Under the leadership of David Ira Goldstein, Arizona Theatre Company has been expanding their offerings and experimenting with options for its audience. This has almost always been a good thing. Now, ATC has taken its biggest gamble, and once again the audience is the winner. The reasoning behind the mounting of these three particular plays for their inaugural RepFest seems to be threefold: first, it expands the opportunities available to their audience; second, it fulfills a commitment made to the winners of their National Latino Playwriting Award to ensure that the award has some clout by including the possibility of production; and third, it gives the company a chance to mount some lesser-known or complicated scripts that may not have been as successful with a full mounting by the company.

The results of this grand experiment are mixed. The first and most well-known of the plays, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, a tricky intellectual work that is as dry as it is brilliant, is an excellent mounting of what may prove to be too dense for most theatergoers. The second, Felix Pire's 2001 Hispanic Playwriting Award-winning The Origins of Happiness in Latin, an exuberant and precious look at the writer/performers youth growing up in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami, is extremely dependent on the power of its solo star. The third, Michael Healey's multi-Canadian award-winning The Drawer Boy, a slim mystery wrapped in an obvious comedy, has two thirds of an excellent cast carrying the play to its predictable conclusion.

Best known for his backstage farce Noises Off!, Michael Frayn ventures into the realm of theoretical physics with his acutely intellectual Copenhagen. The play theorizes what came to pass between two brilliant nuclear physicists during a strained 1941 visit to occupied Copenhagen by the head of Germany's nuclear weapons project, Werner Heisenberg to his mentor, half-Jewish Niels Bohr. Utilizing a great amount of Heisenberg's famed uncertainty principle and Bohr's principle of complementarity, with a dash of basic fundamental Socratic thinking as embodied by Bohr's non-physicist wife, Margethe, Frayn wonders if the eventual outcome of Germany's not creating a nuclear device before the Americans came from this very short meeting. Hypotheses and drafts of theories abound, and by the end, a postulation is considered about how this single meeting may all have made the difference about which cities wound up nuclear rubble: Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Berlin and Paris; or London and New York.

The play is tough to follow, and it is sometimes easy to get lost in the theories that are bouncing around like free electrons. Stephen Wrentmore creates very lively blocking that is quite descriptive of the physics of the various drafts of the conversation. Scott Weldin's stark stage is itself an experiment in the wave/particle theory of light. The three actors are up to the challenge of the piece, though the extensive line load did lead to some gaffes on the Sunday matinee performance. Ken Ruta and Brian Dykstra are a great match as Bohr and Heisenberg. The textual descriptions of each man are perfectly realized by the actors. Jeanne Paulsen is spectacular as Margrethe. She is the audience's entrée into this intellectual world, and she guides us through each experiment with grace.

For this piece, Rick Paulsen has created an angular, sharp lighting style that can be purgatorially dehumanizing at some points, warm and welcoming at others. Kish Finnegan's costumes are conducive to character, while Brian Jerome Peterson's sound design successfully supports Michael Koerner's original compositions.

I enjoyed this production the most of the three, while my companion found it an excellent presentation of a too obscure script. If you don't mind a lot of quantum mechanics with your theatre, you sound find this to be a challenging piece.

What starts off as a comedy about a young actor/playwright moving to a farm in central Ontario in 1972 to "learn" about farming for his next production swiftly becomes a mystery about the origins of The Drawer Boy. Michael Healey's dramedy explores life stories and drama as two bachelor farmers, Morgan who is tough and prickly, and Angus who is simple and forgetful, are forced to face their conjoined pasts by the visiting Miles.

While it is a multi-award winner in Canada, there's not much surprising or deftly handled in Mr. Healey's play. The exposition is clumsily revealed. The twists are not very twisty. The characters are stock. Andrew J. Traister's blocking and pacing are solid, if not stellar. If there's anything that carries the show, it is the performances of the two actors portraying the farmers.

John Dennis Johnston takes an initially cruelly comedic character and gives him a charming life. As Angus' character arc ascends, Mr. Johnston blossoms. Michael Goodwin's Morgan has less of a character arc to play, but when situations are revealed and his past is exposed, Mr. Goodwin also achieves excellence. The only disappointment is Christopher M. Williams as city boy Miles. He doesn't have much to work with textually, but he never seems to expand his emotional or performance repertoire through the piece.

The visual element of the show is very imaginative. Mr. Weldin's set captures the farmhouse kitchen and the ever-present Ontario sky beautifully, complimented by Mr. Paulsen's mood-capturing lighting. Ms. Finnegan's costumes support both character and period very well. Mr. Peterson's sound design is best when capturing the ambient sounds of the barnyard beyond.

My companion liked this a bit more than I, but neither of us were particularly impressed with this offering.

One man shows live and die on two specific requirements: the power of its performer and the strength of its material. In a memory piece, it's crucial that the audience take to the performer immediately and become sympathetic or empathetic of their revelations. In the case of firecracker Felix Pire, that's a no-brainer. He is energetic, excitable and eager to please. He's the type of person that has a laughing group around him at a party, splitting their sides with his self-defacing tales, extravagant descriptions and over-the-top impersonations. Transferring that talent to the stage is easily done, and to that extent, David Saar seems merely interested in winding Mr. Pire up and letting him bounce everywhere. Mr. Saar and Mr. Pire use every inch of the stage to gather as many laughs as possible.

However, the strength of the material is questionable. As a remembrance of growing up in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami in the 70s and 80s, there are many references to mi familia. Spanish is freely utilized, albeit quickly translated, throughout the piece, and every setup is easily snapped within ten minutes, while each blackout scene of a memory builds on the images and cute jokes from the last, until everything neatly ties up in a colorful bow at the end of the evening, beginning and ending with the ever present grandmother who was always there through his youth.

It's not hard for non-Hispanics to plug themselves into this oddball family, or to enjoy his many precious memories, and there's only one somewhat pandering moment about Mr. Pire's career that's difficult to sit through. It's just that you can't help but get the feeling that this is reminiscing for reminiscences sake and the microcosmic drama created is more sweet than compelling. The only thing that stops this from being too syrupy and much too consistently and manipulatively prepackaged (broken down to: laugh; laugh; laugh; serious; heartfelt; thesis statement; laugh; and blackout repeated nine times) is that Mr. Pire is so sweet and giving. He wants to please the audience, and this material is truly heartfelt. With another performer, this play might tank from it's need to tie up every knot and pull every prank. Mr. Pire, however, is so giving, it feels awful to take issue with his repetitious style of storytelling. You laugh. You cry. You feel warm as you leave. It's hard to fault a show for delivering that much.

My companion enjoyed this piece most of all and I loved the storyteller while not finding myself impressed by the story. Still, heart is in great supply and makes this an enjoyable performance.

None of the three is a bona-fide hit, yet each appeals to completely different audiences, and this experiment may succeed based on variety. The RepFest is conspicuously absent from ATC's announced 2003/2004 season, which may mean that this experiment may have proven too time- and resource-consuming and/or have created too little ticket sales to continue next season. Whatever the case, it's still great to have had a chance to enjoy three pieces of theatre in two days.