Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests, Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

If Kent Carroll, the publisher of Europa Editions, has his way, Mr. Izzo’s brand of Mediterranean noir will soon free the American reader from the icy grip of frostbitten Scandinavian detectives. After almost a decade of publishing literary fiction from Europe and beyond, the ever-expanding Europa is branching out into crime, joining a small group of independent presses that have distinguished themselves by putting out the kind of high-minded thriller that the giants of publishing seem to have no time for. Europa’s World Noir line, which launched last week, features Mr. Izzo and his international ilk: thriller writers who temper their mayhem with serious social critique. Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade this isn’t. These are writers who don’t mind letting their hard-boiled detectives take a break from the straight-faced misery of P.I. work to enjoy the finer things in life, like sipping espresso and contemplating the infinite. Whether or not Americans are ready for this kind of refined crime fiction remains a mystery.

“It’s quite one thing to describe a corrupt policeman,” said Mr. Carroll. “It’s another to describe a dinner in Marseilles with friends.”

Jean-Claude Izzo.

Europa was founded in 2005 by the Italian husband-and-wife publishing duo Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri. The couple made a name for themselves publishing English-language literature in Italy and thought they might have success doing the same thing in reverse. To oversee their American operation, they hired the venerable Mr. Carroll, a former editorial director of Grove Press, whom Melville House’s Dennis Johnson described as “old New York literary royalty.”

Mr. Carroll has a long face, thin gray hair and the quiet smile of a prep school English teacher whose student has just made a clever point. After more than nearly four decades running publishing houses, the king of Europa has a bulging Rolodex. It was at his elbow late last month as he sat in a yellow cardigan and corduroy jacket in his office, laying out his theory of crime fiction.

“Most people who read genre fiction—science fiction or romance or crime—they tend to be habituates,” he said. “They tend to buy a lot. And they essentially want the same experience over and over.”

The lasting influence of hard-boiled authors like Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain means that American readers will recognize much of what goes on behind the exotic World Noir covers. He may be a detective constable, but a cop is still a cop. Unlike their best-selling American counterparts, Mr. Carroll’s authors refuse to sacrifice moral complexity to the demands of plot.

“In places like Italy, where you have very little investigative journalism, people who write crime novels are really doing what journalists do here,” he said. “They’re exposing corruption.”

The grandfather of Italian crime fiction is Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose 1946 novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana treated crime as a gnommero, or tangle. Antony Shugaar is Europa’s go-to translator for Italian fiction, and he said that Italy’s “history of violence and subversion” makes its authors capable of imagining a web of corruption that American crime authors simply cannot fathom. In World Noir novels, answers do not come easy, and the culprit is less likely to be a single villain than the system itself.

“At author events, these guys spend most of their time speaking about what’s going on in their town, in their region,” said Michael Reynolds, Europa’s editor in chief, whose job it is to make sure that these “social crime novels” have not just a conscience but a pulse as well. “Crime fiction has stepped into the void that investigative journalism left behind.”

What Mr. Izzo did for Marseilles, Gene Kerrigan aims to do for Dublin. His sprawling novel The Rage was released in February as part of a soft launch for Europa World Noir, and it shows Ireland as a broken country, its landscape littered with half-finished developments, its jails full of bankers.

“Things have been very exciting in a bad way in Ireland for the last few years,” said Mr. Kerrigan in an interview.

Gene Kerrigan.

Mr. Kerrigan is a journalist, and he gives the impression that he has more important things to worry about than who’s publishing his novels. He had never heard of Europa Editions until his agent mentioned its interest in publishing him, and he summed up their relationship succinctly.

“The way it’s been published has been very gratifying to see,” he said. “Beyond that, I pay very little attention.”

On the other hand, Stav Sherez, author of the London-set thriller A Dark Redemption, is “chuffed” to be working with Mr. Carroll. “All my cultural influences tend to be American,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to be published in America.” In A Dark Redemption, Mr. Sherez delves into the Ugandan civil war with a gravity that goes far beyond “Kony 2012.” Like the work of Messrs. Izzo and Kerrigan, his novel is tied so tightly to its subject matter and setting that the only American analogue Mr. Reynolds could find was The Wire.

Mr. Johnson, the co-founder of Melville House, reached for an even loftier comparison, the holy trinity of American crime writing: Chandler, Hammett and Cain. “They were really good, serious writers,” he said last week. “They were writing stories based on the troubles of their time. The Great Depression. The rise of fascism. And I think American crime writing has gotten away from that.”

To promote its new line, Europa has joined forces with Melville, Akashic and Grove/Atlantic—all of which have their own noir to push—to curate a month of readings and events dubbed “International Crime Month.” These four houses are, according to Mr. Johnson, “very simpatico.”

“Michael Reynolds roped me into it,” he said. “That’s what they do at Europa, they Europa you into ideas.” (Huzzah!)

The idea behind the joint promotion is that crime readers are hungry for exotic material in a way that literary readers are not, which helps explain why crime fiction mostly appears in regional waves—like a certain Swedish trilogy (ahem) that’s left behind a considerable gap in imported crime fiction. No genre is more rooted in its setting than crime (think of the classic noir trope of a detective driving around a city hunting down clues, making a kind of map along the way). So while it might be hard to sell a literary novel set in the Philippines on the strength of its backdrop alone, a collection of stories like Akashic’s forthcoming Manila Noir is enough to set a crime-fiction addict’s mouth watering. Johanna Ingalls, managing editor at Akashic, said that it’s “a lot easier to get information into the hands” of crime readers.

“There’s so much interest [in] and support of American writers abroad,” she said, “that I sometimes feel embarrassed that there’s not a reciprocal interest from American readers.”

editorial@observer.com

Alenka Kraigher, Nicolas Noreña and Rocco Sisto in 'Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance).' (Photo by Joan Marcus))

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage ... Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

For directors interested in efficiency, naturalism or cohesion, this is a terrible way to rehearse a play. But Mr. Foreman has no need for those concepts. Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance), which opens May 7, marks his return after two years’ semi-retirement and shows that his peculiar brand of theater has lost none of its ability to perplex, infuriate and astonish. After more than 50 plays, Mr. Foreman is still doing it his own way, and he will take as long as he needs to get it right.

“I come up with things very fast,” he said during his lunch break, munching on a sandwich in the recently renovated Public lobby. At 75, he is round-faced and sleepy-eyed but still possessed of the quiet zeal of a young director with something to prove. “And I know most of them are bad, and it’s just a matter of changing and changing and changing.”

Mr. Foreman’s work is experimental in the most literal sense. He writes his plays a page or so a day, taking no pains to forge connections between today’s effort and yesterday’s. When it comes time to build a script, he assembles these scraps according to connections seen only by him. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because he knows it will change. When the actors arrive, a set, costumes and props are waiting for them. They learn their lines as they go, with the script and everything else shifting all the time. Rocco Sisto, who delivered the speech about rage, called it “the actor’s nightmare.”

A Richard Foreman production is not easy to describe, but there is usually a lot of string in the air. There are startling noises, unflattering light, Dadaist dialogue and performances so dry that the actors don’t seem like they’re doing anything at all. That, of course, is the point. What seems chaotic, random or meaningless is the result of weeks of agony. Mr. Foreman described his work as “not unexciting, but dry. As if you were in a lab.”

“I’ve always wanted to do plays where the play was continually sparking,” he said. “If it gets too normally dramatic, too normally lyrical, then the sparks don’t fly. It’s too wet.”

His plays are not easy to produce, nor they are easy to watch, but he believes art should sharpen the mind, and every decision he makes is intended to keep the audience sitting up in their seats.

“Not too many people want to do what I say you have to do,” he said. “I want to make a gymnasium to refresh the whole mechanism.”

In 2009’s Astronome: A Night at the Opera, a collaboration with noise art demigod John Zorn, Mr. Foreman’s customary booming narration was paired with a screaming wall of guitars. It was one of Mr. Foreman’s loudest plays ever, and though some in the audience left with headaches, no one slept through it.

“For me, that’s the only important thing in art,” he said. “To be confronted with something that makes you really see It.”

Richard Foreman has been in pursuit of the thing in art that makes you really want to see It since the late 1960s, when he introduced himself to New York’s downtown scene with plays like Angelface, Ida-Eyed and Sophia=(Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs. (He’s always had a knack for titles.) Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public, has been a fan since 1975’s Rhoda in Potatoland, which he called “a really crucial show to me, in simply broadening my aesthetics.”

“I saw it and I hated it,” Mr. Eustis said last week. “And I also hated it the second time I saw it, and I continued hating it the third time I saw it. It was one of my earliest experiences of cognitive dissonance.”

When Mr. Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in 1968, he was one of many artists working to break drama free from the constraints of narrative, character and anything else that might let the audience relax. Today, as theater fights a losing battle against Netflix, downtown companies are reluctant to stage anything that might frustrate their subscriber base, lest they end up in the uncomfortable position of Tim Sanford, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, who in March was forced to send a letter justifying his decision to stage Annie Baker’s The Flick, a three-hour play punctuated by long silences. In an era of compromise, Mr. Foreman remains unbent.

“What’s exciting to me is that his refusal to do a conventional narrative is still incredibly provocative to people,” said Mr. Eustis. “I will get more complaints about this show than any show since the last time I did a Richard Foreman play.”

The last time was 2009’s Idiot Savant, a rapturously well-reviewed production starring Willem Dafoe that was supposed to be Mr. Foreman’s last. Seeking “total compositional control,” the director turned to celluloid, eventually producing the 2012 film Once Every Day. It took him a while to warm up to the new medium, in which his normal dialogue came off as “pretentious.”

“I couldn’t make my language work in film,” he said. “So I eliminated most of the words.” He returned to theater in order to use rhetoric again, and because he “started to feel the need, much to my surprise, of wanting to get involved with other people again and not just sit at home alone all day editing.”

After the success of Idiot Savant, the Public was the natural place to stage Old-Fashioned Prostitutes. For decades, the Ontological-Hysteric’s home was St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, in a little theater upstairs that Mr. Foreman could fill with whatever mad fantasy he chose. When he gave up the space in 2010, his assistants asked if they could take it over as a location in which to produce new works. He agreed, on condition that they “continue to find work that terrifies people.”

The result was the Incubator Arts Project, home most recently to a Vampire Cowboys production of Geek!, by Crystal Skillman. The work staged there looks nothing like a Richard Foreman production—Geek! was a pure crowd-pleaser, with sword fights and dance sequences and no string at all—but Shannon Sindelar, a curator at Incubator, says that Mr. Foreman taught his disciples “to respect their artist’s vision, and their own processes.”

Ms. Sindelar worked with Mr. Foreman for nearly a decade, beginning as an intern in 2004—an experience she called “mind-blowing.” The job meant long unpaid weeks, with rehearsals all day and “work sessions” at night when the crew would implement Mr. Foreman’s new ideas for the set. She found herself in awe of his use of sound, his constant experimentation and his willingness to throw out something that had taken hours to perfect.

“We started out with fake grass all over the set,” she said. “And one day he just said, ‘I don’t want it any more,’ so we had to rip it all up. It was heartbreaking, because we’d spent so much time gluing it down.”

The reasons for snap decisions like this are generally obscure, but Mr. Eustis said that, if pressed, Mr. Foreman could always give a practical explanation, usually having to do with where he wants the audience’s eye to land. Ask him about his work and Mr. Foreman will talk instead about visual artists, mostly Édouard Manet, whom he called “the greatest painter.” Manet would paint a single picture as many as 40 times before he understood what he actually wanted.

“I’ve been doing this for what, 45 years or something?” Mr. Foreman said. “And every time, it’s like reinventing the wheel. I forget what works for me and I’ve got to slowly find it again, because I find myself falling into the traps of doing what I know theater is, and it takes me time to realize—No! That’s what I’ve always seen, and I don’t like theater. I want to do something else.”

Because Mr. Foreman’s scripts are so obtuse, it’s natural for actors to overcompensate with undue emotion. Stripping down their performances is his main role as a director. During rehearsal last month, he gave notes like:

“Could you make that less weighty, philosophical?”

“Rocco—don’t fill it with significance.”

“No, no—it’s too heavy. Just—without thinking.”

“Do anything you can to make it more hysterical.”

His concern is not naturalism, but composition. As Mr. Sisto, who speaks with a wonderful Jeffrey Tambor baritone, explained it, “Richard abhors emotion on the stage.”

“The theater is Richard’s paintbox, and we’re his paint,” he said. “Did you ever watch The Outer Limits, where they say, ‘We control the vertical, we control the horizontal’? That’s Richard. He’s the outer limits.”

Mr. Sisto plays Samuel, the play’s ostensible main character, an everyman figure whose fevered quests have been the subject of many Foreman plays. In Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, Samuel comes to a vaguely Parisian party in search of a courtesan who has stolen his heart. Whether or not he finds her is not quite the point.

Appearing alongside Mr. Sisto is Alenka Kraigher, who finds Mr. Foreman’s complete control “kind of liberating.” Normally, she and her fellow actors would be working to get so comfortable with their characters that the dialogue can flow naturally and unexpected things can happen on stage. Mr. Foreman is trying to get to that same place from the outside in.

“He’s all the time trying to recenter you, to throw you off,” she said. “I think he likes it most when you’re not very sure of what you’re doing.”

If his actors don’t know what they’re doing, Mr. Foreman can empathize. He often doesn’t either. For decades, the opening of his annual play was preceded, like clockwork, by an extreme crisis of confidence.

“Within the last week of rehearsals,” he said, “I would call up my managers and say, ‘You’re going to laugh at me because I’ve done this before, but look. We can’t invite critics to this play, it’s so awful.’ And then I go home and I don’t sleep and I get some idea that changes everything for me and it works.”

The disappearance of those last-minute panics, which only stopped three or four years ago, is one of the reasons he took time off from the theater. Mimi Johnson, who has managed Mr. Foreman since 1972 said that intellectualism aside, he has a strong head for business—you can’t produce a play a year without one—and cares about selling tickets. “He may be a strange man,” she said, “but he’s just like the rest of us. He wants you to all show up for the party.”

This is a central tension within Mr. Foreman—although his work is designed to make keep an audience off-balance, he wants very much for the theater to be full.

“Some people get sort of angry,” he said. “Some people think that’s what I want to do, to upset them. That’s the last thing I want to do! Wouldn’t that be a stupid thing to do for 40 years?”

editorial@observer.com

It was a third-rate chant for a third-rate player, but in the Mets’ first season, it didn’t take much to make the fans cheer. The team was on its way to 120 losses—a baseball record that stands to this day—but with the Dodgers and Giants five years gone, New York was desperate for something to scream about. Throneberry’s Mets were more than lovable losers—they were spectacular. “Name one loyal American,” writes Jimmy Breslin, in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (Ivan R. Dee, 128 pp., $12.95) “who can say he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.” Published 50 years ago this week, this beautiful little book remains the ur-text for Metsian blundering. Here is the franchise’s origin story, writ in Mr. Breslin’s trademark barroom prose and cast with enough devils, heroes and clowns to fill out a pantomime of Faust. They are gamblers, toughs and crusty baseball lifers whom Mr. Breslin rallies in opposition to “the era of the businessman in sports,” when America’s postwar success led to a “dry and agonizing” focus on the bottom line.

Even in 1963, Mr. Breslin’s style was a throwback, a nostalgic echo of sportswriters who were chomping cigars and torturing metaphors before he was born. His New York is deliberately larger-than-life, as though he is trying to mold the modern city into a Damon Runyon story, and his prose is sweet enough to make the ’62 debacle an American epic.

As villains, we have Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley and his henchman Horace Stoneham, of the Giants—a pair of “arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to the bank account.” They are in league with Major League Baseball itself, whose evil plan calls for New York to be a one-team monopoly, boosting Yankee revenue and dooming Giants and Dodgers fans to an eternity of pinstriped baseball.

Standing in their way is the brashly brilliant William A. Shea, a lawyer with a bookie for a father-in-law and “the square jaw of a guy who knows how to punch back.” He starts punching as soon as the Dodgers leave town, threatening to form a rival independent league unless the MLB approves a replacement for the lost teams. Commissioner Ford Frick, a “grey-haired jellyfish,” caves. New York can have the Mets.

To run the team, Shea recruits ex-Yankee GM George Weiss, “a finicky perfectionist” who “raises hell” when his employees are slack. To manage, Casey Stengel, the crinkly-faced doubletalker who led the Yanks to 10 pennants before they gave him the boot. And to sign the checks, Joan Whitney Payson, the finest owner the team would ever have.

A sporting millionaire, Mrs. Payson has an abiding love for dirty jokes, nightclubs and the Giants. In Mr. Breslin’s telling, she “could be the best person to come into baseball in our time,” and she falls into that irresistible stereotype of the old-
money millionaire who’s too rich to let anyone stop her fun.

At the dawn of the ’62 season, the uniforms are gleaming, the manager is optimistic and Robert Moses is building a shiny new stadium in Queens. But the Mets play in the Polo Grounds—the tumbledown shack on Coogan’s Bluff that served Mrs. Payson’s beloved Giants for so many years. The stadium is a dump; the team fits in perfectly.

Lest the expansion team show them up, the National League allows the Mets nothing but fading stars and minor league refuse. Marvelous Marv is among the best of the bunch. The team loses its first nine games, and it keeps that spectacular pace up for most of the season, playing “a brand of baseball which has not been seen in the Big Leagues in over twenty-five years.” Twenty-five years takes us back to Mr. Breslin’s childhood, which he recalls as an innocent time when players were mean, gamblers ruled the ballpark and entertainment was king. He yearns for it, and so do we.

These young Mets lose every way possible. They can’t hit, they can’t field and their pitching staff gives up more home runs than anyone ever has before. They are failures—world-class failures!—and in Mr. Breslin’s world, the schnook is king.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

Over decades of mediocrity, Mets fans have been sustained by the idea that there’s nobility in rooting for a bum team. Lately, that fantasy is beginning to crack. The team’s owners have not recovered from Bernie Madoff’s parting shot, and their desperate efforts to stave off bankruptcy have resulted in a major league team that would do very well in the minors. Bud Selig will never force his friend Fred Wilpon to sell—just as in 1962, baseball’s commissioner is a jellyfish—so the Flushing faithful are stuck paying sky-high prices for bargain-basement baseball. Those who keep watching are divided into two camps: Panglossian optimists and raving conspiracy theorists. The atmosphere in Citi Field is bitter, and there are times one fears the unthinkable has happened—that it has stopped being fun to watch the Mets lose.

If Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? is the Mets’ bible, what counsel does it offer in this dark April?

“The Mets lose an awful lot?” asks Mr. Breslin. “Listen, mister. Think a little bit. When was the last time you won anything out of life?”

editorial@observer.com

Ink-stained solace. (NYTimes.com)

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.

I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend's stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside.

A hot bath might do the trick, but it lacks the escapism and entertainment value of my preferred preferred prescription: Turner Classic Movies, a 24-hour, commercial-free hot water bottle. At moments of crisis, how nice to slip into a perfectly-crafted Hollywood picture, where The End only means I'm seven or eight minutes away from another round of opening credits? Spy novels, adventure stories and Horatio Hornblower books can all serve the same purpose, but nothing seizes your attention like the well-mannered bray of Katherine Hepburn. If the afterlife is TCM, well, I could imagine worse.

I hadn't forgotten what happened in Connecticut, but I was waiting for the next day's Times to learn the details. As a gauge of a tragedy's importance, the front page of the paper of record is hard to beat. How many inches did they give it? Does the headline stretch the whole page? How many days does it stay above the fold? When the unfathomable happens, this is my coping mechanism, and it's one of the best of my ever-dwindling arsenal of answers to the question, "Why do you still subscribe to a daily paper?"

Any newspaper works. Glancing at the covers of the Post and the Daily News each morning is a marvelous way to close the book on whatever troubled the world the day before. On Saturday, I saw a man searching a USA Today for their write-up of the shooting, growing increasingly confused until he realized that they publish their weekend edition on Friday morning—making for a front page that was hopelessly out of date just a few hours later. Print still has its drawbacks

Information blackout, movies, the morning paper. This is my three step routine, my palliative care. After the Javon Belcher shooting. After Aurora. After Tucson. After Malmö. After Virginia Tech, and all the unfortunate others in between. I felt guilty for avoiding the onslaught of real-time truth until I realized that, as a coping mechanism, waiting 24 hours is healthier, or at least more dignified, than taking to the Internet and screaming inanities about gun control, mental illness, even who the real killer was.

It only takes a few minutes for a national news event, good or bad, to turn social media into an echo chamber. Internet discourse is like a dorm room bull session, which gets louder and dumber with each new person who squeezes in. There is a conversation to be had in this country about guns, about mental health issues, about media malpractice, but the hour after a massacre is not the time to do it, and Twitter is not the place.

Reasonable people understand this, but when confronted with this sort of horror, they retreat the same way I do—taking shelter not with Jimmy Stewart, but in the well-worn rut of liberal indignation. Thinking that gun violence could be solved if the Republicans had the balls to tell the NRA to take a hike is comforting, because it creates a fantasy where violence can be solved. Pretending that the solution to this epidemic of mass murder can be summed up in 140 characters is as absurd as thinking Love Actually is a good movie.

“I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.” What took the Twilight saga 1,700 pages, Cain got to in eleven.

A failed opera singer turned journalist, Cain became infamous for novels like Postman, Double Indemnity and Serenade, where raw lust compels ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes. By 1950, his best work was behind him, and he spent the next three decades sliding into obscurity. He died in 1977, so alone that he bequeathed his estate to his landlady.

Although two of his unpublished works were released in the ’80s, his last book, The Cocktail Waitress, was thought lost until a thorough search was mounted by the editor of Hard Case Crime, a highbrow pulp house that specializes in these kinds of hardboiled resurrections. The Cocktail Waitress is far from Cain’s best work, but there are moments where his old ferocity shines through.

James M. Cain.

The story is a throwback to classic noir. Its narrator is a beautiful young widow named Joan who’s just finished burying her husband when she is visited by the police, who are not quite convinced that his death was accidental. As they try to build a case against her, Joan takes a job at the local roadhouse, where her low-cut blouse soon attracts the attentions of a pair of men—one virile and broke, the other decrepit and rich, with a ticker bad enough that sex would be suicide. You can probably guess to which one our heroine gravitates.

Otto Penzler, a crime fiction editor and owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York, first met Cain a few years before his death. Last week, sitting in an office underneath his store jam-packed with first editions, he reminisced.

“He had the saddest stationery,” said Mr. Penzler. “It said, ‘Just call direct. I’m the only one here.’”

Because he had no serial character (á la Philip Marlowe), did not write mysteries, and rarely sunk to happy endings, Cain is not as well-remembered as his revered contemporaries, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. And, like Tennessee Williams, his career’s long tail did nothing to elevate his posthumous reputation.

“Chandler only wrote seven novels,” said Mr. Penzler. “Hammett only wrote five. It doesn’t help to hang on.”

Though Cain “wasn’t exactly Mister Warmth,” he and Mr. Penzler corresponded occasionally. The last time they spoke, Cain yelled at him for calling at an unreasonable hour, even though it was only five in the afternoon.

“I think he was losing it. I think he thought it was 5 a.m. That was my last conversation with him. Not a good way to finish it.”

Cain died soon after, leaving behind the unpublished manuscripts for Cloud Nine and The Enchanted Isle, which Mr. Penzler soon brought into print. But The Cocktail Waitress drew no attention at all, and would never have been published were it not for a peculiar man named Charles Ardai, founder of Hard Case Crime.

“I think these authors deserve better,” said Mr. Ardai, “even if their last book isn’t the best thing they ever wrote.”

Charles Ardai. (Photo by Melanie King)

Founded in 2004, Hard Case Crime was an attempt to recreate the pulp style exemplified by the Gold Medal paperbacks of the ’50s and ’60s. Marked by oversexed covers and irresistible titles like Homicide Hussy and One Monday We Killed Them All, Gold Medal books sold for as little as a quarter, and gave authors like Elmore Leonard, Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block a chance to learn their trade. When he founded Hard Case, Mr. Ardai knew that the crucial thing—besides the sultry cover art—was to be “completely unironic.”

“This wouldn’t be Tarantino doing a modern gloss on something old-fashioned,” he said. “You might sell one book to someone that way, but you won’t sell a book a month every month, because it gets old.”

Since before starting as a publisher, Mr. Ardai had been looking for The Cocktail Waitress. He first learned about it from Max Allan Collins, a Hard Case author and devoted Cain fan who remembered a long-ago interview that contained a passing reference to a novel about a waitress whose life is changed by a $50,000 tip.

“I had not read it,” said Mr. Collins, “but I knew what the plot was, and it sounded like the most absolutely quintessential Cain setup.”

Mr. Ardai expected a few months’ work. It ended up taking nine years.

The book was nowhere, and the author’s estate—now controlled by the landlady’s son—was not encouraging. Their attitude, Mr. Ardai said, was that “if it were a great book, it would have already been published.” After an exhaustive search of rare manuscript collections, library archives and the estate’s files, a copy finally turned up in the filing cabinet of H.N. Swanson, an old-school Hollywood agent who died in 1991.

In the golden years of the studio system, when big-name novelists came west in search of easy money, they signed with H.N. Swanson. Besides claiming to be the man who convinced Fitzgerald to ditch the title Trimalchio in West Egg in favor of The Great Gatsby, Swanson represented James M. Cain. In his files was a typed manuscript of The Cocktail Waitress—complete all the way to “The End.”

“I was almost afraid to crack it open,” said Mr. Ardai, “for fear that it would turn out to not be strong.”

Though the prose was “more florid, not the very terse, pared-back style he became famous for,” Mr. Ardai liked what he read. After a few chapters, he was hooked.

Then came the deluge. Besides the typewritten manuscript, he found dozens of fragments and false starts, all written in the cribbed, impossible-to-decipher hand of an old author with chronic heart trouble. Over the course of a few months, he assembled the best of each draft into a single text.

“It was far more work than writing my own book,” he said. “It was a literal headache. But when I was in my twenties at Columbia and first picked up Double Indemnity, if someone had told me, you’re gonna get headaches and you’re gonna get eye strain, but you get to edit Cain’s last novel, I would have jumped at it.”

Lawrence Block, who scored a blurb from an ailing Cain when he published his first Matthew Scudder mystery in 1976, returned the favor for The Cocktail Waitress. By email, he said the book was “an important occasion,” even though “Cain was a wildly uneven writer.” But, “if it leads a new generation of readers to a rediscovery of him and his finest works, it performs a true service.”

Important, of course, isn’t the same as good. Thirty-five years after its author’s death, nearly a decade after its publisher began searching for it, The Cocktail Waitress has finally swayed into the room. How does she look?

It’s not Postman, but nothing is. There is a killer story somewhere inside this book, buried underneath passages of limp writing and questionable plotting that, while they keep it from greatness, make The Cocktail Waitress even more fun to read.

The trouble starts with our narrator, Joan. In attempting to get inside a woman’s skin, Cain gets stuck in an uneasy compromise between a femme fatale and an actual female character. Joan thinks of herself as a collection of legs and breasts; she sees men as wallets to be opened and emptied. In Double Indemnity, while the male narrator is distracted by “a shape to set a man nuts,” we can imagine there might at least be a brain underneath Mrs. Nirdlinger’s “dusty blonde hair.” The Cocktail Waitress, however, reads as though Joan is objectifying herself.

In the first chapter she meets the man whom, she claims, she will “come to crave as I crave life itself.” But the passion never overwhelms her—she is too calculating to ever murmur “Bite me! Bite me!”

The book is most interesting when we can see the lonely old author peering out. Joan’s wealthy benefactor suffers from angina, and will die if he gets too near a naked woman. Knowing Cain had the same ailment makes the wrinkled old pervert the most authentic, even empathic character in the whole novel. When Joan spends all day in bed with her younger, healthier lover, eating scrambled eggs straight out of the pan because they are in such a hurry to get back to screwing—here we see a Cain who is as sorry as we are that he ever had to grow old.

Given a week with the manuscript, the James M. Cain of 1935 would have sliced it in half, and filled its characters with enough animal lust to drive them half insane. That fire was gone by ’77, but some embers still burned. Occasionally the prose tightens up and the dialogue sparkles, as when he closes a chapter with, “I drove back to Hyattsville, with butterflies in my stomach, and a feeling that I might be playing with fire.” It may not take the breath away, but it’s at least good for a gasp.

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Alan Cox and Jonathan Pryce in 'The Caretaker.' (Courtesy Richard Termine)

Two brothers share a decrepit East London flat. They take in an aged tramp named Davies, who shares the space until the older brother, Aston, evicts him for making noises in his sleep. After being told again and again to leave, Davies still doesn’t listen. “If you want me to go ... I’ll go,” he says. “You just say the word.” In the current revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, the audience responds to that line with either tense silence or uncomfortable laughter, depending on the whim of Jonathan Pryce.

“If I think the audience has been laughing too much, I can kill that laugh,” he said last week in the lobby of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. “I’ll even mutter it if I don’t want them to laugh any more.”

Pinter himself once described his three-man play as, “funny up to a point,” and by the time Davies gets the boot that point is long past. When well-acted The Caretaker is raucous, getting laughs that grow uneasy as the second act winds down. This production, which premiered in Liverpool in 2009 and runs through June 17th at BAM, is uncommonly funny and serves as a reminder that a playwright best known for eerie quiet knew how to make ’em howl.

The Caretaker is not an easy play to perform. In interviews with The Observer, Mr. Pryce called it “quite elusive.” Alan Cox, who plays Aston, used the words “mysterious” and “flimsy.” In the wrong hands, said BAM’s executive producer, Joseph V. Melillo, “it would be excruciating to sit through.” And Alex Hassell, who plays Aston’s interior decorating-obsessed brother, Mick, compared it to “catching hair in the bath.”

“Just before you’ve got your hands on it,” he said, “it slips away.”

Too often, productions of Pinter are designed to heighten the ambiguity, but Mr. Cox said this revival has resisted “the seduction of style.”

“We play it very naturalistically,” he said. “Why play aliens as opposed to human beings?”

“I would do anything to avoid a false sense of mystery,” said director Christopher Morahan, a longtime friend of the late playwright who first directed The Caretaker in 1972.

Mr. Pryce, now 65, has waited for his crack at Davies since 1980, when he played Mick in a production supervised by Pinter. The playwright’s advice: don’t worship the text.

“He hated the kind of sterile Pinter performance which people refer to as Pinteresque,” Mr. Pryce said. “He never understood that word and never wanted it to be used.”

Scholars may swear by the famous “Pinter pause,” but the playwright told Mr. Pryce to take or leave them as he saw fit. Often, their purpose is not to heighten dramatic effect, but to leave room for a laugh. Still, as rehearsal finished, Mr. Pryce hadn’t realized that Mick was funny. During the first preview performance, he finished a long speech about a relative who loved nuts, but “wouldn’t touch a piece of fruitcake,” and was shocked when the subsequent pause was filled with laughter.

“And it was like, we’re off!” Mr. Pryce said.

Since then, he has starred in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, appeared in the 1992 big-screen version of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and won a Tony for Miss Saigon, in a production that was briefly barred from Broadway when Actor’s Equity objected to Mr. Pryce playing a half-Vietnamese man. In his spare time he has filled his IMDb page with throwaway parts in Hollywood blockbusters, including the upcoming G.I. Joe sequel in which he plays a character called “U.S. President.”

“I’m much more careful about what I do in the theater than what I do on film,” he said. “If you look at my CV, it’ll prove it.”

BAM’S revival of The Caretaker offered him a chance to explore how attitudes toward homelessness and psychosis have changed since Pinter wrote the play in 1960, when Mr. Pryce was a child living in rural Wales, and “a tramp, a hobo, was quite a romantic figure who did walk the highways.” Davies spends most of the play good-naturedly searching for a comfortable pair of walking shoes, but beneath his cheer are hints of darkness.

“The end of the play is bleak,” said Mr. Morahan. “There’s not much to laugh about there.”

The point at which the play stops being funny comes deep into the second act, when Aston goes on a long, well-known monologue about receiving electroshock therapy. Davies, who’s said twice that he’s “never been inside a nuthouse,” later admits that he “had a peep in one once.”

“I think he had more than a peep,” said Mr. Pryce. He himself has had at least that. His Davies is marked by a quiet madness that, it turns out, has personal origins. At the time Pinter was writing The Caretaker, Mr. Pryce’s father suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in “an old Victorian, very forbidding, ex-workhouse” psychiatric institution.

“I certainly had a peep in it,” he said. “Going through room after room with doors locked behind you all the time, and what seemed to be hundreds of men, some strapped into their beds with leather straps, and a row of what I took to be padded cells with the little porthole doors down the side. My father recovered. I never talked to him about it again, and I can only assume he did have ECT treatment, because it was very common then. And administered in a way—it’s a little kinder now. They weren’t anesthetized then.”

He said he didn’t allow himself to think about it when he acted in the play back in 1980, but the memory of visiting his father supports his performance at BAM, which Mr. Melillo called “radioactive.”

“That’s quite a solid foundation to work from,” said Mr. Pryce. “You feel free to be as bonkers, as erratic, as funny as you wanna be.”

But for the most part, Davies’s darkness remains cloaked, and the horror that awaits him outside only becomes real in the play’s last, fraught moments. Until then, he is all sweetness and light, trying on shoes, flattering the brothers and carefully folding his trousers. He even breaks into the occasional jig.

“There’s a slight sense that maybe Davies is a down-at-heel vaudevillian,” said Mr. Cox.

Mr. Hassell asked Mr. Pryce for advice on playing Mick, but Mr. Pryce remembered little about his 1980 performance. What he does remember is Warren Mitchell as Davies, from whom he lifted “certain bits of business,” including the way he folds the trousers. They both chose to play Davies with a thick Welsh country accent.

In 1980, Mr. Mitchell threw a tantrum on the first day of rehearsal when director Kenneth Ives said the accent didn’t work. The production was put on hold while Mr. Mitchell, a tennis fanatic, challenged Mr. Ives to a tennis match that would decide how Davies would talk.

“The next day we walked in,” Mr. Pryce said, “and there was Ken Ives with his arm in plaster. He’d been thoroughly defeated on the court. His arm was broken, and he had to concede that Warren was indeed gonna play it with a Welsh accent. But I didn’t have to go that far. I just said, ‘I am Welsh, so I’m doing it Welsh.’”

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Christina Ricci in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." (Courtesy Classic Stage Company)

Like an unimaginative lover on Valentine’s Day, theater companies like to throw around rose petals. It’s always the same: a single petal drifts from the ceiling, then a second, then a flurry. At the Classic Stage Company’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the petals start when Bebe Neuwirth’s Titania asks her fairies for a lullaby. What starts as a gentle shower turns into a deluge, as though the petals were being sprayed by a leafblower, and finishes with the fairies dumping grocery bags full of them onto their queen. The solemn cliché turns to satire, and the audience chortles as Ms. Neuwirth drifts off to sleep, to spend the next few scenes buried under a six-inch pile of petals.

“Last night I had a hot flash while I was under there,” the actress said during an interview with The Observer last week. “Fifty-three-year-old women readers will know that it’s no fun having a hot flash under a bushel of petals. I was laughing at myself, thinking, ‘Oh, wow. I hope none of these petals melt into my flesh.’”

Hot flashes aside, Ms. Neuwirth looks every inch the fairy goddess. As the production rockets from slapstick to sublime, she is its anchor—a woodland monarch who maintains dignity no matter how silly she gets. This strikingly funny take on one of the world’s most-produced plays, which opens April 29, is only the latest in a string of sharp productions by a company whose imagination, A-list casts and impossibly scarce tickets have, in the past few years, won it a place at the top of the Off-Broadway hierarchy. If CSC ever falls from grace, it won’t be Bebe’s fault.

So devoted are the company’s subscribers—who number more now than ever before—that January’s production of Galileo, starring F. Murray Abraham, was sold out by opening night. Tickets for December’s The Cherry Orchard went just as quickly. A three-evening workshop series for Antony & Cleopatra featuring Kim Cattrall sold out before it was even announced, giving the press release little to do but mention, meekly, that “a waiting list will form each evening at 7 p.m. in the lobby.” It was an understatement when artistic director Brian Kulick said, “It’s been a very good couple of years for us.”

He’s managed to draw a succession of Hollywood stars—John Turturro, Jake Gyllenhall, Mandy Patinkin and Peter Sarsgaard—by letting them do more ambitious work than is possible on Broadway. Audiences follow not just to stargaze, but to enjoy the relaxed, modern style that has become CSC’s trademark.

“There is a real hunger within the acting community,” Mr. Kulick said, “to tackle a Chekhov or tackle a Shakespeare. Or for someone of Murray’s stature, you’ve climbed this mountain called Shylock—well there’s this other mountain called Galileo.” The audience watches with an attitude “of bloodsport,” he said, wondering if the marquee name will triumph or flop.

In CSC’s arena, Ms. Neuwirth holds her own. She’s done Shakespeare only once before—13 years ago—but found comfort under the low-key direction of Tony Speciale, a CSC assistant artistic director who insisted his cast approach the play as though it were new work. By emphasizing physicality, movement and song—things actors do when left to their own devices—he achieves the madcap energy more familiar in a college production with, of course, slightly better performances. Ms. Neuwirth, he said, “has been my muse.”

“I came to the table with some pretty crazy ideas, and she not only embraced all of them, but she then took it a step further.”

The conceit of this thoroughly unconceited production is that the characters introduced in the first scenes—a gang of shrill nitwits dressed for cocktail hour in the Hamptons—share a collective vision of fairies, mischief and madness in the forest. Before she dreams she is Titania, queen of the fairies, Ms. Neuwirth is Hippolyta, the Duke’s unhappy fiancée.

She approached the part from the vantage of dream analysis, asking herself a string of questions—“Why would she dream that she’s having this terrible argument with her mate, Oberon? Why would she dream that she has adopted a mortal boy? Why would she dream that she makes love to a donkey? Why would she do that?” She declined to answer these for The Observer, lest she “give away that energy that I have to keep inside.”

Ms. Neuwirth did offer that she is “fascinated by symbols,” explaining that she is “very strong” in Scorpio rising, and that Neptune “is very heavy in my sign,” giving her a balance between analysis and illusion.

“That’s my flaky reason why,” she said. “But my grounded reason is that I’m just interested in symbols and fantasy and the mystical aspect of why we do the things we do.”

As Hippolyta/Titania, she is the calm center of a giddy production that features a tricycle, lawn chairs and a pair of green Hulk hands. As the dream progresses, the quartet of lovers at the show’s heart, which includes Christina Ricci as Hermia, grows increasingly feral—and naked. Ms. Ricci has done almost no theater, and was plagued by stage fright during her (well-reviewed) Broadway debut, in 2010’s Time Stands Still. She’s found Midsummer “a very different show than I thought it would be.”

“You sign up for Shakespeare,” she said, “and then all of a sudden you’re doing acrobatics.” She imagines she was cast because of the 2006 film Black Snake Moan, in which “I ran around like a ferocious little creature in my underwear.”

During rehearsal, she and the other Shakespearean neophytes relied on the advice of Steven Skybell, who plays Bottom, teaches Shakespeare at Fordham, and has a name that would suit a sprite. He said Ms. Ricci had “a natural affinity for the language.” One of the first times he tried on Bottom’s trademark donkey head, Mr. Skybell passed the women’s dressing room and heard a flurry of barks coming from Karen Carpenter, a chihuahua-dachshund mix whom Ms. Ricci keeps backstage.

“She has one little toy and a duck,” Ms. Ricci said of her dog, “and she sits on any of the four ladies’ laps while we do our make-up, and people come and visit her.”

Mr. Speciale relies heavily on Ms. Ricci’s knack for physical comedy, turning a lengthy argument among Hermia, her rival Helena  and the men they’re chasing into what children call a chicken fight. Ms. Ricci and her equally tiny counterpart, Halley Wegryn Gross, climb atop the shoulders of two nearly-identical strapping gingers, who race around the stage as the audience laughs so loudly that it’s hard to hear the dialogue. This has created a problem rare for classical theater: the scene is too funny.

“The fight is so strong that it can overpower the language,” said Mr. Speciale, who has worked to find a balance between slapstick and clarity. Younger audiences are “more vocal,” and their laughter can push that scene to a “high frenzied place.”

“It’s a challenge for the actors to stay grounded,” he said. “To not overproduce, to not add extra gimmicks or gags, because once you add a little joke here, it has a ripple effect and you can’t hear the language.”

On the night The Observer attended, a fire alarm set off by an overactive haze machine served to further drown out Shakespeare’s poetry. Only when the sound of sirens outside stopped the show did the audience stop laughing. Lying on the stage, Taylor Mac, as Puck, asked, “Does anyone know any campfire songs?”

Returning from a dinner meeting to watch the show’s second half, Mr. Kulick was surprised to see a gaggle of firemen tramping into his lobby. One turned to him and said, “Haze machine, right? We’ve seen this before.”

“The thing that makes the smoke,” Ms. Neuwirth said, “I guess we can’t put it up to 10.”

“In this production,” said Mr. Kulick, “10 fireman walking through wouldn’t seem strange. We’ve had fire alarms, we’ve had nude people walk onto our stage, we’ve had a burglar backstage that Murray Abraham had to wrestle to the ground. We’re used to at least once a year something unexpected happening.”

That was just a few days into previews, and the show has been tightened up since. But its ragged spirit reminded Ms. Neuwirth of her teenager years dancing ballet.

“No matter what the choreography was,” she said, “or what level you’re at as a dancer, that music is still there. It’s still Prokofiev. It’s still Tchaikovsky. It’s still Chopin. With Shakespeare it doesn’t matter that they’ve got beach chairs on the set, or that I’m dressed as a trapeze artist. That music is still there. It’s still Shakespeare.”

Of course it is. But not all Shakespeare earns belly laughs.

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Alfred Gingold as H.P. Lovecraft. (Courtesy Dan Bianchi)

Ghoulish youths haunt the alleys of Red Hook. The waterfront district is “a maze of hybrid squalor,” “a babel of sound and filth,” infested by “a dread crew of sentient loathsomeness.” South Brooklyn has changed somewhat since 1925, when H.P. Lovecraft wrote “The Horror at Red Hook,” but the long-dead author seems to have grasped something about the essential nature of a visit to Ikea.

But just what does “sentient loathsomeness” look like? How, precisely, might someone translate Lovecraft’s peculiar brand of weird horror to the stage? Dan Bianchi found a solution: he lets his audience do the work for him.

The founder and driving force behind a company called RadioTheatre, Mr. Bianchi has been producing aural adaptations of weird classics since 2004. On April 19, he presents the third installment in his H.P. Lovecraft festival, produced at the Kraine Theater in collaboration with the Horse Trade Theater Group; it runs through June 24. By dispensing with visuals, he has found a way to stage ambitious work that is nimble, cheap and popular. In an Off-Off-Broadway scene where most companies are content to produce a show a year, RadioTheatre averages more than six. His group has, Mr. Bianchi said, “a roadie mentality.”

Last week, The Observer sat down at the Stillwater Bar & Grill, on Fourth Street, with Mr. Bianchi, actor Frank Zilinyi and sound engineer Wes Shippee. Over beer, disco fries and fried potato skins, the team behind RadioTheatre laid out its philosophy. Although they concede that their name may suggest nostalgia—“It’s the 1940s and there’s a guy someplace with coconut shells,” as Mr. Zilinyi put it—they are not nostalgists.

“I’m not trying to get a recreation of what it looked like in a 1940s studio,” Mr. Bianchi said. “That’s a museum piece. I’m trying to recreate the experience people had of sitting in the dark, listening to their radio.”

Mr. Bianchi is big and grizzled and looks a bit like Jeff Bridges. His website identifies him as “the most produced living writer in NYC.” (Take that, Neil Simon!) He is disdainful of overblown Hollywood movies and Broadway plays, and speaks with the confidence of a man who, in the small world of New York radio theater, is an undisputed king. To Erez Ziv, Horse Trade’s managing director, he is “a never-ending fountain of ideas,” and “a time capsule come to life.” Heidi Grumelot, the company’s artistic director, described him as “a big teddy bear.”

“He can come across a little bit gruff, I guess, like grr!” she said. “But he’s a total sweetheart.”

Since the 1970s, Mr. Bianchi has worked as a composer, visual artist and all-around theatrical dynamo. After a sojourn in Hollywood, he returned to New York a decade ago to find a shrunken indie theater scene, financially restricted to small casts, talky scripts and sets, he said, “that looked like the Little Rascals made it in their back yard.”

“The kind of shows I used to do,” he said, “I had 28 people on stage, three story sets, a live band and a projection screen. That’s Spider-Man nowadays.”

Looking for a cheap way to escape the morass of Off-Off anonymity, he seized on sound. “In most Off-Off-Broadway houses,” he said, “sound is usually the broken CD player and two speakers that don’t work. So I said, ‘O.K., we’re gonna do sound.’”

Since RadioTheatre’s first effort in 2004, a show called Madhouse, he has produced a range of classics—Frankenstein, King Kong, Sundays With Poe—refining his technique but keeping the format the same: actors at music stands speaking directly to the audience, backed up by lush orchestral scores and elaborate sound effects. It’s as though he took a cue from Rod Serling’s The Zero Hour, a 1970s radio show whose motto was “Rest your eyes. Engage your imagination.”

Mr. Zilinyi knows a show is working when he sees that most of the audience is listening with eyes closed. “They’re sitting out there making the scenes in their heads,” he said, “and you know that you’ve got 30 or 40 different shows going on at the same time.”

All the talk of imagination calls to mind children’s theater, but though some of their work is kid-friendly—like King Kong, which Mr. Bianchi is preparing for Sunday matinees in Times Square—shows like the upcoming Naughty Victorians, adapted from 19th-century erotica, are decidedly R rated. If this all sounds boring, you are either too young or too old.

“If someone walks out of our show in the first 10 minutes,” said Mr. Bianchi, “it’s usually a 22-year-old. Ask them to use their imagination to provide the visuals? Either they don’t know how, or they can’t be bothered.”

Gothic horror writing, so reliant on atmosphere, narration and description, is difficult to adapt for stage or screen without succumbing to camp. Adapting Lovecraft is nearly impossible. A Providence native who died at 46, he was a straight-laced, boring man who lived with two aged aunts. Both parents spent time in institutions, and he lived his life in fear of insanity—an anxiety manifested in his stories, whose heroes are routinely driven to madness by the sight of unspeakable horror.

Lovecraft’s nightmarish dreamscapes, his indescribable monsters, and his ever-expanding cast of ancient gods—charming tentacle beasts like Cthulhu, Yig and Nyarlathotep—invariably lose their power as soon as they are made visual.

“Even in Hollywood,” said Mr. Bianchi, “with all the CGI and the effects that they can do nowadays—”

“You can’t do it justice,” said Mr. Zilinyi.

“It looks cheesy or stupid or cheap or whatever. But when it’s left to the imagination, that’s when people go, ‘Whooooa.’”

“It’s truly chilling.”

Mr. Shippee, who is responsible for live mixing of the music and sound effects Mr. Bianchi creates, said that the sound design for Lovecraft is, “screaming sound effects” aside, “quiet, subtle, just enough to guide how you are interpreting what the actors are saying.”

“It’s a nice dynamic,” he said, “going from that to the thunderous sound effects. This, more than a lot of the shows we’ve done, runs the gamut from pianissimo to fortissimo.”

RadioTheatre has had success with Poe and Lovecraft fanatics—the people who, Mr. Zilinyi said, “go line for line with you” and care deeply about “the pronunciation of Cthulhu.” (The closest human speech organs can come to it, Lovecraft wrote, is something like “Khlul’-hloo.”) Apparently the Lovecraft acolytes count among their ranks the dark mind behind “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”

“John Mayer came in one night,” Mr. Bianchi said, “and he had his hood up, hiding and everything, and said, ‘Aw, man, this is great.’”

But despite its devoted following, RadioTheatre is no gold mine, making just enough to pay for the next production and no more.

“In a sense, we’re doing community theater,” he said, “but Manhattan happens to be our community, so we have 952 other entertainment things to compete with.”

He competes by pushing every moment of every story as far as it will go, and it can be quite effective. On our way to meet the RadioTheatre gang at Stillwater, The Observer was listening to their production of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” a story about an alcoholic pushed to insanity and murder by a sinister, one-eyed feline. Passing the Marble Cemetery on Second Avenue—whose last grave was filled in 1937, the year Lovecraft died—we saw a black cat lurking among the tombstones. Our stomach lurched, our spine tingled, and somewhere in the cosmos, Poe, Lovecraft and Dan Bianchi shared a cackle.

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Lead singer of the band in 'One Man, Two Guvnors.' (Photo by Johan Persson)

Grant Olding knows how to bow, and he’s willing to teach Americans. Over the past three weeks, the British composer of the West End smash One Man, Two Guvnors has been transforming a quartet of American youngsters into the Craze, a British rock group circa 1963. He has tailored their accents, poured them into purple suits and taught them that quick, self-effacing bow best known from YouTube clips of the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

As he explained last week, during a break from rehearsal, “It’s a very specific bow.”

When the audience marches into the Music Box theatre on Friday, April 6, to watch One Man’s first Broadway preview, Mr. Olding’s band will be there to play them into their seats. The band is on stage for most of this slapstick, seaside farce, setting the scene with hard-driving British rock, a style called skiffle whose blues and country roots make it familiar to American ears. The London-based part of the team—which includes the director, playwright and most of the cast—began rehearsing here on Tuesday, allowing just three days before previews to bond with their American colleagues. If One Man, Two Guvnors is to replicate its London success, the Craze will have to learn quickly.

Such a short rehearsal period, which might doom some plays, suits One Man. Based on the 1743 play Servant of Two Masters, its roots are in the Italian commedia dell’arte, a low-brow style marked by musical interludes and improvisation. One Man maintains that form, ignoring the fourth wall in favor of the kind of audience interaction that calls on the improvisational chops of star James Corden. In London, this has led to moments of unscripted absurdity, as when Mr. Corden begged the audience for a sandwich and was pelted with an eight-pack of pork pies. Speaking with The Observer over the phone from England, playwright Richard Bean called it “Benny Hill humor.”

“It’s kind of Benny Hill plus,” he qualified. “It’s got the artistic pretensions of commedia dell’arte, so it’s got some legitimacy, but one has to remember that commedia dell’arte was the lowest form of comedy at the time.”

One Man is not a musical—the band plays before curtain, at intermission, and between scenes—but the Craze matches the show’s ragged spirit. Though tightly rehearsed, they grin like they’ve never been on stage before, smirking like Paul and jerking their heads like Ringo. Comparisons to the Beatles are apt. Like many giants of British rock—Jimmy Page, Van Morrison, the Kinks—the Beatles started as a skiffle band, racing through American country standards as the Quarrymen. Skiffle, said Mr. Olding, “was a great training ground for how to be in a band.”

“It was kind of the punk of its day,” he said. “These songs were all three-chord songs. You just bashed through them on the street corner. The playing wasn’t accomplished, but the energy was incredible.”

Because all a skiffle band needed was, as Mr. Olding put it, “an acoustic guitar, a washboard, and a tea chest with a broom-handle,” it’s been estimated that at the height of the late ’50s “skiffle craze,” there were as many as 50,000 such combos in Britain. (And many mothers wondering where their tea chests had gone.) To the American sound they added the manic energy of “end-of-the-pier” variety acts, represented in One Man by impromptu breakdowns featuring xylophones and car horns.

By the mid ’60s, when One Man takes place, the fad was fading in the face of the slicker sound of what would become the British Invasion. The play begins with Mr. Corden’s character, Francis, being ejected from his band after a Beatles concert makes his bandmates realize they no longer need a washboard player.

Though many skiffle standards—“Rock Island Line,” “John Henry”—are familiar to fans of American blues, the style has been largely forgotten in Britain. Rather than score his show with more familiar Beatles-style numbers, Mr. Bean chose skiffle to “give people something they don’t quite know.” The sight of a man playing a washboard is, he said, something that leaves an English audience “intrigued.”

In London, Mr. Olding led the band himself, singing and playing guitar on songs “The Brighton Line” and “The Brighton Line (Car Horns version).” Equity rules prevented him from reprising his role in New York, and so he came over in February to form the Craze, USA. His British bandmates had to learn the country style that is at skiffle’s heart, but he found that American musicians have no trouble “playing country licks.” The trick, he said, was finding players “who can convince me that they’re British,” in order to imitate “snotty-nosed” English kids who were trying to sing like Lead Belly and “not quite managing it.”

As his replacement, Mr. Olding chose Jason Rabinowitz, a mop-headed singer who spent his teen years resisting the urge to talk in a British accent. Singing like an Englishman, he said, requires “constant carving, like water dripping on a rock” to smooth out uncouth American vowels.

“Most of my work has been on accent,” said Mr. Olding. “Who knew that, ‘She’s got cause to worry, ’cause he always stands her up,’ would be the most difficult phrase in the world to have in an American accent?”

Mr. Olding has found that the key to being convincingly British is for Mr. Rabinowitz to sing “just right on top of the beat. Not back phrasing, not holding notes on. In a way, not showing off.”

When they do show off, as when percussionist Jacob Colin Cohen dings the hotel desk bell that’s glued to the top of his washboard, it’s done with a wide-eyed eagerness that Mr. Olding compared to the “saucy, British-seaside-postcard thing which runs through the whole show.”

Playing bass is the show’s music director Charlie Rosen, an experienced pit musician who has found a niche playing in on-stage bands, in musicals like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Thirteen. Being on stage, he said, is “much more exciting than playing in a pit.”

“You get to feel the energy of the actors, the audience, the set pieces, all of the design that went into the show,” he said, “and it directly influences the way you behave, in the same way it does an actor.”

He and the rest of the Craze have striven, despite the matching suits, to “be a little unpolished.” Although Mr. Rosen called the band’s sound, “by today’s standards, a little tame,” skiffle is raw compared to the Disneyfied scores of most Broadway musicals.

“The important thing is to get the detail right, to make it feel authentic, and not forget that we’ve gotta have fun doing it,” Mr. Olding said, as Mr. Rosen gave his upright bass a twirl.

“He wants to spin his bass,” said Mr. Olding. “That’s new for us. We don’t spin the bass in London. He’s all over spinning that bass.”

By Friday, if all goes according to plan, nearly every such Americanism will be sanded away, allowing the play’s uniquely British silliness to shine through.

editorial@observer.com

Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Broadway fortunes have been forged from Abba’s Greatest Hits. Hearts and bank accounts have been broken trying to do the same with the music of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Last year, Kathleen Marshall found success directing a revival of Anything Goes, packed to the gills with Cole Porter classics. Next month, she will attempt a repeat with Nice Work If You Can Get It, an original musical built from the Gershwin songbook, which opens April 24. But despite superficial commonalities with Mamma Mia! and its descendants, Ms. Marshall has one thing to make clear.

“This is not a jukebox musical,” she said last week.

Rather, she said, Nice Work is “a musical comedy for people who love musical comedies.” To charm that discerning demographic, she presents a farce that wouldn’t be out of place on the Prohibition-era stage. It is as light and bubbly as illegal Champagne, and will find success only if it can rise above pastiche to attain the feel of something the Gershwins might have written themselves.

“From the business standpoint, we’re going for the low-hanging fruit—the people who know who George Gershwin is,” said Roy Furman, one of the show’s producers. “Real theatergoers. The people who love showmanship and razzle-dazzle.”

What separates George and Ira’s numbers from Abba’s—aside from, ahem, everything—is that they were originally written for the stage. The natural theatricality of “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “S’Wonderful” mean they should flow easily from the lips of Nice Work’s stars, Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara. As Boardwalk Empire prepares its third season, and the city continues to thirst for speakeasy cocktails, Ms. Marshall and her producers hope that ’20s nostalgia can carry them to a long, pocket-lining Broadway run.

Last week, in a rehearsal studio a few blocks from the Flatiron Building, the ensemble hoofed through “Fascinating Rhythm,” and Ms. O’Hara and Mr. Broderick told The Observer, in an interview, that it was the era that drew them to the show.

“Most people who do musicals like old musicals, whether they admit it or not,” said Mr. Broderick. “I like the flasks, the shoes. My costumes are so beautiful in this. It’s when there were real tailors. My god, how old do I sound?”

Besides looking like the ’20s, the show will sound like it. “There’s no American Idol here,” said Ms. O’Hara. The songs, most of which are well-known standards, “are going to be familiar in the same way that history is.”

“With a new twist!” said Mr. Broderick.

“A new twist,” she allowed. “The ’20s for the 21st century!”

In the late ’90s, the Gershwin estate—flush with the success of 1992’s “reimagined Gershwin musical” Crazy For You—hired playwright Joe DiPietro to write something similar. Where Crazy for You was “very much about the dancing,” he said, this was to capture “the crazy farcical nature of the Gershwins.”

Mr. DiPietro’s book for Nice Work is loosely based on the Gershwins’ 1926 hit Oh, Kay!, whose book was cowritten by P.G. Wodehouse. Oh, Kay! was the third Gershwin show to open that year, and one of about 30 that the brothers churned out during the decade. Although their songs became immortal, the plays were not built to last.

“If they had a comic who was a juggler, suddenly there’d be a lot of juggling,” said Mr. DiPietro. “There’s a big tap-dance number in the original Oh, Kay!, and I realized it’s because one of the minor characters was an excellent tap dancer, so they put his vaudeville act into the show.”

Though bereft of juggling, Nice Work maintains that spontaneous spirit. Mr. Broderick plays a playboy with a bad habit of waking up hungover next to chorus girls and who attempts to cure himself by marrying “a woman of substance.” The weekend of his wedding, he falls for a brassy bootlegger (Ms. O’Hara). Madness ensues.

“The times are demanding something light, something frothy, something fun, something fresh,” said Mr. Furman. “The public wants to be delighted.”

After a 2000 production at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House, under the title They All Laughed, Nice Work nearly opened in 2008, with Harry Connick Jr. as the lead, but the production was shelved amid rumors of infighting. After a few more years in the Broadway version of development hell, Mr. Broderick’s arrival brought a swarm of investors hoping for a repeat of The Producers.

“Even though it’s taken 12 years,” said Mr. DiPietro, “the show has always had some forward motion to it.”

Last fall, with the play’s $10 million budget in place, its producers scrambled to find a theater in time for a spring opening, winning the Shubert’s Imperial Theater when funding collapsed for Funny Girl. Two weeks away from the start of previews, Nice Work has a theater, an ad campaign, and two stars who, in Mr. DiPietro’s words, “know what schtick is.

“They take the lightness very seriously,” he said.

After making a career playing the ingénue, Ms. O’Hara was hungry for a character who is “street smart, scrappy, and not quite as dependent on sashaying across the stage in a nice costume.”

Mr. Broderick, meanwhile, was lured to the show by his former agent Scott Landis, a lead producer and husband of Ms. Marshall. For Mr. Broderick, Nice Work is a chance to make believe he’s a marquee star of old Broadway.

“I don’t even like to say it because I’m such a pale imitation,” he said, “but whenever I dance I’m thinking of Fred Astaire. I’m laughing because you’ll laugh too, when you see it.”

“Matthew could have been a music star in the ’20s,” Mr. DiPietro said. “He’s a ne’er-do-well, and he plays a ne’er-do-well in the show. How often do you use the word ne’er-do-well nowadays? But he can actually play a ne’er-do-well!”

Mr. Furman, the producer, put it more directly. “Kelli’s a supernova,” he said, “and will be supernova-ed again. Matthew is just delicious.”

The supernova and Mr. Delicious have their big love scene to “S’Wonderful.” Rather than sing their feelings, Ms. O’Hara said, she and Mr. Broderick engage in “a silly kind of Astaire/Rogers moment, but with the kind of abilities we have which are more—”

“Limited,” said Mr. Broderick.

“It’s light-hearted,” Ms. O’Hara said. “There’s a love story, but there’s shenanigans all over the place.”

The Observer: Tell me about the shenanigans.

Mr. Broderick: The shenanigans in the show? She brought it up.

Ms. O’Hara: I’m not even one of the big shenaniganers.

Mr. Broderick: Yes you are.

Ms. O’Hara: Shenaniganizers.

Mr. Broderick: Shenanigist.

Ms. O’Hara: I am a shenanigist from way back.

Mr. Broderick (sounding hurt): You pour soup on me. You steal my hat, briefly. My wallet.

Ms. O’Hara: Oh, there’s so many shenanigans.

The shenanigans, soup-dumping and “S’Wonderfuls” add up to an idyllic portrait of the ’20s, where, Mr. Broderick said, “everybody’s drunk and rich.”

“I like the ’20s,” he said. “Just not the dentist. Everything is so romantic, but at some point you’re going to end up in Dr. Heischman’s chair, with the slow big old drill. It’s not all fun, the ’20s. Their teeth, pulled out with pliers. Think of it!”

No musical could ask for a better foundation than a Gershwin score. If everything else falls into place, Nice Work If You Can Get It should prove to be the polar opposite of pulling teeth.

editorial@observer.com