Joe's View

Playwright Geoffrey Nauffts carves out new theatrical turf in his play “Next Fall,” a hit off-Broadway last year that is now in previews for a Broadway opening next week.

Nauffts zeroes in on a few topics that rarely come up among sophisticated Manhattan folk — belief in God and acceptance of the notion of sin.

“Next Fall” is an issue play, but the writer tells the story with such wit and humanity that the debates that erupt in the course of the story seem real and worth talking about.

Nauffts tracks the relationship that develops between a seeming mismatched gay couple — 40ish Adam (Patrick Breen, above right), who thinks religion is a foolish and dangerous crutch designed to make him feel guilty about his sexuality; and twentysomething Luke (Patrick K. Heusinger, above left), a very active gay man (originally from Florida) who nevertheless believes his lifestyle is a sin.

Adam doesn’t understand how Luke can fall in love with another man — and move in with him — if he believes what he is doing is wrong in the eyes of his deity.

Luke explains that everyone sins, but that with prayer and “acceptance” of Christ he will go to Heaven when he dies. Luke worries that most of his Manhattan friends will spend eternity burning in Hell.

Nauffts mines a lot of comedy out of the reaction of Adam and his close friend Holly (Maddie Corman) to Luke’s seemingly contradictory belief system. It is to the writer’s credit that he takes the younger man’s faith seriously (although all of the best lines go to Adam in his role as the cynical doubter).

“Next Fall” cuts back and forth from a hospital where Luke is being treated after a serious accident — he’s in a coma and the prognosis is not good — to scenes showing us how the two men met and began living together.

The accident brings Luke’s divorced parents into the picture — Butch (Cotter Smith) and Arlene (Connie Ray) — who start off as somewhat caricatured religious Southerner targets for Adam and Holly’s witty scorn, but who deepen as the play progresses.

Luke has never told his parents that he’s gay — he assures Adam in one of the flashback sequences that he will tell them “next fall” when his younger finally goes off to college, but he keeps delaying the revelation.

More than a few of the people who comment on the volatile Broadway chat room, All That Chat, have questioned the wisdom of moving “Next Fall” to Broadway, but the show played like gangbusters at the Monday night preview performance.

Nauffts is one of the writers for the ABC series “Brothers and Sisters” and he has constructed a slick and very entertaining mainstream play with six terrific roles that are played to the hilt by a strong cast.

Patrick Breen is a theater and TV veteran who takes the central role in this comedy-drama and runs with it.

Adam’s sarcastic humor and his continuing aggravation with the belief system of the man he loves power some of the best moments in “Next Fall” — Breen’s timing and his ability to quickly shift gears from comedy to drama anchor the whole play.

The Danish thriller/historical drama, “Flame & Citron,” didn’t get many theatrical bookings in this country, so you may not have heard of it.

The movie was released on DVD last Tuesday, however, and deserves a spot near the top of your Netflix queue.

Writer-director Ole Christian Madsen tells the true story of two legendary resistance fighters in Denmark during World War II — Flammen (Thure Lindhardt, above) and Citronen (Mads Mikkelsen).

The two men are basically contract killers, but for a good cause — foiling the Nazi occupation in their country through a series of assassinations of Danes who have collaborated with the Germans.

The film begins near the end of the war — in 1944 — when Flammen and Citronen are itching to target Nazis in Denmark rather than Danish traitors.

The younger Flammen wants to kill Hoffman (Christian Berkel, below left), the head of Gestapo in Denmark.

Like Steven Spielberg in his superb espionage drama, “Munich,” Madsen seems to be as much interested in the emotional toll of spying on the individuals who do it as he is in the political impact of this vital work.

Flammen and Citronen are shaken when they are told that some of the people they’ve killed might not actually have betrayed Denmark — they were following orders, but were the men who issued the orders wrong?

The key question raised by the move is: What happens if you stop to think about wartime killing before you pull the trigger? Does it render you useless to the cause?

Madsen was very fortunate to get two of the finest Scandinavian actors for his film. Mikkelsen and Lindhardt are both chameleon-actors who seem to change their personas as well as their physical appearances for every role.

In this film, the actors mine every conceivable emotion from an incredibly complex moral and emotional dilemma: Is a form of soul death inevitable in the sort of pretense and violence necessary for Flammen and Citronen to do their work?

The tension increases as Flammen falls for Ketty Selmer (Stine Stengade) who may be a double (or even triple) agent.

The spy partners begin to lose their bearings when it seems likely that their supervisor could have a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with foiling the Nazis in Denmark.

“Flame & Citron” is a terrific picture that deserves to be discovered on DVD in this country.

Good news from Vintage Books this week.

The paperback publisher is reissuing two volumes by Alan Sillitoe — “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” — on Tuesday.

Sillitoe’s view of angry young working-class men in England at the end of the 1950s inspired excellent movie adaptations that became key films of the 1960s. Directors Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson brought a new documentary-style realism to British film in Reisz’s 1960 version of “Saturday Night” (above) and Richardson’s searing 1962 film of “Long Distance Runner.” In both cases, the directors were wise enough to hire Sillitoe to write the screenplays.

The anti-heroes of both stories rebelled against the way British class restrictions were holding them back, but both buckled under the pressure. It wasn’t until a few years later that the sexual and cultural revolutions in England and around the world made Sillitoe’s misunderstood rebels into heroes (the boarding school anarchist in Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 film “If…” took the simmering anger of Sillitoe and expressed it in the overt violence that was not thinkable a decade earlier).

It’s interesting to see Sillitoe’s development from “Saturday Night” to “Long Distance Runner.”

Arthur Seaton in the first book is a 22-year-old factory worker who lives for his weekend debauches (much in the manner of another working class hero, Tony Manero in “Saturday Night Fever”). Arthur eventually bows to social pressures and we’re left to assume that he will simply become another cog in English industry.

The younger protagonist of “Long Distance Runner” is a juvenile delinquent sent to a reform school who rises above his peers because of his abilities as a runner. The boy expresses his own revolutionary impulses, however, by throwing away a sure win in a key race against a pretigious private school. In this book — and film — Sillitoe was lighting a match to a fuse on a bomb that wouldn’t explode until a few years later.

The Reisz and Richardson films had a big impact in the United States where art house moviegoers appreciated their sexual frankness and moral ambiguity. The films also inspired American directors to push for the changes in content that would completely alter the U.S. film industry in just a few years.

The casting of rough-hewn Tom Courtenay (below) in the leading role of “Long Distance Runner” was also a crucial step away from the glossy movie star look of the 1950s. On this side of the Atlantic, Courtenay and the new breed of British film star would embolden directors such as Mike Nichols and Bob Rafelson to build movies around new (and far from glamorous) actors such as Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson.

For the past several months, I’ve been hosting a series of movies from the late 1960s and early 1970s at the Fairfield Theatre Company’s “Martini & a Movie” series.

In what has turned out to be something of an anti-nostalgia fest, audiences have been entertained and provoked by pictures such as “Easy Rider,” “Gimme Shelter” and “Alice’s Restaurant.”

The screenings have taken me back to my days as an art house theater manager — in the late 1970s — when the lobby would turn into an impromptu salon after a particularly controversial film. The fun was in never being able to predict which movie would provoke the most heated debate.

Tomorrow night at 8 p.m. we’re ending this mini-festival with Haskell Wexler’s 1969 drama, “Medium Cool,” which has to be one of the quintessential ’60s movies. Wexler got the backing for his feature debut on the basis of his highly acclaimed cinematography for such major Hollywood films as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

Given the chance to make a movie his way, Wexler went for broke with an experimental narrative feature – heavily influenced by the work of  Jean-Luc Godard – about a TV cameraman (Robert Forster) covering the most explosive political events of 1968. Wexler structured his screenplay loosely to allow for whatever might happen during the months the film was in production. The climax takes place at the Democratic Convention in Chicago where the writer-director sent his lead actress Verna Bloom right into the center of the police riot against leftist demonstrators that shocked the nation.

When “Medium Cool” came out in the summer of 1969, it dazzled critics and daring moviegoers with its mixture of politics, sex and very tough commentary on the TV journalism of that period.

It is hard to believe what the major Hollywood studios released during the final turbulent year of a continually shocking decade. Paramount was reportedly not pleased with Wexler’s film — or the fact that its then frank language and sexual situations earned it an X rating — but critics ranked it with “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider,” “The Wild Bunch” and the other revolutionary pictures that hit mainstream theaters in 1969.

With the passage of more than 40 years, “Medium Cool” has become a vibrant time capsule of American culture and Hollywood at the dawn of a new age. As the movie’s ad slogan put, “Beyond the age of innocence/into the age of awareness.”

If you’re free Tuesday night, join me at the Fairfield Theatre Company for this provocative film and a discussion afterwards with veteran Fairfield County broadcaster David Smith. The screening is free.

Photographer, painter and writer Todd Selby (below) has produced one of the new year’s most entertaining books, “The Selby Is in Your Place” (Abrams), a compilation of the “home environment” lay-outs Todd does on his popular blog, The Selby.

The book allows us the voyeuristic fun of exploring the homes and lives of some very creative people who live in a down-to-earth fashion that probably would not interest the editors of Architectual Digest, but is a true expression of their personalities and their work.

Selby takes us from the home of Australian surfer Ozzie Wright and his wife Mylee Fitzgerald to the funky Los Angeles house of musician Guy Blakeslee and his artist partner Maximilla Lukacs.

The photographs and the spaces are very beautiful but not in the sense of being elaborately designed. Most of the rooms are filled with objects that are important to the people who live there — in the majority of cases the “art” on the walls consists of collages of photos, paintings and thrift shop finds that give us much more to look at than we would see in the rather sterile interior photography in glossy magazines.

Many of the subjects are friends of Selby’s who clearly trust that his photos will bring out the best in spaces that are sometimes very cluttered (none of the rooms look like they were gone over by a cleaning crew before Selby shot his pictures — they all appear to be comfortably lived in).

Selby asks each of his subjects to fill out a questionaire that includes requests for them to draw some of the answers. The author also includes his own charming sketches of the people whose spaces he invaded.

“The Selby Is in Your Place” humanizes everyone Selby shoots, including the often frosty German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld whose rooms on view here are filled almost from top to bottom with the books he loves. It’s the sort of wonderful clutter that any book lover will appreciate (and understand). My only question for Karl would be the same one I often ask myself — How do you find the books you need in what appears to be a jumble?

One of the most interesting sections in the book is devoted to former model Nicolas Malleville and his gorgeous partner Francesca Bonato (top) who used their earnings in New York City to build a little hotel on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

“The Selby Is in Your Place” combines travelogue, sociology, fashion, and just about every other aspect of pop culture in one of the most diverting books I’ve picked up in a very long time.

 To keep up with the latest work by Todd Selby, visit www.TheSelby.com 

A remake of “The Nightmare on Elm Street” is opening soon and let’s hope it’s better than the contemporary remakes of “Friday the 13th,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and just about every other popular horror picture from the 1970s and ’80s.

The best remakes take the original films and adapt them to new eras. If a premise is suggestive enough, it can be updated on a regular basis.

Witness the way the 1956 science-fiction film “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (above) was cannily remade in 1978 (bottom) and 2007 (below, left).

The Jack Finney novella about an insidious extra-terrestrial life-form that duplicates human beings and then destroys the originals has served for more than 50 years as a chilling commentary on conformity and the various other ways we allow our humanity to drain away.

The 1956 and 1978 versions are terrific reflections of the periods in which they were made. The 2007 remake (which chopped the title down to “The Invasion”) has some good 21st century ideas and scenes in it, but was famously tampered with by the studio (Warner Bros.) after German director Oliver (“Downfall”) Hirschbiegel delivered his cut of the movie a year before it was released.

(A picture called ‘Body Snatchers’ was made by director Abel Ferrara in 1994, but veered too far away from the original story to count as a version of the Finney book.)

It’s fun to watch all three of the films in quick succession to see how three different directors used the idea to comment on the social and political atmospheres of their times.

My favorite of the three is the 1978 Phil Kaufman version which is a wonderful mix of science-fiction, horror and satire.

The notion of aliens taking over the planet one person at a time — through giant seed pods that grow human duplicates — is unsettling to say the least.

The fact that these pseudo-humans live only to force other humans to change too is an especially frightening way of dramatizing conformity.

The director of the original 1956 version of the Finney story — Don Siegel — wanted to call his movie “Sleep No More,” to reference the fact that the aliens can only take control of a human subject while he or she sleeps. The human characters who catch on to what is happening are forced into the nightmarish — and exhausting — position of not being able to go to sleep.

This plot point feeds on a generally unspoken fear of what sleep might bring us — nightmares or, in the words of that old prayer, “If I should die before I wake…”

“Body Snatchers” also works as a political and social parable. When the 1956 version debuted, the alien menace was seen as representing both Soviet Communism and the red-baiters led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The Kaufman movie has an added comic spark missing in the original. The film often plays like a satire of all of the self-help movements of the “Me Decade.” And what better setting for a late 1970s tale of sweeping human change than San Francisco, the place that spawned hippies, gay liberation and the Rev. Jim Jones?

Kaufman works at a much higher level of accomplishment than most sci-fi practitioners, with a superb company of actors led by Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams, terrifically moody cinematography by Michael Chapman (who shot another great urban horror story, “Taxi Driver,” two years earlier), and an unusually vivid soundtrack put together by audio wiz Ben Burtt (who had just finished working on “Star Wars”).

The two remakes tip their hats to the earlier films in very clever ways. Kevin McCarthy (star of the original film) and director Don Siegel both have cameos in the 1978 film and Veronica Cartwright — who is so good in the Kaufman version — turns up in the 2007 film as the first person we meet who suspects that people around her are changing in strange ways.

There is no reason to doubt that some smart filmmaker a decade or two from now will come up with a new way to use Jack Finney’s amazingly durable idea.

If you can make it into New York City tonight, you can the see the hit revival of ”Hair”  at 8 p.m. for only $40.

The producers announced this afternoon that all remaining tickets at the box office for the show have been reduced in price to ”celebrate today’s blizzard.”

“Hair” is at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 West 45th Street.   This offer is not valid for previously purchased tickets.

David LeShay of the Theatre Development Fund took the shot below of his organization’s TKTS cut-price ticket booth this afternoon. They’re open today, but you can go directly to the Hirschfeld Theatre for the steeply discounted ‘Hair’ tickets.

Andre Techine’s “The Girl on the Train” is the first narrative feature I’ve seen that deals with the problems of young people who are more comfortable online than they are in real life and who are still relying on “helicopter” parents into their 20s.

Techine is a French writer-director with a long list of credits going all the way back to 1969, but he has clearly stayed in touch with modern pop culture and the lifestyles of kids who grew up spending more time in front of a tube — and plugged into an iPod — than interacting with other people.

The “girl” of the title, Jeanne (Emilie Dequenne), is jobless when we meet her and living in a Paris suburb with her widowed mother, Louise (Catherine Deneuve), who makes her living taking care of the kids of working women in her neighborhood.

We follow Jeanne as she rather aimlessly looks for work and falls into a relationship with a handsome young man Franck (Nicolas Duvauchelle) with dreams of wrestling at the Olympics.

Techine shows us that Jeanne’s closed-off lifestyle leaves her almost completely vulnerable to the influence of other people and what she sees on TV and the Internet. She also never leaves the house without her iPod attached to her ears — her own personal ever-present booming soundtrack distracts her from what is going on around her.

Louise looks for work for her daughter, prepares most of her query letters and resumes, and Jeanne goes through the motions with potential employers (on a job appointment with an important lawyer — an old friend of Louise’s — Jeanne’s detachment and inability to answer questions leaves her interviewer visibly perplexed).

“The Girl on the Train” gets steadily darker without ever feeling melodramatically contrived. The movie drifts into danger the same way Jeanne does when her new boyfriend takes a caretaking job and asks her to move in with him. The job is obviously fishy but Jeanne never questions the set-up until something terrible happens.

The movie gets even grimmer when the girl decides to earn some sympathy from her mother and the surrrounding community by making herself appear to be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack on the commuter train (she isn’t Jewish, but hears about a similar attack on TV and decides to use the scenario for herself without thinking it through).

Techine never creates false sympathy for his troubling protagonist, but we feel for her because she is so obviously unprepared for day-to-day life in the modern world.

The director keeps repeating shots of the commuter trains going in and out of the city, implying that girls like Jeanne are legion. The movie is French but the subject matter and the characters both feel very close to life in this country as well.

“The Girl on the Train” is playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan and is set to open in Connecticut soon. It is not to be missed.