Miles & Ellie

Comic meditation on gawky first love, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

The central character of playwright Don Zolidis' newest work would have you believe, "This is not a love story." But from the joint he-and-she title, to the saccharine meet-cute tropes, to the carefully cresting hopes and expectations, "Miles & Ellie" actively beats back this assertion at every turn. Indeed, under the direction of Guy Sanville, The Purple Rose Theatre Company's world premiere production handily captures the sweet ungainliness of childhood's fumbling first love; yet this delectably sweet and tart comedy also excels by more complicated maneuvers regarding storytelling, memory and misguided protagonists.

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The Meaning of Almost Everything

To guess at the meaning of everything…it’s an endeavor that may be as futile as nailing down the essence of The Meaning of Almost Everything. Pondering the imponderable may be a familiar old exercise in any medium, but it feels shiny new in playwright Jeff Daniels’s latest comedy, now in its world premiere at the Purple Rose Theatre Company. In this delightfully enigmatic production, director Guy Sanville draws on a tightrope-taut balance between cavorting and profundity to turn passive navel gazing into a gamboling truth-seeking extravaganza.

The world of the play springs into being out of sheer nothingness, introducing the arbitrarily named A and B (Matthew Gwynn and Michael Brian Ogden), a pair stuck at the precipice of some unknown adventure. Their immediate, relentless banter about the possibility and prudence of “beginning” feels like snapping awake halfway down a fall into a theoretical crevasse — the play makes no pretense of exposition, but rather fills in the vast emptiness with rampant curiosity, a sharply honed relationship dynamic, and intriguing variables. The duo’s personalities and thought processes begin at neutral and generously overlap, but critical differences peek in and grow into a clear (and richly exploited) alpha-beta dynamic. Ever the rubber-faced foil, Gwynn excels at wholly reacting to every new innovation, presenting as a baby to be guided, someone for the viewer to pity and adore in equal measure. Conversely, Ogden emerges as a dark mentor of sorts, strikingly confident and engrossed in bowling over his easily swayed other half.

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White Buffalo

One man’s lighter-side news footnote is another’s religious phenomenon. Playwright Don Zolidis tasks one Midwestern family with comprehending, appreciating, and protecting another culture’s miracle in his redolent drama White Buffalo. Under the direction of Guy Sanville, the world-premiere production at Purple Rose Theatre Company uses mystic inquiries and Native American traditions to enhance its contemporary story of wayward characters looking for guidance.

Inspired by a real-life occurrence, the events of the play are launched by a single event: the birth of a pure white buffalo calf on a small Wisconsin farm. Single mother Carol Gelling (Michelle Mountain) and her teenaged daughter, Abby (Stacie Hadgikosti), recognize the remarkable beauty and rarity of the occurrence, but little do they know its portentous significance. The appearance of John Two Rivers (Michael Brian Ogden) briefly prepares them for an ensuing onslaught of publicity and visitors; as John explains, according to Sioux legend, the white buffalo signifies the return of an ancient savior. As the curious and the fervent descend on the farm by the thousands, the Gelling women must contend with the ways, good and bad, in which this miracle is altering their present — and how it can shape their future.

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A Stone Carver

William Mastrosimone’s comedy A Stone Carver is as brashly funny as it is affectionately warm and sometimes genuinely exasperating, qualities that are hardly guaranteed to play nice together in a single play. Happily, director Rhiannon Ragland goes into the Purple Rose Theatre Company’s production swinging, balancing a light, humorous tone with growing stakes and no shortage of tender reflection on preserving what we treasure.

The play’s single act is confined to the home of Agostino (Guy Sanville), an Italian-accented widower who lives alone and works in his kitchen: a mostly retired stone carver, his current project for the church is nearly complete. His work is interrupted by the surprise appearance of son Raff (Matthew David), which instinctively triggers a curmudgeonly defensiveness in the father; in fact, both parties approach their visit with distrustful preemption that only exacerbates their frosty familiarity. But the surprises don’t end there: Raff has brought a woman to meet his father, and by the way, they’re engaged. The pert, polished Janice (Charlyn Swarthout) clearly suits Raff’s chosen identity as a successful businessman and aspiring public servant, which is to say, she’s not an instant favorite in this house. Armed with a militia’s store of tactics, Raff angles and angles for some point of concession, but even his ace in the hole — asking his father to do the stone work on the house the couple is building together — proves vulnerable to derision. However, all the nicety and cajoling merely serve to tiptoe around the primary conflict: the only remaining residence for blocks, Agostino is resisting eminent domain, and this is Raff’s last opportunity to peacefully extract his father from his childhood home.

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Escanaba in da Moonlight

Playwright Jeff Daniels’s Escanaba in da Moonlight has forged a legacy for itself since its world-premiere production at Purple Rose Theatre Company a decade and a half ago. Now, under the direction of Guy Sanville, the play that sparked a trilogy returns to its original home. As this actually marks the first time this reviewer has ever seen the show, I’m unable to provide any sense of comparison with other stagings. However, it’s clear from this “reloaded” offering why the Purple Rose couldn’t resist another shot: with a tale this silly, folksy, eerie, warm, and improbable all rolled into one comedy full of Michigan flavor, it’s hard to imagine staying away.

Jim Porterfield plays the curmudgeonly narrator and family patriarch, Albert Soady; although he professes little patience for the so-called fudgesuckers of Michigan’s lower peninsula, it’s hard not to be won over by his staunch Yooper pride (for the uninitiated, the label is derived from U.P. for “upper peninsula”). In point of fact, Albert has little patience for anything but hunting, including the near-constant ribbing between his two sons, Reuben (Michael Brian Ogden) and Remnar (Matthew David). When we meet them on the anticipatory night before 1989 deer season opens, Remnar is primarily occupied with taunting Reuben for never having bagged a buck of his own. In fact, the reluctantly nicknamed Buckless Yooper is about to become the oldest member of his lineage to hold that dishonor — this year is do or die for him. Ogden ably embodies the hopelessness, ambition, and failure of never measuring up, which turns his every spoken word into a vital entreaty for his family to take him seriously (which backfires by virtue of his wanting it so frantically). David’s Remnar, a creature of habit and superstitions (cheers to costume designer Suzanne Young for his clumsily preserved lucky shirt), provides an efficient foil when Reuben asks to leave aside tradition just this once. Much of the first act is concerned with bizarre, half-understood Native American rituals Reuben learned from his wife, Wolf Moon Dance (Rhiannon Ragland), blending laughed-off mumbo jumbo and pure lowest-common-denominator nastiness, the disgustingly funny stuff of spit takes (for which we have properties designer Danna Segrest to thank).

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