Jeffrey DeMunn in 'A Family for All Occasions.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The set for A Family for All Occasions, a new play from the small Labyrinth Theater Company, is a wonder. In the tiny Bank Street Theater, where Bob Glaudini’s darkly comic drama opened Sunday night, David Meyer has built a finely detailed, deeply lived-in re-creation of a working-class family’s front room—dining table and chairs, lounger, workbench in a corner, books and tchotchkes on the shelves—in what the program tells us is a midsize Northeastern city. But the remarkable moments come, in this cramped and low-ceilinged room, when first a side wall and then, later, a back one slide away to reveal other rooms of the home. They’re unexpected discoveries, these additional spaces, and impressive, enjoyable flourishes.

Unfortunately Mr. Glaudini’s play, a sometimes intriguing but more often opaque portrait of a deeply dysfunctional family, is less revelatory than that set, and not so enjoyably fulfilling.

Howard (Jeffrey DeMunn) is a retired electrician who earns extra money repairing lamps for a local shop. He’s kindly and optimistic and always sees the best in his gruff wife and wayward kids. That wife, May (Deirdre O’Connell), a supervisor at a box factory, is perpetually tired and cranky. Howard’s two adult children from his first marriage—his wife fled the family when the kids were young—live at home and maintain sullen, aimless existences. Sam (Charlie Saxton), whom we meet first, is a schlubby tech guru who can’t or won’t get a job; instead he stays shut in his room, working on the coding project that he believes will get him a scholarship to college and fulminating about the old crappy computer he’s forced to try to do it on.

Sue (Justine Lupe), Sam’s older sister, is a party girl whom we meet after breakfast, when she comes home from a night out. She announces to Sam that a man she met the previous night might be stopping by, and then she heads for the bathtub. Soon enough, Oz (William Jackson Harper) arrives, and if it’s unclear why a man who seems to be so kind, calm, respectful and well-spoken—he “eschews” drugs, he tells Sue—would be so smitten with this aimless clubgoer, or why he would agree to a date that begins at 9 or 10 in the morning, his character at least serves an important dramaturgical purpose as the catalyst that will knock this family out of its depressive stasis.

The play is directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a Labyrinth stalwart, and he gives it a deeply naturalistic feel reminiscent of his acting: gritty, authentic, not at all showy. You hear murmurs of conversations happening just off set, you watch characters eat—and slurp—cereal. It’s an approach that lends visceral immediacy to the proceedings, as do the generally subtle and affecting performances. But it also diminishes the comedy of what could be played as a satire and instead gives A Family for All Occasions a gravitas that the material cannot quite support.

Oz, who reports that he also “eschews” alcohol, turns out to be a boon companion for the lonely older man, and the two bond over a shared love of words and books. Oz has access to wholesale electronics—never explored is how, or whether it’s entirely legal—and he soon worms his way into the family with gifts: a new computer for Sam, an iPod for the music-loving Howard, a foot massager for exhausted May. Sue’s gift is a child, apparently conceived after an odd onstage seduction. Oz’s background and motivations remain opaque, but soon enough he’s stuck in this same small house, raising a child.

The play’s climax—an entirely uncharacteristic burst of violence from Howard—feels contrived, but it also shows how a man who spends so much time trying to be positive amid unhappy circumstances must eventually release his frustration. The denouement is fitting, and sad: Sue has fled, like her mother; Sam is finally off at college; Howard and May, who is now also in retirement, are reconnecting. Oz is left to raise the baby, a new version of Howard.

The point, I suppose, is about the inevitability and repetition of life, and it could be a bracing one. Instead, A Family for All Occasions is a little like Howard: nice, well-intentioned and disappointingly ineffectual.

Bunty Berman Presents..., a new musical at the New Group, has a different ambition—to be a big, boisterous, Golden Age of Bollywood extravaganza—and it’s more of a disappointment.

Set in 1957, when Bombay moviemaking was like studio-era Hollywood, it starts off promisingly, as the opening number—“Bombay Opening,” an exuberant and silly paean to the glories of the Indian filmmaking capital—reveals bouncy music, a charmingly hammy cast and goofy, clever choreography (by Josh Prince). There are also bold, colorful, clever costumes and sets (by William Ivey Long and Derek McLane).

Soon enough, the stock characters and convolutedly mechanical plot—aping the style of 1950s Hindi films—are introduced: there’s Bunty (Ayub Khan Din), a paternal studio chief lately down on his luck and short of financing; his secretary, Dolly (Gayton Scott), secretly in love with him; his beloved, over-the-hill star, Raj (Sorab Wadia); Shambervi (Lipica Shah), the young female star with a secret past; Saleem (Nick Choksi), the tea boy in love with her; Shankar Dass (Alok Tewari), the local gangster offering a financial resource; and on and on. There are twists, turns, misunderstandings and dance numbers, and eventually everything turns out as it should.

Would that the same were true of this play, which opened last week at Theatre Row. The music, by Ayub Khan Din, the star, and Paul Bogaev, is entertaining and upbeat, more Big Band jazzy than Eastern. But Mr. Din’s book and lyrics, as directed by New Group artistic director Scott Elliott, don’t match the upbeat enthusiasm of that first number. There are a few outright groaners, like the lyric about chutzpah that prompts this exchange: “I’m Jewish.” “A Jew?” “Gesundheit.” But the larger problem is a wholesale lack of wit, pep and excitement. It’s a lugubrious farce, a sodden flight of fancy. Bunty Berman Presents... should be a luxurious immersion in the lovable excesses of Bollywood; instead, it’s just a brisk walk through Curry Hill.

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Morris and Kunken in 'Nikolai and the Others.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Richard Nelson, Tony-winning book writer, Obie-winning playwright and former Yale Drama playwriting chair, is today best known for his ongoing saga about the Apple family. Each year for four years, culminating this fall, he has brought a new play to the Public Theater about a close-knit, articulate, politically aware family from Rhinebeck, N.Y., each play premiering on a historically significant date and set on the day it debuts. (The final installment will open on Nov. 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.) These lauded plays, about the hopes and frustrations of liberal-leaning New Yorkers in the age of Obama, tend to unfold during a long family meal; there is well-wrought discussion, subtle revelation and layered character development, but typically little action.

So it goes with Mr. Nelson’s Nikolai and the Others, which opened Monday night in a Lincoln Center Theater production at the Mitzi Newhouse. This time the family, such as it is, is a group of Russian émigré artists and intellectuals, among them George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky, at work on their ballet Orpheus, gathered for a weekend in the Connecticut woods. It is once again a play with a lot of discussion—the Playbill lists 18 characters—and the issues it takes up include the role of the artist, the struggles of the immigrant, and specifically those roles and struggles as they fit into the soft-power cultural Cold War. Once again there is little action. In this case, though, exploring half-century-old debates, it’s harder to keep that discussion vital.

It is 1948, and these Russians are gathered at the Westport farmhouse of Lucia Davidova (Haviland Morris), described in the Playbill as Balanchine’s “confidant,” which is to say one of several women here who are unrequitedly in love with him. A large meal is being prepared in honor of an aged, ailing guest, the revered set designer Sergey Sudeiken (Alvin Epstein), whose arrival they await. We slowly meet the group. The titular Nikolai is Nikolai Nabokov (Stephen Kunken), a composer who no longer composes but instead serves as a fixer—he has a business card from the Voice of America and indistinct sources of funding and influence, to be deployed as needed. Stravinsky (John Glover) is in from California and looks very Hollywood; his wife, Vera (Blair Brown), is Sudeiken’s ex-wife. And on and on: Natasha Nabokov (Kathryn Erbe), another “confidant” of Balanchine, is Nikolai’s ex-wife; the rehearsal pianist Kolya (Alan Schmuckler) is Sudeikin’s nephew.

The undisputed star of the group is Balanchine (a regal Michael Cerveris), and later, in the adjacent barn, he presents for the first time his dances for Orpheus. That’s when the conductor Serge Koussevitsky (Michael Rosen) turns up, bringing with him the State Department man Chip Bohlen, a fluent Russian speaker and, it later becomes apparent, Nikolai’s handler. He is the outsider, and his presence throws things off kilter. (A note from Mr. Nelson emphasizes that while the play is historically informed, it isn’t strictly historically accurate.)

David Cromer directs, and it’s both beautiful and fascinating to watch how he places and moves this sprawling cast around Marsha Ginsberg’s three-part set, in which rotating walls separate the yard from the house from the barn, the other spaces partially visible even when not at center stage. That cast is excellent, impressively imbuing each of these many characters with a recognizable personality. And I am by no means a balletomane, but watching Natalia Alsonso (as Balanchine’s wife, Maria Tallchief, a dancer) and Nicholas Magallanes (another dancer) perform portions of Orpheus, narrated by Mr. Cerveris as Balanchine, was breathtaking.

And still, Balanchine choreography notwithstanding, Nikolai and the Others doesn’t quite take flight. It is a lengthy, pleasant but unthrilling exploration of old questions that leaves us more or less where we began. If the key to Mr. Nelson’s Apple plays is that they aspire to burn with the so-called fierce urgency of now, Nikolai and the Others can’t help merely simmering in the mild intrigue of the past.

J.M. Barrie, the Victorian author and playwright, gave the world Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up. On the evidence of This Side of Neverland, a pleasantly diverting and mildly intriguing evening of two Barrie one-act plays presented by the Pearl Theatre Company in its new home on far West 42nd Street, where it opened Sunday night, Barrie had a fascination with all sorts of alternate lives.

In Rosalind, the first play, a pleasantly contented middle-aged woman (Rachel Botchan) is on holiday from London, visiting a small Scottish town. She is the mother of a noted English actress, she says, and it is only when a young man on a walk nearby (a drily funny Sean McNall) stops in to get out of the rain, a young man who purports to be in love with her daughter, that it eventually becomes clear: mother and daughter are in fact the same person. (She asks by way of explanation, “Have you noticed there are no parts for middle-aged ladies?”) That is her double life: she is happily, glamorously living as a young woman in town, and happily, frumpily relaxing as an older one in the country.

In The Twelve Pound Look, meantime, a pompous Englishman (Bradford Cover) on the verge of being knighted sends out for a typist and is shocked when his equally surprised long-lost first wife (Ms. Botchan) arrives to do the job. He believes he understands women, as he keeps telling us; she reveals that she left all those years earlier, and chose to make it on her own, because she simply couldn’t bear being married to him. It is, especially in Victorian times, a shocking revelation to him; it’s also, again, a powerful vision of an alternative existence.

Both plays, if slight, are clever and full of wordplay, and J.R. Sullivan, the Pearl’s artistic director, directs them, and his small ensemble of actors (which also includes Carol Schultz and Vaishnavi Sharma), with charm. This Side of Neverland is, likewise, a slight, charming evening.

The British playwrighT Mike Barlett made a splash a year ago with his crackling, unnamable-in-the-Times Cock, a tense bisexual love triangle set in a bullring-like set. His brisk, compelling new work, Bull, which opened last week at 59E59 Theaters, seems at first to be a parallel battle, this time set in an office. But it’s not, and the play, directed by Clare Lizzimore, would be better served if it was presented as less of a companion piece.

Audience members entersthe theater to find a workplace version of a boxing ring in the center of the room, a raised, carpeted square with glass-and-rail walls in lieu of ropes and a water cooler in the corner; seating is arranged bleacher-like at each end of the room, and some observers stand on the floor around the “ring.” Three gray-suited actors, portraying two employees and their supervisor waiting for a meeting with the big boss (who will be laying one of them off), enter, and the set, with its echo of Cock’s bullring, suggests we’ll see a similar dynamic play out, alliances shifting among the three as they battle for workplace supremacy. As it becomes clear that two of them—Tony (Adam James), the supervisor, and Isobel (Eleanor Matsuura)—are united in their dislike of the third, Thomas (Sam Troughton), and conspiring against him—it is, despite the play’s intricate and very funny verbal jousting, a disappointment that the lines are so clearly and uninterestingly drawn.

But as Tony and Isobel continue to beat up on Thomas, emotionally and eventually physically, even after the big boss, Carter (Neil Stuke), fires him, Bull morphs instead into a fascinating study of abuse, of bullying, of total interpersonal annihilation. Tony and Isobel seem soulless, inhuman and corporate, each an Aaron Eckhart character in an early Neil LaBute film. They leave Thomas alone on the floor at the center of the ring, prone and utterly defeated. It’s shocking, visceral and a little scary.

As for Bull, it might not be quite that much of a knockout, but it sure packs a punch.

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'Pippin.' Photo by Joan Marcus

Leave your fields to flower, leave your cheese to sour. In her new revival of Pippin, which opened at the Music Box last week, director Diane Paulus really does have some magic to do (whether or not it’s just for you). And if you have any fondness for musical theater—in this case, deliriously joyful, gorgeously staged, unexpectedly moving musical theater—you’ll want to join her for this colorful, acrobatic, magical indeed interpretation of Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz’s anecdotic revue.

Doodle-ee-do.

I’m riffing, of course, on lyrics from “Magic to Do,” Pippin’s opening number. This is what one tends to do with this show, not seen on Broadway since its original 1972 production closed in the summer of 1977 but ingrained in nearly all of us from the innumerable high school and community productions staged over the past three and a half decades. It’s larded with at a least a half-dozen infectious, mildly funky pop-rock theater songs, most with clever rhymes and memorable imagery in their lyrics. The songs stay with you, and get quoted and riffed on, even as the show’s book, the shaggy story of a medieval price with a post-collegiate identity crisis—he’s determined to be extraordinary, but he can’t quite figure out how—recedes from memory.

Hence my slight concern as I approached Ms. Paulus’s revival, the final show of the Broadway season. The last time I’d seen Pippin was when we at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., closed our production in March 1992. Since then, I loved the score and had only hazy recollections of the book. Plus I recall with trepidation last season’s insipid, kindergarten-on-acid revival of Godspell, Mr. Schwartz’s other feel-good 1970s warhorse. The word from Cambridge—where Ms. Paulus debuted this Pippin at the American Repertory Theater, of which she is artistic director and where she did likewise with last year’s controversial and excellent Porgy and Bess—was enthusiastic, but there were also dissenters amid those I knew who’d seen it.

But from the show’s first moment, all apprehension evaporated. The conceit of Pippin is that it is being presented by a troupe of traveling performers; Pippin the musical is a show about this troupe putting on a show about Pippin the prince. (The key role, made famous by Ben Vereen in Bob Fosse’s original production, is known only as Leading Player.) Ms. Paulus’s innovation is to make those troupers into a circus; there’s a big top and trapezes and strongmen and acrobats. As the audience enters the Music Box, there’s a scrim across the stage, the front wall of the big top, and as the lights go down and the music begins, a dancer is lit from behind and silhouetted against that scrim in a classic Fosse pose. It’s Patina Miller, sinewy and sensational (and, as of yesterday, Tony-nominated) as the Leading Player, and it’s a beautiful, thrilling moment, improved only as that curtain falls and the full big top is revealed, packed with an ensemble that sings and dances but also spins and twists and climbs; it’s busy and overwhelming and wonderful.

And it’s a very fair preview of what’s to come. Ms. Paulus’s staging is kinetic and acrobatic; it’s also consistently beautiful. It’s a twist to cast a woman as the Leading Player, and Ms. Miller is riveting. The choreography, by Chet Walker, is listed in the playbill as “in the style of Bob Fosse,” and one of the pleasures of his “in the style” treatment is the occasional posed moments, like that opening one, that present not as reductively Fosse-esque but instead as delicious Fosse homages. The acrobats are astonishing. (Gypsy Snider has a “circus creation” credit.)

The most astonishing moment, as you may have heard, is Andrea Martin’s acrobatics. The justly beloved Broadway vet here plays Berthe, Pippin’s fun-loving grandmother, who advises the angsty post-adolescent that it’s time to start living. She does this in a number that eventually leaves her in a sparkly leotard, delivering a big finish while suspended upside down from a trapeze. She stops the show, quite literally: she earned a mid-act standing ovation on the night I attended.

The rest of the supporting cast is nearly as much fun to watch and listen to: Terrence Mann as a funny, blustery Charlemagne; Charlotte d’Amboise, Mr. Mann’s real-life wife, slinky and sly as Charlemagne’s scheming second wife, Fastrada; Rachel Bay Jones as the ordinary woman with whom Pippin finds happiness. In fact, the weakest performance may well be the man at the center of the show: Matthew James Thomas sings beautifully as Pippin and looks beautiful without his shirt on, but he appears to lack the charisma of a leading man—or the acting chops to stay in character and vamp his way through Ms. Martin’s thunderous applause.

Of course, it may also be a conscious choice by Mr. Thomas, who went conspicuously un-Tony nonimated, to seem a little vacant as he plays Pippin; the character, too, is lost and unsure of his role. (Breaking character, however, is inexcusable.) Indeed, Pippin’s sweet, slightly sad and a little bit profound lesson is that sometimes the best way to be happy is to stop trying to be special. That while a young man searches for a way to make his mark on the world, a wiser man knows how to be happy with what he has. Fortunately for us, Ms. Paulus has mounted an extraordinary argument for the ordinary.

THE MEMORY SHOW, a two-woman musical about a mother suffering from  Alzheimer’s Disease, turns out, alas, to be merely ordinary.

It’s too bad, because it opens so sharply. Catherine Cox, as the mother, is alone in an exam room, clad in a paper gown, singing a funny, angry song called “Who’s the President of the United States,” about the indignities of illness and medical treatment, including the insipid questions neurologists often ask. The twist at its end is that she cannot, in fact, name the president. She’s not well. And so her daughter moves back home to care for her.

The mostly sung-through show opened last night at the Duke on 42nd Street in a Transport Group production. Written by Sara Cooper, with music by Zach Redler and directed by Joe Calarco, it tracks the relationship between these two women as the mom gets sicker and the daughter tries to understand their complicated history. Leslie Kritzer plays the daughter, and she is the show’s attraction: she gives her thinly drawn role some warmth and humanity, and she has a lovely singing voice.

But the score, as is so often the case with contemporary musical theater, is atmospheric and indistinct, the major plot revelation is unsurprising, and the relationship between the two is never particularly interesting or compelling. (It’s also tough, after two seasons that included two productions of The Other Place, to impress with a show about a woman losing her mind.) The Memory Show isn’t an unpleasant evening, but it’s not a memorable one.

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Baldwin in 'Orphans.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Bad news, Bette. Celebrity actors are bustin’ out all over the Theater District this spring, but it turns out the must-see event of the season is at the Public Theater, where Here Lies Love, David Byrne’s clubland pop opera on the life of Imelda Marcos, opened last night. Already twice extended, this is a show that will be bringing town cars down Lafayette Street till it closes.

Mr. Byrne, the erstwhile Talking Head, began with a song cycle about Mrs. Marcos, the ambitious and high-living wife of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos. Hers is a compelling story, and an inherently theatrical one: a middle-class woman who reached the heights of wealth and power, a devoted political wife devastated by news of her husband’s adultery, an acquisitive Machiavelli who ran the country while her husband was ill. That the jet-setting Mrs. Marcos liked to hang out in disco-era hot spots provided a genre: Mr. Byrne’s album is inspired by ’70s and ’80s dance music. The producer Fatboy Slim provided beats, singers like Cyndi Lauper, Nellie McKay and Sharon Jones provided vocals, and Mr. Byrne’s Here Lies Love—the title is the epitaph Mrs. Marcos has requested for her grave—was released in 2009. It’s not a defense of Mrs. Marcos, an indictment or even a documentary; mostly, it’s an emotional record of her life.

Now the explosively creative theater director Alex Timbers, working with Mr. Byrne and a gifted design team, has turned that album into an eye-popping, head-bopping, immersive theater experience. Theatergoers climb to the Public’s third floor and enter a theater that’s been remade as a disco. Music is playing, and the audience stands around elevated stages. Those stages will move, and there are jumpsuited men to direct you out of the way. All around you—in song and dance, with projections and parades—Mrs. Marcos’s story will be told. It’s emotionally rich and deeply engaging. You will be surprised to find yourself cheering for Ferdinand’s first electoral win.

Mr. Byrne’s music is propulsive, and the cast—mostly unknown, mostly Filipino—is fantastic. Annie-B Parson’s choreography is mesmerizing nightclub dancing with martial undertones. The costumes by Clint Ramos are sleek and sexy, with the requisite arm-poufs for Mrs. M. (David Korins is the scenic designer and Justin Townsend the lighting designer.)

The show isn’t perfect. Unsurprisingly for what began life as a song cycle, the narrative can sometimes be unclear. And while the moving stages are cool and visually intriguing, it’s also a distraction each time an attendant taps you on the shoulder and you have to look away from the action to make sure you’re out of the way of yet another rolling platform.

But Here Lies Love is exciting, unexpected and an awful lot of fun. As the room rearranged itself yet one more time, I looked across the stage to see a dude in flannel and a watch cap smiling and bouncing his head to the music. Just to his right, an older couple in turtleneck sweaters was doing the same. Like Mrs. Marcos always wanted, the masses are happy.

The Trip to Bountiful, meanwhile, is a trip to the other end of the theatrical spectrum. It’s a big production of a sentimental Broadway drama, played in the cavernous Stephen Sondheim Theatre (where it opened last night) with a celebrity cast. And it’s every bit as engrossing as its hip downtown counterpart.

A Horton Foote play first produced in 1953, The Trip to Bountiful is a simple, sweet story about family and home: an old woman who lives in Houston with her meek son and domineering daughter-in-law wants to see the small town where she was born, Bountiful, before she dies.

Staged by Michael Wilson with a crackerjack cast led by Cicely Tyson, 79 years old and gleefully stealing scenes from Cuba Gooding Jr. (as her son) and Vanessa Williams (as her daughter-in-law), this is a graceful production. A recurring theme is that Ms. Tyson’s Carrie Watts has a bad heart and shouldn’t be traveling. But of course she has the biggest heart in her family, and this show—the most enjoyable production of a Foote play I’ve seen—has plenty of heart too.

Holy mother of Christ is Fiona Shaw good.

Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, which opened Monday at the Walter Kerr, is a one-woman show in which the gospel is retold from Mary’s point of view. Ms. Shaw plays her as an anxious, distracted, devoted and guilt-ridden mother.

Working with her longtime collaborator Deborah Warner, who directs, Ms. Shaw’s Mary is very human, pacing a junk-strewn campsite. The playbill lists the time as now, and as Mary paces the stage she smokes cigarettes and drinks from coffee cups. Ms. Shaw is riveting.

Mr. Tóibín’s play, however, is less so. There are moments of transcendent, spine-tingling beauty, but there are also long stretches leading up to those moments that get lost in a thicket of storytelling that is near indecipherable, at least to those of us whose religious education reads from right to left. At those points, the 90 minutes can seem interminable. Still, for the good parts, it’s worth it.

Amid the fragrance line, the mugging and the debaucherous man-about-town party-going, it’s easy to forget that Alan Cumming is a serious actor, and a very good one. His one-man Macbeth, which played the Lincoln Center Festival last summer, opened Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore, and it is a tour de force performance.

Directed by John Tiffany (of Once and Black Watch) and Andrew Goldberg, this Macbeth is set in a psychiatric ward, and it opens with two attendants removing a disheveled suit from a bloodied Mr. Cumming and placing the clothes in evidence bags. They leave—“When shall we three meet again?” Mr. Cumming asks as they exit—and Mr. Cumming begins to retell the famous story, playing all the parts. He is monitored by security cameras and gazed at by attendants as he bounces among beds, slits his wrists and tries to drown himself in a bathtub.

It all works, and it’s transfixing.

Man may have a dual nature, but about some things there are not two sides. Jekyll & Hyde, the Frank Wildhorn musical, with book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, is one of them: as revived at the Marquis Theatre last week, it is dreadful.

Mr. Wildhorn has a well-earned reputation as a reliable composer of unsuccessful musicals that somehow get produced. At Jekyll & Hyde I once again found myself thinking that the composer is perhaps worst served by his collaborators. Two of his songs for Jekyll & Hyde are justifiably beloved by musical-theater geeks, and the rest of the music is pleasant if uninspired pop-rock.

But the dialogue is laughable and the lyrics worse. Constantine Maroulis, the would-be American Idol in the lead role, can sing but cannot act. (Deborah Cox, however, gives a nice performance as his love interest/victim.) And ultimately this production, directed by Jeff Calhoun, is so overstuffed and overdone that even the roller-skating models of Starlight Express would find it a bit much.

Orphans, the Lyle Kessler play best known as the production from which Shia LaBeouf was fired, is, like its theatrical namesakes from Peter to Annie, lovable but a little bit lost. What was once considered a hard-edged drama is now, as directed by Daniel Sullivan at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, a comic romp. That’s an odd progression in the three decades since its premiere, but it’s not a bad one.

Treat (Ben Foster) and Phillip (Tom Sturridge) are orphaned adults living in a dilapidated North Philadelphia row house. Treat has taken on the parental role, working as a petty thief to provide for Phillip. Phillip, meanwhile, has been infantilized by his brother; he doesn’t leave the house, he doesn’t work, he can barely read. Jumping around the set like a cat, he’s nearly feral. It’s when Treat kidnaps Harold (Alec Baldwin) that this order changes. Harold, an orphan too, wriggles free of his constraints but chooses not to leave the house; instead, he becomes a father figure to the two boys.

The three performances are deeply pleasurable to watch, all slightly surrealistic. Mr. Baldwin does his usual avuncular thing to great effect. Mr. Foster is a growling, confused Treat. And Mr. Sturridge’s Phillip is the performance to remember, an awkward man-child, slowly coming into his own.

I can’t tell you quite what the lesson of Orphans is, but I can tell you it’s an awfully entertaining evening.

You’re got to give the Manhattan Theatre Club credit for knowing its audience—which is precisely those of us whose religious education reads from right to left. Assembled Parties, the new Richard Greenberg play MTC opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre last week, is a beautifully, hilariously written homage to a certain idealized kind of Upper West Side Jewish existence—sprawling prewars, witty repartee, secular humanist Christmas dinners—that may or may not have ever existed, that if it did is surely gone now, but that we’d all like to think is just a good rent-stabilized lease away.

It’s particularly easy to feel that way in this lush production, elegantly directed by Lynne Meadow, staged on a rotating Santo Loquasto set of Central Park West opulence, and featuring two incomparable leading ladies. Jessica Hecht plays Julie Bascov, the urbane earth mother of this comfortable home; Judith Light—note-perfect Judith Light—is her comfortable but less well-off sister-in-law. They’re women of a certain age, a certain class, and a certain time, but they’re smart and sassy and, mostly, indomitable.

But their time is passing, and they know it. Mr. Greenberg’s script is littered with allusions to lost eras, and indeed the entire play, set at a family Christmas dinner in 1980 and another in 2000, is about the inexorable passage of time and the equally inexorable forces of entropy. The happy, prosperous family of 1980 is a smaller, sadder one in 2000. The Assembled Parties is a very, very funny play that’s also a very sad one.

It’s also a bit scattered, both overplotted and underdeveloped—there’s an appetizing counter worth of enticing diversions that never seem to go anywhere, plus a few central mysteries that remain unsolved. But, sha, do I really need to bring that up? Things don’t stay good forever, The Assembled Parties tells us, so you might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

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'Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.' (Carol Rosegg)

“My life is empty,” moans a lonely, sad, aging Sonia. “And I forget something every day. I can’t remember the Italian for window or ceiling.”

“Window is finestra, ceiling is soffitto,” replies her equally lonely, not quite as sad, very practical brother, Vanya.

“That doesn’t sound familiar,” Sonia says. She twists her face with a quick, crazed glint of awareness. “I don’t think I know Italian.”

There isn’t a rim shot, but there ought to be.

Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which opened last week at the Golden Theatre, is one of the funniest plays on Broadway in recent memory, and it’s also one of the cleverest. It’s Chekhov relocated to Bucks County, Pa., and updated to the 21st century, allusive and intellectual but also zany and broadly comic. Mr. Durang explores the good doctor’s usual themes—the past and the future, unfulfilled ambition and suffocating regret, the inevitability of change—in an American-Chekhovian universe of three siblings named by their professor parents for the famous dramatic characters. As in Sonia’s lament—it’s a line from Three Sisters: “Everything is confused in my head ... I can’t remember what is the word for window in Italian, or for ceiling”—this play mixes up the classical and vernacular, the profound and the quotidian, the serious and the silly. It’s a great time.

The play transpires in the morning room and yard of a sprawling stone-and-shingle
farmhouse, where Vanya (David Hyde Pierce, mostly subdued and very droll) and his adopted sister Sonia (Kristine Nielsen, hilariously wide-eyed and manic), live in quiet if not quite contented isolation. It’s the house in which they grew up and then cared for their increasingly decrepit parents—a provincial estate, you might say—and where they now pass their days, looking for the blue heron that visits their pond and contending with their soothsaying weekly cleaning lady (a funny Shalita Grant), conveniently named Cassandra. (The lush set is by David Korins.)

Their complacent monotony is upended when their movie star sister Masha (Signourney Weaver, Mr. Durang’s old Yale Drama pal and a fine comedienne) arrives from New York with her beefcake boy toy, Spike (Billy Magnussen, appropriately dim and Aryan). She’s in town for a party, but also to tell her siblings that she’s planning to sell the house, the upkeep of which she has been funding. (Shades of Uncle Vanya!) Masha’s presence draws the neighbors’ aspiring-actor niece, Nina (an ethereal Genevieve Angelson), who ultimately inspires Vanya to stage a performance of his secret, experimental play. (Shades of The Seagull!)

Director Nicholas Martin, who also staged the virtually identical production that ran off-Broadway in the fall at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater (and before that at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, which commissioned it), deftly walks a fine line with Mr. Durang’s play, eliciting performances that are alternatingly screwball and affecting. The young characters are both naïve and ludicrous; the older characters worry either that their lives are over or have passed them by.

An emotional high point comes in Vanya’s unexpected tantrum about the indignities of the modern, multitasking, always-on society and the superiority of the bland 1950s. “The ’50s were idiotic, but I miss parts of them,” he shouts, after praising Ed Sullivan and postage stamps and Hayley Mills, who “grew up to be a sensible, nice woman.” It’s a bravura turn from Mr. Hyde Pierce, but it’s also a cleverly constructed, perfectly pitched bit of business: it credits his anxiety, but it also makes him look more than a bit ridiculous for wallowing in it.

And that, ultimately, is what makes this Durangian and not Chekhovian, American and not Russian. Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike has a happy ending, with the house unsold and its characters acclimated, if warily, to change. This Vanya and Sonia remain at home, but happily. If they wanted to, they’d get to Moscow.

Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, a heady 1975 drama that opened in a muddled revival at the Signature Theatre Sunday night, is an anthropological look at anthropologists, and the best way to view it today is anthropologically, as a window onto 1970s mores about marriage, class and real-estate development. While Mr. Wilson’s 1979 Talley’s Folly, currently in lovely revival at the Roundabout, has aged gracefully, The Mound Builders, alas, has not.

Structured as a memory play and a mystery, The Mound Builders opens with Prof. August Howe (David Conrad) in his university office, reviewing slides from a summer dig and dictating dejected notes for his secretary. Over the course of the play, as the setting shifts back and forth in time between the office and the dig, we meet the rest of Howe’s crew—the detoxing novelist sister; the adulterous wife; the ambitious protégé; the protégé’s pregnant doctor wife, who seems not terribly in love with him—and we wait to find out what went so terribly wrong. Much pot is smoked and much white wine is drunk; the women, for the most part, pick up after the men, and several in the group presume that the doctor-wife won’t return to practice after childbirth. None of the characters seem particularly real.

The one interloper is Chad Jasker (Will Rogers), the aspirational son of the local landowner; he befriends the crew and dreams of the riches he’ll have once the Interstate arrives. (Jasker, for his part, sleeps with one of the wives, lusts for the other, and makes a drunken pass at the protégé, his fishing buddy.) It’s when the archeologists make a major find—the first located tomb of a god-king in the lost Mound Builder culture—that trouble comes. Archeology will trump the Interstate, and a rerouted road will bypass Jasker.

The point, of course, is the inevitable march of time and civilization, how one bit of progress is always destroying what came before, how any society—be it the archeologists’ own or the one they are studying—can disappear. The ghostly, glowing-from-below set in Jo Bonney’s production nicely hints at the things always lurking underneath. (The scenic design is by Neil Patel and the lighting by Rui Rita.) But because we have so little emotional investment in the society on stage, we don’t much care when it collapses.

There is real pleasure in watching the quirky comic actress Carol Kane live on stage in the Atlantic Theater Company’s intimate Linda Gross Theater, where she is starring in The Lying Lesson. There is even more pleasure in seeing how good she is at nailing her character, the seemingly inimitable Bette Davis, how she moves, lingers on a gesture, holds an expression. The problem is that she’s doing it in Craig Lucas’s awkward, schematic, barely dramatic play, staged with uncharacteristically sloppy direction and a painfully slow pace by Pam MacKinnon.

It’s 1981; Davis been through four husbands and the good parts of her career, and she has come to a small town in coastal Maine where she summered as a child to buy a house from a man she once loved. Things start off well: it is a literally dark and stormy night, and Ms. Kane enters as a mid-century Hollywood star—coiffed hair, hard-cased bags, sunglasses (darkness and storm notwithstanding). Soon the power cuts out, and moments later someone breaks in. Davis is armed with a kitchen knife and a biting wit; the burglar is clearly overmatched. In any case, it turns out to be a local girl, a caretaker, who is seemingly unaware of her interlocutor’s fame. They become friends.

Thus is that early moment of drama swiftly ratcheted down. And so it continues, with every new revelation serving to make things less interesting, rather than more. Worse, the play’s main revelation is about the caretaker, Minnie (Mickey Sumner, with a dreadful Down East accent), who is the character we don’t care about. (Speaking of accents: Ms. Kane’s is inexplicably Mittel-
European.) In that respect, The Lying Lesson is like Looped, the crackpot Tallulah Bankhead bio-play that asked us to care deeply about an unknown sound engineer’s coming-out story. But Looped was at least chockablock with over-the-top campy fun. The Lying Lesson is just dull, and Ms. Kane’s fine performance can’t change that.

editorial@observer.com

Allison Case in 'Hands on a Hardbody.' (Courtesy Matthew Murphy)

Hands on a Hardbody
Brooks Atkinson Theatre 
Opens March 21
The weird, charming 1997 documentary about a group of Texans competing in an endurance contest to win a pickup has become a—hopefully—weird, charming Broadway musical. The creative team augurs well for charming weirdness: the book is by I Am My Own Wife author Doug Wright; the music is by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio. Even weirder: it ís by all accounts a sympathetic, insightful commentary on financially struggling contemporary Americans—and when do you ever see that on Broadway?

Lucky Guy 
Broadhurst Theatre
Opens April 1
Sure, The Wood, last season’s bioplay about the controversial, beloved late Daily News columnist Mike McAlary, written by PR mogul Dan Klores and staged at the Rattlestick, was a bust. Which might not suggest we needed another version a year later. But this season’s take on the crusading, flawed journalist offers a Nora Ephron script and the Broadway debut of yet another Hollywood star: Tom Hanks.

Kinky Boots 
Al Hirschfeld Theatre
Opens April 4
La Cage Aux Folles meets Billy Elliot, with a Harvey Fierstein book and music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper, plus Jerry Mitchell directing—of course this is a hugely anticipated new musical. Based on the 2005 film, it’s the no-doubt heartwarming story of a struggling small-town shoe factory saved by the brilliant idea to start making women’s shoes designed for cross-dressing men. Drag queens, after all, just want to have fun.

Matilda The Musical
Shubert Theatre
Opens April 11
The Roald Dahl children’s book—about a little girl unloved at home but wildly successful in school and life—is coming to town as a big Broadway musical. First, though, it played London’s West End, where last year it won a record-setting seven Olivier Awards. Matthew Warchus directs a rotating group of four girls in the lead role, but don’t be misled into thinking it’s just a kids’ show. Word from London is that it’s fantastic—one of those Oliviers was for Best Musical.

The Nance
Lyceum Theatre
Opens April 15
The nance, in early-20th-century burlesque, was a campily gay stock character, typically played by a straight man. In The Nance, Nathan Lane plays a closeted gay man, pretending to be a straight man, who plays a gay man. The Victor/Victoria-ish premise is scripted by the hilarious Douglas Carter Beane, and Jack O’Brien directs. Cady Huffman, Mr. Lane’s Producers Ulla, is in the cast, too.

Orphans 
Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
Opens April 18
If your only goal was to see Shia LaBeouf on Broadway this season, then Orphans is no longer your show. But the young movie star’s dramatic departure, and its epistolary fallout, only makes the production—a revival of Lyle Kessler’s 1983 drama about two orphaned brothers who kidnap an older man—more intriguing. Alec Baldwin, who may or may not have incited Mr. LaBeouf’s departure, still stars as the older man, Tom Sturridge still plays younger brother Phillip, and Ben Foster has joined the cast as younger brother Treat. Daniel Sullivan directs.

Here Lies Love
The Public Theater
Opens April 23
Four names: Imelda Marcos, David Byrne, Fatboy Slim and Alex Timbers. Here Lies Love was a concept album about the shoe-loving life of Mrs. Marcos, released in 2010 by Mr. Byrne, the onetime Talking Head and current downtown fixture, and Fatboy Slim, the British “Praise You” DJ-producer. With Mr. Timbers, the director who created Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, they’re turning it into a dance-music musical.

I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers
Booth Theatre
Opens April 24
One name: Bette Midler. The Divine Miss M is coming back to Broadway for the first time in more than 30 years, in a one-woman show about the Hollywood super-agent Sue Mengers. Ms. Mengers, who died two years ago, remained a power player even after her retirement, hosting legendary, intimate weekly dinner parties in her Beverly Hills home. Joe Mantello directs, and the playwright, John Logan, knows a thing or two about capturing larger-than-life personalities: he wrote the Mark Rothko bioplay Red.

Far From Heaven 
Playwrights Horizons
Opens June 2
Todd Haynes’s 2002 movie was a critical darling, a look behind the sunny façade of 1950s conformity, with a secretly gay suburban husband and his wife striking up a doomed interracial friendship, all filmed in a glossy, Douglas Sirk style. Take Me Out playwright Richard Greenberg has adapted it for a musical, with music and lyrics by the Grey Gardens team of Scott Frankel and Michael Korie. The very accomplished Michael Greif directs, and—even better—Kelli O’Hara stars.

Natasha, Pierre, and
the Great Comet of 1812
TBA
Several critics and editors will tell you that immersive-theater experience—a musical adaptation of a bit of War and Peace—was the best thing they saw in 2012. (They all told this reviewer, who never got to it.) But after a month and change last fall at Ars Nova, the show disappeared. Now there are reports of a casting notice, with performances scheduled to begin April 1. There was no theater, and no specifics as of press time—but let’s hope this Comet returns.

Burstein and Paulson in 'Talley's Folly.' (Joan Marcus)

“If everything goes well for me tonight, this should be a waltz—one-two-three, one-two-three—a no-holds-barred romantic story,” Danny Burstein, as Matt Friedman, tells his audience soon after he wanders onstage, house lights still up, “and since I’m not a romantic type, I’m going to need the whole valentine here to help me: the woods, the willows, the vines, the moonlight, the band.”

Matt, not unlike the narrator in Our Town, is welcoming his audience and setting the stage in Talley’s Folly, Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner from 1979, which opened last night in a sweet, deceptively slight and remarkably well-acted revival at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre. Soon, the lights will shift and the object of his affection, Sally Talley, played by Sarah Paulson, will appear; Matt’s story will begin, and the play will become, if not quite as simple as a waltz, indeed a movingly romantic story.

It is the summer of 1944, America is winning but has not yet won World War II, and Matt, a European-born Jewish accountant from St. Louis, has come to rural Lebanon, Mo., to ask Sally to marry him. There’s no reason this match should work: he’s a smooth-talking, hardworking immigrant, while she is local gentry, the daughter of a prominent family that co-owns Lebanon’s major employer, a garment factory. Matt and Sally met the previous summer, saw each other frequently during a week Matt spent in Lebanon, but in the year since, while he has written every day, Sally has replied only once. Her family is against this interloping Socialist; he’s hiding out in a decrepit Victorian boathouse on their property—one of several such “follies” an earlier Talley erected around town—because Sally’s brother chased him from the house at gunpoint. But Matt is convinced there’s a connection. And he’s right.

The director, Michael Wilson, has cast two remarkable performers in these two roles. Mr. Burstein, especially, is fantastic. With a full beard and a hint of Yiddish inflection behind his Midwestern accent, Mr. Burstein’s Matt is a charmer, a showman, but one whose constant, chirpy patter masks a wounded, alienated heart. Ms. Paulson is lovely as ever, but with self-protective steel. She has secrets too—but, until she finally reveals them, hers are more carefully buried, further from the surface. Both characters are needy; neither is a pushover. The actors are a pleasure to watch.

To win Sally’s love, Matt eventually opens up about his European background, the horrors that befell his family during the previous war and his determination to put that behind him and begin anew in America. Sally, too, has unhappy stories in her past that are eventually revealed, and her ideals are far closer to Matt’s than to her family’s. (She was fired from Sunday school for teaching Thorsten Veblen instead of the Methodist reader.) Lanford Wilson’s play encompasses so much 20th-century history—war, Depression, anti-
Semitism, unionism—but it does it, cleverly and elegantly, within a simple love story that makes a simple point: make the choice to pursue what you want, the one that you want, and you just might be happy.

AS WE ARE CURRENTLY learning, to be an Amy Herzog fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals. Often this is because of her heartbreakingly poignant plays, including the fall’s moving Great God Pan. But sometimes it is from disappointment, as is the case with the overpraised, flawed Belleville, which opened Sunday at New York Theatre Workshop.

Belleville tells the story of a young married couple, Abby (Maria Dizzia) and Zack (Greg Keller), college sweethearts, he just out of medical school, who have moved to the titular Brooklynish Paris neighborhood. As the play begins, they are seemingly happy, seemingly in love, but seemingly a little tense around each other. There are hints of larger problems—he smokes a lot of pot and is secretly behind on the rent, she is obsessively connected to her father and sister back in the States after the death of her mother several years earlier. As the play progresses, their lives and their marriage unravel, until a final, horrifying conclusion.

Ms. Herzog’s dialogue is, as always, spot-on, the recognizable snappy, allusive patois of overeducated Ivy League types everywhere. Anne Kauffman’s direction is similarly naturalistic and competent. And Belleville’s middle third is outstanding, a finely observed, recognizable and very sad portrait of a couple in love but deeply frustrated with each other, trying to communicate but unable to hear, trying to make the other happy but feeling unable to do so.

But that section is bracketed by a slow opening that takes a good half hour to build any real interest in the characters and a final section of mounting misfortune and revelation that strains credulity and eventually turns Gothic. Ms. Herzog’s strength is her subtlety, and in Belleville it has gone missing.

In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella—the creators’ names are part of the title, in the current fashion—love blossoms not just between its lead characters, as is required in any feel-good fairy tale, but also between the audience and the actors playing those leads. Laura Osnes, as Cinderella, and Santino Fontana, as the prince, are perfect in their parts—modern, pretty, sweet but not cloying, ever-so-slightly ironic heroes for this modern, lush, more-than-slightly ironic (the new book is by Douglas Carter Beane) musical. The show is good; Ms. Osnes and Mr. Fontana are spectacular.

This is the Broadway premiere of a TV musical that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote in 1957. (It opened Sunday at the Broadway Theatre.) It has a pretty, symphonic score, and, thanks to Mr. Beane’s rewrite, quippy one-liners and a plot that makes Cinderella a (successful!) advocate for democratic reform in the kingdom.

But what makes it work, as directed by Mark Brokaw, is precisely its Big Broadway Show-ness: big production numbers, gorgeously silly (and magically transforming) William Ivey Long costumes, and pitch-perfect casting. Victoria Clark is a doting, off-kilter fairy godmother, Ann Harada a goofily sulky evil stepsister, and, most notably, Harriet Harris a sublime evil stepmother, the role she was born to play.

The audience was filled with little girls in tiaras on the night I attended, and they were in thrall. The best news—hear ye, hear ye—is that their parents had every right to be, too.

Midway through the second act of Old Hats, Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s new retro-vaudevillian clowning spectacular, in a segment called “New Hats,” the singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, who serves as the evening’s Paul Shaffer-like bandleader and goofy straight man, convinces the boys that it’s time for the heretofore silent performers to open their mouths and sing. Mr. Irwin puts a toe in, scatting while playing ukulele. Mr. Shiner retorts with animal noises, “to be or not to be,” and eventually a cavalcade of movie quotations. Mr. Irwin, it turns out, just wants to sing the title number from Oklahoma! Such is the power—on all generations—of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Old Hats, which opened Monday night at the Signature Center, is a deeply funny, deeply charming, deeply old-fashioned evening, designed for thoroughly grown-up theatergoers.

Mr. Irwin and Mr. Shiner are virtuosic clowns, a delight to watch do their work. Their bits are interspersed with Ms. McKay’s numbers, which marry a sultry mid-century nightclub sensibility to a 21st-century lyrical sensibility. (Her spoken lines are delivered in a convincing, though I’m not sure entirely intentional, impersonation of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.) There are nods to the current era, like the opening number of the clowns running and fighting their way through a special-effects backdrop, which comes to a sudden stop and is replaced by a your-app-has-crashed spinning wheel. Later, Mr. Irwin does battle with a smaller version of himself that breaks free from an iPad.

But this is all, ultimately, proudly old-fashioned stuff. And it’s a lot of fun.

The Classic Stage Company is, as the name suggests, known for its takes on the classics: lots of Shakespeare and Chekhov and Beckett. But it turns out it’s also a swell place to see a musical, especially an intimate, intense one like Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion, and even more especially in the stripped-down, chamber style of director John Doyle.

Mr. Doyle is best known for his actors-with-instruments revivals of the Sondheim classics Sweeney Todd and Company. At the 199-seat, thrust-stage Classic Stage, where his revival of Messrs. Sondheim and Lapine’s musical drama about a homely recluse who falls obsessively in love with a handsome officer opened last week, the cast of 10 is nearly always on the small stage, and the nine-piece orchestra is suspended immediately overhead. It is the most enveloping production of a musical I’ve seen, and it sounds divine.

Judy Kuhn plays the sick, crazed Fosca with some tenderness and sings her part gorgeously. Melissa Errico is lovely as the officer’s pretty, married lover, Clara. That Ryan Silverman is conventionally handsome but not particularly charismatic as the officer, Giorgio, is somewhat problematic; it’s tough to credit him as the subject of wild obsession.

But it still works. Mr. Doyle creates some strikingly beautiful moments, and those visuals, with that music, in that intimate space, take your breath away.

For the second time in two seasons, the Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg has written a play for himself to star in at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. And for the second time in two seasons, he has created a character so deeply unpleasant—so self-absorbed, so stunted, so simultaneously verbose and uncommunicative—for himself that it’s a painful chore to sit through the play.

In The Revisionist, which opened last week in a Rattlestick production at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Mr. Eisensberg plays David, a young stoner from New York who has decamped to a distant cousin’s apartment in Poland to complete revisions on his novel. Vanessa Redgrave plays that cousin, Maria, who idolizes her American family and is thrilled to host David. But David is there only because he didn’t get into any writers’ colonies and needs a place to work; he has no interest in Maria. She makes him a welcome dinner; he won’t eat. She plays music; he complains about the noise. He feigns interest in her; he talks about himself. He is insufferable.

In Maria, Mr. Eisenberg has created a fascinating character. She lost her family to the Holocaust, her husband is recently dead, and she focuses on the American relatives, who barely know her and whom she visited only once, as a way to replace her own missing family. Ms. Redgrave gives a rich, nuanced performance in the role, and she credibly, movingly delivers the play’s surprising twist, which reveals her to be a revisionist of her own. It is a rare pleasure to watch her work from so close in such a tiny theater.

Unfortunately, Mr. Eisenberg has written a repellent character for himself. And while it is admirable that a major movie actor chooses to craft small Off Broadway plays instead of simply burnishing his bona fides with splashy Broadway star turns, it would be more admirable if those plays were better.

editorial@observer.com

Edie Falco in 'The Madrid.' (Joan Marcus)

I’ve met Liz Flahive, author of the curious and compelling new drama The Madrid, having spent a dinner party once happily chatting with her, and I can report that she seemed entirely pleased and content with her husband, her child and her life. This is worth noting, because The Madrid, which opened last night in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Off Broadway space at City Center, is a fantasy about a mother, a kindergarten teacher, who one day up and leaves. It’s a startling and disquieting portrait of cheerful abandonment, but it offers its audience only the subtlest of cues on how to react to this departure and its repercussions. As you’re thinking through the play and trying to piece together a response—and it’s well worth the effort—you should take solace, at least, that the playwright herself seems not to present a flight risk.

No, The Madrid’s flight risk is Martha, with her loving husband and college-graduate daughter and career, and it is Martha’s great fortune that she’s played by Edie Falco. (Ms. Flahive’s day job is as a producer on Nurse Jackie, in which Ms. Falco stars.) Among Ms. Falco’s many gifts is the ability to render the abnormal normal, to make a monster human. Her scheming mafia wife in The Sopranos was also a put-upon suburban mother; here, a woman who suddenly walks away from her husband and her daughter and her job in loco parenting other, younger kids quietly holds onto our sympathy. The play’s first scene is remarkable, an underplayed trauma in which we watch Martha competently run her class, and then, just as competently, get up and walk out.

As the play progresses, we watch Martha’s family and friends try to come to grips with her unexplained departure. Her husband, Michael (John Ellison Conlee), also a teacher, is selling everything in the house, a curiously defeatist effort to move on. Their confused, conflicted, steely daughter, Sarah (an excellent, poised Phoebe Strole), puts her own life on hold to help her father and to try to understand what’s happened. The neighbors, Becca (Heidi Schreck) and Danny (Christopher Evan Welch, to be replaced later this week by Darren Goldstein due to a scheduling conflict), already immersive parents to their own kids, take an outsize interest in this family, perhaps to avoid tensions in their own. (And also, it seems, to present a counterpoint, of a long marriage that sticks to the status quo, even with no one particularly happy in it.) Finally, Martha’s mother, Rose (Frances Sternhagen, arch and funny in this comic-
relief part), keeps having small car accidents, probably to get her daughter’s attention.

Sarah has taken a job at Starbucks, and that’s where Martha tracks her down to wish her daughter a happy birthday. Secretly, the two strike up a wary friendship; Martha has moved to a rundown flat in a nearby city (“The Madrid” is the name of the pink-tiled apartment building), and in their conversations we learn more about Martha—that her escape was planned, that she has no intention of returning, that she’s happy, or claims to be, with her near-empty refrigerator and fold-up chair-bed. But she won’t give a reason for her departure, perhaps because there is none. She is sanguine, seemingly pleased with how things have turned out. Eventually, Martha returns—but only because she realizes that escaping from her life has left her daughter trapped in it.

The Madrid is smartly and engagingly written, and it is nicely staged by Leigh Silverman, who allows all of the characters—the absconded wife, the forgotten husband, the overburdened daughter, even the overbearing neighbors—their warmth and humanity. It is also hard to get a grasp of, elliptical and indirect, with suggestive strands—involving Danny, his odd son, Dylan (Seth Clayton), and Martha’s past—that remain little more than suggestions. Martha’s inscrutability leaves the play somewhat opaque.

Ultimately, this is a fairy tale, a vision of an easy exit into a Sliding Doors life not lived. Whatever is happening in it, it provides us two valuable takeaways: that vision of escape, and the satisfaction of knowing we’re too responsible to ever do it.

ANYONE CAN FANTASIZE ABOUT ESCAPE, but to have the possibility of actual escape is a luxury. The crushing realization that arrives late in David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad, now in a haunting revival at the Signature Center, is that, for the Chinese immigrants building California railroads in 19th century, nothing—not even a successful strike—would change their lot in life.

Mr. Hwang’s second play, from 1981, The Dance and the Railroad is set in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the 1867 strike by Chinese laborers against the Central Pacific, then working its way toward Promontory, Utah, and eventually the Golden Spike. (It is the second production in Mr. Hwang’s Signature Theatre residency.) Ma (Ruy Iskandar) is a naive, 18-year-old new immigrant, convinced that he’ll make his fortune in America, that winters in the Sierras are not cold and snow there does not melt, and that the Chinese will emerge from the strike victorious. Lone (Yuekun Wu), a wise 21, knows better. Before his family forced him to leave China to work on the railroad, he’d been training to be an opera star; he is using the time of the strike to practice his skills, and Ma wants instruction.

The play speaks to the challenges and demands of true artistry—“you don’t know how you endanger your relatives by becoming an actor,” Lone tells Ma after recounting a story about a man whose father exploded on hearing the news—while also recounting the Chinese immigrant experience. Its most moving segment is when Lone and Ma improvise Ma’s own opera, using traditional technique to tell his typically harrowing story. Then the strike ends, and Ma, who has become caught up in the fantasy of an artistic life, realizes everything is, alas, still the same. For the first time, this giddy enthusiast has hardened.

Mr. Hwang’s script mixes a reverence for the traditional with amusing anachronistic dialogue, and sets it to long segments of traditional Chinese dance. May Adrales directs, Qian Yi is the Chinese opera consultant, and Mimi Lien and Jiyoun Chang designed the set and lights. The scenes and images they all create are deeply beautiful, and the play is deeply sad.

editorial@observer.com

Lauren Culpepper, left, and Zosia Mamet in 'Really, Really.' (Courtesy Janna Giacoppo)

Of course Zosia Mamet stars in Really Really.

I say this partially because Ms. Mamet, Shoshanna on HBO’s Girls, with her hard-set jaw and strategically vacant stare, is extraordinary in her role, as a poor girl who has made it to a tony college and is determined to consolidate her socioeconomic gains.

But I also say it because this engrossing, unsettling and mildly repulsive new drama, the New York debut of playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo, is unavoidably a 2010s version of 1990s David Mamet. It’s Oleanna with iPhones, Speed-the-Plow in a dormitory, and Ms. Mamet, daughter of the Pulitzer-winning provocateur, conveniently provides an actual genetic link in a play already borrowing so much dramaturgical DNA.

In Really Really, which MCC Theater opened last night at the Lucille Lortel, Mr. Colaizzo doesn’t offer Mametian dialogue; his is a naturalistic, slangy, amusing take on how college kids talk today. And Really Really isn’t a play with an overarching air of cynical menace; that’s old-Mamet territory now owned by MCC’s resident playwright, Neil LaBute. But its plot, themes and setting—the intersection of sex, politics and ambition in a campus crucible; the characters each working the angles for his or her own ends; the tense question of who is conning whom—make the lineage unavoidable.

The play opens with two girls drunkenly arriving home from a party. One is Ms. Mamet’s character, Leigh; the other is her privileged, do-gooder roommate, Grace (Lauren Culpepper). Both are wobbling and giggling, and Grace has a gash on her hand, about which she’s not terribly concerned. It’s clear they’ve had a good time, but things are not quite right: there’s that blood, and Leigh is obsessively checking her voice mail for a call that hasn’t come. In the next scene, which has shifted to a different campus apartment, this one filled with dudes, we learn why. It’s morning, and fratty roommates Cooper (David Hull) and Davis (Matt Lauria) are waking up hungover after their annual kegger, at which Davis had sex with Leigh—who is dating their absent-for-the-weekend rugby teammate Jimmy.

As the first act progresses, alternating between scenes in the girls’ and the guys’ places, Jimmy (Evan Jonigkeit) returns from his beach vacation and, inevitably, learns of the Leigh-Davis liaison. In the meantime, we learn, surprisingly, first that Leigh was pregnant with Jimmy’s child, and soon thereafter, horrifyingly, that Davis raped her and she miscarried. And then we start to wonder if any of these facts are true. This is Ms. Mamet at her best—steely and emotional and utterly convincing during her terrible revelation. It is also Really Really at its best, unexpected and thrilling and, as Davis confesses he was too drunk to have any memory of the night, ambiguous and discomforting.

In the second act, the ambiguity disappears and the play becomes simply uncomfortable. It is still an exceedingly well-made play: the dialogue is rich and the plot continues moves forward with precision. It remains deeply engrossing, thanks in no small part to David Cromer’s stylish, crisp direction. The cast is excellent, and the design is lovely, especially David Korins’s resourceful, suggestive sets and David Weiner’s lovely, inky lighting. Mr. Colaizzo provides a number of very funny lines.

But as Leigh is revealed to be a venal, calculating fabricator—saying what needs to be said, doing what needs to be done, to snare that rich husband—you are forced to wonder: is this play offensively misogynistic? Or is it offensively disparaging of poor people? As its ham-handedness becomes more apparent, it becomes more off-putting.

All of the characters are stereotypes: the boys aren’t just fratty jocks; they’re spectacularly rich and connected. Leigh isn’t just less well-off; she grew up so poor she never had lunch; her sister, Haley (Aleque Reid), who arrives to get in on Leigh’s score, lives in a Super 8. The boys’ one hardworking, good-student friend, Johnson (Kobi Libii), is, inevitably, black and an affirmative-action striver. They’re also unpleasant, uninterested in the truth and only concerned with maintaining their status. Not just Leigh, but also Jimmy, who is determined to make Leigh’s story true; Cooper, focused on maintaining his cushy life; and Johnson, abandoning the wronged Davis lest his friend’s scandal hurt his job prospects.

Ambitious, organized Grace, at a Future Leaders of America conference, delivers a speech that baldly explicates Really Really’s critique: “What we have learned,” she tells her other upwardly mobile peers, “is with persistence, grace, a plan of attack and that secret weapon of ours—healthy selfishness—we can accomplish any feat. We can acquire any good. And we can get exactly what we want.” After a final scene that strains credulity, every character—well, nearly every one—steps downstage in a coda to announce that, yes, they have gotten what they wanted. Really Really isn’t attack on women, or the poor—it’s an attack on a healthily selfish generation.

IN FROM WHITE PLAINS, a Fault Line Theatre production that opened last week in the tiny Studio Theatre at the Signature Center, a similar determination to get what he wants curdles a successful young filmmaker and ruins his relationship. But in this equally intriguing but ultimately less successful play, the writer and director Michael Perlman chooses to side with the optimists.

Ethan (Aaron Rossini, co-artistic director of Fault Line) is a regular guy, at home watching the Oscars with his best friend, John (Craig Wesley Divino, the other co-artistic director), when he hears himself called out as a onetime bully on global TV. Dennis (Karl Gregory), a young gay filmmaker, has just won an Academy Award for his indie film about a bullied gay youth, and in his acceptance speech, he speaks of the friend who inspired it, Mitchell, whose bullying at the hands of one Ethan Rice, he says, led Mitchell to suicide. Ethan, stunned, posts a YouTube response-cum-apology the next day, which leads to a war of online videos between an increasingly angry Dennis and an increasingly tormented Ethan. Gregory (Jimmy King), Dennis’s boyfriend, watches powerlessly as his partner becomes more and more vindictive and unlikeable.

This is a fascinating set of premises: how the bullied can become the bully; who is right and who is wrong when one person has done horrible things in the past but another is doing horrible things in the present; what sort of vengeance is appropriate against a guy who was a spectacular ass in high school but has matured into a mildly offensive, run-of-the-mill everyman; what happens when a man who still feels belittled now has the power and prestige of being an award-winner.

And yet From White Plains never becomes as compelling as it should, in part because of Mr. Perlman’s lumbering direction—there is a simple living-room set, lit in bright white, that alternately serves as Ethan’s apartment, Dennis’s apartment and whatever other scene is necessary—and in part because the characters and developments often seem unbelievable. It’s hard to accept that Dennis, evidently a narcissistic self-righteous bully, once created a sensitive indie drama. It’s hard to understand why John, who confesses to having been bullied in high school, would have become best friends with Ethan, who as an adult may not be a bully but is still domineering. And while Dennis delivers a lovely final-act speech about how anti-gay bullying in his youth haunts him even in his success, it seems incongruous with the character we’ve watched for the previous 80 minutes.

That speech does redeem the character a bit, but it doesn’t quite redeem the play.

editorial@observer.com

Scarlett Johannson and Benjamin Walker in Cat on a 'Hot Tin Roof.' (Joan Marcus)

Maggie the Cat doesn’t purr. She barks and snarls.

Scarlett Johansson’s top-billed and awkward turn as Maggie dooms the director Rob Ashford’s take on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Tennessee Williams Pulitzer Prize winner that opened in revival at the Richard Rodgers Theatre last week. It’s a prettily staged production, almost dreamlike, and it features a handful of fine performances. But its central character is off, and so the entire production is adrift.

Ms. Johansson made her Broadway debut three seasons ago in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, in which she gave a muted and convincing performance as a strong girl from the Brooklyn docks desperate to get out from under the thumb of her infatuated uncle. Holding her own against the indefatigable Liev Schreiber, she was terrific, and won a well-deserved Tony Award for her work.

But in Cat, disappointingly, she is overmatched by the role, or at least mismatched with it. Ms. Johansson is a beautiful woman—a bona fide movie star—and yet her Maggie seems drained of the character’s rapacious sensuality and defiant glamour. Williams designed Maggie as the audience’s entry into the play, a charismatic, gorgeous, wounded heroine. In this production, Maggie is pretty but not beautiful; in her bra and slip she seems dumpy rather than sexy, and in her needling of her husband she is little more than a suburban nag.

Not that she doesn’t have some good reasons for nagging.

Maggie, who grew up poor but genteel, is married to Brick (Benjamin Walker) a former football star and the favorite son of Big Daddy Pollitt (Ciarán Hinds), the richest planter in Mississippi. Brick has become an alcoholic, he refuses to sleep with her, and perhaps worst of all, he’s uninterested in competing with his rapacious brother, Gooper (Michael Park), for his share of the family estate.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has all of Williams’s favorite preoccupations: the mask of southern gentility, truth and lies, masculinity, closeted homosexuality. It transpires over one hot, humid, stormy night on Big Daddy’s plantation, “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile,” as the patriarch never tires of describing it. The family has gathered—Big Daddy, Big Mama (an oddly daffy Debra Monk), Gooper, his calculating wife Mae (Emily Bergl) and their five kids, plus Maggie and Brick—to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday and also his clean bill of health, after a cancer scare is revealed to be a mere spastic colon.

But of course not a lot of this is true. Big Daddy isn’t healthy; he’s got metastatic cancer, and the doctors and children are keeping it from him and from Big Mama so as not to ruin the birthday. The big birthday celebration, including a choreographed homage to Big Daddy by Mae and Gooper’s kids—the “no-necked monsters,” as Maggie famously terms them, though in this production all of the children are blondely attractive and perfectly normally necked—isn’t to celebrate the man but rather to angle for more of his estate. Big Mama fawns over Big Daddy, but Big Daddy can’t stand her. Maggie fawns over Brick, trying to re-seduce him, but she has also slept with his best friend, Skipper, who then killed himself. And Brick has become an alcoholic because he’s disgusted with Maggie, disgusted with his own life, and, whether he can admit it to himself or not, because he was in love with Skipper, who loved him too, and who, just before his death, had the courage to say so. Brick rails against the “mendacity” all around him, but mostly he’s contemptuous of the mendacity in himself.

It’s a hell of a play, with gorgeous, intricate, subtle and often very funny language. It’s deep and moving, and still, as many times as you’ve read or seen it, even a bit bracing. All these years later, it retains the rough honesty—the frankness about sex, alcoholism and homosexuality—that no doubt shocked audiences at its debut in 1955.

Mr. Walker makes an excellent Brick, not least because he spends the first act clad only in a towel and yet displays a physique—lean, toned, but not over-muscled—that is credible for his handsome former jock character and thus stands as a refreshing counterpoint to this month’s other midcentury-revival torso in a leading role, that of Picnic’s Sebastian Stan, playing a drifter with a David Barton membership. More than that, he well embodies his character’s lost indifference, his defeated ennui. Brick retains his natural charisma even as he works to drown it, and Mr. Walker manages to be simultaneously compelling and diffident.

Mr. Hinds, as Big Daddy, is a big, loud force of nature. There’s not a lot of emotional shading in his characterization, but there’s not a lot in the character. You can see the drive and ambition that took him from sharecropper to plantation owner, and you can see the bluster that leaves everyone in awe of him. The best part of this Cat is its second act, in the long confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy. It’s the moment when these two titans—two men’s men, attached to but fighting against each other—break down much of the family mendacity, revealing hard truths to each other. It’s also the most honestly compelling and revelatory part of the play.

Mr. Ashford’s direction emphasizes the claustrophobia of this kind of world, with people always invading, servants always hovering, rivals always eavesdropping. “The walls have ears,” both Maggie and Big Daddy say, and the staging makes that evidently the case.

The worst eavesdropper is Mae—“that monster of fertility,” the childless Maggie calls her—a malevolent Machiavelli scheming for herself and Gooper against Brick and Maggie. A former Cotton Carnival Queen, she represents all the bad stuff in the play: a honeyed veneer of sweet propriety overlaying a steely strategic ambition. That, to use Brick’s word, is mendacity. And the ultimate problem with this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is that there’s not so much difference between Maggie the Cat and Mae the Fox.

editorial@observer.com