Woman Before a Glass

As one might expect from a biographical one-woman show, the subject of Performance Network's Woman Before a Glass is interesting, successful, and famous in her own right. White-haired Peggy Guggenheim invites the audience into her mid-1960s Italian palazzo filled with her "children," a staggering collection of modern art assembled over a lifetime. In the play's expansive eighty minutes, actor Naz Edwards and director Malcolm Tulip delve into art and artists, politics and religion, and Peggy's private life and family.

What makes playwright Lanie Robertson's take on Peggy worth the visit is the character's scathing honesty, her abundant humor, and — yes, at least in part — her wealth. As "merely" a millionaire Guggenheim (small potatoes compared with most of her relatives), she attributes most of her success to herself, and to a large degree it's deserved; she may have started with a few million, but what she did with it stemmed from her own ingenuity and drive. The combination of gumption and bankroll allowed Peggy to cultivate a curious amalgamation of nuances: now firing words crisply into the phone with the savvy entrepreneurship of a self-made woman, now throwing about her coture wardrobe like an unimpressed debutante, now saucily dropping names of some of the most celebrated modern artists of the mid-twentieth century.

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The Seafarer

Against the oppressive heat of a Michigan summer, the Performance Network Theatre has conjured up a Dublin winter in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer. Under the direction of Malcolm Tulip, the production takes its misguided characters and toys with delivering at least one of them from his hellish fate.

The major story is bundled up tightly with a handful of smaller arcs, touching on themes of dependence and redemption. Recently blinded Richard (Hugh Maguire) is forced to rely on others to provide for him. He and his brother, Sharky (Aaron H. Alpern), eke by with the help of cash settlements they seek after getting drunk and injuring themselves on public property. Everyone has an alcohol dependency. Friend and occasional caretaker Ivan (Keith Allan Kalinowski) waits out Christmas Eve at Richard and Sharky's house after a row with his wife, waiting to find a way back into her good graces. Finally, fair-weather Nicky (Joel Mitchell) swings by to tell of his all-day bender financed by mysterious companion Mr. Lockhart (Richard McWilliams). This is when all the other stories become so much background din: unbeknownst to the others, Sharky discovers he is beholden to the devil for his soul, and his only hope rests on a friendly game of poker.

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Little Shop of Horrors

It doesn't take much to get me excited for Little Shop of Horrors. Infectiously catchy book and score by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, crazy sci-fi tale about ethical slippery slopes and the dangers of botany, Motown girl group–inspired trio as Greek chorus — is it all right if I bring my giant foam finger to wave? Yet for its clarity of vision as well as its pure excitement and fun, this production at the Performance Network stands out as a phenomenal theatrical experience.

The show is best known for the character of Audrey II, the strange and unusual plant that brings fame to a struggling Skid Row flower shop and to the young man who cultivates it, but at a steep price: the fresh human blood on which it feeds. Audiences are used to fantastic feats of puppetry making up Audrey II, often as big as a green Jabba the Hutt, backed by a very specific-sounding male voice over. To deviate from the long-accepted formula would require nothing short of awesomeness in execution to justify the choice, and this is just what director Carla Milarch has done. I won't spoil her extreme and provocative departure here other than to say it works without question, especially in the atmosphere of this production.

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It Came From Mars

Pop quiz: When the Martians land, what do you do? A: Ensure the safety of your family. B: Hunker down and barricade the door. C: Search for conspiracies. D: Profess your love before it's too late. E: Laugh, because you're the only one who realizes it's an ingenious hoax. In Joseph Zettelmaier's latest play, It Came From Mars, the answer is obvious...to the audience, that is. Directed by Tony Caselli, this world premiere at the Performance Network plays with a delightful concept, finding humor in the scenario and the relationships alike.

On the evening of October 30, 1938, a group of performers gathers to rehearse at WHQN New York, terrified this may be the eve of their final broadcast. The first act is full of palpable strife about job security and the future of the radio drama medium, as the characters encounter creative and personal differences — a last-minute replacement actress who demands her ex-husband director grovel before she will take the role, a roiling distrust between a wounded veteran and the German-born sound effects artist. However, 10/30/38 has more significance than simply providing Great Depression and pre–World War II context: this is the date of the famous Orson Welles The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, and the ensuing, even more famous hysteria of a listening public that believed an alien invasion was upon them. At the end of the first act, when the six characters tune in to the broadcast in progress, they, too, believe it completely. In every subsequent action they take to save their own lives, the audience is in on the joke.

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K2

Performance Network's K2 starts out ferociously; the rest of the production must aspire to do justice to its cinematic opening moments. The audience's senses are liberally assaulted with the sounds of high winds and endless terrifying darkness, juxtaposed with images of the actors coming into view on Daniel C. Walker's imposing cliffside ledge, all of which had my mouth hanging open in anticipation. Lighting and sound design by Andrew Hungerford is well used as a commanding presence and as an unobtrusive backdrop, especially in these quick illuminations.

In a production rich with such arresting visuals, two challenges arise. One is to effectively maintain the illusion of peril from being stranded at near-cruising altitude on the world's second-highest mountain, instead of mere feet above a stage floor. The other is to make the characters' words and relationship compelling enough to draw focus from the horror of their situation. Here, longtime collaborators James Bowen, John Michael Manfredi, and director Tim Edward Rhoze meet the former with aplomb, and come within a hair of sustaining the latter, in a riveting production as unforgiving as the mountain that lends it its name.

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