Theatre in Review: City Of (The Playwrights Realm/Peter Jay Sharp Theater) The above title refers to Paris, which one of the characters in Anton Dudley's play calls the "city of tangible dreaming." And what dreaming -- this is a Paris where garrulous gargoyles buddy up with ravenous pigeons, where sewer rats hand out career advice to aspiring opera divas, where the dead talk and paintings come to life, and five strangers turn out to have a multitude of hidden connections. Dudley has conjured up a world of twilight, the time of day described by the French as "entre chien et loup," -- between dog and wolf. Watching all of this, I often felt between a rock and a hard place. You have to have an enormous appetite for the fey and fantastical to enjoy City Of; otherwise, it is the theatrical equivalent of devouring a dozen of the mille-feuilles that the characters delight in. The setup is relatively simple. Dudley assembles four seekers and puts them on a plane to Paris, where many surprises await. In New York, the rather quiet, unassuming Claude meets Dash at the Museum of Modern Art, while staring at Henri Rousseau's The Dream, with its once-controversial image of a naked woman reclining in a jungle. As it happens, the painting has been donated by Dash from his extensive collection. Sparks fly between the two, but nothing happens. Oddly, however, they end up in adjoining seats on the plane, and later on, they keep running into each other on the street. Meanwhile, Cammie, a young opera singer, is headed to Paris to find her voice. ("Right now, it's in my handbag," she says, unhelpfully, launching into a theory of voice placement that I couldn't explain if you begged me.) Her seatmate is Eleanor, a grave, leonine woman who sees dead poets and hints that she may be dying. Anyway, Dash is headed to Paris to buy paintings for his mother, even though she has recently died; he is hollowed out by grief. Claude admits to being an orphan, and all I will say about this is, Keep your eye on the blowsy blonde streetwalker who wears dozens of sweaters to stay warm on the job. Eleanor, who grew up in the house now owned by Dash, is seeking some sort of communion with her late father, so she may leave this world gracefully. (There's a trip to Père Lachaise cemetery in her future). And if she says it once, Cammie says fifty times, to every character, "Promise me you'll see me sing at the opera," although she spends much of the play wandering through the sewers of Paris. As the characters work out their destinies, the author fields one fey conceit after another, each one begging harder to be adored. Cammie, describing her singular method of preparing for European travel, says, "I pack nothing but five shoes in my pocket, plus underwear, and a sweater for the fog." On the plane, Eleanor and Dash speak the same speech, then stop and take notice of each other. "It's fine, actually," Dash assures her. "We're in separate scenes." At Notre Dame Cathedral, the pigeon asks the gargoyle, "How's your erosion?" The gargoyle, complaining about the rainy weather, adds, "I can't be expected to say anything with a mouth full of runoff." Cammie hits the absinthe bottle pretty hard -- at the Green Dream Café, no less -- and next thing you know, there's a green fairy finger puppet spouting off. Claude and Dash get together, sort of, but then the latter's arm falls off; "Lately, I've been falling apart," he adds, as the second arm lands on the floor. The prostitute, who lives rough, recalls that she slept under the Opera Garnier until someone told her about its notorious phantom. "I didn't want people to think I was a groupie," she explains. It's around this time that I decided that Paris, at least in Dudley's version, is the City of Twee. That City Of never really becomes insufferable is due to the work of a fine cast under Stephen Brackett's relatively light-fingered direction. Devin Norik and Jon Norman Schneider enjoy a real chemistry as Dash and Claude; you almost accept that they have fallen in love even though they know nothing about each other. Suzanne Bertish is seriously overqualified as Eleanor, using her immense presence and her powerful rumble of a voice to lend a sense of significance to the most self-consciously poetical speeches. Give this woman a challenging role by Shakespeare or Molière! Colby Minifie is hamstrung by the inane things Cammie has to say and do, but she makes a stunning appearance late in the show in a silver gown designed by Paul Carey (whose varied costumes go a long way toward realizing Dudley's vision). As the pigeon and gargoyle, Cheryl Stern and Steven Rattazzi have French accents so fruity you could bake them into a clafoutis, but Stern excels elsewhere as that overdressed lady of the evening and as the shade of Dash's mother, and Rattazzi is oddly charming as a museum curator and late-in-the-day homosexual convert, who makes some pretty explicit suggestions to Dash. If you're going to design a play about the magical effects of the world's most beautiful city, I don't know why you would create a gloomy environment consisting of a slanted upstage wall and a pair of ruined walls, one of which has a lamppost embedded in it, but that is what Cameron Anderson has done, and I must assume that this is what Brackett wanted. Under these circumstances, Brian Tovar's lighting -- which makes excellent use of sidelight and bold patterns to suggest a variety of locations -- is extremely helpful. Matt Hubbs' sound design provides an extensive menu of effects, including airplanes, musical selections, and operatic voices, among other things. Dudley says in his program notes, "I began City Of as an exploration of life in The In-Between," a notion that has seemingly amounted to a license to indulge every cute conceit that occurred to him. (One wonders if he wasn't influenced by Jean Giraudoux or Jean Anouilh, those past French purveyors of fantasy, who wound together light and dark elements to sometimes seamless effect.) For all its attempts to wrestle with death and the passage of time, what one remembers is the parade of gimmicks. I'll take the real Paris, thank you; it offers far more romance, mystery, and food for thought than anything in City Of. -- David Barbour 
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