! But he's up to it. Sleek in an '80s-style business suit, he's a can-do demon in the sense of can-do-anything-to-anybody. Nees's Lucifer and Redmond's Beelzebub also appear suavely suited, smiling corporate executives ready to fit Faustus with a leaden parachute. They present him with a Powerbook, which Mephastophilis obligingly shows him how to use. So far so good. The businessman-as-Devil conceit isn't new, but it still has some satirical and scary juice in it. In modern terms, the environment for selling your soul is an office tower rather than a scholar's study. But Davis's other updatings, in which he has Faustus travel to different time periods, feel forced. When he plays tricks on the pope (Nees again, very funny), the pontiff is dining with Hitler (Redmond, not funny exactly, but impressive). This is a historical jab we can appreciate, but when Faustus turns up in the antebellum South and performs the miracle of showing a planter and his wife "Gone With the Wind," the joke isn't anchored to anything. Neither is a stint in the Wild West, which seems to have been chosen as a setting just because the sequence is about horse-trading. To director Rick Davis's credit, these comic scenes of Faustus's wanderings are frequently quite funny. This is a triumph of sorts, as the crude humor clashes so much with the great poetry that some academics believe Marlowe didn't even write that part of the play. Faustus does so little with his gift -- he's damned for the chance to play a few practical jokes. While this may be Marlowe's ironic point, dramatically it's not very satisfying. Jason Rubin's set is surrounded by screens onto which are projected some extremely interesting moving visuals designed by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White. (My favorite was one of two snakes that emerge from an apple and travel to the point where Mephastophilis makes his entrance.) The problem is, the production is in the semi-round, with the audience seated in two groups opposite each other. With a proscenium setting, where the actor would be standing in front of the projections, your eye could easily take in both. Here, the projections draw your focus away from the actor completely, to the detriment of the production. As long as the professionals hold the stage, "Dr. Faustus" moves along painlessly and sometimes interestingly. But when the students and graduates come on to play various angels, devils, sins, townspeople, friars, etc., the production falls into a hole. Tindle has a scene lording it over a lesser servant played by John Slone in which the two actors don't even seem to be in the same aesthetic universe. It's painful to watch. I don't mean to pick on Slone, who does as well as the many others Davis has cast above their training or abilities. But because he's working opposite someone who knows what he's doing, he is shown at a greater disadvantage. It's not these young actors' fault they're not on the same performing level as some of the best actors in the city. They just shouldn't have been put in this position. Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe. Directed by Rick Davis. Costumes, Howard Vincent Kurtz; lights, Martha Mountain; sound, Mark K. Anduss. With Wyatt Wegrzyn, Sarah A. Maxwell, Steve Tipton, Skyler A. Heavans, Gina Tassa, Nicholas X. Parsons, Amy Miharu Hard, Ruth Provance, Rahmein Mostafavi, Chad Davis, Brad Alan Waller. At the Theater of the First Amendment, George Mason University, through Nov. 22. Call 703-993-8888.

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The Rep Stage production of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" is sexy, sophisticated and deliciously mean. Director Joe Banno has brought Christopher Hampton's script (an adaptation of the 18th-century novel) forward two centuries to set the tale of sexual deceit and manipulation among decadent '50s Eurotrash, the same setting in which Roger Vadim set his '50s film version of the story, starring Jeanne Moreau. This works quite well, since Hampton's smart dialogue has a contemporary snap to it.

The onetime lovers the Marquise de Merteuil (Valerie Constantini, the Rep's artistic director) and the Vicomte de Valmont (Rick Foucheux) are jaded libertines who amuse themselves by toying sexually and emotionally with others' lives. As the play begins, the Marquise is plotting against Madame de Volanges (Caren Anton) to avenge a slight. Her plan is to have Valmont corrupt the woman's naive young daughter, Cecile (Jennifer Selby Albright), but Valmont has plans of his own. He is determined to seduce the famously virtuous Mme. de Tourvel (Sarah Ripard) while her husband is away on an extended business trip. Bored by mere physical seduction, Valmont wants the thrill of a moral conquest. As things turn out, he beds both women -- but his attempt to rekindle his affair with the Marquise fails.

The Marquise and Valmont pride themselves on their heartlessness; the play is the story of their comeuppance. In spite of its grim ending, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" is essentially a comedy, a cruel satire of love and manners, and by casting Foucheux as Valmont, Banno brings this out. In the film of the play, John Malkovich played Valmont as a sly, reptilian seducer. The role was originated on stage by Alan Rickman, in a sexy, vicious performance that made him a star. Hampton wrote the part with the sexually dangerous Rickman in mind, so he must have intended for Valmont to be threatening. But by having Foucheux play the role as an amiable, shallow socialite, Banno emphasizes the play's satirical elements, makes it less an examination of evil and more a scornful indictment of petty human selfishness. Valmont admits to "a certain weakness of character," and Foucheux plays him as a man who's never had to develop any character because his charm could get him whatever he wanted. This Valmont is a fit companion for Constantini's full-figured, indolently confident Marquise, whose elegance masks a vulgar, conscienceless appetite. In previous productions I've seen, the drama revolved around Valmont's ultimately self-destructive passion for de Tourvel. Banno reaches another level in the script by gradually revealing that the proudly cold-blooded Marquise and Valmont are actually, though they cannot admit it, in love with each other -- and this is what destroys them. The play becomes something more complex than a simple sexual melodrama. The one flaw is that Constantini, particularly in the latter part of the play, is too heavy-handed a villainess to suggest the character's ambivalence. Physically, the production is rather extraordinary, with set designer Tony Cisek and lighting designer Dan Covey working together to create a stylized world that is both spare and sensual -- and slightly ominous. Scott Burgess contributes to the unease with his rock-meets-cocktail-lounge jazz score, which shifts as duplicitously as the characters between emotional intensity and mocking cynicism. Annie Kennedy's "La Dolce Vita"-style costumes manage to be both beautiful and satirical. Ripard's de Tourvel is an Indian beauty in a modest sari, a tiny silver cross at her throat. She's virtuous without being prim, and you see how the character's sensitive conscience is what dooms her. David Bryan Jackson is jovial and oily as a valet, Anton is appropriately stiff and abrasive as Cecile's society-matron mother, and Rusty Clauss brings pithiness to the role of Valmont's aristocratic aunt. Albright is a touchingly dopey innocent, well matched by Edward Baird Wilford as Cecile's shy would-be lover. Foucheux gamely exposes his sagging middle-age midriff, and as a result his encounters with the nubile Albright have a disquieting sordidness. The fact that their liaison calls to mind contemporary events only confirms Hampton's instincts about the timelessness of the story. Some things never change. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Joe Banno; props, Elsie Jones. With Samarra Green, Brendan Stackpole, Daniel Cabrera, Donna DeVilbiss, Wil Greene, Jeannean T. Roberts, and Greg Walker. At Rep Stage, Columbia, through Oct. 18. Call 410-772-4900.

"It's the Truth (If You Think It Is)," which opened last night at Arena Stage, is one of Luigi Pirandello's early plays, and it's a little thin and schematic, more like a puzzle than a play. But the Romanian director Liviu Ciulei, who also designed this production, imbues it with world-weariness, irony and scathing observation. In his hands the play becomes not just a Pirandellian illusion-vs.- reality conceit, but a political critique of the secure and insulated bourgeoisie who set out with such thoughtless confidence to solve what seems to be a trivial little human mystery.

The play takes place in the apartment of the Agazzi family, a richly furnished upper-middle-class place, as puffed with comfort as a plumped-up pillow. The wood of the chairs has the kind of deep gleam that comes from hundreds of polishings, the upholstery is brocade, the pillows have tassels, and a private elevator with stained-glass doors brings guests up. Ciulei must remember these spacious prewar European apartments from his childhood, this set looks so right: so old-fashionedly elegant in its layout and furniture placement, so clearly from another, vanished culture.

It was a time when the bourgeoisie took its luxuries for granted. As costumed by the brilliant Marina Draghici, the characters have an indolent satisfaction in their clothes: the fussed-over gowns of the women, the beautifully cut suits and handmade shoes of the men. They wear their fine clothes and sit in their lovely chairs and read by the rich, gentle light that falls from their opaque-glass shaded lamps, and the minute something from outside their privileged world enters, they pull it apart and hurt it as thoughtlessly as spoiled children.

"It" is a little knot of human relationships. An elderly woman has moved into the apartment downstairs; though her son-in-law visits her often, her daughter never does, and, the gossips have discovered, when she goes to visit her daughter she must stand in the courtyard and talk up to her balcony. The idle Agazzi family and its friends have nothing better to do than pick at the scab of this little mystery. First they trick the mother into coming to visit and interrogate her, then they get the story from the son-in-law. The two are mutually exclusive, and the curious bourgeoisie are thrown into a tizzy of speculation and determined to find out the "truth" at any cost.

Of course the cost - and this is the political point Ciulei makes oh-so-gently - is borne by the poor family they've decided to investigate. Hounded and questioned, their privacy invaded, Signor Ponza and his mother-in-law, Signora Frola, are reduced to tears, anger, panic and finally a defeat that leads them to want to leave town. Ponza is a clerk, and his mother-in-law, all in black, is, if not a peasant, just one social step up. So the Agazzi crowd feels free to use them as if their problems were a game and they themselves toys.

Ciulei's satire of his bourgeoisie is warm and precise. It's not very often you find yourself laughing at a Pirandello production, but this one is full of humor, half ironic, half affectionate. The actors create both types and individuals: Halo Wines is the perfect society matron, Trazana Beverley the epitome of the flighty gossip, Ralph Cosham pettily vain in his government post. As a pair of curious women with too much time on their hands, Vivienne Shub and Jean Schertler are the ne plus ultra of little-old-ladydom.

Richard Bauer plays the Pirandello stand-in, Laudisi, the fellow who keeps insisting that objective truth is unknowable and may not even exist. Laudisi could be a pain, but fortunately he's being played by a master comic who also has a thoughtful moral presence. Tana Hicken is Signora Frola. She's too young for the part, but that's the only thing wrong with her performance, which is passionate, fragile, intense. Henry Strozier switches nerve- rackingly fast from anger to misery as Signor Ponza; and as the Butler, Teagle F. Bougere steals the scene he's in - a wonderful pas de deux in front of a mirror - from Bauer, no small feat. In smaller roles, Pamela Nyberg, Jeffery V. Thompson, Michael W. Howell, Terrence Currier and Jurian Hughes give the kind of satisfying performances that make you appreciate the unshowy strength of the Arena acting company.

Pirandello cheats us at the end. A character is summoned who in fact could explain everything, but who refuses to speak. This shoots the truth-is-unknowable thesis of the play in the foot, since Pirandello, having set up the game, won't play. Until that point, though, "It's the Truth ..." is, despite an overwritten third act, surprisingly engaging. It has some of the fun of a murder mystery, one of those chess-problem ones by Agatha Christie. And it has Ciulei's extraordinary portrait of a vanished social order and his depiction of the flaws and complacency that led to its vanishing. Somehow he has fused Pirandello with Chekhov.

It's the Truth (If You Think It Is) by Luigi Pirandello, English- language version by Laurence Maslon. Directed and designed by Liviu Ciulei. Costumes, Marina Draghici; lights, Nancy Schertler; sound, Susan R. White. With Richard Bauer, Halo Wines, Teagle F. Bougere, Trazana Beverley, Ralph Cosham, Tana Hicken and Henry Strozier. At Arena Stage through Feb. 21.

Utopia in a chair. Such an abstract idea to reside in this solid, simply put-together, finite construction of wood that's sitting here, part of the exhibition of Arts & Crafts - a k a "Mission"-style - objects on display at the sixth annual Grove Park Inn Arts & Crafts Conference.

It's a beautiful chair. That must be said. It was designed in the early years of this century by Gustav Stickley, a man with very definite ideas about furniture and a really exquisite eye. The story goes that Stickley actually designed his chairs, tables, bookcases, et al. by gesturing to his workmen, shaping the proportions in the air, and that he then had them modify the models they produced until the object struck his artist's inner eye as ... exactly ... right. Made of quarter-sawed oak with a deep, lustrous finish, and the plainest set of rectangles and squares, Stickley's furniture is a balance of forms set against one another with a symmetry that's mysteriously ... perfect.

Although Stickley's earliest furniture was a little, well, awkward, to be absolutely frank. "Those clunky, clumsy chairs," one woman is heard to say as she tours the exhibits. But his later work is so finely attuned to its own proportions and mass, to the way it occupies space, that it seems to rest on the floor only as a courtesy to gravity, a bit of noblesse oblige to the laws of nature from something hewn from nature, something artificial, something made.

The Grove Park Inn, site of the conference, is an Arts & Crafts- style hotel built in 1913 on the side of a mountain overlooking the Blue Ridge city of Asheville. It is a deluxe place - the hotel guides say so: deluxe in italics, instead of just expensive. The original building (additions were built in the '80s) is five stories of stone with a red roof pierced by eyebrow windows. At each end of the vast lobby is a fireplace in which a full-grown man could stand upright with inches to spare. But the crowd of Arts & Crafters doesn't look particularly well heeled. They tend to be sweater sorts, with comfortable shoes. Mostly 35-plus. This isn't a yup crowd - in spite of the fact that they're cruising the exhibit room eyeing objects like that Gustav Stickley chair, which carries a price tag of $1,300.

"Can't we stop talking about money for a minute?" moderator Bruce Johnson, who organizes this conference each year, asked the four members of the Saturday night panel discussion titled "Building an Arts & Crafts Collection." They all laughed. One of the favorite stories of collectors is how Barbra Streisand paid $365,000 at auction for a Gustav Stickley sideboard, and a few months later at another auction an absolutely identical piece sold for only $50,000. No, there is really no way to stop talking about money.

There wasn't any way at the end of the 19th century, either, when the Arts & Crafts movement got its start in England with the designer William Morris, who had absorbed ideas about utility and beauty from the art critic John Ruskin and was all set to bring utilitarian beauty to the lives of the newly risen middle class, who would otherwise be swamped by mass-produced ugliness. Morris was very high- minded in his ideals and insisted that all the furniture and objects he designed be built by hand by artist-craftsmen, as a rebuke to industrialization and its concomitant mass production. But Morris soon discovered, as the art historian Leslie Greene Bowman has noted, that "only in areas of upper-class patronage could top craftsmen hope for recognition and compensation." Disillusioned, Morris abandoned design for socialism.

The crass problem of "simple" craftsmanship costing lots of money emerged on this side of the Atlantic too. One of the Arts & Crafts arts and crafts was pottery - "art pottery" it's called now - an enterprise that employed a great many women, not as potters and rarely as designers but often as decorators, since young ladies were presumed docile and came cheap. In Boston, a little club called the Saturday Evening Girls was organized for young immigrant women so that they might have a skill (china painting) and make a living. The club depended on a wealthy patron, without which it would simply have been an interesting failed social experiment.

In New Orleans, Newcomb Pottery employed female designers and decorators for the pots thrown by a male potter. (Newcomb pottery, which is most typically characterized by greenish-blue matte glazes and moss-dripping oaks carved in bas-relief, has become one of the most "collectible" art potteries today: There's a piece here selling for $10,000, and a piece below $1,000 is nowhere to be found.) The young female decorators who worked at the pottery 90-odd years ago made $30 to $40 a month, even then not enough to live on. In Terra Cotta, Ind., designer William Day Gates produced astonishing geometric-biomorphic modernist forms (also very "collectible" today) known as Teco, which might cost $30 or $40 a pot - the same amount those Newcomb decorators made in a month.

This annoying little matter of cold cash worried the Arts & Crafts philosophers. After all, their movement wasn't about pots and copper candlesticks and colored-glass lampshades. It was about ... the quality of life! Just as for the past 20 years or so in this country, the hip and politically committed have fetishized stereo equipment and pop musicians, at the beginning of the century social thinkers and activists fetishized furniture and the "craftsman." To furnish a house was to furnish a soul. Acrimonious arguments broke out, full of self-righteousness and high dudgeon. Furniture making - to use the machine or not to use the machine? Decoration - harmless pleasure or loathsome "parasite" (as Stickley described it)? It might be your bottom that sank into that Arts & Crafts chair, but it was your moral being that was on the line.

What about your bottom, anyway? How are those gorgeous, expensive chairs to sit in? This isn't a question that can be casually answered in the exhibit room, where plopping into one high-priced chair after another is bound to be interpreted as interest in a purchase. However, it can be answered in the Grove Park Inn lobby, which is furnished with severe oak Arts & Crafts chairs from various studios of the period. People scrunch down in them, sip their drinks and look out at the valley and the distant mountains, or into the flames warming the immense fireplaces. And how do they feel? Put it this way: The chairs are more comfortable than they look. And remember that in terms of pure comfort, as opposed to taste, the Barcalounger is probably the most superior seating apparatus ever invented.

Which is part of the problem, of course, at least if you're an A&C idealist. The original proponents of the Arts & Crafts movement were out to help those new hordes of the bourgeoisie who - no sense being polite about it - had absolutely no idea what good taste was. Leave it to them and they'd fill their houses with lumpy dark machine- tooled stuff covered with velvet - Victorian equivalents of the Barcalounger. Unavoidably, this creepy little strain of condescension is present in Arts & Crafts theory: It's about an elite deciding what is good for "them." Ruskin himself felt that the uneducated eye could not appreciate beauty, and the whole English movement, with its dewy- eyed reverence for the craftsmanship of the Middle Ages, is somewhat precious. English A&C furniture is self-conscious, slightly theatrical, a bit twee.

The Americans were a more robust bunch. There was Elbert Hubbard, who ran the Roycroft studios-inn-commune-tourist attraction in East Aurora, N.Y., that produced beautiful hammered copper items and simple elegant furniture. Hubbard had a showy, self-aggrandizing personality. A big man, he sometimes appeared in full-length fur outfits, and he prominently displayed the Roycroft logo on the front of all of his furniture, a habit that drove the more austere Stickley nuts. ("That damned soap salesman!" he'd sputter.)

Yet it was Stickley's vulgar touch, not his artistry, that was probably responsible for the success that the Arts & Crafts movement had in America. He was a pragmatist who had no problems with yoking both the dread machine and the bugbear capitalism to his service. Stickley knew how to market, and when he started his Craftsman Studios he didn't stay in artsy-craftsy upstate New York to be visited only by the cognoscenti; he headed for Grand Rapids, Mich., then, as for years afterward, a center of furniture manufacturing.

Stickley's motto, adapted from William Morris's "Suis je puis," was "Als ik {sic} kahn," which, roughly translated, means "To the best of my ability," and Stickley was a can-do kind of guy. A proselytizer as well as a designer, he published a magazine, the Craftsman, about the Arts & Crafts philosophy, and when he started designing houses he made the floor plans available through mail order. He was an old-fashioned American democrat, as perhaps only the son of (German) immigrants could have been, and he determined, as he once wrote, "to substitute the luxury of taste for the luxury of costliness."

Today's collectors can have both. In fact, they have no choice but to have both. This can lead to crises of conscience. Antiques dealer Bruce Szopo wrote an essay for last year's A&C conference program in which he lamented: "How do we justify the relentless pursuit of what could often be called luxuries? Luxuries, ironically, that make up an environment which espouses the philosophy of the simplification of life." Szopo never really gets around to answering this question. He just breast-beats in the best moneyed-guilt style: "My own hypocrisy is undeniable, as I sit in my $8,000 Morris chair."

The fact is, simplicity costs a lot. The crowd here attending lectures about Teco and Roycroft, wandering among the expensive, exquisite objects for sale, comparing notes on such things as varnish, are realists about the situation. That aforementioned panel on amassing an arts and crafts collection was full of questions like, "What's hot? What's not? And where is the market heading?" "That sounds like a dealer's question," one of the panelists answered. "My advice is, don't buy for investment." But in a room just across the hotel, these people are being asked to spend $10,000 on a pot. Beauty, sure; love of the object, sure; but $10,000 is $10,000. And for stuff that 25 years ago no one even wanted. (The Grove Park Inn itself gave away its Roycroft chairs in the late '50s for $5 apiece. In the '80s, it began buying them back.)

This is the beauty part of the resurgence of interest in the Arts & Crafts movement. Ruskin's remarks about the "educated eye" come to mind. After Mission furniture went out of style around 1920, there was a period of 50 years in which people looked at it and said, "Clunky." Plain, squared-off wood - who needed it? Kind of Puritan, wasn't it? Then, in 1972, the Art Museum at Princeton University presented a retrospective of Arts & Crafts furniture and objects, and suddenly ... interest! As if people had put on a new pair of spectacles, magic lenses that transformed the ugly duckling chairs into swans of inspired design. Now furnishings in what's called the Arts & Crafts "style" - non-designer pieces that sometimes really are kind of clunky, to tell the truth - get snapped up by eager collectors. Another question at the collecting panel: "Are there any unknowns that I can collect now that aren't too expensive?" (The answer is no.)

"You will find yourself going into very dangerous parts of the city - and will barely escape with your life getting out of there!" This was an apparently serious remark by a woman at the conference who was giving a seminar on collecting art pottery tiles, most of which are now ensconced around mantels in big old houses in the run- down inner cities. Dangerous! Escape! The angry proles pursue the wealthy bourgeois collector! O, nasty implications of class, of haves and have-nots. Like a cold little whisper, the question shivers around the crowds in their sweaters and sneakers, their unostentatious middle-classness: "Do we even have a right to this?" One hears again Morris's cry as he fled to the pure isles of socialism: "What business have we with art at all, unless all can share it?"

It's a good question or, at any rate, a question without a good answer. Art has such a nasty, uncaring way of slipping the moral leash and just existing. Even knowing what the objects here cost, the immediate and lasting impression of the displays in the exhibit room is, simply, of beauty. Frank Lloyd Wright's A&C-influenced furniture has a hectoring, sit-up-straight-and-eat-your-vegetables quality, but Stickley and his followers had more welcoming sensibilities and their work a more human scale. The varnishes glow warmly, the chairs invite you to sit, the glazes on the pots ask to be touched, and wherever the eye turns there is pleasure.

At a lecture on Saturday morning, a slide is shown of a music cabinet by Harvey Ellis, a brilliant designer who worked for Stickley for a few months before resigning to concentrate full time on drinking himself to death. Ellis was a master of wood inlay and of long, slender, airborne lines. When his cabinet flashes onto the screen, a spontaneous, unguarded murmur rustles through the crowd. They are gasping because the object before them is so startlingly beautiful. It is a sound of pure human pleasure. As Ruskin wrote of the presence of decoration in architecture, of what it meant to the human beings who would look on and use the buildings, "We are going to be happy."

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"The Member of the Wedding," which airs tonight at 9 on the USA Network, isn't taken from the play but is a new film adaptation directly from the Carson McCullers novel. Alfre Woodard is Berenice, the Ethel Waters role in the 1952 film and the play, and Anna Paquin ("The Piano") is Frankie, the troubled girl played by Julie Harris both onstage and in the movie. This television film is a sensitively done piece of work, and director Fielder Cook understands the South -- at one point there's a subtle but deliberate shot to show us that the back of a bus is filled with black riders. It's also very well acted, but there are odd tonal lapses that make you wonder whether the people who made it knew exactly what they were doing.

Frankie Addams is the 12-year-old daughter of a widower (Enrico Colantoni), skinny, tomboyish and confused by the onset of adolescence. She is spurned by the "popular" girls who have learned to flirt and wear lipstick (and who for some reason are all blondes); her only companions are the maid who has raised her, Berenice, and the 6-year-old from next door, John Henry (the charmingly unaffected Corey Dunn). The lonely Frankie focuses all her hopes and dreams on the upcoming marriage of her soldier brother (the story takes place in 1944), determined to be a true "member of the wedding."

Woodard is an excellent Berenice, but it's the kind of role she could do in her sleep, and her performance doesn't let you know exactly what attracted her to the part. Paquin is very, very good as the prickly, vulnerable Frankie, but though she acts awkwardness convincingly, there's no getting around the fact that she's already a beauty. Her short haircut is very becoming and she's coltishly graceful, altogether more attractive than the clunky, conventional girls she envies. Just possibly this is a deliberate irony, but I don't think so. In the face of her performance, a viewer could ignore the problem if it weren't for Frankie's scene with a horny soldier. At one confused point, Frankie runs away to a local bar, where she meets a soldier on leave (Jack Landry) who is somewhere in the middle of a three-day drunk. He mistakes her for being older than she is, and she innocently -- with those perfect Southern manners -- follows him up to his room, where she gets a rude shock. The trouble is that unlike Harris, who was older when she played the role, Paquin really looks like a child. The soldier would have to be awfully, awfully drunk to think otherwise, and he doesn't seem that sloshed. The result is that his interest in her seems creepy and prurient. (If the makers of "Lolita" had cast Paquin rather than a modelish young babe as the nymphet, the new movie would have been guaranteed to deliver a real shock.) The sexual amorphousness at the center of the story was, along with a precious variety of pathos, one of McCullers's specialties. In the old film, Harris made all Frankie's longings emotional and there was no sexual undercurrent, but Paquin isn't an ethereal actress, and her mooning over both her brother and his wife, plus all Berenice's advice to her about getting a boyfriend, has implications that this movie doesn't deal with or even, apparently, notice. This version is stranger than the Harris film, which actually brings it closer to the novel, in which Southern Gothic self-pity and confused sexuality are all mushed together.

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The Washington Shakespeare Company's production of "The Tempest," which opened last night, is intelligent and often imaginative. But in spite of Richard Mancini's thoughtful, responsible work as Prospero and Brian Desmond's sometimes poetic direction, this is a "Tempest" without the dynamic commitment that has so often made the WSC's work arresting. You're never sure what the play means to the creative people involved.

The invaluable James Kronzer does the impossible by providing a workable set in a small space - a playing area of sand encircled by sloping platforms, with the audience seated on two sides. It's an island, all right, and a circus ring, a playground, a desert. This kind of simple, evocative set works very well for Shakespeare - it sets off the words rather than competing with them.

You really hear the play here. Mancini in particular is a graceful, clear verse speaker, and there is very little of the rocking-horse iambic pentameter that sometimes mars even the most professional of Shakespearean productions (the National Theatre of Great Britain's "Richard III" with Ian McKellen was little else). The story seems simpler and more direct than I remember from other "Tempest" productions. Here Prospero, the banished and shipwrecked Duke of Milan who has gained the supernatural power to right his wrongs, sets up his last show like an old magician about to retire.

Or maybe like a theater director. Desmond begins "Tempest" with an interpolation from "Hamlet," the speech of advice to the players, which Prospero gives to the other characters. This conceit doesn't really carry through, though. This is true of many of the interesting ideas Desmond brings to the play, most specifically the relationship between Prospero and Nanna Ingvarsson's womanly Ariel, which is full of odd hints of loneliness and sexuality that don't cohere into anything meaningful.

The Washington Shakespeare Company usually makes up in boldness what it lacks in means and finesse. Here, however, there are long stretches in which you might be at any competent Shakespeare production. Ferdinand and Miranda (Paul Takacs and Laura Carr) are the usual generic lovers, wise old Gonzalo (Dennis Fecteau) emerges as a prattler and little else, Lord Francisco (Michael Comlish), a court hanger-on, hangs on to no discernible purpose. Ariel, who becomes quite intriguing, begins the play leaping about in ill- conceived scarf-and-tights costumes that look like something out of community theater.

Shakespeare's fairies are always a problem: I haven't seen any done well since Peter Brooks's television production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" 20-odd years ago. The overrated Kenneth Branagh directed a "Midsummer" with pale, skinny English fairies crawling around in black leather and sticking their tongues in and out. Ingvarsson at least can dance - her interpretation of the masque for the young lovers is the only successful Dionysiac dance I've ever seen onstage. This fairy who seems to long for the flesh, who is part neuter and part woman, is the most fascinating, risky element in the play.

As Caliban, Brian Hemmingsen looks great, kind of like a cross between a bear and Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. He's menacing and lewd and shows off his long, feral teeth, but he doesn't make the role particularly threatening, partly because neither he nor Desmond can decide whether Caliban is a clown or a demon (if they attempted to portray him as both, it didn't come across). Our modern sensibilities are more sympathetic to Caliban than Shakespeare's audiences were - we have mixed reactions to his enforced servitude to Prospero and are likely to think he hasn't gotten a fair deal. But none of this ambivalence is touched on here.

Christopher Henley is a nice, nasty-spirited Antonio, Prospero's usurping brother, though he's getting almost too good at playing spoiled brats. Bill Delaney isn't very original as the drunken butler Stephano, but he plays with winning gusto. As his companion, the jester Trinculo, Kate Fleming does some inspired comic acting. She's very amusing vocally (sometimes she reminded me of Sarah Marshall) and has a really wonderful bit trying to get a cork into a bottle.

Prospero, the magician, orders his life by reclaiming his dukedom and betrothing his daughter, then he is ready to break his staff and declares that henceforth "every third thought shall be my grave." At the height of his powers, he renounces them and turns to face death. This mortal poetry is absent from this earnest, well-meaning but limited production.

The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Brian Desmond. Set, James Kronzer; lights, David R. Zemmels; music and sound, David Maddox; costumes, Pamela Sellman. With Richard Mancini, Nanna Ingvarsson, Brian Hemmingsen, Laura Carr, Paul Takacs, Christopher Henley, Jim Stone. At the Washington Shakespeare Company, Gunston Arts Center, Arlington, through June 26.

In "Julius Caesar," which opened last night at the Shakespeare Theatre, Ted van Griethuysen's Caesar enters to upbeat, quasi- military, patriotism-stirring music, resplendent in a white suit and pale blue tie. It's a great image, conjuring Huey Long, South American despots, even Mussolini.

At moments like this - and there are several throughout the first part of the production - director Joe Dowling powerfully fuses our experience of the play with our awareness of current history. Caesar and his wife suggest the Ceausescus, the unrest in the streets evokes Russia and Haiti, Mark Antony's rabble-rousing speech at Caesar's funeral casts a South African shadow. But in the second half, when the text leaves political machinations for the battlefield, it leaves Dowling's conceit too, and this production that has started so explosively gradually stumbles to a standstill.

Frank Hallinan-Flood's set is minimalist monumental - white marble edifices and purple silk hangings - the perfect backdrop for the political ambition and conflict of imperial Rome. Rumor has it that Caesar, supposedly first among equals, is plotting to be emperor, and the half-ethical, half-envious Cassius (Philip Goodwin) convinces the decent, well-meaning Brutus (Robert Stattel) that assassination is the only possible way to prevent tyranny. Tyranny is prevented - at least temporarily - but chaos ensues, with Brutus and Cassius at war with Octavius Caesar and the wily Antony, who with his funeral speech has turned the populace of Rome from support of the conspirators to rage against them.

This production boasts some very strong acting. Van Griethuysen's Caesar is unsettlingly comfortable with power, yet the actor adds integrity and genuine leadership ability to this would-be monarch's vanity and arrogance. Goodwin, who has been going from strength to strength in his recent roles, is a stooping, harsh-voiced, high- strung Cassius, a volatile mix of idealism and bitterness. And Gary Sloan is a confident, subtle, vicious Antony, cold-eyed behind his hot words. Unfortunately, Stattel, as Brutus, is stolidly pinched, dully worried and not in the least compelling. The script makes you wonder about Brutus - to what extent is this "honorable man" lying to himself about his own ambitions? - but in Stattel's hands the character is plodding and unambiguous.

As a result, after the assassination, when the drama focuses on the relationship between the rebels Brutus and Cassius, somewhat unwilling partners in a war they didn't anticipate, nothing much happens onstage. Even at the play's beginning, you may wonder why these two are good friends, since they seem to have hardly anything in common. Since neither Dowling nor the actors answer this question, watching that friendship falter and nearly crumble isn't particularly interesting.

The two men's quarrel in Brutus's battle tent is in some sense the center of the play, but here the scene is so slack that it's sometimes confusing - as when Brutus, having told Cassius of his wife's death, seems then to hear for the first time, from a messenger, that she's dead. (On the page, the dialogue with the messenger reveals Brutus's stoic acceptance of his wife's death, not his ignorance of it.)

The production is boldly stylized, sometimes to marvelous effect. Judith Dolan's costumes are an intriguing mix of the modern (Caesar's white suit, Antony in jeans and Brutus at one point in a cardigan) and the ancient (leather armor, white robes). The soothsayer (played by Floyd King, who is also quite good in the small role of Cinna the poet) is presented as a shellshocked veteran with a placard, the sort of guy you might see roaming Lafayette Square (the placard reads, of course, "Beware the Ides of March").

Caesar's death is choreographed to clashing electronic music - the assassins' knives don't touch him, and there is no blood. As a set piece it's impressive but a little self-conscious, more about its own beauty than the murder taking place. Then Dowling redeems it with the aftermath, as the killers react in numb shock to what they've done: Cassius, kneeling beside the body and turning his head to and fro, is like nothing so much as a frightened dog.

Images like that are shudderingly effective, as great as the play. And as long as Dowling is dealing with the political maneuvering of the characters, this production is frequently electric. But when the play no longer provides him an excuse for current political imagery, the energy runs out of the proceedings. It's not the first time and it won't be the last that Shakespeare's genius has boiled over and left empty a director's conception.

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Joe Dowling. Set, Frank Hallinan-Flood; lights, Christopher Akerlind; costumes, Judith Dolan; composer/sound design, Keith Thomas; fight director, David Leong. With Emery Battis, Robert G. Murch, Todd Breaugh, Trish Jenkins, Eric Hoffmann and Edward Gero. At the Shakespeare Theatre through Jan. 9.

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In his production of "Mourning Becomes Electra," which opened last night at the Shakespeare Theatre, Michael Kahn calls up once more the combination of stylization and raw force that has brought his productions of Renaissance classics to towering life. Eugene O'Neill's wildly Freudian, wildly personal epic is rich with the excess only genius is rich enough to produce: Maybe Kahn's major achievement is that he wasn't afraid of it. Here, as he's done before, he makes directing the near-impossible look so easy that you almost wonder why the gigantic, difficult play isn't done every few years instead of every 40.

The first of O'Neill's dramas to be critically hailed as "great," "Mourning" was originally three plays, in which he reset the tragic story of the House of Atreus, the source ofmuch ancient Greek tragedy, in 19th-century New England. The choice was risky to the point of foolishness, and the resulting play has all the hubristic power of O'Neill's daring along with his characteristic bludgeoning, emotional fury. As brilliantly designed by Ming Cho Lee, the palatial house of the Mannon family is a high, cold, neoclassical tomb. Overshadowed by this symbol of their past, the Mannons struggle to escape into life, but their petty passions aren't strong enough.

Kelly McGillis is the spinster Lavinia Mannon, who loves her Civil War general father, Ezra (Ted van Griethuysen), and hates her sensual, dissatisfied mother, Christine (Franchelle Stewart Dorn), who has taken as a lover Capt. Adam Brant (Brett Porter). In the Greek original the queen, Clytemnestra, and her lover murdered King Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War, and the royal couple's son, Orestes, urged on by his sister Electra, killed their mother. This didn't quite fit O'Neill's psychological obsessions, and he shifted things around a bit. In "Mourning Becomes Electra," the Orestes figure, Orin (Robert Sella), is as much a mama's boy as Lavinia is a daddy's girl, and hates his bullyingly masculine father as his sister loathes their amorous mother. This setup has a geometric purity that approaches the lunatic, and O'Neill plays it out with all the rage of his personal madness. In "Mourning Becomes Electra," the characters' machinations are as tawdry as a nighttime soap opera, the Freud is glopped on extra-thick, and O'Neill makes his points so obviously he risks looking simplistic. But risk -- of the excessive, the ridiculous, the overwrought, the overdared -- is the power that drives O'Neill's dramas. While you're smirking condescendingly at his mistakes, he just roars on past you, unnoticing: He doesn't care. All too soon we realize that O'Neill's simplicity is brutal, his emotionality assaultive, his grip on our throats hard as iron. He doesn't entertain or move an audience, he works it over. And you can't just dismiss him as histrionic, because it's so clear the one suffering the most here is O'Neill himself. McGillis's repressed, vengeful Lavinia seems a prisoner in her clothes; you're very aware of the actress's size and vitality, her healthiness, and the way in which her life is imprisoning and deforming her. Her face masklike, her voice cool and commanding, McGillis's Lavinia is more than a match for her mother -- something of an achievement, since Dorn plays Christine with insolent, languid command. Unlike the family into which she married, Christine is alive in her body. It's her physical revulsion toward her husband -- which, unusual in a male writer, O'Neill takes seriously -- that sets the tragedy in motion. As so often in both American pulp and high art, female sexuality is an irresistible destructive force. O'Neill acknowledges Christine and Lavinia's right to satisfy their needs, but he also punishes them for doing so. Orin, far from being an Orestian hero, is pinched and small -- the avenger as prig. Sella makes an affecting, scary transformation from a sensi tive boy damaged by his father's ideas of manliness into a rigid, fearful copy of that same father. Van Griethuysen gives the father his full share of humanity without soft-pedaling the old soldier's greedy selfishness. In smaller roles, Porter plays Brant as a basically decent man playing out of his element, Emery Battis is excellent as the old caretaker of the Mannon place, Ralph Cosham is an amusing drunk, and David Sabin is jocular and disturbing as a drunken sailor who is also a portent of doom. Many of the minor characters serve as a Greek chorus -- a conceit Kahn handles exceptionally well, even finding some humor in the give-and-take of the husbands -- Sabin, Glenn Evans, Donald Neal -- and their wives -- Jennifer Mendenhall and (in two roles) Judithann Simmons. As the sane brother and sister who for a while seem to offer the Mannon siblings a romantic way out of their family trap, Lee Mark Nelson and Michelle O'Neill bring, respectively, moral weakness and moral strength to what could be wanly virtuous roles. Just as much as the Tyrones in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," the Mannon family is a blueprint of O'Neill's own psyche. Lavinia and Orin are two parts of him, caught eternally in attraction-revulsion for his parents, shying away first from his mother's needy sensuality, then from his father's judgmental selfishness -- panickingly unable to accept the idea that either one is a part of him. More than any other American drama, "Mourning Becomes Electra" captures a child's fear not merely of turning into his parents but of being dissolved in them, damned by them. Lavinia has inherited her mother's red hair, and once her mother is dead she blossoms happily into a replica of her. But Orin, speaking for O'Neill's Catholic guilt, is unable to live with the consequences of his deed -- tortured by his conscience, he becomes Lavinia's torturer. "Mourning Becomes Electra" isn't a soapy potboiler, it's a vat of lye. Mourning Becomes Electra, by Eugene O'Neill. Directed by Michael Kahn. Lights, Howell Binkley; costumes, Jane Greenwood; music, Adam Wernick. At the Shakespeare Theatre through June 15. Call 202-393-2700; TTY 202-638-3863.

ton audiences who laughed themselves sick at the Flying Karamazov Brothers' previous appearances that for all their zaniness and talent, the juggling clowns don't make a success of "Room Service" -- but then, even the Marx Brothers couldn't in their movie of the Broadway farce back in 1939. John Murray and Allen Boretz's farce about a theater producer on the brink of bankruptcy, which opened last night at Arena Stage, has been adapted by the Brothers K and director Robert Woodruff into a postmodern prank. Just as the original Marxes were known for comically deconstructing any script they were given, the Karamazovs deliberately take the piece apart -- playing themselves trying to put on a play about some guys trying to put on a play. It's an artful, sophisticated conception, but it's not very funny.

In Murray and Boretz's script, producer Gordon Miller (Dmitri Karamazov,a k a Paul Magid, in the Groucho role) is holed up in a suite in the White Way Hotel, desperately hoping to get a backer so his play will open and he can pay his hotel bill and other assorted debts. How he got into this unlikely situation isn't clear (he got into it because the authors thought there were some yuks in it). Miller is harassed by the hotel manager Wagner (played mostly by Smerdyakov Karamazov, a k a Sam Williams) and his flunky bookkeeper Gribble (played mostly by Rakitin Karamazov, a k a Michael Preston).

To add to Miller's troubles, the naive young playwright Leo Davis (Rakitin again) shows up from the Midwest full of enthusiasm for the coming disaster. Ingenue Christine Marlow (Ivan Karamazov, a k a Howard Jay Patterson, in the Lucille Ball role) finds a backer, but will he bail them out before they're thrown out? Much rushing in and out of doors and jumping out of windows and dashing into closets ensues.

In the Karamazov script, the play opens with Dmitri reading the published script of "Room Service," mulling over the problems of doing it with only four actors. Soon Ivan is revealed in bed with a tuba, and things look promising. The Brothers start playing the various roles, quarreling among themselves over casting (both Rakitin and Ivan want to play Christine), dancing, juggling, making gags, rushing in and out of doors, jumping out of windows and dashing into closets.

Longtime Arena patrons will naturally think of Douglas C. Wager's celebrated '80s resurrections of two Marx Brothers stage shows, "Animal Crackers" and "The Cocoanuts," which were giddily, blissfully, mind-bendingly funny. Possibly, Wager should have directed this show. It must have seemed like a great idea to cast the juggling, anarchic Karamazovs as contemporary versions of those leering, anarchic Marxes. But even the Marx Brothers, as their failed film of "Room Service" shows, needed a worthy show to destroy.

Woodruff choreographs his clowns skillfully and keeps the gags coming, but neither script of "Room Service" has any comic build, and neither he nor the Brothers can provide one. The result plays like a comedy sketch that goes on for 90 minutes instead of 10. There are laughs, to be sure, but one gag doesn't really lead to another, and for that matter one gag isn't really funnier than another -- it's a string-of-beads show, and after a while the sameness gets tedious.

The Brothers K are spry and willing, throwing themselves unreservedly into the second-rate material. Williams is particularly graceful and surprising, and Magid can cop a convincing Groucho attitude. (In the last act, when the Brothers actually play the original script more or less straight, Magid's makeup makes him look hilariously like SCTV's Eugene Levy.) Everyone is high-spirited and wanting to please, but they're jumping up and down on a trampoline with no springs.

Room Service, by John Murray and Allen Boretz, adapted by the Flying Karamazov Brothers with Paul Magid and Robert Woodruff. Sets and costumes, Greco; lights, Allen Lee Hughes; original music and sound, Doug Wieselman; choreography, Doug Elkins. At Arena Stage's Kreeger Theater through Oct. 19. Call 202-488-3300.

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Patrick Stewart is a commanding, fascinating Othello in the Shakespeare Theatre's production of this saddest of all the Elizabethan tragedies. Theatergoers, particularly those who saw Avery Brooks's volcanic performance here seven years ago, might have wondered whether Stewart, an actor of formidable power but not much heat, was the right choice for the jealous-mad wife-murderer who at one point says of his bride, "I'll chop her up in messes."

But the canny Stewart knows not only how to play to his strengths but also how to play his limitations so that they serve as strengths. He creates a beautifully delineated portrait of a plain-spoken man of action who turns out to have rotten nerves (someone should cast him as Hemingway). This Othello collapses rather than explodes,and the result is as frightening as any eruption, as if we were caught in the crushing fall of some great building.

Othello is the most fully sympathetic of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. The complex, ambivalent, brilliant Hamlet somehow disdains our sympathy, while Macbeth is a homicidal careerist and Lear a spoiled jerk. Othello is truly great-souled. In former centuries, Othello was said to be vulnerable to Iago's machinations because he was black and therefore impulsive. Nowadays, he is said to be vulnerable to those machinations because he is black and therefore has learned self-hatred from the ruling white society. But the reason the play is so painful to watch is that Othello is vulnerable to Iago because he is simply too good to understand him. The Moor can hate and he can kill, but the petty, sneaky nastiness of an Iago is beyond his imagining. He's a lion brought down by the bite of a rabid rat. Ron Canada's middle-aged Iago has had time to brood on his wrongs until they've hatched to moral tumors. Straightforward, efficient and careful -- a typical career noncom -- this Iago starts out as one of the most successful renditions of the role I've seen. But the character fades as the play goes on. Iago sets in motion a plot with many moving parts -- we need to see him thinking on his feet, always in motion to trap his victim. Canada just plods on. At one point, he makes Iago conscience-stricken at what he is doing to Desdemona, but in the next scene he seems to have overcome this with no trouble. Nothing builds. As his net tightens, this Iago becomes not more frightening but vaguer. It doesn't help that Canada kept stumbling over his lines, the kind of thing that saps a character's authority. It's good to see Teagle F. Bougere, the talented former Arena Stage actor, back in town to play Cassio, Iago's unwitting tool. But Bougere doesn't appear to have made up his mind whether Cassio is a decent fellow or a sulker or some combination of both, and it's hard to know how to respond to him. Jimonn Cole is broadly funny as Roderigo, which sometimes works and sometimes seems like an outtake from some other play. The delicate-boned Patrice Johnson plays Desdemona as a loving girl, too sweet-natured and too young to understand the foulness that envelops her. The most startlingly original performance comes from Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Emilia, Iago's wife. Dorn gives us a browbeaten creature, pathetically in love with the husband who despises her, and afraid of him as well. This Emilia makes a moral journey in the course of the play; she has her own tragedy and heroism. Jude Kelly's direction is vigorous, and her production ideas are often impressive, but sometimes she over-theatricalizes. The play opens in a rainstorm, which is supposed to supply mood but really just piques our curiosity about where the drains are and why Roderigo ruins his lovely green velvet suit by sitting down in a puddle. In a brutal, powerfully acted scene between Othello and Desdemona that should be devastating, the lighting is so moody that half the time you can't see the actors' faces. Desdemona dies on a bed hung with sheer white curtains so that we can view the action through the thin fabric, watch the curtains flutter down as she dies, and admire the artfully placed splotch of blood that shows up on one of them. Stewart plays Othello the Moor in his own white skin, bald head scarred with a savage-looking tattoo, while his new young wife, Desdemona, his destroyer, Iago, and the ruling nobility of Venice, where the play begins, are African Americans. The stage couldn't be more obviously set for some daring, stinging race-reversal, but the potential dynamite fizzles -- largely because race prejudice is only one of several dramatic elements in the script and won't stand up to being made into what the play is "about." Of all the characters, only Iago and Desdemona's father (Darrell Carey) make racially disparaging remarks about Othello. Everyone else either speaks well of him or is mute on the subject. (Even Iago never makes racial sneers at Othello when he's speaking his mind directly to the audience in his soliloquies: Like any cynic, he plays the race card when it suits him.) Though lines have been modified to conform to the production (since the soldiers use guns, "Put up your bright swords or the dew will rust them" becomes "Put up your bright arms . . ." and so on), the insults to Othello are left as written and Stewart's Othello is sneered at as black. For a white audience to see a white actor and character scorned in vicious racist terms could have been a scathing theater experience, but the whole issue just seems confused. What is the audience supposed to think when Stewart, an actor whose mouth is like a slit in his face, is derided with the remark "thick lips"? Or when, pale pate gleaming, he announces in the plummiest of English accents, "Haply, for I am black . . . "? Or when a black actor castigates Othello for his dark-skinned ugliness? If the purpose was to show how foolish and empty racial derogations are, how they're just words, the device misfires. Racial derogations end up seeming meaningless, even harmless -- surely not what Kelly intended. So though the Venetian senators look at Othello in disdain and disgust when they find he's married Desdemona, and the Venetian soldiers, who are black, razz the Cypriot troops, who are white and wear funny-looking orange uniforms, that's about the extent to which the production grapples with race relations. Fortunately, the play, indifferent to present-day graftings, rolls on its magnificent, terrible way, to dash the audience on the rocks of terror and pity. Othello, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Jude Kelly. Set and costumes, Robert Innes Hopkins; lights, Frances Aronson; composer, Michael Ward; fights, Rick Sordelet. With Craig Wallace, Michael W. Howell, George Causil, Chad L. Coleman, William Badgett, R. Emery Bright, George F. Grant, Kate Skinner. At the Shakespeare Theatre through Jan. 4. Call 202-393-2700.

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"I don't know who the devil you are!" cries beleaguered, bourgeois Mr. Bates (Mitchell Hebert) at Martin (Christopher Lane), the young interloper who has insinuated his way into the Bates household in Dennis Potter's "Brimstone and Treacle."

Well, he may not, but the audience has been tipped off by a wink or two from Lane, some sly lines from Potter and the careful emphasis of director Tom Prewitt: Martin is Who? The Devil! indeed, dropped in on the Bateses as an answer to their prayers. It's another wild night at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, where Potter's appallingly comic mixture of squalor, nastiness and divine grace is being given a sharp, beautifully acted production.

Potter is best known for his television plays ("The Singing Detective," "Pennies From Heaven," which was later made into a movie) and that's what "Brimstone and Treacle" originally was. The BBC taped it in 1976 but, after a good look at the finished product, declined to broadcast the result, opining that it was "brilliantly written and made, but nauseating." Potter rewrote the play for the stage, it was later filmed with Sting as Martin, and the banned original was finally shown in 1987, but I'm happy to say that those original BBC censors had a point: The script is brilliant but nauseating. It's the combination Potter does best. Mr. Bates and his wife (Nancy Robinette) live a pinched, miserable existence centered on their daughter, Pattie (Rhea Seehorn), who since an auto accident two years earlier has been paralyzed and apparently imbecilic. Mr. Bates goes to work, comes home and is rude to his wife about dinner; Mrs. Bates is virtually a prisoner, unable to leave her helpless child even to run to the store. This limited life is beginning to tell on them, especially Mrs. Bates, who on the night the play begins tells her husband that they have to get out more. "We mustn't ruin our lives," Robinette says to Hebert, though the look on her face and the dead tone of her voice tell us it's already too late. But miracles do happen in this crazy world! Martin, supposedly an old love of Pattie's, literally runs into Mr. Bates on the street, and the next thing you know he's cooking for them and cleaning for them and talking right-wing politics with Mr. Bates and flirting with Mrs. Bates and bringing joy and relief into their lives -- and, oh yes, raping the helpless, strapped-down Pattie when he's got her folks out of the house. To his credit as a human being but possibly to the detriment of the production, Prewitt doesn't seem to be a particularly sadistic fellow. The sex between Martin and Pattie is surprisingly easy to take, partly because of Seehorn's radiance and self-possession in her role. Pattie never quite seems like a victim. Unfortunately, this may be the one play in the world where you want a character to be a victim. If we're not made to squirm at Pattie's fate -- and we aren't here -- "Brimstone and Treacle" loses a lot of its powerful offensiveness. Happily, Prewitt is on top of the play's other strengths -- its wit, comedy, rudeness and surprising pathos. Potter himself sometimes seems uncertain what he's doing with Martin. He'll establish him as diabolical, then appear to have decided he's just a con man. Prewitt makes a strong choice for the diabolical at the very start of the play -- almost as soon as Lane, in a black velvet suit with purple shirt and tie, sidles into the Bateses' parlor, he gives the audience a fiendish grin. This may be a little obvious, but at least it makes things clear. We watch in dread as Martin works his wiles on poor Mrs. Bates, and flinch as we realize that he actually is making her life better. Christopher Lane, who has made something of a specialty of playing charming heels, would seem like an almost too obvious choice for Martin. But he brings some fresh acting twists to the role. He has more authority and a new mastery of stillness, and he's learned to use the deeper register of his voice for emphasis and shock. He wears a short beard here and his hair's straggly -- for the first time, his good looks seem feral. Lane's performance is so much fun that it's hard to find Martin really sickening, but he's a jauntily disturbing demon. Robinette brings a touching, dazed hopefulness to Mrs. Bates, whose insistence on believing her daughter can recover is poignant rather than foolish. Always trailing an air of existential bewilderment, Robinette perfumes whatever she's in with the mournful tension of a Beckett play. Her flirtatiousness with Martin, which could be played as repellently self-deluding, is heartbreakingly naive. As the narrow-minded, pitiable Mr. Bates, Hebert gives his most emotionally rich performance. In a soliloquy in which he discovers the limits of his own hatefulness, Hebert performs it in a way that makes the audience seem to suspend its breath. James Kronzer's set, with its gray furniture and ghastly faded yellow floral wallpaper, epitomizes lower-middle-class English seediness; it's no surprise to hear a water tap, courtesy of sound designer Daniel Schrader, dripping in the background; the scene wouldn't be complete without it. The only thing missing is a stale, sour smell. (The atmosphere is wonderfully evoked, but with this set Martin's references to stealing jewelry and money from the Bateses don't make a lot of sense.) Robin Stapley's superb costumes include not only Lane's darkly elegant suit, but almost-matching baggy beige cardigans for the Bateses, a perfect visual symbol of their dreary lives. Below its surface oddity, "Brimstone and Treacle" is unexpectedly conventional. Potter's characters may be vicious and horrid, but the world he sets them in is one in which sin exists to be exposed and punished. Pattie really is an innocent, a victim of another's shameful behavior -- and both she and her tormentor get the miracle each deserves. In one of Prewitt's stunning visual coups, Pattie's hair flies free at the moment of her liberation and swirls around her head as if she were buoyed on air, and we realize that throughout this sordid, blasphemous play we have been entertained by angels unawares. Brimstone and Treacle, by Dennis Potter. Directed by Tom Prewitt. Lights, Martha Mountain; props, Elsie Jones. At the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Nov. 23. Call 703-218-6500.