Stage

Conflict arises early when the 99-year-old Anne (a hilariously crotchety Anne Gee Bird) decides she doesn't want to be filmed. In fact, Anne is so exasperated by her failing body and still-sharp memory that she doesn't really even want to live anymore; one of the show's best songs is "Seventy-Five Years Ago," Anne's sputtering litany of old-age ills, punctuated by crude cartoon sound effects. (Not all the songs are so effective -- pedestrian lyrics like "Ben, I'm at the library" might have worked better simply as text.) Between Jane's probing and Anne's reluctant recollections, the story of Anne's life and the early days of silents eventually unfolds in a jumble of fact and fiction.

With the exception of Gee, Lenney, and Ellen Greene (the Little Shop of Horrors actress who plays a spunky young Anne), most of the actors assume multiple roles. Harry Waters is memorable as Jane's indulgent husband and as Percy Waters, an aging black filmmaker whose proud assertion "I never took the white man's money" suggests the real-life career of Oscar Micheaux, whose film company made movies with black casts for black audiences before Hollywood co-opted the idea and drove him out of business. As Louis Furstmann, Evan Pappas projects an infectious enthusiasm for motion pictures ("... the only business where you get the money before the people get the goods," he declares, starry-eyed), while Norma Fire's comic timing is excellent as Louis' wife, May, the deadpan voice of reason. Valda Setterfield (wife of David Gordon, mother of Ain) is delightful as the breezy filmmaker Blache, and again as the Rev. Wilbur Crafts, a villainous anti-smut crusader who petitions for government censorship of films.

Unfortunately, censorship issues also slow the show's trajectory, with some fairly obvious parallels drawn between film and Internet censorship and turn-of-the-century religious fervor that tends to accompany distrust of new media. A courtroom drama is engaging (as Crafts, Setterfield likens the government inspection of movies to the government inspection of meat), but as with many moments in the play, when names and dates come flying at us, it's not always clear which ones are the most significant. Picture Show is sharpest on the subject of the industry's first women and how they rose to prominence, expressed in the simple and moving group number "I Say Sure."

-- Heather Wisner