Oh, Hell!

With an inspired double bill, the Abreact pals around with the old serpent in the theater’s season opener, collectively titled Oh, Hell! The common denominator of the play’s two acts by famous American writers is the devil, in form and fable. With both halves directed by Charles Reynolds, the other throughline is a wry wit that bursts with hilarity and bumps up the intrigue.

The first act is David Mamet’s bonus feature of sorts for one of his best-known characters: Bobby Gould in Hell. Relatively dissolute from the earthbound reality of Speed-the-Plow, the genesis of Bobby Gould, here Adam Barnowski’s morally unbound powerful man butts heads with the horned Interrogator (Joel Mitchell), debating the good-person-or-bad-person judgment that will determine his fate. The action takes place in some netherworld’s waiting room/courtroom/trophy room, which set designer Eric Maher and lighting designer Kevin Barron flesh out with charming surprises. Mitchell takes a pointedly chatty, inconsequential approach to what are actually rapid-fire tactical offenses, as his character employs every method in the book to entrap his prey. He even summons witness Glenna (Katie Galazka), who — true to the conniving Mamet woman — runs away with the interrogation with her maddening, impenetrable woman-logic.

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The Light in the Piazza

The Encore Musical Theatre Company explores a different kind of “classic” musical, transporting the viewer to the Continental classicism of The Light in the Piazza (book by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel). The musical’s tale of pure love in the face of distance and disapproval is also an old one, but rich vocal performances of a lyrical score are evocative of newness. Moreover, as directed by Steve DeBruyne, the show complements its storybook tone with indulgent design as well as big comic gestures.

Splendid production values are a highlight of this production, bringing literal and representative details to various locales in 1953 Italy. Rarely are set and lighting design (courtesy of Toni Auletti and Matthew Tomich, respectively) implemented with such exceptional teamwork; a column effect lends a sense of open space befitting an Italian piazza, while at the same time evoking various architectural and cultural landmarks as called for by the script. The mid-twentieth century period comes to life in detailed and impressively accessorized costume design (by Sharon Larkey Urick, with hair and makeup by Cara Manor), and Eileen Obradovich’s properties lend credence to interior scenes in the absence of walls or much furniture. The effect is ancient, artistic, and romantic all at once, entirely befitting the tone of the play. And this is to say nothing of The Encore's new amplification setup, conveying every lyric clear as a bell. (The mikes are almost too good, requiring the viewer to tune out footfalls and rustling costumes; however, the adjustment is minor, and it's a far superior predicament to straining to hear lines of dialogue or song.)

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The Whipping Man

At the close of the Civil War, citizens of the ravaged South were in upheaval: depending on their skin color, either their former wealth and lifestyle was toppled, or they faced an exciting but daunting new world of rights and responsibilities. Playwright Matthew Lopez imagines a singular fallout in The Whipping Man, a co-production of Jewish Ensemble Theatre and Plowshares Theatre. Directed by Gary Anderson, artistic director of the latter company, this production plunges into the social issues surrounding it, but hits home with the palpable anguish of its magnificently portrayed personal stakes.

On the heels of the Confederate surrender in April 1965, rebel officer Caleb (Rusty Mewha) returns wounded to his home, where newly emancipated slave Simon (Council Cargle) recognizes the severity of his former master’s gangrene and rightly insists on amputation. The elephant in the room — this white-hot power shift among privileged Caleb, nurturing Simon, and the wild-card return of former slave John (Scott Norman) — is magnified in the face of a medical emergency (and subsequent convalescence) that leaves Caleb in no position to protest. After the events of the first turbulent night, the physical squeamishness lets up, allowing an unrelenting but handily earned emotional discomfort to take its place. No ramification is left unexamined, from the freed men’s motives for staying in the house of their oppression, to the hypocrisy of their shared Jewish faith being passed down by mandate from owner to slave, to the fallacy of Caleb’s hollow justification that — compared with the horrors of plantation work — his family treated their slaves with fondness and fairness. Much is made of John’s opportunistic looting of the abandoned homes surrounding them, an exorbitant expression of his freedom that previously would have gotten him sent to the titular whipping man; at another extreme, Simon’s caretaking of Caleb is at once a triumph of human compassion and an open question without an easy answer.

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Heroes

Sometimes, people are not the conflict; sometimes it’s the passage of time itself, or other circumstances beyond our control. What is so often overlooked in drama is that we don’t necessarily rail against these things; sometimes we observe, and accede, and it’s not necessarily a surrender. This is the essence of the excellent Heroes, adapted and translated from Gerald Sibleyras’s Le Vent De Peupliers by playwright Tom Stoppard. Neither a return to the trenches nor a weary white flag, the Stormfield Theatre production examines a trio of war veterans in the autumn of their years; under the direction of Kristine Thatcher, thoughtful performances and winning teamwork make for an experience as captivating as it is fond and warm.

In August 1959, in a nun-staffed veterans military hospital in the French countryside, residents Philippe (Richard Marlatt), Gustave (Gary Houston), and Henri (Richard Henzel) pass the time together on the remote back terrace. Their histories, ages, injuries, and time spent convalescing are all different — whereas tender Henri has nursed his bum leg for over a decade, randy Philippe increasingly feels the effects of a remnant of shrapnel; bristly Gustave boasts of his return to the service in 1940s Paris, but reveals no evidence of any wound from either World War. They spend time together by choice, and although petty disagreements serve to pass the time, their friendship is evident; it proves easy to like these men because of how readily they like each other. Curiously, one of their main points of commonality is a leftover military mentality, a shared language upon which they draw to protect their turf from interlopers or to strategize approaching a pretty young woman seen around town. Over scenes spanning several weeks, everyday activities and larger developments all serve as portals into the men’s separate characters and philosophies, as everything from a fellow patient’s birthday party to the fate of an ornamental stone dog sheds light on their psyches.

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The Mystery of Irma Vep

The conceit of The Mystery of Irma Vep is also its main selling point: two performers do the work of at least six, exiting the stage as one character and emerging moments later as another. At face value, the Tipping Point Theatre production directed by James R. Kuhl is a cavalcade of wild and often otherworldly scenarios engineered for maximum far-reaching parody and meta jokes. The drawback of playwright Charles Ludlam’s script is that it doesn’t aspire to anything deeper — the purpose of this sprinting two-act comedy seems to be sleight of hand for its own sake; yet without anything to mask, the effect is of an extended parlor trick, however amusing or adept.

The preeminent draw of this production is the duo of Brian P. Sage and Kevin Young, who collectively portray all half-dozen or so characters. With all the boisterousness of a door-slamming farce, the pair evokes the feel of a busy household amid a circus of quick changes — it’s telling that the run crew (Caitlyn Macuga, Natividad Salgado, and Katie Terpstra) is larger than the cast. Consistently at the fore of the production is gentle mockery of the restrictions and conventions of live theater as well as the monster-thriller genre, but Young and Sage double down with extravagant character work and playful give and take. Both have fun in male roles, Sage as the masculine hunter-adventurer and Young as a lecherous stable grunt, but they really shine with inelegant female characterizations — Sage’s housekeeper Jane plots and orchestrates with madly imperious resentment, and Young’s tittering Lady Enid is an encyclopedia of physical tics deployed with a kind of secret precision. Exhausting staging works best in a cavalcade of little flourishes outside the text, both self-referential and blindingly oblivious.

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