"People have been telling me to shut up since I was four," Mary Pat Gleason announces the minute she walks onto Neil Patel's black-trimmed, three-sided box set on the stage of the Vineyard Theater, home of her courageous new solo show, Stopping Traffic. The fiftyish, solid Gleason immediately makes it clear that she's not going to start buttoning her lip now that she's confronting an audience. Instead, she will use the vaguely confined environment -- which lighting designer David Weiner lends the changeable aspects of a mood ring -- as a confessional.

Gleason talks primarily about her moods shifting like a weathervane in a high wind. After chatting some about her Minnesota childhood and [...]