Mr. Marmalade

The title Mr. Marmalade may be catchy, but make no mistake: this is Lucy's world; everyone else just lives in it. Accordingly, I found the opening moments of the Breathe Art Theatre Project's production misleading. The onstage presence of the title character (Joel Mitchell) before the play even begins suggests that Mr. Marmalade is the focal point, whereas the real omnipresence is four-year-old Lucy (Christa Coulter), the lens through which every stimulus passes.

Essentially, if Lucy's not interested in something, it doesn't exist. In her eyes, her New Jersey home consists of dull, empty walls and grown-up chairs with their backs to her domain. The play's ninety minutes cover less than twenty-four hours of real time, but for Lucy and her play world, timelines bend to her will. The primary challenge in director Kevin T. Young's staging is the unavoidable dissonance between the narrative structure mirroring a four-year-old's attention span and the deep investment in her real-seeming imaginary life. Coulter is sometimes an uncomplicated child, but just as often the preternaturally composed adult Lucy imagines herself to be, and the shifts are fluid, not overt. Young's blurred lines of make-believe and reality lend occasional unevenness (especially the inconsistent use of characters' "play" accents), but also generate an atmosphere of stream-of-consciousness immediacy that ultimately work for Noah Haidle's darkly comic script.

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The Last Five Years

Musicals get away with being fluffy. A man and a woman singing prettily at each other — the bar is set low. This is why the heartfelt The Last Five Years from Magenta Giraffe Theatre will soar past everyone's expectations. The small-scale piece by writer/composer Jason Robert Brown, sharply conceived and beautifully executed, delivers such exquisite sadness that your heart may explode.

The musical has just two characters, Cathy (Anne Marie Damman) and Jamie (Kevin Young); their romantic relationship has an expiration date. When the play opens, Cathy bitterly sings that it's over, yet in Jamie's reality, they've just met. From the opposite ends of their five years together, they bookend each other: he moves forward in time; she goes back. Although they occasionally share the stage, the characters mostly occupy it alone for alternating songs; there is relatively little dialogue, but a variety of  ballads and some up-tempo, rock-adjacent numbers. The concept allows us to primarily see each character feeling alone within a relationship, revealing well-earned undercurrents of pain and second guessing, and making the few points of connection all the more bittersweet. Director Frannie Shepherd-Bates takes excruciating care to develop the individuals as well as the couple, constructing believable love and loss — simultaneously — between two people who almost never address each other. The staging weaves the two actors together without being intrusive, there are no lazy choices, and everything clicks.

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Dutchman

In the talk back I attended after Dutchman, director LoriGoe Nowak told the audience that the Magenta Giraffe Theatre's production was intended to be abstract. I was actually surprised to hear this, as it had escaped my notice during the 60-minute play. Some choices became clearer in retrospect, but at first, most of the elements of this version did not seem much different from a classic staging.

The setting, especially, revealed details — from the set to the costumes to the passengers' movements suggesting a train in motion — that precisely evoked a 1960s subway car. The cohesive set design by Kevin Beltz lent intimacy and a sense of voyeurism that were well suited for this challenging piece. Lighting design by Gwen Lindsay and music by Chuk Nowak (mixed live from the conductor's booth onstage, an undercurrent of music blended with the constant sound of the train) added additional layers of vérité, so much so that the actors had to raise their voices over the din. The four nonspeaking passengers were unremarkable upon first glance, in nondescript costumes suggestive of decades ago. Perhaps the abstract point of view was a bit too well concealed.

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