Twelfth Night

With its third comedy in as many months, the Blackbird Theatre’s Shakespeare West festival now bends Twelfth Night to its counterculture will. The show’s carefree decadence nestles intriguingly into the perspective of free love and rollicking social change, but palpable rough edges and pitfalls keep the story from reaching far-out heights. The drawbacks are most likely suggestive of time constraints on the part of director Barton Bund and company, a reminder that the young festival’s learning curve remains steep.

Disparity reigns in the play’s several plots, bridged by common characters but not often intersecting; the cast of twelve appears in small groups of limited permutation. Playing hub to these many spokes is Viola (Diviin Huff), washed ashore alone on the island of Illyria and forced to pass as a man out of self preservation. As “Cesario,” Viola enters the service of the duke Orsino (Sean Sabo) and is sent on his behalf to court the countess Olivia (Marisa Dluge); thanks to the gender reversal, the three form a perfect unrequited-love triangle. Huff’s intelligent and able Viola is a likable protagonist; opposite her, Sabo’s best work is not as a lover, but as a uncomprehending, patronizing confidante, and indulgent Dluge’s amazement at her own infatuation is quite fun. Olivia is also sought after by her humorlessly aspirational servant Malvolio (Bund), who becomes the target of a team of perpetually wasted ne’er-do-wells — Dan Johnson, Danny Friedland, and Qmara Peaches Black join forces in revelry to form a riotous peanut gallery. Elsewhere, Viola’s twin brother is less dead than his sister believes (and vice versa); he’s also markedly less identical than the plot requires.

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Boxfest Detroit 2011

The spotlight once again turns to the woman director for BoxFest Detroit 2011, a mixture of the familiar and the new. Artistic director Molly McMahon and executive director Kelly Rossi return to the festival, once again making the most of the Furniture Factory space and its limitless permutations of rolling blue flats. Ten new plays, some helmed by BoxFest Detroit veterans and some by first-time directors, bring opportunities and challenges for playwrights, directors, and performers alike, and the festival’s festive atmosphere again prevails.

The short plays are a little longer this year; although the basic “box” system of programming blocks remains intact, the pacing has changed. Whereas last year’s boxes were mostly populated with a triptych of lightning-fast one-acts, this year finds the majority of boxes with just two plays. It’s a more than acceptable variation, as the longer fifteen- to twenty-minute intermissions between boxes are well met by a supply of donations-encouraged beer, wine, and concessions, and the pressure feels ever so slightly loosened for stage manager Meghan Lynch and assistant stage manager Jon Pigott to keep things running on time. If there’s any melee, it’s occurring behind the scenes — the spacious lobby has a welcoming and jovial atmosphere, great for engaging conversations with the directors and performers and retrospection on this year’s ten offerings.

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The Tempest

Water Works Theatre Company isn’t the first of Michigan’s companies to honor The Tempest on its quadricentennial anniversary, but an organization whose hallmark is a single Shakespeare-in-the-park production every year can hardly be blamed for seizing the opportunity. For what it’s worth, the outdoor production in Royal Oak’s Starr Jaycee Park is thus far unique in its creative and high-tech focus on the magical and superhuman elements of William Shakespeare’s final play. As was abundantly evident to this reviewer even at the production’s first preview performance, Water Works Artistic Director Jeff Thomakos helms the current production with a flair for the theatrical, using fantasy and spectacle to perform sorcery in plain sight.

Front and center in this telling are the design and technical elements that highlight the inexplicable capabilities of the desert island under rule of the banished Prospero (Paul Hopper). In particular, Nina Barlow’s exhaustive mask work is executed with purpose, serving as a physical talisman of a creature touched by magic. Notably, Prospero’s servant Caliban (Rusty Mewha) dons a single mask, a source of vile fascination to which the actor layers on incredible simian physicality. In contrast, the changeling spirit Ariel (Sara Catheryn Wolf) wears a half-dozen faces to suit the text, each variably informing a solid performance founded on curious approximations of human interaction and animal-like loyalty. The action also extends into vertical space, in the form of visible rigging that suspends characters several feet above the stage. The effect is best implemented with a hovering trio of spirits (Jaclyn Strez, Samantha White, and Katie Terpstra), a constant and mysterious reminder of the magic influences of the island in addition to one of many gorgeous stage pictures.

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Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare West’s inaugural season continues with a stylishly contemporary Much Ado About Nothing. In keeping with the Blackbird Theatre’s penchant for pushing the limits of adaptations, this production, adapted and directed by Brian Carbine, plays with gender roles and musical showmanship to give a modern spin to a pair of comic love stories.

Among the primary conceits of this staging is the reverse-gender casting, most notably romantically pairing two women in Beatrice (Diviin Huff) and Benedick (Emily Patton-Levickas) and two men in Hero (Forrest Hejkal) and Claudio (Maxim Hunt). This is a full, pronoun-changing choice — not a woman in the guise of a man, but rather Lady Benedick and Lord Hero, in every respect addressed and considered as such. Carbine and his cast play the bulk of the story faithfully, making the same-sex relationships feel less like the entire point of the production and rather an unremarkable fact. In fact, just as interesting is the reverberating effect on the platonic and familial relationships surrounding the main couples: instead of the men and women conferring separately, only crossing the divide to pair off and marry, Hejkal and Huff are closest confidantes, and Patton-Levickas sufficiently justifies a female Benedick’s supposed revulsion of women by comfortably dude-ing it up with the guys. Occasionally, the text staunchly refuses to bend to the choice, or the staging gets mired in the device, but these are ultimately forgivable in the face of a well-propelled narrative and moments of sweet discovery.

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The Tempest

Never one to tiptoe into a new frontier, the Blackbird Theatre gallops onto the summer festival scene with Shakespeare West, a heady months-long celebration of the Bard. In its inaugural offering, The Tempest, the company plunges headlong into a new outdoor venue and, happily, takes the outside play as an invitation to play outside. With is lively, exploratory staging and focus on the passion of the text, this self-described "Shakespeariment" takes the reflection and wisdom of the playwright's final work and layers on a youthful surge of innovation.

The playing space is a permanent structure in Ann Arbor’s newly restored West Park, with a carefully landscaped marshy expanse separating the band shell from the gently sloping seating area, and a second playing space between (probably used as a dance floor in other applications). Under the direction of Lynch Travis, the two divided planes are envisioned as a massive natural playground, with the actors pushing through thigh-high grasses and climbing atop stones as characters navigate the hostile-seeming, untamed island where banished Prospero (Barton Bund) has orchestrated revenge upon the men who usurped his dukedom a dozen years hence.

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