An intense end to trilogy on Americas

The Melting Bridge The man from the toilet paper company explains at a conference in Mexico City why genetically manipulated trees make his product so soft. Once back in his hotel room, he gets an enigmatic fax from his anthropologist father, who is filled with theories about ancient civilizations and "man's inability to live on Earth." Dad has also vanished from sight.

The Melting Bridge is the third play in a trilogy about the Americas by the unfailingly inventive Thaddeus Phillips and his company, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental. The troupe presented the first two, ¡El Conquistador! and Flamingo/Winnebago, in former Live Arts/Philly Fringes, and this installment is the most intense. Phillips, who created the play and designed the production with Tatiana Mallarino (she bewitchingly portrays a newsstand lady), was struck by the juxtaposition of a Mexico City subway station amid Aztec ruins, which inspired the play about old cultures and their hold on new ones.

Phillips is a sweet mixture of fearless and clueless as his character searches for his dad. Juan Gabriel Turbay's vibrant original score (he also performs) sets and reflects many moods, and the multimedia work - a troupe trademark - is terrific. Filmed subway trains come and go on one level as Phillips and the cast perform in the station on another. A live Phillips glides recorded boats down rivers, including the Amazon. In Bridge, which examines many losses – personal, cultural and environmental - the live action against recorded scenery resonates.

- Howie Shapiro

Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day The visual art and theatrical spectacles of renowned Belgian Jan Fabre share in the use of multiples. One canary onstage will not do - instead the set of Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day features a dozen cages with live birds and not one but a bunch of miniature mountains of coal, each with its own working model train. Lanky Ivana Jozic as the solitary player wears a vivid yellow dress, and with her single rocking chair and microphone, spins out a poetic meditation on "Ode to Billie Joe." She reads a suicide note written in stages approaching the act itself, interspersing it with convulsive, disjointed dances and renderings of the famous song with all its verses accumulating by the end.