While We Were Bowling

If Carter W. Lewis's While We Were Bowling is nothing else, it is supremely titled. In actuality, the play — and this John Lepard–directed production at Williamston Theatre — is a cavalcade of "else," from family squabbles to curses from beyond the grave to race relations to suppressed homosexuality to substance abuse to inappropriate romances to narration that looks both forward and backward. With so much happening, in fact, the play's over-the-top unifying theme is a welcome throughline: as advertised, everything that happens to the Irish-Catholic "Bowling McGlaughlins" of Buffalo is distilled through the lens of the family's all-encompassing pastime.

Daughter Lydia (Kelly Studnicki) doubles as omniscient narrator; years away from the play's 1957 setting, she muses that those days that really alter our lives are relatively few. The first act, guided by her own need for recollection, lays out one such day, framed by the approaching All-City bowling tournament. Patriarch Melvin (Joseph Albright), so patriotically paranoid that he sent the kids for Russian language lessons to ready them for invasion, takes Lydia and perfectionist son Brent (Tyler VanCamp) to the alley to practice, where the kids' initial gee-whiz wholesomeness rapidly deteriorates. Melvin aches to surpass his own father's as-yet untouchable lifetime high score, which distracts him from seventeen-year-old Lydia's revelation of the truth behind her relationship with the potentially reformed, dweeby-tough team alternate Stickpin (Edward O'Ryan). Back at home, mom Frances (Suzi Regan) revels in her alone time — which is amber colored and comes from a bottle stashed in the hi-fi — until a preteen black boy named Jeremy (Aya Obayan) arrives to install the family TV set as well as himself in the living room. With so much going on, there's a prevailing soapy feel to the proceedings, but the characters don't lose their dimension; even Albright's maniacal focus on bowling and post-McCarthyist fervor are well packaged in a character who is, at his worst, merely accustomed to being in the driver's seat where his family is concerned.

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Oedipus

There’s little arguing with a good story told well.

Williamston Theatre’s new adaptation of the Sophocles classic Oedipus Rex is a mystery whose solution the audience already knows. The eighty minutes of Oedipus, simplified, concern an immediate problem (a plague in the city-state of Thebes, over which the title character reigns) and the hard-fought road to discovering its cause (the unfortunate intersection of a few foreboding prophecies, which leads to the ruination of all involved). Yet Tony Caselli and Annie Martin’s adaptation still approaches the investigation with desperate severity and an appreciation for the agonies of discovery; faithful to the original text, the meat of the drama lies not in emotional repercussions, but the human flaws that drive us both away from our fates and toward understanding and truth, whatever the cost. The language of the script varies between lofty and humble, but rarely passes on an opportunity to engage in word play that presciently toys with the parallels between knowledge and sight, opening up the myriad thematic possibilities of the tale. However, as directed by Caselli, the production’s greatest accomplishment is in getting the viewer caught up in the intrigue — in an age of spoiler alerts, it’s remarkable to be reminded that in the best of stories, how can trump who, what, and where combined.

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Greater Tuna

The world becomes smaller and more homogeneous every day, with the far reach of media and the ubiquity of chain restaurants and big-box stores, and yet: rural Texas. For a Michigan crowd, much of Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed Howard's Greater Tuna may feel as remote as an alien race that doesn't let their pet dogs in the house. But for all the idiosyncratic, folksy humor in Williamston Theatre's production, directed by Tony Caselli, there's little condescension; the best mockery comes from a place of love, and the affection inherent in this text translates.

From sunup to sundown, the play covers a representative day in Tuna, Texas, as just two actors (Aral Gribble and Wayne David Parker) adjust voices, statures, and costumes to play nearly a dozen roles each. The title is derived from the listening area of local radio station OKKK (and its hosts, delivering all the news it's fit to chatter about), whose daily programming provides a loose thematic framework and effective transitions. The diminutiveness of a city home to fewer than 500 is evident in Donald Robert Fox's forced-perspective set, which makes the main downtown intersection look like the meagerest hub ever created. Lighting design by Daniel C. Walker keeps up with the changing places and focal points, discerning brief radio spots and other one-off material from the lingering fuller scenes. Although Karen Kangas-Preston's surprisingly thorough quick-change costumes are a useful visual aid to the character changes (and a wealth of potential for wardrobe malfunctions), props by Erin Roth and sound design are intentionally scarce; sound effects frequently originate in the actors' own mouths, and abundant use of pantomime keeps the stage free of clutter. In Tuna, it's a simple existence, and its residents know what's most important: family, church, rivalries, firearms, socially ingrained racism, and their own brand of justice.

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Blue Door

Tanya Barfield's script for Blue Door is beyond ambitious, taking on themes of race and identity in concert with issues of ancestry and origin. As presented, it's enough material for two entirely separate plays, yet Barfield comes out with a highly distilled ninety-minute powerhouse. Cemented by intense performances and Suzi Regan's thoughtful direction, the Williamston Theatre's production is a luminous mingling of personal identity with personal history, and the case of a man who desperately wants to cut one off from the other.

Lewis (Rico Bruce Wade) is an accomplished academic and professor who wants to stop being seen as a black man and be just a man. At the play's outset, his refusal to attend the Million-Man March has turned out to be the last straw that ends his marriage. This in turn plunges him into one bleak and sleepless night, his head swirling with liquor and thoughts — the latter taking physical form in actor Julian Gant, who appears as Lewis's brother, Rex, as well as their grandfather, Jesse, and great-grandfather, Simon. Gant's varied characters inform the past Lewis doesn't care to acknowledge: his ancestors' upbringings as slaves, their emancipation and subsequent struggle to exercise their freedoms, and the continuing (even increasing) danger of being black in the murderous deep South. Lewis, meanwhile, is disgusted that the reviews of his book all qualified him as a black mathematician, as though his work has been assigned some kind of handicap; however, what Lewis sees as his desire for parity, Rex labels as assimilation. The brothers' different approaches to honoring their forefathers' struggle for equality is a fascinating exploration of how, and whether, race should play a part in one's self-perception.

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Five Course Love

We think of love as such a complicated thing, when the recipe is simple: one man, one woman, one waiter. So argues Williamston Theatre's Five Course Love, in a bawdy production that repeatedly defies expectations. Directed by Tom Woldt, the one-act musical sprawls and meanders, but just when it appears to be no more than a series of barely linked vignettes about the marriage of sex and international cuisine, playwright/composer Gregg Coffin ties it all together handsomely.

To be fair, love remains hidden for most of the 90-minute production. Instead, the first scenes are more concerned with aspects of passion and lust: four increasingly rowdy demonstrations that perversion knows no nationality. Performers Laura Croff, Matthew Gwynn, and Aaron T. Moore each play five different characters, changing costumes and hair as sharply as they change their accents. In the absence of a clear plot line, the production relies heavily on its jokes — big comedy founded in euphemisms, sight gags, and over-the-top characterization, giving much of the show a musical-sketch-comedy feel. However, it's the ending that really sparks: it's clever, it justifies everything that precedes it, and I never saw it coming.

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