Humana Kind

Comfort food was on the menu at Louisville's annual new play fest

by Jennie Webb

    Living in Los Angeles—the land of "take two freeways and call me in the morning"—we’ve long bemoaned the lack of a theatrical center. Theatre here is a reflection of L.A. itself. It’s spread out and disparate and it’s hard to form a clear image of what’s out there and who’s doing it; where it’s going.

  So picture if you will, a month-long festival of fabulously-mounted new work that’s all in one place, where you spend all day and all night seeing play after play, and chat with playwrights, performers and producers in between.

    That’s the Humana Festival of New American Plays, held at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville (ATL) in Kentucky. Kind of an extraordinary thing, this.  Having birthed a bevy of award-winning, heavy-hitting works by playwrights like Tony Kushner, Donald Margolies and Naomi Wallace (can you spell "Pulitzer," anyone?), Humana is a yearly event that’s touted as charting the "new directions and new freedoms" of American theatre. All in a town where it’s nearly impossible to get a sandwich without meat or mayo, and the beverage of choice is anything with bourbon.

    Okay. So this is the 26^th Annual Festival, the first for ATL Artistic Director Marc Masterson. And there’s a lot that’s up in the air this year—not the least of which is how Masterson stacks up against the "master," former Artistic Director Jon Jory, who’d led the Festival since day one and went out with a bang two years ago.

    But what I’m mainly interested in is seeing what the 13 plays by 29 playwrights offer us in the way of theatrical direction. What will Humana tell us about what’s happening on stages across America? Because what I’ve noticed is a whole lot of new play programs shutting down, and theatres making more and more "safe" choices in order to keep their doors open.

    On the recent "Special Visitors Weekend" (or, as the staff at Actors Theatre calls it, "the big weekend") which closes the Festival, I was among a group of invited writers, directors, literary managers, agents, industry executives, journalists and theatre-makers from around the globe, all in town to take it all in. We’re together "in the spirit of adventure," checking out what’s presented on these stages, and listening in to what’s being said about the bigger picture.

    Even before the first performance began, the conversations about the price of risk-taking had started. "We love new works, and new writers," I overheard an East Coast theatre producer bemoan. "We’re all for them! But we also have to fill the houses."  I take quick look at this year’s program, filled with familiar names like Tina Howe, Ann Bogart, Charles Mee and Marlane Meyer.

    "Admittedly, it’s hard to get audiences to take a chance on a new play," said Timothy Douglas, newly-appointed Associate Artistic Director at Actors Theatre. "And the Humana Festival is a position to produce six new plays every year. That’s a wonderful thing."

    Douglas came to Louisville after working as a director at theatres across the country, including the Mark Taper Forum, where he spent five years with the New Works Festival. While he agrees that the Humana Festival seeks to "push audiences," the goal is also to "speak to audiences."

    For the Festival, he directed Jerome Hairston’s "a.m. Sunday," among the weekend’s sentimental favorites. At 26, Hairston has written a haunting drama of a multi-racial family falling apart. Despite some awkward poetic breaches, this heart-breaking play lingers effectively on what goes unsaid in a marriage, settling with delicacy on sounds and images that bleed into one another until they are unrecognizable. 15-year-old Jerome (Jason Cornwell) longs to shut it all out, but his young brother Denny (H.J. Adams) is growing more and more desperate to find clues that will explain the way his parents—his white mother (Barbara Gulan) and black father (Ray Anthony Thomas)—tip-toe around each other. Because theirs is a dynamic where "there’s no need for straight and honest." As a director, Douglas bathes the play in a leisurely, almost spiritual wash, which gives a cohesion to a work that clearly doesn’t want to pander, but maybe leaves audiences with too many unanswered questions.

    Next, Festival regular Charles Mee offers Marc Masterson a wonderful pallette to work with as a director, in his charming "Limonade Tous Les Jours." Together, they’ve drawn a breathtakingly beautiful study of love. In Paris. In the springtime.

    Mee’s characters are wounded souls who meet nearly by chance: a middle-aged American (Tom Teti) and a young Parisian nightclub singer (Christa Scott-Reed) with a thing for older men. Make the leap. So these two gallivant around the city looking smashing, explaining to each other in very funny conversations how they are wrong for each other and don’t want to be together, but then there’s that big soft bed and charming cafes and plenty of photo ops and . . . Granted, there’s not much to this play, but it’s a lovely, short jaunt which Masterson and his actors (and designers) have successfully crafted into a delightful, frivolous vacation

    To be honest, not what I expected from this heralded writer, especially after seeing his biting "Berlin Circle" at L.A.’s Evidence Room. 

    "Yes, I used to write mean, nasty plays," Mee said, when I asked him about changing artistic gears. "But I’m happier now!" And with that he looked lovingly at the young lady accompanying him for the weekend, his 13-year-old daughter, Alice.

    Mee is joined by a couple of other tried-and-true artists for this Festival, whose work to me was equally surprising . . . in its complacency. This year, Award-winning playwright Tina Howe ("Pride’s Crossing" and "Coastal Disturbances") has penned "Rembrandt’s Gift," a gentle comedy which finds the Dutch painter materializing in the SoHo loft of a has-been actor and his photographer wife. Well acted by Fred Major, Josef Sommer, and Penny Fuller, the idea that it takes an artistic force like Rembrandt to wake up the artist in a self-sacrificing woman is a nice place to start, but throw in jokes about Gouda cheese and Hollandaise sauce and we’re at a dead end.

    Then there’s the latest piece conceived and directed by the acclaimed Ann Bogart and the SITI Company, also Humana staples. "Score," adapted by Jocelyn Clarke from the writings of Leonard Bernstein, is a solo-show which promises to be a "study of ecstasy, genius and the power of great music." But comes across as an academic lecture which only teases us with snatches of great music. Performer Tom Nelis is swell, but I’d rather go to the symphony.

    So onto the Festival’s "experimental" offerings. This year, instead of the "Phone Plays," or "Car Plays" or even "T-Shirt Plays" of previous seasons, Humana is playing around with something they call "The Technology Project."

    Of the three projects, L.A. writer Alice Tuan took the challenge farthest, creating an interactive "virtual hypertext" called "F.E.T.C.H." Her very physical actors are attached to a pole, climbing up and down and integrating audience feedback to script the event.  "The rewarding thing about it was that it was vertical theatre," said Tuan, who can’t stop talking about her director, Eric Johnson. "He really took the dare. I loved watching the audience watch the actors—it was like a circus, a spectacle," she laughed.

    Sarah Ruhl’s "Virtual Meditation #1" was a tame collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, and John Belluso created a moving but conventional short play which comes from his very personal relationship with technology.  His "Voice Properties" follows a couple on a first date and like Belluso, the leading character has cerebral palsy and is in a wheelchair. But Barney (played by Bryan Buckler) also uses a "Stephen Hawking" device to speak, which becomes even more of a barrier.

    Director of the New Voices project at the Mark Taper Forum, Belluso said he recognizes the movement in on stages across the country toward what he calls a conservative theatre aesthetic. "But I hope it’s temporary," he added.  "There’s a real tug of war at work between needing to serve an audience—needing to serve the tastes and desires of a particular audience," he noted, "And the need to nurture the next generation of artists and bring the next generation of theatergoers into the fold."

    You can’t say that Actors Theatre isn’t doing its share on both of these last counts. The talents of its strong apprentice acting program are showcased during this Festival in "Snapshot," a compilation by 17 commissioned writers. The work provides wildly uneven glimpses of new writing, but even these seem to all reflect an undue respect for the traditional.

    "Yeah, I guess I’d say that it’s a pretty safe festival," said Marlane Meyer, whose "Mystery of Attraction" is getting its long-awaited world premiere. "But they’re doing my play," she added with a smile. "And I’m afraid to write easy plays."

    "Mystery" was originally commissioned and developed in readings by A.S.K. Theater Projects, (and also slated for a production at [Inside] the Ford which was recently cancelled). The work is an often fascinating exploration of human connections, centering on two brothers (Steve Juergens and David Van Pelt). Through late-night conversations, "Mystery" peels back, layer by layer, the passions and bargains and lies upon which they’ve built their relationships. These are two "lost men," and Meyer’s sharp dialogue gives them a sort of nasty, brutally honest focus, particularly in a confrontation between Juergen’s gambling lawyer and his hard-working wife (a spot-on Claudia Fielding). But for my money this production, directed by Richard Corley, fell victim to problematic casting of the male leads, and much of the time felt false and disjointed.                                        

    It’s Meyer’s first time at Humana, however, and she’s obviously impressed by the experience. "Louisville has been great. I’ve never been with such a terrific staff; they’re completely freeing and supportive," she said. "Plus, they’ve really trained an audience here! They’re giving people an opportunity to experience more challenging pieces. I mean, at a matinee, one little old lady was laughing hysterically watching the guy peeing for three-and-a-half hours."

    You heard her. The peeing in question (which is more like, oh, three-and-a-half minutes—still impressive for onstage peeing) takes place in Adam Rapp’s "Finer Noble Gasses."

    At Humana, this barely-thirty-something playwright soon became the darling of the weekend, in part because he woke everyone up. But the shock value of bodily functions and breaking television sets aside, Rapp’s surprisingly straight-forward look at the skewed reality of drugged-out musicians in the NY’s East Village is a breath of fresh air. Even if that air smells like a college frat house.

    Actors Robert Beitzel, Dallas Roberts, Michael Shannon and Ray Rizzo deliver extraordinarily defined performances of these go-nowhere band members who are studies in the subtlety of non-events. Moving the davenport for ideal viewing of a blank computer monitor is a really big feat for guys who literally can’t leave the couch, or their bowls of brightly colored pills.

    But things get a bit tricky for these amazingly likeable, horrible heroes when we meet their neighbor (Jeffrey Bean) and a roller-blading child of a dot.com couple (Alaina Mills). All of the sudden, the world of these four dope-heads expands and the need to feel, to connect, to belong . . . becomes too much.

    "Writing new works, you want to touch audiences," said Rapp. "But in theatres there are so few new play spots. I’ve been really fortunate in the last few years. ‘Nocturne’ [championed by Robert Brustein and staged in 2000 at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre] was my break out," he said, "but it was my 15^th play. I‘d been hearing that my plays were good for 14 plays." (His "Ghosts in the Cottonwoods" was produced by LA’s Echo Theatre Company at the 24^th Street Theatre two years ago.)  Oh, "Gasses" wanders and sometimes trips itself up when it becomes self-aware, but the production at ATL is in the capable hands of director Michael John Garces, who tears open the envelope just when audiences are laughing too comfortably.

    With the weekend almost over, the only thing left is the Festival’s signature Ten-Minute Plays. Each year, the plays are chosen from thousands of works submitted for the National Ten Minute Play Contest. "The door is completely open to any playwright," said Amy Wegener, ATL Dramaturg and Director of New Play Development. "It's a great way for us to identify writers whose work we may not have yet encountered."  But this year, even these works came from playwrights already in ATL’s sights. Which proves that sometimes safe isn’t half bad, because the Ten-Minute Plays (only three this year) were definitely worth waiting for.

    "Classyass" by Caleen Sinnette Jennings is a clever look at a college radio station, followed by Julia Jordan’s sweet "Nightswim." And Sheri Wilner’s dark horse, dopey-sounding "Bake Off" was the unequivocal hit of the Festival. Set at the Pillsbury Baking Competition in 1979—the year after the first-ever man took its first-ever million dollar prize—"Bake Off" is crisply directed by Sullivan Canaday White, who brings out every nuance in Wilner’s delicious writing. Kim Martin-Cotten is hysterical as a woman putting it on the line to keep female territory feminine, and Jeffrey Bean rises to the occasion as her male victim. Truthfully, flour and eggs have never been so funny.

    Hey. What does that say? After this long weekend, that a short and sweet deranged domestic satire comes out on top?

    Sounds like a theatrical community in need of comfort food to me.

An edited version of the preceding article appeared in Backstage West April 18, 2002