Blue Over You Francis can’t find his wife, Mitzi. She was gone when he came home from work yesterday, didn’t sleep at home last night, and hasn’t called in. So now he’s rooting around in her stuff, searching for clues. Maybe she lit out for Phoenix. Maybe she ran off with Joey, the macho maintenance engineer at the school where she teaches first grade. After a few minutes with Michael Joseph Mitchell’s Francis, though, you might suspect that she just couldn’t take his loopy, manic style anymore—his best-gay-friend asides (“Don’t you just love Angela Lansbury?”), his tendency to break into a Broadway show tune at the least provocation. You’d think that Francis’s many affectations would have some bearing on the ultimate trajectory of Dan Noonan’s play, getting its world premiere here as the debut production of Spot On Company. But they don’t. They’re apparently just there to give us something to focus on until an unremarkable surprise ending arrives. —Tony Adler
Ten 2018 The Gift Theatre kicks off its 2018 season with a night of ten ten-minute world premieres. David Rabe’s Winter or Fall features Mary Ann Thebus and Mike Nussbaum reminiscing about dating in college 60-plus years ago and realizing that maybe the good old days are better left forgotten. In Carly Olson’s Slate two aspiring actresses—one white, the other Latina—debate how much they’d bend their morals to land a part. Carolyn Braver’s The Cellphone Play attempts to engage the audience by making them do the opposite and turn on their devices. Rammel Chan’s Northern Michigan Trust is a Fargo-esque riff on small-town desperation. The three standouts are K. Frithjof Peterson’s sad bartender-relationship story Soft Things, J. Nicole Brooks’s hilarious Nigerian Astronaut Wants to Come Home, about an e-mail scam one would almost want to fall for, and Tracy Letts’s The Night Safari, featuring a world-weary tour guide whose anthropomorphizing of the exotic animals he’s tasked to describe seems uncomfortably personal. The night concludes with Will Eno’s Cancellation, an extended one-liner about a couple scoring a coveted reservation only to receive everything but a meal, or service for that matter. Even the pieces that don’t come together have kernels of good ideas and at ten minutes can hardly be accused of wearing out their welcome. —Dmitry Samarov
