CAROLYN CLAY

Return of the screw

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:19:57 GMT

The Woman in Black haunts Gloucester Stage
Line up your goosebumps: Gloucester Stage is rushing Halloween with a bit of Victorian hokum entitled The Woman in Black.

GHOST PLAY: And there’s little one can say about the malevolent title character without giving away the gimmick.

Line up your goosebumps: Gloucester Stage is rushing Halloween with a bit of Victorian hokum entitled The Woman in Black (through September 14). Adapted from a 1983 ghost tale by novelist Susan Hill, Stephen Mallatratt’s two-man play adds meta-theatrics to the mystery swirling about Eel Marsh House, across Nine Lives Causeway, on the misty East Coast of England, where a young solicitor named Arthur Kipps is sent to sort out the affairs of a recently deceased dowager. In the novel, this “true story of haunting and evil, fear and confusion, horror and tragedy” is told in the first person by an older Kipps to counter the ghoulish exaggerations of his ghost-story-telling stepchildren. In the play, Kipps has hired an actor to help him turn his story into a performance that he hopes will exorcise the hangover willies of his unsettling youthful errand, if not its fateful after-effect. I must say it all struck me as tedious and silly, and the play-within-a-play trick really slows things down. But the work has been running for almost 20 years in London — can two decades worth of the satisfactorily spooked be wrong?

At Gloucester Stage, the show begins on a rudimentary stage thrust out from a squat, gilded proscenium. Furniture is blanketed. A few trunks are stacked. The rehearsal-ready set looks like a thing designed by Miss Havisham. (David Reynoso actually did the honors.) Quite suddenly the lights go up on Steven Barkhimer as an awkward older Kipps nervously clearing his throat before droning from a script as thick as the phone book. He is soon interrupted from the house by Shelley Bolman’s boyish but merciless actor coach, admonishing him to perk it up and threatening to make “an Irving” — not an Olivier or Gielgud — of him. Although Hill wrote her story in the 1980s, it’s clear she styled it after Victorian prose of the genre, with echoes of Charles Dickens and Henry, not to mention M.R., James. And Mallatratt retains the writerly, melodramatic feel of the narrative. But to me the tale, full of fog and fright and the vehicular equivalent of the headless horseman, sounds more like parody than the thing itself.

Home invasion

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:14:06 GMT

Mishegas meets metaphor in Fabuloso
Fabuloso is about what happens to a vaguely disappointing marriage when a couple of maniacs show up at the door insisting they’re family.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: What to do when “family” come to call?

Fabuloso is about what happens to a vaguely disappointing marriage when a couple of maniacs show up at the door insisting they’re family. Once the light dawns that this wild ride is in fact a comic metaphor for the bedlam that comes with having children, the play seems both clever and rather sweet. Indeed, playwright John Kolvenbach penned the work, which is in its world premiere on Wellfleet Harbor Actors’ Theater’s Julie Harris stage (through September 6), in the wake of welcoming two sons in 15 months. The play can seem arbitrary, however, particularly as infants do not fight with knives, drink copious amounts of alcohol, or speak.

Here’s the ostensible premise. Kate, who works in a bank, and Teddy, a part-time girls’ soccer coach who considers himself a failure, are home of an evening in their one-bedroom apartment when Ted gets a blast from the past. Arthur, a motherless rich kid taken in by Ted’s family during his teen years but lost track of for two decades (and never mentioned to Kate), calls to say he’s coming over. Teddy, who doesn’t “want him to see me like this,” is thrown into a dither. But it gets to be 3 am, the former faux sibling hasn’t shown, and Kate’s in her underwear. Cue the knock at the door, whereupon Arthur blows in like a hyperkinetic, overemphatic Peter Pan. And he’s followed by a murderous Tinker Bell of a fiancée, against whom Arthur quickly arms Kate and Ted with their own kitchen knives. We will learn that Samantha often threatens Arthur with bodily harm: it’s one of the adorable pair of adult-size children’s favorite games. The immediate source of her ire is her discovery that the family her intended has taken her to meet are made up entirely of hired impostors. Running for his life, Arthur has brought his love to be embraced by the only family he knows: Teddy.

Sunny chaos, alternating with melodramatic chaos, ensues. Arthur and Samantha drink wine and eat Fluff in the host couple’s bed, borrow their clothes, keep them up all night, include them in a carefully choreographed dance routine to a 1920s vaudeville ditty (for which an old-fashioned record player has been ordered in the wee hours), engage in an elaborate game of playing dead, and clearly have no intention of leaving. Arthur’s happiest years were the five he spent playing Spin to Teddy’s Marty, and for him the new arrangement, albeit cramped, is “paradise found.” At first Teddy, too, reverts to childhood, forcing Kate into the role of Ms. Mom. But confidences are exchanged, guns are brandished, and eventually regression leads to rebirth: of Teddy’s flopped ego as well as of his and Kate’s marriage. As for the grown-up rug rats, in their ascots with pajamas and cocktail dresses, they’re both cute and exhausting — like the play.

Dysfunction junctions

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:53:20 GMT

Spelling Bee in Beverly; The Goatwoman in Lenox
“Have you ever been in a gymnasium in the round before?” asks one of the participants toward the top of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at North Shore Music Theatre.

THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE: Emy Baysic is all perky defiance as the over-programmed Asian prodigy.

“Have you ever been in a gymnasium in the round before?” asks one of the nerdy participants toward the top of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at North Shore Music Theatre (through August 31). And yes, it is strange to witness this delightfully quirky musical set in a middle-school gym in NSMT’s large arena. But the ad lib reflects what’s best about William Finn & Rachel Sheinkin’s unlikely Broadway hit: the oft-ironic witticisms and asides that trump Finn’s catchy but unmemorable score and the feel-good-about-yourself message that’s built into the small-scale songfest in which six young adults play nervous, oddball adolescents vying for top orthographic honors — plus a chance at national glory — at a county spelling bee.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee began life as an original improvisational play called C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E (take that to Broadway) created by Rebecca Feldman and a group called the Farm. The musical version — which retains an improvisational edge in that it includes several audience members as spellers — began life in 2004 at the Pittsfield–based Barrington Stage Company, which claimed the right to the first regional production following the show’s odyssey to Broadway. The NSMT staging, directed by Jeremy Dobrish, is a co-production with Barrington Stage that has been reworked for the round. And though the hyperactive adolescent excitement seems smaller than it did when the show played at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, the show’s geeky, idiosyncratic charm for the most part survives the transition from proscenium to doughnut.

The spelling bee has become a pervasive metaphor of late, from the Myla Goldberg novel Bee Season (which became a 2005 film) to the 2006 movie Akeelah and the Bee to the documentary Spelling Bee. But none of those features the outlandish likes of stocky, sloppy William Barfee, who suffers from a “mucus-membrane disorder” as well as from a nut allergy so acute he can’t be in the presence of still-packaged peanut M&Ms and who spells with the aid of a “magic foot” snaking in script across the floor. Neither do they offer hippy-dippy, home-schooled Leaf Coneybear or pint-sized gay activist Logainne Schwarzandgrubenierre, whose impossible last name joins those of her two pressuring dads. Really, as these linguistic warriors deploy their painful backstories and hifalutin phonemes, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Suspicion

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:59:40 GMT

Othello at Shakespeare + Company, Doubt at Gloucester Stage
With John Douglas Thompson’s Moor, more is evidently more.

OTHELLO The big gestures here are earned.

With John Douglas Thompson’s Moor, more is evidently more. The bristling African-American actor was a fiery Othello at Trinity Repertory Company in 1999 and a more varied if less volatile one at the American Repertory Theatre in 2001. Now he’s the breaking heart of an anxious, atmospheric staging of the tragedy — the first in its 30-year history — by Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company.

Inspired by the paintings of Goya and set in the 1820s, director Tony Simotes’s Othello (in repertory through August 31) is shadowy yet exuberant, stormily scored by composer Scott Killian and pushed along by Michael Hammond’s Iago, who is unusually hail-fellow and hearty, even in the soliloquies wherein he improvises his plan to deploy “the green-eyed monster” against the black general who has passed him over for promotion. Plotting to convince Othello of his new wife’s unfaithfulness, the ensign promises to turn Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch” — at which Hammond claps his hands with such flamboyance you think he might jig. Moreover, the scoundrel’s interactions with the other characters are marked by a forcible if friendly energy that might warn but rather charms them, perhaps seeming as “free and open” as the nature of the Moor.

With its blatant villain making up the plot as he goes along, Othello is one of the Bard’s most straightforward tragedies. Not to mention, with its bestial imagery, one of his most vividly written. And like all Shakespeare & Company productions, this one is very well spoken, especially by the chiseled Thompson, who ventures to give the Moor a light African accent (as well as an African off-duty wardrobe). Although the actors’ tongues race as swiftly as the production does, slowing down only to prolong the agony of Desdemona’s tender murder, you hear every word, and the imagery sticks deep.

Like many modern productions, this one tries to tie Othello more to the racism of our time than to that of Shakespeare’s. Not only is Venice’s hired general black, so is LeRoy McClain’s Cassio — which makes Iago less a creature of what Coleridge called “motiveless malignity” than a man chafed by affirmative action. And Hammond’s Iago exhibits more motive than most: he does seem to brood both on being passed over for the lieutenancy bestowed on Cassio and on the possibility that Othello or Cassio (or both) may have slipped between his sheets. Cuckoldry, real or imagined, is a potent thing in the very masculine world of this Othello, part of the tragedy of which is that men trained to violence, without any war to fight after the enemy’s convenient drowning, are shored up on Cyprus with nothing to do but play drinking games and brawl.

Vintage mirth and vintage laughter

CAROLYN CLAY — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:41:35 GMT

Hay Fever at the Publick; A Flea in Her Ear in Williamstown
Coward is said to have written the play in three days, in the wake of a nerve-racking weekend at the country home of American actress Laurette Taylor and her British-playwright husband.

HAY FEVER Ignorance is Bliss — or maybe it’s the other way around — in Noël Coward’s vintage
piffle.

The drawing room moves outdoors at the Publick Theatre, which fields an al fresco staging of Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy of bad manners, Hay Fever (in rep through September 14), that whips the vintage piffle into a paradoxical froth of lightweight histrionics. Coward is said to have written the play in three days, in the wake of a nerve-racking weekend at the country home of American actress Laurette Taylor and her British-playwright husband, J. Hartley Manners, who penned the hoky Peg o’ My Heart for her. If so, Coward was probably not invited back, for the Blisses of Hay Fever are hardly portrayed as heavenly hosts. In less than 24 hours, the self-absorbed and self-dramatizing quartet of actress mom Judith, novelist dad David, adult son Simon, and 19-year-old daughter Sorrel, each of whom has invited a weekend guest without informing the others, manage to drive their company not only out the door but over the edge.

Described by Sorrel, the sole still impressionable Bliss, as “slapdash,” the bickering and eccentric family unit revolves around Judith, who may for the moment have retired from the stage but can no more retire from drama than she can from breathing. Neither can she be weaned from the adulation beamed across the footlights, so she’s asked athletic young blockhead Sandy Tyrell to spend the weekend making eyes at and declarations to her. David has invited a diffident and somewhat dithering flapper, Jackie Coryton, whom he wishes to study “in domestic surroundings” with an eye toward turning her into fiction. Sorrel’s guest is the dapper, much older “diplomatist” Richard Greatham; Simon’s is a sultry Mrs. Robinson of a London socialite called Myra Arundel, whom his mother accuses of using sex “like a shrimping net.” There is, moreover, only one desirable guest room (the second best is referred to as Little Hell), and the meager staff are under the command of Mom’s former dresser, the lackadaisical Clara, who’s generous with neither tea nor sympathy.

The brief weekend evolves over three acts, which director Diego Arciniegas has trimmed to less than two hours including intermissions. So even though the action consists of little more than petulance, posturing, and the plotting of escape, it’s easy to be charmed and hard to be bored as the Blisses conduct their delicate grandstanding, first disregarding, then swapping, then ensnaring their guests in arbitrarily conjured romantic melodramas that culminate in a reprise of Judith’s own Peg o’ My Heart, a cheesy potboiler called Love’s Whirlwind.

Mirrors up to Nature

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:51:14 GMT

As You Like It on Boston Common; QED in Central Square
Up close, the Forest of Arden, an elevated glade tucked into Boston Common, looks like verdant, dappled clouds tacked to two-by-fours.

AS YOU LIKE IT: Loud, fast, highly physical, and filled with the ache of love.

Up close, the Forest of Arden, an elevated glade tucked into Boston Common, looks like verdant, dappled clouds tacked to two-by-fours. But wander back to the Parkman Bandstand, before which As You Like It unfolds as this year’s offering of Free Shakespeare (presented by Citi Performing Arts Center through August 3), and set designer Scott Bradley’s jumble of cutouts on poles looks more like a forest. Such are the perplexities of pitching an al fresco show to thousands of people. As director Steven Maler knows from 12 years of amplifying the Bard in the city’s great outdoors, subtleties designed for those in front will be lost to those picnicking near Tremont Street. So his As You Like It is loud, fast, and highly physical. But the ache of love at the core of Shakespeare’s romantic pastorale will be felt as through an analgesic.

This is the second time As You Like It has taken a turn on Boston Common. It’s a natural, since the comedy quickly leaves the repressive court for the more liberating — if also cruel — elements. The mercurial Duke Frederick has usurped his brother Duke Senior’s kingdom, and the true duke has taken up rustic residence in the forest. In Maler’s early-20th-century staging, Frederick is a fascist whose underlings wear red armbands bearing a Mussolini-esque logo. And Duke Senior, himself a carnivorous usurper in the land of Bambi, has arrived in Arden in the vintage airplane we see crash-landed at the back of the woods.

Rosalind, the deposed duke’s daughter, remains at court to keep Duke Frederick’s daughter, Celia, company. At least she does for Shakespeare’s first act — long enough to be love-smacked by Orlando, youngest son of Sir Rowland de Bois, come to try his luck against Frederick’s thuggish wrestler, Charles. Charles doesn’t knock Orlando out, but Rosalind does. When she’s banished by her uncle and dons male clothing to head for the forest, Celia goes along, as does the ribald jester, Touchstone — here pedaling a bicycle-drawn cart from which he takes a break to shake up some martinis. Orlando, to escape his malevolent older brother’s murderous designs, also goes into the woods, accompanied by a faithful septuagenarian.

Smart women, tough choices

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:56:58 GMT

All’s Well in Lenox, Going to St. Ives via Gloucester
Welcome back to the director’s chair, Tina Packer.

GOING TO ST. IVES: Lee Blessing’s canvas may be small, but his concerns are global.

Welcome back to the director’s chair, Tina Packer. The Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company’s artistic director, who’s spent the past few summers on the thespian side of the footlights, returns to playing boss lady with a vigorous, ultimately magical All’s Well That Ends Well (in repertory through August 31) that, if it doesn’t solve all the problems of the Bard’s “problem play,” at least hides them under musical bridges. Realizing that one of the play’s settings, Roussillon in the south of France, is where the troubadour movement of the Middle Ages was born, Packer turns the Countess of Rossillion’s cynical clown, Lavache, into the play’s “resident troubadour” — albeit one whose bluesy growl suggests Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen more than a mediæval minstrel. In the aging-rock-star persona of Nigel Gore, he fronts the 20 musical numbers, some drawn from Shakespeare’s texts, that are the glue connecting the play’s comedy, tragedy, fairy tale, and masochistic romance

So what are All’s Well’s bugaboos? For starters, its fanatically determined heroine, Helena, is in love with a jerk. The low-born lass, daughter of a famous physician but brought up in the Countess’s court, has set her cap at the Countess’s callow, snobbish son, Bertram, who’s described by critic Harold Bloom as “a spoiled brat” and “authentically noxious.” The excuse for Bertram — for those who care to make one — is that his insensitivities are those of youth and that he’s ultimately transformed. (Never mind that, moments before the happy ending, he’s been lying his head off.) Packer casts not a Zac Efron but 40-year-old — albeit handsome and dashing — Jason Asprey in the role. But she does begin the play with a prescient bit of horseplay in which childhood chums Helena and Bertram engage in some mock fencing — until by accident he wounds her, leaving a red blot on her white camisole and a bewildered look on her face.

Neither, for all the jumping-up-and-down charm of Kristin Villanueva, is the monomaniacal Helena a flawless heroine. The character’s an Elizabethan case study for Smart Women, Foolish Choices, stubbornly affixing her affections to the shallow Bertram — though, to her credit, she realizes the match is not likely: “ ’Twere all one/That I should love a bright particular star/And think to wed it, he is so above me.” Then, when she cures the King of France of a “fistula” and claims Bertram as her prize, only to be brutally rejected, she turns so crafty you’d think she’d taken manipulation lessons from Measure for Measure’s “duke of dark corners” — even resorting to the Boccaccio-borrowed “bed trick,” a sexual bait-and-switch that figures in both plays.

Killing grounds

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:00:02 GMT

The Seagull flies at the Publick; Company One knocks off Assassins
Chekhov wrote to a friend while composing The Seagull , first of his Big Four, that he was writing a “comedy with three female parts, six male parts, four acts, a landscape (a view of the lake), much talk about literature, and five tons of love.”

THE SEAGULL: The Publick production is as lively as the script — no Stanislavskian malaise.

Chekhov wrote to a friend while composing The Seagull, first of his Big Four, that he was writing a “comedy with three female parts, six male parts, four acts, a landscape (a view of the lake), much talk about literature, and five tons of love.” Diego Arciniegas’s Publick Theatre production of his own new translation of the play (in repertory through September 7) doesn’t have a lake — it substitutes the nearby, conveniently glimpsed Charles River — but it sure supplies the five tons of love, throwing in a little lust for good measure. Set against the landscaped wilds of Christian Herter Park, it looks gorgeous. If Arciniegas’s text (he studied Russian in college and worked from his own literal translation) is sometimes jarringly contemporary given that the production hews to the play’s late-19th-century milieu, the cadences reflect the juxtaposition of passion and randomness one associates with Chekhov. And the staging ably balances the play’s angst and absurdity, making one wonder, once again, whether it wasn’t really Chekhov who invented the human.

Chekhov’s 1895 play about art, nature, and the inconvenience of the human heart works nicely in an al fresco setting. The opening two acts are set outdoors, the first of them in a makeshift summer theater where Nina, the girl-next-door with whom fledgling playwright Treplev is in love, performs her boyfriend’s abstract new work: a Symbolist evocation of a futuristic world devoid of living things. Treplev is an advocate of “new forms” in art, and sure enough, to judge by the snippet of monologue we hear before his bored-actress mother shoots down the effort, he’s a regular little Beckett.

But then, Arkadina, the mother to whom Treplev’s a regular little Hamlet, is an actress of the old school: vain, histrionic, self-centered, and charming. Between engagements, she’s summering at her brother Sorin’s country estate, where Treplev also lives. And she’s brought along her lover, the lightweight novelist Trigorin, of whom Treplev is both contemptuous and jealous. It is Trigorin who supplies the central metaphor when he turns Nina’s head. “Subject for a short story,” he jots down upon seeing a seagull Treplev has shot for no reason, then proceeds to pen a scenario in which a young girl lives by a lake, “free and happy as a gull,” until “one day a man comes along and, because he has nothing better to do, he destroys her.”

Twisted love song

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:21:32 GMT

Gloucester riffs on Enigma Variations
Enigma Variations isn’t very good, but I can’t tell you why.

SURPRISE! And then another, and another, and another . . .

Enigma Variations isn’t very good, but I can’t tell you why. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s 1996 two-hander (in the original, Variations Énigmatiques), which is in its area premiere at Gloucester Stage (through July 13), is, like Anthony Shaffer’s superior Sleuth, a play that turns on twist after twist, in this case to the point where it becomes either tiresome or laughable depending on your mood. The first revelation comes about a third of the way into the hour-and-three-quarters work, so Schmitt’s contrivances beyond that point cannot be pooh-poohed without ruining his surprises. Suffice to report that, toward the end, one of the two characters appeared absolutely astonished when the other, having made his exit, returned and their melodramatic cat-and-mouse conversation continued. I felt the same way.

The play takes its name from Sir Edward Elgar’s 1899 composition of the same name: 14 variations on a theme that’s never quite discerned. A rumination on the elusive nature of intimacy and love, Schmitt’s Enigma Variations starts out as something other than what it proves to be (though both pretense and actuality are pretty implausible). A Nobel Prize winning author of 21 novels who lives in seclusion on an Arctic island high up in the Norwegian Sea has granted an interview to a small-town journalist. Abel Znorko has just published a book quite different from his previous, more philosophical novels, and Erik Larsen, who arrives with a non-functioning tape recorder and more knowledge of his quarry that might likely be garnered from the public record, is convinced it’s not a work of fiction. For the first half-hour, he tries to get the pretentious and insulting Znorko to own up to this. Turns out he’s after more than just a scoop for his local rag.

Dedicated (as is each of Elgar’s Enigma Variations) to an individual identified only by initials, the book that so interests Larsen is a series of love letters between a man the novelist calls Abel Znorko and a woman he calls Eva L’Amour whom Znorko at first insists he made up, along with her beautifully concocted letters. We learn, however, that both men have known the same woman in different contexts: she is the enigma of this Enigma Variations, a turgid if explosive encounter that asks whether one can ever really know one’s beloved and whether any of us is indeed a single self to be comprehended. Also on the table are the writer’s need to control the narrative of his life and the strange ways in which we contrive to hold onto what’s lost. But the play goes on and on, dropping emotional bombshell after emotional bombshell until, by the end (that is, the final end, not to be confused with the several false endings), the situation is not only tearful but a little kinky. The play’s portentous language, too, is clichéd; it’s difficult to know whether to blame Schmitt or his English translator, the well-reputed Jeremy Sams.

Easy to love

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:12:44 GMT

According to Tip debuts at New Rep; the ART sings Cole Porter
Given the water wings of a viable performance, one-person shows about historical figures tend to sink or swim on the raconteurship of their subjects.

ACCORDING TO TIP: Ken Howard relates “true” stories that might not have actually happened.

Given the water wings of a viable performance, one-person shows about historical figures tend to sink or swim on the raconteurship of their subjects. Court holders like Gertrude Stein and Truman Capote provide better odds than, say, General Douglas MacArthur. Dick Flavin’s According to Tip, which is in its world premiere from New Repertory Theatre (at Arsenal Center for the Arts through July 13), has itself a doozy of a subject. In the imperfectly bewigged but aptly shambling and twinkling person of Tony-winning actor and one-time TV White Shadow Ken Howard, consummate Massachusetts pol and long-time Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill sings Irish ditties, swings his golf club, sucks his cigar, and gives good anecdote, both historical and blarney-cal. He came into politics when it was “entertainment” rather than “advertising,” he says, and he knows how to put on a show. So why doesn’t the audience “sit back and let an old guy tell you a story or two?” The crowd at the performance I attended licked those stories out of his hand.

Toward the end of According to Tip, which begins at the height of the Speaker’s political shoot-’em-up with Ronald Reagan but is mostly chronological, an aging O’Neill remarks that “it’s not easy getting off stage when you feel you still have a few songs left in you.” That would seem truer of one-time television commentator and sports maven Flavin than of his subject, who retired at 73. The one trouble with According to Tip — almost two hours long, including an intermission — is that the material needs to be pared down. (I’d suggest the omission of random anecdotes about little-known Massachusetts politicians.) O’Neill may have been a three-time failure at Weight Watchers, but this show needs to go there.

Pausing after a woolly tale about Henry Ford’s being bilked by some crafty Irishmen, According to Tip’s O’Neill adds, “That’s a true story — whether it actually happened is another thing.” But according to Flavin, who knew O’Neill, most of the piece is “historically accurate.” No question that it captures the colorful North Cambridge man for whom “all politics is local.” Flavin’s O’Neill is blunt (Bobby Kennedy “treated me like a piece of garbage”), courtly (singing “In Apple Blossom Time” to wife Millie before waltzing an imaginary her around the stage), clout-seeking if self-depreciating, and unflaggingly populist. Slipping in and out of his rumpled suit coat while negotiating a stage chock with mementos and festooned, in Janie E. Howland’s set design, with caricatures of the seven presidents under whom he conducted a 34-year career in Washington, O’Neill holds forth for the audience, going so far as to ask, after intermission, whether there’s a “quorum.”

Mad men

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:42:42 GMT

Orfeo’s Look Back in Anger; WHAT’s What the Butler Saw
Audiences must have developed shock absorbers over the course of the past 50 years.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER: John Osborne’s Angry Young Man strikes a chord with Orfeo.

Audiences must have developed shock absorbers over the course of the past 50 years, because it’s almost impossible to imagine the outrage evoked in their respective times by John Osborne’s 1956 Look Back in Anger, which was described by one critic as “misanthropy among the garbage cans,” and Joe Orton’s 1969 What the Butler Saw, which on its opening night prompted cries from the gallery of “Filth!” Osborne’s play shook the genteel underpinnings of the British theater, whacking away at the drawing-room gewgaws with a kitchen sink wrenched from the wall by an Angry Young Man. Orton’s gender-bent madhouse farce attacked the Establishment by spraypainting the trappings of classical comedy with a bright lacquer of Wildean artifice and polymorphous perversity. Both plays were landmarks. But looking back on them with candor rather than anger, it’s hard to imagine the Playboy of the Western World–worthy ruckuses they raised.

In some ways, Look Back in Anger seems a curious choice for Orfeo Group, a collective of young theater artists out to seduce an audience for whom theatergoing is not a regular occurrence. To that end, the troupe is offering a free and very creditable Actors’ Equity Association Members’ Project Code production of Osborne’s rarely produced if historically important drama in the cramped, claustrophobic, absolutely apt Factory Theatre in the South End (through July 6). You might think the twentysomething troupers would be put off by the play’s old-fashioned structure, its sexism, and its teatime talkiness, however volatile. But the embittered disenfranchisement of intelligent, dead-ended, 25-year-old Jimmy Porter seems to have struck a chord with these members of a generation feeling fenced out of a craven America ruled by rich Republicans. Never mind that Osborne’s enraged if sensitive working-class protagonist lashes out at all things posh and sundry through the emotional punching bag of the passive upper-class wife ironing his shirts and sharing his life of loudmouthed desperation.

Jimmy and Alison Porter split their rented digs with Jimmy’s Welsh working-class chum and sweet-stall co-operator, the gentler Cliff Lewis, who serves as a sort of junior punching bag, confidant, and referee. When Alison’s upper-class friend, Helena Charles, shows up to slum it temporarily with the crew, the odd family dynamic splinters and socio-economic and sexual tensions come to a head, with Alison, who is pregnant, eventually being whisked off by her father, a mastodon of Empire who served 30 years as a British army officer in India and is described by Jimmy as “one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.” Whereupon Helena’s mixed motives come to light — she can’t take over Alison’s bed and iron fast enough.

North Shore's snazzy revival of contact

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:39:05 GMT

Plus, Gurnet’s Essential Self-Defense
For a Broadway show, contact is closer to Twyla Tharp than George M. Cohan.

CONTACT: Naomi Hubert in the clingy yellow dress is simply irresistible.

For a Broadway show, contact is closer to Twyla Tharp than George M. Cohan. Tharp hit the street in 2002 with her own “dance play,” Movin’ Out, which was set to Billy Joel songs pounded out by an on-stage piano man. But Susan Stroman’s 1999 contact, seen here in a snazzy revival by North Shore Music Theatre (through June 29), was first. The show — really three vignettes linked by a themes of loneliness, liberation, and play — won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical. Some were outraged, since nobody sings and the music, which ranges from Tchaikovsky to the Beach Boys, is pre-recorded. But whether contact is or isn’t a musical, it is an original entertainment, and for all its synchronistic slickness, it’s far from heartless. And at North Shore Music Theatre, where Stroman’s direction and choreography have been replicated by original cast member Tomé Cousin, the balance between showmanship and human need is maintained. Some adjustments have been made to accommodate NSMT’s theater in the round, but by and large, this is the contact Stroman made.

Commissioned to create an original work for Lincoln Center, Stroman and minimal-book writer John Weidman began with the title tale. They were inspired by Stroman’s late-night meander into a meat-packing-district pool hall doing after-hours duty as a swing-dance venue, and by the Ambrose Bierce story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” where a man in a noose escapes into dream. And “contact,” which comprises the entire second act, is the main event. The shorter first-act vignettes were invented to further the themes of “swinging” and the freeing power of dance.

The curtain raiser, “Swinging,” is a brief dance sketch with a Pinteresque twist, inspired by the 1768 Fragonard painting Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette and set to Stéphane Grappelli’s jazz rendering of Rodgers & Hart’s “My Heart Stood Still.” In a sylvan glen, a servant pushes a peach-clad lass on a swing as her aristocratic admirer reclines on the ground taking peeks up her dress. Flirtation ensues, but when the boyfriend goes off to fetch more wine, the swing becomes a trapeze for a high-flying copulative encounter between lady and valet. It’s a buoyant, gymnastic affair performed with soaring, ducking precision by Sean Ewing and Ariel Shepley before Jake Pfarr returns to add an unexpected flourish to the fantasy.

All's fair?

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:08:56 GMT

Shakespeare + Company’s The Ladies Man; Gloucester Stage’s Billy Bishop
If Viagra had existed in La Belle Époque, The Ladies Man would be a very short show.

THE LADIES MAN: Charles Morey finds the farce in Feydeau, but he’s no Stoppard.

If Viagra had existed in La Belle Époque, The Ladies Man would be a very short show. The catalyst for this roughhouse farce, which is freely adapted by Charles Morey from Georges Feydeau’s 1885 Tailleur pour dames, with details borrowed from the better-known Une puce à l’oreille (“A Flea in Her Ear”), is Dr. Hercule Molineaux’s sudden inability to hear his young wife whisper her favorite sweet nothing — the endearment “tigre” — without dissolving into a fit of giggles and detumescence. A modern-day Molineaux would just cry, “Physician heal thyself,” pop the pill, and put the tigre back in his tank.

But an instant cure would be as antithetical to farce as non-slammable doors. What the frantic genre demands is that the situation grow sicker and sillier as the miscommunications, missed connections, and misdemeanors mount to a frenzy — as they eventually do at Shakespeare & Company, where Morey’s 2007 Feydeau mix is in its East Coast premiere (in repertory through August 31). By the end of what must be Feydeau’s second act, the eight performers are shooting themselves in, out, and through set designer Carl Sprague’s classic five-door set-up like cancanning cannons. Alas, the play starts out as limp as the good doctor, and some of the troupe, perhaps trying too hard to perk it up, cross the line between rambunctious and heavy-handed.

Last summer many of the same suspects, including director Kevin G. Coleman, contributed to the delightful cocktail of slapstick and drollery that was the troupe’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing, which he adapted from Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár’s Játék a kastélyban (“The Play at the Castle”). The hope may have been that comedic lightning would strike twice. But Morey, artistic director of Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Theatre Company, is no Tom Stoppard, and there’s more bumptiously choreographed slapstick than drollery on view here — though there is some funny double entendre involving a large, tremulous soldier’s misunderstanding of instructions for constructing a riding habit. And Govane Lohbauer’s period costumes, each lace-trimmed puffed sleeve bigger than the last, are bright, sensuous fun.

The farce is slow to start. Molineaux has stayed out all night, and before he can knock at a window and be hauled in by his valet using an umbrella-to-the-rump technique, his young wife has discovered his absence. There’s a reasonable, mostly innocent explanation, but he’s no more going to give it than down that not-yet-invented Viagra. Besides, there is the sticky wicket that it involves an assignation with lusty patient Suzanne Aubin at the Moulin Rouge that he thought might improve his bedside manner but decided at the last minute not to keep.

Sleeping with the enemy

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:11:29 GMT

Tennessee Williams’s Milk Train stops in Hartford
Who knew the azure waters off the Amalfi Coast flowed into the River Styx?

GEORGIA VIA LOWELL: Olympia Dukakis sinks her teeth into Flora Goforth.

Who knew the azure waters off the Amalfi Coast flowed into the River Styx? They do in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, the underappreciated tragicomic allegory that in the early 1960s began Tennessee Williams’s long and demoralizing Rodney Dangerfield period — during which, trying to jump off the Streetcar everyone expected, he experimented with other forms, often garnering little respect. Milk Train, with which the playwright struggled through several revisions, is recognizably a Tennessee Williams play, with its rapacious old dowager, handsome young drifter, affected lyricism, and tug-of-war between flesh and spirit. But elements of surrealism, expressionism, even kabuki and The Madwoman of Chaillot, float in its Italianate stew — whose principal ingredient refuses to give up the ghost and jump into the pot. Artistic director Michael Wilson, concluding a 10-year Williams Marathon at Hartford Stage with Milk Train (through June 15), makes the disparate flavors meld.

Wilson has an uncanny affinity for Williams, even when the writer is dropping clunky symbols into a dark-comedy-infused contemplation of the Abyss. Here the director is abetted by Jeff Cowie’s set design, which conjoins gauze and faux concrete to create a sort of diaphanous fortress, and by Olympia Dukakis, who though she hails from Lowell sinks her teeth into “Georgia swamp bitch” Flora Goforth. The lady, having outlived three fabulously wealthy husbands before marrying a young poet who also went to his reward, resides in resplendent isolation in a compound of villas on a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. On her last legs, she is desperately dictating her disjointed memoirs at all hours of the day and night to abused and sleep-deprived secretary Blackie when a nice-looking, youngish man appears, having made his way up a steep goat path bearing a sack full of heavy metal and an air of mystery. Is he the Angel of Death or just a gigolo?

In fact there’s little doubt that Chris Flanders is the Reaper recast as a burnt-out stud who constructs mobiles, writes poetry, and has been the sympathetic companion of a string of wealthy old ladies as they wafted into Hamlet’s unknown country. But the formidable Mrs. Goforth is flat-out refusing to go forth, clinging to life and to lust with an alcohol-and-morphine-fueled grit. When she gets a load of Flanders, even when she hears about the “Angel of Death” nickname affixed to him, her reaction is “Okay, old girl, we’ll give it another whirl!”

Gone but not forgotten

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:12:59 GMT

She Loves Me at the Huntington; plus Way Theatre Artists’ The Memory of Water
Before there was eHarmony, there were harmony and disharmony.

SHE LOVES ME Nicholas Martin’s Huntington farewell has “A Romantic Atmosphere.”

Before there was eHarmony, there were harmony and disharmony, and Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick make hay of both in the evanescent 1963 Broadway musical She Loves Me (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through June 15). You know the drill from the show’s Internet-era edition, the film You’ve Got Mail, not to mention from the 1940 Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner and the 1949 Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime, all, like She Loves Me, drawn from Hungarian-born playwright Miklós László’s 1937 play Illatszertár, or Parfumerie. It’s clear László had a marketable idea in his pair of lonely hearts who, when not pouring their feelings into anonymous epistolary amore, work in the same shop and can’t stand each other.

Joe Masteroff’s book for She Loves Me hews to the original setting and period, Budapest in the 1930s (when cigarettes were kept in music boxes rather than relegated to the street), and it’s bolstered by the ebullient, Eastern European–accented score by the Fiddler on the Roof team of Bock and Harnick. The show wasn’t a huge hit in 1963, but original star Barbara Cook is still dining out on the Toscanini’s-worthy ditty “Vanilla Ice Cream.” And a 1993 Scott Ellis–directed Broadway revival reminded folks of the musical’s considerable charm. Now outgoing Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin makes it his sweet, antic swan song — one that will also serve as his “Good Morning, Good Day” to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he takes the artistic reins this summer.

It’s clear that Martin, who entered his Huntington tenure by filling the orchestra pit with water for a splashing Dead End, didn’t want to go out on a sour or anticlimactic note. He would appear to have shaken the Huntington piggy bank vigorously for this lavish if whimsical staging with 13-person orchestra floating above it like a blue heaven. Set designer James Noone provides the tall, revolving and dissolving parfumerie and environs, Robert Morgan the comically vivid yet well-tooled threads. Musical director Charlie Alterman conducts the able musicians on high. And Martin has cast the show to emphasize its dance of nervous romance and old-fashioned musical-comedy shtick, the latter provided not just by the appealing second and third bananas but by unlikely leading man Brooks Ashmanskas, a talented Nathan Lane–alike with a rubber baby face, a lovably awkward air, and a physical dexterity that turns the title tune into one giddy and gratifying caper.

Channeling Shakespeare

CAROLYN CLAY — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:33:48 GMT

Cardenio at the ART; King John at ASP
Cardenio , an early-17th-century play in which Shakespeare may well have had a hand, has been MIA since its debut and will doubtless remain so.

CARDENIO: This contemporary effort is tedious, meandering, and bereft of the poetry and rueful human insight the Bard wraps into his comedies.

Cardenio, an early-17th-century play in which Shakespeare may well have had a hand, has been MIA since its debut and will doubtless remain so. Eminent Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and dramaturgical collage artist Charles L. Mee have not rummaged in the back of some closet to unearth a missing masterpiece. To produce their retooled Cardenio, they instead took a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, with which they took a lovely vacation in Umbria and came up with a protracted contemporary comedy inspired by the Bard in general and the probable subject manner of Cardenio in particular. Some of the collaborators’ magical Umbrian holiday (the wine! the art! the pecorino!) does make it into the text — something one hopes does not qualify the authors for a tax write-off — but, alas, little of the magic itself.

You might think Greenblatt and Mee would be the perfect team for this stunt being pulled off by the American Repertory Theatre (at the Loeb Drama Center through June 8). Among Shakespeare specialists, Greenblatt has the literary, if not the literal, heft of Harold Bloom, and Mee is as prodigious a recycler as the Bard himself. Here the pair transplant a group of young Americans to a romantic Italian villa for a weekend wedding party that’s knocked awry by assorted Bardic devices augmented by one from Don Quixote in which a suspicious husband prevails upon his best friend (here named Will) to test his new wife’s fidelity by hitting on her. That set in motion, the groom’s Player-King-and-Queen parents turn up brandishing, they say, the lost play of Shakespeare, which they want the nuptial revelers to put on. They also have in tow an actress some of the crowd once knew who will conveniently round out a quartet of mix-and-rematch lovers reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s.

The play the parents are pushing, as Mom explains in a giddy but still awkward aria of exposition, is based on the Don Quixote–derived Cardenio that was performed at least twice by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, in 1613, and registered but not published in 1653, when it was attributed to Shakespeare and sometime collaborator John Fletcher. The manuscript was alleged to have resurfaced in 1727, when Lewis Theobald rewrote it as Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers. Indeed, part of what is presented here as the play within the play, performed (and panned) by the wedding party, is lifted straight from Double Falshood.

Enter triumphant

CAROLYN CLAY — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:38:46 GMT

This year’s Elliot Norton Awards
It was a Martin love fest Monday night at the 26th annual Elliot Norton Awards, Boston theater’s annual pat on the head.

MARTIN NUMBER TWO is headed for a summer with the Williamstown Theather Festival.

It was a Martin love fest Monday night at the 26th annual Elliot Norton Awards, Boston theater’s annual pat on the head. Tony- and Emmy-winning actress Andrea Martin was the guest of honor and introduced long-time colleague and outgoing Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin (no relation), who was celebrated on his way out the door with the Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence. Martin number one is currently playing Frau Brucher in the musical version of Young Frankenstein on Broadway. Martin number two, about to turn 70, takes over the reins of the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer.

Actor Jeremiah Kissel described the ebullient soon-to-be-ex-Huntington honcho as “the Typhoid Mary of joy.” But Nicky Martin’s was not the only happy face at this year’s Norties, which saw the bestowal of 19 other awards. Honored productions included My Fair Lady (outstanding visiting production, presented by Broadway Across America), the Huntington’s Present Laughter (outstanding production by a large company), New Repertory Theatre’s The Clean House (outstanding production by a midsize company), Boston Theatre Works’ Angels in America (outstanding production by a small company), Zeitgeist Stage Company’s epic The Kentucky Cycle (outstanding production by a fringe company), and American Repertory Theatre’s A Marvelous Party: The Noël Coward Celebration (outstanding musical production). The award for outstanding solo performance went to Nilaja Sun, who brought her one-woman, multicharacter piece about teaching tough in inner-city New York schools, No Child . . ., to ART.

Actors generally take to recognition, and some was handed out by the Norton Awards selection committee of critics (including this one). Thespian honorees included Alf alum Max Wright for his profound and zany turn in ART’s No Man’s Land; Nancy E. Carroll for the Huntington’s Brendan and Present Laughter; Maurice E. Parent for work with Boston Theatre Works, New Rep, and SpeakEasy Stage Company; and Rachel Harker for A Streetcar Named Desire and A Pinter Duet at New Rep and The Cutting at Stoneham Theatre. Lisa O’Hare, the crystalline Eliza Doolittle of the touring My Fair Lady, won kudos for outstanding musical performance.

Learning curves

CAROLYN CLAY — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:29:45 GMT

SpeakEasy’s The History Boys; Trinity’s Paris by Night
From Mr. Chips to Miss Jean Brodie, charismatic teachers have been the stuff of drama.

THE HISTORY BOYS: Alan Bennett’s Tony winner sets up a duel between knowledge for its own sweet sake and cogitating to a purpose.

The lineup for Boston Theater Marathon, Sunday, May 11, at the BCA's Calderwood Pavillion. By Jeffrey Gantz.

From Mr. Chips to Miss Jean Brodie, charismatic teachers have been the stuff of drama. But British writer Alan Bennett’s literate 2004 comedy The History Boys, which won the 2006 Tony Award for Best Play and was whittled into a film that same year, supplies more than one influential educator, setting up a duel between knowledge for its own sweet sake and cogitating to a purpose. In other words, it’s a debate that treads the same ground as that cynical joke alleging what an English major really needs to learn is how to say, “Would you like fries with that?” The erudite and eclectic Bennett, whose work runs the gamut from Beyond the Fringe to The Madness of George III, would certainly beg to differ.

The History Boys, which is enjoying a warm and astute New England premiere from SpeakEasy Stage Company (at the Calderwood Pavilion through June 7), is set at a Sheffield grammar school in the 1980s. Eight middle-class sixth-formers — the boys of the title — are being groomed to sit for the Oxbridge exams, their heads crammed by the eccentric, Auden-inspired Hector with language and his passion for it and by glib young interloper Irwin with an exam-taking strategy that boils down to being cleverly contrarian in order to stand out. Some have seen the play as a metaphor for 1980s Thatcherized Britain, and it does include a song by the Pet Shop Boys. But to me The History Boys is more redolent of the 1950s, when Bennett himself was a non-public-school-pedigreed Oxbridge candidate (and the inept homosexual groping by Hector might more likely have been regarded as harmless). Throw in Robin Williams and some old school ties and you have Dead Poets Society with a higher IQ.

Bennett’s script is characteristically rich, contrasting not just two but three teaching methods — the boys are also mentored by Dorothy Lintott, a female historian who, after a career spent sifting through “five centuries of masculine incompetence,” believes in both the randomness of history and a firm grounding in the facts. And the complex comedy is as chock with glimpses into the human heart as with philosophies of education. Sometimes the two mesh, as in a scene where a subdued Hector walks the most sensitive student, Posner, through Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge,” conveying both its poetic significance and his own intimations of insignificance. True, the play is talky (an hour was cut turning it into the film), but what witty, provocative talk it offers — not to mention the snippets from old movies, the music hall, and, in director Scott Edmiston’s rendition, Adam Ant.

Musical chairs

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:04:02 GMT

Dessa Rose, Whizzin’, The Drowsy Chaperone
Perhaps only the team that triumphed with Ragtime would attempt a musical based on Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose .

DESSA ROSE: Leigh Barrett and Uzo Aduba pack an emotional wallop.

Perhaps only the team that triumphed with Ragtime would attempt a musical based on Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rose. After all, Ragtime has three intersecting stories to work into its swirl of narrative and music, whereas this one has only two: one of an abandoned wife, the other of a female slave sentenced to the gallows. Stephen Flaherty & Lynn Ahrens’s 2005 musical, in its New England premiere from New Repertory Theatre (at the Arsenal Center for the Arts through May 18), tells both. And it enriches the material with some powerful hymn- and spiritual-based, even ragtime-inflected, songs. True, there is something preachy in the musical’s sledgehammer insistence that the horror of slavery not disappear from “living memory,” and something cheapening in its reduction of the yearning for freedom to a wish upon a star. But despite its flaws, Dessa Rose packs an emotional wallop, especially when the fierce Uzo Aduba is throwing the punch.

“We are descended,” the opening number begins, “from a strong line of women.” Two of them, the Caucasian Ruth and the African-American Dessa Rose, proceed to narrate the story of their intersection one summer in the 1840s. Ruth was a disappointed Charleston belle, waltzed off her feet by a gambler, then left to mind his half-completed rural estate and their infant daughter. Dessa Rose, a 16-year-old slave who lashed out when her lover was killed by their nasty master, proceeded to lead an uprising that got her sentenced to the gallows.

Moldering in a cellar cell until her baby (valuable property) could be born, Dessa Rose shared her story with a white journalist before a jailbreak brought her to the farm absently presided over by the passive Ruth that had become a refuge for runaway slaves. Initially resentful and mistrustful, the two young women eventually became part of a dangerous money-making scheme that involved the bogus sale, escape, and resale of their mostly black contingent. Stooped and barking, the elderly Ruth and Dessa Rose tell the story, which is enacted by the same actresses as their younger selves.

The double skein can be confusing, and with time out for some powerful music making, the tale necessarily becomes sketchy, the two main characters turning on a dime from trash-talking competitors to bonded co-conspirators. But there are some powerful performances and gorgeous voices deployed at New Rep, where Rick Lombardo’s production unfolds on a multi-level structure of slats backed by vivid skies. And there are a couple of knockout numbers, the better of them being the first-act finale, “Twelve Children,” in which Aduba’s Dessa Rose sings to her infant daughter about her own mother’s brood, the sold, the dead, the escaped, each etched by name in that “living memory” so oft evoked.

Winner takes all

CAROLYN CLAY — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:04:34 GMT

The Four of Us at Merrimack Rep; Spin at Zeitgeist Stage Company
Itamar Moses takes the buddy vehicle and twists it early and often in The Four of Us.

THE FOUR OF US: Is that sex-toy bear the key to Ben’s $2 million advance?

Itamar Moses takes the buddy vehicle and twists it early and often in The Four of Us, a smart meta-theatrical comedy that opened Off Broadway in March and has already made it to Merrimack Repertory Theatre (through May 11). For starters, the play is a two-hander; the other two title entities are either the characters’ egos or the selves they used to be. We meet fledgling playwright David and first-time novelist Benjamin at a celebratory lunch — Benjamin has just sold his first book. But these two twentysomethings met each other at a summer camp for rock-star wanna-bes, becoming fast friends at 17. Having traded in one kind of keyboard for another, the two now literary lights aspiring to flicker have continued to support each other — until Ben’s switch is suddenly cranked up to mega-wattage. Dave is all congrats until the sale price for Ben’s tome is announced: $2 million. Dave’s first reaction is to spew the water he has just sipped all over his friend. His second is to wonder whether such success and lucre won’t be “totally spiritually corrupting.” And so the worm begins to turn.

The Four of Us has garnered attention in part due to speculation that it is a poison pen aimed at long-time friend Jonathan Safran Foer, whose 2002 tome Everything Is Illuminated did indeed garner the kind of cash and acclaim that might make a still-struggling pal gag. The play almost certainly is inspired by the Moses/Foer alliance, right down to the optioning of Foer’s first book by a famous movie star (Liev Schreiber). But this cleverly constructed dual portrait of the artist is no attack. It’s an engaging series of snaps of two gifted, still maturing guys caught in the flux of confidence and self-doubt. That one is the tortoise, stolidly bent on the finish line, and the other the hare, running the race in part to wave to the crowd, hardly reflects badly on the guy in the shell.

Moses’s previously best-known work is the historically inspired, fugue-structured Bach at Leipzig. This one is a hipper cousin of Donald Margulies’s elegant portrait of literary mentor and mentee, Collected Stories. But Moses works into the dynamic between creative friends an interesting discussion of the inwardness of fiction writing versus the sometimes dauntingly collaborative process of writing for the stage that includes a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the young-playwright character, melting down in the wake of a badly received regional-theater production, denounces the folks who’ve just put on his play as a “gantlet of morons.”