The local company brings three pieces to the Eisenhower this fall, dances that find the company more often in character shoes than pointe shoes: Septime Webre's one-act Carmen, a bit of Twyla Tharp, and a Balanchine classic. Brianne Bland takes a breakneck approach to her brief solo work in the well-executed Serenade. In Tharp's ballroom-driven Nine Sinatra Songs, Erin Mahoney-Du and Luis Torres are a pair of luscious drunks in "One for My Baby" and Maki Onuki plays the giddy coquette to her partner Zachary Hackstock in "Somethin' Stupid."

Webre condenses Bizet's story of the headstrong Carmen into three scenes. The central scene "in a tavern" features a knockout flamenco sequence for the chorus, all powerful feet and tricky Spanish rhythms. Ziva Cohen is acknowledged as consultant. ¡Muy caliente! And Webre may be the master of using portable seating in his choreography. Holly Highfill's Picasso-inflected decors are outstanding.

posted: 12:42:52 PM  

Richard Greenberg continues to explore the spectral tensions between the author and his muse, between life as it is lived and life that is nothing but following a script. This is the territory that he has worked with The Author's Voice, in which a captive gnome ghost-writes for a talentless novelist. In the new thought-provoking play, the extra-natural plot device is a mysterious machine delivered to the shabby offices of an unpublished publisher, John Pace Seavering, at the onset of the Jazz Age. Seavering is weighing his choices for the first, and perhaps only, book that he will publish: a tell-all memoir of a black chanteuse that doesn't quite tell all, or a sprawling, unmanageable novel of ideas by a college friend, Denis McCleary. McCleary could turn out to be a talent like Wolfe or Fitzgerald, or he could wind up a co-dependent drunk. When the uncanny telegraph machine begins spewing random pages from books that purport to have been published in the second half of the century, messages from the future to the Seavering's world of 1919, his choice seems to become clear. Or perhaps not.

At moments, the first act text resembles McCleary's tediously long manuscript, but it is always enlivened by the appearance of Gidger, assistant to Seavering, a comic figure of good taste and repressed sexuality who (so the machine says) is to fade into obscurity while Seavering's publishing career rises. Played with perfect pitch by Bruce Nelson, he is wounded when he reads that the word "gay" has been appropriated by the homosexual community. Gidger is gay but not gay: he is grimly cheerful is the face of disaster. He is mortified to learn that his outlook on life has disappeared along with the older sense of the word.

Megan Anderson breaks out in the role of Rosamund Plinth, McCleary's volatile fiancée, who is more than a little patterned on Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Timothy Andrés Pabon, a bit glib as 1919's McCleary, gives a heartbreaking reading of a letter from the 1930s, written by a washed-up version of himself.

Richard Montgomery's set, a trapezoidal run-down office in a tower inspired by the Flatiron Building, is a marvel of detail: light fixtures, radiators, peeling wallpaper below the chair rail.

While the events that close the second act may be a difficult to untangle, we can say that ultimately Seavering avoids the banality of a life written down, flattened onto book paper. Instead, he embraces the mysterious potentiality of life, the photographically quick moment of a woman looking in a shop window, the wisp of

posted: 12:07:50 PM