Mrs. Mannerly

Fond humor and formative charm, if you please, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

In terms of what it's about, playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's "Mrs. Mannerly" is an autobiographical retelling of the writer's childhood etiquette class and its wonderfully exacting, eccentric and enigmatic teacher. But such a paltry description falls humbly short of what the Tipping Point Theatre's current production is. Exuding a feather-light tone and sustaining an affable atmosphere of whimsy, this playfully comic reminiscence of a defining relationship, as directed by Quintessa Gallinat, resembles nothing so much as a short story brought to marvelous theatrical life.

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Looking

Dating woes done comic: Even fizzle sizzles, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Playwright Norm Foster had one specific meaning in mind for the title of his comedy "Looking": the stigmatized, desperation-rank practice of actively seeking a mate. Everybody wants to find love, yet to search for it, ostensibly to force it, paradoxically comes off as repellent. It's therefore no coincidence that Tipping Point Theatre's take on amorous connections sought and stumbled across, helmed by director Kate Peckham, flourishes on the basis of one intangible, organic ingredient that also portends romantic success. Put simply, it's all about the chemistry.

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The Cemetery Club

There’s no denying the benefits of a thorough warmup. The opening scenes of The Cemetery Club make for a goofy, dramatically languid romp, in which playwright Ivan Menchell gives his characters ample time to stretch as comic plots develop. In the Tipping Point Theatre’s final production of the season, director Beth Torrey guides the fluffy early humor with fond patience, gamely preparing a well-conditioned cast to open up into a triumphant emotional sprint. It’s a feat worth waiting for.

Three women face a sea change in their longtime friendship: once occupied with couples’ activities, each of the trio is since widowed, and their primary group pursuit now is a standing monthly appointment to visit the cemetery. Designer Gwen Lindsay, tasked with making a cozy living room and a green expanse of burial ground coexist in the same set, bisects the realms with a simple raised platform. Most of the details are found near ground level, which permits lighting designer Joel Klain to cleanly divide and define the spheres with top-down specificity, keeping the unused parts of the stage well out of mind. Quintessa Gallinat interweaves instantly recognizable classic tunes with gently inoffensive musings on love, a soundtrack that reflects the safety established in the characters’ harmless early tiffs.

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Fiction

Complacent audiences conflate story with truth. Backed by history and storytelling rules, it’s a generally acceptable expectation (there’s a murder, the butler did it, he eventually confesses); it’s why reversals that upend the very foundations of storytelling remain so effective. However, in reality, truth is a flawed continuum for which story is an imperfect stand-in: this is where Steven Dietz’s Fiction thrives. In this Tipping Point Theatre production directed by James R. Kuhl, the viewer is guided along an unusual journey, in which the complex relationship between storyteller and audience is illuminated with intellectual curiosity and visceral connection through the lens of one marriage.

The rollicking squabble between Walter (Aaron H. Alpern) and Linda (Julia Glander) that opens the play turns out to be their first meeting; the scene is followed by present-day narration that succinctly introduces a broken-timeline structure and well-deployed editorializing. In the present, they have been married twenty years, both have since become published novelists of fluctuating acclaim, and they have just learned that Linda has an inoperable brain tumor and mere weeks to live. Among her last wishes are for her husband to read her private journals after she dies — and to read his in return, with the time she has left. Together, Glander and Alpern cultivate a uniquely quirky rapport that speaks to their shared competitive profession and highly refined respect for each other’s privacy; both are possessed of warmth and wit that bring wry humor and vexing immediacy to a loving but fractious relationship tested by strife.

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The Love List

Playwright Norm Foster rests his hopes for The Love List on its out-of-this-world premise, depositing an inexplicable phenomenon into an otherwise-normal world and charging his characters with making sense of the mystery. In the Tipping Point Theatre production, director Lynn Lammers pushes a luminary cast of three to unearth comedy both within and well beyond the text. For viewers unfamiliar with the shopworn dictum Acting Is Reacting, here is exhibit A+.

In the tradition of the milestone birthday, self-assured Leon (Wayne David Parker) makes much of unassuming Bill’s (Dave Davies) fiftieth. His gift is an unconventional matchmaking service: list your ideal mate’s ten most desired qualities, submit it to the old gypsy woman, and meet your match. The two fill out the list together amid much quibbling, providing an initial scene of pat exposition that establishes Bill’s lonely-nice-guy shtick and Leon’s predatory carnality, the former’s humiliating divorce and the latter’s waning infidelities, as well as their solid friendship of opposites. No sooner do sound designer Julia Garlotte and lighting designer Joel Klain weave in one gentle suggestion that something strange is afoot, but a knock on the door in the wee hours of that same night reveals a stranger (Tina Gloss-Finnell) with the name of an old flame of Bill’s, uncanny knowledge of and closeness to him, and ten suspiciously desirable character traits — as if upon request.

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