Abrams: True enough

For Most of This Is True, choreographer Jen Abrams has reconfigured and minimized audience seating at WOW Café Theater. The performance area opens up invitingly yet stays intimate--like a second-coming of the beloved old Dixon Place, perhaps a tad roomier. WOW rarely features dance, but maybe Abrams's example will give that stalwart theater collective a few ambitious ideas. I'm hoping.

Certainly, Most of This Is True makes a case for Abrams as an artist pushing herself into uncomfortable territory and, as a result, growing in vision and skill. In this jigsaw puzzle of a narrative dance, she's joined by fellow performers Ariel Polonsky, Jessica Ames and Ariel Cohen, depicting relationships that are specifically lesbian but filled with the just-plain-human stuff of vulnerability, tenderness, boredom, restlessness and eccentricity. Their characters bear specific names, placing their movements squarely in the realm of story and humanity--two things that have always mattered to Abrams.

Movement, then, serves story. It's not movement for movement's sake, although, in True, it remains an odd, tough-to-decipher code and an often harsh, tough-to-speak language within a fractured, jumbled history. We are meant, I think, to connect to and work with these fragments in whatever ways we can as individuals. For me, the takeaway was the performance of Ariel Cohen (Dana), a rangy woman with a simmering demeanor and explosive physical bravery that rendered her character's disturbing qualities absolutely convincing. To see her throw and bang herself against the floor or crouch miserably beneath a table might make you want to draw back or it might make you want to find out how she got that way.

Although seating is extremely limited, Most of This Is True has an unusually generous run: 12 days, through Sunday, November 8. For a detailed schedule and ticketing, click here.