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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Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun

If ever a show were certifiably insane, the world premiere of Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun might be it. At the Abreact performance space, playwright Franco Vitella’s forty-some short comedies provide the springboard for director Frannie Shepherd-Bates’s overripe imagination. The production’s framework morphs these absurdly funny snippets into a farcical torrent of merriment, for which no swipe at humor is off limits.

Vitella’s script is what might happen if David Ives and Anton Chekhov’s respective catalogs had a litter of baby-plays. Fallaciously entrenched in mother Russia, the sketches provide mere flashes of interaction, pared-down glimpses of lives whose extreme agony and malaise are almost apologetically funny in the absence of context. The cast of four (Steve Xander Carson, Jonathan Davidson, Keith Kalinowski, and Kirsten Knisley) dons and drops characters with alacrity, finding life’s little indignities and inconsequential exchanges alike to be positively fraught with meaning. It’s the richest source of parody for this genre, and Vitella skips directly to it several dozen times. A few archetypes and recurring characters slip in for a little sense of order, but not enough to be mistaken for story continuity: there is no plot. Instead, the vignettes prey on the worst, blandest generalizations of Russian storytelling, dabbling in rebellions and thickly accented authority figures. The artifice is intentional, smartly self-aware, and written — and played — strictly for laughs, which it earns in no small measure.

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Dead Man's Shoes

Gather ‘round and witness the amazing, unbelievable tale of Injun Bill Picote, an outlaw and loner with his mind set on unlawful justice. Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier takes inspiration from a gruesomely morbid historical footnote and fashions it into Dead Man’s Shoes, a unique Western-comedy hybrid with bawd and bite. The world-premiere production, a joint offering by Williamston Theatre and Performance Network Theatre with direction by David Wolber, marries component skill and tight cohesion into a masterpiece of workmanship with entertainment value to match.

Portrayed by Drew Parker, Injun Bill is already a noted killer and ne’er-do-well by the play’s start. In a jail cell somewhere in the lawless West, he makes the inescapable acquaintance of the defiantly enthusiastic Froggy (Aral Gribble), a misfit Creole now purposeless and drunk since his employment as General Custer’s cook was, let’s say, terminated. Froggy instantly cleaves to his infamous companion, and when circumstances allow for the pair’s release, the adrift ready-made sidekick has already signed on to aid in the renegade’s quest, a mission straight out of the truth-stranger-than-fiction vault. After Injun Bill’s only friend in the world was publicly killed, an influential doctor purchased the man’s remains and made a horrific memento of his skin. Leaning on the excesses and indignities of this (totally true, and hideously documented) act, the story plainly roots for the vigilante hero to find the titular shoes and kill their contemptible possessor.

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The Tim Machine

In the early days of Go Comedy! Improv Theater, original sketch comedy shows were generally Christmas novelties. Now in its fourth year, the company has been returning to the form with increasing frequency and consistency: sketch shows regularly fill the scripted-Thursday time slot and further venture into Friday’s mainstage performance schedule. The latest in the line is The Tim Machine, written by the ensemble cast and director Nancy Edwards, with additional writing by Genevieve Jona. Stretching backward and forward in time, no less than 40 years in each direction, this production achieves roaring multi-era success by laying out all kinds of storytelling and time-traveling rules and adhering to one above all the rest: Do what’s funny.

The viewer first lands in 1972, at almost the same moment as protagonist and time traveler Tim (Tim Kay). Having intended to venture from 2052 to the 2012 Occupy Detroit movement, he overshoots and finds himself in the middle of a central-casting version of a hippie revolution. The 70s agitators are angling for an end to war; civil rights for women, minorities, and homosexuals; and taking power back from the corporate Man…oh, that sounds familiar. It’s not lost on Edwards and company (nor on the audience) that the more things change, the more they stay the same, but that’s not all that this production has in store.

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Tearful Release

That’s great, it starts with a jewel heist, virgins, rings, and therapists: the Planet Ant is not afraid to kick the 2012-armageddon jokes into high gear with its original late-night comedy Tearful Release. Written by and featuring the winning troupe of 2011 Summer Colony Fest, and directed by Shawn Handlon, the show rides high on deftly funny ideas and batty characters that help smooth over its less-than-polished edges.

Despite some brief introductions and hints at exposition, the one-act production begins with a strong sketch comedy feel. Mike Hofer brings melodramatic absurdity to a bereft artiste who pays cringe-worthy homage to the woman who raised him. As an unhinged, undeterred marriage counselor, Katie Saari finds a serial killer’s resourcefulness in her quest to fix relationships. Rebecca Concepcion’s cult leader retains her mysterious, imposing force even when the real world gets in the way. Standout punchlines and sterling references are liberally deployed, deviating from the main thread whenever necessary to showcase the smart comic writing. Although a few everyday scenes and characters sneak in, the production revels in the outlandish, the heightened, the bizarre — this is a world in which marriages end because of poor performance on a reality TV show.

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