Babylon Babylon

MAKIN’ PAGAN Hope Cartelli, right, presides over heathenish rites.

Photograph: Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors

More can be less. Though any writer-director who constructs a 30-plus character epic deserves a medal for sheer ambition, Jeff Lewonczyk (a TONY contributor) hasn’t assembled the raucous historical-comical party one might hope for in his sex-temple–centered comedy. Seated within the ancient city of Babylon, spectators view a day inside the temple of Ishtar—here the goddess of both love and war. As the Persians approach, threatening to conquer and defile the city, a quirky assemblage of women attempts to participate in the then-common ritual of offering oneself to a male stranger in the name of Ishtar.

Despite boasting a stage filled with figures in provocative costumes, Babylon Babylon feels slow and tame. Lewonczyk’s dialogue is rendered in an “olden speak” cadence—bombastic, self-righteous and slightly formalized. So when the final character shows up and exclaims, “There are people fucking out there!,” it’s a welcome jolt of realism (he is, it turns out, a present-day American soldier). By then, however, Lewonczyk has steered his tale into a tricky position: There are more than a dozen subplots to tie up, and the play has only just begun to flirt with more than surface meaning.

With all those bodies, the temperature in the Brick gets as hot as Babylon itself halfway through the two-hour piece. And the messy, fight-filled ending doesn’t come quickly enough. What exactly happened to those characters whose stories were left unfinished? Only Ishtar and the Persians know—or care.