Theatre in Review: Summer Shorts 5, Series B (59E59)

There's nothing like the moment when a sleepy evening suddenly comes to life. In the second edition of this year's Summer Shorts, a collection of one-acts, it comes during Will Scheffer's The Green Book. Rebecca Shull is Sheila, a former actress and the elderly matriarch of a very troubled Jewish-American family. Burdened with dementia and aphasia, she is confined to a wheelchair; given her inability to speak and lack of affect, it's almost impossible to know how aware she is -- a good thing, since her children are melting down in front of her.

Suddenly -- for reasons too complicated to go into here -- she stands up, addresses us, and narrates a kind of Yiddish-inflected version of the tale of Red Riding Hood. It's a spellbinding few minutes; in her quiet, intimate, deeply sardonic telling -- you feel as if she is addressing you and you alone --- this classic bedtime story bristles with fatalism, a sense that doom is just around the corner. It climaxes with an authentic frisson -- and then it's over. The actress returns to her wheelchair, her face goes dead, her posture goes slack, her eyes roll around, and you sit there, wondering if what you just saw really happened. It's a moment of sharply pointed writing elevated by great acting, and it's enough to restore your faith in the short-play format.

That faith is otherwise sorely tested by the evening's program, beginning with the rest of The Green Book. There's plenty of interesting material here-- too much, in fact. The family in Scheffer's play is roiled by critical illness, sibling rivalry, homosexuality, parent-child bickering, a traffic accident, a whopper of a secret, and, as if that weren't enough, the Holocaust. There are also pauses for lyrical passages, shifting points of view, and fantasy sequences. Eugene O'Neill himself couldn't handle it all -- certainly not in 40 minutes -- and Scheffer doesn't aid the cause by acting as his own director. There's an absence of tension or dramatic build, and he draws awkward performances from Neal Huff and Christian Campbell as troubled spouses trying to get to the bottom of the chaos in the household of Huff's parents. Shull can take care of herself, as does Jodie Markell, as Huff's stupendously passive-aggressive sister.

At least The Green Book contains real conflict at its core; the rest of the program is anorexically thin. In Jose Rivera's Lessons for an Unaccustomed Bride, an innocent young virgin, somewhere in the Caribbean, visits her local witch in order to get the goods on her cheating boyfriend. Nothing much happens as the author draws odd-couple distinctions between the two women, letting them spar a bit and tell a few stories before settling down to dinner and an evening of sex education. If Shirley A. Rumierk and Socorro Santiago are less then believable, blame the meandering script and folkloric dialogue.

Tina Howe's Some Women in Their Thirties Simply Start to Fall is a ghoulish sketch -- it has the makings of a good New Yorker cartoon -- about a children's book author who, walking around the Upper West Side, takes a tumble and is parted from her head. While her body runs around in a panic, she calls for help, getting only comic commentary from a pair of bystanders. Finally, an Indian doctor shows up and, and, after some mortifying questions and answers, romance blooms. There are a couple of laughs, but hardly enough to justify this mysterious sketch. Crystal Finn works hard as the decapitated heroine. Arthur French and Kathryn Grody each have a couple of good moments as the kibitzers. Ryan Shams does what he can with his stereotyped Subcontinental medicine man. Billy Hopkins' direction seems hamstrung by the premise.

In Clap Your Hands, two marriages unravel at the Waldorf Astoria during a New Year's Eve celebration in 1947. The husbands, both lawyers, are colleagues; their wives are quietly going mad from dissatisfaction and an excess of champagne. There are some funny lines, but the piece seems to have no particular reason for being, other than to make condescending fun of sex roles in the '40s. At least, it allows you to enjoy the comic timing of Victor Slezak, J.J. Kandel, Megan Ketch, and Meg Gibson. Here, Hopkins' direction is more assured. One note: South Pacific, which the characters discuss having seen, didn't open until 1949.

It's the nature of such evenings that they're uneven, but this one is a little too heavily weighted toward the negative column. Series A of Summer Shorts got better reviews, and, even though I haven't seen it, my guess is it's the better choice. If you see Series B, hang on after the intermission and let Shull do her spellbinding, if brief, best.--David Barbour