The Hot Mess Chronicles 3

Leave it to the Abreact to spin a turd into gold: a few Halloweens ago, a last-minute show was assembled to fill an unfortunate scheduling hole, and lo and behold, a series was born. This year’s installment, The Hot Mess Chronicles 3, sees the return of director Mike McGettigan to a new crop of fright-themed plays engineered to surprise and amuse, even as they retain the best of that thrown-together magic.

In true Hot Mess fashion, the episodic play is strung together with introductions by its host; this year, a uniquely outfitted and disembodied-voiced entity known as MR BABY presides from his spot catty-corner to the main stage. The placement, along with Kevin Barron’s lights and quietly creepy sound design by Mike Eshaq, provides enough distraction to let the scene changes feel unobtrusive and gives the production a nice flow. Quick changeovers are crucial for this installment, which has grown from four to eight short plays by a total of nine playwrights. This year’s selection features a number of scenes that deliver a quick one-two, just enough setup to enact a change-up ending: Ron Morelli’s “Yard Sale of the Damned” infuses an ominous tone into a humdrum transaction, Joe Becker’s “Player V Player” lies in the safety of two guys playing video games, and Dave Davies’s “A Family Feature” fires off a punchline in its suggestively grotesque resolution. A longer second-act piece, Bill McGettigan’s “The Wreck of the Minerva Witherspoon,” takes its time maneuvering toward a gruesome fate, giving its construction-worker characters a long leadup full of probably important but ultimately foggy details.

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The American Crowbar Case

The New Theatre Project partners with local band Match By Match for its first ever original musical, The American Crowbar Case. Created by band member Gray Bouchard, with a book by Jason Sebacher, the play concerns itself with one of the most famous and inexplicable brain injuries in history — the ostensibly self-lobotomized railroad worker Phineas Gage, whose baffling survival was made all the more intriguing by his before-and-after personality shift. Accordingly, Keith Paul Medelis directs a production that, like its subject, seems to be of two minds, but the parts are pleasing enough to make a satisfying whole.

The music doesn’t follow the traditional mold of the musical: Bouchard is a featured singer, but doesn’t himself play a character; lyrics are thematically relevant, but not directly applicable. For their part, Bouchard and Sebacher don’t try to force the story to meet the existing songs, but instead allow for a prevailing feeling of concept album turned concert. This is confirmed and amplified by magnificent design choices: from the up-lit circular stage (set by Medelis) to the unrealistic, high-contrast lighting scheme to the complementary projection work (both by Janine Woods Thoma), the result is a unified vision that rocks along with the music. Melissa Coppola’s music direction fills the space with expertly blended sounds — one is reminded that this is not a house band assembled just for this production, but an actual band, an acoustic trio of guitar (Bouchard), piano (Coppola), and bass (Linden McEachern), playing its own catchy indie/folk songs.

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Unlocking Desire

Tennessee Williams did right by his treatment of Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire; the classic play uses nuance and inference to delicately trace (here be spoilers!) a used and broken woman’s final spiral into insanity. Now, playwright Barbara Neri seeks to revisit the character and possibly offer release in Unlocking Desire, taking those dearly extracted private truths and tossing them into the primordial soup of troubles of a mental institution. Yet at the same time, Neri seems so gun-shy to take the character in an unsanctioned direction that poor Blanche can go nowhere at all; in actuality, this Khoros Inc. production (performed at the Marlene Boll Theatre within the downtown Detroit YMCA, with direction by John Jakary) prefers exclusively to exorcise old demons in new surroundings.

The play’s premise imagines the next steps for Blanche (Linda Rabin Hammell), who was at last writing being escorted away to the booby hatch. (Although a basic familiarity with Williams’s original text — not the 1951 film, there are key differences — couldn’t hurt, the script’s overwhelming repetition of the critical plot points should get even the most unversed viewer on track.) Upon her arrival, the newest patient is introduced to a half-dozen institutionalized personalities that can all conveniently be used to reflect on the protagonist in some way. It’s very Blanche Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, especially in us-versus-them group scenes of mild to moderate rebellion. In the interest of academic discourse, each character is reduced to a cheat sheet of useful opposing convictions, rendering conversations about love and desire into so many core values being nakedly wielded at each other, with little import assigned to who originated them. However blatant, the main tenets and arguments are certainly intelligent and thought-provoking, and most every beat swells with deeper meaning.

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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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Season In Review — The Abreact

Even with a decade of experience behind it, a show at the Abreact remains an encounter unlike any other. This season’s landmark tenth anniversary marked the theater’s second year at a new location, as always in the heart of Detroit, but nobody would mistake the shift as a step toward the mainstream. Now, patrons are buzzed into the Lafayette Lofts building only to discover that the theater space actually spans two apartments: one a black-box studio whose seating is peppered with accumulated armchairs and couches, the other a small lobby, stocked with liquid refreshments, that doubles as a private residence. And just as the company invites viewers into its figurative and literal home, with a characteristic blend of offbeat modern classics, obscure titles, and new works, this season it invited viewers into its many worlds for as close a look as they could stand.

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