Rosmersholm

Politics in this country have become inseparable from political theater. Decades-ago drug experimentation, offhand allusions to witchcraft, and dalliances with young up-and-comers on the campaign trail and in office are doggedly sought out, exhaustively distributed, and used by the opposition to cast aspersions onto a public figure’s entire character and ability to lead. What’s worse, we didn’t even come up with it ourselves — it’s all right there in master dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, written in 1886 in response to the divisive political climate in his home country of Norway. Now in a rare production by Magenta Giraffe Theatre at Detroit’s 1515 Broadway, with direction by Frannie Shepherd-Bates, the story of a man conscripted into the public arena at his own peril proves as hyperbolically dire as it is disarmingly prescient.

Jon Ager is Johannes Rosmer, a well-respected clergyman who has removed himself from the public eye after his mentally unstable wife drowned herself within view of the front parlor window. His sense of home and order comes in the form of Rebecca West (Alysia Kolascz), who came to live at the house called Rosmersholm as his late wife’s caretaker and stayed thereafter to provide him counsel and companionship. At the time, an unmarried woman sharing a house with a widower would ruffle serious feathers, but the pairing is shown to be utterly innocuous and, more importantly, nobody else’s business — that is, until Rosmer is recruited by his brother-in-law (Keith Allan Kalinowski) to join their conservative friends in an unofficial movement to curtail the free-thinking liberalism that’s gaining in popularity. When Rosmer must admit that he has embraced the liberal point of view (and abandoned his Christian faith in the offing), a battle for leverage suddenly changes relationships to alliances and oppositions, and the first stirrings of a rotten truth threaten to gurgle to the surface.

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iMerica, Brand That I Love

The latest Go Comedy! original sketch comedy show, iMerica, Brand That I Love, isn’t solely about Apple’s encroaching global takeover, but the show certainly knows on what side its digital bread is buttered. As directed by Tommy LeRoy, this blazing-fast one-act production covers a lot of ground with competence and its front-and-center nerdy viewpoint with particular bravado and exceptional skill.

Everything seems to be fair game in this world. The scenes have a grab-bag feel of comic premises and styles: riffs on one or more outlandish characters, pun-infested wordplay, heightened spins on real-life relationships, and a little parody thrown in for good measure. Rather than establishing and following rules, the production pays attention to the individual needs of each scene. Costume pieces and embellishments are introduced as needed; a soundtrack is added if useful and neglected if not. LeRoy keeps his set design scaled back; lighting designer Michelle LeRoy invests in a few distinctive cues, but uses them sparingly. Thus, the scene in which a tightly wound couple stiffly attempts to frolic on the beach works with both performers in basic black, but it also feels completely different from an imagined mudslinging political ad bolstered by super-patriotic production values. Shaking off one scene and burrowing into a new one in the blink of an eye, the show ensures that a joke is never far behind, keeping the viewer laughing as a means of acclimation.

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Daddy Long Legs

The Gem Theatre, in partnership with a handful of companies and producers nationwide, presents Daddy Long Legs (book by John Caird, music and lyrics by Paul Gordon) as its first offering of the season. With direction by Caird, the result is a gorgeous musical about a young woman who writes her life out in letters, and the man who is taken with her words in spite of himself. Her effect on him is no parlor trick: with so much lovely prose set to music, backed by strong character work in sterling performances, the viewer is likely to be just as taken with the delightful protagonists and their intriguing tale.

Based on a 1912 novel by Jean Webster, the story is another entry in the popular orphan-against-all-odds literary canon; here, late-teens Jerusha (Christy Altomare) is rescued from her hated orphanage by an anonymous benefactor, who sends her to college on the grounds that she write him letters and never expect any in return. Through her effusive and detailed monthly correspondence over the course of four years of school, the viewer learns about the foundling’s development as well as the identity of her sponsor, Jervis (Kevin Earley), who only wishes he could be as detached as his postal stonewalling suggests. Caird’s staging maximizes the lack of intersection between the characters: Jerusha lives downstage, facing life — and the audience — head on, whereas Jervis starts out a spectator from his upstage study. With much of the text coming from one-way written conversation, the youthful and appealingly petulant Earley makes capable character work out of reading someone else’s words, which is no small feat. Even so, Altomare’s wonderful, plucky Jerusha is a force to be reckoned with, exhausted by her own exponential development and with an untamed edge to her sweet singing voice. Beyond gaining ground academically and socially, Jerusha desperately wants to feel she knows the man behind the pseudonym “Mr. Smith,” in whom she confides completely; his height is the only detail she has and the basis for the pet name that gives the show its title.

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Freud's Last Session

Playwright Mark St. Germain’s lofty Freud’s Last Session delivers on its promise of an academic clash of the literary-analytic-scientific titans. Indeed, the Century Theatre’s production, directed by Tyler Marchant, crackles with discourse on matters religious and ethical. Underneath its idealized principles, however, the play ultimately succeeds by virtue of its vulnerable human realities, explored deftly by two passionately respectful performances.

Under warplane-crossed London skies in September 1939, C.S. Lewis (Cory Krebsbach) answers a summons for an audience with venerated Sigmund Freud (Mitch Greenberg); although this is their first meeting, each man is aware of the other’s work and principles, and they could not seem more different. The young novelist has not yet written the fantasy series for which he will be best known; the neuroscientist is near death of a belligerent oral cancer that plagues his thoughts and faculties. Any awkwardness stemming from the fact that the former skewered the latter in his first novel is addressed and dispatched. No, what the doctor wants to know is how such intelligence and such pure faith can coexist in one person, when his calculating mind knows better than to believe in a higher power.

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Southern Baptist Sissies

This isn’t the first go-round of Del Shores’s deeply personal Southern Baptist Sissies at the Ringwald; the now five-year-old company Who Wants Cake? had its first ever hit with the coming-of-age play a handful of seasons ago. Telling pieces of numerous stories simultaneously, director Joe Bailey works this complex text into a darling and woeful take on the struggle for self-acceptance in the face of religious shame, specifically with respect to the supposed sin of homosexuality. Readers should note that this reviewer did not see the original production and has no basis for comparison; on the other side of the coin, I can say with certainty that this revival undoubtedly stands alone as a fine piece of theater.

With four main characters, the play’s structure swims between and among a number of parallel narratives, past and present. The audience is first introduced to the preteen versions of Mark (Matthew Turner Shelton), TJ (Michael Lopetrone), Benny (Vince Kelley), and Andrew (Joe Plambeck) singing in their church choir, but this is in the context of a longer view; although each character will leap without hesitation into a past scene as his twelve-year-old self, the narrative voices are those of older gay men in reflection. Just as each young man approaches his faith and indoctrinating baptism at different times and with different motives, so has each grown into a different kind of adult. One felt a compulsory fervor to be saved, whereas another composed poetry about his abiding skepticism; one now performs in a gay bar in drag as various country divas, but another marries a woman and viciously cuts ties with all his childhood “sissy” friends. The level of de- and reconstruction in the script is incredible; that the flow works breezily in performance, with the help of a clearly delineated lighting scheme also by Bailey, is a credit to the production. The boys’ individual developments are further supported — or, more accurately, undermined — by the violent condemnation of Preacher (Barry Cutler) as well as the sissy-phobic hand wringing of their mothers (Connie Cowper, in three distinct but thematically similar roles).

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