Tearful Release

That’s great, it starts with a jewel heist, virgins, rings, and therapists: the Planet Ant is not afraid to kick the 2012-armageddon jokes into high gear with its original late-night comedy Tearful Release. Written by and featuring the winning troupe of 2011 Summer Colony Fest, and directed by Shawn Handlon, the show rides high on deftly funny ideas and batty characters that help smooth over its less-than-polished edges.

Despite some brief introductions and hints at exposition, the one-act production begins with a strong sketch comedy feel. Mike Hofer brings melodramatic absurdity to a bereft artiste who pays cringe-worthy homage to the woman who raised him. As an unhinged, undeterred marriage counselor, Katie Saari finds a serial killer’s resourcefulness in her quest to fix relationships. Rebecca Concepcion’s cult leader retains her mysterious, imposing force even when the real world gets in the way. Standout punchlines and sterling references are liberally deployed, deviating from the main thread whenever necessary to showcase the smart comic writing. Although a few everyday scenes and characters sneak in, the production revels in the outlandish, the heightened, the bizarre — this is a world in which marriages end because of poor performance on a reality TV show.

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The Sunday Punch

Very rarely does a play reside solely in the dramatic or the comedic realm; our world — the one upon which playwrights base their staged realities — is never so binary. In The Sunday Punch, playwright Linda Ramsay-Detherage pours dramatic heft into a comedic premise, establishing a goofy story about one man’s crisis of masculinity and then veering into a deeper meditation on parenting and growing up. In the world premiere production at Planet Ant Theatre, director Nancy Kammer attempts the daunting task of merging these contradictory approaches, and the result shakily straddles the different worlds as it unearths successes in unexpected places.

The play begins with a scene that would be right at home in a sitcom: Gordon (Eric Bloch) hopefully pops an erectile dysfunction–correcting pill at the urging of his anxious wife, Claire (Sonja Marquis), with farcical PG results. They discuss his problem the next day with Gordon’s swaggering brother, Max (Sean Paraventi), and encouraging sister-in-law, Sarah (Wendy Katz Hiller), while packing for a weekend visit with Gordon and Max’s parents; like budding Freuds, the group traces Gordon’s lament to his perpetually negative father. Max recounts the day he clocked Dad in the face and his own berating ceased, and by the transitive property of comic setups, Gordon seizes on the punch as the one thing that will course correct everything miserable in his life. Soon, everyone in the family is clued in to his intention (as sucker-punching infirm old Dad is out of the question, as is violence during the Sabbath). Radiating cartoon villainy to cement his antagonism, the cantankerous septuagenarian Arthur (Clement Valentine) refuses to take the hit lying down, and so the punch becomes a fight, with the bout set for Sunday morning.

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Séance 4

Planet Ant Theatre’s late-night series is a platform for offbeat one-act plays and emerging comedy troupes, but it’s also a ready-made spotlight for its own Home Team of improvisers. Despite the implied sequel in its title, original comedy Séance 4 needs no introduction. Conceived and written by its ensemble cast and directed by Lauren Bickers, this gathering of oddballs is less a scary Halloween story and more a vehicle for exquisite character play among longtime teammates.

Other than excusing any limpness or watering down in its story, the script itself doesn’t explore the meta humor of the played-out repetition of a horror series. Instead, the plot is a stand-alone tale of four cul-de-sac buddies who gather for a half-serious trek into the unknown. Tender-butch Tina (Cara Trautman) wants to contact her years-passed paramour, downtrodden Trent (Michael Hovitch) needs a distraction from his recent divorce, nonbeliever Jane (Dyan Bailey) is as pleased about the choice of activity as she is about the dog doo haunting the neighborhood, and profoundly distinctive Colleen (Tara Rase) will try anything once as long as there are snacks. With a Ouija board at the center of the action, the play progresses and meanders in expected and unexpected ways, balancing supernatural surprises with superb character choices. Even the use of iconic material lifted wholesale from its source works here, demonstrating the effectiveness of homage when filtered through an original lens.

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Love Song

Narrative rules are so well established, so deeply ingrained, that it seems there can be little more satisfying than identifying a problem and neatly solving it. Playwright John Kolvenbach appears to be on board with the formula in his comedy Love Song, but then sees fit to take his quirky, character-driven story in whatever direction it aims to go, and the result is a markedly unexpected — and deftly unique — night of theater. In this Planet Ant Theatre production, director Inga Wilson fosters a sweet and light tone that balances out the gravity of a story of real mental anguish.

To say that Beane (Ty Mitchell) is quiet would be an understatement. He’s antisocial to a fault, plagued by some kind of uncertainty that he’s getting life wrong — he doesn’t get the same enjoyment from food that others seem to, for example, and thus he’s uninclined to eat. His sister, Joan (Annabelle Young), and her husband, Harry (Stephen Blackwell), feel responsible for him, worried more so. Deciding whether and how to interverene in his welfare is clearly weighing on all three, until something amazing happens: a sardonic, malicious thief (Sarah Switanowski) breaks into Beane’s apartment, then lies in wait to give him a piece of her mind. As it happens, she is captivated (yet angrily disbelieving) that he has so little in the way of possessions — her greatest thrill is to discover and destroy the impersonal objects people give treasured places in their homes and pore over the extremely personal ones they hide away, a dichotomy that only seems to grow more polarized with increasing wealth. Her name is Molly; she gets to the very center of Beane; he loves her instantly. To the playwright’s credit, the ensuing plot is not solely concerned with his potential craziness at this development, but also with his happiness, and gives equal credence to the ramifications of both.

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Cop Block

Strange to think of winter in this heat, but Planet Ant Theatre’s latest original late-night comedy was born in January, with the Winter Improv Colony Fest — the coveted prize for the winning troupe was this time slot and director Matthias Schneider. Vaulting from improvisation to the scripted world, the winning trio invented and wrote Cop Block, a one-act revenge fantasy that plays with grizzled old clichés. However, given a troupe whose predominant strength appears to be finding comic nuance in the everyday, this over-the-top genre parody makes for an imperfect fit.

The play’s simple story arc concerns police officers Shaw (Andy Wotta), McLopez (Andrew Seiler), and Freedom (Clint Lohman), recently bereft of their beloved chief by a noted cop killer/drug dealer. Intent on avenging their lost leader, the men set out to bring his murderer to justice, battling various personal demons along the way: McLopez’s domineering and disapproving wife, Freedom’s alcoholism, and Shaw’s rampaging ineptitude and fondness for “sampling” the drugs they encounter on the beat. From dramatic graveside pledges to off-the-books interrogation tactics to expository scenes at the shooting range, the best-known devices of law enforcement storytelling are all here. Happily for the plot, a too-early victory gone awry ramps up the interest, and what follows are some of the most crafty and inventive moments of the piece.

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