Romantic Fools

Stormfield Theatre indulges in a zany confection with its Romantic Fools, by Rich Orloff. Director Rob Roznowski and his cast of two gnaw through a brittle, stale exterior of he-said/she-said tropes in order to savor a fulfilling chewy center of relationship-centered humor.

Man (Roger Ortman) and Woman (Lisa Sodman) make their way together through twelve comic vignettes, broken up into two acts. The first, concerned with meeting and pursuing potential mates, relies heavily on overblown gender stereotypes: to her, men are prehistoric relics with elementary needs and rudimentary communication skills; to him, women are needy basket cases whose mixed signals render them nearly schizophrenic. Even the more remote generalizations feel like they’ve been made before, and these performances are too by the book to transcend their other iterations. Separately, Ortman and Sodman adopt a few outrageous personas, but the comic pairing doesn't feel attuned. Similarly, the early scene work relies heavily on scripted zaniness: the beats safe and underworked, the choices reserved, this is the minimum acceptable qualification for humor. Some of the material is even lifted conspicuously from a classic comic routine, which emphasizes the importance of timing and delivery to its success — and not in the way one would hope.

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Will Rogers: An American Original

This isn’t the first time Stormfield Theatre has hosted a one-man show by a living American playwright about a famous dead American. However, Will Rogers: An American Original marks the first time to this critic's knowledge that the famous dead American hasn’t been storied company inspiration Mark Twain. In the current production, Artistic Director Kristine Thatcher invites playwright and performer Kevin McKillip to bring to life a plain-speaking humorist and all-around good guy who was liked — and who liked in turn — the world over.

The play is packaged as a regular stop on one of the gentleman cowboy’s national lecture tours, near the end of his accomplished and varied career. In character as Will, McKillip engages in conversation directly with the audience from in front of a self-consciously artificial backdrop. Set designer Michelle Raymond adds a few painstaking details to an empty expanse that recalls movie sets of old; Joseph Dickson’s lighting design statically keeps the focus on the performance. The only tricks possible here are Will’s lasso work (at which McKillip is impressively competent) and his word play, which seem like key components in promoting his folksy brand of philosophy.

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Heroes

Sometimes, people are not the conflict; sometimes it’s the passage of time itself, or other circumstances beyond our control. What is so often overlooked in drama is that we don’t necessarily rail against these things; sometimes we observe, and accede, and it’s not necessarily a surrender. This is the essence of the excellent Heroes, adapted and translated from Gerald Sibleyras’s Le Vent De Peupliers by playwright Tom Stoppard. Neither a return to the trenches nor a weary white flag, the Stormfield Theatre production examines a trio of war veterans in the autumn of their years; under the direction of Kristine Thatcher, thoughtful performances and winning teamwork make for an experience as captivating as it is fond and warm.

In August 1959, in a nun-staffed veterans military hospital in the French countryside, residents Philippe (Richard Marlatt), Gustave (Gary Houston), and Henri (Richard Henzel) pass the time together on the remote back terrace. Their histories, ages, injuries, and time spent convalescing are all different — whereas tender Henri has nursed his bum leg for over a decade, randy Philippe increasingly feels the effects of a remnant of shrapnel; bristly Gustave boasts of his return to the service in 1940s Paris, but reveals no evidence of any wound from either World War. They spend time together by choice, and although petty disagreements serve to pass the time, their friendship is evident; it proves easy to like these men because of how readily they like each other. Curiously, one of their main points of commonality is a leftover military mentality, a shared language upon which they draw to protect their turf from interlopers or to strategize approaching a pretty young woman seen around town. Over scenes spanning several weeks, everyday activities and larger developments all serve as portals into the men’s separate characters and philosophies, as everything from a fellow patient’s birthday party to the fate of an ornamental stone dog sheds light on their psyches.

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The Lady With All the Answers

The challenge of the celebrity bio-play is in striking a balance between the individual’s public and private faces; showing only the former feels like a shallow impression, but revealing only the latter robs the viewer of the familiarity of the ingrained connection. Playwright David Rambo executes this conceit with skill in The Lady With All the Answers, an intimate exploration of extraordinary woman Eppie Lederer as well as of her nom de plume, famous advice columnist “Ann Landers.” Stormfield Theatre’s production, as directed by Kristine Thatcher and performed by Diane Dorsey, has mixed results in giving credence to both halves of the same subject, but succeeds in conveying unshakable strength and reason that reinforce the larger-than-life timbre of a nationally treasured voice.

The play opens with the moment of truth for any writer, her deadline, which Eppie is evading late in the evening in her downtown Chicago apartment. Something is evidently amiss: the character hesitantly dips a careful toe into her family life and upbringing, including the famous rift with her twin sister and professional rival “Dear Abby,” but for the most part she retreats behind the Landers persona and elegantly procrastinates. The character seems touchy about how to approach Landers’s fame, her boggled mind — that people have no recourse but this stranger for their weird, personal troubles — hovering near condescension and judgment. Yet despite her saucy quips that come across more like barbs, Dorsey is generously effusive connecting with the audience as she takes informal polls and initiates some easy question-and-answer, her delight in their laughter and reactions providing a concentrated shot of warmth to the character. Eventually she confesses to the viewers, who she addresses as readers but treats as friends, that her column is held up because she can’t think of how to tell the readership about her — Eppie’s — impending divorce.

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Kimberly Akimbo

All the publicity for Stormfield Theatre’s full production of Kimberly Akimbo (after the late-2009 staged reading that marked the theater’s inception) trumpets actor Carmen Decker in the title role, and it’s more than earned by Decker’s celebrated decades-long history in Michigan theater and carefully honed performance. Yet what makes this lovingly oddball production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s script really tick is its sharp ensemble feel and embrace of a comedic oddball world in which high school and criminal activity, normal and abnormal, and impending birth and death can coexist, or, more curiously, overlap.

Teenaged Kimberly is the new kid in Bogota, New Jersey; her parents have moved the family here under suspiciously vague circumstances. There’s some witness protection–like allusion to keeping quiet about their past, but it would be impossible for this quirky crowd to blend in or lay low. Hypochondriac Pattie (Deborah Keller) pushes her pregnant belly around the house, her hands bound tightly after a carpal tunnel operation, but her mouth in fine working order to plead and command. Unreliable boozer Buddy (Tommy Gomez) brings the deadbeat dad to new levels of bumbling ineptitude, but manages to stay in the family’s good graces with warmth and heartfelt promises. However, most conspicuous of all is Kimberly, who has a genetic disease causing her body to age at 4.5 times the normal rate. She looks like a grandmother at the age of sixteen, the average life expectancy of people with her condition — her birthday passes as celebrated as a death knell. From her place at the fringes of the social order, Kimberly makes a single friend in Jeff (Comso Greene), another loner who prefers his pastimes of role-playing games and anagrams to fitting in with classmates who ridicule him. Rounding out the ensemble is erratic and dangerous Debra (Michelle Meredith), Kimberly’s aunt, who tracks down the family and seems intent on blowing the mystery of their past wide open. The play's narrow world is intentionally alien and insular, populated entirely by people who couldn’t arrive at normal with a map, yet however unusual or closed-off these characters are, when surrounded by their own kind, their existence feels full instead of pitiable.

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