The Weir

Raise a glass, bend an ear, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

To close its all-Irish season, The Abreact could not have made a more Irish-for-Irish's sake selection than "The Weir." Beer, whiskey, yarn spinning, and supernatural folklore are the foundation of playwright Conor McPherson's nimbly simple script. However, as abundantly demonstrated here, one ordinary night at the pub – rendered intensely authentic by directors Adam Barnowski, Andrea Smith, and Eric W. Maher – can make for an extraordinarily affecting theater experience.

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Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun

If ever a show were certifiably insane, the world premiere of Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun might be it. At the Abreact performance space, playwright Franco Vitella’s forty-some short comedies provide the springboard for director Frannie Shepherd-Bates’s overripe imagination. The production’s framework morphs these absurdly funny snippets into a farcical torrent of merriment, for which no swipe at humor is off limits.

Vitella’s script is what might happen if David Ives and Anton Chekhov’s respective catalogs had a litter of baby-plays. Fallaciously entrenched in mother Russia, the sketches provide mere flashes of interaction, pared-down glimpses of lives whose extreme agony and malaise are almost apologetically funny in the absence of context. The cast of four (Steve Xander Carson, Jonathan Davidson, Keith Kalinowski, and Kirsten Knisley) dons and drops characters with alacrity, finding life’s little indignities and inconsequential exchanges alike to be positively fraught with meaning. It’s the richest source of parody for this genre, and Vitella skips directly to it several dozen times. A few archetypes and recurring characters slip in for a little sense of order, but not enough to be mistaken for story continuity: there is no plot. Instead, the vignettes prey on the worst, blandest generalizations of Russian storytelling, dabbling in rebellions and thickly accented authority figures. The artifice is intentional, smartly self-aware, and written — and played — strictly for laughs, which it earns in no small measure.

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The Hot Mess Chronicles 3

Leave it to the Abreact to spin a turd into gold: a few Halloweens ago, a last-minute show was assembled to fill an unfortunate scheduling hole, and lo and behold, a series was born. This year’s installment, The Hot Mess Chronicles 3, sees the return of director Mike McGettigan to a new crop of fright-themed plays engineered to surprise and amuse, even as they retain the best of that thrown-together magic.

In true Hot Mess fashion, the episodic play is strung together with introductions by its host; this year, a uniquely outfitted and disembodied-voiced entity known as MR BABY presides from his spot catty-corner to the main stage. The placement, along with Kevin Barron’s lights and quietly creepy sound design by Mike Eshaq, provides enough distraction to let the scene changes feel unobtrusive and gives the production a nice flow. Quick changeovers are crucial for this installment, which has grown from four to eight short plays by a total of nine playwrights. This year’s selection features a number of scenes that deliver a quick one-two, just enough setup to enact a change-up ending: Ron Morelli’s “Yard Sale of the Damned” infuses an ominous tone into a humdrum transaction, Joe Becker’s “Player V Player” lies in the safety of two guys playing video games, and Dave Davies’s “A Family Feature” fires off a punchline in its suggestively grotesque resolution. A longer second-act piece, Bill McGettigan’s “The Wreck of the Minerva Witherspoon,” takes its time maneuvering toward a gruesome fate, giving its construction-worker characters a long leadup full of probably important but ultimately foggy details.

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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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Season In Review — The Abreact

Even with a decade of experience behind it, a show at the Abreact remains an encounter unlike any other. This season’s landmark tenth anniversary marked the theater’s second year at a new location, as always in the heart of Detroit, but nobody would mistake the shift as a step toward the mainstream. Now, patrons are buzzed into the Lafayette Lofts building only to discover that the theater space actually spans two apartments: one a black-box studio whose seating is peppered with accumulated armchairs and couches, the other a small lobby, stocked with liquid refreshments, that doubles as a private residence. And just as the company invites viewers into its figurative and literal home, with a characteristic blend of offbeat modern classics, obscure titles, and new works, this season it invited viewers into its many worlds for as close a look as they could stand.

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