Women or Nothing **

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Whether or not you will enjoy Ethan Coen's new comedy for the Atlantic Theater Company depends largely on how much disbelief you are willing to suspend for some snappy dialogue and a few laughs. For me, accepting the premise of a pair of affluent sophisticated lesbians hatching a lame plot to trick a man into supplying the sperm for the child they want was too much of a stretch. Their plan makes little sense and is divorced from anything remotely resembling reality. On the plus side, the four actors (Halley Feiffer, Susan Pourfar, Robert Beitzel and Deborah Rush) play well together and two of the four scenes work quite well. Unfortunately, the final scene is a letdown. David Cromer's direction gets the most out of the script. Michele Spadaro's lavish set design of a Manhattan apartment incorporates a strange mixture of styles. Sarah Laux's costumes are apt. The play shows progress over Coen's recent one-act efforts, but still lacks the off-kilter inventiveness of a Coen screenplay. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes including intermission. NOTE: Avoid Row B at Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater -- there is no rake between Rows A and B and the seats are not staggered.

Tribes ****

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Director David Cromer, whose production of Our Town at Barrow Street Theatre was so widely acclaimed, is back with an Olivier-nominated family drama by Nina Raine about deafness and language. Billy (Russell Harvard), the deaf youngest child of an intellectual family headed by retired academic Christopher (Jeff Perry) and would-be novelist Beth (Mare Winningham), is a very skilled lip-reader, but was deliberately never taught sign language. His seriously depressed brother Daniel (Will Brill) is writing a dissertation on the inadequacy of language. His sister Ruth (Gayle Rankin) is an unsuccessful opera singer. His self-absorbed parents and siblings may hear, but they don't listen. Billy's feeling of isolation when he is left out of their intellectual battles goes unnoticed. When he falls in love with Sylvia (Susan Pourfar), a young woman active in the deaf community who is herself going deaf and who teaches him sign language, Billy's feelings toward his family change dramatically. A subplot about him working for the court system reading lips from surveillance videos misfires. The cast is uniformly excellent. The set by Scott Pask makes good use of the limited space. Staging the play in the round (in the square, actually) works quite well. The play presents interesting arguments about whether embracing deaf culture is liberating or limiting. It is far from perfect, but it is thought-provoking and deeply felt. It's not for everyone, but I was glad I saw it. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including intermission.