Engagement Rules

Detroit Repertory Theatre refers to playwright Rich Orloff’s Engagement Rules as a comedy. Indeed, in this world-premiere production directed by Bruce E. Millan, the opening scenes — and many following — play that way, with seemingly harmless character differences leading to nonthreatening conflicts. However, the story that unfolds involves themes both heavy and profound, lending a slight but persistent tonal dissonance to the playwright’s study of clashing values and hard-earned communication and compromise.

The younger of the play’s two couples, Donna (Kelly Komlen) and Tom (Charlie Newhart), have an enviable connection that sparks from their first intimate moments onstage. Newly engaged, the pair’s fresh young passion is contrasted with the decades-married complacency and routine of their closest friends, empty nesters Rose (Trudy Mason) and Phil (Harold Uriah Hogan). The women used to be colleagues at an organization championing women’s rights until Donna took up the law school track; all four are established as gym buddies, conveniently making way for numerous Donna/Rose and Tom/Phil locker room scenes that add perspective and depth to the expected Mars and Venus material. There’s a lowest-common-denominator feel to the short opening vignettes, in which every beat is played with flinty contention straight out of a sitcom, regardless of whether it suits the nature of the conversation. Overall, the comic perspective works better for the misaligned Rose and Phil; as performers, Mason and Hogan have a field day blithely failing to connect, and every one of Hogan’s begrudging punchlines is a winner.

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Looking for the Pony

A play about cancer, a play about unbelievable fortitude, a play about unique family bonds — none of these in itself is rare. What is exceptional, and on full display in Detroit Repertory Theatre’s Looking for the Pony, is a production whose every component works harmoniously in service of a singular, remarkable vision.

The play’s premise is laid bare in its unusual title: sisters Lauren (Lisa Lauren Smith) and Oisie (Yana Levovna) are the kind of people who, given a mountain of horse crap, see nothing but equine promise, and they’re ever-ready to get their hands dirty in search of the prize. Here, the excrement of the fable takes the form of Lauren’s breast cancer, which emerges abruptly and is fought aggressively, with surprising mirth and no shortage of loving support. Yet it’s a credit to this show, and to director Charlotte Leisinger, that cancer hardly feels like the sole fact of the play; rather, it’s an unfortunate but reliable way of marking the passage of time in their already-full lives, be it Oisie’s graduate writing program across the country or Lauren’s full-time social work, passionate fundraising, and role as Supermom. Even when energies flag or the outlook is dire, these women have vigor and pluck to spare, and the tender, cherished relationship they share provides reason enough to keep fighting.

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Forgiving John Lennon

William Missouri Downs’s Forgiving John Lennon is designed to provoke a reaction from its audience. There’s no one desired effect, the play is too diverse and open-ended for that, but that the viewer will react — strongly — is almost certain. In its world-premiere production, the Detroit Repertory Theatre and director Harry Wetzel use twisted comedy as an entry point into a minefield of well-intentioned prejudice and misguided political correctness, blurring perceptions of acceptable and taboo.

The plot is centered around Asma (Yolanda Jack), a Muslim poet invited from Somalia to deliver readings and speeches at a few New England colleges. In the home of her eager hosts, professors Joseph and Katie (Benjamin J. Williams and Leah Smith), wide-eyed Asma’s awkwardly pointed comments (emerging from literal interpretations of English phrases and an outsider’s perfectly logical deductive reasoning) are effusively smoothed over and preemptively forgiven by this almost aggressively tolerant couple. The foreigner iteration of “kids say the darndest things” is an old device, but it works here in light of Asma’s enormous insight and Jack’s playful reactions as she politely endures Katie and Joseph’s meager hospitality and quietly enjoys pointing out their ideological inconsistencies and being smarter than they give her credit for. She isn’t Borat by a long shot (although these scenarios are certainly funny); her questions originate from fearless inquisitiveness rather than ignorance.

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A Lesson Before Dying

There are few real surprises in Romulus Linney’s stage adaptation of the Ernest J. Gaines novel A Lesson Before Dying, but they’re not necessary in a story that shocks and dismays simply by playing out exactly as the viewer would expect. At the play’s opening, the young Jefferson (Gabriel Johnson) is already on death row, but fear and institutionalized inequities in the Jim Crow South keep anyone from challenging the verdict; even an explicit did-he-do-it conversation in the second act feels like no more than a mournful intellectual exercise. In this world, it’s accepted as fact that a black man standing close by when a white man is murdered is as good as dead. When his own public defender uses the gangly metaphor of a hog to be slaughtered as a plea for clemency, Jefferson seizes on that one word — hog — and turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, shutting down and merely waiting for the day he’ll be dragged to the electric chair.

His guardian, Miss Emma (Barbara Jacobs-Smith), wisely realizes the only thing Jefferson can now control is how he chooses to face his fate, and she recruits the boy’s former teacher, Grant Wiggins (Harold Hogan), to instill a manly sense of dignity in the condemned. Already struggling with his vocation at a rural plantation school and sustaining a cautious relationship with another teacher, the still-married Vivian Baptiste (Angela King), Grant thinks only of leaving the doldrums of his surroundings to accomplish better and more important things elsewhere. Nobody should be surprised that Grant needs to learn a lesson as much as Jefferson does, but the way it plays out in this Detroit Repertory Theatre production, directed by Barbara Busby, peels back futility to reveal the power of pride in the face of oppression.

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A Strange Disappearance of Bees

Family, community, devotion, and apiculture are all given their due in playwright Elena Hartwell's A Strange Disappearance of Bees. The world-premiere production by Detroit Repertory Theatre is a strong union of script, direction, and tech, creating a safe-feeling yet emotionally vulnerable journey whose honey-drenched heart rarely skips a beat.

Hartwell's script uses bees and beekeeping as a framework as well as a loose metaphor for the events of the play. The central role of bees in the agriculture industry, the symbiotic relationship between the potentially deadly insects and their cultivators, the power of the female in community dynamics, and even the emergence of colony collapse disorder, a real-life threat to bees that lends the show its title, are discussed in monologue form by beekeeper Rud (Milfordean Luster). Time will tell how this highly topical entry point ages, but the connection between Rud's brief lectures and the organically unfolding events of the play are largely complementary. In fact, as directed by Hank Bennett, each element of the story feels integral, which is no small feat.

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