Hylomorph

The Planet Ant Theatre’s world-premiere production of Hylomorph, by Maggie Smith, is ensconced in a kind of desperate silliness. Director Yasmine Jaffri guides this mash-up of a pair of mundane marriages and a world of scientific improbability with a strongly stylized perspective that plays to the strengths of both. The result is a lightning-speed, fish-out-of-water comedy in two short acts that resolves little and explains less, but abounds with thematic curiosity.

Something out of Alice in Wonderland, the story of the play seems intentionally obtuse and difficult to describe in precise language. In barest terms, Mrs. Wilson (Inga R. Wilson) is hired to tutor Mrs. Nara (Linda Ramsay) in English, but instead they are transported to a wasteland that may not even be of this dimension. The best explanation Smith seems to provide for the phenomenon is: science. However, what the characters (and audience) discover about their surroundings isn't nearly as interesting as what they learn about themselves. From their character names to their defining traits, the subservient wives define themselves by their husbands — if he insists she's agoraphobic, then she doesn't leave the house. In this respect, Ramsay’s dawning awareness is the biggest and most identifiable development, played with a balance of level-headed reason and a comically destructive streak. However, it’s Wilson who is the most consistently and subtly funny, a maniacally repressed housewife in constant terror of the possible, albeit implausible, atrocities she could perform at any instant. So afraid of everything she can’t manage to do anything, her Mrs. Wilson anchors the pair of lost women as a clear and relatable protagonist, able to elicit both laughter and affection by her pasted-on smile and deeply apologetic outbursts.

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Menllenium

Go Comedy!’s latest Thursday-night offering, Menllenium, was originally a product of the Second City improvisation conservatory, and its ingrained sketch-comedy feel is well suited for the quirky and fast-moving Thursday grab bag of scripted and improvised shows. This reimagined production, now directed by Tommy LeRoy, doesn’t seek to do anything groundbreaking with subject matter or form; instead, it relies on keen writing and a strong ensemble to unearth a well of comedy in the rise and fall of a circa-2000 boy band. The one-hour Behind The Music–style show hits all the familiar beats, but shines with a hardworking team of writer/improvisers that works with the medium to showcase its own strengths.

Our heroes’ story follows the mold of so many popular artists’ biographies: a humble quartet of high school football teammates is discovered by the music biz, gets rocketed to superstardom, mishandles newfound fame and unchecked egos, and parts ways after seemingly petty differences turn irreconcilable. Written by the ensemble, the scenes are a selective bunch of representative vignettes that establish the characters of Marcus (Tommy Simon), Kevin (Andrew Seiler), JaySon (Micah Caldwell), and Justin Dance (Clint Lohman) and allow them to react to new situations. Happily, although each character has an identifying type (playboy, narcissist, rebel, and gay), most don’t live exclusively within these descriptors, making the scenes feel playful and inventive instead of formulaic. An absolute highlight of these sketches finds the boys discussing contract negotiations with football coach turned manager Sarge (Ryan Parmenter), establishing the game of the scene and then methodically piling on to absurd heights of humor. The ensemble members are sharply attuned to one another, and it shows in the writing: jokes of all stripes and sensibilities are laid down in rapid succession, too numerous and varied to be the product of a single mind.

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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.

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Oedipus

There’s little arguing with a good story told well.

Williamston Theatre’s new adaptation of the Sophocles classic Oedipus Rex is a mystery whose solution the audience already knows. The eighty minutes of Oedipus, simplified, concern an immediate problem (a plague in the city-state of Thebes, over which the title character reigns) and the hard-fought road to discovering its cause (the unfortunate intersection of a few foreboding prophecies, which leads to the ruination of all involved). Yet Tony Caselli and Annie Martin’s adaptation still approaches the investigation with desperate severity and an appreciation for the agonies of discovery; faithful to the original text, the meat of the drama lies not in emotional repercussions, but the human flaws that drive us both away from our fates and toward understanding and truth, whatever the cost. The language of the script varies between lofty and humble, but rarely passes on an opportunity to engage in word play that presciently toys with the parallels between knowledge and sight, opening up the myriad thematic possibilities of the tale. However, as directed by Caselli, the production’s greatest accomplishment is in getting the viewer caught up in the intrigue — in an age of spoiler alerts, it’s remarkable to be reminded that in the best of stories, how can trump who, what, and where combined.

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Corktown

With its astronomic stakes, operatic violence, and cinematic flourishes, Corktown is in essence a mob movie played out on the Purple Rose Theatre stage. Yet the world-premiere production of this Michael Brian Ogden script is notable for its complex and engaging performances as well as its innovative application of live-theater magic to the genre. Director Guy Sanville plays on viewers' familiarity with these brutal life-and-death stories while simultaneously reveling in the novelty of bringing an audience so close to something so dangerous and — in most cases — foreign.

The play is set in the Detroit apartment of Joey (Matthew David), an enforcer for the Irish mob. Set designer Bartley H. Bauer provides an ominous letterbox view of a remodeled-over domicile in a shabby building; even the water damage tainting its posh faux-finish paint job has a sinister quality. The tone is borne out in the terrible scope of Danna Segrest's properties, which quickly spell out Joey's exact role in the organization — in polite company, he might be called a "cleaner." In the disarming opening scene, Joey and longtime friend and colleague Laurence (Ogden) casually talk shop, quickly submerging the viewer into a world of unspeakable violence that's accepted as strictly business. The juxtaposition of their humdrum middle-management world view with the carnage in which they are steeped (further contrasted by the relatively pristine white coveralls of Christianne Myers's costume design) is a terrific entry point for a production insistent that gangland-style executions must coexist with basic human connection.

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