Moving Day

"Should I stay or should I go now?" the Clash so memorably asked. The answer is clear for the characters in this play: Leave and never come back.

Emily tries to stall Max for some reason.

Reviewed by Ryan Max

Poor Max has had a rough time of it recently: his adulterous wife left him on account of his heroin habit, and his sister Emily keeps guilt-tripping him for not visiting their late mother in the hospital. He seems like the perfect candidate for a fresh start, a "moving day," if you will. But Emily doesn't want him to leave their ancestral Greenpoint home; she wants to take care of him, knowing that he’s the kind of guy only a sister could love. It is easy to understand her stance but much harder to sympathize with it, given Frank Nigro’s portrayal of the man: even at his most intimate he shouts at characters like a game-show host attempting to sell the banal twists of the plot. Tina Barone, who plays Emily, brings enough nuance to balance Max's grating performance, and the other two actors that round out the cast repeat this unfortunate pattern: as sleazy neighbor, Douglas Reid is just as inept as Nigro, while Max's erstwhile wife Melinda, played by Christie Zampella, almost shines enough to compensate for him. But not quite.

These wildly uneven performances are weighed down even further by the hackneyed concerns of the story in Moving Day. Writer-director Helene Montagna indulges in the most cloyingly symbolic imagery imaginable, and even the characters themselves seem to know it: On the umpteenth time Max compares the boxes he is packing to emotional baggage of some sort, his sister Emily shoots him down: "these metaphors aren't helping." And she's absolutely right: the play isn't strong enough to rise above its fairly basic conventions. In fact, amidst the wayward tone and uneven performances that dominate the show, the Greenpoint home in front of which the action unfolds might be the most skillfully rendered aspect of the production, right down to its green shake siding and wobbly banister. References to skeletons in closets and lines like "Running, moving, what's the difference?" make one hope that the play could be somewhat self-aware regarding its familiar territory. Alas.

The show falters on motions both large and small to the point that even surefire intrigues like adultery, lust, betrayal and death simply fall flat. A moving day, similar to its well-trod cousins like the wedding and the funeral, requires a huge amount of originality and cleverness to make it worthwhile, and it's more than this sincere little play can muster.

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Moving Day (70 minutes, no intermission)

The Kraine Theater (85 E. 4th Street)

Tickets (theatermania.com): $20

Remaining performances: Thurs 4/29-Sat 5/1, 8pm

Caroline, Or Change

Park Slope's Gallery Players pick the perfect time to revive Tony Kushner's show about the pain of change and progress.

Photo by Bella Muccari.

Reviewed by Ryan Max

Caroline, or Change is a musical about the Civil Rights Movement that isn't really about the Civil Rights Movement. True, it is set in 1963 Louisiana and centers on a white family's miserable black maid. But Caroline lacks the obvious villains, segregationists and fire hoses that have come to signify the fight for civil rights. In place of a Good vs. Evil battle for men’s souls, the script (by Tony Kushner) provides an ever-shifting balance of allegiances and emotions. Can we blame petulant Noah for manipulating Caroline, or is he just a lonely young boy that lost his mother? Or is stubborn, prickly Caroline the source of her own ills, even though her stubbornness is inseparable from the stability that shields her family from the worst of Southern racism? Park Slope's Gallery Players chose a perfect time for this alluring revival which shows how painful change can be, even for those it is intended to help.

Caroline is the maid to a left-leaning family of Jewish transplants from New York City. The family consists of a young boy, Noah, his clarinet-obsessed father, and his father's new wife (Noah’s mother recently died of cancer). The new wife’s attempts to ingratiate herself to Noah and Caroline ignite much of the play’s conflict, demonstrating the show’s ability to distill tension even from banal or well-intentioned attempts at change. All the while Noah's father sits idly playing his clarinet, and Caroline—Noah's preferred replacement for his mother—grows ever more bitter as she toils away for too little pay.

Mr. Kushner brilliantly uses the unfolding conflict to open our eyes to an unexpected victim of change: those who have found a way to survive in lousy circumstances. And Caroline, played gloriously by Teisha Duncan, is the perfect example. She works for a sympathetic but unhelpful family (Noah starts getting an allowance even after they say they can’t raise her $30 a week salary). She can't afford to take her kids to the dentist, and she left her husband long ago. But people around her are ready for change. Her joyful teenage daughter is intoxicated by the messages of the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. But her daughter's anger, however just, seems to Caroline like a dangerous waste of time. A fellow maid who goes to college and wears fancy shoes strikes the white-clad Caroline as too flashy. To her, change is not necessarily synonymous with progress; change can just as easily mean forgetting who you are or needlessly risking your way of life—it may not be ideal, but at least it's surviving.

Despite being deeply contradictory, facets of character like Caroline's stubborn dignity, her daughter's fiery idealism, and Noah's callow machinations each command our sympathy at one time or another. And Caroline, marvelous Caroline, stands at the crux of these codependent and competing attitudes. Her daughter would not have the luxury of idealism without her mother's hard work (something she realizes in a beautiful moment when she affirms "My mother is a maid" with palpable pride), but if Caroline stands up to her employers’ condescension, she could imperil her own family’s well being. The puzzle of these shifting allegiances and irreconcilable views makes for a viewing experience endlessly more rewarding than the black and white dramas we reasonably expect from stories about the segregationist South. When Caroline finally snaps under the pressure of these competing aims, its makes for a visceral, mesmerizing solo performance by Ms. Duncan, the sort rarely matched in theater today.

The format of the play, performed on Edward T. Morris’ three-tiered stage, blends the action organically, and the lighting is skillfully handled by Mike Billings. The music, by Jeanine Tesori, makes many strong moments even stronger by bypassing the intellect and cutting straight to the gut. Use the restroom during the intermission and you're sure to hear someone humming the tune that closes out the first half.

Caroline is very good—great, even—but falls just short of perfect. Though the acting and writing sidestep many of the pitfalls that stud the path of such an iconic period and its cliché-heavy characters, it is not a play that is concerned with illuminating its specific circumstances. It is a story about "Change" in the wider sense almost more than it is about "Caroline," but it is Caroline that gets the more skillful rendering; the stock characters still have a hard time transcending their circumstances and by show’s end, change, and how we are supposed to feel about its wonderful and frightening effects, is still just a vague notion.

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Caroline, or Change (2 hours; One Intermission)
The Gallery Players Theatre (199 W. 14th St., Brooklyn, NY)
TICKETS: $18; $14 Seniors and Children Under 12 (www.ovationtix.com)
PERFORMANCES: Through Feb. 21; Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, and Sun 3 PM

A British Subject

As part of the Brits Off Broadway Festival at 59E59 Theaters, a beautifully produced play shines a harsh light on how effortlessly modern politics can wreck the lives of those that it finds inconvenient.



Reviewed by Ryan Max

The great irony of international politics is how effortlessly it can destroy the people it is, in theory anyway, intended to protect. Lives are wrecked between all those press conferences and handshakes and in A British Subject, the multi-talented Nichola McAuliffe has written and acted in a gripping (and true) portrayal of one man's fight to stop the geopolitical gears from grinding yet another person into dust.

The man at risk of being lost here is Mirza Tahir Hussain, a dual British and Pakistani citizen. In 1988, the then 18 year old Hussain was jailed for killing a cab driver in self-defense while visiting family in Pakistan. By the time any Western press outlets notice Hussain's plight, he has been on death row for 18 years. Don Mackay, a journalist for England's The Daily Mirror (and husband of McAuliffe), flies to Pakistan out of professional obligation but becomes obesessed with telling Hussain's story and winning his freedom.

Maybe it's a given that Don Mackay would be painted as a sympathetic character, seeing as his wife wrote the play, but Tom Cotcher's portrayal still works perfectly to get the audience behind his quest to free Hussain from prison. He is easily identifiable for a Western audience as a stand in for the average apathetic observer: glib, sarcastic, and numb to the horror stories that flood the media.

It is only when he meets Hussain face to face, in the play's riveting centerpiece, that Mackay's feelings shift. After he artfully gains access to interview Hussain--the first journalist to even attempt the feat in his 18 years on death row--Kulvinder Ghir, the actor who plays Hussain, gives a performance of languid motions and whispers that cut straight to Mackay's heart.

What allows the play to be engrossing, funny, and heartbreaking all at once is the near-perfect production. Lighting and sound are crafted for maximum effect, but restrained enough to skitter on the edge of melodrama without surrendering to it. A striated square of harsh light with a background of faintly buzzing flies transports the audience seamlessly from, say, the stuffy British ministry offices to Hussain's Pakistani prison cell.

In Hussain’s cell, the background sounds of traffic and honking that washed over the stage when Mackay was outside on the street fade, and the low buzzing of flies in the prison slowly gives way to a crushing silence. Hussain's words are so soft and slow, and the absence of any other sound so striking, that the audience becomes painfully aware of its own noise. Coughs and wheezes (it's winter in New York) become deafening as Hussain details the horrors of his life in prison. The effective restraint in tech and performance also extends to the dialogue: Hussain doesn't speak in easy prison cliches such as the stench, or beatings, or boredom. Instead, he explains how they can't even play chess anymore, because "with nothing else to do, people cannot bear to lose."

The second half of the play, dominated by Mackay's passionate campaign to publicize Hussain's plight, struggles to match the first half's breathless pace and palpable tension. At times it does, like when Mackay's wife (a role which has McAuliffe playing herself) shouts at someone explaining that “at least” Hussain’s execution isn’t until New Year's Eve: "While you're singing Auld Lang Syne, he'll be evacuating his bowels at the end of a rope."

That the play fails to wring any real drama out of the quest to free Hussain can be partially attributed to the facts of the story: the efforts took place mostly in Britain, mostly between people who weren’t in as desperate (or interesting) situations as Hussain himself. Transitions between scenes may still be seamless, but the locations to which they transport the audience are hardly worth visiting. Absent the tension of the first half, focus is drawn to the play's weaker themes, such as the relative merits of faith and reason, prayer and action as a means to spring Hussain. When these limp themes take center stage, it’s akin to the background sounds becoming the main dialogue, and it’s an odd position that the second half puts you in: wishing you were back in prison with Hussain.


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A British Subject (75 minutes; no intermission)
59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street)
TICKETS: $35
PERFORMANCES (through Jan. 3; no performances Jan 1): Tue 7:15, Wed-Fri 8:15 (except 12/31 @ 7:15), Sat 2:15 & 8:15, Sun 3:15 & 7:15

The Traveling Players

The opening show of La Mama's 48th season, a play-within-a-play modern adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women by puppet savant Theodora Skipitares, makes for a visually impressive, if uneven, production.



Reviewed by Ryan Max

One by one, four enormous, gorgeous puppets rumble onto the stage. As each emerges at intervals throughout they play, she delivers a monologue detailing cruelties she has suffered, and then gives birth to a life-size puppet (strapped to an actor) that performs scenes from Euripides's The Trojan Women. The four giant puppets each represent a modern-day feminist: three from Africa and one, a young girl named Shamsia, from the Middle East. Shamsia's tale, which appeared in The New York Times earlier this year, is a harrowing one: on her way to school one day, bandits on motorcycles stop her and ask her if she is on her way to school and then spray her in the face with acid. Coming from a 13-foot-tall puppet, the monologue has an arresting and surreal sense of doom.

But her story also illuminates the serious pitfalls of hastily tying an ancient play with ripped-from-the-headlines vignettes. The Traveling Players, in its highly incongruous halves, fails to make a good case for its appropriation of Trojan Women. The monologues from the giant puppets and Euripides' tale are connected only very loosely: they are both about women being treated like dirt. With few other complementary aspects in the two pieces, little is gained from uniting the two in such an intimate theatrical space.

Deficiencies aside, the delights of the play—and there are many—are mostly visual. The lighting, alternating between stark, cold tones and warmer hues, is a gorgeous compliment to Theodora Skipitares’ hypnotic puppets. The life-sized puppets acting out The Trojan Women, affixed to actors wearing dark, full-body suits, are manipulated so gracefully they take on lives of their own. Hecuba, in particular, is entrancing as the fallen queen of Troy. And then there are Ms. Skipitares’ 13-feet-tall puppets, the stunning giants that sermonize about modern horrors faced by women. Their large, unwieldy nature relegates them to the background, but their looming presence is inescapable.

The play also attempts to integrate some more scattershot elements with varied success. The musical score, best described as "electro-tribal," provides a perfect atmosphere. An entertaining mini-play, acted out with small wooden puppets on sticks, tells the tale of a group of African women doing battle with the Chevron oil company. But a carnival barker that introduces each of the giant puppets before they roll out from backstage clashes with the solemn tone of the stories he sets up.

In the end the lack of purpose overwhelms the obvious skill and craftsmanship of the production. The very lyrical, deliberate cadences of the Greek play do not rest well alongside the more visceral, modern stories of the mistreatment of women in Africa and Afghanistan. When each monologue ends—by far the stronger half of The Traveling Players—and another sequence from The Trojan Women commences, it grows more and more difficult not to feel disappointed by the unnecessary and unimaginative portrayal of Euripides’ play. The friction between the play’s dual parts is exacerbated by its increasingly didactic scenes, like the one in which a woman in police custody cannot distinguish the stench of her own menstrual blood from that of a nearby animal carcass. But when the play ends and you just can’t shake those true-to-life monologues, it becomes clear that it is a rare case in which the facts outshine the legend.

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The Traveling Players (1 hour; no intermission)

The Annex at La MaMa ETC (66 East 4th Street)
Performances: Concluded October 25

Fringe/Poppy!: An Enchanted Evening with Poppy Bulova

Poppy Bulova, a lighthearted parody of a hardscrabble, down-and-out lounge singer, uses her hauteur and strange life story to charm her audience into the adoring fans she firmly believes she deserves.

Poppy

Reviewed by Ryan Max

Ms. Poppy Bulova—a performer of incredible talent, fame, and self-regard—would not have liked the scene just outside of her recent performance. As happens with the venue-sharing turf, a large crowd of theatergoers was huddled in the lobby, waiting for another show. When the lobby had emptied, only a handful of people remained to see Poppy!: An Enchanted Evening with Poppy Bulova. How could they possibly be so near and still resist the powerful allure of Ms. Bulova? As she makes very clear, she is “much more interesting” than just about anyone else.

The lucky few that remain fill the small tables around her stage, and the intimate, lounge-y atmosphere is all the better for it. For Poppy, any sort of captive audience will do. The fairly bare space (a microphone, a piano, and its player) makes sure that when Poppy enters wrapped in a bright Asian gown, all eyes are on her. After some cursory introductions, she launches into a beguiling hour of stories and songs that detail her very strange life. Her ambiguously accented English (think Paris by way of the Ukraine) has a sweet, disarming quality, so much so that you hardly mind when you are lumped in with “all of the small people…who don’t really matter,” as Poppy so gently puts it.

Lillie Jayne—who, in addition to playing Poppy, also wrote, directed, and produced the show—keeps things lighthearted, even when detailing Poppy’s oddly tragic life (“toddler alcoholism and amphetamine addiction”). She also saves Poppy from being a character of Mel Brooksian (that’s a thing, right?) hyperbole. The engaging interludes between songs—in which Poppy explains her experience of puberty (“I make tits”), the origin of her exotic accent (“an island out in the Atlantic Ocean…Long Island”), and her eventual rise to superstardom in films that don’t exist—blend very organically into the show. Songs may be inspired directly by, say, her proclivity to alcoholism (“I drink to get drunk”) or spring from more obscure sources. Basically, whatever Poppy feels like singing about. And throughout them all, it is the clear disconnect between her view and the reality of her situation that makes the show so ceaselessly charming.

The songs that form the backbone of Poppy’s story—tapped out on the piano by her one time lover Fagen Beauregard (a mostly silent Michael O’Dell, who also arranged the music)—consist of simple, catchy melodies. But while the music may be simple and Poppy may be a parody, Ms. Jayne’s voice is legitimately gorgeous. She can alternate from a strong warble on the more rambunctious songs, to an intense Bjork-like whisper on the unexpectedly poignant “Black-Eyed Soldier.”

Toward the end of An Evening with Poppy Bulova, Poppy describes one of her many encounters with obscure (yet impressive, she assures us) Hollywood figures. He tells Poppy that one of her recent shows was awful because it “didn’t seem regretless.” And he is dead on about what makes Poppy so easy to enjoy: it is freeing to surrender your time to someone so sublimely confident and convinced of their own fame and glamour, regardless of whether they deserve to be. She is the beginning and end of the show’s strengths, weaknesses, charm and appeal, and that is why this review will end right where it began: with Ms. Poppy Bulova.


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FringeNYC 2009: Poppy!: An Enchanted Evening with Poppy Bulova (1 hour)
CSV Cultural and Education Center, Flamboyan (107 Suffolk St.)
Performances: Concluded August 29

Benny

The subject of quite a few episodes of Oprah gets a more courageous portrayal.

Anna and her mother say "cheese."Photo Courtesy JMTC


Reviewed by Ryan Max

Benny, a new play written by Suzanne Bachner, is a familiar story, told in fragments: a child decides to search for her biological parents against the protests of her loving adopted parents. But the similarities to any tear-jerking identity quests end there, as we get a far more nuanced and intimate portrait of Anna (a.k.a. Benny, what she was called as a baby in foster care). Her first meeting with her biological mother—the point at which Oprah would break out the Kleenexes—falls comically flat. From there, it is Anna’s often unsuccessful relationships with the men in her life (father, therapist, lover[s]) that really make the glimpses we see swirl into a compelling picture.

Benny’s structural conceit is nothing new. Chopped up narratives have been in vogue ever since Memento tore through town, and, since then, lots of lesser writers have used it to liven up otherwise dull stories. So it is a great relief that Benny takes a typically melodramatic storyline, adds truly funny, intimate, and disturbing moments, and then chops it up. It’s a recipe that works well, for the most part.

Dispensing with a smooth, linear narrative forces Benny to live and die on the strength of its component pieces. This sometimes hurts the play: momentum is lost between scenes that have no direct narrative link, so strong moments are swiftly extinguished. Additionally, each scene is forced to operate like a two-man one-act, leaning heavily on a conflict confined to a single moment. And yet, these isolated scenes often work in Benny’s favor. The scenes that trace the arc of her relationship with Shane, her husband, are almost painfully intimate. From their first stages of romance (Anna kissing the dimples in Shane’s back), to their wrenching separation, each glimpse into their relationship is both illuminating and deeply affecting.

Creative staging and direction make other scenes just as impacting. For example, one scene with Max (the infinitely hateable blowjob enthusiast / family friend who starts an inappropriate relationship with Anna when she is a 12-year-old girl and he is a much older lawyer) has Anna speaking to both Max and her father but with each man occupying a parallel plane within the play. That is, both are on stage, but while she speaks to one, the other is placed in a sort of suspended animation. This yields some vital theater: at one point, the condescending creep Max holds her hand in one time while she is talking to her father in another, but the moments exist simultaneously onstage. Her father, despite his flaws, cares deeply about Anna, and it’s very disturbing to watch Max caress her hair while she spills her guts to her dad.

Any bildungsroman has to choose which events from the protagonist’s life are worth portraying. Here, the impact of such choices is magnified by Benny’s structure. Because the story pops in and out of Anna’s life, we only see the points of high drama and miss the smaller moments in between. At one extreme, they fall in love; at another, he comes home drunk and hits her: there’s little to flesh out the relationship. This often works in Benny’s favor. The play suggests arcs that allow the audience to fill in the blanks, and is never so vague to be meaningless. But occasionally it leaves the audience cold, for the same reason that it’s easier to watch strangers divorce than to see your own parents do the same.

Given our limited glimpses into Anna’s life, it’s a shame that many scenes fail to enrich her story. Repeat viewings of Anna struggling through meetings with her biological mother, for instance, flatten things out. Thankfully, Benny manages to escape the dull fate of so much daytime talk-show fodder, thanks to the talent of its creators and cast. That brings the tally to something like, Good Stories: 1; Oprah: A zillion. Keep fighting the good fight, Ms. Bachner.

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Benny (90 Minutes; no intermission)
June Havoc Theatre (312 W. 36th St. 1st Floor)
TICKETS [www.ovationtix.com]: $15 Students and Seniors, $18 General Admission
PERFORMANCES: Saturday 8/01 @ 3pm

Numbers

A short play filled with witty dialogue takes a turn at picking apart the pretensions and cruelty of the upper class.

Reviewed by Ryan Max

From the first glimpse of the all-girls prep-school dorm room set, to the first word out of these quick-witted Brits, it’s pretty clear that Numbers isn’t about how righteous and generous the upper class is. The all-female cast hashes out this tale of class tension in flurries of finely calibrated dialogue: the audience laughs exactly when they are supposed to, and the pause after each precision-guided line ("If she can't do anything better with her hair, how can she do anything better with the school?") is just long enough to let the laughter rise and fall without breaking the rhythm.

The three girls that we are introduced to first--Katherine, Isabel, and Jennifer--are deeply involved in discussions of what Katherine will do when she is named head girl of the boarding school in which they reside. They play little games where they take turns shouting out future plans and husbands' careers ("Married to a painter!"). And about half an hour into the hour long play, they are more or less in the same place that they started: prep school girls chattering about exactly what people imagine prep school girls chatter about.

Only in the play's second half does the expected comeuppance interrupt their little orgy of arrogance. Their fourth roommate, Hetty, enters and reveals that, in fact, she has been chosen as the head girl. Hetty here stands in for the lower classes: she is quieter, nerdier, and not as obsessed with status as her soon-to-be-former friends. After their initial shock turns into disdainful and increasingly cruel attacks against Hetty, the girls begin to turn on one another.

All of this drama may be intended to speak to the vitriolic response of assumed privilege and power when it is questioned or challenged. The way that Hetty gets Jennifer to defect to her side (by using her older brother, on whom Jennifer has a crush, as bait) may be intended to reveal how flimsy their convictions are, and how self-serving their motives. But, much like the MacGuffin stolen diary that the girls use against Hetty, these devices are too quick and easy of narrative fixes. They may be great tools to reveal the ugly side of those who use them, but they don't work so well as tools to make a compelling story.

Numbers is an enjoyable play, full of deft dialogue and acting. But with a central conflict that is too long in coming and a narrative pushed along by easy fixes, it falls short of the scathing indictment of class pretension it set out to be.

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Numbers (1 Hour; No Intermission)
Where Eagles Dare Studio Blackbird (347 W. 36th St., 13th Fl.)
Tickets: No Performances Remaining at the Midtown International Theater Festival

The Roses on the Rocks

A play about a teenage Latina prostitute confronting her dead pimp’s wife is a flawed yet surprisingly tense and moving study of love and power, despite what the synopsis makes it seem.

Reviewed by Ryan Max

A 14-year-old, HIV positive, brassy Latina prostitute confronting her dead pimp's wife is either the premise for the year's edgiest comedy or most melodramatic tear-jerker. Luckily, in the able hands of writer Ellen Boscow and director Richard Caliban, this play becomes a tale of ego, power, love and (possible) redemption as two women—Peggy, the wife, and Blossom, the teenager girl—try to carve their own happy experiences from the sordid mess thrust upon them.

Blossom first appears attempting suicide in grand fashion, pointing a knife at her chest on a dark and stormy rock (the storm courtesy of flashing lights and fantastic live cello and violin accompaniment). But the ghost of Bill, her pimp, appears and stops her. Bill, dressed somewhat like a pirate in a long coat and boa, appears benevolent, preventing the young girl from going through with her brash act. But the ambiguity of Bill's motives are what give the first act its tense power, which seems almost inadvertent for a play that embraces such a strong feminist viewpoint (and for a playhouse that keeps copies of the journal "Estrogenius" behind glass in the lobby). The man is the most intriguing and powerful character: the women remain beholden even to his ghost.

Following his intervention, Bill requests (nay, demands!) that Blossom visit his wife, Peggy, who is as white as can be. Now Bill's fun begins: at first it looks like he’s making amends for his double life by reconciling his prize prostitute (of many, we learn) with his doting, bland, wife. He appears only to Blossom (he refuses to say exactly why) and urges her to slowly transgress more and more of his wife's delicate boundaries. Peggy is in mourning, and hence not very welcoming to Blossom's assertions that, no, she was not one of Bill's charges at the shelter, but in fact his whore and sex toy. As Bill whispers these bombs—for instance, he thought Peggy’s pussy was too hairy—to his unsuspecting widow (through Blossom’s ear), his pleasure becomes clearer and more disturbing.

The actor playing Peggy, Rachel Jones, acts out the naive wife's shock and unbearable discomfort with incredible realism. She trails off, fakes smiles, and fumbles for words so evocatively that it is hard not to run on stage and give her a hug. For her part, Laura Montes, asBlossom, plays the bombastic Latina stereotype with unexpected subtlety, letting her prickly attitude soften ever so slowly as Bill's grip on her loosens. And Scott Sowers, as Bill, is an asshole, and he is very good at it.

From here, The Roses on the Rocks becomes a desperate struggle between the three characters. Peggy strives to redeem her naiveté and implied complicity with Bill by legally adopting Blossom and embracing this embodiment of Bill's dark secret life. Blossom slowly and reluctantly fights to wrest control of her own life from Bill. And Bill, despite his claims that death has made him a superhero, fights to manipulate both women into surrendering their happiness and love to him and him alone.

The first act’s struggle and shifting loyalties between characters make for potent material. In particular, Bill's attention toward Blossom grows more and more disturbing. Imagine watching a balding middle-aged man with a gravely voice (and dressed vaguely as a pirate) grope the teenager, telling her he owns her and describing how he once ripped the clothes off her "slender, nasty, little-girl doll body."

Other scenes aren’t as intriguing. In one that comes dangerously close to hysterical and sentimental melodrama, we learn that Peggy and Bill once had a child of their own, but it only lived for one day. "Dear God, make our baby cry and smile again," Peggy pleads. In this dreamy sequence (it’s often hard to tell what’s real and what is not) Bill puts on a devil mask and makes a deal with her: he will take the baby (not coincidentally named Blossom) to hell for 15 years at which point she will judge whether Peggy is fit to be her mother or not. The whole deal with the Devil is somewhat confusing and forced. The audience now has to piece together the bet with the devil rather than absorbing the truly fascinating stuff of Bill's fight for power over these two women from beyond the grave. This along with Bill's habit of breaking out in rhyming soliloquy ("Urchin venom spines that gleam / Fish heads dipped in gasoline") are the most serious threats to the play's integrity. They swerve the action between surrealism and the cheesily supernatural, the latter of which reduces the strength of the former. It’s no surprise that the strongest thread in the play—the domestic drama of the milquetoast Peggy struggling to smile through the adoption and acceptance of Blossom, and Bill's attempts to derail both of their attempts at happiness—is firmly grounded in reality of human relationships.

Each character's quest for self-determinacy and control is focused on a central image: Peggy's is based on a creepy doll named "First Bloom" (the play is heavy on the flower imagery), which was made from her child's death mask and her own hair for $15,000—the same price Bill paid for his own Blossom. Blossom's quest is to reclaim what she was before Bill bought her at age 9, and manifests in memories of her mother, played by an actress who dreamily swirls on stage and provides her daughter a benevolent balance to Bill's violently sexual machinations. And Bill's quest amounts to shattering these dreams for both women, often quite literally, especially when it seems like they are becoming closer and comforting one another.

Bill's attempts to turn each woman into a controllable puddle of dependency become more and more fevered, only to suddenly dry up. The second act falls into a predictable second act and loses the seething tension of the first act. The first act was a rose growing, against all odds, from a rock. The second act is more like finding moss there instead.

Once Bill transforms from slyly sinister to outright barbaric, the power drains quickly from the play. He makes the last scenes a trying combination of brutality and boredom. Thankfully the lingering strength of the first act is never totally erased, and the actors are strong enough to keep the audience invested in the fate of the characters. But it is ironic that a play so committed to its feminist message ultimately leans on the male character for so much its narrative force. The finale is mercifully short and vague about the outcome of the battle for Blossom’s soul, but it is a shame that such a strong start couldn’t be followed up with a better finish.

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The Roses on the Rocks (1 hour 40 min; One Intermission)
Manhattan Theater Source (177 MacDougal Street)
Tickets (http://www.ovationtix.com): $18
Performances: Wednesday - Saturday @8pm through June 27, with additional performance June 27 at 2pm