Suddenly, Last Summer

Don’t be put off by the highfalutin’ title (Suddenly, Last Summer) or author (Tennessee Williams) of the latest Ringwald production. Far more telling — and accurate — is the collective screaming-mimi label LIZ-A-PALOOZA!, applied to the company’s current two-show repertory Elizabeth Taylor tribute. If director Joe Plambeck and company kid because they love, then this sidesplitting send-up of one of the actress’s iconic performances shows a campy adulation that knows no bounds.

This production is not drawn from the adapted Taylor film, but returns to the one-act stage play, a lightning flash that feels even quicker than its hour-skimming running time. Set in the flamboyant New Orleans home of lascivious eccentric Violet Venable (Lauren Bickers), the tawdry plot finds her plying a financially motivated surgeon (Mikey Brown) to help silence the rumors surrounding her beloved son Sebastian’s death while abroad. Yet this is no simple sweep under the rug: Violet’s own niece Catharine (Marke Sobolewski), Sebastian’s gorgeous traveling companion turned disturbed and manic after bearing witness to the event, will not be silenced by anything short of a lobotomy. Still, even shady Dr. Sugar has some compunction, and insists on hearing what Catharine has to say — with the help of some good ol’ 1955 medicinal truth-serum mumbo-jumbo — before determining her course of treatment. Even for all its inference, the filthy, lurid tale does not disappoint; mathematically speaking, it’s sensational to the power of awesome.

Click to read more ...

Ruined

Even in the worst of circumstances, people manage to carve out something that looks like merriment. In Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined, one watering hole and brothel is the purportedly carefree backdrop for a steely-eyed look into the exceptional barbarity of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For this challenging production, Plowshares Theatre Company moves to the downtown Detroit Boll Family YMCA, where director Gary Anderson lets these truth-inspired accounts of atrocity against civilian women carry their own significant weight.

Most of the play is confined to a small DRC social establishment, catering to the local miners’ intoxicant and carnal needs. Scenic design by John Manfredi imagines a festive, if slipshod, open-air edifice whose ambience doesn’t appear to be its primary draw. Cheaply furnished, with strings of lights stretched over the bar and a small platform for live music, the modest arrangement is just hospitable enough to bring in the men for a few rounds before enjoying some paid companionship; it’s an oasis without the kind of ostentation that courts trouble. The place is run by Mama Nati (Iris M. Farrugia), a salty proprietor and shrewd businesswoman who fights to keep political allegiances outside her walls — after all, everyone’s money spends the same. She prides herself in securing bright luxuries, conjured by properties designer Jennifer Maiseloff: inaccessible beer, cigarettes, and other delicacies. However, at the play’s start, Mama’s clumsily flirtatious supplier Christian (Augustus Williamson) also brings her a pair of young women in need of shelter and protection, with nowhere else to turn.

Click to read more ...

Snowbound

After a well-received run in 2010, playwright Margaret Edwartowski returns Snowbound to the Planet Ant stage, now expanded to span two full acts. A story of plight, persistence, and regret buried in an unforgiving Colorado winter, the latest version retains all the sting of its snappy viciousness while tacking on intrigue and dimension of changing characters in changing circumstances. Director Kate Peckham takes the action to the brink, brutalizing protagonists and audience alike with sky-high stakes and unrelenting outcomes.

What little remains of the Adler family fits into a meager mountain cabin, situated a treacherous crossing away from the paltry descriptor “remote.” Of the four survivors, siblings John (Stephen Blackwell) and Sara (Jaclyn Strez) are the only two capable of toil, forced to provide enough for themselves as well as their mentally and physically debilitated grandmother, Evaline (Nancy Arnfield), and the infant whose arrival rendered John a widower. With a dearth of able bodies and fewer provisions than ever, the impending winter of 1873 promises to be the end of them. Yet muleheaded John is icy with grief and grim determination; Blackwell’s gruffly inscrutable character suggests that he either doesn’t believe the so-called Adler curse (the death and disaster that has followed Evaline since she left her refined Boston family to marry a common pioneer), or he’s hell-bent on seeing it through — possibly both. One last appeal to reason comes in the form of family friend Wil (Jon Ager), a gentle and unassuming farmer who has a personal stake in their survival. Sara and Wil secretly agree that they must leave the cabin in order to escape certain death; it’s not all they agree on, as their fondest hopes intersect in a perfectly enchanting stolen scene. Arnfield’s endlessly rambling, sometimes ranting Evaline provides comic decompression, but also drives a critical wedge between the escapist needs of a hopelessly isolated seventeen-year-old woman and the crippling accountability weighing down a man who feels he’s already lost everything.

Click to read more ...

If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]

Like the reply-all taboo and the necessity of logging out of a public computer, the latest formative lesson our society is learning is that absolutely anything posted online can take on a life of its own. Playwright Kevin Kautzman phrases it better in the enticing title of his new internet-age sex comedy, If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]. The world premiere by The New Theatre Project is notable for meticulous production values that give the show the resplendent obsession with technology it deserves. Yet as directed by Natividad M. Salgado, the strongest material resides offline: this script has so much fun guiding its characters into a zany, last-ditch enterprise that the ramifications can’t hope to reach the same level of enthusiasm.

The play’s emphatically contemporary context suits the immediacy of its premise. Lucy and Chris (Elise Randall and Peter Giessl) are a couple of textbook ninety-nine percenters, overeducated and underemployed in a crummy economy: she’s thanklessly waiting tables while toiling on an expensive MBA; he’s a college dropout whose service job affords them the barest health coverage. It’s a lamentable career picture for both, so for things to get worse merely adds insult to injury. And when the business world has no place for a couple of hungry, desirable youths, these two blaze their own trail that plays to their unique strengths — in this case, putting a technologically new spin on the oldest profession. True, selling sex online is hardly a novelty, and why this venture is expected to succeed against oceans of competition requires some suspension of disbelief, but it’s well worth the effort in a first act this fresh and funny. Kautzman’s text is magnificent as he submerges these two characters robbed of forethought into a trajectory of pure discovery, and Salgado and company play the beats with realistic give and take and fed-up desperation that ably sets up the foolhardy scheme and everything that follows. As a team, Giessl and Randall operate with fantastic chemistry, bandying about impulsiveness and familiarity that elicits laughter from every sardonic quip and well-placed withering glance.

Click to read more ...

Mary Stuart

If to the victor goes the spoils, then at least the vanquished gets a play. Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart romanticizes the last days in the life of a martyred queen and her captors, chronicling the no-win aspect of the monarchy system’s intertwined personal and political interests. Although the Meadow Brook Theatre production is of a new version of the play by Peter Oswald, director Travis W. Walter and team preserve the methodical feel of a costume drama, albeit one whose single-minded pomp overshoots the inevitable circumstance.

Although the titular Mary, Queen of Scotland (Julia Glander), and Elizabeth, Queen of England (Ruth Crawford), are first cousins, and although Elizabeth answered Mary’s desperate plea for protection by imprisoning her for nearly nineteen years, the two have never met. By way of history, Mary’s onetime claim to the throne of England — a rationale contingent on Elizabeth’s bastard status — tasted extra bitter in light of her abhorred Catholicism; her marriage to the man believed to have killed her previous husband was a scandal; her supposed participation in a whopping three assassination attempts — from the closely watched confines of English prisons, no less — appears unlikely at best. Yet the Mary of 1587, when the play opens, receives the expected guilty verdict from her treason trial with the gentle patience of a saint; her only request is to have an audience at long last with her cousin/captor and personally plead her case. Repentant for past sins, steadfast in her faith, and noble to a fault, Glander’s Mary bangs the gong of resolute martyrdom without yield (as do Reid G. Johnson’s positively angelic lighting cues).

Click to read more ...