The Meaning of Almost Everything

To guess at the meaning of everything…it’s an endeavor that may be as futile as nailing down the essence of The Meaning of Almost Everything. Pondering the imponderable may be a familiar old exercise in any medium, but it feels shiny new in playwright Jeff Daniels’s latest comedy, now in its world premiere at the Purple Rose Theatre Company. In this delightfully enigmatic production, director Guy Sanville draws on a tightrope-taut balance between cavorting and profundity to turn passive navel gazing into a gamboling truth-seeking extravaganza.

The world of the play springs into being out of sheer nothingness, introducing the arbitrarily named A and B (Matthew Gwynn and Michael Brian Ogden), a pair stuck at the precipice of some unknown adventure. Their immediate, relentless banter about the possibility and prudence of “beginning” feels like snapping awake halfway down a fall into a theoretical crevasse — the play makes no pretense of exposition, but rather fills in the vast emptiness with rampant curiosity, a sharply honed relationship dynamic, and intriguing variables. The duo’s personalities and thought processes begin at neutral and generously overlap, but critical differences peek in and grow into a clear (and richly exploited) alpha-beta dynamic. Ever the rubber-faced foil, Gwynn excels at wholly reacting to every new innovation, presenting as a baby to be guided, someone for the viewer to pity and adore in equal measure. Conversely, Ogden emerges as a dark mentor of sorts, strikingly confident and engrossed in bowling over his easily swayed other half.

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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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Postcards

“A man is what a man does.” Spoken early and with heady conviction, this would appear to be the thesis statement of Postcards. The power in the platitude comes from its simplicity, but, as examined by playwright Bill Costanza, it’s an assertion that grows intractable with time and context. “A man is what a man did”; “A man is what a man regrets” — how much weight should a deplorable past bear? In the world premiere production at Detroit Repertory Theatre, director Barbara Busby makes unwaveringly clear the wrongness of an appalling chapter of the American past, while at the same time raising intriguing questions about the long-lasting consequences of the unconscionable.

The play begins in the New York City of 1954, in a small apartment where Hattie McLendon (Cassaundra Freeman) and Rachel (Jacquie Floyd) discuss a mutual acquaintance, whose absence from the scene is conspicuously felt. With the halting allusion people use to speak of the unspeakable, the women lay down just enough of a mysterious framework to begin filling in the biographical blanks of white photographer Alvin Moseby (Dax Anderson). The Alvin of ’54 is at the forefront of the jazz scene, obsessively documenting future greats on the rise (a fervor that similarly informs Burr Huntington’s luscious sound design). But to understand the whole story is to follow Alvin back to 1939 Shiloh, Tennessee, to his marriage with Loretta (Kelly Komlen), and to the origin of an unremarkable box labeled “Postcards,” whose devastating contents have followed and haunted him throughout his life.

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Brill

Building foundations of song and story, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Times are always changing; old is always begrudgingly giving way to new. The tools of today's digitally driven music industry might be unrecognizable to the brick-and-mortar establishments of 50-some years ago, but upon closer inspection, the building blocks of craft and collaboration are well intact.

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Flowers Up Her Attic

Take a pulpy young-adult novel made famous for its taboo subject matter, and turn up the dial on the salacious stuff until it breaks. That’s the simple, winning recipe used by Marke Sobolewski and Joe Bailey to cook up Flowers Up Her Attic, a wickedly comic distillation of the similarly titled 1979 V.C. Andrews book. Now in its world premiere under Bailey’s direction, the Ringwald Theatre rocks with storybook scandal even as it keeps viewers rolling in the aisles.

In Flowers in the Attic, both the book and the 1987 movie adaptation, a group of siblings frantically languishes in the top room of their grandparents’ house, indefinitely trapped and neglected for unknown reasons, with inappropriately racy results. This show follows in the same melodramatic mold, from Traci Jo Rizzo’s forgotten storage-room set to Joe Plambeck’s Amityville-style devil lights and thriller score. Costumes by Vince Kelley double down on the horror show of circa-1980s fashions with a horror show of fakey-fake blond wigs as far as the eye can see. It’s just the right tone for the kind of campy homage that reveres its source material with feats of soaring irreverence.

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