Season's Greetings 2011

The Rogue Critic has embarked on a year-end hiatus until early January. Until then, please enjoy this personal reflection on a Southeast Michigan theatrical institution celebrating its 30th anniversary.

"Why I cannot review A Christmas Carol at Meadow Brook Theatre"

This year has brought many amazing developments, for which I am grateful beyond measure. From a new website to a momentous Wilde achievement to the continuing bounty of the Rogue Critic Gas Card, it's been another unforgettable 365 days, 115 reviews, and 155 theatrical events. Although I'm in need of the break, I'm no less excited to do it all again.

This is Rogue P. Critic, signing off for 2011. See you in the new year!

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The Tempest

After playing host to outside companies and productions at its upstairs venue, the Park Bar Theater now introduces its own producing company and marks the grand opening with a classic take on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Project mastermind, entrepreneur, and venue owner Jerry Belanger also directs the inaugural production, the result of large-scale work and investment that showcases the potential of the space, although its finest achievements of mirth and wonder prove transient rather than continuous.

Now extensively remodeled, the theater represents a Detroit-style makeover of a repurposed raw space: rough walls and exposed conduits are starkly contradicted by a unique teardrop-shaped bar, hardwood floors, and comfortable graduated seating. Any doubts about the technical credentials of the theater are dispersed by sound designers Mikey Brown and Joe Kvoriak’s first cinematically glorious thunderclap and lighting designer Michael Rollo’s inundating lightning. The initial scene throws the audience into the tempest with the passengers and crew of a ship, which founders and casts its inhabitants into the brine — an ingenious set detail by designers Belanger and Rollo helps communicate the mayhem and desperation of tumult at sea that is so difficult to transport to the stage. Unbeknownst to the ship’s inhabitants, who wash up on an island apparently devoid of civilization, this storm was far from a random vagary of the weather. Rather, it was intentionally conjured by the banished duke Prospero (Pat Loos), who has raised daughter Miranda (Katie Terpstra) in seclusion on the island for more than a decade, carefully plotting revenge on his usurpers that is now coming to fruition.

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God of Carnage

If playwright Yasmina Reza writes what she knows, her deliciously brutal God of Carnage (translated from the French by Christopher Hampton) may make viewers relieved not to know her. True, one would be hard-pressed to get embroiled in a battle of infantilism from which there seems to be no escape. But as evidenced by this co-production of Jewish Ensemble Theatre and Performance Network Theatre, with a sublime ensemble wonderfully directed by David J. Magidson, such childishness can be as gratifying to recreate as it is deviously funny to observe.

The instigating event of the play takes place offstage and is perpetrated by characters that never appear. An incident of playground violence between preteen boys prompts the victim’s parents (Sarab Kamoo and Joseph Albright) to invite the attacker’s parents (Suzi Regan and Phil Powers) for an informal conference that will put the matter firmly behind them. Instead, initial apologies and pointedly civil discourse give way to utter amazement that people can simultaneously rise above something and shove it down another’s throat — this is but the first sign that things are not going to go smoothly. What follows is barely polite savagery at best, which continues to devolve (yes, rum is involved) through the play’s single act as the parents lash out at each others’ characters, actions, and attitudes.

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Fugue

The deliberately ambiguous play is as alluring in theory as it is difficult to enact in practice: the production must keep the audience invested in its suspenseful limbo; the script must deliver a payoff satisfactory enough to justify the willful obscurity preceding it. Pitfalls, pretension, and shortcuts to failure pave the way, yet the challenge remains irresistible, largely because of successes like Fugue, now in its world premiere by The New Theatre Project. This haunting, expressive journey by playwright Audra Lord and director T. Luna Alexander wanders with purpose through a murky story abyss, incrementally raising the unease and the stakes as it pushes quirky details into a luridly affecting context.

The word fugue has several meanings, and the interminable miasma of a fugue state is well met by the disquieting atmosphere of the show’s design. Translucent panels neatly subdivide Keith Paul Medelis’s boldly stark setting, with a row of chambers that leave the performers still discernible in offstage holding patterns. In tandem with the unpredictable ambient and downcast lights by designer Janine Woods Thoma and mostly blank costumes by Ben Stange, the colorless surroundings have a curious antiseptic constancy. The presence of a kindly but aloof nurse (Dan Johnson) adds further implication as to the play’s framework, suggestive of a mental health retreat or, more formidably, a psychological experiment. And indeed, the four patients in residence seem well worthy of study, if for no other reason than they can’t remember how they got there — or anything else about themselves.

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It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play

Part of HappenStance Productions’ cachet is in staging solid crowd-pleasing entertainment, but a large proportion lies in choosing projects that agree with the Andiamo Novi upstairs theater that it’s occupied for a string of productions. With the Christmas season in full swing, and most favorite holiday tales requiring expansive casts and settings, the company now takes a winning scaled-down approach to a time-tested classic. With playwright Joe Landry’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, director Aaron T. Moore blends front-and-center character work with backstage magic, putting engaging new packaging on a story many viewers know by heart.

It may be 2011 in the surrounding Italian restaurant and martini lounge, but here it’s December 24, 1946, in the studio of Detroit City radio station WAND. The premise is efficiently established in a few deft strokes, as the sharply attired players welcome the audience to the live broadcast and entertain them with a handful of a cappella carols while making their last-minute preparations for the show. By the time the stage manager calls the countdown and the on-air light toggles on, it’s easy to believe the illusion, especially given the practiced professionalism of this ensemble. The broadcast itself is presented in a single block of three major acts, which are broken up by quick breaks and cute ads from laughable “sponsors.” In all, the show runs less than two hours at a single stretch, quite a bit shy of the original film's running time.

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