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Arts & Entertainment Preview - June 1998 B Y   N A N C Y   D A L V A   &   J O H N   I S T E L Written on the Body Scene from One Flea Spare The award-winning poet and playwright Naomi Wallace writes dramas with the no-holds-barred, bowie-knife sensibility of a better-known Kentuckian, Daniel Boone. A thirty-something mother of three, Wallace scouts out the ways our body politic is reflected in the politics of the body. In Slaughter City, for instance, set in a Louisville meat-packing factory, she shows how late-stage capitalism consumes the bodies of its laborers like the slabs of meat they butcher. In a scene from In the Heart of America a Gulf War soldier recalls slitting open an Iraqi soldier, stepping into his rib cage, and proclaiming, "Hey, boys, now I'm really standing in Iraq." In One Flea Spare, Wallace demonstrates the artificiality of class distinctions when the aristocratic Mrs. Snelgrave (played off-Broadway by Dianne Wiest last season) rides out a seventeenth-century London plague quarantined with a scurvy sailor who reignites her sensuality. Last year Wallace's stage adaptation of William Wharton's novel Birdy (which Alan Parker made into a 1984 film with Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage) opened in London's West End, starring Rob Morrow, of Northern Exposure fame. It now receives its U.S. premiere thanks to the Philadelphia Theatre Company (May 29-June 28; 215-735-0631). Jumping back and forth in time, Wallace's adaptation focuses on the shrapnel embedded in two Second World War buddies' psyches. Again Wallace finds images to make her ideas physical: at one point Al feeds his psychotic would-be feathered friend by masticating food and spitting it into his mouth. In Birdy, Wallace again reminds us that our common humanity may be grounded in other parts of the body as well as the heart. --J.I. Under This Monarch Inclusion is the Rule In Virgil's Aeneid, Dido, the Queen of Carthage, promises her lover, Aeneas, that she will make no distinction between his people and hers. No wonder the choreographer Mark Morris cast himself as Dido in his own Dido and Aeneas. He is Dido! In his movement world he makes no distinctions. Story ballet, Graham, Balanchine; sign language, clogging, flamenco; tableaux vivants, country western; church processionals, the laying on of hands, the simple sight of people turning in their sleep -- all this, and more, Morris embraces. The Morris philosophy is also expressed through the catholicity of his musical taste, and in his choice of dancers. Morris as Dido (left) Within the Mark Morris Dance Group there is a continuum of color and corpus, with men and women ranging from sinuous to sturdy, and all considered beautiful. With his work and with his presence, Morris crosses the boundaries we tend to impose on time, on identity, on the nature of people and the nature of things. His own visage is confounding: winged-browed, craggy-chinned, snaggle-toothed, moon-pale. His physique is contrary: large-boned, bulky, buoyant, precise. You never know whether Morris is getting ready to bourrée or to belch. Nowhere do you realize this great comprehensiveness, as it were, more than in his Dido and Aeneas (set to a glorious Purcell opera of the same name). Morris plays both the noble, love-besotted Carthaginian Queen and her nasty sorceress nemesis in a star turn that is arguably either a very grand theatrical transformation or a very potent personal revelation. Or, perhaps, both (June 24-27, BAM Opera House; 718-636-4100). Earlier in the month you can catch the American premiere of Morris's weirdly enchanting version of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Platée (June 10-13, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley; 510-642-9988). --N.D. Manhattan: The Greenberg Variations Three Days of Rain Richard Greenberg's characters barely seem to possess bodies. In breezy comedies like Eastern Standard, The Maderati, and The Extra Man they resemble paroxysms of verbosity. With WASPy, petlike names, they pontificate and postulate, berate and bellyache, wheedling and whining with rare wit. Then there are the ones to be pitied--poor saps who can't pun with the rest of them, who stutter, sputter, and mumble or, heaven forbid, heap cliché upon cliché. In other words, Greenberg is the closest America can come to producing another Noel Coward. His latest, Hurrah at Last, at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California (May 22-June 28; 714-957-4033), caps a triple-crown season for the playwright. His haunting family drama Three Days of Rain explored two generations of aristocratic New Yorkers and ran to critical acclaim last fall at the Manhattan Theatre Club after its debut at South Coast. In March the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, premiered Greenberg's Safe as Houses. Hurrah at Last finds Greenberg again amid the East Coast elite, focusing on a privileged, assimilated Jewish family (with typical Greenbergian names like Thea, Lawry, and Sumner) that gathers to celebrate Christmas Eve in a swank New York City loft. Following in the footsteps of literary forebears such as Thornton Wilder and A. R. Gurney Jr., Greenberg's comedy promises to be the perfect antidote to a long Christmas dinner. --J.I. Nancy Dalva is the author of Dance Ink: Photographs. John Istel is a senior editor at Stagebill. Go to ... Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.