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 Sunday Punch

Very rarely does a play reside solely in the dramatic or the comedic realm; our world — the one upon which playwrights base their staged realities — is never so binary. In The Sunday Punch, playwright Linda Ramsay-Detherage pours dramatic heft into a comedic premise, establishing a goofy story about one man’s crisis of masculinity and then veering into a deeper meditation on parenting and growing up. In the world premiere production at Planet Ant Theatre, director Nancy Kammer attempts the daunting task of merging these contradictory approaches, and the result shakily straddles the different worlds as it unearths successes in unexpected places.

The play begins with a scene that would be right at home in a sitcom: Gordon (Eric Bloch) hopefully pops an erectile dysfunction–correcting pill at the urging of his anxious wife, Claire (Sonja Marquis), with farcical PG results. They discuss his problem the next day with Gordon’s swaggering brother, Max (Sean Paraventi), and encouraging sister-in-law, Sarah (Wendy Katz Hiller), while packing for a weekend visit with Gordon and Max’s parents; like budding Freuds, the group traces Gordon’s lament to his perpetually negative father. Max recounts the day he clocked Dad in the face and his own berating ceased, and by the transitive property of comic setups, Gordon seizes on the punch as the one thing that will course correct everything miserable in his life. Soon, everyone in the family is clued in to his intention (as sucker-punching infirm old Dad is out of the question, as is violence during the Sabbath). Radiating cartoon villainy to cement his antagonism, the cantankerous septuagenarian Arthur (Clement Valentine) refuses to take the hit lying down, and so the punch becomes a fight, with the bout set for Sunday morning.

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Mid-Life Christmas

One could glean from the title of Mid-Life Christmas, Go Comedy!’s third annual holiday sketch show, that the well of holiday-themed content may be drying up at Southeast Michigan's preeminent improv theater. But based on the razor-sharp humor and screaming breakneck energy of director Pj Jacokes and his ensemble, one would be wrong. Indeed, this is a tightly packed and wildly varying show with not a misstep in sight.

From the outset, an army of characters hurtles across and around the stage, portrayed by a half dozen performers. As suggested by the title, the bloom is off the rose for many of these Christmases; life’s little disappointments and missed expectations are somehow magnified at the holidays, a theme that pervades these hilariously awkward sketches (written by Jacokes and cast). As newlyweds, Jen Hansen and Tommy Simon keep the conflict amicably realistic as they negotiate shared holiday time between their two families. Bryan Lark lends an undercurrent of maliciousness to a composer putting his distinctive spin on a famous Christmas tune. In the longest post-layoff elevator ride ever, Christa Coulter and Chris DiAngelo use much more than words to maximize their excruciating discomfort. And the Christmas Eve Macy’s dressing room is ground zero for Carrie Hall, who enacts the mother of all pubescent humiliations with perfect physical comedy.

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Engagement Rules

Detroit Repertory Theatre refers to playwright Rich Orloff’s Engagement Rules as a comedy. Indeed, in this world-premiere production directed by Bruce E. Millan, the opening scenes — and many following — play that way, with seemingly harmless character differences leading to nonthreatening conflicts. However, the story that unfolds involves themes both heavy and profound, lending a slight but persistent tonal dissonance to the playwright’s study of clashing values and hard-earned communication and compromise.

The younger of the play’s two couples, Donna (Kelly Komlen) and Tom (Charlie Newhart), have an enviable connection that sparks from their first intimate moments onstage. Newly engaged, the pair’s fresh young passion is contrasted with the decades-married complacency and routine of their closest friends, empty nesters Rose (Trudy Mason) and Phil (Harold Uriah Hogan). The women used to be colleagues at an organization championing women’s rights until Donna took up the law school track; all four are established as gym buddies, conveniently making way for numerous Donna/Rose and Tom/Phil locker room scenes that add perspective and depth to the expected Mars and Venus material. There’s a lowest-common-denominator feel to the short opening vignettes, in which every beat is played with flinty contention straight out of a sitcom, regardless of whether it suits the nature of the conversation. Overall, the comic perspective works better for the misaligned Rose and Phil; as performers, Mason and Hogan have a field day blithely failing to connect, and every one of Hogan’s begrudging punchlines is a winner.

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Séance 4

Planet Ant Theatre’s late-night series is a platform for offbeat one-act plays and emerging comedy troupes, but it’s also a ready-made spotlight for its own Home Team of improvisers. Despite the implied sequel in its title, original comedy Séance 4 needs no introduction. Conceived and written by its ensemble cast and directed by Lauren Bickers, this gathering of oddballs is less a scary Halloween story and more a vehicle for exquisite character play among longtime teammates.

Other than excusing any limpness or watering down in its story, the script itself doesn’t explore the meta humor of the played-out repetition of a horror series. Instead, the plot is a stand-alone tale of four cul-de-sac buddies who gather for a half-serious trek into the unknown. Tender-butch Tina (Cara Trautman) wants to contact her years-passed paramour, downtrodden Trent (Michael Hovitch) needs a distraction from his recent divorce, nonbeliever Jane (Dyan Bailey) is as pleased about the choice of activity as she is about the dog doo haunting the neighborhood, and profoundly distinctive Colleen (Tara Rase) will try anything once as long as there are snacks. With a Ouija board at the center of the action, the play progresses and meanders in expected and unexpected ways, balancing supernatural surprises with superb character choices. Even the use of iconic material lifted wholesale from its source works here, demonstrating the effectiveness of homage when filtered through an original lens.

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