Romantic Fools

Stormfield Theatre indulges in a zany confection with its Romantic Fools, by Rich Orloff. Director Rob Roznowski and his cast of two gnaw through a brittle, stale exterior of he-said/she-said tropes in order to savor a fulfilling chewy center of relationship-centered humor.

Man (Roger Ortman) and Woman (Lisa Sodman) make their way together through twelve comic vignettes, broken up into two acts. The first, concerned with meeting and pursuing potential mates, relies heavily on overblown gender stereotypes: to her, men are prehistoric relics with elementary needs and rudimentary communication skills; to him, women are needy basket cases whose mixed signals render them nearly schizophrenic. Even the more remote generalizations feel like they’ve been made before, and these performances are too by the book to transcend their other iterations. Separately, Ortman and Sodman adopt a few outrageous personas, but the comic pairing doesn't feel attuned. Similarly, the early scene work relies heavily on scripted zaniness: the beats safe and underworked, the choices reserved, this is the minimum acceptable qualification for humor. Some of the material is even lifted conspicuously from a classic comic routine, which emphasizes the importance of timing and delivery to its success — and not in the way one would hope.

Click to read more ...

Race

A hot-button criminal case is the impetus for the events of Race, by David Mamet. For the legal firm approached by the accused, what happens is the stuff of buzz words as well as ugliness of the highest post–politically correct order. Yet in the Jewish Ensemble Theatre production directed by Christopher Bremer, however strenuous the conceptual workout, attention to the people in this world returns the largest reward.

Scenic designer Jennifer Maiseloff creates an imposing corporate high-rise setting in shades of gray, backed by a pen-and-ink skyline alive with visible strokes and shading. The depth and detail created with only two shades prove a fitting choice for a play that examines dichotomies: black and white, rich and poor, guilty and innocent, just and profitable. Michael Beyer’s lighting scheme casts a pallor on the artificiality of the surroundings, and Hank Bennett’s superior-jazz sound design elicits a smug happy-hour feel. This is undoubtedly the kind of office where a rich-beyond-measure white man would seek legal counsel in response to a rape accusation made by a black woman.

Click to read more ...

A Stone Carver

William Mastrosimone’s comedy A Stone Carver is as brashly funny as it is affectionately warm and sometimes genuinely exasperating, qualities that are hardly guaranteed to play nice together in a single play. Happily, director Rhiannon Ragland goes into the Purple Rose Theatre Company’s production swinging, balancing a light, humorous tone with growing stakes and no shortage of tender reflection on preserving what we treasure.

The play’s single act is confined to the home of Agostino (Guy Sanville), an Italian-accented widower who lives alone and works in his kitchen: a mostly retired stone carver, his current project for the church is nearly complete. His work is interrupted by the surprise appearance of son Raff (Matthew David), which instinctively triggers a curmudgeonly defensiveness in the father; in fact, both parties approach their visit with distrustful preemption that only exacerbates their frosty familiarity. But the surprises don’t end there: Raff has brought a woman to meet his father, and by the way, they’re engaged. The pert, polished Janice (Charlyn Swarthout) clearly suits Raff’s chosen identity as a successful businessman and aspiring public servant, which is to say, she’s not an instant favorite in this house. Armed with a militia’s store of tactics, Raff angles and angles for some point of concession, but even his ace in the hole — asking his father to do the stone work on the house the couple is building together — proves vulnerable to derision. However, all the nicety and cajoling merely serve to tiptoe around the primary conflict: the only remaining residence for blocks, Agostino is resisting eminent domain, and this is Raff’s last opportunity to peacefully extract his father from his childhood home.

Click to read more ...

The Love List

Playwright Norm Foster rests his hopes for The Love List on its out-of-this-world premise, depositing an inexplicable phenomenon into an otherwise-normal world and charging his characters with making sense of the mystery. In the Tipping Point Theatre production, director Lynn Lammers pushes a luminary cast of three to unearth comedy both within and well beyond the text. For viewers unfamiliar with the shopworn dictum Acting Is Reacting, here is exhibit A+.

In the tradition of the milestone birthday, self-assured Leon (Wayne David Parker) makes much of unassuming Bill’s (Dave Davies) fiftieth. His gift is an unconventional matchmaking service: list your ideal mate’s ten most desired qualities, submit it to the old gypsy woman, and meet your match. The two fill out the list together amid much quibbling, providing an initial scene of pat exposition that establishes Bill’s lonely-nice-guy shtick and Leon’s predatory carnality, the former’s humiliating divorce and the latter’s waning infidelities, as well as their solid friendship of opposites. No sooner do sound designer Julia Garlotte and lighting designer Joel Klain weave in one gentle suggestion that something strange is afoot, but a knock on the door in the wee hours of that same night reveals a stranger (Tina Gloss-Finnell) with the name of an old flame of Bill’s, uncanny knowledge of and closeness to him, and ten suspiciously desirable character traits — as if upon request.

Click to read more ...

A Body of Water

The new Threefold Productions, a partner company in Ypsilanti’s recent Mix Studio development, makes a fractionated first offering in Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water. With artistic director Sarah Lucas at the helm, this inscrutable work stretches into a marathon of beguiling flux, as long on story transformation as it is enigmatically short on answers.

A man and a woman (Lee Stille and Brenda Lane) wake up together and find pertinent details missing from their memories: who are you, who am I, do we know each other, where are we, and how did we get here pretty neatly sums it up. Although this sounds like a potential setup for numerous horror films, there is no such foreboding in the handsome, well-stocked, but empty house on the water, which in the modest Mix space is represented by designer Dustin Miller’s symmetrically pleasing frosted-lit windows and modular furniture. Beginning at square one, or even farther back if that’s possible, he and she make generally polite inroads toward returning to themselves, their exchanges ranging from childlike musing to frustrated fear that something that should be known is unaccounted for. As a pair, Stille and Lane are careful to be amiably elusive, cultivating a rapport that could easily be the nagging patter of an old married couple or, just as believably, the guarded terseness of strangers.

Click to read more ...