2011 Rogue's Gallery, Part 5

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Costume Design

Dana Sutton, Women In Love, Blackbird Theatre
•Tommy LeRoy, RoGoCop! The Musical, Go Comedy!
•Sarah Lucas, Seascape, Blackbird Theatre
•Jodi Ozimek, While We Were Bowling, Williamston Theatre
•John D. Woodland, The Misanthrope, Hilberry Theatre

Awash in 50s-iconic bowling shirts, Ozimek also provide pieces that weathered the years to match the narrator’s much-later present. Lucas blended mixed-dye Lycra, tactile textiles, and aquamarine makeup to create a unified vision for her humanoid sea monsters. No excess seemed too great for the exaggerated pompousness of Woodland’s period garb. A combination of reproduction, retrospection, and era-appropriate overkill was LeRoy’s endearing recipe for parody. Sutton nabs the honor for innovating a hybrid concept like nothing I’d ever seen, both elegantly appropriate and with a captivating trendsetting feel.

New Play or Adaptation

David MacGregor, Consider the Oyster, Purple Rose Theatre Co.
•Kim Carney, The War Since Eve, Performance Network Theatre
•Tony Caselli and Annie Martin, Oedipus, Williamston Theatre
•William Missouri Downs, Forgiving John Lennon, Detroit Repertory Theatre
•Joseph Zettelmaier, Salvage, Planet Ant Theatre

Downs was unafraid to breed discomfort in his treatise on American political correctness and unofficial, bumbling international relations. With a twisting plot and foreshadowing layered on as precise as origami, Zettelmaier used geek passion as a gateway to a much deeper yarn of new romance, deception, and morality. Carney humorously reimagined the Prodigal Son parable using mothers and daughters, but looked past the initial reunion to fallout and shifting gray areas. Caselli and Martin’s faithful but accessible adaptation did justice to the desperate inevitable tragedy of one of the oldest known stories. Ultimately, though, MacGregor’s fable of mistaken identity and gender gone awry comes out on top with its fine capsule of a story, presented with inquisitiveness and reverential humor aplenty.

Ensemble (2–4)

'night, Mother, Breathe Art Theatre Project
•Eleemosynary, Williamston Theatre
•Greater Tuna, Williamston Theatre
•Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, Performance Network Theatre
•Proof, Tipping Point Theatre

With a preponderance of two-person scenes, the four characters of Proof found the passion in mathematics as readily as the pitfalls in human interactions. Greater Tuna hilariously populated an entire Texas town with its two enviably versatile and easily comic performers. Political, economic, and social motivations infected the inextricable love triangle of Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh. The soaring Eleemosynary traversed three generations of brilliance and rebellion, finding the familiar in a peculiar tale. And then there’s the unendurably painful mother-daughter pair of ’night, Mother, who worked together at feeling alone as they explored the rationales of suicide.

Ensemble (5 or more)

The Cider House Rules (Parts 1 and 2), Hilberry Theatre
•Equus, Blackbird Theatre
•The Piano Lesson, Performance Network Theatre
•Sonia Flew, Jewish Ensemble Theatre and Performance Network Theatre
•While We Were Bowling, Williamston Theatre

Telling dual stories with dual roles, the cast of Sonia Flew was equally effective in both scenarios and in all combinations. Equus’s psychological brutality was handled as adroitly as its physical and palpably sexual intrigue. Even with a designated protagonist, While We Were Bowling easily shifted among its captivating characters to lend satisfactory attention to numerous developments. The Piano Lesson took a web of extended-family and acquaintance relationships and spun them into an entire history. But the honor goes to the Cider House cast twenty-two strong; the complex mixed-narrative flow of the text was upheld fluidly and without impediment, a truly collective accomplishment.

Best Rogue

Edmund Alyn Jones, Richard III, Hilberry Theatre
•Luna Alexander, The Everyman Project, The New Theatre Project
•Tobin Hissong, Damn Yankees, The Encore Musical Theatre Co.
•Sarab Kamoo, Consider the Oyster, Purple Rose Theatre Co.
•Bryan Lark, RoGoCop! The Musical, Go Comedy!

Oh, the litigator has pretty teeth, dear, and Kamoo showed them pearly white. Lark’s dastardly executive triumphed with a combination of ego and blazing furor. Alexander was death and loving it; endearing mischief did not deter her from her purpose. Ever the dapper devil, Hissong was salesman and con artist both, eschewing artifice in favor of a cool as old as time. Yet there was no better rogue than Jones, whose evil-incarnate antihero bore a magnetism as penetrating as his motives were murky and deplorable.