Family Secrets

A hundred years ago, the schooner Mair and Cranmer set out from New York Harbor bound for Washington with a cargo of patented paving blocks. The captain, John Budd, was familiar with the course, having sailed it dozens of times. It would be the schooner's last voyage. After the small ship left the harbor, sometime between March 25 and March 30, the weather turned for the worse. The Mair and Cranmer sank in shallow waters off the Virginia coast on March 31, 1887. According to reports filed by a nearby lifesaving station, the ship sank with all five hands, seven miles south of Cobb Island, Va. The report states that the Mair and Cranmer had been rammed accidentally by another vessel the night it sank.

A brother and sister, twins in Montreal, are being read their mother's last will and testament. The news is jolting: Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) have a sibling in their mother's Middle East homeland they did not know existed. And their father, whom the pair believed to be long dead, is apparently alive. So begins the epic journey that is Incendies , Denis Villeneuve's extraordinary exploration of the juncture where family history, religious identity, and roiling politics collide.

Yet another way the very rich are different from you and me: When they complain about their dysfunctional childhoods, they do it from a Central Park West apartment, ensconced on a velvet sofa, surrounded by bowls of narcissus blossoms, with a Vanity Fair reporter in attendance. That's how singer Carly Simon does it, as detailed in the new issue of the celebrity mag. From her comfy perch above Manhattan, the 50-year-old Simon recites a litany of sexual misbehavior, selfishness and psychiatry she says filled her affluent Connecticut childhood.

When Family Secrets was an Off-Broadway hit a couple of years back, it was performed by Sherry Glaser, who also created and co- wrote the series of five theatrical portraits based on members of her own family. The version of the show in Philadelphia, where it is reopening the NewMarket Cabaret Theater in the long-abandoned NewMarket shopping plaza, isn't acted by Glaser. It seems to make a difference. Alice Manning, who performs the one-woman show, is an accomplished, experienced actress.

For the last four decades, Claude Chabrol, the French filmmaker with a taste for fine cuisine and refined murder, has been likened to Alfred Hitchcock. Interestingly, when Chabrol toiled as a movie critic, he wrote penetrating observations about Hitchcock's themes of murder and the transference of guilt. Chabrol espaliers those themes in The Flower of Evil, a manicured multigenerational film set in Bordeaux, mostly in an ancestral villa presided over by Aunt Line, played by the remarkable Suzanne Flon.

Oh, how I wish it were still April Fools' Day, because then I might be forgiven for a demonic joke. I'd write a sterling review of Festen, which opened Sunday night on Broadway, and maybe then you'd go, and spend the same miserable two hours in the theater as I did. But April Fools' Day is 10 days gone, and now it's just plain fools' day over at the Music Box. There, an uneven cast tangles with an absurd play that is never truly absurdist, whose...

The memo was titled "Baron/RES 3d Fandango. " It was written on Jan. 6, 1984, by G. Stockton Strawbridge and it addressed a matter that struck fear into the hearts of the Strawbridges and Clothiers behind the Philadelphia retailing company that bears their names. Baron is Ronald S. Baron, a 42-year-old, New York money manager who has devoted much of his time in the past three years to plotting a purchase of Strawbridge & Clothier. RES 3d is Robert E. Strawbridge 3d, a 45-year-old New Yorker and great- grandson of company founder Justus Strawbridge.

By Kamala Nair Grand Central Publishing. 305 pp. $24.99 Reviewed by Karen E. Quiñones Miller For those who have wondered how old is too old to be fascinated by fairy tales, Kamala Nair has answered the question in her debut novel, The Girl in the Garden . The answer? There is no such thing as too old. This beautifully written story is filled with intriguing characters, hints of mystery, and sprinklings of magic that will touch any reader's heart as a young girl - struggling to save her parents' shaky marriage - sets out to unlock the family secret that she senses hangs over everyone's head and affects all of their lives.

A play in props. Bigger than the junk shop in Mamet's American Buffalo, messier than the abandoned apartment in Miller's The Price, weirder than the Collier Brothers' New York hermitage, Gas & Electric Arts' set for Cabinet of Wonders is the Miss Havisham of 'em all. The venue, a huge warehouse basement filled with stuff actually for sale - clothes, lamps, pictures, jewelry, teacups - is wildly atmospheric. (Don't miss the plaster rat on the windowsill in the alley before you enter.

'Is there something wrong with you?" the young wife asks her young husband when the subject of children is brought up, and he has said no kids, "not ever. " And in All Good Things , there does appear to be something amiss with David Marx (Ryan Gosling). Son of a New York real estate magnate, David mumbles to himself, seems lost in his own world. He can be oddly charming, and when he first meets Katie (Kirsten Dunst), a Long Island girl just moved to the big city, they are clearly taken with each other.