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.
February 3, 2012