Pookie Goes Grenading

It was announced that playwright JC Lee’s Pookie Goes Grenading would be the swan song of The New Theatre Project, which for three seasons has been bringing brash, brave programming to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti venues with guerrilla flair. It’s tempting to dissect the final production in this context, as the culmination of continuous evolution and the final vehicle for the company’s mission. But frankly, Pookie Goes Grenading is so funny that I don’t care what else it is. Director Emilie C. Samuelson catapults a savagely ebullient script into the kind of all-in production that could teach hyperbole a thing or two, and the result is as wildly hilarious as it is charmingly insane.

The play is marked by an all-consuming energy and conviction, qualities that are endemic of adolescence, which explains the mini-gymatorium evoked by the painted floor of the Mix Studio Theatre stage. Indeed, protagonist Pookie (Luna Alexander) is a high school student, with a dream of making a movie. And not just any movie — an action movie, starring Pookie, in which she exacts explosive metaphorical revenge against a psychopathic baker. Deterrents like having no equipment, budget, staff, or experience and the threatened wrath of school administrators are no match for Pookie’s intensely concentrated zeal; instead, she channels her vision into other forms of expression, with catastrophic results that elevate her status to that of vigilante artist and legitimate outlaw.

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Edward II

The New Theatre Project is no stranger to the fresh, exciting, unconventional, and downright rebellious; the company’s history has seen it layer a sexy edge onto several older works, stories, and literary figures. Now, in reimagining the dramatic history of a misfit party-boy king, the world-premiere production of Edward II (adapted by Jason Sebacher from the much-longer-titled Christopher Marlowe play) primarily embraces, rather than strays from, these themes. Yet here, under the direction of Keith Paul Medelis, although the play’s central story of forbidden love spits at convention, it’s the cunning machinations of the aghast status-quo types that send up sparks.

How do you solve a problem like King Edward II (Chris Jakob), the recently ascended English monarch who loves the unquestioned liberties of royalty almost as much as he hates the establishment or responsibility of any stripe? But while his chemical excesses are disruptive and his behavior blatantly hostile to his own stuffy court, the root of the problem appears to be the favors and confidence Edward bestows on his hardly secret male lover, Piers Gaveston (John Denyer). Whether homosexuality itself is the predominant strike against the king, or whether his reactionary boorish behavior or his problematic favoritism is what’s rankling the institution, is left blurred — attempted proclamations and policy meetings are inseparable from boundary-pushing scenes of revelry and heat (including frank displays of nudity and simulated sex). Edward’s story is one of blessed power and cursed duty, seen through the lens of insubordinate youth; for his part, Jakob acts the hell out of the role, ascribing breathless fullness to his every juvenile emotion.

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If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]

Like the reply-all taboo and the necessity of logging out of a public computer, the latest formative lesson our society is learning is that absolutely anything posted online can take on a life of its own. Playwright Kevin Kautzman phrases it better in the enticing title of his new internet-age sex comedy, If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]. The world premiere by The New Theatre Project is notable for meticulous production values that give the show the resplendent obsession with technology it deserves. Yet as directed by Natividad M. Salgado, the strongest material resides offline: this script has so much fun guiding its characters into a zany, last-ditch enterprise that the ramifications can’t hope to reach the same level of enthusiasm.

The play’s emphatically contemporary context suits the immediacy of its premise. Lucy and Chris (Elise Randall and Peter Giessl) are a couple of textbook ninety-nine percenters, overeducated and underemployed in a crummy economy: she’s thanklessly waiting tables while toiling on an expensive MBA; he’s a college dropout whose service job affords them the barest health coverage. It’s a lamentable career picture for both, so for things to get worse merely adds insult to injury. And when the business world has no place for a couple of hungry, desirable youths, these two blaze their own trail that plays to their unique strengths — in this case, putting a technologically new spin on the oldest profession. True, selling sex online is hardly a novelty, and why this venture is expected to succeed against oceans of competition requires some suspension of disbelief, but it’s well worth the effort in a first act this fresh and funny. Kautzman’s text is magnificent as he submerges these two characters robbed of forethought into a trajectory of pure discovery, and Salgado and company play the beats with realistic give and take and fed-up desperation that ably sets up the foolhardy scheme and everything that follows. As a team, Giessl and Randall operate with fantastic chemistry, bandying about impulsiveness and familiarity that elicits laughter from every sardonic quip and well-placed withering glance.

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Fugue

The deliberately ambiguous play is as alluring in theory as it is difficult to enact in practice: the production must keep the audience invested in its suspenseful limbo; the script must deliver a payoff satisfactory enough to justify the willful obscurity preceding it. Pitfalls, pretension, and shortcuts to failure pave the way, yet the challenge remains irresistible, largely because of successes like Fugue, now in its world premiere by The New Theatre Project. This haunting, expressive journey by playwright Audra Lord and director T. Luna Alexander wanders with purpose through a murky story abyss, incrementally raising the unease and the stakes as it pushes quirky details into a luridly affecting context.

The word fugue has several meanings, and the interminable miasma of a fugue state is well met by the disquieting atmosphere of the show’s design. Translucent panels neatly subdivide Keith Paul Medelis’s boldly stark setting, with a row of chambers that leave the performers still discernible in offstage holding patterns. In tandem with the unpredictable ambient and downcast lights by designer Janine Woods Thoma and mostly blank costumes by Ben Stange, the colorless surroundings have a curious antiseptic constancy. The presence of a kindly but aloof nurse (Dan Johnson) adds further implication as to the play’s framework, suggestive of a mental health retreat or, more formidably, a psychological experiment. And indeed, the four patients in residence seem well worthy of study, if for no other reason than they can’t remember how they got there — or anything else about themselves.

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The American Crowbar Case

The New Theatre Project partners with local band Match By Match for its first ever original musical, The American Crowbar Case. Created by band member Gray Bouchard, with a book by Jason Sebacher, the play concerns itself with one of the most famous and inexplicable brain injuries in history — the ostensibly self-lobotomized railroad worker Phineas Gage, whose baffling survival was made all the more intriguing by his before-and-after personality shift. Accordingly, Keith Paul Medelis directs a production that, like its subject, seems to be of two minds, but the parts are pleasing enough to make a satisfying whole.

The music doesn’t follow the traditional mold of the musical: Bouchard is a featured singer, but doesn’t himself play a character; lyrics are thematically relevant, but not directly applicable. For their part, Bouchard and Sebacher don’t try to force the story to meet the existing songs, but instead allow for a prevailing feeling of concept album turned concert. This is confirmed and amplified by magnificent design choices: from the up-lit circular stage (set by Medelis) to the unrealistic, high-contrast lighting scheme to the complementary projection work (both by Janine Woods Thoma), the result is a unified vision that rocks along with the music. Melissa Coppola’s music direction fills the space with expertly blended sounds — one is reminded that this is not a house band assembled just for this production, but an actual band, an acoustic trio of guitar (Bouchard), piano (Coppola), and bass (Linden McEachern), playing its own catchy indie/folk songs.

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