7.) Cadillac Records: We missed this when it hit theaters, despite the good reviews, and we’ll probably end up missing it on DVD as well. This just feels like the movie in your Netflix queue that you always put five other movies above. There’s always cable…

6.) Rachel Getting Married: A true example of the parts being better than the sum of the whole. Anne Hathaway is amazing throughout, we have a cinematography crush on Declan Quinn, and Jonathan Demme does his best faux-Altman/Cassavettes impression. Yet... the movie is an arch bore that over stays its welcome by twenty minutes.

5.) Let the Right One In: The beloved Swedish import, which is being turned into a sure-to-be hated American remake by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, centers on a young boy who falls in love with a young girl who turns out to be a vampire. Tomas Alfredson’s film is supposed to be alternatively touching and horrifying, but we expect to spend a lot of the running time with the remote control firmly planted over our eyes.

4.) Synecdoche, New York: Everything we heard about Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut made the film sound about as much fun as attending a funeral. But now that it’s on DVD, what better way to spend a Saturday night?

3.) Happy-Go-Lucky: However, we may wash Synecdoche, New York down with this one. Mike Leigh’s film is every bit as happy-go-lucky as its title. And if anyone out there wants to do a recount to find out how Sally Hawkins didn’t get an Oscar nomination, be our guest.

2.) Milk: We liked Milk enough when we saw it last November, but we were slightly disappointed anyway with all the effusive praise. Still, we’re anxious to revisit the film on DVD to see if Sean Penn and Josh Brolin were indeed as good as we remember, and if Diego Luna was as bad.

1.) Role Models: We never did a top-ten list for 2008, but if we had, Role Models would have certainly been invited to the party. Take everything you love about Judd Apatow movies, combine them with David Wain’s absurdist sense of humor and then give the film a load of truly earned emotions. Role Models is the best kind of comedy: one that actually makes you feel for the characters. Also, the cursing children and KISS songs don’t hurt either.

RocknRolla

What's the story: Guy Ritchie is back! Excited? Nah, us neither. (The Ex?-) Mr. Madonna returns to the storytelling that made him moderately famous. RocknRolla looks like Lock, Stock and Two Snatch-ing Barrels, but with a bigger cast; instead of Jason Statham, 300's Gerard Butler is the lead here. Also, Jeremy Piven shows up playing Jeremy Piven.

Who should see it: Alex Rodriguez

City of Ember

What's the story: Two kids (one played by Saorise Ronan, the prickly girl from Atonement) must save an underground city from extinction. Produced by Walden Media (the people who brought you the Narnia films), Ember features a pretty great cast, including Bill Murray, Martin Landau and Tim Robbins.

Who should see it: People who thought Martin Landau was already dead.

The Express

What's the story: An unabashed tearjerker, The Express tells the story of former Syracuse running back Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy who, upon entrance into the NFL, was diagnosed with leukemia. Sad! Dennis Quaid co-stars.

Who should see it: Guys tired of crying at the end of Brian's Song.

Quarantine

What's the story: All that's left after a mysterious virus kills a bunch of people is a reporter's video tape of the events. Hmm. Where have we seen this before?

Who should see it: J.J. Abrams.

Happy-Go-Lucky

What's the story: Mike Leigh's latest is the story of 30-year-old woman who is really... happy. Our esteemed colleague, like others, has singled out Sally Hawkins as the main reason to see the film. As Poppy, the happy-go-lucky lead, she's bright and effervescent and lined up to be the latest British actress to clean up during Awards season. At the very least, Happy-Go-Lucky should put a smile on your face by the time you leave the theater.

Who should see it: These guys.

Only a year ago, The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, made his stage debut at Culture Project in a solo performance of his own script, My Trip to Al-Qaeda. At this rate, Anthony Lane will be performing his collected movie reviews. And why not? Henry James was famously stage-struck and look what happened to him. (All his plays were a bust.)

Mr. Packer doesn’t appear in Betrayed, thank goodness. There’s a limit. He sensibly leaves the acting to the ensemble of first-rate actors. Mr. Packer has written a play—not a political polemic or mini-lecture—which has been very effectively directed by Pippin Parker (a founder of Naked Angels). Betrayed couldn’t be more serious or shocking—and its neophyte playwright couldn’t be more thrilled.

It’s normal. Anyone who loves the theater as much as you and me and the New Yorker guys obviously do is bound to be stage-struck one way or another. Mr. Packer and Mr. Wright have both talked earnestly about “the immediacy that only theater can provide” and “bringing words to life as only theater can”—but don’t be fooled.

“You know, it’s still sort of unreal, to tell the truth,” the wide-eyed Mr. Packer has said about his theater debut. “In theater terms, this has been a nanosecond. From original conception to performance in eight months is nothing, from what I hear. I’d never been involved in a play that wasn’t a junior-high-school production. It’s kind of unreal and thrilling to see these actors and the set and the direction pulling together what has been raw life.”

MR. PACKER’S ACHIEVEMENT is to give his betrayed Iraqis a voice onstage. The play’s three central characters are composites drawn from the interviews in his widely admired New Yorker piece. There are some imperfections in the play version; the production at the tiny theater is necessarily modest. (It doesn’t try to soar imaginatively in the theatrical manner of the political docudrama Black Watch). It’s simply and effectively what it is: the human story of hundreds of loyal Iraqi interpreters—both Sunni and Shiite—who daily risk kidnapping, torture and beheading by insurgents to work for the Americans in Iraq. Why America callously abandoned them like pariahs to their fate is the dismaying question asked by Betrayed.

The Iraqis portrayed in the play were among those who welcomed the American invasion in 2003, and Mr. Packer supported the war at its inception, beginning with an influential New York Times article. Some still vilify him for it—pointing out that his lack of skepticism about the war encouraged its boosters. Perhaps, but in The New Yorker, as well as in his admirable book The Assassins’ Gate (2005), and now in Betrayed, Mr. Packer has brought to honorable light the moral shame of staggering American ignorance and lies in its conduct of the war.

Betrayed reveals a Catch-22 of Iraq: If America refuses asylum to the desperate Iraqi translators portrayed in the play, the chances are they’ll be hunted down and murdered; if they’re granted asylum, it signals the war in Iraq has failed.

According to The Times, the U.S. admitted just 1,600 Iraqi refugees in 2007 (though an estimated 4 million have fled their homes since the war began). In contrast to the U.S., tiny Sweden has admitted 20,000 refugees. “It is strange to think of becoming Swedish,” says Adnan at the end of Betrayed, though he’s one of the fortunate few to find refuge anywhere. “I will have to be like a small child again and learn a new language. My expertise is useless there. Sweden is not interested in Iraq—what is Iraq to Sweden?”

The America he initially welcomed as the symbol of freedom and democracy doesn’t want him. His shameful fate—like that of others damned to flight or death in the play—will surely make your blood boil. Yet the thoroughly decent Adnan (who’s wonderfully played by the compassionate Waleed F. Zuaiter) tells us calmly that he still dreams forgivingly of America.

Mr. Packer the journalist has no doubt that such good men have been betrayed. Mr. Packer the playwright is pointing to a more open question about heartbreaking, fragile humanity.

Mike Leigh, the renowned British film director and playwright, has written and directed over 20 stage plays (the well-regarded Abigail’s Party and Goose Pimples among them), and it gives me no pleasure to report that Mr. Packer’s first play is a hundred times better than Mr. Leigh’s latest.

Betrayed is a lethal parable about American ignorance abroad, whereas Mr. Leigh’s Two Thousand Years is a middle-class social comedy of sorts masquerading as a parable about Israel.

Staged by Mr. Leigh’s longtime director in New York, Scott Elliott of the New Group, the belabored evening, accompanied by numerous blackouts and pro-forma klezmer music, promises much, much more than it delivers. It arrives here via a successful run at the National Theatre, which only proves that not everything that arrives here ought to.

Mr. Leigh has done little more than write a Jewish version of the cozy British TV soap EastEnders with variations on its trademark line, “I think I’ll put the kettle on.” Though he’s admired for his keen sense of social realism, little or nothing in Two Thousand Years appears to be rooted in any reality. Mr. Leigh has given us instead an awesomely mundane, meandering “slice of life” in which everyone’s glib opinion is just “like” those of real people. The sorry outcome is a reality show about a secular Jewish family with seriously stupid problems. Take the pivotal early scene concerning Josh’s yarmulke.

The 27-year-old son of well-meaning Danny the dentist and his overpatient wife, Rachel, Josh is a surly shlump who’s dropped out of life after a promising university education. He’s still living moodily with his parents. One day, he returns home furtively and closes the curtains in the living room. The fuss made over this! We can’t quite see what he’s doing behind the sofa. He appears to be wrapping his arm tightly in leather in order to inject himself with heroin. It’s a laborious set-up. He’s wrapping his arm in tefilin. And then out comes the yarmulke.

When his parents discover him wearing it, much hysterical parental consternation ensues. “It’s like having a Muslim in the house!” complains dad. “Or a Martian.” Some in the audience found this amusing, and the scene was played for laughs. Why a yarmulke should be seen as automatically funny mystifies me, but let it pass. Mr. Leigh crucially neglects to provide Josh with any reason for his newly found religious piety, and the scene ends conveniently with the peculiarly outraged parents rushing offstage for a defiant meal of bacon
and eggs.

This isn’t, then, a serious play about Jewish identity. It’s a contrived, second-rate sitcom. The talk and kvetching about early Zionist utopianism or the price of religious fanaticism are token window dressing and even dated. There’s no intellectual muscle to the play, and a surprising lack of emotional authenticity. The very belated appearance of the deluded and loathed alcoholic aunt who’s been estranged from the family for over a decade doesn’t, strictly speaking, even belong in the play. Aunt Michelle is just there, to save the day perhaps, like grumpy Grandpa’s bad jokes and death-defying asthma attacks.

Or she’s a symbol. By the end of Two Thousand Years, Mr. Leigh appears to be telling us all sentimentally, “Hey, give peace a chance.”

Not this time.

Wall Streeters prop up the real estate bubble in anticipation of juicy year-end pay-outs; not since before 9/11 have finance folks been compensated for their troubles so handily.

Fine, we'll say it: Brooklyn Is The New Philadelphia, the sexy suburb that could. No longer the sadsack spot where losers go when they fail out of Manhattan, Brooklyn finally has it all going on.

Aaaaaaaagh, George Gurley and his lover Hilly are back in couples therapy.

Even Bush I isn't afraid of Al Jazeera any more; Here comes Al Jaz Int'l.

Back to Canada with ya, eh? Michael Ignatieff says see ya to America, off to save his homeland.

Harvard Law School, a hungry hungry hippo for conservatives.

Nerve.com sex columnist plans to wed! But what of the lust in the dust?

After her delectable and hilarious turn as Clarice in Silence! The Musical, Jenn Harris joins Bebe Neuwirth in Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos ... Or, What Am I Doing Here? Just how odd is this Roger Rosenblatt entertainment? The preface, which calls the work “almost a play,” reads: “This is a play made up of separate pieces that taken together represent an amused and anxious mind.” Yikes! Ashley Montana, by the way, for those who remember the model on the Sports Illustrated cover from which the title of the play is taken, is alive and well, thank you for asking. (Flea Theater, previews begin Oct. 6, opens Oct. 20th, through Nov. 19.)

The London-based playwright Sarah Kane, the Ian Curtis of the theater world—which is to say, immensely talented and dead by her own hand—will (or will not, depending on how you feel about the afterlife) surely enjoy her greatest production to date. Isabelle Huppert, that cream-limbed French siren, takes on the dark hours before the dawn in Ms. Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis. (Does all this sound familiar? Last year, the Royal Court brought 4:48 Psychosis to St. Ann’s for its American premiere.) But really: Don’t bring the kids, Ms. Huppert. (B.A.M.’s Harvey Theater, Oct. 19 through 30.)

Sure, it won a Pulitzer in 1975, and the original production starred that naughty Frank Langella—but it only ran for 70 shows. (No, not Anna Karenina: The Musical. Blech!) Now Edward Albee’s Seascape, the story of two strolling seaside couples—one human, one sea-based and reptilian—is back, baby, and it’s scalier than ever! With the begenius Frances Sternhagen, also known as the evil Bunny MacDougal, Kyle MacLachlan’s scheming super-WASP mother. (Booth Theater, previews begin Oct. 28; official opening, Nov. 21.)

Michael Cerveris, Stephen Sondheim’s big, bald, hunky baby, goes all out this fall in a production of Sweeney Todd. It’s set in a mental hospital, which makes one wonder. (Marat/Sade/Sweeney Todd? Hey, it’s euphonic!) Mr. Cerveris will be accompanying himself on guitar throughout the production, apparently. Yes, you may have missed Mr. Cerveris’ secondary career as an instrumental musician as well (get the album on his Web site!), but, more importantly, press materials claim that Mr. Cerveris’ co-star, one Patti LuPone, will be playing the tuba onstage. We’re so there. The stakes have been raised! Let’s see you work a tuba, Kristin Chenoweth! (Eugene O’Neill Theater, previews begin Oct. 3, opens Nov. 3rd.)

Look, she’s nuts—but that just makes Jennifer Jason Leigh a better match for a Scott Elliott direction of a Mike Leigh play. Gives the nice lady something to sink her teeth into! The New Group—which began its life 10 years ago with a Mike Leigh play, also directed by Scott Elliot—brings the 70’s London-suburbanite satirical pain of Abigail’s Party. (Acorn Theater at Theater Row, previews begin Nov. 14, opens Dec. 1.)

Rabies! Perhaps poor dead Snoopy, the dog of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, however, turned out the best of all the Peanuts gang. Poor Lucy is, after all, coughing up that “five cents, please” for her own therapy now. The bizarre Breakfast Club-esque borrowing of the Charles Schulz characters by Bert V. Royal made big waves in New York at the 2004 Fringe Festival; finally, the gang has migrated into a theater. (Century Center, previews begin Nov. 28, opens Dec. 15.)

For 18 years, no public performances of any kind were permitted in England, thanks to the Puritanical and repressive decades ruled by the anally retentive Oliver Cromwell. But in 1660, when the Stuart dynasty was restored to the throne with the coronation of prissy, fun-loving Charles II (Rupert Everett), a new era of exploration and permissiveness blossomed called the Restoration, and theaters once again played to full houses. The stage was still considered improper employment for ladies (what’s more, it was illegal), and Ned Kynaston played all of the best female roles, relishing his wigs and lipstick so much that he even greeted his public backstage in full makeup, reducing lady fans to fainting spells by displaying his endowments under his petticoats. He also carried on a passionate affair with his patron and lover, Lord Buckingham (Ben Chaplin)—all to the horror of his loyal dresser, prompter and stagehand Maria (Claire Danes), who studies his every move in Othello with the dream of someday playing Desdemona herself. When the king, who longs for some fresh flesh and gender-bending titillation onstage (and who, as wittily played by Mr. Everett, is a bit effete himself), suddenly lifts the ban on women and insults Ned by decreeing that men can no longer wear gowns, Maria seizes the opportunity to finally become a star while Ned’s career plummets. Without the sexual fantasy of bedding a man pretending to be a woman, Lord Buckingham deserts him and marries a real female, and Ned is ruined.

The dilemma is sad but ironically amusing: Maria, the new star, can’t act, and Ned, whose identity and self-confidence have been tossed on the rubbish heap along with his high-heel shoes, can’t play male roles. On a downward spiral, the drunken and dissipated Ned is beaten and left for dead in a park by one of Maria’s own jealous "sponsors," then rescued by her. In a country inn secluded from London gossip and prying eyes, they find redemption in each other: While he teaches his former dresser how to play Desdemona, she tenderly inspires him to inject the Moor’s speeches with manly authority and gives him a graduate degree in how to really make love to a woman. With the skeptical theater owner (Tom Wilkinson), the irascible King Charles and his mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper)—a tart so notorious there are still pubs and taverns named after her to this day—all applauding wildly, stardom miraculously returns in a triumphant production of Othello. But in the end, the half of his dual sexual psyche Ned loves the most is still in doubt.

What a story, and how little of it was ever revealed until playwright Jeffrey Hatcher dramatized it for the stage and then adapted his own screenplay for the film after reading Samuel Pepys’ diaries of the Restoration in a secondhand bookshop and researching the characters of the period as well as he could. How much of the story is accurate I cannot tell you, but in director Richard Eyre the project has found a perfect choice. His film experience has been limited but impressive (who could forget Judi Dench in his wrenching Iris Murdoch biopic, Iris?), and his period theater research is impeccable. There are several concurrent themes at work here—the search for sexual liberation in a time of repression and religious hypocrisy, the emergence of 17th-century feminism, the way beautiful young men were used as toy-boys by the British upper classes, the theatrical stage as a reflection of the evolving politics of British history—and Mr. Eyre has bathed each one in a radiant amber gel. The production values are rich, the sets are arresting—from the lurid taverns where Maria secretly performs vulgar parodies of Shakespearean roles in Ned’s stolen costumes, to the king’s lavish private dinner parties, to the piles of steaming manure in the filthy streets of London—to the point that you feel you have been transported by time machine to the 1660’s.

The acting is splendid. The big surprise is Claire Danes, who grows from Ned’s shy, stagestruck backstage serf to his powerhouse rival, ruining his career while challenging him—personally and professionally—to reinvent himself. Both Ms. Danes and Mr. Crudup master demanding and complex roles, in the formality of their onstage acting as well as the subtlety of their private love scenes, where she teaches him to be a man not by what he does, but by how he feels.

My only problem with Stage Beauty is that Billy Crudup lacks stage beauty. As a transvestite described as the most beautiful woman on the stage, he did not convince me. A prettier actor, like Rob Lowe or Ben Affleck, would have made a more alluring woman in rouge, eyelashes and powdered curls, but might not have been skillful enough to bring the same artistic flourish to the role. Still, there is something awkward and disconcerting about Mr. Crudup. As a "man in a woman’s form," his bone structure is too sharp, his shoulders are too broad, his hips are too narrow, his muscles are too sinewy. When Mr. Chaplin throws him out of bed, it’s not because he’s no longer a lady, but because Mr. Crudup is bigger than the mattress. No question about his acting chops, but in drag Mr. Crudup looks like a college jock roped into playing the lead in an embarrassing frat-house parody of Charley’s Aunt.

Put the Kettle On

More British working-class suffering from Mike Leigh infects the dreariness of Vera Drake, which opens commercially this week after its initial unveiling at the New York Film Festival. Despite the honest, penetrating and open-faced presence of the distinguished Imelda Staunton in the title role, the film is something of an ordeal. Vera is a kind and charitable maid in 1950 who makes her daily rounds in a battered cardigan and sensible shoes administering to the sick and needy, clucking over her husband, a garage mechanic, and providing a meager life for her son, an apprentice tailor, and her spinsterish daughter, who works in a light-bulb factory. Life is grim, but for Vera no hurdle is so daunting that it can’t be put right by putting the kettle to the boil for a fresh cup of tea. Between scrubbing the floors of the well-to-do and mashing the spuds for her numbingly dull family, Vera also masters another line of work in which she finds the appreciation and gratitude she doesn’t get at home. Vera, you see, performs illegal abortions for women in trouble. She sees nothing wrong with this sideline. She’s just trying to help, charging no fee for her services and innocently unaware that her sleazy "agent" is ripping her off in the bargain. It all comes to a bad end when one of her "clients" nearly dies, the police arrive in the middle of her daughter’s engagement celebration, and the family is scandalized. Vera is tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. A flood of tears ensues.

The whole story is worth enduring for about 30 minutes max, but Mike Leigh drags out every painful minute for 125 minutes that seem like 125 days. We are forced to watch repeatedly as Vera hums cheerfully while unwrapping the tools of her trade—a bar of soap, a cheese grater, a bottle of disinfectant and a rubber hose—when once would be more than enough. Then, after she’s arrested and dragged to the station house, we are held hostage as Vera goes through each and every halting, agonized, gasping, sobbing, punishing moment of interrogation like a child about to be flogged for sticking a finger in the fudge. When she is ordered to remove the wedding ring she hasn’t taken off her finger in 27 years, you wonder if she’ll get it off before the camera runs out of film. In most Mike Leigh films, the accents and brogues are so thick you need subtitles. Not here. Imelda Staunton’s stoic sweetness spreads through her voice like clotted cream on a scone. Still, what is the point? If the director intends to drum up sympathy for the plight of women seeking abortions in 1950, when the movie takes place, it’s too late. The abortion law of 1861 that condemns Vera Drake was modified in 1938, again in 1967, and the French "abortion pill" was approved in 1991. It would have been advisable to bring everything up to date in the end titles instead of making Vera Drake a martyr for the ages.

Despite my reservations, the acting justifies the pain. It’s hard to imagine that the dumpling-faced star of this turgid melodrama is also one of London’s most popular musical-comedy stars. Transformed from a pleasant, compassionate, optimistic wife and mom to a haggard, traumatized, burned-out old hag branded a criminal by the magistrate’s court, Ms. Staunton gives a mesmerizing performance, but the movie is so slow and grueling that by the time she goes to prison, you wish you had seen her play Miss Adelaide in Richard Eyre’s acclaimed National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls instead.

Good Men Are Hard to Find

Also transferring from Lincoln Center is Undertow, a Southern Gothic tale about violence, blood and frightened children fleeing a demented uncle with a knife. Think Flannery O’Connor with obvious shades of Night of the Hunter. Grieving for years over the death of his wife, a hog farmer and taxidermist (Dermot Mulroney) becomes a hermit in the backwoods with his two sons. The younger boy (newcomer Devon Alan) eats dirt and suffers from epileptic seizures. The older boy (Jamie Bell, gifted star of the cherished Billy Elliot) is on the verge of juvenile delinquency. Into their isolated, unhappy lives comes Dad’s estranged brother (Josh Lucas), a jealous, resentful and mean-spirited convict who slashes Dad’s throat searching for a fortune in hidden gold coins. The older boy heads for the swamps with his fragile, pampered little brother in tow and the coins in his pocket, pursued by the psychotic uncle, and the movie focuses on their adventures on the way to survival.

The result is profound, beautifully photographed and a real Gothic page-turner in the William Faulkner tradition. Director and co-writer David Gordon Green does an admirable job of showing the disparity between four members of two different generations in the same dysfunctional family, while building gobs of menacing ambiance, and all of the actors are superb. Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Lucas have all but disfigured themselves in their apparent distaste for the handsome "leading man" labels they have often been assigned, but the real shock for me in Undertow is the gifted Jamie Bell, whose British accent has disappeared into a cotton-pickin’ drawl that is astoundingly accurate. He plays the first part of the movie as a confused player in a family civil war, a lanky, rural troublemaker caught up in violent circumstances beyond his control. In the second half, he is a man-boy coming of age fast, stuck between childhood duties and adult responsibilities, escaping a sadistic uncle and a dead-end future. What a talent. As a teenage rebel in bayou country with great reserves of strength, sensitivity and range, he is as far removed from the sensitive kid who wanted to be a ballet dancer in Billy Elliot as an alligator in Alaska.

The company Grant keeps is unexpected, including the Emperor and Empress of Japan. And what, we may ask, bowing before their ghostly royal presence, are they doing here? Well, we quickly find out in the splendid opening moments, in which the robed Emperor announces, "I am memory," and the bewildered Grant, slumped in his wheelchair, asks, "But who am I?"

Any drama that can start with such bold originality promises the world. But the last thing a serious dramatist should be content to be is screwball . Unless they're Kaufman and Hart (who aren't, of course, serious). Is Mr. Guare as content as he seems? His intellectual curiosity in A Few Stout Individuals -the title comes from Emerson's dictum that history is "no more than the biography of a few stout individuals"-is keen, but I'm afraid the outcome is slack and fuzzy. Too much screwball loses the plot. (So does too much plot.) In his scattershot way, Mr. Guare lurches lazily off into any showboating area that springs to mind, and our response swings with the ups and downs of the play.

The pageant of history in the making that the director Michael Greif keeps on the boil with his excellent cast is a pleasure. Mr. Guare's take on immortality is caught in the intriguing line "Can you be a former immortal?" But that startling thought veers chaotically off-course, and, for me, the dramatist's jazzy free-form riffs that spiraled effortlessly between reality and fantasy in his most appealing work have been replaced by a veneer of his style.

I say so reluctantly, for the dramatist of such earlier delights as The House of Blue Leaves has been struggling of late to recapture his best comic form. The wild swings of comedy and taste in his last outing, Chaucer in Rome (which had nothing to do with Chaucer), reached an absurdist low in superficiality with a sour message that appeared to claim that art poisons the artist (or vice versa). Not since the high pretensions of his Four Baboons Adoring the Sun had he written anything so wobbly.

A Few Stout Individuals is a giant step above those giant lapses. But then, only Mr. Guare would ask us to seriously consider the nature of myth and memory in Western civilization while being unable to resist the silliness of guest appearances by a salesman of magic hair tonic (read "charlatan"), a loony comic sculptor (read "faux artist") and Adelina Patti, the opera diva (read "celebrity").

The frantic spirit of the Marx Brothers is present, and welcome. But the targets are familiar-the vagaries of the publishing industry, exploitation, fame, greed, New York, New York. It's all dressed up as "ideas" (plus quotations from Shakespeare, no less, and dark sermons on the horrors of war). We must say that Mr. Guare's preening preoccupation with celebrity is becoming a tiresome form of name-dropping. Messages are repeated; dialogue goes blustery. "America is the ultimate democracy," goes one of the flagging aphorisms. "Anyone can end up in the gutter." Hmm. The irony, we assume, is a wee bit heavy-handed, the joke a tired one.

There are just too many misfires in Mr. Guare's lurching plot. Apart from the too-passive character of Ulysses S. Grant (given towering, befuddled dignity by Donald Moffat), the focus shifts to everyone surrounding him-his spoilt, adoring wife, his two wayward sons, his Anglophile daughter, his publisher Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), his scheming secretary and his story, his black valet and his story. And on. Throw in the phantom royal folks from Japan, the zany comic turns, the madcap family squabbles, and we are reminded of an unfortunate line of Mr. Clemens: "I like things to be funny, but this goes too far …. "

Mike Leigh Celebrates Ignorance

Mike Leigh, the British dramatist and filmmaker, has described his comedy Smelling a Rat as an "anti-farce." Anything is possible, and apparently he set out to write a farce that isn't funny. He succeeded.

He's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It's no secret that, as a general rule of thumb, farces are meant to be funny. But Mr. Leigh's aren't. Hence his "anti-farce." This is an anti-review.

You see the mood I'm in? Now, in all fairness, I must say the audience found Smelling a Rat pretty funny on the night I went. What can I say? They're not supposed to. Well, not according to Mr. Leigh.

Mr. Leigh suffers from some kind of strange British misery. It so happens he was born in the same town as me, and he was born miserable. You would be, too, if you were born in the north of England. I knew him when we were schoolboys, actually. He was a quiet, morose, middle-class lad who would say of the funniest things, "I don't get the joke." Or, "What's so funny?"

Since then, of course, the good Mike Leigh has gone on to become a major filmmaker ( Topsy-Turvy , Secrets & Lies ) but not, to my taste, a major dramatist ( Goose-Pimples , Ecstasy ). A while ago, we met each other after a hundred years and in his quiet, morose way he asked me what I was doing nowadays. I didn't have the courage to tell him I was a drama critic. I said I drove a truck, and although he looked suspicious, he said, "That's good."

As I was saying, anti-farces go against the grain in my book of Good Playwriting. Smelling a Rat is really an outer-farce. An exterminator named Rex Weasel-try not to be convulsed with laughter quite so soon-comes home to his horribly nouveau riche bedroom during the Christmas hols. Enter Vic Maggot, who's employed by the Weasel vermin-control company, accompanied by his wife, Charmaine, who's also a working-class idiot. Weasel, who's still supposed to be in Spain, hides in the closet.

Nothing much then happens. At length, the Maggots decide to hide in two other closets. This is because two more idiots have arrived-Rock Weasel, the surly son of Rex, and his hysterically inclined, sort of posh girlfriend, Melanie-Jane Beetles. (Weasels, Maggots and Beetles.) But nothing much happens next, either. Rock tries to seduce Melanie-Jane. The Maggots belatedly come out of the closet. Rex Weasel is still in the closet, but you may have forgotten about him by the time he comes out in a temper. He has a gun, but nothing happens with it.

Produced by the New Group at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, the ensemble, led by the veteran English actor Terence Rigby, is far superior to the sketch they're performing. And no more than an inconsequential little sketch it surely is. The 1988 Smelling a Rat is directed by Scott Elliott, who has staged Mr. Leigh's so-called working-class dramas before and, indeed, is responsible for his high reputation here. Mr. Leigh's well-known playwriting method is to write his plays via improvisations with his actors. But that's exactly what Smelling a Rat amounts to-a soft improv around a bizarre, weasely theme. I tend not to enjoy characters who invite us to laugh at their stupidity. The true farceur makes us laugh unknowingly. Mr. Leigh's patronizing anti-farce celebrates ignorance, whereas the authentic farce nails it. I guess, with Smelling a Rat, I just don't get the anti-joke.

Give a nice, well-educated lad like Martin Amis a whiff of the sewers, and he's in heaven. Give the average middle-class theatergoer a dose of the socialist dramas of Bertolt Brecht, and he couldn't be happier, either. Mother Courage reminds the privileged Englishman, apparently, of his nanny. Brecht is his fearsome prep school headmaster. Brecht gives British theatergoers cold showers and beatings and tells them to shape up.

Conscience doth make voyeurs of us all. The success of Mike Leigh's sordid Goose-Pimples -or "dazzlingly sordid," depending on your point of view-is a case in point. The renowned film director and auteur is a morose misery whose social conscience strikes me as patronizing. His critically acclaimed Goose-Pimples , well produced by the New Group at the Judith Anderson Theater (it transfers to the Intar Theater on Jan. 23), amounts to a pretty disgusting display of some of humanity's more loathsome characteristics. But the solidly middle-class Mr. Leigh is within the voyeuristic tradition that righteously condescends to its own working class-and all in the name of conscience and comedy!

Jez Butterworth's Mametian celebration of brutality and foulness, Mojo , is another successful example of the genre. The production of the heralded British play by the Atlantic Theater Company must end its extended run in Chelsea on Jan. 17, but a commercial run is very unlikely. Mojo is a comedy in the sense that Jacobean blood baths are amusing. The subject of the award-winning drama by the 28-year-old Cambridge-educated Mr. Butterworth is the amoral low life of London's Soho in the late 50's.

Its squalid underworld brutality and menace have been compared-almost inevitably-to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction . If so, Mojo is showboating style over slender, trendy content. But for long stretches I couldn't actually understand what was going on. I couldn't understand the language . I can speak working-class Cockney. But whereas everyone else in the audience could understand it-judging by their happy response-the loud, garbled Cockney of the Soho spivs and dim-witted psychotics on stage left me as nonplused as Mike Leigh's non-English-speaking Saudi in Goose-Pimples .

The common language that divides only me, it seems, reminded me of the time Ian McKellen was virtually incomprehensible as Richard III. His strangulated upper-class accent made it difficult to understand him at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House, which swallows sound, anyway. "Can you understand what's going on?" I asked a group of New Yorkers at intermission. "Not a word!" came the sunny response. They were good sports and recommended supertitles, as at Italian opera. But at the curtain, they were all on their feet, cheering wildly. "Bravo! Bravo! Best Shakespeare I ever saw!"

Mojo made theater history in England. It was the first play by a first-time writer to have its premiere on the main stage of the Royal Court Theater since John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956. It is, therefore, presumed to be as revolutionary as the Osborne-though the angry, blistering voice of Look Back was wholly new, and Mr. Butterworth's voice isn't. His influences clearly echo Harold Pinter (there's the same obscurantism) and David Mamet. There's the same explosively heightened Mametspeak, the same attraction to inarticulate losers of the underworld, with a dash of sexual abuse thrown in.

David Mamet is a founder of the Atlantic Theater Company- Mojo' s New York producers-so the admiration is mutual. But whereas the con men of Mr. Mamet's earlier plays can be seen as an emblem of America gone wrong, Mr. Butterworth has built a house of stupid nutters signifying little or nothing. Mojo is like a cartoon, a weird game for its own weird sake, and maniacally performed. I didn't believe a second of it, including the severed heads.

Idiocy, greed, racism and throwing up are on uncompromising display in Mike Leigh's Goose-Pimples . The 1981 play is what used to be called "a slice of life." Life-or reality-is the last thing I want to see on stage. After all, we get quite enough of that sort of thing at home. But Mr. Leigh is asking us: "Don't you care ?" If, then, you don't see the comedy in his condescension-proceed to jail.

Goose-Pimples is an unfocused one-joke play about pathetic London suburbanites, miscommunication and a confused Arab. It would make an O.K. sketch, but Mr. Leigh has spun it out shakily into a portentous statement about racist England within the theatrical tradition of a drawing room farce. The room here is deliberately tacky, a hideous monument to black and gold in the age of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" It made a promising start.

A small-time Saudi businessman-named Muhammad, naturally-mistakes a young, thick croupier, Jackie, for a hooker. (Caroline Seymour is terrific as Jackie, a dreamer.) She takes him home thinking he's an oil sheik. Muhammad-an Arab stereotype who's played with wonderfully discreet comic befuddlement by Adam Alexi-Malle-doesn't speak a word of English and thinks the flat is a brothel. The flat is owned by Vernon, a loudmouthed car salesman who's having a fling with malevolent, flighty Frankie, the wife of his pal and fellow car dealer, an ignoramus named Irving.

What a bunch! The English are portrayed exaggeratedly as deeply unpleasant, drunk and mindless bigots. (Poor Muhammad, he just wants to get laid.) England has been known to be racist, but these people are as cartoonish as Mojo' s lowlifes. You don't have to like the characters, of course. (How likable is Medea?) But why spend time in their absurd company?

Goose-Pimples exalts in ignorance and nastiness. It treads clumsily between condemning racism and exploiting it. It goes sneeringly for cheap laughs. (It gets them.) You sense the moves as they're happening. (Muhammad will be humiliated.) Are we laughing at these goons, or with them?

What's fatally missing from Goose-Pimples is the brilliant dark comedy and voice of the late Joe Orton. There was nothing he couldn't have us in stitches of laughter about, particularly British hypocrisy. But Mr. Leigh is no Orton. Nor does he believe in working with playwrights. He famously improvises with his actors around a theme and edits the outcome himself. He believes the result is more authentically real that way. But at best what is revealed is an authentic actor's improvisation. And at worst, the ending to this play. Goose-Pimples closes with the prolonged, irritating sound of Muhammad snoring. It must have been a fun improv in the rehearsal room, but it's too close for comfort here.