24th Street Theatre

Sophie Treadwell loosely based her 1928 expressionistic play "Machinal" on convicted murderer Ruth Snyder. In the Nomad Theatre Company's lukewarm revival at the 24th Street Theatre, an uninspired Melody Mooney takes Snyder's role. A young woman (Mooney) marries her boss, a much older man (Chris Mock), because she must provide financial stability for her nagging mother (Elizabeth Ince).

Adam Rapp's darkly funny "Ghosts in the Cottonwoods," at the 24th Street Theatre, ludicrously layers bad luck and hick humor, as the actors earnestly portray their characters' emotional and physical squalor on Juliana von Haubrich's atmospheric rustic shack set. As the audience enters the dimly lit, smoky theater, Pointer Scully (Jeremy Maxwell) stands naked on the rough boards of a ramshackle house.

First produced in 1932, "The Great Magoo," a vintage potboiler by Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, now at the 24th Street Theatre, is a Damon Runyon wannabe that would have been better off gathering dust in the archives. The action opens in Coney Island at the height of the Great Depression. Nicky (Jay Karnes), a womanizing barker and songwriter, has fallen hard for hoochie-coochie dancer Julie (Julia Campbell), an ambitious entertainer whose sights are set on the Great White Way.

For a less conventional version of the "Hamlet" story--a downright kooky one, in fact--look no further than "Mad Boy Chronicle" at 24th Street Theatre. In the U.S. premiere of Canadian playwright Michael O'Brien's perplexing parody, Shakespeare's tragedy has been transposed to a fanciful Helsingor in the Viking era (circa AD 999), as Christian missionaries begin their first penetration into barbarian Denmark.

It's 1934 and Albert Einstein, having fled Nazi Germany, has arrived in New Jersey but has yet to appear at a scheduled news conference. His harried private secretary, trying to placate restless reporters, begins fielding questions about the iconic physicist's life and work. What follows, in Kres Mersky's one-woman play, "The Life and Times of A. Einstein," is a seriocomic portrait of a man of "great intellectual courage" and of the woman who devoted most of her life to him.

Worn red bricks, wire mesh, the dust of indifference and the grit of common cruelty are the foundations of a London housing project in the powerful "The Neighbour" at 24th Street Theatre. The Tuesday Laboratory's presentation of Meredith Oakes' drama has a hard-edged elegance as it explores the horrors of unneighborly neighbors. "When someone finds fault with me, it interrupts my inner life," James (Miles Eastman) opines--and his inner life is constantly interrupted.

The Glorious Repertory Company's production of "Poe: Out of his Mind" at the 24th Street Theatre is a captivating introduction to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, particularly for children ages 10 and up. Yet ardent Poe enthusiasts may feel that too much of the grandiosity and eloquence of Poe's language has been jettisoned, perhaps in an attempt to accommodate the younger audiences.

When it comes to stage shows, why are some things sung, not spoken? 24th Street Theatre investigates that question in its 10th annual Saturday Explorer Series, a festival of quirky family works.

Warning: "Kate Crackernuts" may give you a buzz. I don't mean the Ecstasy high of its club-kid chorus, but something closer to an actual buzzing in your ears -- from John Zalewski's thumping, trickling sound design to the strange, dense, brilliant wordplay of writer Sheila Callaghan. There's an equally high risk of visual and spatial intoxication.

In "Roma al final de la via" (Rome at the End of the Line) by the Tijuana playwright Daniel Serrano, two 7-year-old girls in a Mexican village decide to run away to Rome. Having neither ticket money nor an understanding of geography, they wait together at the railroad tracks to jump the next train. Unlike Godot - the theatrical specter that hovers over these lifelong friends' sweetly, bleakly existential story - the train does come, rendered in all of its thrill and terror by lighting and sound in a spare, expressionist production originated by Mexico's Viaje Redondo Producciones and performed at the 24th Street Theatre as the play's U.S. premiere.