Look for a revamped, new-approach theater section coming soon. In the meantime, feel free to search our archives for theater reviews from past seasons.

In Athol Fugard’s “Sorrows and Rejoicings,” the funeral for white South African poet David Olivier (Loren Bass) brings together the three women closest to him: his white widow Allison (Barbara Coven); Marta, his family’s black housekeeper (Sandra Love Aldridge), and Rebecca (Casaundra Freeman) the poet’s daughter by Marta.


The women meet at David’s family home in the South African province of Karoo. The home has been under Marta’s care for years, while Allison and David lived in exile in London for protesting apartheid. With a black majority government now in power, the women come together in David’s old study and embark on a bittersweet conversation about their lives with the conflicted poet.


Allison’s main rival for her husband’s affection, we learn, was not Marta so much as South Africa itself, which David pined for incessantly during their years in England. Marta, meanwhile has polished David’s abandoned desk for years, dreaming of his eventual return to their shared home.


And Rebecca - well we don’t know what she feels about her father. At least not during the play’s first act, in which she silently listens to the other women speak. Also listening in is David himself, whose spirit is called up in the women’s flashbacks, and occasionally interjects his own take on past events.


What emerges is a portrait of a man divided, much like his homeland. From England, he dreams of life in Karoo. But in Karoo, he cannot bridge the divide between himself and Marta, or even acknowledge their daughter. The playwright, also a white writer from Karoo, and a vocal critic of apartheid, seems to be working out some demons in this play, which often bogs down in details of David’s life in academia and alcoholism in England.


Much of the play is presented in lengthy monologues, in which David, or one of the women act out one side of a remembered conversation, while everyone else holds a frozen pose. The overwrought soliloquies showcase the cast’s considerable skills, but the actors occasionally succumb to the temptation to treat the monologues like the audition pieces they resemble. Ultimately, the absence of true interactions between characters slows the play to a crawl.


Director Barbara Busby keeps the energy level as high as possible despite the limitations of Fugard’s odd conventions and stage directions that call for an enormous writing table to site at the center of the stage. The table serves as a heavy-handed metaphor for the writer’s homeland, but it also serves as an obstacle to the play’s flow, as the women awkwardly navigate their way around the massive piece of furniture.


Coven does a nice job of slowly letting Allison’s self-control give way to more heated emotions. And Aldridge convincingly portrays a quiet woman in the midst of exchanging her broken dream for a new and unfamiliar one. Though Bass’s performance is a little more Oxford than Karoo, he ably captures the spectrum of feelings the poet is struggling to reconcile


The play bursts to life, though, when Rebecca breaks her long silence to directly challenge her mother’s unquestioning loyalty to the man who abandoned them both. Freeman’s impassioned performance as the angry young woman ignites the play with an energy that was sorely missing from the play’s first half.


While much of “Sorrows and Rejoicings” is genuinely moving, there’s also something self-indulgent about the play. Writing about a man who shares many of his own biographical details, Fugard focuses his attention on the poet’s disappointments but gives us little reason to sympathize with a man mistreats his wife, betrays his lover and abandons his only child. We feel for the women in the play, but we never understand why they’ve dedicated themselves to this particular man. - John Sousanis



“Sorrows and Rejoicings” runs through May 25 at the Detroit Repertory Theatre, the Detroit Repertory Theatre, 13103 Woodrow Wilson, Detroit. (313) 868-1347.

The Hilberry’s season-closing production of “The Cherry Orchard,” and the mid-season “Philadelphia Story” were the highlights of the company’s 2002-03 season. But while the two plays share a sensitivity to class politics, “The Philadelphia Story” was concerned with its characters ability to change, while “The Cherry Orchard” is about people who refuse to change - even when doing so could save them.


As the play opens, the aristocratic Madame Ranevskaya (Shelly Gaza) and her family are faced with raising enough money to save their estate from pending foreclosure. Ranevskaya, who has lost much of the family fortune in Paris, has returned to Russia less than triumphant.


Despite the family’s ailing finances, Ranevskaya and her brother (Eddie Collins) reject the suggestion of the businessman Lopakhin (Seth Amadei), to sell their cherished cherry orchard in order to save the rest of the estate. With the fall auction of their property looming, Ranevskaya, and her brother spend the summer wistfully ignoring the problem, assuming fate will take care of them as it always has.


Director James Thomas’s matter-of-fact presentation allows the play’s subtle ebb and flow between nostalgia and the tug of the future to gently pull the audience into the story. As the play develops, it is not the Russian characters, but the changing character of Russia, that emerges as the play’s central figure.


Indeed, Chekhov treats most of the men and women in “The Cherry Orchard,” as near-comic characters caught in a tragedy - buffoons or straightmen who undergo almost no transformation even as the world around them changes dramatically.


Lopakhin may be the exception. Amadei taps into the servant-turned-successful-businessman’s central conflict - balancing his adoration of the aristocracy whom he has always envied and his anger toward the class that kept his father and grandfather as serfs. He seems to love Ranevskaya’s stepdaughter (Nikki Ferry) but he cannot muster the will to propose to her. And when Lopakhin is presented with a chance to outbid Ranevskaya and her brother for their own property - Amadei captures Lopakhin’s triumph and sadness, as he simultaneously takes what he’s wanted and destroys it at the same time.


Gaza - delivering a touching performance in her final role with the company - allows us to understand Madame Ranevskaya’s general outlook with a sigh. She’s Scarlet O’Hara murmuring “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” but unlike Miss Scarlett, Madame Ravenskaya never musters the energy to fight back the inevitable. Ferry is similarly moving as the hopeful object of Lopakhin’s unsteady affection, who waits for her life to change, but takes no steps to change it.


The Hilberry is designed to give its graduate student actors the experience they need to succeed as professional actors. The best actors always find a way to push beyond characterization and convey the emotional life of the souls they portray - a task that can sometimes be overlooked in drawing room comedies, costume dramas and even in a play as good as “The Cherry Orchard.”


Josh Eikenberry’s dandy servant, Aaron T. Moore’s blustery friend of the family, and Andrew Huff’s turn as the family butler are exactly the type of charismatic, semi-comical performances that this play requires.


But these actors, and others in the cast, are capable of more. Looking ahead to next year’s season at the Hilberry - which balances Shakespeare and Dickens with contemporary works like David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” and John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves” - they may just get the chance to prove it.


The Hilberry Theatre Company presents “The Cherry Orchard” through May 17, 2003 at 4743 Cass Ave., Detroit. (313) 577-2972.

After two seasons of producing well-known contemporary and classic plays, Hamtramck’s Planet Ant Theatre returns to the business of producing new works with the world premiere of “Only Fresh Lemons,” an edgy underground look at the advertising industry.


Local writers Jack Griffith and Timothy Shores’ off-color, absurdist comedy follows the exploits of the Frothing Mad Men - a startup ad agency created by Q and A (John Maxwell and Dax Anderson). Q and A take Madison Avenue by storm with a slash and burn approach to image management that begins with the premise that the ad - not the product - is all that matters.


Whether they’re using hypodermic needles to promote sporting goods, candy-coated chocolate to jumpstart Saudi Arabia’s image in the West, or pimping an Investment Company with XXX -graphics, the madmen ride the rising stock of shock tactics, upping the ante with every ad they assault us with.


Directed by York R. Griffith, Anderson and Maxwell bring demented soul to existentially vile Ad Men, playing them like Martin and Lewis written by Mamet and Ionesco. Keith Allan Kalinowski, playing Everyone Else, adds a burst of energy to the show playing everything from a moralizing pundit to a sleazy PR man to a director who falters at the brink of excess.


The R-rated humor is alternately sophomoric and sophisticated, with wit and audacity to spare. Of course, audacious wit is pretty much what the play’s about- or at least what it seems to be about. After soaring from outrage to outrage for two acts, “Lemons” ends on a sour note -a somber speech that strives to turn a play about the emptiness of advertising’s message into a message play about the nature of truth.


It doesn’t work - but it doesn’t dampen the fun of the preceding roller-coaster of cynicism either. One way or another Griffith and Shores have futures as writers. If the theater thing doesn’t work out, they should have no trouble finding jobs in advertising. - John Sousanis


“Only Fresh Lemons” plays through May 18 at the Planet Ant Theatre, 2357 Caniff, Hamtramck, (313) 365-4948.

Like his four previous “Nunsense” musicals, Dan Goggin’s “Meshuggah-Nuns” is a rare strain of anti-theater - a critic-proof form of show business that appeals to large audiences by delivering exactly what it promises. What it promises is an evening of silly songs and religious jokes nearly as old as religion itself, served up as an amiable all-Nun talent show.


This time out four or the Little Sisters of Hoboken are joined on an Interfaith Cruise by Howard (Kenny Morris), a Jewish actor who was supposed to play Tevye in the onboard production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” When the rest of the “Fiddler” cast gets seasick, however, Howard and the Nuns must band together to create a cross-cultural talent show for their fellow cruisers.


To their credit, Meadow Brook Theatre and Goggin, who directs, have put together a solid production. Sound designer Brett Rominger delivers a perfect mix between the singers and pianist Jeff Hess’s flawless five-piece combo. Milica Govich, Bambi Jones, Shannon Nicole Locke, and Kathy Robinson are good singers who do an admirable job of shuffling through the pedestrian choreography in their habits across Melinda Pacha’s fun nautical set design. And Morris’s puppy-dog charisma blends in perfectly with the show’s generally inoffensive air.


Forget that Morris is hardly someone you’d cast as Tevye, even on a cruise ship. And forget the dull and dated Gilligan’s Island/ Poseidon Adventure skit and the uninspired lyrics set to familiar melodies. Forget that in “Meshuggah-Nuns” Sisters uttering Yiddish terms like ferklempt passes for high comedy or that Howard actually alludes to his participation in the “Nunsense musical” by calling it a “Nunsense Jewsical!”


While you’re at it, forget that the play’s send up of “Fiddler on the Roof” is basically a list of song titles set to music. Forget that the cheesy duet between Howard and Sister Robert Anne (Govich) is dedicated, without irony, to both Howard’s wife back home and Sister Robert Anne’s Lord and Savior! And forget that she later operates a puppet that propositions Howard a la Mae West.


All right, at some point you’ll have forgotten the whole thing. And yet the play works for large numbers of people. Why? My guess is that the show’s mediocre writing and mock innocence somehow combine to win the goodwill and sympathy that audiences normally reserve for real talents shows, and that the faux Nuns’ send-up of amateur showmanship is embraced as the real thing. Strange? Maybe. But as bang-up ticket sales at MBT will attest, it’s absolutely critic proof. -John Sousanis



“Meshuggah-Nuns!” runs through May 18, 2003 at Meadow Brook Theatre, on the campus of Oakland University, 2200 N. Squirrel Road, Rochester Hills, (248) 377-3300.

Like a working class version of “The Philadelphia Story,” Wendy MacLeod’s “Sin” tracks the journey of a woman who sits in judgment of her friends and family, until her experience opens her eyes to her own weaknesses and allows her to see others in a more charitable light.


Looking down on the world from a traffic helicopter over San Francisco, reporter Avery Bly (Carla Milarch) can’t help thinking that if people showed more self-control and took responsibility for their problems the world would be a better place. She’s hardly wishing fire and brimstone on the world below, but she does hover with a certain air of superiority.


On terra firma, Avery urges her alcoholic husband (David Wolber) to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and refuses to return to their home until he does. She questions her overweight roommate (Laurel Hufano) about her binge eating and encourages her whiny underpaid co-worker (Aral Basil Gribble II) to take some initiative in his career.


Apparently, this is enough to earn Avery a comeuppance, and MacLeod has concocted just the thing: a single evening in which Avery is confronted by and succumbs to each of the Seven Deadly Sins (as well as an earthquake) only to emerge a better and humbler woman.


Milarch’s cheerful charisma may be partially responsible, but Avery hardly seems in need of such biblical intervention. Only when she lectures her AIDS-stricken brother (a rather stiff Grant Stokes) as he nears death in a hospital do we really see her go too far. The brother, however, poses much bigger problems for the playwright, who manages to treat his death like just another bump in a night of madcap misadventure.


The cast has fun with MacLeod’s dialogue - Scott Crownover’s sleazy executive, Alex Mediola’s money-obsessed speculator and Gribble’s buffoonish helicopter pilot eat up the scenery while passionately defending their vices. Yet the play swings awkwardly between farce and soap opera.


Director Travis Reiff, unable to trace an emotionally coherent through-line in MacLeod’s script, attempts to connect the dots with external devices. It’s a losing battle. Rather than smoothing the ride, Ken Faulk’s sound design - abrupt snippets of rock and loud sound effects - simply adds to the general dissonance. Reiff and designer Monica Essen’s ambitious use of video is also problematic. While the projected scenes of clouds and San Francisco are often mesmerizing, in the wake of the glowing screen the stage seems almost pale.


Indeed, the video clips come across as an admission of theater’s limitations, as though actors can’t fly onstage or experience an earthquake without the help of film. Anyone who saw Guy Sanville’s staging of a tornado in the Purple Rose’s “Book of Days,” though, knows there are less literal ways of creating cataclysm onstage.


Ultimately, it’s the script, not the production, that comes up short. While often laugh-out-loud funny, MacLeod’s play is both too didactic and too unstructured to take us where she’s trying to go. Employing a decidedly artificial plot to explore human pride and prejudice, “Sin” provides neither the real insights of good comedy nor the depth of feeling we expect from drama. -John Sousanis



“Sin ” plays through May 18at the Performance Network, 120 E. Huron Ann Arbor. Call (734) 663-0681.

In playwright Randall Godwin’s “Hope for Corky,” at the Purple Rose, the longtime Rose actor’s sardonic delivery is echoed in his first script’s hilariously dry cynicism.


The often-biting play centers on the public obsession over the fate of a dog that unsuccessfully attempted to save his drowning owners. Candlelight vigils are held for the missing dog while the owners’ deaths go all uncommemorated.


A jaded radio announcer (Ryan Carlson) finds himself jettisoned to fame while grudgingly covering the story, until he and his partner (Kate Peckham) initiate a senior citizen crime wave by robbing a church in the hopes of getting free medical care in prison. And a pathological prisoner (Jim Porterfield) who claims he talks to God becomes a successful storefront preacher as soon as he’s out of jail.


Despite the thick cloud of dark humor, “Hope for Corky” reveals an unexpectedly sunny side to the playwright, as Godwin intercuts social satire with a New Age tale of crossing over. Conducted by a ghostly young girl (Bess Miller), the soul-searching journey ambles down the same road traversed in the Rose’s season opener, “Across the Way".


First-time Rose director Michelle Mountain paces the show with comic aplomb. Carlson and Peckham seem to feed off each other’s energy, creating a compelling camaraderie fraught with underlying tension. And the scenes between Carlson and Porterfield (who also plays a maddeningly unsympathetic brain surgeon) showcase two masters of comic timing at their best.


Like Planet Ant’s current “Only Fresh Lemons,” (also by first-time playwrights) the pessimistic “Hope for Corky” seems poised to reveal the Humbug at the controls of Oz. But just as the playwright seems ready to pull back the curtain, he changes direction, and looks to the targets of his satire for redemption. It’s said that most cynics are idealists at heart - and Godwin’s spiritual climax to an otherwise irreverent comedy would seem to prove the point. Fast, funny, but strangely sentimental. - John Sousanis


“Hope for Corky” runs through May 31, 2003 at the Purple Rose Theatre Company, 137 Park Street, Chelsea, (734) 433-7673

As you might expect in a show that’s written onstage each night, the Century Theatre’s new “Comedy Works” featuring the Guild, had its share of ups and downs opening night. But despite a few missteps, the all-improv comedy show was a big success.


Taking advantage of the Century’s intimate cabaret setting, “Comedy Works” uses audience suggestions to drive the show. Act One features improv games, a la ABC’s “Who’s Line Is It Anyway,” in which the cast’s turns audience suggestions into fast, funny skits on the fly. Act Two is reserved - ostensibly - for long-form improv, in which the actors develop a series of related sketches around the same subject matter.


While the opening night performance strayed from the stated format (the cast opted to improvise shorter, unrelated skits in the second act) it certainly was a lot of fun.


The 20-member Guild is a comedy confederation of some of the area’s best comic and improv talents, including a number of former Second City-Detroit mainstagers, and players still active in SC-D’s touring company, Planet Ant’s Improv Colony and other local improv groups. The opening night cast featured Keith Reay, improv vet Mark Mikula, Ant Colonists Elana Elyce and Dave Davies, alongside former Second City stars Kirk Hanley and Guild director Margaret Edwartowski, whose sketch involving a long distance Civil War romance was one of the night’s highlights.


A few skits crashed and burned (which can be kind of funny in its own right) but the ratio of hits to misses was remarkably high - thanks in no small part to Hanley, whose quick-wit heroics snatched several doomed scenes from the jaws of defeat.


With 20 Guild members - including standup comedian Rico Bruce Wade, Flint export Quintin Hicks and Second City’s Nancy Hayden - rotating through the six onstage spots, you never know who’ll be onstage. But the high level of experience throughout the Guild roster should ensure a consistently high level of fun. A welcome addition to the downtown entertainment scene. - John Sousanis


“Comedy Works” starring the Guild plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. through June, 2003 at the Century Theatre, 333 Madison Ave., Detroit. Tickets are $12.50. Call the Gem and Century box office (313) 963-9800 or visit www.gemtheatre.com

Playing emotionally unstable characters prone to disturbing behavior in such Second City revues as “Phantom Menace II Society,” actor Marc Warzecha established himself as one of Detroit most energized comic talents. In “Woodward to Your Mutha,” Warzecha steps into the role of director at Second City, and brings his taste for hyperactive comedy to this fast and furious romp through some broad topical landscape.


“Mutha” is a giant step up from last fall’s aimless “Less Talk, Motown"- it’s funnier, more focused and more ambitious. After a chaotic rap ode to Detroit that’s nearly unintelligible without a lyric sheet, the show kicks into gear with skits that shoot high and low.


Not surprisingly, the company still has an easier time hitting the low flying targets - often relying on profanity and sophomoric stunts to keep the laughs coming (which they do). But they also aim high. An extended sketch in which economically ailing Hamtramck (ruled by a shadow government of bar owners) plans an invasion of Royal Oak, for instance, satirizes current events while spoofing local communities from Ferndale to Frankenmuth.


The skit encapsulates “Mutha’s” strengths and weaknesses. Funny and smart at the start, it ends in a “battle” that doesn’t satisfactorily deliver on the sketch’s initial promise. Other scenes are built on funny insightful premises - including a political debate between Democratic hopefuls, and a skit about the death of face-to-face conversations in today’s technology-dependent offices - similarly devolve into silliness before they can be fully developed.


Still Warzecha’s direction seems to have invigorated the cast, which keeps the show moving at manic speed. Topher Owen, in his second revue, demonstrates great range, as everything from a wannabe B-boy to a bizarre anti-motivational speaker. And newcomer Jelly’s solid acting helps ground the cast of zanies that also includes veteran mainstager Antoine McKay, Suzan Gouine, Jeff Fritz and Jelly’s fellow newcomer Shawn Handlon.


Hopefully, Warzecha and this relatively new will get a chance to build on the foundation they’ve established with this very funny, if uneven, production. - John Sousanis



Second City Detroit presents “Woodward to Your Mutha” at the Second City Comedy Theatre, 2301 Woodward, Detroit. Ongoing, Spring 2003. Call (313) 965-2222

In his new play “In Walks Mem’ry” playwright Eric Waldemar, Jr. has so much to say about the cycle of abuse in families, the role of race in shaping identity, and the power of memory in shaping character that he can never figure out what he wants to focus on. Filled with insight into the nature of violence and abuse, the play lacks a consistent dramatic voice.


After serving 15 years in prison for killing her lover, Zoey (Iris Farrugia) returns to the home she grew up in, which now belongs to her brother Jess (Cameron Knight) who lives in the family house with his girlfriend Genevieve (Telisha Sims) and their teenaged daughter Tyese (Lydia Willis).


The opening scene, in which Jess takes his sister to task for her cavalier attitude toward her crime, provides a compelling look at a brother and sister whose bond has been severely tested and points to one of the potential paths this play might have pursued – the different ways in which people experience the same events.


When the spirit of Zoey and Jess’s father Winston (Augustus Williamson) steps out of the house, the ghost triggers a flashback to a pivotal day in the siblings. It’s an effective use of the ghost and flashbacks – but it’s also the first and last use of flashback in the play. From that point on, Winston’s ghost serves largely as the dark incarnation of Jess’s psyche, badgering the son to repeat his father’s mistakes.


Indeed, the play starts down numerous paths, before abruptly changing direction. A good deal of the first act is devoted to Jess’s contention that his sister always wanted to be white and that this racial envy led to her downfall. Again, Waldemar tries out an interesting idea for a while before dropping it altogether and steering the play in a completely different direction.


The play changes direction so often, and features so many dark revelations from left field, that the audience – not to mention the characters - never has a chance to digest them. Genevieve’s admission that she was a prostitute before meeting Zoey, for instance, might have been grist for an entire play – especially as it plays into her willingness to live in an abusive situation. But in “Mem’ry” it’s just another log thrown on a woodpile of sad and horrible secrets.


Similarly, Jess’s initial crime is all but forgotten by the end of the play - even as it becomes clear that her rationalization for the crime was based on a lie.


Considering the play’s bizarre arch, and often awkward dialogue, the cast comes close to salvaging the production. Williamson, who often plays warm-hearted good guys, puts his considerable stage presence to menacing effect as the patriarch of this cursed family. The women all have moments to shine, and they work together well. After spending much of the play on the sidelines, - and performing her most devastating scene in silence, Willis explodes in a charged scene in which she tries to confronts her mother with the reality of the terrible things that go on in her house.


Knight is excellent in early scenes, as a brother who cares for, but doesn’t trust his sister. As his role shifts from hero to villain, though, the playwright and the actor have a harder time keeping sight of Jess’s character. In the second week, Farrugia occasionally struggled with her lines, though, in her defense, the dialogue was often so off the wall it’s a wonder she remembered it at all.


Interestingly, scenic designer Christopher Carothers’ set gives physical manifestation to both the strengths and weaknesses of Waldemar’s script. Grand and sprawling, impressively realistic in parts - slightly surreal in others, Carothers’ house, like the play, becomes a tangled maze in the middle - a jumble of vistas in which it’s easy to lose track of where the characters are – and where they’re going. - John Sousanis


(Plowshares Theatre Company presents “In Walk Mem’ry” March 20 through April 13 at the Paul Robeson Theatre in the Northwest Activities Center, 18100 Meyer Drive, Detroit. Call (313) 872-0279).

Just when you think you know the lay of the land in local theater, a new company bursts on the scene to redraw the map. The African Renaissance Theater Company of Detroit’s debut production, “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” is a tour de force - a wrecking ball of a play that shatters all expectations.


Stephen Adly-Guirgis’s devastating play follows two men who meet in prison: Lucius (A.R.T. founder Oliver Pookrum), a convicted serial killer who has found religion in prison, and Angel (Brian Marable), who awaits trial for killing a cult leader who “stole” his friend. Held in a 23-hour lockdown facility, the men engage each other during the one hour a day they are allowed outside. From separate chain-link pens, Angel and Lucius argue about heatedly about sin, forgiveness and atonement.


As one might expect in a penitentiary play, profanities abound - hilariously so during the play’s stylized opening scene in which a prisoner tries to pray under a wave of expletives flowing from his fellow inmates. The funny, furious scene sets the tone for the rest of the play – which is a remarkably sophisticated examination of right and wrong and the search for inner peace, even among killers.


Masterfully directed by Cass Tech instructor Marilyn Green McCormick, Marable and Pookrum (both Cass Tech alums) give two physical, through-the-roof performances – stellar portrayals of men overflowing with anger, frustration, remorse and humor. Indeed, the play’s grim subject matter is offset throughout by the prisoner’s dark humor, which had the audience laughing in spite of itself.


Joe Wheeler’s gentle manner as a sympathetic prison guard provides a stark contrast to Joel Mitchell’s roaring turn as a tyrannical guard who never lets the prisoners forget what they’ve become. And Leah Smith gives a soulful performance as a defense attorney caught in her own moral crisis.


Never preachy or one-sided, “A-Train” is an electrifying production that will give you chills, make you laugh, and leave you thinking. A very auspicious beginning. - John Sousanis


A.R.T.’s “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” plays through April 13 at the Hastings Street Ballroom, Call (877) 865-6818.

The Theatre Company at University of Detroit Mercy puts professional actors onstage with theater students as part of a mentoring/teaching system that allows the young actors to practice and learn their craft from veteran performers. In “The Runner Stumbles,” however, it’s playwright Milan Stitt who seems to be learning on the job.


“Runner” recounts the story of Father Rivard (Patrick Gough), a priest sent to a tiny parish in Northern Michigan as punishment for upstaging a vindictive superior (Jason Echols). Since arriving in the hinterlands, Rivard has preached an emotionally austere brand of religion, reflecting his own increasingly dark outlook.


A ray of sunshine finds its way to Rivard’s cathedral on the hill in the form of Sister Rita (Jessica Cloud), an energetic young Nun who threatens to lift the clouds hanging over the Father and his rural parish. But Rita burns a little too brightly and soon she and Rivard are fighting to stave off their evident attraction to one another.


Stitt has interesting things to say about faith, love and religion, but he submerges the Father and Sister’s potentially compelling story in a half-boiled plot in which Rivard stands accused of Rita’s murder. The plays shifts clunkily between unconvincing scenes from the Father’s trial, and flashbacks to when Rita was still breathing (and providing) fresh air on the church grounds.


The trial moves forward in barely coherent fits, and features witnesses whose testimony is so weak that it makes you wonder if Stitt only outlined the scenes, then forgot to go back and rewrite the awkward, simplistic courtroom scenes. And the constant shifts in time only amplify the fact that the moving scenes between Rivard and Rita –when the characters’ full humanity is fully displayed– are barely held together by the thin facsimile of plot.


The supporting cast primarily provides a succession of walk-on bits as witnesses who appear in a scene and disappear for the rest of the play. Mary Bremer delivers an interesting turn as the Father’s recently converted housekeeper, but she’s forced to carry out one of the play’s silliest plot twists, which depends on character development that apparently take place offstage.


Marty Bufalini, in disheveled performance as Rivard’s disheveled attorney, is likewise put in the awkward position of making the lawyer’s embarrassingly naïve dialogue seem profound. And Susan Berch, the star of last fall’s “The Children’s Hour” does a nice job at the risk of being typecast as a bitter young perjurer.


It’s the show’s leads that almost make the production a success. Gough has stage presence to burn, and provides “Runner” with its gravitational center. He also has a lot of skill as an actor, but he doesn’t quite trust himself here. His performance suggests learned lines that were eventually attached to the appropriate emotions: The Father’s volatile feelings seem to begin and end on the surface.


This might not have been as apparent if Gough weren’t playing opposite Cloud, a supremely natural actress whose lines seem to be born the second she utters them, as if they were the only words that could possibly express the emotions welling up in Sister Rita’s heart.


A senior at UDM, Cloud is clearly a student who’s learned her lessons well. – John Sousanis


The Theatre Company presents “The Runner Stumbles” at the McCauley plays March 19 through April 5 at the McAuley Theatre, University of Detroit Mercy Outer Drive Campus. (313) 993-6461

Even those of us who enjoyed last year’s production of “Copenhagen” at the Fisher had to admit there was something a little stultifying about the show. The scientific discussions and historical references in the play about two physicists seemed to form a wall between the audience and the play’s emotional core that required immense concentration to scale.


The fault, as Performance Network’s invigorating current production of “Copenhagen” proves, was apparently not with the script. Director Gillian Eaton and a trio of stars have collectively found the play’s heart and soul, in a production that demonstrates that science – like all human endeavor – is subject to the best and worst of human impulses.


In “Copenhagen” playwright Michael Frayn examines a now famous meeting that took place at the height of World War II, between one-time friends Werner Heisenberg (Malcolm Tulip), the leader of Germany’s atomic research, and Danish scientist Niels Bohr (Robert Grossman) who later helped in the creation of America’s atomic bomb. After the war the men disagreed bitterly about what was said that day, and their meeting has been the subject of conjecture ever since.


Frayn, of course, doesn’t know what happened either, nor does he pretend to. Instead, the playwright reunites the ghosts of Heisenberg, Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margarethe (Sue Berg) for a spirit-world symposium on the nature of memory, the simple horror of war, and the unpredictable forces that lead to discovery.


The discussion bounces between jovial recounting of the scientists’ pre-War days as part of an international fraternity of physicists, to heated discussions about whether or not Heisenberg was hoping to get information from Bohr that would help him build an atomic bomb for the Nazis. Along the way, they examine Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Bohr’s wave and particle theories, Einstein’s theories of relativity– but whenever things get too technical, Margarethe (who is largely in the play for this purpose) insists that they explain themselves in plain English – which they do. She also repeatedly reminds the men that before they were enemies, they had been close friends as well as fierce competitors.


What emerges from these swirling conversations is an elegant portrait of the human nature of scientific inquiry –where jealousy, pride and ambition play as large a role as they do in politics, business or love – as well as a convincing argument that the past is always, and necessarily, a mystery.


All of this was evident in last year’s show at the Fisher. What makes Performance Network’s “Copenhagen” so much more accessible is the cast’s soaring ensemble performance. At first glance, Frayn’s well-mannered, emotionally reserved characters seem to offer little for Grossman, Tulip and Berg (a trio known for their ability to chew up scenery) to sink their teeth into.


The counterintuitive casting, however, turns out to be exactly what this play needs. With no direct outlet for their considerable energy (no big crying scenes or emotional breakdowns), the actors infuse their characters with vitality - charging everything they do with electricity.


Performing in the round in a reconfigured Network theater that is more intimate than ever, Grossman and Tulip’s every movement underscores the scientists’ passion for science and for arguing - their eyes alternately beam with pleasure and burn with distrust. And Berg allows Margarethe to emerge as a woman with a passionate emotional identity of her own.


In other words, they’re interesting. And as soon as the audience becomes interested in the three people on stage, “Copenhagen’s” science and history all fall into place. As Heisenberg and the Bohrs discuss science, history, family and war, the audience finds itself emotionally involved in a complex play that is both full of insight into the human condition and also very entertaining. – John Sousanis


“Copenhagen” plays March 21 through April 13, 2003 at the Performance Network, 120 E. Huron Ann Arbor. Call (734) 663-0681.

Long before Joe Pesci terrorized Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone” (or was it the other way around?) one Harry Roat laid siege to the home of seemingly helpless Susy Hendrix in “Wait Until Dark.” Though hardly a comedy, Meadow Brook Theatre’s current staging of Frederick Knott’s 1966 thriller - in which a recently blinded housewife matches wits with two conmen and a killer - give audiences a lot to smile about.


The conmen (David Regal and Thomas Gebbia) have been recruited by the murderous Roat (Wayne David Parker) to retrieve a very valuable doll from the apartment of Sam (a slightly stiff C.W. Gilbert) and Susy Hendrix (Julie Marie Paparella). After luring Sam out of the couple’s apartment, the criminals descend upon the sightless woman- who turns out to be no easy mark. Still adjusting to her blindness, Susy’s disability becomes her greatest asset as she and her young neighbor Gloria (a delightfully impetuous Lauracindy Plague) work to outmaneuver the intruding crooks.


Knott, who also wrote “Dial M for Murder,” is an expert craftsman, planting tiny details about Susy’s everyday life like seeds in the first act that bloom into pivotal facts in the second act, as our heroine fights to protect her home, the doll – and her life.


Like much of MBT’s lineup this season, “Dark” is light, well-crafted entertainment: Gebbia’s badman is so congenial that even Susy isn’t afraid of him - and Regal and Parker’s heavies are cuddlier than they are menacing. But that’s in keeping with the production’s overall tone.


Director Ed Smith keeps his eye on moving the plot briskly, rather than creating an atmosphere of dread, and the production often has the air of a sporting event between the Good Team and the Bad Team. Which works out fine. Paparella’s convincing and very charismatic performance keeps the audience involved and rooting for Susy, while the play’s clever climax keeps everyone in the dark till the very end. Good fun. – John Sousanis


“Wait Until Dark” plays March 22 through April 13, 2003 at Meadow Brook Theatre, 127 Wilson Hall, Oakland University, Rochester Hills. Tickets are $26 - $38. (248) 377-3300.

Sandra Birch and Lynch R. Travis take a “Stand” at Purple Rose Theatre


In two very different productions, two local playhouses look at how a free society deals with hate and violence – legally, intellectually and emotionally. In the Jewish Ensemble Theatre’s legal drama “Denial,” playwright Peter Sagal examines the power of hateful ideas in an environment of free speech, while the Purple Rose Theatre’s “Stand” explores the emotional toll of living in a society rife with violence.


In “Denial” ACLU attorney Abigail Gersten (Rebecca Covey) has her belief in First Amendment rights severely tested when she asked to defend Prof. Cooper, (Aaron H. Alpern) a man charged by the government with inciting violence by arguing that the Holocaust never took place.


Director Evelyn Orbach’s production moves at a lively pace. Covey’s Abigail begins the play with a self-assured sparkle in her eye, and ends in tears of anger, undergoing a visible transformation as she struggles to defend a man she hates in order to protect the freedom she loves. Alpern, meanwhile, maintains the professor’s harmless appearance while conveying a convincing air of menace just below the surface that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats.


The production works as an emotionally charged legal thriller but as an issue play, “Denial” is a muddled affair. For a civil rights attorney, this is an open and shut issue: protect the individual’s rights in order to protect the general right for the rest of society. In Sagal’s play, however, Abigail finds herself abandoned by her colleagues who find her willingness to defend Cooper a betrayal of her Jewish heritage and her general liberal politics. This is a little hard to swallow considering the ACLU routinely takes on unpopular cases in defense of the First Amendment.


Stranger, though, is the handling of Cooper’s Holocaust conspiracy theory. Cooper initially appears to be a nutty professor whose ideas, however hateful, are too crazy to pose a threat to anyone. Yet, when it becomes clear that her client hopes to air his ideas at his trial, Abigail fights to keep her client from taking the stand. Sagal seems to imply that Cooper’s conspiracy theory might be too dangerous to be heard (even as he has the professor explain it to the audience) as though his ludicrous ideas might hold up under public scrutiny. And, in fact, no one in the play does a very good job of arguing with the hate monger.


I suspect Sagal wanted to inflame the audience’s emotional reaction to Cooper by making him seem really dangerous. But as First Amendment issues give way to Cooper’s increasingly hateful rants, one begins to wonder what, exactly, the playwright is asking us to consider.


There’s certainly no conflict between the intellectual and emotional undercurrents in the Purple Rose’s “Stand.” Playwright Toni Press-Coffman’s heroine Liz (Sandra Birch) doesnt give two figs about rationalizations of hate and violence. When the sports radio talk-show host finds herself negotiating with a kidnapper (Joey Albright in a unnervingly understated performance) for the release of a little girl, she wears her heart on her sleeve.


Confronted with man’s capacity to hurt, Liz drops her glib façade, revealing herself an emotional bundle of raw nerves. The radio host’s emotional response to the violence around her is balanced by the more contemplative reactions of her producer (Lynch Travis), a Vietnam Vet who tends to look at the big picture when discussing the kidnapping or his son’s recent experience with violence. But in the end Liz loses patience with patience itself.


The DJ, as embodied by Birches dynamic performance, registers a purely emotional response to a world in which violence seems immutable and compassion seems irrelevant. However fruitless or inarticulate it is, when Liz finally raises her voice in a extended howl of protest, she’s showing us the only truly logical response to the horrors of the world. - John Sousanis



JET presents “Denial” through March 30, 2003 at the Aaron DeRoy Theatre, 6600 West Maple Rd., West Bloomfield. 248.788.2900. “Stand” runs through March 15, 2003 at the Purple Rose Theatre, 734.433.7673.

You’d have to know a friend’s taste pretty well before recommending they go to Zeitgeist’s “The Ubu Variations.” Nearly every line of director John Jakary and producer Troy Richard’s original script contains some horrific image or scatological profanity. The show is full of gratuitous sex and violence, drug abuse and blasphemy; the can drag at times, and sometimes it’s hard to know what’s going on.


On the other hand, a true friend might simply send you in without warning, knowing that however harrowing the ride, you’ll thank him in the end. Because as overstuffed and overreaching as “Ubu” is, it is also one smart, engaging, scary, and absolutely hysterical production.


Jakary and Richard use the strange life and stranger writings of 19th Century French writer Alfred Jarry as source material for a rollercoaster ride through the bowels and brains of absurdist theater, delivering a dose of social commentary, for good measure.


Jarry, considered one of the pioneers of surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd, is most remembered for his play “Ubu Roi” and its sequels, in which the slovenly coward Pere Ubu uses deception and savagery to overthrow the king of Poland and oppress the people.


In Zeitgeist’s play, Jarry (Charles Reynolds) has turned his back on his successful “Ubu” plays to write wild philosophical treatises. Abandoned in the dark recesses of Jarry’s mind, Ubu (Joel Mitchell) and his wife (Jamie Moyer) plot an overthrow of their author’s will, hoping to force Jarry to write a play unleashing Pere Ubu on America. Only America, with its love of freedom and excess, will sate Ubu’s lust for gluttony and destruction.


With the help of his wife, his concubine (Maria Haag) and his soldiers (James Mio and Bryan Spangler as a sort of blood-thirsty Frank and Ernest), Ubu launches an offensive on Jarry’s drug-addled consciousness – beating his way back into the writer’s imagination by any means necessary.


Under Jakary’s inspired direction, the cast creates a legion of clown warriors – buffoons with killer instincts. Moyer’s Ma Ubu is Lady Macbeth without conscience or subtlety. Reynolds’ half-mad Jarry twitches, winces and rails with his entire body while Dax Anderson as Jarry’s confused publisher provides the play with its only straight man.


But it’s Mitchell’s barreling tidal wave of a performance that propels the show and carries the audience down the whitewater rapids of this production. Head shaved and covered in white greasepaint, wearing an X-rated Elvis jumpsuit with a hypno-swirled Superman crest, and bellowing like Richard III and Falstsaff trapped in the same body, Mitchell’s imperial buffoon, rolls his Rs, spits his esses, and speaks his Id with hilarious and horrible conviction.


Richard’s set design plops the audience on rolling office chairs - the better to turn and face the action, which takes place on all sides of the playhouse. Ubu will not be contained - by his author or by theatrical convention. At one point, the tyrant escapes the theater altogether, kicking open the theater door and venturing out onto the streets of Detroit. For all his bluster, bloodlust and appetite for destruction, though, Pere Ubu is ill prepared for what awaits him on the other side.


What awaits those willing to brave “Ubu’s” wrath is an exciting one-of-a-kind production that incorporates Zeitgeist’s philosophical leanings, its love of the Absurd and its desire to create unique theater. - John Sousanis


“The Ubu Variations” plays through March 15, 2003 at Zeitgeist, 2661 Michigan Ave., Detroit 313.965.9192

In the pitch perfect opening scene of the music-soaked comedy “The Ball and Chain Gang,” three couples in three cars fall into arguments until a snippet of transcendent pop music comes on the radio t magically soothes their ill tempers.


The couple’s funny front seat behavior provides a roadmap of the relationships in this cast-written comedy from Planet Ant’s Improv Colony: a happily married poet and business man (Elana Elyce and Dave Davies) sing along with a soul duet in happy-couple harmony; a hipster couple (Mollie Platt and P.J. Jacokes) argue over the credentials of an alternative act on the radio, and a boyish groom-to-be (Brett Guennel) drums to classic rock while his take-care-of-everything fiancée (Jen Nischan) drives.


When the couples converge to celebrate Platt’s 30th birthday, the “Gen X/Big Chill” scenario is disrupted by Jacokes’ angry reaction to Platt’s announcement that she’s pregnant. Through flashbacks and quick cuts, director Margaret Edwartowski and her cast put the tools of sketch comedy to work in a tightly scripted show about friendship and love.


The play owes a lot, in tone and structure, to last season’s hit “Standing on Ceremony” at Second City - and there are moments when “Ball and Chain” comes close to delivering the laugh-induced insights into relationships that made “Ceremony” so special. Too often, though, “Ball” turns away from its couples conflicts, opting to focus on funny but fluffy sketches such as a ridiculous (and hilarious) scene involving a Spanish lounge singer (Jacokes), and a hysterical demonstration of a defective “auto pilot” steering mechanism that Davies and Guennel have sunk a fortune in.


Ultimately, the relationships in “Ball and Chain” are treated too lightly to carry the show to the emotional heights it reaches for. But the often touching, seriously funny comedy proves there’s no shame in aiming high. – John Sousanis



The Improv Colony’s “The Ball and Chain Gang” plays March 14 – 30, 2003 at Planet Ant, 2357 Caniff Ave., Hamtramck. 313.365.4948

The Matrix Theatre Company’s current twin bill is perfectly suited to a night on the town. In less than an hour you can catch two plays guaranteed to provide you with hours of material for dinner conversation at one of the nearby Mexican eateries. Located on Bagley in the heart of Detroit’s Mexican Town, Matrix is offering Samuel Beckett’s short “Play” and “Rockabye,” directed by Beckett Scholar Dr. Shaun Nethercott.


Under Nethercott the casts of both plays deliver dynamic performances without moving their bodies. In “Play” a man, his wife and his mistress each gives his or her version of the events surrounding a love triangle, delivering a loop of intercut monologues with just their heads poking out of three enormous urns. Each character speaks only when lit by an ominous spotlight that bounces from one face to another throughout the play.


Lessa Bouchard, Leah Smith and David Schoen deliver a technically dazzling performance – coordinating snippets of broken dialogue with each other and the roving light, while conveying a range of emotions with just their faces. As with most Beckett works, “Play” is an existential romp that is alternately hilarious and unsettling, that uses unorthodox means to shed light on the human condition.


In the one-woman “Rockabye,” Nkenge Zola plays an elderly woman ruminating on the events of her life and her need to reach out to another person. Rocked by unseen hands in a large rocking chair, Zola moves between sleep and wakefulness while her recorded voice provides a lullaby monologue of dream and memory. The short eerie piece is a profoundly moving theater poem about the end of life. Together the plays clock in at less than an hour– but it’s one of the more interesting hours of theater you’ll see this year. - John Sousanis


“Play” and “Rockabye” play Friday and Saturday night at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. through March 16, 2003 at the Matrix Theatre Company, 2730 Bagley Street, Detroit, MI 48216. 313.976.0999.

Rachel Kavanaugh is a busy woman. Between rehearsing a new play by the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of “The Hours,” David Hare, in England last week, and flying to Michigan last Thursday to prepare the Royal Shakespeare Company’s staging of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in Ann Arbor, the British director found made time to speak with The Oakland Press about comedy, touring and the importance of Shakespeare.


The RSC is presenting “Merry Wives” in repertory with Shakespeare’s Roman war tragedy “Coriolanus” - using the same 20 actors in both plays – creating a situation that the director says was both challenging and rewarding.


“It’s always hard for an actor to do two things, especially when they’re very, very different,” says Kavanaugh. “On the whole, though, it wasn’t that hard. I think that often the actors were quite relieved to be doing something lighthearted (after ‘Coriolanus’). Though, sometimes it might take 10 or 15 minutes to get them back into Windsor – they were so used to hitting each other in Rome.”


“Wives” revolves around Falstaff, a comic character that Shakespeare introduced in “Henry IV: Parts I and II,” as a rowdy, bad influence on England’s Prince Hal. In “Wives” Falstaff attempts to con money out of a pair of housewives, but winds up being thoroughly outwitted by his intended victims.


“A lot of critics think that Shakespeare somehow dumbed Falstaff down in the ‘Merry Wives,’ but what changed is not him, but who surrounds him,” says Kavanaugh. “I think if you look at the language, Falstaff uses exactly the same kind of invention and hyperbole – I recognize him as absolutely the same man. We even see a glimpse of the same despair in him that we saw at the end of ‘Henry IV, Part II’ (when the maturing Prince turns his back on his delinquent old friend.)”


“If you’re interested in theater, Shakespeare is absolutely essential, because I still believe it to be the best,” she says. “And really, if you’re interested in life, it’s essential. No other writer comes near his breadth of understanding… The fact that he can write a (dark character such as) Macbeth and a Mrs. Quigley (from “Merry Wives”) and seem to have equal love for them - he’s always surprising. And he writes in this extraordinary way that’s wonderful for actors and directors, and is good entertainment.”


“There is a joy, a love of living, and a vibrancy in the speaking in the comedies,” adds the director. “I love hearing an audience laugh at that text now, proving that it isn’t hard to understand.”


And while Kavanaugh says she would never presume to update Shakespeare’s language, she has reset the action in “Merry Wives” to the years just following World War II.


“Shakespeare’s plays were performed in modern dress when they were written,” Kavanaugh says. “They didn’t do the Roman plays in togas; they did them in Elizabethan dress. So I think he would absolutely approve of updating the costumes. But I would never choose a concept that would make you have to twist the play to fit it. I’m trying to find a world that illuminates the play, not twist the play into that world.”


She doesn’t mind, however, taking the play around the world.


“(Touring the plays) may be the most important thing (the RSC does),” she says. “The more places you can take something to the better we’re going to do in the future in terms of getting people to want to work in theater and wanting to come and see it.” - John Sousanis



Michiganders can see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “Coriolanus” at Ann Arbor’s Power Center through March 9, 2003.The company will also stage Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” March 12-16. Call (734) 764-2538.

John Henry Redwood’s drama “No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs” now at the Detroit Repertory Theatre, takes its volatile title from signs that were posted outside certain towns in the old South. But in 1940s Halifax, North Carolina, where this compelling production is set, no signs are needed to spell out the threat of racial violence that hangs in the air.


As Redwood describes it, there is plenty of everyday interaction between blacks and whites in Halifax, where Mattie (Amber Hemphill) and Rawl (Harold Hogan) are raising their two daughters. The black family buys farm supplies at a white-owned store; Mattie does laundry for a white family, and the girls walk from their rural home into town to attend school, sing in church and run errands. Halifax, however, is a town steeped in Jim Crow laws with a lynch mob mentality, and blacks and whites co-exist strictly according to white rules.


Nonetheless, Mattie and Rawl strike up a friendship with a Jewish writer (Gregory Olszewski) who has come to Halifax to research the effects of racism on blacks and Jews. Redwood uses the character to voice ideas about historical parallels between the Jewish and African American experiences. In this play, however, the effort seems forced. While Olszewski conveys the tension and affection of the writer’s relationship with Mattie’s family, his character feels like a footnote to the play’s central story about a family struggling to survive.


When Mattie is raped by her employer, she faces a soul-wrenching dilemma: If she tells her husband, she knows he’ll seek revenge and almost certainly be murdered by the rapist or his friends. On the other hand, if she lies to Rawl, she risks losing the man she loves, and leaving the town as dangerous for her daughters as it has been for her.


Under director Jerry Cleveland, (on a realistic set by designer Bruce Millan and scenic artist Harry Wetzel) DRT’s strong ensemble create a single family portrait - full of the energy and peculiarities one would expect to find in any family. And while the bigots at the center of the play are never seen onstage, their presence is always felt.


Baseemah Mustafaa and Stacey Weddle are just right as the squabbling sisters –arguing one moment and standing up for each other the next. As the older sibling, Mustafaa ably straddles the line between girlish concerns and dawning womanhood while Weddle bubbles with pre-adolescent energy.


Hogan and Hemphill establish a strong relationship onstage. Hogan communicates the father’s gentle love for his family as well as his barely contained rage toward the society he lives in. And Hemphill, making a terrific debut at the DRT, expresses Mattie’s fear and anger quietly - as though voicing them loudly might increase their power.


The play’s resolution (involving an unexpected intervention) is perhaps too tidy, but it’s hard to fault Redwood for wanting to save this loving and lovely family. Remarkably, he delivers a happy ending that doesn’t disregard the suffering – physical and otherwise – inflicted by the town’s violent oppression.


One of DRT’s best. - John Sousanis


“No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs” plays through March 23 at the Detroit Repertory Theatre, 13103 Woodrow Wilson, Detroit. (313) 868-1347.

Meadow Brook Theatre’s “The Foreigner” is a shining example of the well-crafted play. Like an Agatha Christie mystery, Larry Shue’s fish-out-of-water comedy is full of peculiar characters with eccentricities that we know will all figure strongly in the play’s neatly tied-together finale. Light and airy (despite its nefarious villains) “The Foreigner” is also very funny.


When Charlie, (Ted Raimi of television’s “SeaQuest” and “Xena” fame), finds himself stranded for a weekend in a Georgian boarding lodge, the shy visitor from England pretends to be a different kind of foreigner –one who can’t speak English – in order to avoid interacting with his fellow borders. Instead, his ploy only draws more attention to him.


Betty, the eccentric lodge owner (Mary Benson) takes a maternal interest in her seemingly helpless guest. Catherine (Robin Lewis-Bedz), a young debutante living at the lodge, divulges her secrets to the stranger, assuming he can’t understand her. And Catherine’s learning-challenged younger brother Ellard (Joey Bybee) is excited to befriend someone who has a harder time understanding things than he does.


The plot turns on Catherine’s fiancé (John Biedenbach), a duplicitous preacher who, along with good ol’ boy Owen Musser (Kristopher Yoder) is plotting to steal Catherine’s money and cheat Betty out of her property in order to set up a Ku Klux Klan headquarters at the lodge.


Like one of Moliere’s clowns, Charlie uses his secret understanding of events to move the other characters into place like pieces in a puzzle, building toward the improbable but entertaining showdown between the lodge residents and their hooded enemies. The play’s best moments, though, involve young Ellard’s attempts to help the foreigner learn English. As the boy “teaches” Charlie, the Englishman discovers there’s more to his young friend than anybody thought.


Director David Regal has the comedy firing on all cylinders, allowing the characters’ relationships to develop alongside the punchlines, and using simple stagecraft (lightning and thunder, explosions, trapdoors) to great effect.


Raimi is a natural on stage, delivering the play’s broad laughs without pandering, and allowing the audience to see what’s going on behind Charlie’s befuddled façade. Bybee’s straightforward performance as the retarded boy is charming without being patronizing. Lewis-Bedz and Benson’s spirited turns (along with Paul Hopper’s high-octane cameos) keep the energy flowing. And Yoder gives a loose, accomplished comic performance as the dumb but dangerous bigot, that is essential to the play’s success.


The only disconcerting element of “The Foreigner” is its portrayal of the Klan as easily spooked clowns - a comforting but far too cavalier portrait of a group known for murder and violent intimidation.


Plot reigns supreme in Shue’s play, but the comedy does bear a moral: Even the oddest ducks have something unique to offer the world. It’s a simple message, delivered with little angst or introspection, but it works. With its vaudeville pacing, broad stereotypes and rabbit-out-of-a-hat ending, “The Foreigner” is a basically a cartoon - but it’s a very well drawn, entertaining cartoon, at that. - John Sousanis




“The Foreigner” runs through March 9, 2003 at Meadow Brook Theatre, 127 Wilson Hall, Oakland University, Rochester Hills. Tickets are $26 - $38. (248) 377-3300.

As America prepares for the possibility of war, Performance Network ’s timely “Necessary Targets” explores the desolation that war wreaks on populations long after the soldiers have concluded their business. Playwright Eve Ensler’s drama follows two Americans, a psychiatrist (Jan Radcliff) and a veteran refugee counselor (Carla Milarch), who travel to Bosnia to help women refugees “cope” with their trauma.

But while “Targets” raises questions about our ability to understand others suffering – it is surprisingly ineffective at conveying that suffering.


The fine cast, under director David Wolber, articulates the individuality of women lumped together under the term refugee. Shirley Benyas plays an elderly peasant, heartbroken by the loss of her farm and livestock; Terry Heck gives a taut performance as a formerly wealthy Bosnian physician now forced to live in the camps, and Rebecca Delcomyn delivers a charismatic turn as a young woman who finds hope in Hollywood images of America.


The production, however, is hamstrung by the playwright’s ambivalence toward relating the details of the women’s experiences. Ensler is perhaps too alert to the danger of turning the play into a macabre horror story. The women refugees are so wary of what one of them calls “story vultures” – people mobidly fascinated by atrocities - that by the time they do tell their stories the audience has been conditioned to keep its emotional distance.


The production’s most powerful statement about war may be found in Monika Essen’s set design, which transforms the psychiatrist’s elegant home into a bombed out refugee camp with a slight change of lighting. War reduces beauty to rubble with a flick of a switch.


One senses that Ensler is using the self-conscious Americans, who bicker about their role in the camp, to work out her own issues about how to write about the refugees without exploiting them. The Americans’ constant struggle of conscience, though, eventually dilutes the impact of the refugees’ own stories.


In the play’s final scene, the psychiatrist relates how her visit to Bosnia changed her outlook on life. However, it’s a statement without dramatization. The psychiatrist is preaching to an audience that is kept at too much of a distance from the refugees to undergo a similar transformation.


In her much more successful “Vagina Monologues,” Ensler used interviews with hundreds of women as source material for a series of witty affecting monologues that presented women’s stories honestly, openly and without judgment. One wishes the playwright had similarly allowed the women in “Necessary Targets” to speak for themselves and let the audience feel the impact of their stories directly. - John Sousanis




“Necessary Targets” runs through March 9, 2003 at the Performance Network, at Performance Network, 120 E. Huron Ann Arbor. Call (734) 663-0681.)

The Royal Shakespeare Company has arrived in Ann Arbor with one cast and two very different productions – one of Shakespeare’s broader comedies and one of his more narrowly focused tragedies.


The comedy is “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the only play that Shakespeare set in the England of his time. In it, Sir John Falstaff, the loveable rogue from “Henry IV” is an unemployed soldier. Upon arriving in the suburban town of Windsor, he works to seduce a pair of housewives in the hopes of pinch their husbands’ money. The wives - Mrs. Ford (Claire Carrie) and Mrs. Page (Lucy Tregear) - discover his plans and pretend to fall for the errant knight’s charms – only to trick him into a series of humiliating situations.


After adjusting to the size of the cavernous Power Center in the play’s opening scenes, the cast of the Royal Shakespeare Company gave spirited, often surprising, performances. Carrie and Tregear, as the titular wives of Windsor, convey the women’s enjoyment of being able to plot mislead and flirt, all in defense of their honor. Tregear, in particular, conveyed the middle-aged wife’s happy return to the youthful pastimes of passing love letters, whispering secrets and planning trysts.


Tom Mannion is another delight. As the suspicious Mr. Ford, he nearly self-induces a nervous breakdown by spy on his wife while (in disguise) also urging Falstaff to test her honor. Greg Hicks strikes a hilarious pose as the foppish Dr. Caius, spitting French doctor’s favored oaths in octave dropping bursts of sotto voce syllables. Alison Fiske is enjoyable as the gossipy Mistress Quickly though her thick accent made some dialogue nearly unintelligible.


And Richard Cordery gives a sly, unusually subtle reading of Falstaff. While giving full weight to the character’s comic flaws, his performance nearly allows the audience to imagine the boisterous boar as a successful seducer.


For such a storied company, much of the supporting cast wasn’t particularly strong. Hannah Young and Chuk Iwuji, as Mrs. Page’s daughter Anne and Anne’s lover Fenton, failed to generate any spark. And Richard Copestake and Keiron Jecchinis, as Falstaff’s unreliable underlings Nym and Pistol, never establish a presence in roles that are rife with comic potential.


Director Rebecca Kavanaugh sets the play in post-WWII, which suits the play’s middle-class milieu and Falstaff’s position as an out-of-work soldier nicely. What the setting doesn’t do is make the enjoyable but forgettable force any more relevant to modern audiences. The play’s slapstick elements are fun but not particularly special. And Shakespeare’s language, though clever, never reaches the poetic heights of his best comedies - such as “Much Ado About Nothing,” which deals more astutely with the same themes of romance, seduction and deception.


For Shakespeare, the tragedy “Coriolanus” is remarkably devoid of subplots. The play is concerned almost, exclusively with the rise and fall of one man: Caius Martius (Greg Hicks) – a remarkable soldier who fails to turn glory on the battlefield into honor at home.


Shakespeare’s Roman play is gorgeously re-imagined by director David Farr and designer Ti Green in the silk Samurai cloaks of Imperial Japan. For an audience whose country is poised for war, though, the story of a nation torn between peaceful prosperity and the call for a strong defense might just as well be set in 21st century America.


Caius (renamed Coriolanus after single-handedly winning a battle in Coriol) returns to Rome a conquering hero, but he cannot hide his disdain for the un-militarized populace. Sensing his contempt, the citizens of Rome refuse to elect the soldier as their leader and instead banish him from their city. Enraged, Coriolanus joins with Rome’s enemies against his countrymen. As his new army marches toward his homeland, Rome’s only hope lies with Coriolanus’s mother and wife, who are sent to beg for the Coriolanus’s mercy.


There are plenty of bloody battles staged in this production, but the real spectacle is watching Hicks’ Coriolanus battle his pride. The actor finds a striking balance between Coriolanus’ righteous indignation and his almost comical inability to behave politically. The scene in which he scolds the people’s Tribunes (played with quiet humor by the “Merry” husbands Tom Mannion and Simon Coates) is electrifying, while his argument with his mother (Alison Fiske in a frightening performance as the ultimate stage mother) about how to placate the people is both tense and hilarious.


As the Senator Menenius, Richard Cordery displays the same talent for understatement that informs his Falstaff in “Wives.” Speaking more quietly than anyone else in the production, his words demand the audience’s attention, while his friendship with Coriolanus provides the play’s most intriguing relationship.


As Coriolanus’s archenemy Tullus, Chuk Iwuji’s emotional performance provides a compelling foil to Hicks’ cold savagery. Which makes it surprising that the production almost runs out of steam in the pair’s gory final showdown. But perhaps it isn’t that surprising: What Shakespeare is showing us in this play, isn’t a battle of great warriors, but the demise of unbridled glory in the wake of unbridled pride. - John Sousanis


“Coriolanus” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” play in alternating repertory Saturday March 1 through Sunday March 9 at the Power Center for the Performing Arts, 121 Fletcher Street, Ann Arbor. UMS Ticket Office (734) 764-2538.

One of the goals of the international peace initiative “The Lysistrata Project” is to have multiple readings of the project’s namesake anti-war comedy take place “around the globe” on March 3. Readings are scheduled in cities from New York to Athens – and, as it turns out, in at least two theaters “around Detroit.”


Joining the metropolitan and international fray is the Furniture Factory – home of Walk & Squawk Performance Project – which announced it too will stage “Lysistrata” on March 3. The Furniture Factory on Detroit’s Third Ave. is just blocks from the Bonstelle, where a separate reading of the play was announced two weeks ago.


Can two “Lysistratas” take place at the same time peacefully? Or will the peace project devolve into warring factions? Actually, the multiple readings are in keeping with the project’s aim to have as many people participate in the readings as possible, so the more the merrier, we hope.


The Furniture Factory reading, which begins at 8 p.m., will be directed by Amy Arena and features, among others, Leah Smith and Lessa Bouchard (of POW Theatre Company and 2001’s “David’s Redhaired Death” fame). Tickets are available for a $5 donation at the door, with all proceeds benefiting the international women¹s human rights organization MADRE. The Furniture Factor is located at 4126 Third Street, Detroit.
Details are also emerging from the Bonstelle camp this week. Co-directors Gillian Eaton and Lavinia Moyer will wrangle a chorus of 100 men and women to join a cast of 20 principal characters. The group’s lineup is a regular Who’s Who of the Detroit world, including Henrietta Hermelin, Lynnae Lehfeldt and John Hawkinson (all appearing in the Gem hit “Sheer Madness”), Terry Heck (P-Net’s “Necessary Targets”), Gem Theatre artistic director Danny Jacobs, Tom Mahard, Will Young (the Rose’s “Across the Way”), Council Cargle (Plowshares’ “The Piano Lesson”) and many more. The Bonstelle show will benefit Detroit’s Freedom House sanctuary, and starts at 7 p.m. Call (313) 577-5126.

So what is this “Lysistrata” about anyway?


Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy, written 24 centuries ago, concerns the eternal war of the sexes as much as it does the ephemeral peace of nations. In the play, after suffering 21 years of war between Sparta and Athens, the women in both city-states decide to withhold sex from their husbands until they agree to stop fighting.


Predictably, after about, oh, five minutes, the warring men find a peaceful resolution to their conflict. Now there’s a domestic peace initiative.


For more information about this first-ever global theatrical movement visit Lysistrata Project

On this Valentine’s Day Weekend, two local theaters respectfully remind us that love’s bumpy road is full of detours, dead-ends and potholes that can only be traversed by leaps of faith. At the Theatre Company, the seemingly innocent “Franny’s Way,” suggests that a hint of infidelity might be the cure for an injured love, while Planet Ant’s “The Woolgatherer” asks whether two people can be so screwed up that their only hope for survival is in each other’s arms.


In “Franny’s Way” Sally and Phil (Amanda L. Stein and Patrick Gough) are devastated by the death of their newborn baby. The once torrid lovers now barely touch, and Sally refuses even to leave the couple’s New York apartment. Hoping to alleviate Sally’s misery, her grandmother (Yolanda Fleischer) pays a visit to the Big Apple with Sally’s 15 and 17-year old cousins - Dolly (Susan Berch) and Franny (Megan Messmer) - in tow.




The cast conveys as much about this awkward family through body language and their physical interactions as they do with their delivery of the dialogue.


Stein and Gough, all but swim in the afterglow of an early romantic encounter, but are painfully stiff around each other after the tragedy. Stein gives a particularly physical performance – loosening visibly while singing a novelty song, swaying angrily in a vain attempt to seduce Phil, or crumpling on the couch after finding a baby’s toy under the cushions.


Berch conveys Dolly’s hopeful spirit with a light step and lack of self-consciousness while Fleischer’s walking-on-egg-shells gait conveys the Grandmother’s awkwardness around her bereaved granddaughter. And Messmer is frighteningly in touch with her inner 17-year old: Preening self-consciously, assuming everyone is watching, she strikes the perfect balance between an adolescent girl’s insecurity and a young woman’s increasingly confident sexuality.


Director Mary Bremer frames the story nicely, allowing scenes to play out naturally, and insinuating New York’s presence with the wafting sounds of a jazz club below Sally’s apartment.


Playwright Richard Nelson’s repeated allusions to J.D. Salinger’s short stories come across as an attempt to borrow some literary weight but the events and characters he describes ring true. When the playwright suggests that a sexually charged encounter between Franny and Phil leads to a reconciliation between Sally and Phil, it seems at once ludicrously wrong and absolutely plausible. Nelson’s characters deal with varying degrees of loss through any means necessary – lies, trickery, seduction. But, the playwright argues, when the end is love, the means are justified.


In “The Woolgatherer,” Cliff (Ryan Carlson) and Rose (Michelle Held) are a pair of lifelong losers who are seemingly incapable of even looking for a happy ending. Cliff is a hard luck truck driver who meets Rose in a small town candy store after his truck breaks down. Looking for a good time, Cliff visits Rose’s one-room apartment, but from her opening conversation about a suicide that took place in her dingy apartment, Cliff discovers that Rose is no simple good-time gal.


Emotionally unstable and willfully childlike, Rose refuses to take anything lightly. She eats food she scavenges, lives without a window, and seems to exist with the sole purpose of not disturbing anyone. Yet she also has lofty dreams for her future. Cliff on the other hand has no trouble disturbing those around him. He enjoys drinking, loud jokes and fooling around. Unlike Rose, though, he’s given up on dreaming.


Rose and Cliff have both been wounded in love, but the two are so clearly mismatched - every exchange borders on disaster – that there appears to be little chance of them nursing each other back to health. Carlson gives the truck driver a laidback, ironic toughness and Held portrays Rose with the earnestness of very serious child. Rose needs to trust Cliff but is scared - she reaches out to the truck driver with one arm and pushes him away with the other. Cliff, desperate to find some connection, suspects Rose is only playing him for a fool.


Playwright William Mastrosimone heaps strangeness onto his play – from Rose’s peculiar method of remembering would be lovers, to her fatal romantic tendencies and a fairytale like story of boys killing rare birds. There is something jolting about the play’s most melodramatic elements. In a story about two lonely people’s very ordinary need for love, the extraordinary events seem out of place.


There was something slightly amiss in the production’s pacing as well. Its subject matter is dark and strange, but “The Woolgatherer” is structured like a comedy - full of one-liners, quick comebacks and calculated absurdities. The actors, though, occasionally (and understandably) give in to the weight and strangeness of what the characters are saying, - slowing the pace, and altering the play’s natural flow.


The play and performances, however, are successful in their ultimate goal – making us care about the outcome of this strange and halting romance. If these star-crossed losers can find salvation in the same tumble of romance that life’s winners do –maybe love is the tonic for all that ails us. - John Sousanis


The Theatre Company presents “Franny’s Way” plays through February 23, 2003 at the McCauley OnStage Theatre, University of Detroit Mercy Outer Drive Campus. (313) 993-6461.



“The Woolgatherer” runs through February 23 at Planet Ant, 2357 Caniff Ave., Hamtramck. (313) 365-4948.

August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” begins with Boy Willie (Marlon Bailey) knocking loudly on his uncle Doaker’s door at four a.m. When he’s let in, the young man happily demands a drink for himself and his friend and we immediately understand that this is a man with a lust for life and a sense of entitlement.


It is that sense of entitlement that has brought Willie from his home in the South to his uncle’s door. Willie hopes to buy the land his family has farmed– as slaves and then sharecroppers – from the white family that has owned it for generations. To raise the money, he wants to sell the family piano that his sister Berniece (Cecilia Foreman) has brought with her to Doaker’s home in Philadelphia. Berniece, however, has no intention of selling the heirloom, which has played a significant role in their family’s history.


Wilson’s play revolves around the sibling’s fight for the piano, while drawing a nuanced picture of black American life in the 1930s, exploring the changing relationship between blacks who had moved to Northern cities and those who remained in the South.


Berniece has moved to Philly to escape the South where her husband was murdered. Doaker (Council Cargle) has secured a comfortable middle-class existence working for the railroad. And Berniece’s friend Avery (Wining Boy), another transplanted Southerner, is building a career in another urban growth industry – the Baptist church.


But Boy Willie dreams of transforming the South, not escaping it. Only Doaker’s brother Wining Boy (Herman McCain) – a piano player fluent in the cross-cultural languages of music and vice – traverses easily between both worlds.


Plowshares Theatre Company’s artistic director Gary Anderson has an affinity for Wilson’s plays (his magical “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” remains a favorite) that is evident again in this production.


Cargle and McCain present the steady Doaker and the wild Wining Boy without judgment, allowing the audience to identify with both men. Bowen imbues Avery with a self-respect that rounds out the slightly comical character. And John Woolridge gives an affecting performance as a young man looking for a new beginning in the city.


Bailey hits the stage with a truckload of country charm and not an ounce of buffoonery making it nearly impossible to take your eyes off the energetic performer. Foreman is equally riveting, conveying Berniece’s passions through stillness and understatement.


There is a supernatural element to “The Piano Lesson” - a ghostly reminder of a time when there were no opportunities for blacks in the North or South – that threatens to transform the richly realistic drama into a metaphorical fable. Nonetheless, “The “Piano Lesson” is an undeniably significant work – a moving depiction of a family and an era, that resonates intellectually and emotionally. - John Sousanis.


Plowshares Theatre Company’s “The Piano Lesson” runs February 1 through February 23, 2003 at the Marygrove College Theatre, Detroit. (313) 872-0279.

Community theater is a very different animal than professional theater – not worse or better but different. The “community” in its name is at least as important as the “theater,” which is one reason I seldom review community theater shows. A CT production isn’t just a play, it’s an extension of the individuals who support the theater onstage, behind-the-scenes and in the seats.


While most community theaters do have open auditions, CT casts theater tend to come from a core of committed volunteer members whose participation is the theater’s lifeblood. This can lead to outsiders might term “uneven” casting but from the inside is a matter of familial pride, not to mention survival. Community theater audiences are a special breed too, in that their sense of ownership in “their” theater’s productions makes an outside critic’s opinion largely beside the point.


Nonetheless, I was enticed to go to Stagecrafters’ current production of “Chicago” by a local director whose opinion I respect and by the novelty of the concurrent release of the new film version. Residing in Royal Oak’s palatial Baldwin Theatre, the Stagecrafters community theater produces five mainstage shows a year, as well as three plays on its Second Stage, two youth theater programs and numerous workshops.


“Chicago” is theater’s second big musicals this season (they tackled “The Pirates of Penzance” last fall) and the bawdy comedy about two women who become celebrities on Chicago’s death row is a nice fit for the company. John Kander and Fred Ebb’s delicious score gives nearly every singer in the show a chance to bring the house down and under director Rick Bodick, nearly all of Stagecrafters’ leads do just that.


After a tentative start, conductor Priscilla Benson’s onstage orchestra provided a peppy soundtrack to the concert-style production, while John Luther’s inventive choreography retained much of Bob Fosse’s original bump-and-grind flavor. However, it’s the company’s singers who really stand out.


Stephanie Elaine Samuel’s leads the cast with a heated, gutsy performance as double-murderess/Cabaret star Velma Kelly, burning through the sexy “All That Jazz,” and the wittily misnomered “Class” and delivering the show’s most entertaining dance routine in the hilarious “I Can’t Do It Alone.”


Matching her nearly step for step is Carrie Wickert as housewife-turned-vaudeville-aspirant Roxie Hart, who in songs like “Funny Honey,” “Roxie” and the Velma/Roxie duet “Nowadays,” makes cynical opportunism (not to mention adultery and murder) seem charming.


The show rests on Samuel and Wickert’s shoulders and the actresses carry it with ease. But there are plenty of other highlights, including Jamie Richards’ shoot-for-the-back-rows take on celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn; the falsetto stylings of J. Skoog as Mary Sunshine, Lynn Marie Konczak’s comically woeful Hunyak and Mary Ann Redhage spirited performance as Matron Mama Morton.


No performance, though, captures the essence of community theater better than Steve Worley’s turn as Roxie’s sad sack husband Amos. A longtime member of Stagecrafters, Worley is perfectly matched to the role and his hilarious self-effacing take on the tragicomic cuckold would earn kudos in any theater.


Yet as the actor belted out the terrific “Mr. Cellophane” Thursday night, I sensed an added element of pride mixed in with the well-earned applause at the Baldwin Theater, as the audience acknowledged not just a great performance but also the unabashed success of one of their own. And that is just as it should be. - John Sousanis


“Chicago” runs through Feb. 9, 2003 at Royal Oak’s Historic Baldwin Theatre.(248) 541-6430

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of Ontario’s renowned Shaw Festival, who was in town to direct “Candida” at Meadow Brook Theatre. Maxwell, who was born in Ireland, has lived in Canada for the past 25 years. One of the subjects she talked about was the culture and theater in Canada and the large role the government plays in supporting the arts.


“In Ireland having a (national) culture is a given – it’s in the fabric of everything you do. In Canada, though, there’s a fight to maintain and clarify what Canadian culture is. And I think that – certainly within the theater –that’s why there has been government support and why people have demanded that,” Maxwell said. “Because they need that support to offset the pervasive and strong culture of their neighbors below.”


“But I think (the presence of U.S. culture) has actually helped, in a funny way, to assist Canadians by making them fight for and keep their own culture,” she said. “There’s a grassroots support or at least an acknowledgement that the arts should be supported.”


Around the time I spoke with Maxwell, I also interviewed Arturo Brachetti, the Italian quick-change artist whose one-man show at the Fisher Theatre ends today.


“I was lucky to be subsidized in Italy for many years,” said Brachetti, who developed a number of off-the-beaten-path productions in his home country over the years. “I could express myself each year in a different show. You make much less money, because the state gives you the money, but the tickets are cheaper. It’s a different system, but that’s why I got to try so many things.”


The result, in Brachetti’s case, was the development of a uniquely Italian performer whose work is extremely original while still reflecting the artist’s Italian culture and experience.


What does that have to do with us, you might ask. American culture isn’t about to be erased by Indian films, or Canadian theater, or Italian magicians. The movies we watch, the television shows we tune in, the pop music we listen to, all reflect who we are as Americans.


True. But what about our particularly Midwesterner voice? What about our identity as Michiganders? And what about the specific culture of Southeast Michigan? These are at least as vulnerable to the influence of Hollywood and Madison Avenue as Canada’s culture is, and perhaps more in danger of being totally overwhelmed by the culture of the coasts.


Which is where local art galleries, the local music scene, and perhaps most directly, local theaters come in.


Too often, we view the local artistic community as a sort of farm system where artists struggle to make it to the big leagues in New York or L.A. However, local artists are more than a bunch of minor leaguers. They are the voice of the people who live here, the protectors and interpreters of our unique Southeast Michigan cultural identity. Their work keeps us in touch with the things that make us different from people in Texas or Idaho or New England (who all have their own specific cultures).



It would be nice if we could follow the Canadian lead and implement more government support for the arts – pass more initiatives like the twice-defeated Proposal K. Whether or not we ever effectively involve the government in supporting the arts, though, it is important to keep in mind that local culture is our culture– and one way or another it depends on us, and only us, to keep it alive. - John Sousanis

Congratulations go out to Detroit’s Fox Theatre, which was named the number one theater in North America last week by Pollstar, a concert industry magazine. Of the top 50 Theatre Venues, the Fox was also the No. 1 ticket seller with 642,162 tickets sold. If one includes the Fox’s civic and corporate events, the number of visitors through the theater’s turnstiles exceeds three quarters of million.


In addition to numerous concert events, the Fox’s 2002 lineup included numerous theatrical productions, including “West Side Story,” “The Music Man,” “Grease” and a host of live-action children’s show’s from “Blue’s Clues” to “Veggie Tales” and “Scooby Doo.”


Among the theaters beaten out by the Detroit venue, were its sister Fox Theatre in Atlanta, and Radio City Music Hall in New York. 2003 is shaping up as big year for the Fox. The nation’s top-ranked theater, which was one of the original motion picture palaces of the 1920s, turns 75 this September.

If the clothes make the man, Arturo Brachetti is a small army. The spry performer owns some 350 theatrical costumes that he houses in an apartment of their own in Italy. But in the new “One-Man Show”, the master transformist sets out to prove that it’s the man who makes the clothes, by infusing life into dozens of costumes in a whirl of lighting fast costume changes.

Brachetti is credited with single-handedly resurrecting the art of transformism or quick changes – an art form that dates back to the 15th Century but had lain idle since the retirement of quick-change comedian Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1936) in the 1920s.

In “One Man Show” (opening at the Fisher this Tuesday) Brachetti dons some 80 costumes in under two hours in split second changes before the audience’s eyes. In one scene, the actor stages a wild gunfight between two cowboys, changing costumes faster than the wranglers’ ricocheting bullets. However, for the self-proclaimed “world’s fastest man,” who was born in Turin, Italy, it is the changing of character that holds the most pleasure.

“What I like is not only the exercise of changing costumes, but the exercise of changing souls,” says Brachetti. “For instance, at the end of the show I’m a very earthy clown who suddenly becomes a very beautiful woman: What is striking is not only the special effects, but all of a sudden the movement is different and the hands are different … it’s a different person completely.”

“When we rehearse any play, there’s a moment when I put on the costume, and I will find it penetrating the soul. I’ve talked with other actors and many of them start on the outside too, with a wig or a costume - and then you look in the mirror and you see this other person and then you have the character.”

The actor’s interest in playing characters began with a puppet theater that he played with obsessively as a young boy. At age seven Arturo was sent to the seminary in the hope that he would become a priest. Instead, he found his true calling.

“A priest who did magic as a hobby taught me magic tricks and I started doing magic,” says the actor. “But what I really loved was the theatricality of performing.”

He quickly turned his magic act into a three-character show in which transformed from a witch into a beautiful young woman and then a man – with makeup assistance provided by the nuns at the seminary. The show prompted friends to bring the career of Fregoli to the then 16-year old performer’s attention.

“Fregoli would perform 50 or 60 characters in a show,” says Brachetti, who is now something of an encyclopedia of theater history. “He would do a play, playing all the characters, then parody the vaudeville stars of the day.”

“He was also a friend of the Lumiere brothers (early developers of the motion picture) and he shot clips of himself as different characters: then he stood behind the screen and gave voice to his own characters. He was one of the first to play with movies and sound.”

At 17, with Fregoli’s example fresh in his mind, Brachetti left the seminary for Paris with six costumes in a suitcase, and quickly earned a spot at the legendary cabaret “Paradis Latin.” From there he went on to serve as MC of the acclaimed German production “Flic Flac.”

“It was an old time marvels show,” the actor recalls. “We had a Chinese acrobatic family, a swallower of swords, a Shadow player, a giant a crocodile act. I loved it because it was so full of images,” he says. “One moment we had people from the Alps singing in lederhosen and all of a sudden 18 crocodiles were on stage with them and then it started to snow –the whole show was like this.”

That experience left an impact on the performer who has since created several other shows in the German “Variete” tradition.

“There was a moment in time,” says Brachetti, “when my mother told me “You want to be everything, but remember – you cannot be the four seasons at the same time.” And I thought, “Ah, but why not!”

One scene in the new show tackles that challenge directly - posing the actor in rapid succession as autumn, winter, spring and summer. In some respects, though, Brachetti has dedicated his entire career to proving he can do it all, putting his quick-change skills to remarkably versatile use.

Since “Flic Flac,” he has written, directed and acted in numerous musicals, comedies, and films. He has performed for the English Royal Family, appeared on the Drew Carey Show and played traditional roles in plays like the Italian production of “M. Butterfly.”
He has also put his quick-change skills to remarkably versatile use. In the Italian comedy “I Massibilli,” he played a stagehand who fills in for one actor in a theater company and ends up taking over every role in the play. In the drama “Square Rounds,” Brachetti showed a serious side, playing a shell-shocked WWI veteran who first transforms into the soldier he was then - with a single scream - becomes a wailing mother dressed in black. And in 1996’s “Brachetti in Technicolor” the performer put Hollywood history through a blender, mixing the worlds of Cleopatra, James Bond and Scarlet O’Hara in a 60-costume extravaganza.

“I was lucky to be subsidized in Italy for many years,” said Brachetti, who developed a number of off-the-beaten-path productions in his home country over the years. “I could express myself each year in a different show. You make much less money, because the state gives you the money, but the tickets are cheaper. It’s a different system, but that’s why I got to try so many things.”

“One Man Show” draws from the best of Brachetti’s earlier shows, using familiar images and archetypes to explore the realm of the imagination in a fast-paced exhibit of transformations. At the center of the production is a large box that provides the ever-changing backdrop for Brachetti’s fantasies.

“The box is a metaphor for an attic – not just my attic, but everybody’s attic: that room that can become whatever we want,” the actors says. “The show tells the story of a child who had a dream to be on stage and do everything – too much of everything!”

“The child makes us curious. I’m over 30, but in my head I am 10-years old, especially for those two hours of the show, where I’m more or less playing with my puppet theater by myself.”

And in that respect, the world-renowned quick-change artist really hasn’t traveled all that far from the puppet theater he played with as a boy in Turin.

- John Sousanis

Arturo Brachetti plays January 14 – February 2, 2003 at the Fisher Theatre, Detroit. Visit Arturo Brachetti on the web.

Laurie Patton and Blair Williams share a moment of marital bliss


From the opening moments of the Shaw Festival’s production of “Candida” at Meadow Brook Theatre, you can tell you’re in for a treat. Designer Sue LePage has taken what might have been a flat and ordinary parlor scene and turned into a nuanced setting - a home with perceptible depth, width and warmth. As the actors quietly take their places onstage accompanied by Paul Sportelli’s perfectly pitched score, their movement hints at characters’ lives beyond their scenes onstage.


Happily, the artistic confidence that director Jackie Maxwell and company establish in these first 20 seconds is maintained throughout the excellent production’s remaining two hours.


George Bernard Shaw’s domestic comedy has certainly aged well. Written and set in late 19th Century London, the play’s spirited discussions of religion, poetry, workers rights and matters of the heart often seem strikingly contemporary.


The play begins with the Reverend James Morrell (Blair Williams) juggling his schedule in happy anticipation of his wife Candida’s return from a holiday trip. Morrell is clearly in love with his wife - and when Candida (Laurie Patton) arrives in a flurry of laughs and hugs it seems equally clear that she loves him.


Morrell’s life, however, is turned upside down with the arrival of an 18-year old poet named Marchbanks (Mike Shara). The young artist confesses his love for Morell’s wife and brazenly argues that the staid Reverend can’t possibly make Candida happy. Shaken by Marchbanks’ confidence, Morell is further rattled when his wife seemingly echoes the poet’s sentiments.


What follows is a philosophical tug of war between poet and preacher, broken up by small skirmishes involving Candida’s unscrupulous father (played with curmudgeonly charm by Bernard Behrens) and Morell’s frustrated young secretary Prossie (Severn Thompson in a funny and fiery performance).


Shaw’s characters are all terribly clever (if not necessarily bright) and their pointed banter can be delightfully funny as well as insightful. The production (first staged at last fall’s Shaw Festival in Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario) is solid from top to bottom, and the entire cast works with the calming assurance of actors who work in the same company year round.


Williams lets us see the Reverend’s frat-boyish self-confidence slowly drain from his body as it’s replaced with a less buoyant but healthier air of self-knowledge. And Shara conveys the poet’s baby steps toward manhood as his penchant for flinging himself about gives way to a less melodramatic carriage.


“Candida” is definitely one of the better productions to be staged this season. But it isn’t flawless. While the play’s male characters undergo dramatic transformations, the titular heroine is more witness to their journeys than a fellow traveler. Shaw shows us that Candida is her own person but it’s an anti-climactic revelation: Candida begins and ends the play defined by her role as a nurturer to the men she loves – a mother rather a partner.


Maxwell could have helped Shaw out by heating up the encounters between Candida and her young suitor. But Paton’s charismatic bemusement and Shara’s comical buffoonery, while entertaining, put to rest any threat of a tryst between Marchbanks and Candida. The Rev. Morell may question his wife’s loyalty, but the audience never does.


The hilariously combustive scenes in which Morell’s secretary wrestles with her own repressed sexuality hint at how Shaw might have uncovered the whole woman inhabiting Candida’s prescribed roles of wife and mother. As it is, too many stones are left unturned for us to really appreciate who, rather than what, Candida is.


The Shaw Festival’s ”Candida” plays January 8 - February 2 at Meadow Brook Theatre, Wilson Hall, Oakland University, Rochester Hills. Tickets are $24 - $38. Call (248) 377-3300

The Shaw Festival’s new artistic director, Jackie Maxwell


Director Jackie Maxwell will take over as the artistic director of Ontario’s prestigious Shaw Festival this season, after a year working as the artistic director designate. Maxwell is in town to direct George Bernard Shaw’s comedy “Candida” for Meadow Brook Theatre this month and took some time to talk to the Oakland Press about the play, its author and the festival that takes his name.


In “Candida” a married woman brings a poet into her home, knowing he is in love with her. She quickly loses control of the situation, though, when poet unexpectedly declares his love for her to her husband, a respected minister.


“One of the things I was really interested in about this play was that its sexual politics are still so resonant and impactful. For a piece (from 1895) it’s really quite radical,” says the director who was born in Ireland, but has worked and lived in Canada for the past 25 years.


“One of the actors in the play pointed out is has the same plot as Othello with a different ending: It’s about a man who has all these assumptions he’s built his life on and another man comes in and puts doubt in his ear, and woosh –everything tumbles down.”


“Of course, they all get built back up, but there are these wonderful scenes. Candida’s husband says that he trusts his wife’s principles, and she says ‘The only reason I’m not with the poet is because I love you, not anything to do with my principles.’ That’s pretty wild for its day … it has real sting in its tail.”


That sting, Maxwell contends, is what distinguishes Shaw’s work in general, and makes him the perfect anchor for a theater festival whose goal is exploring the “beginning of the modern world.”


“When you talk about Shaw you’re talking about a questioning of the status quo. That’s what Shaw continually did and I think that’s what good theater should do. So if he’s your festival’s “home’ playwright, then part of your mandate is to do plays that are subversive or don’t fit in an easy place. I think that has been the lodestone of the festival because you go there to be challenged. The plays are fun - but after the show people talk about what they just saw, not which winery to visit.”


“I’m also really interested in the notion of doing plays (by Shaw and his contemporaries) and newer works that look at the same period and just sort of juxtaposing the two ideas,” she says. “What happens if you put a piece by Shaw or Chekhov onstage and then put on a contemporary piece, dealing with the same period? What are the different ideas, how do they see things differently?”


“In Ireland having a (national) culture is a given – it’s in the fabric of everything you do. In Canada, though, there’s a fight to maintain and clarify what Canadian culture is. And I think that – certainly within the theater –that’s why there has been government support and why people have demanded that,” Maxwell said. “Because they need that support to offset the pervasive and strong culture of their neighbors below.”


“But I think (the presence of U.S. culture) has actually helped, in a funny way, to assist Canadians by making them fight for and keep their own culture,” she said. “There’s a grassroots support or at least an acknowledgement that the arts should be supported.”


Bringing “Candida” to MBT is part of Maxwell’s larger vision of taking the Shaw on the road.


Mostly we’re just adapting to the new venue (at Meadow Brook),” she says. “We’re not using a curtain, so we had to figure out other ways of going from scene to scene . The actor originally playing Candida, had a prior commitment and was recast from the Shaw ensemble, but other than that it really has the original soul of the piece, which is what’s important.


“Over the last year, as I visited Detroit and other places I was amazed that there is a very strong and committed group of people who make the journey and want to come to the Shaw,” she says. “I think it’s important to get our work seen in other places, with the hope of course that people like what they see and want to come back and see us.”



For more information link to the Shaw Festival

Meadow Brook Theatre artistic director Debra Wicks recently resigned as the company’s artistic director citing personal reasons, according to Oakland University director of auxiliary services Peggy Cooke. Wicks was in the midst of her first season in the position after serving as the company’s interim artistic director for the past three theater seasons.


Wicks had taken a leave of absence prior to the opening of MBT’s October 2002 production of “Witness for the Prosecution,” for which she shared directing credit with retired Wayne State theater professor Anthony Schmitt.


Wicks’ resignation leaves Meadow Brook Theatre without an official artistic director at this time, but Cooke says that Schmitt, who formerly served as the head of Wayne State’s Hilberry Graduate Theatre Acting Program and Company, will serve as an artistic consultant to MBT for the remainder of the season, and will play a role in selecting plays for the company’s 2003-04 season.


Former Wayne State theater professor Ed Smith - who directed last spring’s MBT production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” - has also been hired to direct the March production of “Wait Until Dark” which Wicks was scheduled to direct.