Action Sports News

Oh, local news — so ambitiously overstated, so determinedly solemn, so laughably irrelevant. Now at Planet Ant Theatre, writer-directors Dyan Bailey and Mike McGettigan merrily amplify the absurdity of the bush-league broadcast in Action Sports News. This world-premiere production gains comic footholds in wild, ridiculous moments and characterizations, but finds its ultimate success in threading an emotional, congenial story through its workplace ensemble.

The play stays entirely within the confines of the WHET newsroom, the realm of anchors Gloria Day (Lauren Bickers) and Harry Herpst (David Herbst), station owner/manager Dean Davenport (Dave Davies), and a few new faces, namely inexperienced weather nitwit Jeanette Santino (Melissa Beckwith) and untested local celebrity athlete Sam Hall (Louie Krause). The atmosphere is sufficiently rinky-dink to begin with, but Bailey and McGettigan heighten the triviality with a loopy premise: the station promises to report only good news. The concept not only makes way for great ancillary content (no shortage here of local photo-op contests, baby animals of predictable cuteness, and radiantly worthless investigative series), but it also plants a real story seed, in Gloria’s understandable aspirations to do more serious work for bigger markets. Amid a handful of secondary workplace concerns, the main thrust of the plot becomes a thoughtful look at the push-pull of change versus constancy, outgrowing one’s professional home, and losing one of the family.

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The Do-Over

Dramatic writers are rewarded for making their characters dabble in subterfuge or rash decision-making, to the tune of pages upon pages of discoveries and repercussions. Infinitely more challenging to write effectively — let alone stage — is a rational dialogue undertaken by parties with transparent motives. In the latest entry in its late-night series, Planet Ant Theatre presents the world premiere of playwright Margaret Edwartowski’s The Do-Over, a sensible look at a pair of old friends faced with an opportunity to rediscover their former closeness and the warring temptation to rekindle something deeper. This production marks the professional directorial debut of BoxFest Detroit 2011 honoree Kelly Komlen-Amadei, who tackles this heady setup by reaching for the affection and tension hibernating inside of bloodless deliberation.

If friendships have life spans, then Facebook is their respirator, artificially reinstating and preserving intimate connectedness among people long separated by time, distance, life events, and philosophies. Here, social media has instigated the real-life reunion of college friends and paramours Bernadette (Karen Kron) and Ben (Jon Ager). She’s the mayor of a small Arizona border town, he’s an architect in New York City, but when a weekend mayoral conference brings her right to his neighborhood, they arrange to meet up — absent spouses and kids — and hang out at her hotel. Collectively, the production design hits just the right notes of hotel-suite anonymity: set designer Seth Amadei’s glut of pillows and legally mandated exit route map speak a familiar language, and Patrick O’Reilly’s ever-generous mini bar becomes a playground for college-hearkening revelry. In concert with scenic transitions scored by Komlen-Amadei, stage manager Alexandre Bleau’s lighting design abruptly hits on that disturbing acclimation to an unfamiliar setting at first light. Indeed, the reunion spans the entire weekend, equal parts sincere and tenuous, as it grows into a treatise on navigating that killer supposition: What if…?

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The Rise and Fall of Little Voice

Planet Ant Theatre closes out its mainstage season with a seriocomic inferno, playwright Jim Cartwright’s dually hysterical and tender The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. Director Annette Madias guides a cast at the top of its game through a stiflingly real world full of tangible promises and disappointments, the kind so wretched they’re almost a little funny. The resulting production bubbles with laughter even as it nestles into emotional recesses, balancing amusing quirks with real stakes throughout.

Portrayed by Inga R. Wilson, the titular Little Voice aches to be left alone, or, better yet, left behind in the past. Stubbornly averse to the outside world, she prefers to hole up in her bedroom and listen to the stacks of records accumulated by her late father. In stark contrast to such nostalgia, mother Mari (Linda Ramsay) seeks relevance in newness; in the play’s 1980s northern England setting, the trends she grasps range from Madonna-inspired fashion to installing her very first home phone line. The women’s shared living situation and opposing needs breed mutual consternation and ritual annoyance — even a power outage divides them, dampening Mari’s merriment with suitor of the moment Ray Say (Joel Mitchell), while simultaneously emboldening LV to raise her voice and finish her classic ballad in progress. Ray, a marginally successful music promoter, is dumbstruck at the accuracy of the imitation, and soon convinced that his discovery cannot fail to reap mutually beneficial fortune and fame. What follows is the foretold rise and fall, an examination of what we want from each other and at what price, of hurting others and being hurt in return.

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M 5

Planet Ant Theatre’s commitment to new works was never in question: its monthly Ant Farm staged reading series has previously shepherded new scripts to successful full productions. However, M 5 marks the first time the company’s late-night series has been specifically earmarked to showcase favorite Ant Farm selections. Helmed by director Sara Wolf Molnar and with a capable quartet of comic performances, this original show feels like an ode to the short play — that is to say, something rich and strange.

All five scripts (“Mile High,” by Leah Darany; “The Little Things” and “Homeland Security,” both by Audra Lord; “Mother,” by Jacquie Priskorn; and “Bloody iPhone,” by Marty Shea and Ian Bonner) are brief enough to tuck into a single act, barely skimming an hour’s running time. Each bears the brand of preposterousness that serves as the quirky signature of a short-form comedy, although the devices and executions vary. Against the elaborate setup leading to a swift roundhouse punchline, for example, is a slow-burning monologue of increasing perturbation. Whereas one play roots into the comic possibilities of forced conversation amid sustained discomfort, another gets its framework out of the way in a staccato of short establishing scenes. Strengths and weaknesses show in the writing for each, but the end product amasses into a kaleidoscope of the form’s overall potential.

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Snowbound

After a well-received run in 2010, playwright Margaret Edwartowski returns Snowbound to the Planet Ant stage, now expanded to span two full acts. A story of plight, persistence, and regret buried in an unforgiving Colorado winter, the latest version retains all the sting of its snappy viciousness while tacking on intrigue and dimension of changing characters in changing circumstances. Director Kate Peckham takes the action to the brink, brutalizing protagonists and audience alike with sky-high stakes and unrelenting outcomes.

What little remains of the Adler family fits into a meager mountain cabin, situated a treacherous crossing away from the paltry descriptor “remote.” Of the four survivors, siblings John (Stephen Blackwell) and Sara (Jaclyn Strez) are the only two capable of toil, forced to provide enough for themselves as well as their mentally and physically debilitated grandmother, Evaline (Nancy Arnfield), and the infant whose arrival rendered John a widower. With a dearth of able bodies and fewer provisions than ever, the impending winter of 1873 promises to be the end of them. Yet muleheaded John is icy with grief and grim determination; Blackwell’s gruffly inscrutable character suggests that he either doesn’t believe the so-called Adler curse (the death and disaster that has followed Evaline since she left her refined Boston family to marry a common pioneer), or he’s hell-bent on seeing it through — possibly both. One last appeal to reason comes in the form of family friend Wil (Jon Ager), a gentle and unassuming farmer who has a personal stake in their survival. Sara and Wil secretly agree that they must leave the cabin in order to escape certain death; it’s not all they agree on, as their fondest hopes intersect in a perfectly enchanting stolen scene. Arnfield’s endlessly rambling, sometimes ranting Evaline provides comic decompression, but also drives a critical wedge between the escapist needs of a hopelessly isolated seventeen-year-old woman and the crippling accountability weighing down a man who feels he’s already lost everything.

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