Dead Man's Shoes

Gather ‘round and witness the amazing, unbelievable tale of Injun Bill Picote, an outlaw and loner with his mind set on unlawful justice. Playwright Joseph Zettelmaier takes inspiration from a gruesomely morbid historical footnote and fashions it into Dead Man’s Shoes, a unique Western-comedy hybrid with bawd and bite. The world-premiere production, a joint offering by Williamston Theatre and Performance Network Theatre with direction by David Wolber, marries component skill and tight cohesion into a masterpiece of workmanship with entertainment value to match.

Portrayed by Drew Parker, Injun Bill is already a noted killer and ne’er-do-well by the play’s start. In a jail cell somewhere in the lawless West, he makes the inescapable acquaintance of the defiantly enthusiastic Froggy (Aral Gribble), a misfit Creole now purposeless and drunk since his employment as General Custer’s cook was, let’s say, terminated. Froggy instantly cleaves to his infamous companion, and when circumstances allow for the pair’s release, the adrift ready-made sidekick has already signed on to aid in the renegade’s quest, a mission straight out of the truth-stranger-than-fiction vault. After Injun Bill’s only friend in the world was publicly killed, an influential doctor purchased the man’s remains and made a horrific memento of his skin. Leaning on the excesses and indignities of this (totally true, and hideously documented) act, the story plainly roots for the vigilante hero to find the titular shoes and kill their contemptible possessor.

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Returning productions — Holiday season 2011

Novemer and December in the theater world signals the return of favorite Christmas productions for all ages. As the Rogue has her hands overfull with new plays, holiday and otherwise, here’s a round-up of shows that played to audience and critical acclaim in previous years and return in 2011 to delight audiences anew.

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The Dead Guy

Reality television is a vicious mistress: viewers cluck their tongues at premises that seem engineered solely to expose contestants to potential harms, be they physical or psychological. Yet for better or worse, episodes that promise contestant breakdowns or near-death medical emergencies are among the most publicized and talked about in the genre. (Un?)fortunately, to date, no show has ever seen a contestant perish on camera — a threshold that playwright Eric Coble shatters in his nail-biter of a satire, The Dead Guy. In Williamston Theatre’s production, part of a continuing partnership with Michigan State University Department of Theatre, director Tony Caselli dives headlong into the ethical wasteland of television entertainment, an industry that requires each new offering to be more shocking than the last to keep its ratings up.

In the world of the play, The Dead Guy is a new reality series by bottom-feeder producer Gina Yaweth (Robin Lewis-Bedz). No longer daring humans to touch savage wild animals and filming the results, Gina concocts the ultimate ratings grab of a premise: give a man a million dollars, film him spending it for a week, and then watch him die by a method of the audience’s choosing. Her subject is Eldon Phelps (Chris Korte), a small-town presence who has never been reliably employed and was just given up on for good by his girlfriend; Eldon enters into his contract with eyes open, hoping to make a difference in the world rather than pass through unnoticed. The seemingly impossible sell is made believable by a combination of Lewis-Bedz’s frightening skill for understated spin and Korte’s characterization as a guy of pendulum-swing choices, the kind who finds himself unhappy and believes that what will turn his fortunes around is a complete one-eighty to the opposite extreme. After the contract is signed in the production’s first few minutes, there is nothing else to do but see how it all plays out.

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And the Creek Don't Rise

The beauty of Joseph Zettelmaier’s And the Creek Don’t Rise lies somewhere in its wonderful simplicity. The playwright’s fish-out-of-water premise and intricate trio of relationships touches on a kind of real-world uncertainty, giving warmth as well as benign enmity to a skirmish between neighbors. Under the direction of Joseph Albright, this world-premiere production at Williamston Theatre humorously pits North against South in a play that uses Civil War history as an entry point to civil warfare.

When we first meet Rob Graff (John Lepard), he’s moving the last of the boxes into the Carson, Georgia, house he has purchased with wife Maddie (Kate Peckham). Both transplants from Michigan, Rob and Maddie are agog at the visage of their neighbor, Doc Boggs (Thomas D. Mahard), who arrives in his Confederate uniform to bid them welcome. Doc is a devoted reenactor of the “war of Northern aggression,” and when he invites Rob to participate in the next day’s battle, Maddie sees it as a way for her spouse to make friends and valuable connections in this foreign land. And in excellent concert with the gracious complexity of Southern rules of hospitality, she is both right and wrong. When Rob commits a gaffe of incomprehensible magnitude, Doc remains outwardly cordial and generous to a fault, but the wary Michigander suspects a steely hostility under the old gentleman’s acts of kindness. To the viewer’s great reward, Rob is entirely right. The men’s subsequent escalation is fantastic for injecting high stakes into a stiffly polite and largely harmless feud. Together, Lepard and Mahard expertly traverse their characters’ conflict, which pays off both in their growing understanding despite themselves and in the big laughs they deliver along the way.

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Eleemosynary

Mothers and daughters, and the ties that bind them, make for compelling and timeless dramatic fare. Playwright Lee Blessing’s sparkling Eleemosynary constructs a trio of such relationships, viewed through the lens of extraordinary accomplishment and intelligence. Here, director Lynn Lammers does examine the expectations placed on exceptional women, but the bread and butter of this Williamston Theatre production is in the compassionate struggles of parents’ hopes and their children’s resistance, dually absorbing to watch and heartbreaking to experience.

The play is consumed with three generations of brilliant women: young Echo (Michelle Meredith), a teen spelling prodigy, mother Artie (Rebecca Covey), a coldly private research scientist, and grandmother Dorothea (Julia Glander), an unabashedly deliberate eccentric. Because understanding Echo is predicated on understanding her lineage, early scenes often find her in a solitary position as chronicler/monologist as the tumultuous relationship between Artie and her own mother is fleshed out. Having broken with the confinements of a woman’s traditional role in mid-twentieth-century America, bold Dorothea is so enamored of all information and beauty and philosophy, she seeks to expand her wonder beyond the known world and into spiritual and metaphysical ones. Artie, in adolescence conscripted into everything from regular hypnosis sessions to haphazard experiments in human flight, severs ties with her mother and makes choices directly in opposition to Dorothea’s dreams, her interests strictly tangible and logical. The path of this relationship is given careful and affectionate treatment by Covey and Glander, the former bringing empathy to her character’s flawed, reactionary decisions, the latter showing all sides of a woman so loving and open and driven, her irresistibility masking the related threat of being swallowed up in her dominant personality and passion.

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