Boxfest Detroit 2011

The spotlight once again turns to the woman director for BoxFest Detroit 2011, a mixture of the familiar and the new. Artistic director Molly McMahon and executive director Kelly Rossi return to the festival, once again making the most of the Furniture Factory space and its limitless permutations of rolling blue flats. Ten new plays, some helmed by BoxFest Detroit veterans and some by first-time directors, bring opportunities and challenges for playwrights, directors, and performers alike, and the festival’s festive atmosphere again prevails.

The short plays are a little longer this year; although the basic “box” system of programming blocks remains intact, the pacing has changed. Whereas last year’s boxes were mostly populated with a triptych of lightning-fast one-acts, this year finds the majority of boxes with just two plays. It’s a more than acceptable variation, as the longer fifteen- to twenty-minute intermissions between boxes are well met by a supply of donations-encouraged beer, wine, and concessions, and the pressure feels ever so slightly loosened for stage manager Meghan Lynch and assistant stage manager Jon Pigott to keep things running on time. If there’s any melee, it’s occurring behind the scenes — the spacious lobby has a welcoming and jovial atmosphere, great for engaging conversations with the directors and performers and retrospection on this year’s ten offerings.

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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.

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And the Creek Don't Rise

The beauty of Joseph Zettelmaier’s And the Creek Don’t Rise lies somewhere in its wonderful simplicity. The playwright’s fish-out-of-water premise and intricate trio of relationships touches on a kind of real-world uncertainty, giving warmth as well as benign enmity to a skirmish between neighbors. Under the direction of Joseph Albright, this world-premiere production at Williamston Theatre humorously pits North against South in a play that uses Civil War history as an entry point to civil warfare.

When we first meet Rob Graff (John Lepard), he’s moving the last of the boxes into the Carson, Georgia, house he has purchased with wife Maddie (Kate Peckham). Both transplants from Michigan, Rob and Maddie are agog at the visage of their neighbor, Doc Boggs (Thomas D. Mahard), who arrives in his Confederate uniform to bid them welcome. Doc is a devoted reenactor of the “war of Northern aggression,” and when he invites Rob to participate in the next day’s battle, Maddie sees it as a way for her spouse to make friends and valuable connections in this foreign land. And in excellent concert with the gracious complexity of Southern rules of hospitality, she is both right and wrong. When Rob commits a gaffe of incomprehensible magnitude, Doc remains outwardly cordial and generous to a fault, but the wary Michigander suspects a steely hostility under the old gentleman’s acts of kindness. To the viewer’s great reward, Rob is entirely right. The men’s subsequent escalation is fantastic for injecting high stakes into a stiffly polite and largely harmless feud. Together, Lepard and Mahard expertly traverse their characters’ conflict, which pays off both in their growing understanding despite themselves and in the big laughs they deliver along the way.

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RoGoCop! The Musical

Now titled Robocop: The Musical, this hit original production has added a final midnight performance at Go Comedy! Improv Theatre on August 11, 2012, as part of the Detroit Improv Festival. The following is the review of last summer's show.

Parody is fun when it takes a common cultural experience and dissects its flaws and quirks. However, a great parody manages to surprise the viewer, even as it adheres to its universally known story. Combining fine writing, abundant production values, and sharp direction by Joe Plambeck, Go Comedy!’s world preimere of RoGoCop! The Musical (book by Sean May, music by May and Ryan Parmenter) brings astonishment and hilarity to an exceptional spoof.

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Cop Block

Strange to think of winter in this heat, but Planet Ant Theatre’s latest original late-night comedy was born in January, with the Winter Improv Colony Fest — the coveted prize for the winning troupe was this time slot and director Matthias Schneider. Vaulting from improvisation to the scripted world, the winning trio invented and wrote Cop Block, a one-act revenge fantasy that plays with grizzled old clichés. However, given a troupe whose predominant strength appears to be finding comic nuance in the everyday, this over-the-top genre parody makes for an imperfect fit.

The play’s simple story arc concerns police officers Shaw (Andy Wotta), McLopez (Andrew Seiler), and Freedom (Clint Lohman), recently bereft of their beloved chief by a noted cop killer/drug dealer. Intent on avenging their lost leader, the men set out to bring his murderer to justice, battling various personal demons along the way: McLopez’s domineering and disapproving wife, Freedom’s alcoholism, and Shaw’s rampaging ineptitude and fondness for “sampling” the drugs they encounter on the beat. From dramatic graveside pledges to off-the-books interrogation tactics to expository scenes at the shooting range, the best-known devices of law enforcement storytelling are all here. Happily for the plot, a too-early victory gone awry ramps up the interest, and what follows are some of the most crafty and inventive moments of the piece.

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