Tag: play

REVIEW: Play of the Month – 4 Genres by Ron Riekki

Madison Krumins Leave a comment

‘4 Genres’ is a short play written by Ron Riekki, produced as part of the Play of the Month series through Theatre Nova. Theatre Nova gives the opportunity for new works to be performed professionally, spotlighting the voices of new playwrights and making theatre more accessible and relevant to current times. ‘4 Genres’ was a perfect example of a playwright writing for the time and medium–I felt that Riekki really used Zoom as a tool rather than simply working around it, which brought something special to the performance.

Four characters reveal that they have been trapped within four respective genres in their Zoom boxes: horror, musical theatre, slapstick, and documentary. In order for their genre experience to end, they must say what they learned during their time there. After living in their respective realms, it’s clear they don’t seem to be enjoying it that much.

One by one, our characters reveal what they’ve learned. Our documentary character encourages the others to share, before he quietly bemoans that he’s disappointed that he feels he didn’t live through anything. While the other genres experienced running from vicious werewolves, learning about the power of friendship through song and dance, or slipping on banana peels, the man in the documentary says, he’s just sat there with a camera in his face. Sound familiar? 

It took me a while for the underlying messages of this short play to sink in and really take root. Since March of last year, I’ve so often felt like I’m living in the dark and dull page of a far-off future’s history book. How many times have I wished to be elsewhere, living in another time or realm free of the troubles COVID-19 has brought with it? But just as our documentary character realized: What we are living through is important. We are brave for having lived through this time. We are resilient and we’ve learned to adapt.

Like I said before, I applaud the writer and production team for really using Zoom for what it can do, in regards to effects and lending to commentary on our current times. My only perceived drawback to live Zoom performance is technical issues–lag between cast members, differences in sound quality, inability to hear overlapping lines. These are things that seem to be natural aspects of the Zoom culture most of us are experiencing right now, but they don’t always lend well to a scripted performance where every line counts. 

However, until we are able to see live shows again in person, I continue to appreciate how artists are working to keep theatre alive and growing through these difficult times.

For information on the next Play of the Month performance, go to Theatre Nova’s website: https://www.theatrenova.org/current-show

PREVIEW: Play of the Month – Whatcha Doin? by Jacquelyn Priskorn

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Theatre Nova, while no longer putting on plays for an in-person audience, has been giving online access to live performances each month, garnering a great reception from the Ann Arbor thespian scene. The events feature original, 20-40 minute plays from new playwrights.

January’s play of the month is Whatcha Doin? by Jacquelyn Priskorn. It’s about a former child actor reflecting on their childhood career, and how her being typecast as a goofy loser has affected her throughout her life. It speaks to the effects of being an object of others’ consumption–strangers with no recognition of your own identity apart from a character.

This winter brings another season of performances for your viewing pleasure, beginning Wednesday, January 27 at 8pm via Zoom. The season continues through April. The events are performed live, but are taped and available online as well for the next month.

Find tickets to this individual play ($10) or the whole season ($30) here: bit.ly/TNPOTM1

PREVIEW: Mary Poppins

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Whether you’re five or 95, Mary Poppins is an absolute delight.

The Burns Park Players present a special, family-oriented production of the Disney classic this week, intent on bringing all of Ann Arbor the joy and wonder of the nanny we all wanted for ourselves.

Since its 2013 departure from Broadway, productions of the play can be hard to find. Luckily the talented actors of this local troupe are doing us this service. Plus, the proceeds from ticket sales goes toward funding the arts in schools around town!

Showtimes are:

February 27, 7:30 PM

February 28, 7:30 PM

February 29, 2:00 PM

March 1, 2:00 PM

All at the Power Center, 121 Fletcher St.

Ticket prices range from $15-25, with special student pricing of $5 off when you apply discount code SPRINGBREAK at checkout.

Get your tickets here or at the door.

REVIEW: Water by the Spoonful

Angela Gosselin Leave a comment

SMTD’s production of Water by the Spoonful does not deal with light subjects. The play follows a family coping with death, a chatroom for recovering drug addicts, and the way these two groups intersect. Another key point is how Elliot, the son of the deceased Ginny, copes with PTSD resulting from his time spent in Iraq. Though the play finds itself confronting all these difficult situations, it leaves audiences with hope and a heightened sense of one’s priorities.

 

This was my first time at the Arthur Miller Theater. I found its layout really interesting, especially in the context of Water by the Spoonful. The theater is square with the stage at the center. Only a few rows of seats radiate from each of the three exposed sides, both on the ground level and balcony. The performance feels so immediate and three-dimensional when viewed in this way; I could see the smallest changes in an actor’s face, feel the movement of a fight scene, and watch the water fall as it is poured on the stage by the spoonful. When a sizable portion of the dialogue takes place in a chatroom, four different locations need to be created. By angling certain rooms towards different sections of the audience, the staging created this dual sense of dislocation and togetherness in a really interesting and effective way. The section of the stage farther back by the wings was also used in conjunction with an elevated balcony and the central space to explore some of the collage-like overlapping sections of the work. As characters inhabit all three spaces with various lines and music weaving in and out of the scene, the different spatial contexts allowed a type of visual overlapping to coincide with the aural and theatrical pastiches going on.

 

The use of space was intriguing in this work, but what is space if not filled with characters and lines and interaction? The performances in Water by the Spoonful gave life to a plethora of diverse and complex characters. Notable performances include Alyxandra Ciale Charfauros and Vincent Ford as Orangutan and Chutes&Ladders, respectively, as the two bring a realness to their characters that becomes amplified in their back-and-forth conversations. Kyle Prue’s performance as Fountainhead, a man with an addiction who can’t quite face his reality, was also one that I found highly immersive.

 

Ultimately, I found Water by the Spoonful to be a great performance. The material was used in really thoughtful ways in terms of both direction and performance, and I look forward to trekking to North Campus again to see more work in the Arthur Miller theater.

REVIEW: Water by the Spoonful

Shannon Z Leave a comment

SMTD’s production of Water by the Spoonful soared beyond all expectations; it went beyond a simple examination of addiction, familial dysfunction, and the human burdens accompanying both, and instead quivered in an unwavering state of compassion, warming my heart in counterbalance. Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play proved to be as patiently restorative as the the metaphor in which its name is based upon – the title refers to a method of hydrating sick children, in which the caretaker must sustain the child with spoonful-sized dosages of water, spaced five minutes apart. If improperly executed, the results can be devastating; Hudes’ work carries an undercurrent of this metaphor throughout. The characters in the plot, be they recovering addicts, mourners, or both, must likewise learn to sustain their individual burdens within life’s fragile constraints, while recognizing the healing properties of interpersonal support and forgiveness.

I perceived the play to be pretty nonlinear; it was only after Yazmin’s monologue about the necessity of ‘dissonance’ that the scenes and characters gradually unveiled themselves to be far more interconnected than their initial, disparate origins. Indeed, the concept of dissonance through Yazmin’s terms clarified my understanding of the play; on the surface, the eccentric crack-addicts interacting within the support chatroom, Ginny’s death, and her two very different mourning relatives seemed dissonant, like chess pieces moving in no relation to one another. Yet it was about halfway through that I conceived of more than just a community death connecting each character’s stories. Rather, the addicts and the Ortiz family are practically interwoven, not only in narrative but also resolved in the sense of universal yearning, grief, and overall, a collective search for harmony.

“Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution.” – Quiara Alegría Hudes, Water by the Spoonful

Beyond the heartwarming characters and SMTD’s moving portrayals of them, I particularly enjoyed the production’s sound and set designs and the little details included in such that effectively highlighted the pure human emotionality running through the piece. Though Hudes writes Water by the Spoonful with dissonance and John Coltrane’s uninhibited jazz music in mind, the sound designers working on this production incorporated these musical concepts especially well in the play’s most emotionally charged moments – like Odessa’s overdose and the abrupt endings of multiple chatroom arguments. In addition, the set designers managed to transform the space from scene-to-scene into vastly different simulated environments, through multiple wheeled components, which I thought was consistently convincing and effective. After all, how does one spatially represent the cyberspace and how people would interact within a “chatroom”?

SMTD’s Water by the Spoonful will be on show at the Arthur Miller Theatre until November 17; I highly recommend going if you have the chance!

REVIEW: Thus Spoke AnnArbor Fall 2018 Performance

Abby Z Leave a comment

I had been made extremely curious about this semester’s performance by “安娜说 / Thus spoke Ann Arbor” from viewing the gorgeously illustrated posters brightening up campus in the weeks leading up to the show.  While I had been aware of the group for several years now, I finally decided to attend their performance for the first time, and after seeing it I can confidently say that I couldn’t have made a better decision.  After arriving early to make sure to get seats near the front of Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, we were informed that it would be a full house, which hardly came as a surprise at that point due to the fact there was only a few empty seats in sight and the noise level had grown to a nonstop roar.

One of the elements I appreciated the most about the show was the choice to divide the performance up into three shorter plays. It gave many more of the club’s members time to shine in a leading role than if they had just done one play, and the group was also able to challenge themselves to perform three distinctly different styles of play, suiting different members individual strengths.

The first play was a comedic romp titled “黑暗中的喜剧 / Comedy in the Dark.”  The play used physical and situational comedy as characters unveiled hidden secrets in a darkened apartment after a freak power outage. The second play, “人质 / Hostage“ was the shortest of the three, and featured a very limited cast and set. Instead it was more figurative dark comedy to the first play’s quite literal one, with two thieves mistakenly taking a suicidal girl hostage in an attempt to escape the police hot on their trail, and the intense interplay that followed.  The third and last play was “立秋 / The Start of Autumn” set around a century ago in China.  This was by far the most serious of the lot, and told the story of several families internal drama as well a competition between tradition and newly adopted Western ideals.  

The transitions from play to play were quick and painless, with crew members scurrying about to clear the relatively complex set up of the first play for the instead very minimal one of the second.  Considering how long the night was already, nearly reaching a full three hours, I appreciate the brevity in these areas.

The one drawback to the set up was that by the time the third play began most of the audience, myself included, seemed to be getting restless.  With no intermission, the last play with its distinct five chapters and several scenes basically revolving around intense discussions about banking and finance, I’m not proud to say that I was more than a little glazed over myself.  But the fact that the group did manage to hold the audience in rapt attention for the nearly two and a half hour run of the show is impressive in and of itself. 

Additionally, while there were undoubtedly a few intentionally humorous moments in the second two plays, especially the second one, because the audience had been primed to laugh in the over-the-top comedy of the first play, I noticed that the audience, myself included, began to burst into laughter even in otherwise inappropriate moments.  

While the group could have easily put on the play without adding subtitles on projections on either side of the stage for the very small percentage of the audience with less than fluent Mandarin, I appreciated the extra effort put in to make the performances accessible. As a member of that small percentage myself, I definitely found myself referring to to the subtitles frequently throughout the night, especially if a character was talking quietly and I was struggling to hear what they were saying in the first place.

That being said, with so much physical comedy getting the most laughs in the first play, and the more subtle acting in the second two, the experience was definitely better when ignoring the subtitles and instead focusing on all that activity on stage. The actors and actresses couldn’t have done a finer job, and I didn’t catch a single slip up as they all seemed to have prepared their lines to perfection. There was one humorous moment in the first play, however, when one of the sofas being used as props collapsed to the floor.  But like true professionals the actors and actresses continued undeterred, even finding time to prop the sofa back up, resulting in another wave of laughter. I was impressed by the professionalism of cast and crew alike, with the obvious hard work preparing for the show paying off.  I definitely plan on keeping an eye out for their performances in the future, and attending all that I can.