Boxfest Detroit 2011

The spotlight once again turns to the woman director for BoxFest Detroit 2011, a mixture of the familiar and the new. Artistic director Molly McMahon and executive director Kelly Rossi return to the festival, once again making the most of the Furniture Factory space and its limitless permutations of rolling blue flats. Ten new plays, some helmed by BoxFest Detroit veterans and some by first-time directors, bring opportunities and challenges for playwrights, directors, and performers alike, and the festival’s festive atmosphere again prevails.

The short plays are a little longer this year; although the basic “box” system of programming blocks remains intact, the pacing has changed. Whereas last year’s boxes were mostly populated with a triptych of lightning-fast one-acts, this year finds the majority of boxes with just two plays. It’s a more than acceptable variation, as the longer fifteen- to twenty-minute intermissions between boxes are well met by a supply of donations-encouraged beer, wine, and concessions, and the pressure feels ever so slightly loosened for stage manager Meghan Lynch and assistant stage manager Jon Pigott to keep things running on time. If there’s any melee, it’s occurring behind the scenes — the spacious lobby has a welcoming and jovial atmosphere, great for engaging conversations with the directors and performers and retrospection on this year’s ten offerings.

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Posing

The New Theatre Project celebrates its big move from Ann Arbor to downtown Ypsilanti with the world premiere of Posing, written by resident playwright Jason Sebacher and directed and designed by artistic director Keith Paul Medelis. The cozy, craftily appointed Mix Studio space is accessible to patrons through the chic Mix boutique, acting both as landlord and as eager patron of the arts. Although the zip code has changed, the company’s ethos is well intact, as evidenced by this intimate production about the desirability and the price of lifelong youth.

The setting is a slovenly, condom- and clothing-strewn hovel, utterly anonymous but for one curious piece of décor. The two men inhabiting the room are at first just as anonymous, both to the viewer and to each other. That they had a sexual encounter the night before is likely; that they smoked and swallowed a lot of drugs is even more certain. The play’s eighty minutes find the pair in a kind of limbo that seems to last for days, during which they engage in deliberately obtuse and seemingly mundane conversation about where they’ve been, who they’re avoiding, and whether and how soon they’d better get some more drugs. They do get high again, their trips hypnotically, languidly staged with movement by Brian Carbine; they have more sex, the performers generally appearing in a state of undress and briefly stripping completely nude (warranting an 18-and-over door policy). But when the room’s resident (Evan Mann) seems to lose himself and call his companion (Ben Stange) by another name, this ultimate lost weekend finds its traction, snapping much of the wayward dialogue into clearer perspective. The story hinges on a literary device that viewers may or may not pick up on, but the details of the plot are less important — and less impressive — than the captivating issues raised by the playwright’s inventive hypothesis.

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Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh

Everything old is new again: it’s trite, but true. Playwright Joel Gross draws evident parallels between now and two centuries ago in his Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh, but the production at Performance Network Theatre doesn’t feel like a solely or overwhelmingly political play. As directed by Shannon Ferrante, this drama is reduced to an empathetic trio whose complex class, political, and personal associations make for unavoidably difficult love and friendship, long before Facebook coined “It’s Complicated.”

Spanning nearly two decades from the beginning of the maligned queen’s reign to the brutal end of her life, this fact-influenced but imagined history finds a framework in Elisa (Jill Dion), a portrait artist and social climber who angles for a commission by Marie Antoinette (Chelsea Sadler) and becomes the monarch’s friend and closest confidante. Portraiture accordingly becomes the marker of the years, with a handful of reproductions fashioned by scenic and properties designer Monika Essen. With scenes in at least a dozen locations in Versailles, Paris, and elsewhere, Essen’s vision is somehow both Spartan and opulent, avoiding outright lavishness in favor of sparse ornate details. A massively tall setup of delicate folding French doors gives way to a painted floral backdrop, lushly predating Monet’s watercolors and serving as a willing palette for Daniel C. Walker’s dazzling lighting design, which plays with dusk and silhouette to marvelous effect. Period chamber music is provided by sound designer Phil Powers, who notes in the program that one of the pieces used is a composition by the real-life Marie Antoinette — one of many suggestions in this show that the “Let them eat cake” historical figure we know is not a complete or accurate picture.

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The Tempest

Water Works Theatre Company isn’t the first of Michigan’s companies to honor The Tempest on its quadricentennial anniversary, but an organization whose hallmark is a single Shakespeare-in-the-park production every year can hardly be blamed for seizing the opportunity. For what it’s worth, the outdoor production in Royal Oak’s Starr Jaycee Park is thus far unique in its creative and high-tech focus on the magical and superhuman elements of William Shakespeare’s final play. As was abundantly evident to this reviewer even at the production’s first preview performance, Water Works Artistic Director Jeff Thomakos helms the current production with a flair for the theatrical, using fantasy and spectacle to perform sorcery in plain sight.

Front and center in this telling are the design and technical elements that highlight the inexplicable capabilities of the desert island under rule of the banished Prospero (Paul Hopper). In particular, Nina Barlow’s exhaustive mask work is executed with purpose, serving as a physical talisman of a creature touched by magic. Notably, Prospero’s servant Caliban (Rusty Mewha) dons a single mask, a source of vile fascination to which the actor layers on incredible simian physicality. In contrast, the changeling spirit Ariel (Sara Catheryn Wolf) wears a half-dozen faces to suit the text, each variably informing a solid performance founded on curious approximations of human interaction and animal-like loyalty. The action also extends into vertical space, in the form of visible rigging that suspends characters several feet above the stage. The effect is best implemented with a hovering trio of spirits (Jaclyn Strez, Samantha White, and Katie Terpstra), a constant and mysterious reminder of the magic influences of the island in addition to one of many gorgeous stage pictures.

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