Elizabeth Rimar and Becca A. Lewis in Monster Tales.

Pity poor Mimi, the lonely librarian, who only has her teddy bear to snuggle with at night. Well, at least said teddy (dubbed "Pookie") does double duty as lover and sentinel: before dropping off to sleep, Mimi has him peek under the bed, just to make sure there aren't any Monsters down there!

But guess what - there are! Aren't you surprised?

Well, I wasn't, but I still largely enjoyed Mary Jett Parsley’s The Monster Tales, which plays through the weekend at the Factory Theatre in a quietly intelligent production from Mill 6 Collaborative. This young playwright's tale hardly breaks any new artistic ground - it basically revisits, for Generation Y, familiar tropes regarding the psychological resonance of fairy tales. It turns out that Mimi's Monster (Becca A. Lewis) only wants to regale her host (Elizabeth Rimar, both above) with the stories Mimi has been whispering in her sleep. And guess what - those stories tend to reflect Mimi's own psychological conflicts. (Who would have thunk!?)

Ok, enough of the Snark Monster. Parsley does spin some intriguing millennial variations on her folk-tale template, most of which announce their themes none too subtly, but also not too loudly - pretty much as genuine folk tales do.  There's a blind man who orders his wife from a catalogue; a girl who finds a real live boy growing in her garden; a mother whose death proves mortal to her daughter; and a man who must hide his mysterious talents - the themes of these vignettes don't exactly mystify, but they do resonate appropriately.  Alas, Parsley's tales never quite tap into the springs of cruelty and fear that feed real fairy tales, so we do wonder what, precisely, Mimi has been so very afraid of; she doesn't seem to so much overcome anything as just wait it out.

Still, we're distracted from that lack of arc by nicely detailed acting in most of the roles.  In an innovative arrangement, Mill 6's Monster Tales is "sharing" the Factory Theatre with Whistler in the Dark's Aunt Dan and Lemon, and between the two productions you could probably account for most of the better actors on Boston's fringe.  Elizabeth Rimar carries on the strong work she did in The Europeans with a completely believable turn as Mimi, and Becca A. Lewis  proved whimsically feral as her designated Monster.  Meanwhile, in the tales themselves, the reliable Sasha Castroverde and Irene Daly were the clear stand-outs, although Nathaniel Gundy and Lonnie McAdoo both had their moments.  The most pleasing surprise of the evening, however, was its original score - a set of sweetly melancholic pop baubles by Sarah Rabdau and the Self Employed Assassins and Peter Moore of Count Zero.  (Yes, those are really their names.)  The thoughtful direction was a joint effort by Barlow Adamson and John Edward O’Brien.  You only have till Saturday to catch the remaining performances.

I arrived at the Revere cinema last Saturday morning at 11:30 am.

And I left a little after 6 pm.

During those six-and-a-half hours I watched the Met broadcast of Wagner's Die Walküre ("The Valkyrie"), in Robert Lepage's controversial new staging. The opera itself only took up a little over four hours. The remaining two and a half were filled with fluff pieces, set malfunctions, and scheduled intermissions, during which, oddly, the movie audience often stared at the actual audience at the Met staring back at us. (There really should be some kind of two-way exchange going on there, methinks; can't they figure that out?)

I confess I'm forging through the whole cycle (and dragging my friend Geoff with me) to some degree because I've never done it before, and because I'm intrigued by Lepage's concept.  I also admit I've long stored Wagner on the same mental shelf where I've kept most of Goethe, as well as Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest; I appreciate their significance, but minute-to-minute, they're just too long and boring. Vita brevis, and some ars is very longa, as they say. At the same time, I feel tinges of guilt about not knuckling down and getting through these monuments, because often there's a huge pay-off in making it all the way through an enormous masterpiece (Remembrance of Things Past, Don Quixote, Moby-Dick). Then again, sometimes there's only a minor pay-off (The Divine Comedy).  Sometimes there's no pay-off (Thomas Mann, I'm lookin' at you).  It's kind of a crap shoot.

So far, I have my doubts about the Ring cycle, although of course not about Wagner's impact in general.  It's hard to think, in fact, of any genius who has been more artistically influential. In harmonic terms, his music jump-started modernism - and Wagner also fomented revolutions in conducting style and even theatrical design. But beyond these significant innovations his determination to make of opera a "total work of art," or Gesamtkunstwerk, had a profound impact on Western civilization as a whole. It's hard to over-estimate the importance of this central, animating idea; versions of it had long bubbled through Western culture, of course, but Wagner's insistence on opera as a synthesis of all artistic expression, under the guidance and control of a single mind, that the spectator would perceive and "enter" as a kind of living dream (and which would through that experience shape culture, politics, and civilization itself), steadily infiltrated, and eventually dominated, the worlds of art, literature, dance, architecture, and eventually cinema - which probably served as the composer's apotheosis.

So I kept trying to remember all that as I endured the turgid dramaturgy of Die Walküre. Amusingly, Wagner claimed in the first half of the Ring (Rheingold and Walküre) to be tossing aside the long dominion of music over drama in opera for a new synthesis based on leitmotifs. But alas, Wagner was a much weaker dramatist than he was a composer, so the drama lost out anyway; it's true that the old system of recitative and aria often hobbled dramatic action, but it turned out Wagner's matrix of leitmotifs only made things even more static. (Tellingly, the composer largely returned to recitative and aria when he wrapped up the Ring with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung).

What most interested me about Lepage's new production, however, was the way it seemed to re-formulate that underlying concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, particularly as it related to the dividing line between theatre and film. For Lepage's gargantuan, abstract set - famously nicknamed "The Machine" - is clearly designed to produce cinematic effects on the stage. In Das Rheingold, for instance, the famous arpeggios of the "Rhine Music" rippled away as the planks of "The Machine" rose and fell like waves; and as Wagner's harmonies deepened, they towered like an incoming tide toward the top of the proscenium, and we sank deeper and deeper into the dark. Likewise, during the "Magic Fire Music" at the climax of Walküre, the Machine rotated  as if the entire stage was a kind of camera lens, so that we finally viewed the sleeping Brünnhilde from "above" (at bottom).  Clearly what Lepage is aiming for in these sequences is a fascinating new synthesis of modernism and "physical" cinema.

The trouble is that while the Machine impresses during these musical high points, during much - and perhaps most - of the Ring it feels like a gigantic fifth horse, trotting along pointlessly beside what's really an inflated fairy tale.  And alas, after several minutes, the images projected on its flat planks begin to feel a little flat, too, and that sense of actual presence that distinguishes theatre from film begins, perhaps predictably, to leak out of the proceedings. Thus the nostalgia one often hears voiced for the story-book magic of Otto Schenk's durable, pictorial production (Hunding's cottage from Walküre at left), which served the Met well for something like twenty years. For to be honest, despite all of Wagner's high-falutin' manifestos, he often seems to be reaching not for high concept but rather for traditional forms of scenic magic (only king-sized).  Because deep down the old showman knew that high concept spread over four hours gets boring.

There has been considerable criticism of Lepage's direction as well as his set - and it's pretty clear that many of the long exchanges in Die Walküre have been under-directed.  The more talented actors - Stephanie Blythe, Deborah Voigt - managed well, and both were in great voice on Saturday (there has been a rash of hating on Voigt's vocals, for reasons I can't understand); but Bryn Terfel is clearly still wandering as Wotan - although he was in better voice here than he was in Rheingold.  Meanwhile, as Sigmund, the heart-throb Jonas Kauffman sang powerfully but seemed to be acting in some sort of fog (all the more distracting in the close-ups of the HD simulcast).  His Sieglinde, Eva-Maria Westbroek, also sang beautifully, if with less force, but acted with more conviction - although it must be noted that both were compromised by the staging of their scenes behind the front skirt of the Machine, which gave their incestuous passion an unfortunate sense of forced distance (it was only once Sigmund leapt up onto the skirt itself that things began to catch fire).

These problems indicate a deeper problem with the Machine: the actors - and maybe even Lepage - don't know how to relate to it; indeed, even the props and costumes don't really relate to it (they're basically traditional). So far the Machine's concept has operated at the technical level only - and sometimes not even at that level; the delays in Saturday's simulcast were clearly related to its recalcitrance, and there have been noted mishaps in performance (Voigt took a small tumble on opening night, for instance), although as yet no actual injuries à la Spider-Man. So far you'd have to rate the Machine as at best a mixed blessing, I think - and something tells me that a lot of people are hoping the Met didn't actually throw out those old Otto Schenk sets!


Opera as "physical" cinema - the "Magic Fire Music" from Die Walküre.

You may have already seen this . . .

But I still think it's cool.

Nathaniel Watson, Amanda Forsythe, Daniel Auchincloss and Nathalie Paulin in Les Indes Galantes. (Photo: Julian Bullitt)

In a way it's hard to critique Rameau's Les Indes Galantes, because there's so little like it being performed today. What can you compare it to? It's classified as an "opera-ballet," but it's neither a cohesive 'opera' nor a 'ballet' (instead it's a set of thematically related romantic fables, alternating with dances that seem to float on the edge of audience participation). And the whole piece stops every now and then for a major special effect (like the volcano that erupts at the end of the second act - or pardon me, entrée). I think in the end Les Indes is best described as a kind of baroque variety show.

I don't mean that as a crack, btw. Much of the charm of the recent Boston Baroque production (and it was quite charming, trust me) was that you were never sure what might be coming next.  You did know that each scene was going to have a whimsical point to make about l'amour, but the settings of these musical valentines ranged from Persia to Peru, and were crammed with sultans, sun-gods, savages, and even transvestites; one minute, lovers were kissing before the lava reached the village; the next, they were trading suspiciously intoxicating "peace pipes."  Basically, there was something for everyone.

Luckily, every scene was likewise crammed with gorgeous music, too. Conductor Martin Pearlman has a special jones for the French baroque, and his case for a stripped-down version of Les Indes (the original was something of a spectacle) was that the music was spectacular all on its own, and he was proved quite right; particularly the first half of Rameau's score is wonderful - and so varied in its scene-painting that it shocked contemporary audiences. Plus it closes on a thrilling high note with that volcanic eruption (you don't normally link "French baroque" with "Krakatoa," but believe me, Rameau pulls it off). It's true that the work's second half is more variable in its inspiration, but still boasts ravishing moments, like the lovely quartet that pulls together the third entrée, and the elegant closing chaconne. One left the concert feeling that we really don't hear enough Rameau in this town.

The French genius was well-served by the period orchestra, whose playing was exquisite, and the chorus was in good voice, too - but the performance's chief jewel proved to be its soloists, who were all of outstanding quality. Local favorite Amanda Forsythe was most in period - the early eighteenth century - with her pearly, pure tone (her radiant comic acting was timeless, but that's another issue), while soprano Nathalie Paulin seemed to be replying to her from several decades later, but with a dusky richness so transporting that you didn't care. The men were just as strong, and likewise roughly in period - the powerful Sumner Thompson was probably the stand-out (in a passionate turn as a suicidal Incan that's probably the vocal highlight of the opera) but baritone Nathaniel Watson impressed with his eloquent lyricism too, and tenors Aaron Sheehan and Daniel Auchincloss more than held their own in their respective entrées. All in all, this was the most consistent set of soloists I've yet heard with Boston Baroque.

I wish I could give the same high marks to the accompanying dances, but these proved the production's sole weak point. Choreographed by the talented Marjorie Folkman - late of the Mark Morris Dance Group - they were much in her mentor's style, but exhibited little of his sense of musical structure and meaning, and so were lightly charming, but that's about it. Folkman was certainly constrained in terms of space, but you also felt an unnecessary constraint in her choreographic ambition; things got a bit more complex (and more genuinely lyrical) in the later entrées, but one still felt the dances weren't quite worthy of their accompaniment.

Meanwhile the clever direction by Sam Helfrich made witty use of what few (contemporary) props the staging could allow - and he even cheekily pulled the chorus into the action, too (they waved tiny national flags to introduce each change of locale, and even boogied a bit). In some ways Helfrich's ironic flair answered a question that's clearly on Pearlman's mind, i.e. how do you stage baroque works without turning them into museum pieces? Still, by the end of the evening some of the director's gambits had begun to seem superficial, and a few of his knowing jokes (like the predictable one about those "peace pipes") went on a bit too long; we began to perceive that something central to Rameau's vision - its truly wonder-struck exoticism - had somehow gone missing from the staging. This only argues, of course, for a fuller production from Pearlman at a later date. In the meantime we should be grateful for his tireless work in bringing this luminous score back into the repertoire.

I think the news is out about the Actors' Shakespeare Project's Antony and Cleopatra, so I don't really feel the need to pile on the production - but there are some important critical points to be made about it, so here goes nothing.  In a way, it stands as simply another attempt by ASP (I know, an acronym so appropriate to this particular script!) to tackle a play it doesn't really have the cast for with smarts, some nifty lighting effects, and a lot of scrappy attitude.  This time the casting question was particularly acute, however, given the complexity of the two leads (widely assessed as among the most complicated characters in all of Shakespeare).  The word around town was that A&C was chosen in part to give company stalwart Paula Plum a role she'd long coveted.  And I don't blame her; I'd like to play Cleopatra, too.  But not everyone is right for every role - not even local stars as talented as Ms. Plum.

The problem is hardly that Plum's "too old" for the role (as one outraged commenter on this blog claimed); nor is it that she can't muster the mature sexiness to launch (or rather sink) a thousand ships; the lady is still hot, thank you very much.  It's simply that Plum is too trustworthy a presence, too solid an emotional citizen, to conjure Cleopatra, who "makes hungry where she most satisfies" precisely because her "infinite variety" conceals an inner void that she's hungry to fill herself.  In short, Cleopatra is not so much a personality as a performance, and Shakespeare's play not so much a celebration of her allure as a devastating critique.

All this seems to have been lost, however, on director Adrianne Krstansky, who has slashed the text by more than a quarter (it seems half the first half is missing), to focus, it would seem, on Cleo and Tony's notoriously naughty love affair at the expense of those boring political machinations back in Rome.  The trouble is that without those boring political machinations, the context for this power couple's self-indulgence is missing, and the play becomes a simplistic tirade against the "masculine" political state - rather than an exquisite balancing act between two equally flawed modes of gender.

Paula Plum and James Andreassi as Antony and Cleopatra.

I do want to point out, however, that while Ms. Plum may have been miscast as Cleopatra, she was still the best thing in this production.  She has Cleo's quicksilver intelligence and bemused self-awareness, and she threw herself into the tragedy (at left), we didn't believe for a minute her own emotional make-up had largely brought about.  Alas, her Antony was indeed often AWOL from both her and Rome, as James Andreassi all but phoned in his performance, and the usually-reliable Richard Snee (Plum's hubby "in real life") likewise transformed Enobarbus, one of the most fascinating roles in the canon, into a cleanly dicted blank. Doug Lockwood struck a few calculating sparks as Octavius, but he was hit-or-miss - like pretty much everybody else in the cast. As usual in ASP productions, the comic bits worked best - the long scene between Cleopatra and Antony's messenger was a hoot, in fact.  The set and lighting (by Jeff Adelberg) were actually effective, in their way, but other gambits - spankings and various vampings - seemed a bit silly, as did the Saved-by-the-Bell style rock riffs between scenes.

Thus in the end, what's special, and deeply intriguing, about Antony and Cleopatra - its status as one of the "problem" tragedies - went missing. Many people are aware that Shakespeare's comic output, after the glory years of Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, turned darker, and intellectually knotty, with works like Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well. What fewer realize is that the same pattern held for the tragedies: after the "Big Four," you can feel Shakespeare pushing and pulling at the tragic form: he freights the heroes of Antony and Cleopatra with perhaps more equivocal feeling than the mode can bear, while Troilus and Cressida plays as half-satire; then for the first time the Bard gives the hero of Coriolanus no inner voice whatsoever - and finally, perhaps inevitably, Timon of Athens is just an abandoned first draft.

Of this motley group, A&C is certainly the most suggestive and successful. Nevertheless, to call its tone "tricky" is an understatement: for throughout the play, Shakespeare seems to be almost willfully tearing at the tragic status of his heroes; in moral terms they deflate, and then re-inflate, from scene to scene - and while the Bard had previously risked making a tragic "hero" evil (in Macbeth), he'd never built a play around people who are in some ways contemptible. Indeed, Antony and Cleopatra finally die, after a brilliantly managed political and emotional decline, in a manner which flirts constantly with the ridiculous (tellingly, Cleopatra is brought the fatal asp by a "clown"), yet fails utterly if it is played for laughs. I'm not pretending this mysterious, ambivalent atmosphere (similar to that of late Chekhov, in a strange way) is an easy thing to pull off; in fact I've never seen a really successful production of Antony and Cleopatra; still, that's the gauntlet the play throws down to any company that attempts it.

It's a gauntlet, however, that our current political moment perhaps prevents a company from ever picking up. You could feel throughout this production a desire to flatter and forgive Cleopatra as some sort of pre-figuration of the modern female executive. She loomed over Antony, and indeed over Rome; you would never have guessed from Plum's performance, or Krstansky's general direction, that Cleopatra's petty bids for power didn't always deserve our sympathy, or that the feminine blandishments of "Egypt" were inherently problematic morally and politically - much less that Cleopatra may have deserved what she got in the end. In this distortion of Shakespeare's intents, I admit I sensed ASP was simply at one with the attitudes of its politically-correct audience. Too bad Shakespeare's vision is wider, grander, and far more equivocal than that enlightened brand of tunnel vision.

Various trips and an outage at Blogger have prevented me from posting anything about The Seventh Sense, an intriguing theatre piece by an Armenian troupe, the National Centre for Aesthetics SMALL THEATRE, that crossed the water to play our own Charlestown Working Theater a few weeks ago.

Which may have been just as well, because I wasn't entirely sure what to make of this particular show, at least in formal terms.  Its content was clear enough - if somewhat shocking.  I'm not kidding; conceived as a "sensual meditation" on The Book of Lamentations, a book of heartfelt prayer by Armenian patron saint Gregory of Narek, the piece was that rarity in our secular age: a work grounded in straightforward, even naïve, religious feeling.  Stranger still, it was staged with every trick in the postmodern handbook, sophisticated video and projections to the fore; indeed, the production often played like a Mabou Mines version of the Book of Revelation.  Minus any of the irony or alienation, however, that are thought to be the sine qua non of those downtown-drama techniques.

Instead, The Seventh Sense was suffused with a mood lost from the modern lexicon: guilt.  And not specific guilt, but generalized, original-sin guilt - the kind downtown artists don't have; indeed, the piece was unapologetically stylized as a Pilgrim's-Progress-style quest for salvation.  Thus hellfire literally filled the stage (at left), and a video clip peered closely at the skulls in a cathedral's crypt.  In case we somehow missed the point, Death himself soon rose from a billowing maelstrom on the darkened stage floor.  You're guilty, and you're going to die - when was the last time any of our local theatres pondered that question?

I'm afraid the answers supplied by The Seventh Sense were hardly original, however, and the piece was sometimes suffused with a kind of sexual hysteria regarding the flesh while simultaneously trading in sensual tableaux to make its "spiritual" points. Occasionally Seventh even played like some breathless cable documentary about the predictions of Nostradamus. But frankly, it was still refreshing just to feel the icy wind of judgment blowing from the direction of the stage.  And while visual artist Vahan Badalyan's design concept leaned too heavily on borrowings from art history (some of them ham-handed, as in the pseudo-Pietà at top), every now and then the production seemed highly self-aware, as when performer Arsen Khachatryan attempted to literally climb into da Vinci's The Last Supper. Other gambits, like the struggling "souls" projected onto the performers, were striking and evocative, and even the looming figure of Death was surprisingly spooky and visceral. The Charlestown Working Theater is gaining a reputation as the fringe theater that somehow crams poetic wonders into its gritty space; next up for this intrepidly globe-trotting little company is a visit from Poland's Grotowski-inspired Teatr ZAR, with a performance based on a "centuries-old polyphonic funeral songs." Fans of grim religious feeling should take note.

Steely Dan

Meg Taintor tempts Jen O'Connor to the dark side in Aunt Dan and Lemon.

Fascism - even Nazism - is seductive; or so playwright Wallace Shawn would have us believe in his best-known work, Aunt Dan and Lemon, which he has styled into a kind of seduction, too: its charismatic central character - the eccentrically glamorous Aunt Dan - is meant to ravish us with her embrace of the allure of the dictator, just as she does her sickly "niece," the eponymous "Lemon." Indeed, we get the idea we're supposed to leave the show half-convinced - as the dazzled Lemon has been - that the Nazis were simply more honest about what they were doing than the rest of us are.

As you may be able to tell from that opening paragraph, however, I haven't been seduced by either Shawn's argument or his play. The overt political passages in Aunt Dan - particularly its famous debate over the ethics of Henry Kissinger (whom Dan adores) - have an undeniable dramatic snap (as most intelligent political arguments do). But to keep his conceit going, the playwright simply withholds from the characters opposing Aunt Dan the rhetorical resourcefulness required to demolish her claims (which is an easier task than the play pretends). And to be blunt, you can hate Henry Kissinger while realizing that he wasn't quite a Nazi, and that such unhappy distinctions are actually quite important in a fallen world like this one.

In short, in intellectual terms Aunt Dan is rigged; it's designed to shake up the kind of person who reads the Phoenix (or, yes, even the New Yorker) without ever really burrowing beneath the surface of its own assumptions. I admit that as an emotional (rather than intellectual) seduction, however, the play can still work - after all, plenty of people (like Lemon) have given in to the dark side because of the charisma of figures like Aunt Dan rather than their arguments.

But I'm afraid to seal that emotional deal, a production must triumph over playwright Shawn's rambling, naive dramaturgy, and while this is clearly possible - several productions of Aunt Dan have won raves - I'm afraid in the current Whistler in the Dark production (at the Factory Theater through May 21st), the able cast doesn't quite make it over that bar.

This despite the fact that many of them - like Jen O'Connor and Scott Sweatt - are now the leading lights of Boston's fringe.  And they're joined, in the pivotal role of Aunt Dan, by Whistler's own artistic director, Meg Taintor (at top, with O'Connor); the directorial reins this time around have been given over to the New Rep's capable Bridget Kathleen O'Leary.  Supporting roles have been filled by fringe stalwarts as well - folks like Melissa Baroni, Melissa Barker, Mac Young, and Alejandro Simoes - the smart, resourceful kids who, if you're interested in edgy theatre in this town, you find yourself constantly bumping into.  You know when these folks are involved that a production at the very least is going to be articulate, clever, and insightful.

Which is definitely the case with Aunt Dan and Lemon, at least at first; and as long as Shawn keeps questions of politics to the fore, the production convinces, if in a gently ironic mode.  Certainly Taintor puts over Dan's arguments forcefully - which are, roughly, that we have no business criticising the ethical lapses of someone like Henry Kissinger, as he has taken on the burden of moral choice for all our sakes (it's a less-sophisticated, but more passionate, version of the line we heard recently from the Grand Inquisitor, too).

Of course there's some truth to this idea, and in deference to it we routinely give our leaders great moral latitude, and even wipe the bloodstains from profiles of men like Roosevelt and Churchill because history has demonstrated the value of their general goals. But there's always an unspoken calculus at work in this kind of thing, and whether sympathy with Kissinger's far-smaller moral burden can be stretched to cover such atrocities as the carpet-bombing of innocent civilians - well, that's a far more doubtful question, isn't it.  And I'm afraid history has all but mocked Aunt Dan's moral logic; it turned out that Vietnam was not any kind of strategic lynchpin in the fight against communism - and that the divine Henry wasn't engaged in a titanic struggle of any kind.  Indeed, we now trade happily with the very governments whose expansion Kissinger murdered thousands of innocents to stop; to be blunt, he killed all those people for nothing.

So there aren't actually any arguments to be made anymore about that aging, crass, would-be playboy.  Still, my moral contempt for Kissinger doesn't make me fall into the trap of imagining that he was the same as Hitler; yet that's the next step that Shawn seems to want us to make, in an odd series of scenes that reveal Aunt Dan's checkered sexual and moral past.  And this is where the Whistlers lose their way (as, I have a hunch, most productions do).  To be fair, it's not entirely their fault; Shawn's "second act" (in quotes because there's no intermission) is pitted with odd lacunae: we learn in flashback, for instance, that Aunt Dan's free-living set was more than just louche, but actually murderous, but this only evokes an odd kind of radio silence from Lemon that doesn't really synch up with her closing "Hooray for Hitler" rant. A seeming last-minute reversal in character for the aging Aunt Dan likewise cries out for explanation, or at least integration into Lemon's ongoing narrative of self.

Alas, Shawn is of little help on these points, so it's up to the actors to connect these disparate narrative dots; but in the Whistler production, I'm afraid O'Connor and Taintor, who both make initially strong impressions, haven't been guided by O'Leary through arcs that adequately interpret their characters' clumsily-rendered trajectories. O'Connor remains far too sturdy as Lemon - we don't really feel her falling further into Aunt Dan's thrall - and Taintor isn't able to tap into the demonic something-or-other that Shawn seems to be hinting at. Other cast members fare a bit better - Melissa Baroni plays Lemon's mother with a subtly sympathetic exasperation, and Melissa Barker is amusingly cool in her murderous dispatch.

But if the evening never quite gels, one can't help but applaud the Whistlers for once again wrestling with a politically and formally challenging text - and pinning it to the mat at least half the time. If only our larger theatres had half their guts and smarts! Just think how exciting the local scene would be.