If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]

Like the reply-all taboo and the necessity of logging out of a public computer, the latest formative lesson our society is learning is that absolutely anything posted online can take on a life of its own. Playwright Kevin Kautzman phrases it better in the enticing title of his new internet-age sex comedy, If You Start a Fire [Be Prepared to Burn]. The world premiere by The New Theatre Project is notable for meticulous production values that give the show the resplendent obsession with technology it deserves. Yet as directed by Natividad M. Salgado, the strongest material resides offline: this script has so much fun guiding its characters into a zany, last-ditch enterprise that the ramifications can’t hope to reach the same level of enthusiasm.

The play’s emphatically contemporary context suits the immediacy of its premise. Lucy and Chris (Elise Randall and Peter Giessl) are a couple of textbook ninety-nine percenters, overeducated and underemployed in a crummy economy: she’s thanklessly waiting tables while toiling on an expensive MBA; he’s a college dropout whose service job affords them the barest health coverage. It’s a lamentable career picture for both, so for things to get worse merely adds insult to injury. And when the business world has no place for a couple of hungry, desirable youths, these two blaze their own trail that plays to their unique strengths — in this case, putting a technologically new spin on the oldest profession. True, selling sex online is hardly a novelty, and why this venture is expected to succeed against oceans of competition requires some suspension of disbelief, but it’s well worth the effort in a first act this fresh and funny. Kautzman’s text is magnificent as he submerges these two characters robbed of forethought into a trajectory of pure discovery, and Salgado and company play the beats with realistic give and take and fed-up desperation that ably sets up the foolhardy scheme and everything that follows. As a team, Giessl and Randall operate with fantastic chemistry, bandying about impulsiveness and familiarity that elicits laughter from every sardonic quip and well-placed withering glance.

Click to read more ...

A Body of Water

The new Threefold Productions, a partner company in Ypsilanti’s recent Mix Studio development, makes a fractionated first offering in Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water. With artistic director Sarah Lucas at the helm, this inscrutable work stretches into a marathon of beguiling flux, as long on story transformation as it is enigmatically short on answers.

A man and a woman (Lee Stille and Brenda Lane) wake up together and find pertinent details missing from their memories: who are you, who am I, do we know each other, where are we, and how did we get here pretty neatly sums it up. Although this sounds like a potential setup for numerous horror films, there is no such foreboding in the handsome, well-stocked, but empty house on the water, which in the modest Mix space is represented by designer Dustin Miller’s symmetrically pleasing frosted-lit windows and modular furniture. Beginning at square one, or even farther back if that’s possible, he and she make generally polite inroads toward returning to themselves, their exchanges ranging from childlike musing to frustrated fear that something that should be known is unaccounted for. As a pair, Stille and Lane are careful to be amiably elusive, cultivating a rapport that could easily be the nagging patter of an old married couple or, just as believably, the guarded terseness of strangers.

Click to read more ...

Fugue

The deliberately ambiguous play is as alluring in theory as it is difficult to enact in practice: the production must keep the audience invested in its suspenseful limbo; the script must deliver a payoff satisfactory enough to justify the willful obscurity preceding it. Pitfalls, pretension, and shortcuts to failure pave the way, yet the challenge remains irresistible, largely because of successes like Fugue, now in its world premiere by The New Theatre Project. This haunting, expressive journey by playwright Audra Lord and director T. Luna Alexander wanders with purpose through a murky story abyss, incrementally raising the unease and the stakes as it pushes quirky details into a luridly affecting context.

The word fugue has several meanings, and the interminable miasma of a fugue state is well met by the disquieting atmosphere of the show’s design. Translucent panels neatly subdivide Keith Paul Medelis’s boldly stark setting, with a row of chambers that leave the performers still discernible in offstage holding patterns. In tandem with the unpredictable ambient and downcast lights by designer Janine Woods Thoma and mostly blank costumes by Ben Stange, the colorless surroundings have a curious antiseptic constancy. The presence of a kindly but aloof nurse (Dan Johnson) adds further implication as to the play’s framework, suggestive of a mental health retreat or, more formidably, a psychological experiment. And indeed, the four patients in residence seem well worthy of study, if for no other reason than they can’t remember how they got there — or anything else about themselves.

Click to read more ...

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.

Click to read more ...