boom

Oh, Craigslist. Just look at what you've done.

As the instigating event of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom, a vague online personal ad brings Jo (Jaye Stellini) to Jules's (Jeffery J. Steger) bomb-shelter basement laboratory/apartment seeking anonymous sex. (Red flags, anyone?) Indeed, what happens goes well beyond any convention of boy meets girl: Jules, believing a comet is about to wipe out the human race, seals them together in the lab, hoping to convince Jo to be the Eve to his Adam. As each worst-case scenario is somehow trumped by an even worse one, this Breathe Art Theatre Project comedy (directed by Diane Hill) cleanly cycles through genres with each added piece of context, from opposites-attract first date to threatening hostage situation to animals refusing to mate in captivity to abject post-apocalyptic hopelessness. For that's the really funny thing about Jules's catastrophic prediction…he was right.

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Season In Review — Breathe Art Theatre Project

The most obvious characteristic that makes Breathe Art Theatre Project unique is its status as one of the only "cross-border" companies on the continent. Each production this season enjoyed a three-weekend run in downtown Detroit's Furniture Factory, then packed up for a final weekend at Windsor's Mackenzie Hall. The company scaled back somewhat with only three productions this season: one story of a man whose whole world fits in four walls, one of a young girl living exclusively in her imagination, and one of a decimated city whose residents' ruination seems far from over.

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BoxFest Detroit 2010

BoxFest Detroit 2010 is the latest installment in an ever-growing enterprise to support and encourage women directors in the metro Detroit theater community. This year's festival is marked by the promotion of longtime collaborator Molly McMahon to artistic director, accompanied by Kelly Rossi's return as executive director. Both are omnipresent at the Furniture Factory performance space, swapping shifts at the box office with other festival directors. The participants' eagerness to help events run smoothly is evident — among the volunteers manning the concessions counter is Frannie Shepherd-Bates, artistic director of Magenta Giraffe Theatre, which is playing host to the festival. The prevailing sense is one of overlap between the people actively involved in the plays and the people making the machine run, as well as joy in what they've brought to fruition.

Over the years, the BoxFest Detroit franchise has grown from a single evening of short plays to a three-week festival with a complicated schedule of six individual programming blocks. It has become literally too much theater to see in a single day — I know, because I tried. Short plays are fascinating and fun to dissect because they can create strange, special worlds without having to sustain them; the seventeen of this year's festival are no exception, but the sheer number limits my capacity to describe each as fully as it deserves.

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Season In Review — Magenta Giraffe Theatre Co.

The first full season by Magenta Giraffe Theatre Co. capitalized on its youth. As an emerging presence growing its audience, the company made the most of its low overhead and embraced the unorthodox. Under the framework of a titanic mission statement to "eliminate apathy, violence, prejudice, and barriers to education," the organization is young enough that its founders seem to still be burning through pet projects, fueled by unabated passion and absolute freedom to choose what inspires them. For the most part, they managed to balance the exhilaration of expression with the accessibility needed to keep viewers attuned.

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Love Bombing After the Earthquake

Demetri Vacratsis's Love Bombing After the Earthquake is not intentionally timely; there is no sense of Breathe Art Theatre Project capitalizing on recent global devastation. The predominant theme is grief — as much as these characters' environment has seen little rebuilding, the arrest and dysfunction in their emotional states are far more troublesome. The original script, also directed by Vacratsis, methodically digs into the ruins of four survivors to find whatever gasping, pulsing motivation remains to drive their damaged decisions.

The play starts with a bang, which grows into a rumble. In a precursor to a production filled with unsettling sounds, the four actors use the furniture and the concrete floor to simulate an earthquake to surprising effect. Fast forward one year, to parallel stories that begin as if at the edge of a canvas and creep toward an illuminating center. A wife is dead; a child is dead. A man is detained for questioning, but where and by what authority seems uncertain. A woman abandons everything that remained of her life in favor of perpetual reminiscence. One story appears much more dynamic than the other, but both are essential to the feel of this intense production.

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