Autobahn

Celebrating a new space with a bold new collaboration, UDM Theatre Company ushers in the Michigan premiere of Neil LaBute’s Autobahn with a space-age concept. Jointly directed by David L. Regal and Andrew Huff, this automotive production captures the unique tension of the isolated driver-passenger conversation with disquieting humor and an intriguing visual palette.

The theatre’s move to a cavernous room within the University of Detroit Mercy’s architecture building marks a joint venture of the company and the departments of architecture and digital media studies, and it shows in striking surroundings. Physical representations of three different front seats are credited to Melinda Pacha; as lit by Mark Choinski, the tableaux floating pristinely in negative space are as Spartan and judicious as modern art installations. Digital media director Claudia Bernasconi oversees the work of more than a dozen designers, who give new meaning to the concept of rear projection by presenting ambient literal and figurative imagery in the space behind the travelers. Although there may be a brief acclimation period during which the viewer learns to pay attention to the scene before the changing landscape, the visuals’ persistent meandering monotony evokes the very kind of endless road weariness that drives the play’s premise: when people have been sitting in a car as long as this, the only thing left to do is have it out.

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At Home at the Zoo

In Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo (the two-act repackaging of his iconic The Zoo Story), anarchy reaches out to tap average on the shoulder. Directors Barton Bund and Lynch Travis together helm the Detroit Ensemble Theatre production, an audacious piece of counterprogramming that delights in throwing an elbow at normalcy, but struggles to merge the thickly drawn borders of its disparate scenarios.

“Home Life” is the title of the first act: a frank domestic conversation between mild-mannered Peter (Joseph Fournier) and sensible wife Ann (Eva Rosenwald) in their Manhattan apartment, pets and children in absentia. The piece is remarkable for capturing the familiar newness of people who, despite knowing each other intimately, haven’t ventured outside the literal and logistical in far too long. Over the course of their bemusing, cautiously titillating exchange of hypotheticals, Fournier and Rosenwald work together like a pair of sine waves stuttering to break out of their circuitous parallel rhythms; what the approach lacks in moments of clumsy make-work staging, it excels in carefully halting pacing and furrowed false starts — a static pairing rendered effectively dynamic.

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Driving Miss Daisy

Agitating and preaching are effective means of persuasion, but few devices invite receptiveness to the message like a simple feel-good story. With its blameless yet pointed look at racism and intolerance in the mid-twentieth-century American South, playwright Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy is engineered to have few detractors. In the current production at the Box Theater, resident company What’s That Smell? and director John Forlini use the odd-couple pairing of a white woman and a black man to deliver themes of big importance on a small scale.

As in the Academy Award–winning film it inspired, the play justly traces the begrudging professional (and creeping personal) relationship of elderly Daisy (Connie Cowper), an insistently self-sufficient Atlanta widow, and obsequious Hoke (Orson Wingo), the patient and eminently diplomatic black man hired to be her chauffer. Through a series of targeted vignettes stretching from shortly after World War II through the civil rights era, each inadvertently challenges and changes the other, but with gentle comedy and tender regard that keeps the show’s ninety minutes agreeable instead of severe. As Daisy’s enterprising and upwardly mobile son (and Hoke’s employer), Mark Konwinski serves as a necessary dramatic and comic foil, a representative of the younger generation against which his mother’s changing views are measured.

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Elizabeth the Beautiful

Honoring the eightieth anniversary of the venerated Elizabeth Taylor’s birth, the Ringwald Theatre has concocted a two-production repertory package enthusiastically entitled LIZ-A-PALOOZA! Whereas one of the plays is old, the other is brand new: playwright Kim Carney’s Elizabeth the Beautiful, a one-act flight of biographical fancy. Featuring Joe Bailey in the title role and with direction by Bryan Lark, this world-premiere satire takes the form of an acrimonious skewering, a taunting walk of shame followed by an eleventh-hour scrabble for redemption.

The Elizabeth Taylor of this play is not the striking doe-eyed ingénue of the mid-twentieth century; rather, 1978’s incessantly divorced scandal maker is holed up in restorative seclusion, her relevance reduced to being cruelly mocked on TV. Bailey lays Elizabeth’s vitriol on thick, portraying a woman so far down that from her vantage point, her life seems like the lonely, worthless worst. Yet intervention arrives in the form of a bit of pastry in the windpipe — clearly, fate or something has conspired to teach her a lesson. Thrust into an ambiguous netherworld, Elizabeth the obstinate is greeted by her twice-husband Richard Burton (Mike McGettigan), an upright fall-down drunk and here a spirit guide of sorts through the many disappointing scenes of her romantic history.

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Wirelessless

Joe Hingelberg and Travis Pelto rain down characters onto the Go Comedy! stage in the improv duo’s original production Wirelessless. Written by Pelto and Hingelberg with direction by Bryan Lark, this late-night Thursday offering takes away the web as we’ve come to know it, and in its place follows the smaller, conspicuously tighter web of one peculiar technology-addicted society.

Unrestrained wireless internet access is what put Webbland on the map, so when the signal goes down for four consecutive days, the city finds itself in the throes of fiscal and identity crises. The risible mayor and a team of experts scrambles to reconnect with the manned Webbland satellite, a slight but curious mystery of lost and found web access that serves as the backbone of the plot. However, the meat of the play is found in the larger effects on the town and its people: the city’s downtown tollbooth suffers decreasing traffic and revenues, stores are all but abandoned, and disillusioned residents grumble about defecting to the rival community of Neighborton. Hingelberg and Pelto portray at least a dozen characters each, a revolving door of diverse personalities, opinions, and motives hardly limited to the crisis at hand. The scenes hop capriciously from place to place, aided by Lark and Peter Jacokes’s thrumming sound design (including great contributions by Jaws That Bite). But here, pausing is more exception than rule: character transitions are frequently instantaneous, often specified by a single accessory, which banishes mere two-person scenes in favor of filling each locale with activity and humorous content.

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