Boyfriend in a coma I know, I know

I'd heard of playwright Jason Grote quite a bit so when I got a notice about his latest play 1001 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, I decided to go without even really researching what the play was about. Grote has a very ambitious play on his hands, many things that are challenging and work to varying degrees of success. From the lobby entrance to the theater, audience members are given a colored coupon and told to follow along a colored line (corresponding to the color of their coupon) taped to the floor. The lines diverge and snake along the perimeters of the theater and end up in different point of the playing space. A cute device that demonstrates very literally that divergent paths can still lead to the same center. The play itself, staged in the round (or square, as it were) follows a similar structure: several storylines (some more leading than others) intertwined, with the two protagonists finding each other in a love relationship that spans different eras, mythologies, times and spaces. They are Scheherazade and the Persian king (the framing story of Arabian Nights), they are also a contemporary young couple in New York (one an Arab and the other a Jew) who end up suspended in limbo when the next war/terrorism strikes NY and the guy gets bricked in the head and ends up in a coma. The other handful of cast members play a multitude of characters from rivaling romantic interests to Scheherazade's sister, even Gustave Flaubert and Jorge Luis Borges make appearances -- and though this smorgasbord of characters and settings seem intended to create a complex vortex of many disparate stories converging into one, there is something forced in the script and direction that makes it very apparent what the play is up to -- its edge is never quite sharp enough to really surprise or enchant. The cast is limber and versatile, and there are some very effective moments in the play. The live dj running the sound and projected text (for scene titles and once an on-line chat-love-scene) gave the production an air of hipness that didn't quite mesh -- it may have had something to do with the lead actor Matthew Rauch, who I've seen in a bunch of show -- or maybe it was just Red Bull's The Revenger’s Tragedy which for some reason I found so banal -- who is like "a very good actor" type and drives me crazy. The play actually reminded me of that movie The Fountain, in that they both were attempting to weave a timeless (or rather trans-temporal) epic love story but didn't quite keep it together. The Fountain was more beautiful, 1001 was more convincing, but both were kinda cheesy.