Becky Shaw

If everybody else is selfish and self serving, then you should be, too. The world of Becky Shaw (by Gina Gionfriddo) is eminently jaded, full of people chasing their own best interests at the expense of others. For this ethically sticky summer production, Performance Network Theatre gamely turns up the heat: director Phil Powers delivers acid comedy and repellent intrigue throughout a rudderless moral sojourn.

The initial scene contains multitudes, with the inclusive feel of a short play. Months after her father’s death, graduate student Suzanna (Sarab Kamoo) is still listlessly mourning, when she isn’t condemning her infirm mother (Dorry Peltyn) for shamelessly cavorting with a much younger man. They’ve both been summoned to a New York City hotel by Max (David Wolber), Suzanna’s unofficial brother (it’s complicated). A rampantly successful financial manager, Max has taken stock of the family’s precarious financial position and needs to tighten the purse strings. The long and creeping scene allows contentiously bickering Kamoo and Wolber to establish their lifelong codependence and cement their voluntary bond in a development that has the sly feeling of something coming full circle.

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Good People

It’s probably safe to say that very few people truly self-identify as “bad.” Hence, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s coyly titled Good People has the potential to apply to a wide swath of individuals and qualities, and indeed it does. In the play’s Michigan premiere at Performance Network Theatre, director David Wolber doggedly cultivates a quicksand world of keenly felt economic hardship that reflects a growing percentage of Americans, forcing his characters to make daily decisions that cruelly pit kindness against basic self-preservation. Incredibly, though, the show proves as viciously humorous as it is viciously relevant, and this production achieves its purpose by setting each of those disparate bars high and pulling out all the stops.

The play’s initial scene immediately plunges the viewer into a world in which dire straits is not an abstraction. Margaret (Suzi Regan) is once again late to her job at the dollar store, because insufficient money cannot buy reliable childcare and hourly job schedules are by their nature inflexible, in a vicious cycle that allows for no safety nets and absolutely no margin for error. But although she’s bracing herself for another dressing down by her much younger manager (Logan Ricket), in fact Margaret has run out of chances and is being summarily fired. To add insult to injury, the meeting takes place in the alley behind the store, the first of several opportunities for sound designer Carla Milarch to forcefully insert insistent reminders of close proximity and nonexistent borders. Lack of privacy or breathing room is the norm for this South Boston community, where the accents are thick and the ties thicker, and under Wolber’s adamant direction, the severity of the circumstance is not something to be debated. What’s interesting is how bitingly funny it also is — yes, in the funny-because-it’s-true sense; yes, we laugh so as not to cry; but beyond that is caustic, braying comedy that slays, much of it Regan’s. Her use of familiarity as a weapon to make unpleasant interactions as uncomfortable as possible is a vicious and effective tool, one that proves both a blessing and a curse.

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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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Red

Red imagines the painter Mark Rothko (Mark Rademacher) near the commercial peak of his career, through the foil of a hired assistant, Ken (Kevin Young). The Performance Network Theatre production is the Michigan premiere of John Logan’s Tony Award–winning script. Under director Carla Milarch and assistant director/designer Monika Essen, this saturated production examines art and philosophy in a fine character portrait, but its underlying study of theater as art form is its secret masterpiece.

Numerous Essen designs have been Performance Network favorites, so those familiar with her work will hardly register surprise that Rothko’s studio is a tactile paradise. What makes the setting superlative is that it is a living, breathing entity: donning new paint spatters and spills as real as the existing ones, housing fully stocked supplies in logical places and miscellany in thoughtless built-up piles, eating up Justin Lang’s brutal-contrast lighting scheme in all its forms. A visual artist herself, Essen’s role as assistant director provides a hint as to the lived-in feel of the studio in action; the performers’ thorough proficiency with the tools of the craft, to say nothing of their absolutely unconscious familiarity with every object in the room, is an essential component of the production’s success. The text of the play lives in rich theory and passionate language, but a dirty fork wiped on a pant leg is engrossing on another level. Although most of the scenes concern scrutiny and discussion of works at various stages of completion, or low-level prep and cleanup, the artists do put paint to canvas, in one astounding wordless scene enhanced by Will Myers’s lyrical sound design.

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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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