M. Butterfly

Playwright David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly takes dual inspiration from a real-life love affair of mistaken identity and from Puccini’s classic Madama Butterfly to piece together a haunting and tragic romance, the truth of which can never be extricated from the weakness of wistful recollection. As directed by Arthur Beer, the Jewish Ensemble Theatre production is romantic indeed, a heady epic that overindulges a bit in its own stately mystique and polished grace.

The introductory scene establishes that protagonist Rene Gallimard (Glen Allen Pruett) is in a French prison, a laughingstock, and of dubious mental faculties. He fell in love with a devoted, feminine beauty that was not as she seemed, and the revelation and attendant shame has cast doubt on his judgment and sanity. Yet he wants nothing more than to retreat back into that fiction, and is eager to show the viewer why. His tale luxuriates in fond reminiscence of time-tested love with opera singer Song Liling (Tae Hoon Yoo), a Chinese national he met while serving as a diplomat in that country in the 1960s. Sarah Tanner’s scenic design is the China of Rene’s mind, a convertible triptych whose moving parts make abrupt scenic transitions as easygoing as an underhand lob (with seamless assistance by AeJay Mitchell and Chin Yang, whose understated presence is in keeping with the traditional Japanese stagehand role of Kurogo). Lights by Jon Weaver play with the negative space of considerable darkness, upon which isolated illuminations and primary-colored backgrounds provide dazzling contrast and variation. Rapid-shifting focal points are always kept clear, highlighted by a visually striking range of costumes and properties (by Mary Copenhagen and Chelsea Burke, respectively) that neatly bisect West and East. Matt Lira layers a phenomenal sound scheme under and throughout the action, cinematically underscoring scenes with ambient fullness and the operatic grandeur of swelling instrumentals. China is Rene’s exotic paradise, in which his influence as a white European man is considerable, power that plays forcefully into his wooing and eventual possession of Song. Yet the woman he believes to be an awed native willing to become his own personal Butterfly — just like his favorite tragic opera — is in fact a man, a fact of which Rene remains assiduously ignorant across the years and continents of their partnership.

Click to read more ...

The Altruists

Do what The Altruists say, not what they do. Master satirist Nicky Silver burrows into the noblest, most corruptible human aspirations and explodes their hypocrisy from the inside, raising hell and hilarity in a deft condemnation of walking, talking double standards. For this Magenta Giraffe Theatre production, the company makes a return visit to Detroit’s Furniture Factory space, where director Molly McMahon brings jackhammer intensity to a scathing comic indictment.

Although the play simultaneously exists in three New York City residences, set designer Adam Crinson keeps the floor plan open to avoid undue crowding in the Furniture Factory space. On an elevated platform is the chicly decorated apartment that soap opera star Sydney (Alysia Kolascz) opens to her lover; one side of the stage is dominated by lonely Ronald’s (Cal M. Schwartz) snug studio; and downstage is the domain of militant Cybil (Jill Dion) and her insistent squalor. With connections kept ambivalent at first, the play’s single rocketing act insidiously draws out how these arenas intersect. It’s a Sunday, which for one location means shouting at a still-sleeping form; for another, a morning-after meet and greet; and for the last, a scramble to prepare for this week’s protest, against…well, whatever it is this time, it’s certainly a good and righteous cause. Although the specific associations start loose and wind ever tighter, it’s clear early on that the characters operate in the same social orbit — they seem to be members of a group of perpetual agitators, taking up whatever causes allow them to act out on behalf of good and right.

Click to read more ...

Red

Red imagines the painter Mark Rothko (Mark Rademacher) near the commercial peak of his career, through the foil of a hired assistant, Ken (Kevin Young). The Performance Network Theatre production is the Michigan premiere of John Logan’s Tony Award–winning script. Under director Carla Milarch and assistant director/designer Monika Essen, this saturated production examines art and philosophy in a fine character portrait, but its underlying study of theater as art form is its secret masterpiece.

Numerous Essen designs have been Performance Network favorites, so those familiar with her work will hardly register surprise that Rothko’s studio is a tactile paradise. What makes the setting superlative is that it is a living, breathing entity: donning new paint spatters and spills as real as the existing ones, housing fully stocked supplies in logical places and miscellany in thoughtless built-up piles, eating up Justin Lang’s brutal-contrast lighting scheme in all its forms. A visual artist herself, Essen’s role as assistant director provides a hint as to the lived-in feel of the studio in action; the performers’ thorough proficiency with the tools of the craft, to say nothing of their absolutely unconscious familiarity with every object in the room, is an essential component of the production’s success. The text of the play lives in rich theory and passionate language, but a dirty fork wiped on a pant leg is engrossing on another level. Although most of the scenes concern scrutiny and discussion of works at various stages of completion, or low-level prep and cleanup, the artists do put paint to canvas, in one astounding wordless scene enhanced by Will Myers’s lyrical sound design.

Click to read more ...

Avenue Q

Adulthood is horrible in every way, save for the refuge of cursing and self abuse. So says Avenue Q (music and lyrics by creators Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx; book by Jeff Whitty), except funnier. Now at the Box Theater, director Kevin Fitzhenry leads a talented cast and their bevy of puppets appendages-deep into an unsanctioned (and for good reason) parody of a beloved children’s television show, teaching young adults about the many ways in which life after college completely sucks.

First and foremost, it wouldn’t be Shmesshamee Shmeet without puppets, and designer Mark Konwinski deserves accolades for making the felt and fur fly in this supremely appointed production. At the center of the story is Princeton (Eric Niece), fresh from college and unable to conceive of a world in which New York City isn’t lavishly draping opportunities at his feet. Short on income, he follows the alphabetical Manhattan streets down, getting all the way to Q before finding a sufficiently cheap dump for the misbegotten. There he meets plenty of other deferred dreamers, colorful characters with problems that form teaching moments: pretty, single Kate Monster (Andrea Thibodeau) is fed up with anti-monster prejudice and wants to open a school especially for her kind; whereas roommates Rod (Niece again) and Nicky (Steve Xander Carson) have a question mark hanging over their hetero best friendship. Overall, the puppeteer-actors strike a fine balance between creating believable entities and developing empathetic characters. Niece makes for a winning leading man, carrying two major roles with staggering ease and winning the viewer over with expressive singing. A solid vocalist with fine timing, Thibodeau’s best work is as the uninhibited jiggly cabaret singer Lucy; her Kate declines to heighten the expected beats of a neurotic romantic lead. Great vocal range and mimicry only accounts for half of Carson’s impressively familiar-sounding performance, paired with puppet mastery in an amazing partnership with Tim Stone. Whether in tandem work on the same puppet or as a duo of bad-influence bears, they make it easy to forget the black-clad actors supplying these expressive voices and movements — some of which, it must be reiterated, are not remotely appropriate for younger ears and eyes.

Click to read more ...

Raven's Seed

Outdoor productions are already a relative rarity in Michigan, but what sets Raven’s Seed apart is its added mobile element. Matrix Theatre’s unique take on playwright Stephen Most’s script travels outside, inside, and at a handful of locales within a generous block of the company’s permanent home; the bold choice brings stark focus to director Shaun Nethercott’s didactic calamity of worlds colliding.

A communion of archetypal animals populates the establishing outdoor scenes. They speak in ominous tones about the nuclear facility looming upriver, in whose proximity tough Bear (Krista Schafer) contracted an illness that mystifies impertinent healer Coyote (Maurizio Rosas-Dominguez), and whose effect on the water is being felt by the likes of graceful Sturgeon (Matios Simonian). The others warn burgeoning leader Raven (Rodolfo Villareal) away from investigating the human intrusion, including generous pauses to reference origin myths: when darkly off-kilter Loon (Schafer, in a dual role) razed the early world, and when plucky Raven — or, technically, his ancestor — stole the sun from its captors at the expense of his plumage. Masked by oversized puppet heads, skillfully woven and crafted of natural materials, the actors use generous, committed movement to embody the animals’ physical selves and offset their unchanging faces. Nethercott lends these earthen scenes a reverent pace, filling them with old-world grandeur.

Click to read more ...