April 12, 2005

A Double Bill of Loves and the Inevitable Losses

t can be thrilling when one performance in an earthbound double bill abruptly takes off, pulling the enterprise into the realm of feeling and belief. Using little more than an accent and standing under a strategically placed spotlight, Kelli Holsopple persuades you that you are not in a restaurant bar in the East Village watching Romulus Linney's music-inflected one-act play "Can Can," but in France, with her.

As a wry, pragmatic young Frenchwoman who chooses an ex-G.I. as her first lover, Ms. Holsopple manages to convey the urgent vitality of life and its utter precariousness at the same time. She and her American are part of a quartet of voices belonging to characters who remember something inexplicable that they will never forget.

The mystery of desire is emphasized by the second couple: two American women from different social classes - one young, one middle-aged - who find something with each other beyond passion: acceptance. But even that cannot stop the onrushing of time and loss. That all four parts, though interwoven, are truly monologues, underscores the aloneness of the speakers. Mr. Linney, who directs, and whose first couple is autobiographical, merges his characters' words with the strains of Offenbach's music - including "Can-Can," from the composer's operetta "Orpheus in the Underworld," another connection to lost love.

The curtain-raiser of the Phoenix Theater Ensemble's "Play in a Pub" is "A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot," the burlesque-tinged follow-up that Tennessee Williams wrote for the Bessie and Flora characters in "The Rose Tattoo." Hanging on for dear life to life, these fair-weather friends of a certain age from Memphis abandon their petty attacks on each other in a bar at the sudden entrance of two available men and the promise of a warm, if brief, fire against the encroaching night. It fits the evening's theme, though the performances, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, are set at too high a frequency.

The show runs through April 28 at the Bacchus Room, Bona Fides Restaurant, 60 Second Avenue, at Third Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101.