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May 29, 2014

Once upon a time, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and Rising Phoenix Repertory mounted A Fable, a saggy, perplexing parable by Rattlestick’s artistic director, David Van Asselt. Imagine shredding the scripts of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play and Bertolt Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man and forcing them into a Vitamix with the Book of Job, Voltaire’s Candide and a couple of Occupy Wall Street blog posts. Bottoms up? At the Cherry Lane Theater, the show opens on the island of Tahooty, as soldiers overpower a farming family, maiming the father, murdering the mother and gang-raping the daughter, Chandra. (I don’t recall quite so much sexual violence in The Tortoise and the Hare or The Fox and the Grapes.) This brutality is simply an excuse for the devilish Luke (Gordon Joseph Weiss) and the seraphic Angela (Samantha Soule) to have a little chat about the human soul. Spotting a laggard soldier, Jonny (Hubert Point-Du Jour), they agree to a bet. Will Luke tempt him to evil or will Angela win him to goodness?

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