Roaming Charges

“A poem should not mean/But be.” This succinct closing couplet of Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” could double as the thesis statement for the fluid Roaming Charges by Ralph Accardo, now in its world premiere at Detroit Repertory Theatre. Although this carefully constructed fable of poets and poetry raises its share of compelling issues, these occupy a largely thematic space in director Charlotte Leisinger’s interpretation, which seeks above all to approvingly draw out the lyricism in a voluble, very-free-verse text.

The play begins with a conversation between an older white woman, Kate (Leah Smith), and a young black teen, Lacey (Kristin Dawn-Dumas), when the latter comes over to use the former’s backyard swings. The two are by turns open and secretive as they get to know each other’s wounds and boundaries — Kate’s empty nest, Lacey’s dissatisfying home life, and the unspeakable terminal illnesses that touch both. But they are closest bound by the childhood activities that the younger teaches the elder, like the proper form for swinging and jumping rope, and by the poems about Kate that Lacey produces, which are preternaturally sophisticated for a girl her age. As their relationship strengthens, encouragement and praise begins to take on a tenor of surrogate parenting, in which Dawn-Dumas’s precocious open-endedness has an intriguing manipulative undertone, and Smith is believably swept up against all better angels as a salve against the hollowness of her grief. Meanwhile, elsewhere in space and time, a published black poet and academic (Chevonne M. Wilson) strives alone against unseen forces — within and without — to recapture the voice that once made her a prodigy and to get hired for better reasons than infuriating tokenism.

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A Thousand Circlets

At its heart, A Thousand Circlets is a story of dementia. Playwright Theroun D’Arcy Patterson’s ambitious work also seeks to examine the ripple effects felt throughout the lives touched by the disease. True to this phenomenon referenced in the title, the Midwest-premiere production by Detroit Repertory Theatre, under director Leah Smith, is profoundly affecting at its sensory epicenter, with emotional resonance that regresses as it radiates choppily outward.

It starts with something innocuous: Earl (Harold Hogan), a celebrated architect, stares in the mirror, unable to remember the series of movements that will let him tie his necktie. His wife, Liz (Connie Cowper), downplays and masks the occurrence with panicked dismissals that are at least as telling as his confusion. Something is clearly wrong with Earl — even as he approaches the ultimate career milestone, a commissioned skyscraper design, his mind and memory are becoming increasingly unreliable, which is brought into stark relief by Burr Huntington’s instructively dissonant sound design. Together with slippery light cues by designer Thomas Schraeder, the concept patterns past and present stories at cross purposes with a deliberate randomness that conveys the confusion and helplessness of the encroaching malady with blatant efficacy. Rather than merely watch Earl deteriorate, the viewer is pointed directly through his obscured and distorted lens, a palpable force that proves to be the production’s greatest strength.

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Postcards

“A man is what a man does.” Spoken early and with heady conviction, this would appear to be the thesis statement of Postcards. The power in the platitude comes from its simplicity, but, as examined by playwright Bill Costanza, it’s an assertion that grows intractable with time and context. “A man is what a man did”; “A man is what a man regrets” — how much weight should a deplorable past bear? In the world premiere production at Detroit Repertory Theatre, director Barbara Busby makes unwaveringly clear the wrongness of an appalling chapter of the American past, while at the same time raising intriguing questions about the long-lasting consequences of the unconscionable.

The play begins in the New York City of 1954, in a small apartment where Hattie McLendon (Cassaundra Freeman) and Rachel (Jacquie Floyd) discuss a mutual acquaintance, whose absence from the scene is conspicuously felt. With the halting allusion people use to speak of the unspeakable, the women lay down just enough of a mysterious framework to begin filling in the biographical blanks of white photographer Alvin Moseby (Dax Anderson). The Alvin of ’54 is at the forefront of the jazz scene, obsessively documenting future greats on the rise (a fervor that similarly informs Burr Huntington’s luscious sound design). But to understand the whole story is to follow Alvin back to 1939 Shiloh, Tennessee, to his marriage with Loretta (Kelly Komlen), and to the origin of an unremarkable box labeled “Postcards,” whose devastating contents have followed and haunted him throughout his life.

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Dead and Buried

Director Harry Wetzel takes an intriguing fractured approach to playwright James McLindon’s Dead and Buried. Now in its world premiere at Detroit Repertory Theatre, this story of a team of graveyard caretakers pushes its tones to the brink. Yes, that’s tones, plural: Wetzel gambles on the strength of the show’s disparate scenes, rather than aiming for a single mood unfocused enough to unify them. Sure enough, by making each interaction the best it can be, the unorthodox approach pays off in a show that is as hysterically funny as it is weightily dramatic as it is spookily supernatural.

The story begins with seventeen-year-old Perdue (Lulu Dahl), a solitary newcomer to a New England town who pursues the first available job she finds: gravedigger. As the scowling young upstart, Dahl resonates with world-weary independence and spits daggers of cynicism, bitterly resisting the best efforts of employer Bid (Charlotte Leisinger) and coworker Robbie (Benjamin J. Williams) to befriend and earn trust. Yet these are long hours to pass in the respectful company of the dead, and McLindon gently uses instruction as a byway to interaction in Perdue’s workplace scenes. Indeed, Wetzel’s set design includes a large expanse of cemetery, a wonderful hilly abstraction that gives the illusion of size and slope. The place becomes different things at different times: sometimes a quiet refuge for reflection and comfort, sometimes a piece of land to be cultivated, and sometimes (in concert with overstated lighting and sound design by Thomas Schraeder and Burr Huntington, respectively) a macabre emptiness of shivering fear.

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Burying the Bones

The saying goes that the truth will set you free, but nowhere is it written that the endeavor will be painless. Playwright M.E.H. Lewis uses the lens of South African apartheid to examine the dually harmful and healing capacities of truth in the wake of atrocity in Burying the Bones. In the Michigan premiere at Detroit Repertory Theatre, director Leah Smith fearlessly probes the staggering cost of revelation; the evocative and thorny result is a demonstration that in spite of the human tendency to seek liberation in redemption and forgiveness, our most noble attempts to correct past wrongs remain agonizingly imperfect and incomplete.

Two years after the democratic election of Nelson Mandela marks the beginning of the end of apartheid, the effects of institutionalized injustices and insurgent struggles still sting throughout the populace. It is 1996, and Mae Mxenges (Monica J. Palmer) is troubled nightly by the apparition of her missing husband, schoolteacher James (Lynch R. Travis). The visage claims to be his haunting spirit and implores her to retrieve and bury his remains; she, in turn, dismisses the presence as merely a bad dream bent on tricking her into believing that her husband is dead. The intimate confrontations between the two are often hindered by the actors’ faint hesitance regarding verbal and physical contact: the push-pull of Travis’s insistence on spousal familiarity against Palmer’s warring feelings of disbelief and longing strains to reach a comfortable groove of give and take between the performers. Nevertheless, Mae is convinced to inquire about James’s disappearance, and her subsequent journey toward the truth is fascinating and devastating enough to reward the viewer’s intellectual and emotional investment.

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