PLUSCA CHANGE, plus e'est lameme chose:" one of the more memorable lines in The Devil Always Wins, it could, in fact, serve as its thesis statement as well. Not that the basic idea is bad, mind you, though somewhat familiiar, man sells out to the devil, thinks he has gotten the better end of the deal, and discovers otherwise. We've seen what's been done with this theme in the past; let's see what's been done here:

After a brief prologue--nasty, brutish, and short--we find ourselves in Stockton. Massachusetts in 1692, "at the height of the Puritan witch craze." Protagonist Nicholas Flatford (Jeff Rosen), a Puritan with a taste for sentiment and his own bad poetry, has just been given an ultimatum by Martha Coftin (Debra Staniunas), his something-more-than-shrewish wife: five days to clean up his act and cut out the poetry, or else. A reasonable request. "Can't you talk of something else besides the weather, vegetables, and domestic animals?" Nicholas demands, as he proceeds to undertake this task with twice as much time as Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy but with only half the wit. Luckily for him, the Devil (Bill Saunders) intervenes at just the right moment, stepping out inexplicably from the cupboard. (Has he been at those Pop-tarts again?) Through various ruses, he manages to finagle Flatford into signing away his soul in return for a large number of material goods to be provided before the following morning--sort of a C.O.D. arrangement. Nicholas outwits the devil with less-than-fiendish cleverness, in fact, through the oldest trick in the book: by performing what must be the most bizarre rooster imitation ever seen in the history of Western civilization, he convinces the Devil that the sun has come up, that time is up. All is found to be complete except for one item specifically mentioned in the contract--a black cat; but no cat, no soul, the contract is null and void, the Devil loses, and Nicholas is allowed to keep his soul. Such were the days before Federal E. press.

Scene two: surprise, surprise, it was all a dream-a discovery that no doubt leaves us mate with astonishment. What innovation. But where's Auntie Em? This is a dorm room at the Harvard Business School--surely a case of art imitating life imitating art, if ever there was one Ernest Flatford, B-School student with a taste for sentiment and bad prose, is rudely awoken by colleague and rival (and, inexplicably, object of his desire), the ghastly Prudence Tomb (Martha Coffin). Rabid purveyor of the go rich-quick-after-B-School American Drench, Martha, ever the killjoy, nags at Ernest to do his reading between intermittent snatches of an idiotic love duet. Just as we begin to feel at home, the Devil appears once again, in a new guise, armed with a repertoire of tired Harvard Jokes, after enough references to "666" to exasperate even the most cretinous. He cajoles and coerces Ernest into agreeing to attend an interview with his "firm" Watch out. Ernest, we cry, but it is too late; it's intermission.

ACT TWO occurs in Hell, the program informs us; yet, the skyline seen through the picture windows is suspiciously familiar, as is the interior. Shock of recognition, presumably: it is, in fact, an executive office, complete with intercom; and here's the Devil, complete with cigar and sinister Texan accent. Ah, the evils of big business. Ernest begins his meteoric rise to the top as overseer to the Seven Deadly Sins (Norma Lindabl), here a collection of painfully unwitty caricatures: Envy, for instance, wears a Yale sweatshirt. Bring on Lee Lacocca instead and spare us the trouble. Well-prepared by his MBA, Ernest learns the topes quickly and manages to impeach the Devil as president of the company, only to be in turn dethroned underhandedly by none other than the secretly depraved Prudence. At this point occurs the long-anticipated "surprise ending"--not much of an ending and even less of a surprise: the tables are turned through a climactic game of blackjack (at least it isn't trivial Puritan), in which the Devil is foiled by none other than the Narrator (Fred Pletcher), who has remained a grotesquely audible and visible presence since the beginning of the prologue. But there's more: the Narrator, reveals himself, much to chenagrin--"I'm the author of this play, he proclaims with inexplicable arrogance. We'd think the author would have had better sense than to burden his own play with a constantly obnoxious, entirely superfluous commentator...

This work seems to suffer acutely from a problem of genre: is it a play? is it an opera? Billed as a "musical tale," it seems neither fish no, fowl nor the best of both worlds. The music, written and performed by Philip Lasser, is elusive and singularly inappropriate in nature; it runs on incessantly, ubiquitously beneath the speech, providing less of a meaningful subtext than a distraction or, at worst, an embarrassment, as the unfortunate singers actors explode into snatches of unsingable, off-key melody. This post-Wagnerian syndrome is if anything aggravated by the nature of the text: to rhyme or not to rhyme is the crucial question that seems never to have been settled. The effect is unsettling, between intervals of approximately human speech, the characters too often lapse into agonizingly contrived couplets to our dismay we encounter such rhymes as "gluttony/button, he." Nobler no, to notice; "it doesn't always pay to be smart," as one character acutely remarks.

Considering what they must overcome, the actors are generally good, and at times even humorous. Despite their efforts, however, this experiment in music and drama fails to achieve a synthesis; if anything, it takes on enough affectations to raise the hackles of the most indulgent of theatre-goers. Enough said--let us direct out attention and our gaze towards the truly memorable element in the production: the poster for the CIVIL WarS on the back wall.