The Divas Project

Divas of song and spirit, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Plowshares Theatre Company begins 2013 by making good on its mission of "Celebrating the Black Woman" for the 2013 season. Arranged by artistic director Gary Anderson, "The Divas Project" is a world-premiere musical revue in homage to a half-century of American legends of popular music. Readers should note I attended and reviewed the production's sole preview performance before its official opening, but the prowess of the show's professional musicians and its atmosphere of lighthearted fun were already well in evidence.

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Ruined

Even in the worst of circumstances, people manage to carve out something that looks like merriment. In Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined, one watering hole and brothel is the purportedly carefree backdrop for a steely-eyed look into the exceptional barbarity of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For this challenging production, Plowshares Theatre Company moves to the downtown Detroit Boll Family YMCA, where director Gary Anderson lets these truth-inspired accounts of atrocity against civilian women carry their own significant weight.

Most of the play is confined to a small DRC social establishment, catering to the local miners’ intoxicant and carnal needs. Scenic design by John Manfredi imagines a festive, if slipshod, open-air edifice whose ambience doesn’t appear to be its primary draw. Cheaply furnished, with strings of lights stretched over the bar and a small platform for live music, the modest arrangement is just hospitable enough to bring in the men for a few rounds before enjoying some paid companionship; it’s an oasis without the kind of ostentation that courts trouble. The place is run by Mama Nati (Iris M. Farrugia), a salty proprietor and shrewd businesswoman who fights to keep political allegiances outside her walls — after all, everyone’s money spends the same. She prides herself in securing bright luxuries, conjured by properties designer Jennifer Maiseloff: inaccessible beer, cigarettes, and other delicacies. However, at the play’s start, Mama’s clumsily flirtatious supplier Christian (Augustus Williamson) also brings her a pair of young women in need of shelter and protection, with nowhere else to turn.

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A Jazzy Christmas

‘Tis the season for ubiquitous Christmas music, the beastly quantity and dubious quality of which is enough to wear on even the most spirited holiday shopper (and driver, and diner, and dental patient, and person on hold). Fortunately, Plowshares Theatre understands that the best cure for the unfortunate-Christmas-recordings blues is to do the tunes right. As a follow-up to its spring production, Jazz: Birth of the Cool, the company returns to Detroit’s Virgil H. Carr Cultural Center to celebrate A Jazzy Christmas with inviting warmth and seasonal style.

The large second-floor space is here configured with rows of chairs facing a temporary stage, from which the performers frequently step down and sing almost within reach of the front row. It’s an intimate, casual atmosphere that both evades a strictly concert feel and lends flexibility to performer/choreographer Brent Davin Vance’s staging of about three dozen numbers presented in two acts. LED lighting effects set the ladies’ luxe formal wear to sparkling and also wash over the blank backdrop with rich primary colors, supplemented by huge snowflake lights that keep the surroundings dynamic without being overly busy. The sound design has a similarly tech-infused feel, providing personal amplification that puts each of the five singers on even footing with the five musicians arraying the rear of the stage. Although the impressive accoutrements and close feel suggest counterintuitive purposes, the overall effect is coherent enough: a glimmering, jubilant, but highly personal experience.

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The Whipping Man

At the close of the Civil War, citizens of the ravaged South were in upheaval: depending on their skin color, either their former wealth and lifestyle was toppled, or they faced an exciting but daunting new world of rights and responsibilities. Playwright Matthew Lopez imagines a singular fallout in The Whipping Man, a co-production of Jewish Ensemble Theatre and Plowshares Theatre. Directed by Gary Anderson, artistic director of the latter company, this production plunges into the social issues surrounding it, but hits home with the palpable anguish of its magnificently portrayed personal stakes.

On the heels of the Confederate surrender in April 1965, rebel officer Caleb (Rusty Mewha) returns wounded to his home, where newly emancipated slave Simon (Council Cargle) recognizes the severity of his former master’s gangrene and rightly insists on amputation. The elephant in the room — this white-hot power shift among privileged Caleb, nurturing Simon, and the wild-card return of former slave John (Scott Norman) — is magnified in the face of a medical emergency (and subsequent convalescence) that leaves Caleb in no position to protest. After the events of the first turbulent night, the physical squeamishness lets up, allowing an unrelenting but handily earned emotional discomfort to take its place. No ramification is left unexamined, from the freed men’s motives for staying in the house of their oppression, to the hypocrisy of their shared Jewish faith being passed down by mandate from owner to slave, to the fallacy of Caleb’s hollow justification that — compared with the horrors of plantation work — his family treated their slaves with fondness and fairness. Much is made of John’s opportunistic looting of the abandoned homes surrounding them, an exorbitant expression of his freedom that previously would have gotten him sent to the titular whipping man; at another extreme, Simon’s caretaking of Caleb is at once a triumph of human compassion and an open question without an easy answer.

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