Miles & Ellie

Comic meditation on gawky first love, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

The central character of playwright Don Zolidis' newest work would have you believe, "This is not a love story." But from the joint he-and-she title, to the saccharine meet-cute tropes, to the carefully cresting hopes and expectations, "Miles & Ellie" actively beats back this assertion at every turn. Indeed, under the direction of Guy Sanville, The Purple Rose Theatre Company's world premiere production handily captures the sweet ungainliness of childhood's fumbling first love; yet this delectably sweet and tart comedy also excels by more complicated maneuvers regarding storytelling, memory and misguided protagonists.

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Roaming Charges

“A poem should not mean/But be.” This succinct closing couplet of Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” could double as the thesis statement for the fluid Roaming Charges by Ralph Accardo, now in its world premiere at Detroit Repertory Theatre. Although this carefully constructed fable of poets and poetry raises its share of compelling issues, these occupy a largely thematic space in director Charlotte Leisinger’s interpretation, which seeks above all to approvingly draw out the lyricism in a voluble, very-free-verse text.

The play begins with a conversation between an older white woman, Kate (Leah Smith), and a young black teen, Lacey (Kristin Dawn-Dumas), when the latter comes over to use the former’s backyard swings. The two are by turns open and secretive as they get to know each other’s wounds and boundaries — Kate’s empty nest, Lacey’s dissatisfying home life, and the unspeakable terminal illnesses that touch both. But they are closest bound by the childhood activities that the younger teaches the elder, like the proper form for swinging and jumping rope, and by the poems about Kate that Lacey produces, which are preternaturally sophisticated for a girl her age. As their relationship strengthens, encouragement and praise begins to take on a tenor of surrogate parenting, in which Dawn-Dumas’s precocious open-endedness has an intriguing manipulative undertone, and Smith is believably swept up against all better angels as a salve against the hollowness of her grief. Meanwhile, elsewhere in space and time, a published black poet and academic (Chevonne M. Wilson) strives alone against unseen forces — within and without — to recapture the voice that once made her a prodigy and to get hired for better reasons than infuriating tokenism.

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Edward II

The New Theatre Project is no stranger to the fresh, exciting, unconventional, and downright rebellious; the company’s history has seen it layer a sexy edge onto several older works, stories, and literary figures. Now, in reimagining the dramatic history of a misfit party-boy king, the world-premiere production of Edward II (adapted by Jason Sebacher from the much-longer-titled Christopher Marlowe play) primarily embraces, rather than strays from, these themes. Yet here, under the direction of Keith Paul Medelis, although the play’s central story of forbidden love spits at convention, it’s the cunning machinations of the aghast status-quo types that send up sparks.

How do you solve a problem like King Edward II (Chris Jakob), the recently ascended English monarch who loves the unquestioned liberties of royalty almost as much as he hates the establishment or responsibility of any stripe? But while his chemical excesses are disruptive and his behavior blatantly hostile to his own stuffy court, the root of the problem appears to be the favors and confidence Edward bestows on his hardly secret male lover, Piers Gaveston (John Denyer). Whether homosexuality itself is the predominant strike against the king, or whether his reactionary boorish behavior or his problematic favoritism is what’s rankling the institution, is left blurred — attempted proclamations and policy meetings are inseparable from boundary-pushing scenes of revelry and heat (including frank displays of nudity and simulated sex). Edward’s story is one of blessed power and cursed duty, seen through the lens of insubordinate youth; for his part, Jakob acts the hell out of the role, ascribing breathless fullness to his every juvenile emotion.

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Action Sports News

Oh, local news — so ambitiously overstated, so determinedly solemn, so laughably irrelevant. Now at Planet Ant Theatre, writer-directors Dyan Bailey and Mike McGettigan merrily amplify the absurdity of the bush-league broadcast in Action Sports News. This world-premiere production gains comic footholds in wild, ridiculous moments and characterizations, but finds its ultimate success in threading an emotional, congenial story through its workplace ensemble.

The play stays entirely within the confines of the WHET newsroom, the realm of anchors Gloria Day (Lauren Bickers) and Harry Herpst (David Herbst), station owner/manager Dean Davenport (Dave Davies), and a few new faces, namely inexperienced weather nitwit Jeanette Santino (Melissa Beckwith) and untested local celebrity athlete Sam Hall (Louie Krause). The atmosphere is sufficiently rinky-dink to begin with, but Bailey and McGettigan heighten the triviality with a loopy premise: the station promises to report only good news. The concept not only makes way for great ancillary content (no shortage here of local photo-op contests, baby animals of predictable cuteness, and radiantly worthless investigative series), but it also plants a real story seed, in Gloria’s understandable aspirations to do more serious work for bigger markets. Amid a handful of secondary workplace concerns, the main thrust of the plot becomes a thoughtful look at the push-pull of change versus constancy, outgrowing one’s professional home, and losing one of the family.

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The Divas Project

Divas of song and spirit, reproduced with permission from EncoreMichigan.com.

Plowshares Theatre Company begins 2013 by making good on its mission of "Celebrating the Black Woman" for the 2013 season. Arranged by artistic director Gary Anderson, "The Divas Project" is a world-premiere musical revue in homage to a half-century of American legends of popular music. Readers should note I attended and reviewed the production's sole preview performance before its official opening, but the prowess of the show's professional musicians and its atmosphere of lighthearted fun were already well in evidence.

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