Sugarcraft – 09 March 2025

The design elements (and the ice cream!) of No. 11 Productions’s Sugarcraft really hit the spot. From entering and being handed a guest name (audience participation never required) to leaving with a confectionary delight, Sugarcraft was heavy on the novelty. The design team did an incredible job of elevating playwright Danny Tieger’s creative concept to more than the sum of its parts. In parts though, the show owes its glamorous appeal to a set (Ryan Emmons & Jen Neads) filled with soft red velvet, beautifully utilized paintings showing different places on protagonist Mary (Julie Congress)’s journey, beautiful lighting (Mextly Couzin) that used an impressively minimal number of fixtures to accomplish all of the lighting design goals (ex. shift in time, color specific mood, spotlighting the paintings that showcased the setting for the memory scenes), costumes (Emily Atkins) and props that had fun and daring elements to allow actors to play multiple parts, and music composition (Stephan Goodwin)  and sound design (Angela Baughman) that simultaneously kept up the play’s high brow society sensibilities but also poked fun at them. Without the creative gimmicks on the production/direction side, this show’s repeatedly mentioned “1 hour and 30 minutes” would have felt entirely too long.

This show didn’t really come into its own from an acting, writing, or directorial perspective, which, unfortunately, are the primary ways that theatre audiences understand most plays. Steven Conroy went in and out of being funny, particularly in the role of Dupray. Watching Erin Lamar go from one subservient role to the next started to feel uncomfortable racially given today’s political climate. My primary criticism here is that none of the characters, Mary (Julie Congress) included, experienced any kind of character development. No one had any emotion, so there was nothing for the audience to emotionally invest in.

Directing wise, I felt like my attention was frequently being drawn to the wrong things. The plot point that interested me most was Mary’s secret concoction of the almonds during the ice cream demonstration, revealed to us in the sequence where the bar flipped and the fairy lights were flickering and the audience watched the entire play in fast forward from behind the bar. I caught the creation of the almonds and that they were not included in the recipe Mary was presenting, but with everything else going on in the room and absolutely nothing in place to emphasize the almonds, that plot point was not easy to pick up on as there were many moving bodies, decisive lighting choices, and sound shifts going on at the same time. This is one example of several where the biggest movements/noises completely covered up the important plot points sharing the stage with them. As for the writing, the one dimensional caricatures didn’t give the actors or director much to work with, though I did see some missed opportunities. Mary could have had some desperation when she started offering her body as a payment method. She could have cared about her dead friend, Queen Ann. She could have expressed feelings about her daughter leaving for America given that Mary is illiterate and won’t be able to read Lizzy (Ariana Cruz/Lilybeth Linda Guzman)’s letters. Her purely transactional attitude was consistent through the entire show. It made her hard to like and relate to.

Ultimately, Sugarcraft’s biggest structural problem was an underlying lack of commitment to an age range for the audience. By attempting to be silly to children, it garnered eye rolls and watch checks from adults. The more serious elements were vaguely defined, garnering questions from children explained by their respective adults in a whisper to the annoyance of others in the room. Sugarcraft was a novelty that professed to make ice cream live, in front of an audience but didn’t really—just swapped out containers off stage and then compensated the audience with prepackaged ice cream after the show. Sitting through its indecisiveness and lack of character development was tedious. The aesthetic elements of the show were tremendous, and I commend the design team for their truly beautiful work. This story could have been told in 60 minutes or less; with a couple of characters arcs and a commitment to a more specific audience, this same novelty experience would have been elevated to something much more fun and exciting. The right pieces and ideas are there, but to truly move anyone they need to be reexamined for placement that allows the actors and director the freedom to make the same kind of choices that the designers got to. Only then, can the world of Sugarcraft truly be the delectable confection it is aiming to create.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Berlin Rosen.