In the aftermath of a sudden death, it’s not uncommon to wish we had one last interaction, some inkling of finality or closure before it was too late. This well-intentioned fantasy is borne out like a stunning blow in Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother, a surreal examination of a parent-child relationship that also raises serious questions about the limits of self determination. As directed by Kevin Young, the current production by Breathe Art Theatre Project creates a world for its characters that fairly burns with anguish.

Jessie (Lisa Melinn) is an adult woman who lives with her mother (Diane Hill) in her isolated country home. Divorced, estranged from her criminally troubled son, confined to the house in part for fear of a possible epileptic fit, she spends her days managing the household and incessantly feeling the weary isolation of a life unlikely to change for the better. The production utilizes a minimal but effective design that capitalizes on this loneliness: Barbie Weisserman’s properties extend little beyond objects that are handled or remarked upon in the script, and Sergio Forest’s tight, sparing illumination follows the players closely, in the absence of anything else to watch. Both are an excellent fit for the marvelous negative-space set (designed by Young); other than some furniture, the house is suggested by a few walls that throw a vanishing point at the upstage bedroom door, appearing far away and somehow final. Indeed, minutes after the play begins, on an otherwise-unremarkable night, Jessie reveals that she plans to commit suicide before the evening is out. The story unfolds in the aftermath of this announcement, as she continues to get her meticulously planned affairs in order and her mother attempts to process the supposed gift of that known last encounter.

In a conspiracy-hungry age of questioning authority, amateur journalism, and access to disparate opinions the world over, our relationship with the truth — whatever that means — is more tenuous than ever. Humankind is now predisposed to choose what reports to accept and reject; therefore, what beliefs we each dare to espouse, and why, helps define us to ourselves and others. Playwright Steven Dietz’s beguiling Yankee Tavern toys with this theme like a prism, shifting the little world inside a rundown New York City bar as if to see how the changing light alters the ensuing view. Accordingly, the Breathe Art Theatre Project production marking the play’s Michigan and Canadian premieres, running first at Detroit’s Furniture Factory and then at Windsor’s Mackenzie Hall, is enigmatically gripping.

The play’s first act quickly introduces all four of its characters: Adam (Kevin Young), a graduate student who inherited the watering hole of the title from his late father; Janet (Chelsea Sadler), Adam’s practical and understanding fiancé, but no fan of her intended’s birthright; Ray (Dan Jaroslaw), an avid conspiracy theorist and apparent professional barfly with a fondness for the ghosts around him; and Palmer (Joel Mitchell), an unknown loner who buys an extra beer for the empty seat next to him. Dietz works hard to generate a thought-provoking environment in which the characters compare and discuss the various theories about the 9/11 attacks (here only four years out, in the early 2006 of the play). However, it’s the accomplishment of director Michael Carnow and cast that the discourse feels mundane, an ultimately unresolvable curiosity that serves as an efficient means to establish characterizations and relationships. The stakes here are low, and the characters’ affection for each other shows even as they disagree; among these strong performances, Jaroslaw is the early standout, not only entertaining to watch for his considerable eccentric energy, but also a real and quite likable character.

Oh, Craigslist. Just look at what you've done.

As the instigating event of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom, a vague online personal ad brings Jo (Jaye Stellini) to Jules's (Jeffery J. Steger) bomb-shelter basement laboratory/apartment seeking anonymous sex. (Red flags, anyone?) Indeed, what happens goes well beyond any convention of boy meets girl: Jules, believing a comet is about to wipe out the human race, seals them together in the lab, hoping to convince Jo to be the Eve to his Adam. As each worst-case scenario is somehow trumped by an even worse one, this Breathe Art Theatre Project comedy (directed by Diane Hill) cleanly cycles through genres with each added piece of context, from opposites-attract first date to threatening hostage situation to animals refusing to mate in captivity to abject post-apocalyptic hopelessness. For that's the really funny thing about Jules's catastrophic prediction…he was right.

The most obvious characteristic that makes Breathe Art Theatre Project unique is its status as one of the only "cross-border" companies on the continent. Each production this season enjoyed a three-weekend run in downtown Detroit's Furniture Factory, then packed up for a final weekend at Windsor's Mackenzie Hall. The company scaled back somewhat with only three productions this season: one story of a man whose whole world fits in four walls, one of a young girl living exclusively in her imagination, and one of a decimated city whose residents' ruination seems far from over.

BoxFest Detroit 2010 is the latest installment in an ever-growing enterprise to support and encourage women directors in the metro Detroit theater community. This year's festival is marked by the promotion of longtime collaborator Molly McMahon to artistic director, accompanied by Kelly Rossi's return as executive director. Both are omnipresent at the Furniture Factory performance space, swapping shifts at the box office with other festival directors. The participants' eagerness to help events run smoothly is evident — among the volunteers manning the concessions counter is Frannie Shepherd-Bates, artistic director of Magenta Giraffe Theatre, which is playing host to the festival. The prevailing sense is one of overlap between the people actively involved in the plays and the people making the machine run, as well as joy in what they've brought to fruition.

Over the years, the BoxFest Detroit franchise has grown from a single evening of short plays to a three-week festival with a complicated schedule of six individual programming blocks. It has become literally too much theater to see in a single day — I know, because I tried. Short plays are fascinating and fun to dissect because they can create strange, special worlds without having to sustain them; the seventeen of this year's festival are no exception, but the sheer number limits my capacity to describe each as fully as it deserves.

The first full season by Magenta Giraffe Theatre Co. capitalized on its youth. As an emerging presence growing its audience, the company made the most of its low overhead and embraced the unorthodox. Under the framework of a titanic mission statement to "eliminate apathy, violence, prejudice, and barriers to education," the organization is young enough that its founders seem to still be burning through pet projects, fueled by unabated passion and absolute freedom to choose what inspires them. For the most part, they managed to balance the exhilaration of expression with the accessibility needed to keep viewers attuned.

Demetri Vacratsis's Love Bombing After the Earthquake is not intentionally timely; there is no sense of Breathe Art Theatre Project capitalizing on recent global devastation. The predominant theme is grief — as much as these characters' environment has seen little rebuilding, the arrest and dysfunction in their emotional states are far more troublesome. The original script, also directed by Vacratsis, methodically digs into the ruins of four survivors to find whatever gasping, pulsing motivation remains to drive their damaged decisions.

The play starts with a bang, which grows into a rumble. In a precursor to a production filled with unsettling sounds, the four actors use the furniture and the concrete floor to simulate an earthquake to surprising effect. Fast forward one year, to parallel stories that begin as if at the edge of a canvas and creep toward an illuminating center. A wife is dead; a child is dead. A man is detained for questioning, but where and by what authority seems uncertain. A woman abandons everything that remained of her life in favor of perpetual reminiscence. One story appears much more dynamic than the other, but both are essential to the feel of this intense production.

The title Mr. Marmalade may be catchy, but make no mistake: this is Lucy's world; everyone else just lives in it. Accordingly, I found the opening moments of the Breathe Art Theatre Project's production misleading. The onstage presence of the title character (Joel Mitchell) before the play even begins suggests that Mr. Marmalade is the focal point, whereas the real omnipresence is four-year-old Lucy (Christa Coulter), the lens through which every stimulus passes.

Essentially, if Lucy's not interested in something, it doesn't exist. In her eyes, her New Jersey home consists of dull, empty walls and grown-up chairs with their backs to her domain. The play's ninety minutes cover less than twenty-four hours of real time, but for Lucy and her play world, timelines bend to her will. The primary challenge in director Kevin T. Young's staging is the unavoidable dissonance between the narrative structure mirroring a four-year-old's attention span and the deep investment in her real-seeming imaginary life. Coulter is sometimes an uncomplicated child, but just as often the preternaturally composed adult Lucy imagines herself to be, and the shifts are fluid, not overt. Young's blurred lines of make-believe and reality lend occasional unevenness (especially the inconsistent use of characters' "play" accents), but also generate an atmosphere of stream-of-consciousness immediacy that ultimately work for Noah Haidle's darkly comic script.

Musicals get away with being fluffy. A man and a woman singing prettily at each other — the bar is set low. This is why the heartfelt The Last Five Years from Magenta Giraffe Theatre will soar past everyone's expectations. The small-scale piece by writer/composer Jason Robert Brown, sharply conceived and beautifully executed, delivers such exquisite sadness that your heart may explode.

The musical has just two characters, Cathy (Anne Marie Damman) and Jamie (Kevin Young); their romantic relationship has an expiration date. When the play opens, Cathy bitterly sings that it's over, yet in Jamie's reality, they've just met. From the opposite ends of their five years together, they bookend each other: he moves forward in time; she goes back. Although they occasionally share the stage, the characters mostly occupy it alone for alternating songs; there is relatively little dialogue, but a variety of  ballads and some up-tempo, rock-adjacent numbers. The concept allows us to primarily see each character feeling alone within a relationship, revealing well-earned undercurrents of pain and second guessing, and making the few points of connection all the more bittersweet. Director Frannie Shepherd-Bates takes excruciating care to develop the individuals as well as the couple, constructing believable love and loss — simultaneously — between two people who almost never address each other. The staging weaves the two actors together without being intrusive, there are no lazy choices, and everything clicks.

In the talk back I attended after Dutchman, director LoriGoe Nowak told the audience that the Magenta Giraffe Theatre's production was intended to be abstract. I was actually surprised to hear this, as it had escaped my notice during the 60-minute play. Some choices became clearer in retrospect, but at first, most of the elements of this version did not seem much different from a classic staging.

The setting, especially, revealed details — from the set to the costumes to the passengers' movements suggesting a train in motion — that precisely evoked a 1960s subway car. The cohesive set design by Kevin Beltz lent intimacy and a sense of voyeurism that were well suited for this challenging piece. Lighting design by Gwen Lindsay and music by Chuk Nowak (mixed live from the conductor's booth onstage, an undercurrent of music blended with the constant sound of the train) added additional layers of vérité, so much so that the actors had to raise their voices over the din. The four nonspeaking passengers were unremarkable upon first glance, in nondescript costumes suggestive of decades ago. Perhaps the abstract point of view was a bit too well concealed.