Review- Spirits to Enforce

There’s a bit of “Saturday Night Live” (or perhaps "Monty Python") to the setup of Spirits to Enforce, Youngblood Theatre’s joy ride of a production that opened this weekend. Twelve superheroes, stranded in a submarinine, stage a telemarketing drive to raise money for their production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Cue Will Ferrell in a bodysuit and cape.
But playwright Mickle Maher has more on his mind than simple TV-style yucks. As his play goes its merry way, it enters a language-rich dream world that draws inspiration from comic-book morality tales, Shakespeare, and from the great globe itself—a world in which the noble pursuit of storytelling promises to defeat the bad guys and save the world.
Maher is founder of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck and frequent collaborator with the city’s more innovative companies, and his plays reflect his restlessness with traditional forms. Almost all the dialogue in Spirits is spoken to the unseen “customers” at the other end of the telemarketing calls (and when two characters do talk to each other, they do so over the telephone). As such, the play is structured more like a piece of chamber music than a traditional drama. The “patter” of the calls is echoed from one caller to another, and the narrative behind the scene evolves piece by piece. We gradually learn about each superhero’s special powers, and about which role they’ll play in The Tempest. And they even reveal their secret identities.
Or do they? As the show’s music ebbs and flows toward its climactic face off between heroes and supervillains (lead by Dr. Cannibal, of course), the identities—secret and otherwise—slip and slide into each other. The struggle between hero and villain also becomes a battle between art and life, the real and the imaginary, and even between Shakespeare and Mickle Maher. Flights of poetry—from both playwrights—merge with telemarketing banalities, and even Marvel-esque comic lingo in a way that seems to tell several stories at once. But once the revels are ended, you feel like something earth-shattering has taken place.
It’s no easy undertaking, and one of the pleasures of Spirits to Enforce is the thrill that Milwaukee now has a theater company to take on a piece like this. Youngblood Artistic Director Michael Cotey gets energy, precision and imaginative flourishes out of his cast, which includes Youngblood members David Rothrock and Tess Cinpinski, as well as T. Stacy Hicks, Cathryn Melvin and April Paul. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen in Milwaukee in quite a few years. And it’s more than welcome.