F. Murray Abram as Shylock.

Director Darko Tresnjak does Shakespeare one huge favor in his brilliantly-updated production of The Merchant Venice (at ArtsEmerson through this weekend in a production from Theatre for a New Audience):

He doesn't let us pretend that times have changed.

That may not sound like much, but it has become a mantra in the academy (and in the politically-correct press) that the prejudices portrayed in Merchant of Venice are somehow a thing of the past.  We know better now, our professors tell us - we're teaching you better.

Ah, if only.

Because whatever the virtual Freedom Riders of the millennium may tell you, it is one thing to parrot what you learned in school, and create enlightenment zones where sensitivities can never be imperiled.  But it's another thing entirely to forge actual art from human society, which always and everywhere has fed on (and built its entertainment on) stereotypes both good and evil.

Now there's no doubt The Merchant of Venice traffics in evil stereotypes; its putative heroes and heroines call Jews "dogs," don't blanche at roughing them up or even spitting on them, and of course force Shylock, the play's totemic Jewish moneylender, to convert to Christianity; what's more, after this act of spiritual destruction, the happy heroes congratulate themselves on a day's work well done, and retire to a country house for a witty scene of love-badinage.  That is when they're not tossing the occasional slur in the general direction of black or gay people.

Horrible, right?  Right.  That Shakespeare must have been a very bad man.

Well - maybe, but maybe not.  For an entirely different cultural script has slowly unfurled over the centuries regarding The Merchant of Venice, one that casts the murderous Shylock not as villain but as hero. For as later interpreters have scanned the text, they've found enough sympathetic detail crammed into Shylock's scenes (and enough ironic subtext to the rest) to convince many that Shylock, as one academic would have it, is Shakespeare's first sketch of King Lear.

This should come as no surprise to readers of the Hub Review, where I have often explained that part of what makes Shakespeare so great is that his major plays almost always incorporate their own antithesis; they deconstruct themselves before our eyes (and hundreds of years before any professor did, or could). Why is this so? Well, part of the explanation probably lies in Shakespeare's strangely elusive identity; was he gay? Was he Catholic? Married yet living as a bachelor, accumulating wealth like a bourgeois yet carrying on like a bohemian, Shakespeare sustained an identity divided in almost every way it's possible to be divided; perhaps as a result, he operates as both insider and outsider in every dramatic situation he created for the stage.

Then there's the fact, rarely mentioned by the professors, that Shakespeare was his own best critic. Or rather the most insightful critic imaginable of his own cultural material. This is a point that's often missed in the common joke that Shakespeare "stole" his plots - he did (or at least most of them), although he transformed them into new forms which in every case completely replaced the original. More importantly, part of that transformation (of necessity) took the form of critique. Indeed, it's not too much to say that the vast majority of Shakespearean exegesis is merely a restatement of the Bard's own criticism, which he buried in his texts.

That burial was particularly deep in The Merchant of Venice, it's true, for we have little evidence that in its day it was received as anything but a popular comedy, with an evil villain who is unexpectedly defeated at the last minute.  It was only slowly, over a period of centuries, that society caught on to the devastating double image of itself that Shakespeare had coded into his comedy.  Indeed, by the time the superficially "Christian" content of Merchant had reached its murderous apotheosis in the "Final Solution," the play had already become a touchstone of a new tradition of anti-anti-Semitism.  Shakespeare's doubled identity had played out in history in much the same way it had, or would, in the cases of racism and sexism - where the Bard likewise seems to dabble in bigoted tropes on the surface of his work, while planting the cultural seeds to undo those injustices over the long term.

Still, the ant-Semitic surface of Merchant does shock modern sensibilities (and rightly so), and Tresnjak even ups the ante on a few of the play's cruel gambits (in one scene, Shylock is literally kicked to the ground).  But what's truly brilliant about his production is the way he insinuates ancient bigotries into an up-to-the-minute evocation of New York's financial elite; his Shylock all but lives his life beneath Wall Street's Big Board, while Antonio chums around with crass brokerage cowboys, and Portia's treasure chests are now Apple Powerbooks (and her suitors are Saudi princes).  In a way some of the Wall Street detail contradicts, frankly, the lines of Shakespeare's text (his Christians would never hedge or buy on margin), but it does no violence, actually, to one of the play's great themes: the co-existence of smug piety with the crudest hypocrisy.   Thus in this Merchant, Antonio's old Harvard looks disguise a deeply racist WASP hauteur, and Portia is no demure sibyl but rather a privileged Connecticut heiress with a judgmental attitude.  There's even a Chris-Rock-like comic (Jacob Ming-Trent) on hand, seemingly fresh from a Fox sitcom, to remind us of the racial cast of our own popular comedy (shades of The Shipment!).  In short, in transferring the mores of cosmopolitan Venice to cosmopolitan New York, this Merchant doesn't hold the mirror up to nature so much as hold the mirror up to us.

Portia as party girl.

And as long as Tresnjak can coast on this clever mise-en-scène, his Merchant grips us.  But it becomes clear as the play progresses that the director hasn't thought nearly as carefully about the central theme of Shakespeare's plot, which is not so much about the problem of prejudice but rather about the vexingly slippery relationship between love and money. And alas, at the same time we begin to realize that the actual performances moving through this brilliantly realized world are not as persuasive as their setting. Tresnjak's Bassanio and Antonio have little chemistry, for instance (and a last-minute smooch does little to alleviate that problem) - but then his Bassanio and Portia don't have much more, come to think of it.

And F. Murray Abraham's celebrated Shylock may be clearly (if softly) spoken, but it's also encased in a controlled urbanity that Abraham only rarely dares to break.  This may be interesting as concept (who else has tried it?), but it flattens out Shylock's profile, and seriously undermines the rising power of the celebrated courtroom scene.  Abraham's one moment of brilliance is his pin-pointing of the precise moment that Shylock cracks - when he learns that his daughter, who has abandoned him for a Christian, has sold his engagement ring for a monkey.  This moment  beautifully parallels the Christian Bassanio's indifference to his own wedding ring - and the irony is shattering.

Launcelot as Fox comic.

I wish I could think of a single high point in  Kate MacCluggage's power-girl Portia, however - Ms. McCluggage is clearly an actress of presence and ability, but in her confident coldness she's completely miscast, and is generally upstaged by Christen Simon Marabate as her maid, Nerissa. (And without a convincing Portia - whose very name cues you in to the fact that she is concerned with the meaning of justice - the deeper questions of the play simply go missing.) As Bassanio, Lucas Hall, is a bit more sympathetic, but is likewise often a cypher (and actually more melancholic than Antonio); it's as if the director dreamt up the perfect fleet of updated accoutrements to bridge the centuries, but couldn't figure out a similar fleet of characters to deploy them. As a result, this Merchant began to lurch, rather than flow, from point to point as Tresnjak tried to cover Shakespeare's many contradictory bases.  No wonder Melissa Miller's Jessica so often looked confused!

To be fair, there's better (sometimes far better) work around the edges of the production.  Mr. Ming-Trent was, indeed, hilarious as Lancelot Gobbo (above right), and Grant Goodman and Mattheew Schneck did small, cocky miracles with the throw-away roles of Solanio and Salerio.  Raphael Nash Thompson and Christopher Randolph likewise got their laughs as the Princes of Morocco and Aragon, respectively (which is not so easy to do), and Andrew Dahl made a surprisingly effective cameo out of the servant Balthasar.  You left this Merchant of Venice feeling that the "problem" of this play had in a way been solved - but that many of its themes had somehow been lost in the process.

Not quite a meeting of the minds.

Like a lot of people, I'd always thought of Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett as kindred spirits. Both always seemed committed to a monkish spareness, and a determination to burn away distractions, to burrow down to the essentials of things.   Brook spurned more and more of the trappings of theatre as he aged, and Beckett's plays dwindled into "dramaticules" so concentrated that sometimes he seemed to be poised at the very edge of being, scraping at the basis of consciousness. But surprisingly enough, Fragments, Brook's whimsical treatment of various Beckett "shorts" and "roughs" at ArtsEmerson through April 3, somehow leaves you pondering the differences between these two giants rather than their similarities. For note that adjective "whimsical" - yes, I meant it, and it's not a word that's usually attached to Beckett. Not that the great Irish playwright isn't funny - in fact, he's hilarious. But is he whimsical?

Well, sometimes Brook, and co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne, almost convince you he is; and the lightness the director brings to opaque scraps of script like Neither isn't entirely unwelcome.  There's nothing worse than Beckett when it congeals into doom-ridden pretentiousness, that's for sure.  And Brook's spritzes of zen bemusement keep the production far from the dark, very still waters where so many productions drown.

Still, as you watch Fragments, you keep feeling that Brook doesn't really "get" Beckett, or rather that he keeps trying to tease the great playwright into his own modes of Grotowski-in-Asia stylization.  But Beckett's simply got more grit in his soul than Brook seems to realize; and what's more, Beckett is deeply religious, even though apparently an atheist - as one wag put it, Beckett's universe may be a godless one, but the god it's missing is Christian.  Meanwhile Brook kind of floats in the penumbrae cast by Buddhism and Hinduism (or something like that; did I mention Sufism? Zoroastrianism?).

So the tone is a bit odd, and then there's the problem of the changes Brook makes in Beckett's stage directions, even the very explicit, don't-change-this-under-any-circumstances stage directions.  Now I'm not one to cling to Beckett's prescriptions as holy writ - still, whenever a director asks me about this question, I always reply with the following: "Now remember Beckett was a genius - so ask yourself, am I a genius?"  I say this because time after time, when I see a Beckett production that hews closely to his instructions, I find it superior to one that was "experimental."  Now sure, maybe Brook is a genius, too - maybe - but still, Samuel Beckett had a phenomenally acute understanding of how his work would best be realized onstage.  You tinker with his instructions at your peril.

In Fragments, the greatest damage is done to Rockaby, the haunting late-career solo piece in which a lonely woman retreats completely from a seemingly-empty world into the rocking arms of death itself (in French, the original language of most of Beckett's work, the title of the play is Berceuse).  In their production, Brook and Estienne abandon almost all of Beckett's suggestions about props and costume; the weirdly glamorous funeral gown, the pre-recorded vocals (the actress onstage should only chime in occasionally), the chair that rocks itself - all this is gone, as are even the subtle divisions of the woman's descent from consciousness into, well, "apparent" death, as the playwright puts it.  (Does anyone ever really and truly die in Beckett?)

The results were, inevitably, thinner than they should have been - indeed, whole swaths of theme were just missing, and while actress Hayley Carmichael did her best with the text, she simply couldn't conjure its full, echoing dimensions.  Which is too bad, because as Rockaby is the greatest of the scripts on offer in Fragments, its failure counted for a lot. And there were other odd deviations from Beckett's directions that undermined the other, slighter pieces: in Act Without Words II, for instance, I believe Beckett even spells out that the seemingly divine prod that pokes his Didi- and Gogo-like protagonists must come from the wings (on ever more sets of wheels), rather than down from the flies - yet Brook brings it down from the flies anyway, which partly spoils the piece's central joke (that God is just as rickety, and just as determined, as we are).

Still, there were many moments in which Beckett's voice came through, in "fragments," as it were - and it's a voice that's always worth hearing (I personally place Beckett right after Chekhov in the pantheon). Actors Bruce Myers and Yoshi Oïda brought a withered comedy and calm pathos to Rough for Theatre I, which is a kind of variant on the themes (and characters) of Godot and Endgame (although neither actor had quite the level of desperate decline needed to conjure Didi on his way to Hamm, or Gogo on his way to Clov). Brook's methods seemed best suited to the wry vaudeville Act Without Words II, which played (as it should) as a Beckett's idea of a silent Buster Keaton movie. Best of all was Come and Go, which Brook staged explicitly as a light drag burlesque. I have to say that even here, the more exquisite qualities of Beckett's conception (its geometric perfection and eerie sense of timelessness) went missing; but at least the piece worked as comedy, and as a charming introduction to the playwright, as intended. I just thought that Peter Brook would intend more.

The cruel truths of Martin McDonagh

Tadhg Murphy ponders his fate as Cripple Billy.

Martin McDonagh, I think, will always be known as the very good playwright who was never quite a great playwright. And the reason is clear: his vision is compromised by his personality. McDonagh's great theme is sadism. But he also seems to be a sadist.  And that tends, you know, to compromise his perspective on his material.

Which is too bad, because he's certainly clever and funny as hell (if hell is made of ice rather than fire). And certainly The Cripple of Inishmaan - now at ArtsEmerson's Paramount through Sunday - shows off both McDonagh's misanthropic wit and his ability to build metaphor through the barest of means. What's more, Cripple even glints here and there with daubs of conventional sentiment; not everyone in it is a terrorist, for instance, or gleefully torments the helpless.

Of course some of them do; but then this is practically the sine qua non of the McDonagh manner, which is most notable for the importation of the kind of scenes we'd expect to find in the bondage cellars of Quentin Tarantino's skeezy L.A. onto the windswept shores of Ireland. Not that McDonagh is himself Irish; he's English - but born of Irish parents; thus, perhaps, the icy, child-like dissection of Gaelic mores that serves as the backbone of almost all his plays (unsurprisingly, he has never set a single script in his hometown - London - or among his own social set; all his work is a projected teen fantasy of resentment).

As for the Tarantino part - well, McDonagh has all but admitted he was pretty aimless until he saw his first Tarantino films in the mid-90's. Sensing a kindred spirit in the lantern-jawed torture-porn auteur, and grasping that movies like Pulp Fiction had opened up a cultural space in which the spoiled jadedness of Gen-X could slide into "ironic" cruelty, McDonagh promptly sat down and penned virtually his entire ouevre in a matter of months.  And his haughty sense of craft - at least when it comes to dialogue and shorter scenes, if not larger structures - soon made him a star in a field hungry for any author with old-time dramatic flair, however coldly rendered. (It didn't hurt that McDonagh's plays were a frank imitation of the coolest trend in movies, either.)

The Cripple of Inishmaan has some pride of place in this achievement - it's not as vicious as The Beauty Queen of Lenane, not as pretentious as The Pillowman, and not as brutally empty as The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It may represent the playwright's peak, in fact, and is chiefly interesting for the way it see-saws between two emotional and moral abodes - the author's usual charnel house/abbatoir, and some place more humane, at times even cozy.  Its central character, Cripple Billy (Tadhg Murphy, above left), whose parents died under mysterious circumstances when he was a babe, has been brought up by two eccentric "aunts" (Ingrid Craigie and Dearbhla Molloy) who run a run-down grocery on Ireland's western coast that seems to sell only eggs and peas.  Poor Billy is afflicted in many ways - not only must he bear up under twisted limbs, crossed eyes, and a speech impediment, but he's also in love with the beautiful, cruel Slippy Helen (Claire Dunne), and so bored he sometimes finds himself staring at cows (then again, one of his aunties talks to rocks).

When a Hollywood crew arrives on a nearby island to film Man of Aran, Billy sees a possible way out of his torment - and even bends the truth a bit to get a shot at a screen test.   Which feeds into McDonagh's second major concern - the way in which the moral standing of the world shifts with the stories we tell (and believe) about it.  His characters speak to one another with the hard-hearted innocence of children, and yet still the actual "truth" about the world remains strikingly unstable.  We hear several versions, for instance, of how Billy's parents perished - and depending on which one we put our faith in, they seem either heroes or horrors.  Likewise McDonagh teases us with the possibility that much, or perhaps all, of Billy's escape to L.A. is a fiction; has he found fame and fortune playing inspiring cripples in Hollywood, or is he instead dying somewhere of tuberculosis (as the "wheeze" of his early scenes suggests)?  Meanwhile trundling about town - in an obviously symbolic role - is JohnnyPateenMike (the hilarious Dermot Crowley), a pompous little gossip who styles himself "a newsman."  Well, perhaps, but which pieces of his news can we believe - and how does the meaning of life change depending on what we choose?  Seen one way, Cripple Billy's life is a recipe for despair (it hints that God himself is as casually cruel as Slippy Helen); narrated differently, however, it's positively uplifting (he was saved from death by those who love him).

These are quite serious themes, and McDonagh eloquently suggests them - all while demonstrating that every version of the world has been subtly (or even secretly) colored by the people who have crafted it.  All this makes The Cripple of Inishmaan a remarkable play.  If only McDonagh had stopped there!  But I have to report that this usually fastidious writer has crippled Cripple with scenes of pure filler, in which mean-spirited practical jokes and musings on motiveless wickedness eat up nearly half an hour of stage time.  And the finale is likewise drawn out to no apparent end - McDonagh simply swings at will between alternate readings of poor Billy's fate long after we've gotten the point; we can almost hear the playwright musing, "Now am I going to be nice this time - or nasty?  Nice?  Or nasty?  Nice or nasty?  Nice-or-nasty?" By the finish, I felt like packing off for home and leaving McDonagh to his own narrative dilemma, his themes at the mercy of his own predilections.

Still, the near-definitive Druid Theatre production obscures these flaws almost as far as possible.  The Druid's artistic director, Garry Hynes, discovered McDonagh back in the 90's - The Beauty Queen of Lenane premiered there - and by now his manner is in her (and her cast's) very bones.  Thus the acting in this touring version is pretty much impeccable - with the possible exception of the lovely Clare Dunne, who never finds a plausible center to the sadistic Slippy Helen (whose abusive nature I think must stem from her own sexual abuse).  Everyone else is wonderful, though - with perhaps special laurels going to star Tadhg Murphy, those dotty aunties, Ingrid Craigie and Dearbhla Molloy, and Dermot Crowley's memorable JohnnyPateenMike.  The cast is also graced with a local star - Nancy E. Carroll - who more than holds her own as Johnny's bitter 90-year-old mother, whom he's trying to off with drink, and who returns the favor by cackling happily whenever she ponders him in his coffin.  In McDonagh's most inspired gambit, these two vultures briefly muse about "that man with the funny mustache" who has just become Chancellor of Germany.  Which only reminds us that the moral questions disturbing a tiny hamlet on the west coast of Ireland are the same ones that disturb the world.

Gen Y goes to the circus

I suppose the circus will spring eternal - or at least that's what I thought after watching Psy (pronounced "See" because it's Franch, dontchaknow) the millennial circus at ArtsEmerson that spurns the usual accoutrements of the form.  There aren't any spangles, sequins or peekaboo leotards here, and certainly little sense of eurotrashy va-va-voom. Indeed, you get the feeling the show's creators, the Montreal troupe The Seven Fingers of the Hand, almost spurn that kind of sexy showmanship; they probably think the garishly fantastic Cirque du Soleil (also spawned in Montreal, btw) would be better termed Cirque du So Lame.

No, the Fingers prefer to affect the shrugging mope of the millennium; sometimes they take stuff off, sure, but they prefer to chill out in slacks, with their shirt-tails out.  And their set is self-consciously utilitarian - indeed, it's almost anti-fantastic; it looks like the shelf you'd store your computer peripherals on.  The twist they bring to the circus is that they're casual about it, and everything about them all but screams "Whatever, dude."

But trust me,  it's still the circus, just the same, even if at first things seem a little grim as we're introduced to an encounter group full of depressed and damaged souls - an insomniac, an agoraphobic, an amnesiac - you name it.  But it turns out, of course, that these mental patients are also the familiar types from the big top, like the knife-thrower, the juggler, and the girl on the flying trapeze; and their circus skills allow them to either express or escape their "real-world" depression with the greatest of ease.

Which is what the circus has always done, and this clinical wrinkle on the basics of the form strikes you as more and more clever as the evening progresses.  For it allows the wonders of jumps and flips and outright flight to erupt out of the realistic; there are no big set-ups in Psy, no drum rolls and often not even a spotlight; instead, astonishing acrobatics just start to happen before your disbelieving eyes.

Of these wonders, perhaps my favorites were the whimsically quicksilver "juggling" of Florent Lestage (who sometimes seemed like Bip on Ritalin), and Julien Silliau's intensely hypnotic turn on the German wheel, as well as Héloïse Bourgeois and William Underwood's narcoleptic routine on the Chinese pole. And the girl on the flying trapeze - Danica Gagnon-Plamondon (the one with the fear of heights!) - was of course thrilling as she swung up among the rafters of the Cutler Majestic. Perhaps my favorite moment, however, was the riotous cluster-juggle in which the stage seemed to suddenly be filled with a veritable cloud of candlepins.

To be brutally honest, sometimes the studied casualness of the Fingers looks a little unfocused at the edges - but they make up for this with that subtly joyous sense of surprise. And sure, the psychological "concept" winds up being half-forgotten as the most exciting acts get going - but who cares? By the end of the evening, as the cast crowds to the edge of the stage, ready to diagnose the audience, too, I guarantee whatever mental cloud you're under will have completely lifted.

Don't tread on them

Life under the heel of Bruce Rattner and Frank Gehry in In the Footprint.

I really don't know how ArtsEmerson does it, but in their inaugural season (the second half of which kicked off Wednesday with In the Footprint: The Battle over Atlantic Yards, above) they continue to bat close to a thousand - their season has been more consistent in its high quality than that of any Boston theatre I can think of for the last thirty years. To be brutally honest, so far nothing on the Paramount stages has knocked the dramatic ball all the way out of the park (although some productions have come close) - but at the same time everything I've seen there has been worthwhile. And frankly, that's unprecedented in my experience.  When I ponder what Robert Orchard has wrought this year, I can only think back to the decades he spent working under Robert Brustein at the A.R.T. - can you imagine what that theatre might have been like if Orchard had been in charge?  Boston theatrical history would have been completely different (and oh, so much better).

Ah, well - that way madness lies, ya know?  So let's get back to In the Footprint, a kicky little show with music (no, I don't think it's quite "a musical") by New York's The Civilians about the attempts of various players to ram a new sports arena, with attendant malls and skyscrapers stuffed with high-end condos, down the collective throat of downtown Brooklyn.

You may shrug at the topic - what do the travails of Brooklyn have to do with Boston?  But rest assured, the Civilians limn through this particular prism a devastating vision of millennial politics and, you know, how things get done.  For what soon came clear about the Atlantic Yards project was that - as one disgruntled homeowner points out - no elected body or official had ever voted on it ever.  And yet it was presented to the public as essentially a done deal, with a posse of media stars (Frank Gehry, Jay-Z) lining up in support of Rattner's bulldozing much of Prospect Heights.  Indeed, as residents began to fight back against a veritable octopus of appointed agencies and authorities (each, of course, with its own acronym), they slowly realized that essentially, the city's bureaucracy had ceded Bruce Rattner the power to buy up much of their neighborhood on no authority other than his own.  (And what's more, a lawsuit pointing out this sad state of affairs even lost out in court after a battle that lasted years.)

This portrait of civic sleaze is depressing enough, but where In the Footprint breaks from the pack is in its merciless dissection of the liberal political cover Rattner deployed to get his way.  Dangling the usual goodie-basket of minimum-wage jobs and some token low-income housing, the Rattnerettes deftly deployed a strategy of divide-and-conquer that left local activists sputtering.  With Jay-Z, basketball, and new jobs on his side, it was easy for Rattner to depict residents unhappy with the scheme as merely racist gentrifiers - which he promptly did.  The resulting fireworks are sometimes ugly, but always pointedly funny - in fact, I can't think of a more accurate portrayal of the Way We Live Now that I've seen on any local stage in several years.  And somehow the Civilians manage to keep sympathy with the community's many opposing viewpoints even as they lightly satirize them - except, of course, when it comes to the repulsive Rattner (who's portrayed by a Tonka truck) or the vapid Gehry (played by his latest titanium doodle).

The six-member cast proves versatile and appealing, and Steve Cosson's script (as you might guess from the visual gambits above) skips lightly between satirical revue and editorial cartoon.  Alas, the one gap in the show is its music, which plays like watered-down William Finn (with the requisite over-articulate lyrics); but even the score rights itself at the last minute, in a moving paean to the type of neighborhood that can never survive the steamroller of a sports arena.  But at least, thanks to groups like The Civilians, the deaths of such places will be remembered.

The black magic of Basil Twist.

Puppets, as every child knows, are paradoxes.  Seemingly inert, artificial, even "dead," they can nevertheless appear more intensely alive than flesh and blood could ever hope to be.

Thus the long tradition of folk tales spun from the strings of marionettes - among them the sources of Stravinsky's Petrushka, which pirouettes perfectly on this sense of mystery.  The ballet leaps without warning or apology into a dimension of fantasy in which the puppets of a country carnival - the Pierrot-like Petrushka, his beloved Ballerina (below right), and the apple of her eye, the menacing Moor - come "alive" before our eyes (via real-life dancers), enacting their own variation of a classic love-triangle.  And as we watch the poignant struggles of Petrushka, we realize that emotionally - and perhaps even spiritually - we're puppets, too, buffeted by fate and manipulated constantly by needs and dreams over which we have no control. (Indeed, in Petrushka's calmly cruel folk idiom, death is the only release from slavery.)

Enter New Age puppeteer Basil Twist - who brings to the ballet the intriguing twist, if you will, of turning it back into a puppet show.  That's right: a ballet about "live" puppets - enacted by puppets.  Playing people who are playing puppets - who are, of course, somehow "people," too.

Dizzy yet?  Don't worry if you are; Twist never leans on these conundrums too heavily - his Petrushka floats closer to Punch and Judy than Pascal.  Indeed, if his version has a flaw, it's that all this metaphysical speculation doesn't get him very far in performance.  Huge, manipulative hands may constantly threaten Petrushka, but the ensuing focus on his existential rather than romantic dilemmas seems (oddly enough) to crush our identification with him.   It also somehow undermines the folk tale's (and music's) strange appeal to our faith in animism, which is central to the Russian mystical tradition. All in all, this was the least moving Petrushka I've seen - perhaps in no small part because Twist's design for the eponymous marionette is his least evocative work in the show (compare the puppet, below, to Nijinsky's original conception).  And it doesn't help matters that his Ballerina isn't just haughty but a little too bawdy.  In the end, Twist's version may be touching, but it's not heart-breaking - after all, his Petrushka's just a puppet.

You really have to add, though - what a puppet.  If it doesn't actually limn its thematic potential, this Petrushka still dazzles with its technique.  Twist works in a free-form update of the Japanese tradition of bunraku, in which marionettes are manipulated by puppeteers dressed in black (the better to melt into the background).  In Petrushka, this illusion often works almost perfectly - a glittering proscenium (at top) frames a mysterious "black box," in which perspective and gravity are defied, and all manner of surprising visions magically float.  Here the Ballerina can pirouette forever in mid-air, and a giant Russian bear (perhaps Twist's best effect) can loom out of nowhere, balance on a blood-red globe, and then disappear as quickly as it materialized.  Giant banners ripple through the void like spirits (or souls), and an entire carnival can be conjured by disembodied hands plucking musical instruments (at top) like some vision out of Disney's Fantasia.  Indeed, Twist often succeeds in evoking a kind of cinema made flesh; we first see Petrushka's puppet show in the distance, for instance, before we "zoom in" on it - and when the Moor finds his way home through the night, we "track" him through the dark.

Thus Petrushka succeeds spectacularly as pure fantasy (in a way, it seems to operate in relation to traditional puppet shows the way a movie like The Red Shoes does to ballet).  And for children, it may serve as an ideal introduction to the dance itself.  It does make for a short evening (which may, again, be good for the kids) - even though Twist opens with an abstract piece of whimsy set to Stravinsky's exquisitely contrapuntal "Sonata for Two Pianos."  This piece was diverting, but hardly at the imaginative level of Petrushka; Twist seemed to have something he wanted to say about suprematism (the Russian art movement that coalesced just after the premiere of the ballet) - perhaps something about abstraction conjuring a mystical reality in the same way puppets do?  I wasn't sure; the juxtaposition was rather oblique.  Oh, well - musically, the performance was still a great pleasure.  In what seemed like a nod to the evening's double-puppet dialectic, identical twins Julia and Irina Elkina played double-piano versions of both scores superbly - indeed, this Petrushka proved as delightful to hear as it was to see.  And you still have a chance to do both; it closes this weekend.

They say history is written by the victors, so of course pop culture is, too. And our pop culture has been telling us some strange things of late; since the Iraq War, we've not only seen a hit TV show about a torture-lovin', terrorist-bustin' secret agent (24), but another hit "comedy" about a serial killer, Dexter (who of course only kills other serial killers), as well as a mammoth movie franchise, Saw, in which a brilliant mastermind viciously torments people - at one remove - for their own good.

Sense a pattern? Well, if you don't, I do; pop has shown us precisely what we've been up to the last few years - and even why, precisely, we tell ourselves we're doing it.  Only it processes this self-awareness into a perverse, congratulatory triumphalism that always lets us off the moral hook.  After all, we're the victors - right?

But Aftermath (above), at ArtsEmerson through this weekend only, is not a piece of pop culture.  So this time, there's just the news about ourselves, plain and simple, with no ironic, winking spin from Fox.  Instead there are only the words (drawn from direct interviews in Jordan) of a handful of Iraqis - from among millions - "displaced" by the war.  They speak to us, as they did to their interviewers, Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank, as hosts - albeit hosts who are heart-breakingly eager to tell their stories, to have someone, anyone, pay some attention to their plight.  And thus they  don't really accuse us; indeed, they rarely raise their voices - they even manage some sad jokes about their situation.  But then, they don't have to raise their voices: what they have to say would be devastating even at a whisper.

Among them are cooks, and pharmacists, and artists, along with an imam, and even a hot-shot dermatologist.  All of them share one thing, however: they hated Saddam.  But they had learned to live their lives around his cruelty; they "knew where the red lines were," one explains.  "We had some space."

That is, until the sky people (that would be us) decided they cared above all about bringing democracy to tyrannies - but not Wal*Mart suppliers like communist China, rather desolate dictatorships (without air forces), sitting atop large oil fields, that we could crush without instituting a draft.  And as a result, these people's lives fell apart.  The litany of Aftermath is a grim one - the shrapnel still lodged in an eye, the nephew gunned down before his mother, the imprisonment in Abu Ghraib, the son left for dead in the garbage dump - but it only occasionally lapses into political pronouncement.  Instead, there's a dazed sense of question in the air, a palpable sense of the unbelievability of the whole disaster; "Why did you kill my nephew?" one man asks us.  "Who was responsible - and for what reason??"

If you find yourself squirming at such a question - because, of course, the answer is "We're responsible - we killed your nephew because we were looking for vengeance for 9/11!" - then maybe there's some hope for you, and perhaps for the whole situation.  Maybe.  But I have to point out a key flaw in Aftermath: although it raises a terribly pointed political question, it offers not even a glimpse of how it might be answered.  Many of us sky people always opposed the Iraq War, but as we survey the ensuing human wreckage, we simply don't see a way forward.  And nobody in Aftermath, does either.  It may be that there's no solution possible, and that all we can do is bear witness to the suffering we've caused.  Certainly that alone is a legitimate cultural endeavor - although given that gap, skeptics may wonder whether this piece of "verbatim theatre" counts as a legitimate form of "art."  The performances here are all grippingly subtle, but have Jensen and Blank shaped the material as convincingly as they could?  Frankly, I'm not sure.  But if Aftermath isn't a work of art, at least it feels like a small step toward a work of art; and maybe that's all we have.

And we need that art, because it's unlikely we've seen the full aftermath of "Shock and Awe."  There's one moment in the performance in which the veil of hospitality drops, or is torn open, when the imam who was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib at last raises his voice (in the evening's most powerful performance, by Ted Sod), and predicts that we will pay for all this - or rather that our children will.  His jeremiad is immediately withdrawn, his anger extinguished, and apologies made, of course; our translator (the gently sly Fajer al-Kaisi) papers things over.  But history has a way of proving such predictions true; if 9/11 was our thank-you for decades of interfering with Saudi politics, then one can only imagine what kind of fall-out lies ahead for us.