Angry Young Men Ltd.’s Full Frontal Puppetry returned this past Friday with a one-night show that brought back the distinct flavor of weirdness that had come to define the adult puppet group. The delightfully weird, little puppets have been featured on quite a few stages over the years.  This time around the group made its way to the back room of Amorphic Beer on North Fratney. I had wings from a nearby food truck before the show in a very cozy post-industrial atmosphere...enjoying a couple of Paradigm Paradox IPAs in and amidst a show dominated by fellow Xers both in and out of the audience.


A Full Frontal Puppetry is a fun satirical evening of comedy for a generation that might still harbor hazy memories of The Muppet Show over the VHF band on a low-res cathode ray tube in the prime time of  early childhood. Fuzzy, little personalities cascade through skits in a variety show atmosphere.


Modeled as it is after the overall feel of a Muppet Show, there IS a guest star. The guest for this particular show was local opera performer Julianne Perkins, who worked her way through a performance of  a very romantic piece (by Gilbert and Sullivan if I recall correctly.)  It was a duet with partner Josh in the role of a zombie puppet. It was actually an oddly touching duet for singer, puppeteer and zombie voice. Later-on Julianne sung a beautiful piece while a fuzzy, little puppet named Razzle killed mice puppets in the background. Beautiful notes flowed through the space as tiny, little bodies were crushed and decapitated amidst streamers of blood. It was...actually really, really cute.


The show is sharp and self-referential. At show’s opening. Lumpy the Golem Boy and Murry Gauntman (the old zombie guy who was the first ever AYM puppet) discuss the evening ahead and find out that very little of what they’re going to be performing on the evening is actually new material. The simply third-party presidential debate between third-party puppets, a houseplant and Julianne was fun. Once again, Sid the Fetus comes across as an eerily appealing, little guy. The houseplant representing the Green Party held everyone’s attention with some really interesting points. Not all of the old material is funny, but it never fails to be fun. It’s cool, though. FFP is inhabited by cool, little fuzzy guys to hang out with...not all of which I remember from my last visit with the FF puppets.


Of particular note in and amongst the action was an adorable, little goat with a big heart. My wife and I had a chance to talk with her a bit at intermission. She considers herself the GOAT-goat even though...y’know...she hadn’t shown-up in the entire first half of the show. After intermission, Lumpy is giving her a driving test and things...predictably...go wrong. It’s a fun sketch.


Amorphic is a fun space for a show like this. It’s off on the edges of the Riverwest’s spiritual hub.  Walk far enough in any direction in that neighborhood and you just might find the end credits to Milwaukee or something. It’s such an enchanting, existentially permeable space that makes for a really great atmosphere for a really great microbrewery.


The latest Full Frontal Puppetry was one night only. For more information on what the Full Frontal Puppets are up to, visit them on Facebook. For a look at what’s on offer at Amorphic, visit them online too.

The Baumgartner Center for Dance is a spacious temple of performance. The vast space feels like a tribute to the potential of human movement. I wasn’t there Saturday afternoon for the dance, though. Renaissance Theaterworks was hosting a program of shorts in the afternoon as a part of its Br!nk New Play Festival.


Maeve Elliot’s Dry Humor is a light comedy sketch in which Abraham Lincoln waits for his dry cleaning in heaven. Kind of a fun premise that serves as a weird opener for the show.


The second short has considerably more weight to it. Playwright Maria Pretzl builds a endearing and refreshing script around a pair of lovers and a friend at a wedding. Bouquet Toss constructs a strong and idiosyncratic relationship between three individuals who manage quite a bit more complexity than most characters manage over the course of a full-length play. Quite an accomplishment.


The third short dives into a strikingly original piece about a woman who finds herself searching for the heart of dance in and within parties all over the planet. Maria Burnham's "The Air B&B of Broken Dreams" has thematic weight AND a tremendous amount of personality. Well worth attending the program for this one alone. Feels rather pleasantly like a clever updated mutation of “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium” by William F. Wu


Colleen O’Doherty’s Sister of Experience is a rather weighty drama that suffers a bit from being on a program with largely lighter fare. A nun is brought before a priest who is asking her to lie for the benefit of a young woman. It’s pretty heavy stuff and there really are no easy answers in one single totally serious short on the entire program.
 
The show closes-out with a comedic shirt by  Deanne Strasse.Roberta’s Skin is a fun, little examination into the psychology of body image. Nate Press is charming as an inhabitant of a nude beach who is accosted  by a woman who is endeavoring to feel comfortable in her own skin. Ashley Rodriguez is delihghtfully vulnerable as a woman just trying to fearlessly be herself. It’s a really fun ending to the program.


Renaissance Theaterworks’ Br!nk Br!efs! has one more performance on May 19th at 2pm at the Baumgartner Center for Dance on 128 N. Jackson St. Admission to the show is free. (Really.) For more information about the program and everything else on the Br!nk New Plays Festival, visit Renaissance online.

It's something called Here There Where It’s just three people on a stage. Everything is black. As the show open, chalk is marked on the ground outlining some basic boundaries that will more or less be used in the course of the rest of the show. Three characters receive and invitation for a party. Where is the party? Well...it’s not exactly clear, but the three people onstage have to work out exactly where it is that htey’re going to leave from if they’re going to be able to make any headway at all.


Italian writer/performer/filmmaker Alessandro Renda joins Gigante’s Isabelle Kralj and Mark Anderson in a jarringly funny, little exploration into the nature of reality. The three performers engage in a brief performance that seems to conjure a sort of existentialist Marx Brothers sort of an energy that playfully and whimsically tumbles across the stage. The nature of time, space emotion and intention whimsically pop through a narrative that has some breathtakingly simple bits of breathtaking metaphysical depth.


One notable moment has Kralj having a conversation with a prerecorded version of herself that is being projected larger than life at the back of the stage. She’s asking herself about who she is and who she was and she’s answering herself...but she already knows the answers. Elsewhere, Renda is performing a live monologue as video footage of him plays in the background...driving around in search of direction in video as he stands perfectly still onstage. Anderson also has a solo moment in which he considers some of the first principles if superheroing. It’s a surprisingly novel monologue that manages to stake out some strikingly new ground relating to power and responsiibility in a superhero genre that’s been around for over 80 years.


For the most part, the three are all onstage or screen together at various moments over the course of a brief, intermission-less performance that casually touches reality from many different angles. The narrative ends where most stories begin. The whole thing feels like a tripe, little anti-show that plays on all of the empty spaces, silences and darknesses that exist along the edges of perception. On at least one level, it’s as though the show is as much about what it ISN’T as it is about what it is. Theatre like. This doesn’t come around often. It’s breathtakingly deep in a way that feels deliciously organic. It’s all very simple...but the simplest things leave an audience with the most room to consider so much more room for thought on the way out of the theatre.


Theatre Gigante’s Here There Where continues through May 19th at Kenilworth 508 Theatre on 1925 E. Kenilworth Boulevard. For more information, visit Theatre Gigante Online.

There’s a pleasant variety of different shows making it to the small stage this month including a variable plot adventure with First Stage, a promising tenth anniversary for Reanaissance’s new play festival, the emergence of a new opera company and a charismatic one-man show. Here’s a look at what’s coming in May in Milwaukee.

​First Stage presents an interactive adventure with a variable plot as it presents Escape from Peligro Island--A Create Your Own Adventure Play. Playwright Finegan Kruckmeyer pastes together a surrealistic fantasy adventure which tells the story of Callaway Brown. He starts the story stranded on a desert island, but things can go in many disparate directions depending on the decisions of the audience in a fun experimental theatre experience. Director Jeff Frank leads the cast in a show that runs May 10 - June 2 at the Milwaukee. Youth Arts Center on 325 W Walnut St. For ticket reservations and more, visit First Stage online.

Theatre Gigante welcomes Spring with a brand new program--Here There Where...described as "An enigmatic theatrical piece that fluctuates between keen absurdity and poetic musings, interweaving dialogue, monologues, music, video, movement, and a lot of playful wisdom."

Gigante is really, really good with this sort of thing. They've been doing it for quite a long time now. They know what they're doing....it can be breathtakingly fascinating stuff when they frame it well. The show runs for one weekend only: May 17 - 19 at Kenilworth 508 Theatre - 1925 East Kenilworth Place, 5th floor. For more information, visit Theatre Gigante online. 

 

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Renaissance Theaterworks’ Br!NK New Play Festival turns TEN this year with some drama, some comedy and lots and lots and lots of shorts. Featured on the festival is the story of a woman who returns to an island looking for answers about the death of her brother. There’s also a number of shorts written by some pretty impressive names including  Deanna Strasse and  Maria Pretzl. (They’re both really, really cool. Trust me.) The festival runs May 18 and 19 at The Baumgartner Center for Dance on 128 N Jackson St. in the Third Ward. For more information, visit Br!NK  online.

Next Act’s performance space serves as the launching point for  Brew City Opera--a new company which emerges at the end of the month...with a production of Così fan tutte. A man disguises himself in order to hit on his best friend’s fiancé in a light and enjoyable comedy. It’s a warm romantic comic hug from Mozart that comes to inhabit the space at 255 S Water St. BCO should have little difficulty filling the intimate studio theatre space with a light and spacious three hours of Mozart at the dawn of the summer of 2024. The show runs May 30 - June 1st. For more information, visit BCO online.

Actor/performer Thom Cauley presents a story of life with Autism in his one-man show The Spectrum Revisited (or a Typical Neuro-Atypical.) Cauley talks the history of the science, his personal life in a spoken word show infused with song parodies. Cauley has shown a charming and charismatic stage presence in and around the edges of larger ensembles. It should be fun to see him move into something right in the center of the stage. Should be fun evening. The show runs May 31 - June 9th at Hi-Five Studios on 3276 N Weil St. For more information, visit the show’s Facebook page.

​Deliciously awkward romantic comedy stumbles its way onstage with grace and poise in Kith and Kin’s The Hypotheticals. Subtly stunning Selena Milewski is irresistible as a woman who has been sent to see a psychiatric professional. Her employer has required her to do so before she is cleared to return to work. On her way in to her first appointment, she stops a handsome stranger in an elevator and has a brief romantic encounter with him before she can face the tedium of dealing with a psychiatrist. The problem is...the man in question turns out to have been the psychiatrist that she had an appointment with.


Doctor and client are forced to negotiate therapy AND romance together in a complex landscape of lies, insecurities and uncertainty.  Shayne Patrick balances official concern with endearing interpersonal vulnerability as Jamie. Patrick and Milewski have a respectable deal of chemistry together. The more intricate beats of the comedy might not be perfectly articulated onstage, but the emotional connection between the two characters is clearly present in a cute and satisfying romantic comedy.


Playwright Rebecca Anne Nguyen negotiates some pretty tricky terrain as both the leads are struggling to make sense of the world while making sense of their feelings for each other. The strikingly clever bit about the set-up to the play is the SO much of the romantic interaction between patient and clinician is presented exclusively in therapy sessions. Romantic comedy has a tendency to involve characters who exhibit behaviors that could be classified as mental illness were they not romantic fiction. It’s impossible to get lost in any kind of fictional romance without psychoanalyzing the characters on some level. Nguyen’s script addresses this directly by having the vast majority of the romance right there in a psychiatric office.


The psychiatric talk might be a bit too tedious for the wrong kind of audience. For the right kind of audience it might not go far enough. Deeper concerns beyond the romance ARE revealed in the course of the story, but the interaction between Blaise and her doctor lacks the proper intensity crisply quirky nuance that would turn it into something truly brilliant. There IS a hell of a lot of neurosis and anxiety being appealingly flung about onstage...but it doesn’t quite land perfectly. Nguyen’s script is too lost in the clinical exploration between the two characters to allow much time for the fun playfulness of a young romance to properly present itself onstage. There ARE moments of sexiness and whimsical romance, but they seem a bit overpowered by the clinical machinery of a plot that sometimes seems hopelessly buried in the DSM-5.


For all its cute, little flaws, The Hypotheticals remains a fun, little trip to the romantic stage. The electrical exhilaration of romance is one of the easiest special effects to put on the live stage, but it’s allowed on the local small stage so very, very infrequently. A romance like The Hypotheticals is frustratingly rare. It makes a show like Nguyen’s all the more precious.


Kith and Kin Theatre Company’s production of The Hypotheticalsiruns through April 21st at Inspiration Studios on 1500 S. 73rd St. in West Allis. For more information, visit Kith and Kin online.

Novelist James Jones’ romantic war drama From Here to Eternity was a steady success when it was released  in 1951. Not too long afterward, a Hollywood film adaptation of the novel was released which turned the story of a WWII veteran into a runaway smash hit at the cinema AND ​the bookstore. Years later, legendary composer Tim Rice has adapted the story into a musical. The show makes its way to Milwaukee in a production with Skylight Music Theatre. 

The show runs April 12 - May 5 at the Broadway Theatre Center. For more information, visit Skylight online.

The elevator pitch: a concise pitch for a new project that can be delivered between floors in an elevator. Rebecca Anne Nguyễn’s new play Hypotheticals is its own kind of elevator pitch: among attractive, young woman (played by Selena Milewski)  is in an elevator on her way to her psychiatrist’s office. She has a brief kiss with a stranger on the elevator. (Such a cool springboard for a story. Really looknig forward to this one.) That stranger turns out to be her new psychiatrist. Sounds like a fun idea. Also featuring Susan Kelly as Dr. Gwen. Kith and Kin presents the world premiere production directed by Maura Atwood. The show runs April 12 - 21 at Inspiration Studios in West Allis. For ticket reservations and more, visit Kith and Kin online.

​Next Act Theatre enters the Spring with a family story. Reese Madigan plays the title character: an adult son of a woman who has spending habits that require him to assumer the financial responisibilities for his mother. David Flores and Alexis Green round-out an impressive cast for an intimate drama that rounds-out a very satisfying season for Next Act.  The show runs April 24 - May 19 at the space on 255 S. Water St. For more information, visit Next Act online.

It’s billed on the official Milwaukee City website as “the single deadliest event in national law enforcement history” prior to September 11th, 2001. November 24th, 1917 a bomb was detonated at Milwaukee’s Central Police Station. 9 officers and 2 citizens were killed. This coming April, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre present a stage drama based on the aftermath of the incident. Martin Zimmerman’s THE NOT-SO-ACCIDENTAL CONVICTION OF ELEVEN MILWAUKEE "ANARCHISTS” runs April 26 - May 12 at the Broadway Theater Center’s Studio Theatre. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.

It’s a tiny, little motel room in Memphis in April of 1968. It’s modest. There’s a chair and a couple of beds. It’s raining outside, but the outside is inside. The motel room is onstage in Milwaukee in the March of 2024. It’s an intimate, little space in a studio theatre. Bryant Bentley plays Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the last night of his life. N'Jameh Russell-Camara plays a woman working at the motel on the first day of her new job.


Directed by Dimonte Henning, the drama settles-in quickly amidst the onstage rainstorm and quickly settles its way into the drama of life at the center of the civil rights movement during the late 1960s. The drama grabs hold of the stage and doesn’t let go for a full 100 minutes or so without intermission. It opens in an earthbound search for cigarettes in the middle of the rain and ends in a fantastically nebulous space that still manages to find a deep grounding in the heart of human emotion.


Henning orchestrates things with a fairly deft mastery of the shift from realism to something more than realism. It’s a gradual shift that sometimes runs the risk of lurching forward too far into something bigger, but Henning keeps everything onstage firmly focussed on the heart of matters for long enough to keep it all totally emotionally captivating from beginning to end. The balance between realism and something else is a very, very difficult thing to manage given the nature of the drama. This is the last night of a man who has become a legend. This is the motel room in the evening--backstage in the theatre of human endeavor before his death on the balcony beyond the front door the next morning.


Bentley is handed one of the most difficult jobs imaginable onstage. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Is a force of nature in US history. His name instantly conjures images and audio of unimaginable gravity that echo through the decades. No one actor could do justice to that legend onstage. Playwright Katori Hall isn’t focussing on the legend, though--she’s focussing on the man. Bentley provides a solid emotional grounding for a man who knew that there were people who wanted him dead...a man in desperate need of a cigarette who was suffering from stresses of all kinds. Bentley cleverly renders those stresses for the stage.


N’Jameh Russell-Camara is handled the job of doing much of the heavy lifting in shifting the background of the play from simple historical drama to something much heavier. She manages the transformation with grace and poise as she plays one of the countless, nameless victims of racial violence that have tragically etched themselves into the soul of the US throughout history. N’Jameh Russell-Camara is playing a woman on her first day on a new job. The tension of untested energies in that role cascade through the actress with emotional acrobatics that render an impressively complex picture of a single person meant to represent so many others.


Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of The Mountaintop runs through March 24th at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.

​There’s a primal  emotional intensity in ASL that doesn’t often make it to stage or screen. Truly impassioned sign language is capable of delivering a deeply affecting emotional intensity that words alone aren’t capable of delivering. This month, Skylight Music Theatre illuminates the overwhelming emotion of the grunge rock musical Spring Awakening with high-intensity sign for a truly unique theatrical experience that is unlikely to be duplicated again in any other format for quite som time.

Based on the 1891 German drama of the same name, the 2006 rock musical Spring Awakening follows a class of kids in a private high school coming-of-age in an era of repressive social norms and catatonically stifling societal control over the individual. In the midst of a large ensemble dealing with a great many problems, Wendla and Melchior enter into a dangerous romance that threatens to tear their lives apart completely. Somewhere in the periphery, Melchior’s friend Moritz suffers from intense desires he does not comprehend as scholastic stresses threaten to cave-in around him.

The Skylight has done a phenomenal job of staging a fusion between traditional rock musical and ASL drama. Every character is accompanied in some fashion by sign language...except for the towering figures of authority, (played with forceful dominance by  Joel Kopischke and Karen Estrada.) When the lead faculty of the school speak, their words are projected larger-than-life against the bare backdrops of the main stage at the Broadway Theatre Center. Everyone else communicates in sign...in AND out of song. In-your-face grunge rock is performed with amplified emotionality as the entire chorus performs the lyrics accompanying infectiously catchy grunge-inspired songs with names like “The Bitch of Living,” “My Junk” and “Totally Fucked.”

At the center of it all is the romance between Wendell and Melchior which plays out in tandem between two different sets of actors...Erin Rosenfeld and Caden Marshall sign the drama in the center of the action between the two romantic leads as Emma Knott and Edie Flores speak and sing the action in the periphery in nearly identical period costume.

The intensity of everything in the show is deeply rooted in a story that...seems to cover just about every “adult” topic in some way on some level. The musical stops just short of what would be beyond the pale of an NC-17 rating at the multiplex. It’s beautifully vulgar in places as it treads into horrifyingly dark parts of the human soul.

The Skylight’s Spring Awakening feels like a once-in-a-lifetime show that really SHOULDN’T be once-in-a-lifetime. The musical theatre format is capable of being so very, very fluid and amorphous. The intensity of dramatic passions then to get drizzled-away in the tedium of contemporary musical theatre. The rock of Spring Awakening keeps it all very powerful and vital throughout while the ASL ground the visual reality of those emotions in something irresistibly palpable. Over-priced mainstream musical theatre can’t do this. It’s SO very cool that Skylight CAN.

Skylight Music Theatre’s production of Spring Awakening  runs through March 17th at the Broadway Theatre Center on 158 N. Broadway. For ticket reservations and more, visit Skylight online.

Heidi Armbruster is onstage as an actress. It’s a comfy, little set with a feeling of the infinite Wisconsin farmland stretching-out beyond a tiny, little living room in a farmhouse. Jason Fassl’s Lighting design, gives a warmth to a farmland infinity that feels every big as spacious and open as any cozily distant as the abstract idealization of farmland in American Midwest. Armbruster’s playing a big-city actress who has come to her father’s farm to try to figure things out. He’s suffering from terminal cancer and she’s coming to terms with her own life. She’s looking for meaning in memories at the end of one life while looking for some deeper connection in her own.


Directed by Laura Gordon, actress/playwright Heidi Armbruster’s Scarecrow is a deeply engaging hour and a half at the theater. Armbruster moves from personal life to professional life two more abstract concerns. Armbruster is wit has a and endlessly endearing quirkiness about it, but isn't afraid to be slightly less than relatable. She is one of those actresses you see in pharmaceutical commercials playing the mom. And she's got out wit and wisdom about it that really resonates through some very clever and sharply-comic ambient sound design by Joe Cerqua. Armbruster keeps having fantasies about living our life in a Lifetime-Style movie and Cerqua brilliantly nails the made-for-TV scoring cues as Fassl’s lighting transitions into something that feels like it’s glowing through a video screen.


All too often when once writing something autobiographical that's meant to engage a large number of people, of a tend to go in the direction of being very generic. Armbruster leans into the things that make her unique and it presents them in a way that feels very distinctive. For an hour and a half audiences get to hang out with a really enjoyable person. We’re not hanging out with somebody just talking about family life or love life or even the loss of a parent. Scarecrow renders something profoundly more distinctive and engaging. It's remarkable. And it feels remarkably fresh. Like a single actress telling her story on stage has happened countless times over the decades. But Armbruster makes her own impact as an individual through a very striking way, distinctive evening of stories told her on the edge of the life of her own father.


There are similarities between Armbruster's Scarecrow and Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show And God Said Ha! Sweeney’s mid-1990s tale of her life as a working actress while dealing with her brothers cancer echo is a bit into Armbruster's more contemporary story of her life as a working actress dealing with her father’s cancer. Overall, there's a very similar feel between the two shows. However, in leading into more of who she is as a person, and who she is as a character, Armbruster has found a very unique performance that finds its own life through some endlessly enduring humor. Armbruster asserts herself onstage wonderfully. She’s that actress working along the margins of a large ensemble in some big, local production. And she’s a mother juggling everything and dealing with migraines on a pharmaceutical commercial. But more than that, she’s a warm, welcome and welcoming presence onstage that shines all the more radiantly all by herself.


Next Act’s production of Scarecrow runs through March 27th at Next Act’s home on 255 S. Water St. For ticket reservations and more, visit Next Act online.

​A strict 19th century European school serves as a potent backdrop to one of the more intense and provocative contemporary rock musicals to come out of the past few years. There’s a raw intensity to the music. The show comes across like a rock concert that just happens to be telling a very powerful story. The music fuses with the story on a very deep emotional level. Skylight Music Theatre presents its production in the final days of winter March 1st - 17th at the Broadway Theatre Center on 158 N. Broadway. Michael Unger and Alexandria Wailes direct. For more information, visit Skylight online.

Sophocles' tragic tale of Antigone finds its way to the stage for two performances one night only this month as Vanguard Productions presents a new adaptation of the drama. Chantae Miller and Matt Daniels star in a reading that also features Leo Madson, Jake Badovski, Josie Trettin, Shanti Lleone, Maya Danks, and Elliott Brotherhood. The show. runs Monday, March 4th at 5pm and 8pm at Calvary Presbyterian Church on 628 N 10th St, For more information, visit the show's Eventbrite page.

​Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop is an intimate look at one of the most influential peacemakers of the last 100 years. Bryant Bemtley stars as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel the night before his assassination. N’Jameh Russel-Camara plays a woman working the hotel who has a conversation with King. Dimonte Henning directs a close-up portrait of one of  the legendary figure on one of the smallest stages in Milwaukee.  The two-person drama makes the small stage at Broadway Theatre Center on 158 N Broadway. March 8th - 24th. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre Online.

He’s not as well-known for his earliest work...partially because it’s silent film-era stuff that has been lost to history. This month Theatre Gigante presents one of the acclaimed director’s few surviving silent films as it screens The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. The 1928 film is the story of a serial killer who only kills young, blonde women on Tuesday evenings. The film is presented live with original scoring by the tiny, little orchestral powerhouse that is Frank Pahl’s Little Bang Theory. The show runs for one performance only: Sunday, March 10th at 3 pm at the Jan Serr Studio Theatre on 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For more information, visit Theatre Gigante online.

Full Frontal Puppetry returns this month for World Puppetry Day. (It's a real thing. Look it up.) The 8-Bit Show is a one-performance-only variety show featuring the Full Frontal Puppets and its newest member: a fuzzy, brown guitarist named Deep Fried. Sounds like a fun show. Thursday, March 21st at the Brick House on 504 E. Center St, 

The Constructivists open a promising new 60-minute satire this month. Director Jaimelyn Gray welcomes audiences to an hour at the end of the world with the musical group Oconomowocapella.  A Cappocalypse! sounds like a deliciously absurd concept for an intimate, little burst of comedy early this Spring. Conceived by Andrew Hobgood and Joe Lino, the comedy features Andrea Ewald, Ekene Ikegwuani, Joe Lino, Logan Milway, Clayton Mortl, Anya Palmer, Matthew Scales, Kellie Wambold, and Ben Yela. The show opens just a couple of nights after the Spring Equinox at Zao Mke Church on 2319 E Kenwood Blvd. The show runs March 23rd - April 6th. For more information, visit  The Constructivists online.