Performance Review

The 22nd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

Although unavoidable variation in the quality of the playwriting exists from year to year and from show to show, the Humana Festival of New American Plays is the only program that gives new American playwriting a showcase. Filling its three performance spaces with two shows each, plus an hour-long bill of three ten-minute plays, the festival is a feast for scores of visiting critics, agents, and producers from various popular media who descend upon Louisville for three days to gorge themselves on theatre. The Humana Festival also functions as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Each year, Actors Theatre of Louisville's producing director Jon Jory and his creative team program a collection of works that reflect not only the American Zeitgeist, but also seem to provide a funhouse image of America. The imagery we see is sometimes clear, sometimes skewed, but always worthy of discussion.

Frequently leading the way at Humana are the plays of the pseudonymous Jane Martin, a Kentucky playwright who refuses to step forward and receive her accolades (or criticism). Returning with her tenth play, Mr. Bundy (Bingham Theatre), Martin examines the wrenching forces at work when a troubled, but liberal-minded couple discover that the nice, old gentleman next door is a convicted child molester (see TJ 50:3, 1998). As an exercise in dramatic rhetoric, Mr. Bundy holds a certain fascination. As social drama, this play is a tired old man.

In his play Dinner With Friends (Pamela Brown Auditorium), playwright Donald Margulies views the family dynamic through a sharper lens than Martin. Two couples face dark existential fears as one undergoes a divorce. Gabe and Karen (Adam Grupper and Linda Purl) are grief-stricken when they learn Beth and Tom (Devore Millman and David Byron) have given up on their marriage. After more than a decade of weekends away, raising children, and gourmet dinners as a foursome, Gabe and Karen totter at the edge of a chasm over their own relationship. Stylishly rendered by Margulies, Dinner With Friends avoids the quicksand of domestic drama with dialogue that is edgy, honest, and, at times, painfully funny. However, flashback scenes slow the play's momentum. In choosing to go back in time, Margulies allows the play to idle when it should drive forward. Director Michael Bloom's cast performs admirably with Adam Grupper's performance of Gabe as a standout for its simplicity and depth. ATL resident designer Paul Owen offers a handsome, if quirky, series of settings. (Did the tasteful connoisseurs and world travelers, Gabe and Karen, steal their furnishings from a Holiday Inn?)

In keeping with the festival's examination of families in crisis, Stuart Spencer offered a comic take on love and vulnerability with Resident Alien (Bingham Theatre). Set in rural Wisconsin, Spencer's play provides a catalogue of comic types who grapple with love and belief after a visit from a UFO. The alien of the title (V. Craig Heidenreich) looks quite a bit like anyone else, except for the greenish hue of his skin. He is a busboy from an alien ship that has abducted a Wisconsin child, Billy (Corey Thomas Logsdon), whose divorced parents battle constantly. Billy's mother, Priscilla (Carolyn Swift), is convinced that he has been abducted by his father, Michael (William McNulty). Now married to a dull-witted bar owner who samples his own wares too often, Priscilla is a one-note harridan who is later seduced by the goofy, green-tinged alien. The play ultimately reveals that Michael, who loves Mozart and reading, is the true alien in this society.

Resident Alien wasn't the only play with lost children at its center. Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (Victor Jory Theatre), and William Mastrosimone's Like Totally Weird (Pamela Brown Auditorium) functioned as a pair of theatrical bookends. Wallace's play, staged by the legendary director Adrian Hall, struggles with the burden facing young, rural people during the Depression. When there is no work and no money for their parents, how can Dalton Chance (Michael Linstroth) and Pace Creagan (Tami Dixon) have hope for the [End Page 82] [Begin Page 84] future? Pope Lick Creek is a muted elegy about what remains out of humanity's reach. Clearly informed by a Marxian ethos, Wallace's play is a quiet call for people to take control of their lives, their institutions, and their countries. Despite Hall's delicate staging, Wallace's ideas never quite achieve the emotional subtlety necessary to make her characters more than symbols of economic oppression.

At the other end of the spectrum reside the teenage denizens of Mastrosimone's Like Totally Weird. Kenny (Kevin Blake) and Jimmy (Chris Stafford), like their 1930's counterparts in Pope Lick Creek, live outside the boundaries of society. However, where the Depression-era teens can see only the desperation around them, Kenny and Jimmy eagerly press their faces against the glass of popular culture. They want access and they get it because Kenny has a .45 automatic. The boys somehow manage to slip the security system of Russ Rigel (V. Craig Heidenreich), a movie mogul whom they call "the Quad" (actor, director, writer, producer). They terrorize Rigel and his star-actress girlfriend, Jennifer Barton (Kim Rhodes). For two hours, the sadistic, psychopathic Kenny and his less-threatening sidekick enact scenes from Rigel's violent movies. Given the tragic events a few hundred miles away in Jonesboro, Ark., earlier that week--when two boys went on a shooting spree in a schoolyard--Like Totally Weird is not so strange after all.

The mysterious counterpoint to all of the realistic dramas about children at risk and families in crisis was JoAnne Akalaitis's Ti Jean Blues (Victor Jory Theatre). Adapted and staged by Akalaitis, Ti Jean Blues is less a play than it is an impressionist portrait for the theatre. Based on the life and work of poet Jack Kerouac, the production is an ensemble piece that mixes the writer's work and biography with the music that he loved. Philip Glass is credited for some of the saxophone melodies interspersed in the piece, which also features riffs from Charlie Parker and musical phrases from Billie Holiday. Ti Jean Blues also juxtaposes angular, jazzy dance steps with snatches of the writer's work to subtly evoke an era. The play is performed on a black and white checkerboard floor that is littered with baby dolls. At times, cold, stark fluorescent lighting from the back wall and overhead illuminate members of the ensemble reciting rhythmically from Kerouac's work, and provide a glaring counterpoint to his haunted vision of life and death. At other times, a photo backdrop shows the view through an automobile's windshield. Before us sits a Standard Oil gas station at a small town crossroads, but framed in the rear-view mirror is the empty road behind. The image is filled with anticipation, anxiety, and loneliness.

While the piece does not add to our factual knowledge of Kerouac, it does provide a peek at the demons that drove his life. In Akalaitis's rendering, the deaths of family members seem to fuel the poet's desperation and his reliance on drugs and alcohol for relief. Peculiarly, much is made of his womanizing, but there seems to be no concrete reference to his homosexual longings. The challenge for Ti Jean Blues is that the director's impressionistic style and the tonal vagaries of Kerouac's poetry tend to make the imagery more fuzzy than either might have intended separately.

As in previous years, a common cultural thread unraveled as the 1998 Humana Festival productions unfolded. Besides an obvious focus on children and families at risk, the twenty-second annual festival was also a sharp reflection of the mid-life fear experienced by a large segment of our well-fed population. Even Akalaitis's dreamy sketch of Kerouac's life revealed a search for self that seemed to begin (and perhaps ends) with the Baby Boom Generation. As that generation has begun its march into middle age, with the concomitant compromises of responsibility to marriage and family, the dramatic bards of the middle class (who else is it that can afford theatre?) find themselves posing anxiety producing, human questions that may have no answers. These are the questions that intrude on our waking fantasies and nighttime dreams. Can we defend ourselves from the loss of love? What happens when hope dies? How can we protect our children from harm when their classmates decide to use them for target practice? What turns a cherubic little boy into a teenage terrorist? These playwrights remind us that the bogeyman has moved out from under our childhood beds and into the house next door. He may even live in a shack across town where he plans an assault on our lives. When we were kids, we only needed to avoid looking under the bed. Nowadays, we don't know where to look.

Jeffrey Eric Jenkins
State University of New York, Stony Brook

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