QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey MATE IN TWO MOVES

Kirsten Knisely’s clever SOUL MATES or UNDER THE APPLE TREE (@ BCA through March 22^nd) unfolds in a series of nine vignettes (of two characters each) which explore human relationships in various stages of connection.

Early on we meet two giddy teenage girls (Angela Keefe and Laura Menzie) who wonder if “boys will ever stop being jerks” and if the two friends will ever find their soul mates. It’s a delightful scene, made even more delicious by director Caroline L. Price’s sound design and her hilarious choreography, which includes stage manager Samantha MacArthur behind the console, grooving out in her seat to the rock ‘n roll. The smart Boston Actors Theater production enhances Knisely’s script (and ups the comic ante by having MacArthur take part in another scene as well).

As the performance moved pleasantly along through almost half the vignettes, I thought to myself what an amusing little play…and what a versatile foursome to portray all the entertaining, interlinking characters. Then Knisely got serious. One of the men (Joseph Kidawski) from a lighthearted previous scene (involving a shootout with plastic “nerf” guns) comes out to his parents and to his immense disappointment, they’re not happy about the news. Luckily, he has his brother (Brett Milanowski) in his corner. Then Kidawski breaks our hearts again in the next scene (with Menzie) as a young man headed off to Viet Nam. All of a sudden the play acquired considerable weight.

The only vignette which seemed out of place to me (in time and theme) was the last (which bookended the enigmatic first), a scene right out of HOBSON’S CHOICE where the daughter of a wealthy tycoon decides on her own to marry a man in her father’s employ. This fait accompli comes as quite a surprise to both the man and her father. Fortunately Boston Actors Theater has Keefe and Malinowski to pull it off. The BAT’s fine ensemble work is what makes SOUL MATES a cut above.

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey WHOLE AGAIN

 If you haven’t been to a Hovey Players production, now is the time. Director Michelle Aguillon and company are giving RABBIT HOLE (through March 29^th) the best production of it I’ve seen yet. (Yes, it’s even better than the Huntington’s.) David Lindsay-Abaire’s hip, smart, surprisingly gentle play about grief over the death of a child lovingly nudges its characters toward acceptance. The journey for them is divisive, painful and often sardonically funny (especially when the pushy grandmother arrives). For us, it’s endearing, amusing and finally, uplifting.

Lindsay-Abaire invents outlandish characters like the child’s aunt (Brooke Casanova), whose out-of-control life, she thinks, will magically come together if she gets pregnant. It’s her sister (Katie Gluck) whose son has died. She’s fallen into a deep depression which only lifts when she makes an unusual, unexpected human connection. Her exasperated husband (Alex Thayer) is ready to give up on her when she doesn’t seem to want help, from him or anyone. (The playwright miraculously keeps the subject matter miles away from TV “movie of the week” territory.)

Aguillon’s cast is extraordinary, deftly mining the humor in the piece without sacrificing the pathos. Maureen Adduci, as the acerbic grandmother, tries her daughter’s patience but never comes across as unfeeling. Jordan DiGloria is the optimistic student who believes in parallel universes and worm holes but never seems anything but genuine. Best of all, the company manages a Zen finish for the play by slowing down time itself so that we can savor the lovely, emotional, redemptive ending.

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

Playwright Ann Marie Healy tweaks Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (where banned books are burned) with her WHAT ONCE WE FELT (playing through March 22^nd at the Davis Square Theatre). In Healy’s nightmarish utopia A) There are no men (We could debate whether that’s a loss!) and B) Books are on the way out, being replaced by digitized versions which “crunch the themes” and “do away with interpretation.”

When Healy goes for the jugular (designer babies for the “haves,” no medical care for the “have-nots”), the play kills. When she stabs at the capillaries (new age food and TV talk shows), it loses focus. The good news is that Flat Earth’s production, under the sharp eye of Lindsay Eagle, grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Eagle directs from every angle, cleverly foreshadowing events (a sick have-not lingers near the audience through the first scene) and she wrings extra laughs from Healy’s sardonic script.

The production values are sky high, with a gallery worthy, handmade multi-screen installation of books as a backdrop, which change the scenery with the flip of a page. (Crisp artwork by Allison Olivia Choat; ingenious dowel machinery by Leigh Downes) When the play finishes its run, it ought to go into someone’s art collection.

Endangered books are the central metaphor in Healy’s play: No books, no freedom. Her central character (Colleen Moore) the narrator of the play, is in fact a character in “the last published print novel”….and she’s a have not. The author of that book (Kelly Chick) is at the mercy of a manic publisher (Emily Kaye Lazzaro), not to mention a wildly flamboyant agent (Mary Ferrara) and a scheming line editor (Meredith Saran). She doesn’t stand a chance.

A subplot about ordering up or rather “downloading” a baby has Kamela Dolinova and Nicole Dunn contemplating parenthood and having to deal with the unpleasant consequences of a glitch in the system. Alissa Cordeiro is Healy’s tragic anti-hero, who knits like Mme. Defarge, watching her mother suffer. Healy wants us to think ‘revolution’ from the start, way before “the resistance” is mentioned by Saran. I found the dense story convoluted at times but the crackerjack ensemble is the reason WHAT ONCE WE FELT succeeds.

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey KISS THE SKY

Snatches of memory, shards of moments which inform consciousness: Ellen McLaughlin’s ethereal TONGUE OF A BIRD is an impressionistic painting transformed into a play. The first of three in New Rep’s “NEXT REP” series, TONGUE OF A BIRD (running through March 30^th) mixes poetic images with a search (actually many searches) for a child.

A young woman stands at the base of a gleaming mountain face. She remembers looking down from a high window as a child. She thinks something was lost but she can’t find the memory. She’s drawn to the sky, she tells us. She pilots a Cessna now but when she was a girl she could fly up over her body and look down on herself, a “trick [she] learned early,” one of the many wonders we can create as children which are lost to us as adults.

With TONGUE OF A BIRD, McLaughlin taps into a universal female consciousness. (My male friends who saw the same play at the same time tell me they had trouble relating to the imagery so I shall assume it’s more easily accessed by women.) The young woman’s grandmother tells her flight is in her blood. Her great grandmother and her mother’s mother could fly away like birds to protect themselves (which made me think of the African-American spiritual, “I’ll Fly Away”). Surprisingly, miraculously, McLaughlin is able to stir primal perceptions in the listener.

A narrative slowly emerges from beneath and around the elaborate allusions and by the end of the play you’ve pieced together a story but the journey is what matters in TONGUE OF A BIRD, not the destination. The mythic language, the fierce sensibilities in McLaughlin’s writing make the characters soar.

Director Emily Ranii has an inspired cast to embody all the metaphors in TONGUE: Elizabeth Anne Rimar is the driven adventuress, endlessly searching the skies for a lost child who may or may not be the impetuous little girl Claudia Q. Nolan impersonates. Bobbie Steinbach is the strong, immigrant grandmother whose heart was broken and had to “throw away her daughter piece by piece”… who warns us of an unfeeling world that “forgets [its] children.”

Ilyse Robbins is the desperate mother who hires Rimar’s plane to search the snow for her lost daughter. Olivia D’Ambrosio is another mother who, too, sacrificed in her way, for hers. There is so much to absorb in the play, so much which reverberates, resonates, that I suspect you’d find more layers in a second visit. There’s lovely dialogue about the everyday joys children don’t remember when they grow up that I would like to hear again. (I can’t quite recall it now that a whole day has gone by, such are the cruelties of memory.)

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey WHALE SOUNDS

Large metaphors float aimlessly through Samuel D. Hunter’s THE WHALE (@ SpeakEasy Stage through April 5^th). Some, like Captain Ahab’s obsession with Melville’s leviathan, seem plausible when you have a six hundred pound man obsessed with death center stage. Some, like Jonah’s escape from the whale (the playwright’s long awaited “revelation”) don’t fit so easily. Metaphors aside, THE WHALE is a strangely voyeuristic story of a man who cannot revise his life, a man bent on dying.

Charlie (John Kuntz, like Jonah trapped inside a whale of a costume) wants to reconcile with his daughter before he dies. She’s an angry, destructive teenager who hates her father for abandoning her and her mother when he realized he was gay. The playwright inexplicably assigns Charlie’s lover a polar opposite dysfunction: He starved himself to death. To answer why he embarked on that path, Hunter introduces a young Mormon who knocks on Charlie’s door purely by chance.

Ryan O’Connor is delightful as the nineteen year old missionary (“I’m not a kid!”) who tries to help. O’Connor and Josephine Elwood as the spiteful daughter have one of the best, and funniest, scenes in the play when she willfully undermines his piety.

Hunter creates quirky characters like Charlie’s nurse-friend who seems as if she wants to help: She finds him a wheelchair, encourages him to go to the hospital, then incongruously, feeds him endless meatball subs with extra cheese! Georgia Lyman is a plus as Charlie’s mouthy, pushy link to any outside medical care.

Happily, Hunter creates a character to provide Charlie an exquisite moment of pure affection. We see Maureen Keiller as his ex-wife slowly realize what is happening to him and years of rancor subside. The distance between them melts and it’s then we truly see Charlie as he was when he was a fully functioning being.

Director David R. Gammons’ well paced production is immeasurably enhanced by David Remedios’ rapturous sound design. We hear the glug-glug of water sloshing through pipes (mimicking intestinal gurgle), we hear oceans lapping the shore, we hear slow, labored breathing and we hear the haunting whale songs which Roger Payne first discovered and recorded over fifty years ago. Their elegant music lifts Hunter’s play out of its banality.

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey DANCING WITH DEATH

Hats off to Argos Productions for not only shining a bright light on new plays but for staging the heck out of them. David Valdes Greenwood’s BULLY DANCE (playing through March 22^nd at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre) is getting a top quality production, directed by Sarah Gazdowicz.

Chris Larson’s sound design and Sam Beebe’s original music play a pivotal role in creating the haunting, atmospheric setting for Valdes Greenwood’s expressionistic play. Central to BULLY DANCE is a lonely, internet fueled teenaged gunman who embarks on a “mission” of revenge—but the play is truly about the reverberations of his actions.

Why, you might ask, do we need another play about teenagers bent on violence when it’s on the television and news every day? Valdes Greenwood’s play has a unique perspective: He asks us not to judge a book by its cover, or even by one chapter. He asks his characters to heal. He writes from experience.

His play is anchored by a narrator (Juliet Bowler) who brings all the characters together (for our benefit and maybe for theirs) with a nifty dramatic device. Valdes Greenwood invents a form which isn’t exactly magical realism and isn’t exactly naturalistic, either, although it feels all too real. The women in the story who have lost a loved one wail and keen in voices which blend symphonically. As they grieve in harmonic screams, you begin to think this must be the universal, undulating sound of suffering.

Impassioned performances inform director Gazdowicz’ production: Charlotte Kinder as the younger widow gives full vent to her anger. Lida McGirr as the older, wiser widow lets us see the depths of her distress. Veronica Anastasio Wiseman as the killer’s mother suffers the pain of Greek tragedy, her body seeming to slump under her torturous burden. Bowler, as narrator, is a modern earth mother.

You don’t get to know the killer in most plays about serial murder but Valdes Greenwood gives us the chance. Christopher Nourse as the disturbed teenager is able to make us laugh, believe it or not and Valdes Greenwood gives the character the ability to look back on the destruction he’s caused and reflect. All the other males (police, victims etc.) are played by Adam Lauver, who morphs easily into each role.

The more violence in the world, it seems the more plays about it. This past year I’ve seen three others about teenage mass murderers. Too many for me.

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey SOMETHING’S A HIT

Something’s up at the Stoneham Theatre. It’s the “delicious…capricious… suspicious” murder mystery musical, SOMETHING’S AFOOT (playing through March 23^rd). The creators (James McDonald, David Vos and Robert Gerlach with additional music from Ed Linderman) manage to spoof two genres with one fell swoop: They send up traditional musical theater while they “steal” every juicy character Agatha Christie ever invented.

SOMETHING’S AFOOT is loosely based on AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, with snatches of movie perils tucked in: The bridge is out. The generator is blown. Poison has been planted. A will is missing. An inheritance is at stake. You name the cliché and you’ll find it lurking in plain sight! As Miss Tweed (the sensational Margaret Ann Brady) ever so efficiently recounts her favorite motives, there’s always “revenge, passion, lust and greed.”

The tongue-in-cheek songs are delightfully awful or are they awfully delightful? Both. You’ll hear clever musical references and Ceit Zweil’s spot on choreography matches their intent to the letter (or note, as the case may be). The overblown dancing is, in fact, a joy.

Director Caitlin Lowans’ cast of misfit suspects had me giggling non-stop: Brady, as the no nonsense Miss Marplesque cheerleader (“Remember, We’re British: Stiff upper lip!”) gamely dispatches the corpses without so much as a “by your leave.” Off stage they go. Then there’s the cheeky caretaker (John Davin in top form pinching all the ladies), Nick Sulfaro as the hapless butler, Russell Garrett as the dashing doctor, Mark Linehan as the devious nephew (whose tango with himself, one leg involved in another dance altogether, is a sight to behold) and J.T. Turner as the blustery colonel.

Kathy St. George may not be who she says she is and Andrew Oberstein may or may not be a student. He and Stephanie Granade may or may not be meant for each other but they’re certainly charming together. Zweil as the not so loyal maid and Davin have a hilarious escape number together, turning the corniest of vaudeville songs into gold. No one is safe: Even the pianist (Bethany Aiken) is at risk in Stoneham’s comic triumph. Don’t miss it.