Off-Broadway gems: 'Other Place,' 'Kin'

Here's a title -- "The Other Place" -- that pretty much sums up the location of anything not on Broadway this spring. With a dozen more high-profile Broadway openings between today and the April 28 Tony cutoff, audiences can be forgiven for forgetting that theater actually happens beyond the tiny square of screaming marquees in midtown.

If you miss "The Other Place" and "Kin," however, you may not forgive yourself.

THE OTHER PLACE, by Sharr White. MCC Theatre at the Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St.; $65; 212-279-4200; ticketcentral.com

Of all the untamable young talents bursting from Chicago's Steppenwolf in the late '70s, Laurie Metcalf was the one we knew would shoot into the galaxy with the biggest stars. Imagine the surprise when Metcalf -- one of the best Lauras I've ever seen in "The Glass Menagerie" and a legend to anyone who saw her cadenza of an inarticulate hooker in "Balm in Gilead" -- settled comfortably and respectably in Los Angeles to win three Emmys as Roseanne's sister, Jackie.

Metcalf has come back to New York stages a few times lately, most unfortunately in David Mamet's bubbleheaded "November," most thrillingly in last season's criminally short-lived revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" and Sam Shepard's "A Lie of the Mind."

But here she is, downtown at MCC Theatre in Greenwich Village, as the laser-point center of a stunning new play that deserves everything she brings to it. The 75-minute drama, directed with unflinching stealth and sensitivity by Joe Mantello ("Other Desert Cities"), lives mostly in the internal monologues of Juliana, a brilliant neurological researcher, as she tumbles into unknown psychological and medical territory.

Don't mistake this for the pablum that goes down easy with disease-of-the-week theatrics. White, in his first major New York production, includes a twist that seems more convenient than likely. But his writing is crisp and surprising, presenting Juliana in a disorienting number of short scenes that fold back on one another with deep and ever-deepening distress.

The temptation is to say too much about the plot. Juliana, whom we meet in her sleek businesswoman mode, is first delivering a lecture that she knows is just a sales pitch to a medical convention in St. Thomas. She is tough and funny, oozing a sexuality that cannot be separated from her braininess.

But then she has what she calls "a bit of an episode," which sends her back to her doctor husband (the always-good Dennis Boutsikaris), then back and forth in time to deal with other illusive people and a 10-year-old life-altering trauma. She calls that "the situation."

In obvious ways, "The Other Place" is a close relative of "Wit" (MCC's Pulitzer Prize winner about a woman with cancer) and "Wings" (about a woman who has a stroke). But Juliana's journey, staged within a collage of overlapping picture frames, touches mysteries that belong exclusively to this compelling story. Metcalf transforms, from moment to moment and back again, from sublime competence to a helplessness that is hard to watch. Dare you to take your eyes off her.

KIN, by Bathsheba Doran. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St.; $70; 212-279-4200; playwrightshorizons.org

"Kin" also includes a long-lingering trauma. And Bathsheba Doran, a young playwright in her breakthrough production, forms its ultimate impact through a series of brief fragments -- shards, really. Instead of the story of one woman and those around her, however, "Kin" gives us vivid and subtle details about nine people who, eventually, come together in a funny-wistful modern concept -- or is it a compromise? -- of family.

Doran, a former TV-sketch writer in England and a graduate of Columbia and Juilliard, has a lovely, merciless way of nailing characters with the almost-absurdity of life. The main character, if we insist there be one, must be Anna (Kristen Bush), a lanky, unmarried beauty and a literary scholar who is dismayed to find herself an expert on Keats' punctuation.

Her best friend (Laura Heisler) is an unemployed actress who depresses others with her depth of feeling. Anna hooks up with an unlikely guy (Patch Darragh), an Irish personal trainer with an agoraphobic mother (Suzanne Bertish) back home. Personal capsules don't do justice to the singularity of all these people, including Anna's distant father (the remarkable Cotter Smith), a military-secrets officer who suddenly yearns for fewer secrets.

Lonely people try to reach out by describing what the sky looks like to them. A professor drops Anna with hilarious cruelty. People who appear, for a flash, to be soul mates are definitely not. The acting is terrific and the setting -- a big, movable diorama -- takes us from Manhattan to the Irish countryside in unexpected ways.

Director Sam Gold, responsible for emotionally meticulous productions of new work by Annie Baker and Kim Rosenstock, weaves all the threads into a tapestry that just might look like happiness. For theatergoers, at least, it is.