The production looks under-rehearsed, but there's still fun to be had.

When Larry Loebell puts the inner life of his characters ahead of the plot, some good things happen. But far too much of House, Divided is relentlessly agenda-driven, freighted with contrivance and symbolism.

Bill Irwin's dazzling, joyful The Happiness Lecture grabbed me (and I'm known to be unrepentantly mime-averse and clown-o-phobic), and kept me spellbound for 80 minutes.

City Paper: What can you tell us about Beautiful Boy?

Peter Pryor: That what you'll see on Tuesday isn't what you'll see on Wednesday. This is a workshop that's really a workshop, and what we hear from audience talkbacks will really shape the piece.

Dito van Reigersberg is everything you could hope for. He looks just right — like Ingrid Thulin on a very bad day — and he can really sing the difficult score, a compendium of pop idioms.

It's a rollicking canine adventure that should translate ideally into musical vaudeville entertainment.

Director Whit MacLaughlin's production hardly ever wavers — it's an extremely masterful piece of craftsmanship that incorporates beautiful design and finds nuances even where Bryony Lavery's script is flatfooted.

Third becomes a compendium of clichés about liberalism, takes a wishy-washy stance on Ivy League elitism and offers a string of second-rate jokes.

But most of the design is terrific, and all of my quibbles are small in an evening notable for visual appeal, energy and most of all, two great actors in performances that must be seen.

Kahn isn't fazed by the juxtaposition of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, and she refuses to try to even it all out.