Dramatic Events

Clarke's coterie

Martha Clarke's dance-theater hybrids (The Garden of Earthly Delights, Vienna: Lusthaus) revel in opposites and contrasts—pleasure and pain, heaven and hell, the beautiful and the grotesque. It is appropriate, then, that her two prize performers, Rob Besserer and Paola Styron, are themselves a study in difference. He: a heroically proportioned ex-jock from Florida whose introduction to dance came at the late age of twenty-one. She: an ethereal-looking Connecticut Yankee bom into the cradle of culture and affluence (her father is author William Styron). When Clarke's Miracolo d'Amore opens at Manhattan's Public Theater this month, it should prove once again that Besserer and Styron do have at least one thing in common—a talent for melding gymnastic prowess with a highly charged dramatic presence.

JAMES RASENBERGER

Cartwright's Road

When Lancashire-born Jim Cartwright's Road premiered two years ago in London, it had the Brit crits scouring their thesauruses for superlatives and hailing the twenty-eight-year-old first-time playwright as an Osborne for the eighties. This month, the hard-hitting drama— part poem, part polemic— makes its New York debut at Lincoln Center.

J.R