The Play from Tedium

Signature Theatre's production of Edward Albee's The Lady from Dubuque demonstrates the company's mandate - representing the range of a playwright's work.

This 1978 play was written in the years between two great plays - Seascape (1974) and Three Tall Women (1991), both Pulitzer Prize winners. Not that Albee was exactly idle during these years; there were five other plays, but none of them reached the heights of Seascape or Women, or earlier work like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).

Dubuque seems to start off in Virginia Woolf territory, only it's three couples instead of two having a late-night drink-up and cage match. Long-legged, elegant Jo (Laila Robins) is mistress of the caustic quip and launches zingers from an Eames chair as she sizes up the weaknesses of the others. Husband Sam (Michael Hayden) seems to be playing a role as genial host and master of the suburban house.

Pugnacious Fred (C.J. Wilson) is a bully with a much-younger girlfriend Carol (Tricia Paoluccio) who is apparently a hapless airhead. Conventional Edgar (Thomas Jay Ryan) accompanies hand-wringing, neurotic doormat Lucinda (Catherine Curtin). 

Again, like Woolf, there is games-playing going on. As the curtain rises, Sam is starting "Twenty Questions" with the fraught query, "Who am I?" But the apparently sociable evening immediately heads off the rails as Jo addresses the audience with the frank admission that she is dying. Since the atmosphere is one of games-playing, one has some doubt at first as to whether she actually is dying.

As the evening progresses, a second game takes place when Carol, who's not as clueless as she first seems, and Sam pretend he assaulted her in another room - but it's just a put-on to get a reaction out of the others. Pretty soon, Jo leaves no doubt that she is dying, doubled up and screaming in pain.

In the second act, the morning after, Sam descends the winding stair of John Arnone's gorgeous set to find yet another couple in his living room - the elegant, white-haired Elizabeth (Jane Alexander) and Oscar (Peter Francis James). Sam opens the act with the question, "Who are you?"

They are Death, of course, come to take Jo and you can see it coming a mile away. With not much surprise left in the text and much screaming from the dying Jo and several of the other characters, the play visits the house of tedium. Albee's nihilistic view sees no particular peace in death, certainly no religious victory, and not much wisdom. So what is left? "Nothing is retained. Nothing," Oscar says. "There is only one thing that matters: Who am I?" Sam says.

All right, if finding truth in identity is what matters, then what has Jo found? Not much but witty, savage assaults on the existential inevitable. While Virginia Woolf inhabits equally bleak territory, wondering how the characters in that play are going to live proves to be more interesting than considering how one in Dubuque is going to die. Nevertheless, seeing this play provides a deeper understanding of this great writer's body of work. 

Vulnerable boats against the current

Scott Shepherd as the reader in Gatz - and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

"In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." -- "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Those are the first and last sentences of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's deathless 1925 novel about money and desire and the dark side of America's "pursuit of happiness."

They are also the first and last lines of Gatz, a "staged reading" unlike any I have ever seen. Over the course of eight hours -- 2 pm to 10 pm, with two short intermissions and a dinner break -- the entire 49,000-word text of the novel is read aloud, and it pushes the bounds of theater by making us fall in love with prose.

New York City's 21-year-old Elevator Repair Service, which specializes in unusual theater, approaches the drama of the book by not dramatizing it - in other words, by not creating a play out of the plot.

Director and company founder John Collins realizes that the narration of the story by the character Nick Carraway and Fitzgerald's ravishing prose are the drama. But this is three-dimensional theater and visual must be served.

So the glamorous world of Gatsby's Long Island mansions, "blue lawns," white flannels and champagne parties takes place - most improbably - in a shabby office in an unidentified downtown. Time? Apparently the 90s, judging from the clunky cordless phones and computers.

One of the beaten-down workers (Scott Shepherd) can't get his computer to work and it's taken away. Goofing off, he slides a book out of a Rolodex case and begins to read. "In my younger and more vulnerable years ..."

As Fitzgerald's classic tale of romantic obsession unfolds, the workers take the parts: brutal philandering Tom Buchanan, (Gary Wilmes, recently so effective in Chinglish - see blog post here) feckless wife Daisy (Victoria Vazquez), jaunty friend Jordan Baker (Susie Sokol) and intense Myrtle Wilson (Laurena Allan).

As Carraway, Shepherd (also, amazingly, appearing in Blood Knot further uptown at Signature Theatre) mostly reads the text with a medium-weight voice and a touch of the Midwest. It's a most attractive voice to listen to, not flamboyant, but very clear and possessed of a distinct though modest personality.

Apart from Shepherd, the most effective cast member for me was Jim Fletcher as Jay Gatsby, deep of voice and dangerous of manner. The cast also has a couple of unusual participants: Gatsby's father, who appears toward the end, bewildered by his son's death, is played very effectively by Dr. Ross Fletcher, chief of staff of Washington D.C.'s VA Medical Center. The playbill says he has played the role since 2005.

Sokol is a second-grade teacher at a school in Brooklyn. For me, Vazquez was miscast as Daisy. A tall, elegant woman with dark hair, she hardly embodies Daisy's fragility.

The actors' movements are also subtly deliberate and graceful, so the swirl of 1920s party dresses somehow both meshes and contrasts with a woman carrying a stack of papers through an office.

Sometimes the emphasis on the visual distracts from such sentences as this: "The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life."

One scene in particular, a drunken party in a New York hotel room attended by Carraway, Tom Buchanan and his lover Myrtle, isn't enhanced by the characters/office workers tossing papers into the air, symbolizing the chaos of the moment. It smacks of an actorly exercise.    

These are small points, however. The day married a book I've loved for more than three decades and my great love of theater and gave me a single masterpiece.  

A strangely muted Porgy and Bess

It's seldom that a show has to fight for respect before it even opens on Broadway but the current version of Porgy and Bess at the Richard Rodgers Theater isn't the usual show. Originally mounted in Boston at American Repertory Theater by artistic director Diane Paulus, this version of the classic 1935 opera by George and Ira Gershwin and Dorothy and DuBose Heyward was sanctioned by the Gershwin estate and has been re-dubbed The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, rather aggressive "re-branding" since "the Gershwins" weren't the only creators.

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and composer Diedre L. Murray adapted the show and word of the changes they were considering -- a more upbeat ending, a cane for Porgy instead of his traditional goat cart, a more "fleshed-out" part for Bess -- reached New York, where musical theater legend Stephen Sondheim wrote a blistering letter to the New York Times which can be found here.

The idea was to create a 2 1/2-hour version more suited to the Broadway and touring stage than the original 3 1/2-hour opera. While I agreed with just about all of Sondheim's points, I was also a bit uncomfortable with his lack of artistic courtesy toward the three-woman team, all established artists, and recalled that he has apparently been more comfortable with male collaborators.

Audra McDonald as Bess and Norm Lewis as Porgy

As the house lights dimmed, I was delighted to hear a proper pit orchestra (22 musicians) play the overture, a rare occasion in today's theater. However, upon curtain rise, I was dismayed to see that the vibrant Charleston, South Carolina neighborhood of Catfish Row had become a dozen or so large plain panels punctuated with a couple of random shutters and window frames. Riccardo Hernandez' set design brought a minimalist sense to a story that is in a real, colorful place and as the show progressed, the blank background dampened the atmosphere and added nothing beyond being a canvas for some subtle lighting.

Then, the delicate notes that lead into "Summertime," a lullaby sung by a young woman named Clara to her baby. Has there ever been a more ravishingly lovely-poignant-sweet-sad song to open a musical? Nikki Renee Daniels did quite nicely, although she seemed to be singing it in a bit lower range than is usually done. Clara's husband, Jake, joined her for the last couple of verses and the actor playing him seemed a little vocally uncertain, or perhaps had been directed to sing in half-voice? I searched my Playbill and was surprised to realize it was Joshua Henry, late of The Scottsboro Boys and whom I had seen in a very strong performance as the soldier in American Idiot.

He came into his own during "A Woman Is A Sometime Thing," jauntily staged by Paulus as a rivalry between the men and women of Catfish Row. Norm Lewis as Porgy drags a twisted leg and walks with a cane, rather than using the traditional goat cart, but apart from some unnecessary new dialogue that has him telling his neighbors he's saving for a leg brace, I didn't mind too much.

But the show wasn't soaring. New orchestrations by William David Brohn and Christopher Jahnke simply weren't hitting emotional peaks and the singers performed as if the director had said, "Don't use your opera voice." And then Audra McDonald as Bess entered with her brutish lover, Crown (the awesomely effective Phillip Boykin). Beautiful, damaged Bess sings "Leaving for the Promised Land" and the wondrous golden soprano of Audra McDonald fills the theater - and it's clear that Porgy and Bess is an opera. Dazed with pleasure, I would follow that voice off a cliff.

Paulus' "this isn't an opera" approach worked nicely with Porgy's statement of life, "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" or "Plenty of Nothing" as this program primly has it. I've not seen anyone segue from speech into song as smoothly and naturally as Lewis did, and in his hands I heard the song for the first time as a profoundly positive philosophy, not as happy and self-satisfied.

Liftoff finally arrived with one of the two great duets, "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," then, in Act II, "I Loves You, Porgy." McDonald's voice is stronger, but both she and Lewis explored all the paths of love - tenderness, doubt, reluctance, forgiveness, acceptance and finally, pure triumphant joy. But this production also highlights Crown and Bess' powerful sexual attraction and the self-doubt that keeps her in his power.

The Act II set design was even more unfortunate - a big cloth drop lit in blue to suggest Kittiwah Island, where the townspeople gather for a picnic. It looked like a giant artist decided to cover up a piece of furniture and all the little people were performing in front of it.    
    
David Alan Grier made the most of Sportin' Life, though at this performance (Feb. 3), he bobbled one of the best lyrics in "It Ain't Necessarily So," saying "if no man would give in" instead of "if no gal would give in," when singing about Methuselah's 900 years. But he has a big personality and made me realize how Sportin' Life, while being the devil to Porgy's saint, is also some much-needed comic relief.
    
I must note that a wonderful actor and singer, Christopher Innvar, whom I saw star with McDonald in 110 In the Shade, has taken a thankless role here of the police detective who barges into Catfish Row to investigate two murders. I can only think he wanted to be part of this experience as he has many more talents.

In terms of Paulus' directing, I was particularly taken with her talent for blocking, filling the stage space with imaginative, graceful action and movement. When Bess returns from Kittiwah, exhausted and sick, Porgy and the women gather her up and there is a beautiful moment where she is a pieta in their arms.

One of Sondheim's criticisms seems to have taken hold - the ending is as Gershwin wrote it. Porgy calls for his "stick" (his goat in earlier incarnations), takes up a sack and heads for New York to find Bess, who has been lured away by Sportin' Life. His unquenchable spirit sings "I'm On My Way" and he turns directly upstage, hobbling away from us. The set lifts and he moves into the unknown dark.

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Besides the merits of the show, the theatergoing experience at the Richard Rodgers Theater (formerly the 46th Street Theater), managed by the Nederlander organization, was the most unpleasant that I can remember at a Broadway house.

It began in the lobby. I was waiting for my companion outside in the cold and she was delayed. I stepped into the lobby for a few minutes to warm up, only to find the doorman next to me saying, "You can't wait in the lobby." I was stunned. "But that's what a lobby is for," I replied, thinking I hadn't heard correctly. "It's the theater's policy. You can't stay in here," he said. I have been going to Broadway shows for 50 years-- yes, since I was seven -- and this is the first time I have been kicked out of a theater.

At that very moment, there were people on line at the box office. In the lobby. Apparently it was all right to be in the lobby to give the Nederlander management your $100, but then you had to get out until the inner doors to the theater opened. "I am a ticketholder," I explained to the doorman. Perhaps he had mistaken me for a homeless person.

At that point, a middle aged couple stepped into the lobby, only to be told to leave by the doorman. The husband did not take this kindly and complained to the person in the box office. "You can go wait in the hotel across the street," she informed him, and not in a friendly manner. We all asked to see the manager.

An amiable fellow, he met with us on the cold sidewalk and informed us that the lobby was too small to allow people to wait in it. Nederlander management, please - people have common sense. If a space gets too crowded, then folks don't go in there and they wait outside. To tell your over-age-50, $100-paying patrons to get out of your space is astonishing. The middle-aged couple walked off, fuming.

When my friend and I returned, we moved through the lobby toward the inner doors with our fellow theatergoers, as the ushers yelled at us, "Step along! Have your tickets out and separated!" And here I thought going to the theater was different from being in a cattle chute.

When we arrived at the rear of the orchestra, a patron next to me reached toward a stack of Playbills when the usher snapped "those are only for people in this section!" The patron responded in a measured tone, "I am in this section." This particular usher showed us to our row, said, "Number 16 and 18, enjoy the show" and left.

The seat numbers are on one arm of each seat, not the backs, so it's easy to be confused. As patrons arrived, the usher would yell down the row, "OK, everybody move down one!" "Everybody move this way one!" Behind us, people had to do this a couple of times and were getting justifiably annoyed. Perhaps ushers could tell patrons, "the seat number is on your right (or left) as you look at the stage."

Just to add to the stadium atmosphere, ushers then came down the aisles, calling out that they were available for drink orders, which "you can bring to your seats." I personally disagree with this messy policy, but it's taking hold at other theaters, also. It also was obvious they wanted to squeeze even more money out of us.

Nederlander management and the staff of the Richard Rodgers Theater (what a travesty in a building that bears that name) need to attend a boot camp in customer service. Going to a Broadway theater should be a special, welcoming, glamorous event, not one that leaves you in cold awe at how this particular entertainment option came to believe it could treat customers with such arrogance.

The loquacious, elusive Stephen Sondheim

I recently went to hear playwright Tony Kushner interview Stephen Sondheim and it's a measure of the stature of these two theater men that the 870-seat Skirball Center at New York University in Greenwich Village was sold out. Not only sold out, but at a top ticket price of $100, basically to see/hear two guys sittin' around talkin'.

The proceedings got under way at 8 pm in a bit of a lumbering fashion, with the Public Theater's artistic director, Oskar Eustis, greeting us since the event was part of the Public's Forum series of conversations. He provided a memorable quote from someone who didn't think much of his livelihood: "Why would you want to tell lies to strangers in the dark for money?" I might respond, "well, I certainly wouldn't want to do it for free," but then that would ignore the realities of much work in the theater.

Rocco Landesman, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and former producer of shows by Kushner and Sondheim, introduced things. Resembling the actor James Cameron a little, Landesman was lively and full of good theater anecdotes, but did tend to go on. It was edging toward 8:30 and we hadn't yet heard a word from Stephen Sondheim or Tony Kushner.

Kushner was an engaging but long-winded interviewer and I found I was torn between being glad he was there to wishing for a professional interviewer/arts journalist. The frame of the conversation was Sondheim's new book Look I Made A Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany. (Funny, his first book in the series was called Finishing the Hat; you'd think it would be the other way around.)

Tony Kushner interviews Stephen Sondheim

Kushner called Look I Made A Hat a "manual of instruction" and an "adventure story," most apt descriptions as the format of Sondheim's memoir is unique: the printed lyrics and some of the most detailed, brilliant, careful and hard-working analysis of show-tune writing to be found anywhere.

When Sondheim finally did get a chance to speak, he prove to be a chatty, unpretentious interviewee with insights about his own work and musical theater in general. He's certainly not a recluse, having participated in many public interviews. 

Among the gems heard from the conversation with Kushner: Sondheim's not interested in writing opera because "you don't get a chance to fix it" unlike a musical with its workshops, tryouts and previews. He felt that "in opera, you see a lot of first drafts." One of his maxims is "less is more," but "opera is about more is more." Delightful.

Oddly, for me, he also said he can't "accept" recitative. Obviously, he'd disagree, but some of his songs almost seem to me to be recitative.

Kushner has written for a specific actor; Sondheim, never.

Sondheim doesn't necessarily need hushed silence to work. If he gets the melody stuck in his head, he "can write in a steakhouse."

They talked of how Sondheim's work is sometimes criticized for being "cold" and people mistake "smart" for "cold," to which Kushner added, "stupid people." To which I would add, "not so fast, Tony." Simply because an artist's work is not to one's taste doesn't necessarily equate to "stupid," but perhaps this slipped out as part of the generally worshipful attitude that attends such conversations.

There was a telling exchange when the talk turned toward Sondheim's collaboration with James Lapine, which resulted in Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods and Passion. (Love the first two, do not care at all for the third.)

Kushner mentioned a new openness, a longing and yearning quality to the work with Lapine and Sondheim said he was "responding to [his] collaborator." Kushner pushed a little, asking if there was something personal, but Sondheim, who only began a live-in relationship with a partner at age 61, replied that no, it was due to Lapine: "I take the coloration of the person I'm working with."

What impressed me was Sondheim's passionate commitment to the brutal process of making art. He compared it to the effortless quality of nature with this aphorism: "Art is beautiful; nature is pretty."

Hitting some wrong notes

It's mystifying, sometimes, when one sees a show that's been running for a long time, is a popular favorite and one's reaction is "hmm, where's the beef?" I had that reaction at the Canadian show 2 Pianos 4 Hands, which recently played its umpteenth engagement in Toronto.

In this case, it's literally a two-hander, written and performed by Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt, this time at the Panasonic Theatre, about their piano careers -- or rather, the piano careers that never quite got going. Originally produced in 1996, it has, according to the program, played in 10 countries and 200 cities. Since I studied piano for ten years as a young person, then returned to it in 2005 as an adult and continue to play today, I was eager to catch up.

Growing up in the U.S., I had never encountered the Royal Conservatory exams, but as an adult living in Canada, I decided to go through them and am now aiming at level 6. In the 22 years I spent in Toronto, it seemed that 2 Pianos, 4 Hands was perennially playing somewhere. So I was primed for fun. 

There is a simple set -- two grand pianos, nose to nose, and a backdrop that consists of two video screens enclosed by huge picture frames. The first disappointment was that Dykstra and Greenblatt, who also are credited as directors for this production, made relatively little, unimaginative use of those video screens -- window panes to denote a house, etc, but the screens sat blank for much of the show.

They play all the characters, from themselves as kids going through the usual practice agony and lessons ("it sounded better at home" - who hasn't said that?) to teachers and examiners.  

As kids, the two do not seem to be especially talented piano students, which I found a wee bit puzzling as the adults onstage possessed serious piano chops. Their teachers -- especially Sister Loyola -- run the gamut from encouragement to exasperation. The boys persist and enter the Kiwanis Music Festival, a venerable Canadian institution that encompasses local, regional and national competitions. (Canadians love competitive festivals. They exist for music, choirs, community theater -- and auto repair, for all I know -- and more can be found about this national characteristic here.)

The funniest character, for me, was Ed, a long-suffering emcee at the Kiwanis festival who announces in a dead tone that "67 children will all be playing the same piece."

As they progress in their musical studies, they try to take the next step. Dykstra applies to the Royal Conservatory and Greenblatt to a jazz faculty -- but they slam against reality. Dykstra has gotten by on an easy facility at the keyboard, but the conservatory interviewer sees through his facade and bluntly tells him he'd have to work a lot harder to be top-notch. Greenblatt's version of jazz smacks too much of classical training, and his interviewer basically tells him he just doesn't have the soul for it.

Greenblatt gets work in a piano bar ... Dykstra does some teaching ... and the continuation of their story, as one can read from their program bios, is that both went on to busy, full lives as well-known theater artists -- acting (in some roles demanding musical talent), directing, writing, mentoring.

But the acting on display in 2 Pianos, 4 Hands is more of the hammy variety (see photo), with a little Victor Borge-style kidding around at the beginning. And one small question: how the heck could two musicians misspell the names of Richard Rodgers and Edvard Grieg in the music credits for the show?

Richard Greenblatt and Ted Dykstra in 2 Pianos 4 Hands

The show consists of a series of vignettes, but there isn't much character development and there are such hoary jokes as the teacher with the foreign accent mispronouncing English words - the same word, several times.

One of the few negative reviews the show has gotten came from the New York Times in 1997, when it played the Promenade Theatre in New York. Acknowledging their skill, reviewer Peter Marks sharply noted that "they never make it clear what the music has meant to them," so it's hard to feel much when they lose their dreams of becoming concert artists. The full review is here. 

I kept waiting for the play to catch fire, to scale the heights of musical joy, to give me some insight into the despair of being found wanting at the very thing you desire so much (a feeling with which I am all too acquainted when it comes to music). But what I saw was two pleasant guys with a very enjoyable amount of piano talent reminiscing about their young years in music and ending the show with what I thought was a boring arrangement of Bach's lovely Sheep May Safely Graze. I was under-whelmed.

A "Signature" identity

I've seldom been as inspired by sheer artistic passion as I was on Dec. 1, having lunch on a bare plywood stage, looking out at an auditorium stacked high with cardboard boxes, at what in two months will be 20-year-old Signature Theatre Company's new home on West 42nd Street.

Lunch on the stage in the soon-to-be-finished End Stage Theatre at Signature Theatre

It was a press preview of a $66 million complex designed by Frank Gehry that will include - deep breath - three auditorium theaters, a studio theater, a rehearsal studio, administrative offices, a bookstore and a cafe. 

All this will be in service to those of us who make sense of the world through words spoken in a big dark room, who inhabit a neighborhood of voices and walk just one block from crazy, who approach the work half-crippled with fear and electrified by arrogance, in equal measure. "Theater begins with the written word," Signature's founding artistic director, Jim Houghton, told us.

The entire complex, he said, will support Signature's dedication to the playwright -- seasons that focus on the early and current work of a single writer who is in residence and engaged in the creative process and five-year residencies for several playwrights that focus on new work."Every square inch of this place is tied to mission," he said.

The opening is scheduled for February 2012, kicking off a season of work by Athol Fugard, Edward Albee, Katori Hall, Will Eno and Kenneth Lonergan.

Playwright John Guare talked about Signature's artistic legacy. "Signature revived the career of Horton Foote. It restored Edward Albee to his rightful place of prominence in the American theater," he said, adding that Tennessee Williams, in the last 20 years of his life "had no base, no home" to nurture his creativity. "Signature is so unfashionable" in producing a range of a playwright's work, he said. "Usually you are as good as your last play," he added.    

Architect Frank Gehry: "With all the insanity going on in the world, it's nice to be involved with sanity."

Gehry, whose design includes a dramatic canopy at street level and a lobby that will serve as a crossroads for the center, praised real estate developers the Related Companies, whose 63-story apartment/hotel tower houses the Signature Center. He also mentioned the City of New York, which contributed an astonishing $27.5 million to the project. Signature Executive Director Erika Mallin, who has shepherded the project since she arrived in 2007, has worked in the mayor's office.

A rendering of the Signature Theater lobby, next to the tools and materials that will make it happen.

Among the dramatic initiatives at Signature is its Access Ticket program, which will make tickets available at every performance for $25. This can't happen without the generosity of donors and among the major gifts announced were $5 million from John and Amy Griffin to name one of the theaters after John's mother, theater writer Alice Griffin; a $5 million gift from writer Margot Adams that will name the main theater after Signature founding playwright Romulus Linney and $3 million from Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg to name the lobby grand staircase.

In keeping with the spirit of the ticket initiative, which seeks to answer the question of actor and board member Edward Norton - " Is theatre for all of us, or is it just for the very few?" - I'd like to make a suggestion about the bookstore. 

I am as passionate about books as I am about theater, and about theater education. Signature said its bookstore will carry playscripts and books about the worlds portrayed onstage -- apartheid during the run of an Athol Fugard play, for instance. If tickets are $25, then why couldn't every book in the bookstore be available for $5? Why should a person who has spent $25 to see a play be stalled by the $25 price of a book or the $15 price of a playscript? But who would subsidize the Book Access initiative? Possibly individuals who feel as strongly about the written word as I do - or perhaps foundations that have literacy as part of their mandate.

Signature Theatre -- is it worth a thought?

Chinglish: more than fortune cookie fun

Seeing David Henry Hwang's new play, Chinglish, now on Broadway and briskly directed by Leigh Silverman, is like going on the perfect date. You feel very comfortable with the other person, who is polite and eager to please but very witty. Things turn a little sexy and surprising halfway through and you end the evening feeling you've come to understand another human being and you are, well, satisfied.

The play, from the author of the extraordinary M. Butterfly, is told in flashback as American businessman Daniel Cavanaugh begins giving a corporate presentation on doing business in China. Seems he's the proprietor of a Cleveland-based, family-owned sign company. Three years ago, he was trying to convince the town officials of Guiyang that his firm should supply signs for a new cultural center - and avoid the garbled and laughable "Chinglish" on many signs in China. ("Fuck goods" in a grocery store is actually "dry goods," as the modern Chinese character for "dry" and "do" -- as in "to do" someone -- are the same, Cavanaugh explains.)

He picks up as a translator and all-around fixer Peter Timms, a local British teacher who has been living in the country many years and speaks fluent Mandarin. (A delightful bit of information from the Playbill is that actor Stephen Pucci holds a B.A. in Mandarin Chinese from Leeds University/Tianjin Normal University.)

Jennifer Lim as Xi Yan and Gary Wilmes as Daniel Cavanaugh in Chinglish

But of course, the local minister of culture, Cai Guoliang (the suave Larry Lei Zhang) has brought his own hapless translator who mangles such business overtures as "Here's why we're worth the money" into "He will explain why he spends money so recklessly."

While the apparently-affable Cai seems like a fellow one can "do business with" (to echo Margaret Thatcher's famous assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev), vice minister Xi Yan (Jennifer Lim) maintains a composure of steel.

Cavanaugh tries to read the signs communicated in non-written form when people from different cultures meet. Soon, those signals lead to an affair between Cavanaugh and Xi Yan, but each of them have very different motivations. Cavanaugh soon discovers that Timms and Cai also have agendas that won't necessarily align with what seems to be a pretty simple mission: sell some sturdy, correctly-written, American-made signs to the Chinese.

As a comedy, Chinglish is a tamer look at East-West relations than the dark M. Butterfly, but the American's guileless attempt to come to grips with a complex ancient world brings to mind Henry James' novels of Americans in Europe. David Korins' brilliant revolving set seems like a visual maze that complements the characters' dilemmas. Much of the dialogue is in Mandarin, with translations projected on the set and beautifully designed by Jeff Sugg and Shawn Duan. I loved hearing lengthy conversations in this musical, dramatic language.  

Wilmes gives us an attractive, affecting portrait of a middle class Midwesterner (who has a surprise up his sleeve about his background), but one would have liked his character to show a little more deeply how the China experience changed him. Lim reveals a number of layers to Xi Yan, a woman who knows herself and what she wants. Pucci and Lei Zhang create well-rounded characters, but director Silverman possibly could have asked the supporting actors not to play "Oriental" stereotypes quite so broadly.

All told, though, this dramatic Chinese meal doesn't leave you hungry an hour later.