The Maids

It's all in how you play the game, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Lamentably postponed and long anticipated, Magenta Giraffe Theatre's production of "The Maids" (by Jean Genet, translated by Bernard Frechtman) is categorically worth the wait. Closing the season with a daring ideological text that harkens back to the company's initial production of Sartre's "No Exit," director Frannie Shepherd-Bates use cresting tension and the crucial force of opposites to dabble in a dangerous game and see it through to mind-bending ends.

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Soul Mates

Unbreakable bonds, unbeatable connections, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

At once simple and complex, Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company's "Soul Mates" delivers variations on a theme, with a gentle but insistent twist. This world premiere – the first professional production for emerging local playwright Kirsten Knisely – is an ambitious piece that seeks to blend the freedom of isolated two-person vignettes with the intricacy of meticulously planned links that tell a larger story. Here, backed by a sharply considered concept and the evident accord of a gifted ensemble, director Frannie Shepherd-Bates wisely focuses on the rewarding connections of the play's diverse array of soul mate relationships, allowing the burgeoning web of connectedness to speak for itself.

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The Altruists

Do what The Altruists say, not what they do. Master satirist Nicky Silver burrows into the noblest, most corruptible human aspirations and explodes their hypocrisy from the inside, raising hell and hilarity in a deft condemnation of walking, talking double standards. For this Magenta Giraffe Theatre production, the company makes a return visit to Detroit’s Furniture Factory space, where director Molly McMahon brings jackhammer intensity to a scathing comic indictment.

Although the play simultaneously exists in three New York City residences, set designer Adam Crinson keeps the floor plan open to avoid undue crowding in the Furniture Factory space. On an elevated platform is the chicly decorated apartment that soap opera star Sydney (Alysia Kolascz) opens to her lover; one side of the stage is dominated by lonely Ronald’s (Cal M. Schwartz) snug studio; and downstage is the domain of militant Cybil (Jill Dion) and her insistent squalor. With connections kept ambivalent at first, the play’s single rocketing act insidiously draws out how these arenas intersect. It’s a Sunday, which for one location means shouting at a still-sleeping form; for another, a morning-after meet and greet; and for the last, a scramble to prepare for this week’s protest, against…well, whatever it is this time, it’s certainly a good and righteous cause. Although the specific associations start loose and wind ever tighter, it’s clear early on that the characters operate in the same social orbit — they seem to be members of a group of perpetual agitators, taking up whatever causes allow them to act out on behalf of good and right.

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Rosmersholm

Politics in this country have become inseparable from political theater. Decades-ago drug experimentation, offhand allusions to witchcraft, and dalliances with young up-and-comers on the campaign trail and in office are doggedly sought out, exhaustively distributed, and used by the opposition to cast aspersions onto a public figure’s entire character and ability to lead. What’s worse, we didn’t even come up with it ourselves — it’s all right there in master dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, written in 1886 in response to the divisive political climate in his home country of Norway. Now in a rare production by Magenta Giraffe Theatre at Detroit’s 1515 Broadway, with direction by Frannie Shepherd-Bates, the story of a man conscripted into the public arena at his own peril proves as hyperbolically dire as it is disarmingly prescient.

Jon Ager is Johannes Rosmer, a well-respected clergyman who has removed himself from the public eye after his mentally unstable wife drowned herself within view of the front parlor window. His sense of home and order comes in the form of Rebecca West (Alysia Kolascz), who came to live at the house called Rosmersholm as his late wife’s caretaker and stayed thereafter to provide him counsel and companionship. At the time, an unmarried woman sharing a house with a widower would ruffle serious feathers, but the pairing is shown to be utterly innocuous and, more importantly, nobody else’s business — that is, until Rosmer is recruited by his brother-in-law (Keith Allan Kalinowski) to join their conservative friends in an unofficial movement to curtail the free-thinking liberalism that’s gaining in popularity. When Rosmer must admit that he has embraced the liberal point of view (and abandoned his Christian faith in the offing), a battle for leverage suddenly changes relationships to alliances and oppositions, and the first stirrings of a rotten truth threaten to gurgle to the surface.

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Last of the Boys

Live theater affords great opportunities to rattle the viewer, sometimes in its examination of challenging subject matter, but other times through pure, acute expression of a character's substantial pain. Both are felt in playwright Steven Dietz's take on the veterans and casualties of the Vietnam War, Last of the Boys; however, as directed by Frannie Shepherd-Bates, it's the latter that particularly resonates. This Magenta Giraffe Theatre production is a challenging one, its two and a half hours concerned with lives whose stunted sense of normalcy, even decades after the emotional injury, feels undeserved and unfair.

A deserted, late-century California trailer park is home to Ben (Dave Davies), who is visited every summer by longtime friend and fellow veteran Jeeter (Alan Madlane). The relationship between the two men sets the tone for the rest of the production; their shared cultural touchstones bleed over into the personal with respect to the men's differing reactions to the death of Ben's father. Ben professes to be a carpenter but seems to mostly exist outside of the grind, whereas Jeeter is a celebrated academic who has a penchant for younger women and a very unusual reason for following the Rolling Stones on tour. Vietnam is largely folded into Jeeter's grander remembrance of The '60s, a decade since unmatched and affording him no small amount of cachet among students and paramours; Madlane's take on the living time capsule is energetic and grounded in gentle comedy. The viewer later meets Jeeter's most recent one and only, Salyer (Lisa Melinn), and her domineering, protective mother, Lorraine (Linda Rabin Hammell). The four make up a tight ensemble cast, playing equally well in every permutation.

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