Posing

The New Theatre Project celebrates its big move from Ann Arbor to downtown Ypsilanti with the world premiere of Posing, written by resident playwright Jason Sebacher and directed and designed by artistic director Keith Paul Medelis. The cozy, craftily appointed Mix Studio space is accessible to patrons through the chic Mix boutique, acting both as landlord and as eager patron of the arts. Although the zip code has changed, the company’s ethos is well intact, as evidenced by this intimate production about the desirability and the price of lifelong youth.

The setting is a slovenly, condom- and clothing-strewn hovel, utterly anonymous but for one curious piece of décor. The two men inhabiting the room are at first just as anonymous, both to the viewer and to each other. That they had a sexual encounter the night before is likely; that they smoked and swallowed a lot of drugs is even more certain. The play’s eighty minutes find the pair in a kind of limbo that seems to last for days, during which they engage in deliberately obtuse and seemingly mundane conversation about where they’ve been, who they’re avoiding, and whether and how soon they’d better get some more drugs. They do get high again, their trips hypnotically, languidly staged with movement by Brian Carbine; they have more sex, the performers generally appearing in a state of undress and briefly stripping completely nude (warranting an 18-and-over door policy). But when the room’s resident (Evan Mann) seems to lose himself and call his companion (Ben Stange) by another name, this ultimate lost weekend finds its traction, snapping much of the wayward dialogue into clearer perspective. The story hinges on a literary device that viewers may or may not pick up on, but the details of the plot are less important — and less impressive — than the captivating issues raised by the playwright’s inventive hypothesis.

Click to read more ...

The Everyman Project

Death, being universal, unknowable, and utterly final, has been a target of artistic inquisition for ages. One such exploration is Everyman, the medieval morality play by Anonymous and the source of The New Theatre Project’s latest original contemporary production, The Everyman Project. The product represents months of development on the part of the ensemble and production team, as together they scrutinized the conclusiveness death brings and found it reflected in their own experiences.

The production is predicated on identifying moments at which we realized that our lives have immediately and irrevocably changed. In this collaborative adaptation, playwright Jason Sebacher and director Ben Stange framed this question as the base point for developing the original script, which establishes a loose quadrilateral of relationships among its performers (using their own names) and introduces them all to their most essential commonality: death itself. After a ritualistic, guttural group scene introducing distinctive onomatopoeic sounds and mantras, the narrative begins with the aftermath of an auto collision that spins out into scenes of Elise Randall’s gorgeous lamentation with her hospitalized, dying mother (portrayed by Analea Maria Lessenberry). Randall realizes her moment in a lonely monologue, then she suddenly and literally crosses paths with death.

Click to read more ...

The Dance of the Seven Veils

In another original reimagining, The New Theatre Project makes a respectful and inquisitve foray into the world of female sex workers in The Dance of the Seven Veils, written by company member Amanda Lyn Jungquist and directed by Artistic Director Keith Paul Medelis. A blend of first-person narrative, music, and dance, the production presents accounts of prostitutes and strippers culled from real-life sources, giving an emotionally wringing — but ultimately fair and unvarnished — voice to this societally shunned profession.

Jungquist’s sources include the text of Salome, a piece by open-source playwright Charles L. Mee, as well as numerous other online and social networking resources, some of which led to follow-up correspondence or interviews. Accordingly, the piece does betray an extensively researched feel at times; the pressure to be inclusive, to be exhaustive, sometimes manifests in heftily vague or meandering narration. The play functions as a triptych: each of three protagonists is billed as “Woman,” and three stories are told in succession, at times different and the same. One details the ongoing web of lies she maintains to keep her work separate from her regular life, whereas another describes overcoming verbal abuse from a client. Yet each Woman discusses her reasons for taking up sex work, each describes her first encounter, each reveals one or more instances in which she suffered physically or emotionally; moreover, each speaks frankly about the stigma of her profession and how it has changed her. This is probably the most pervasive and certainly the most personal theme of the production: that turning a basic human need into a business transaction, in addition to risking a permanent societal black mark, may irrevocably change a woman’s sense of femininity, her self-perception, her very identity.

Click to read more ...

Cloud Tectonics

To accurately explain Cloud Tectonics — the premiere production of The New Theatre Project’s first full season, written by José Rivera — is akin to explaining a dream. Viewers who like concrete explanations for things would be well served to keep this in mind: after all, metaphysical impossibilities that are nevertheless accepted as fact are frequent features of the dream world. As directed by associate artist Ben Stange, this one-act production is appropriately dreamy, presenting a mere capsule of an unfamiliar existence that still manages to feel comfortably familiar and sound a deep emotional knell.

In a very specific place at a less-specific time, Anibal de la Luna (Samer Ajluni) takes pity on greatly pregnant hitchhiker Celestina del Sol (Jamie Weeder) during a rare Los Angeles downpour, bringing her home to dry off and eat and sleep. Having endlessly crossed the country in a vain search for her baby’s father, Celestina seems at first like a flighty, cagey vagabond; she doesn’t wear a watch and is dodgy at best in reference to questions about how long she's been traveling. Yet increasing clues, and finally a blatant statement of fact, takes the premise in a new direction: time behaves differently around Celestina; her pregnancy, for example, has lasted at least two years of real-world time. But the how and why of her extreme peculiarities, although addressed, are less important than the mere reality of them, and the profound sadness to which this world confines her. When one cannot distinguish a second from a minute from a year, connecting with another person becomes a tricky and ultimately fleeting enterprise.

Click to read more ...

The Spring Awakening Project

Sex, danger, and dangerous sex: the original adaptation The Spring Awakening Project makes for an intense 90 minutes. The inaugural production of The New Theatre Project, directed by founder and Artistic Director Keith Paul Medelis, uses the rigidly repressed and uninformed adolescents of Frank Wedekind's century-old script to examine the intangible threshold between childhood and adulthood.

The play moves fast, combining elements of song, dance, fantasy, and unlikely narration with more straightforward two-person scenes; although the cadence and immediacy of the tone can feel initially prohibitive, it took me little time to catch up with the characters and sort out each of their stories. Viewers like me, who have never seen the original Spring Awakening or its popular musical adaptation, will be well assisted by a quick Wikipedia overview of the major players and plot points. Most of the plot developments are lifted from the source material, although a few surprises emerge, including the appearance of a delightfully bonkers deus ex machina that makes total sense in the context of the project. True to a young perspective, it seems as though none of these young people has any agency over the the situations that change — and sometimes end — their lives; all the characters can manage is to feel and react and despair.

Click to read more ...