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The 29th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

    The 29th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

    'Special to BroadwayStars.com' by David Hurst, Theatre Critic - NEXT Magazine

    In recent years, the Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville has introduced us to works as diverse as: After Ashley by Gina Gionofriddo, which just completed a run at The Vineyard Theatre; Omnium-Gatherum by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros and Theresa Rebeck, which enjoyed an off-Broadway run at The Variety Arts; Finer Noble Gases by Adam Rapp, mounted at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre last fall; and Dinner With Friends which ran off-Broadway in 2000, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a motion picture by HBO Films. The 29th Annual Festival, which ran Feb 27 – April 9, and once again sponsored by the generous Humana Foundation, included six new plays that were equally disparate, wonderfully produced and, for the most part, well acted.

    First to open was Allison Moore's uneven Hazard County, which explored small-town Southern living and deception thru pop culture's obsession with The Dukes of Hazard television show. Ruth (Chelsey Rives), whose husband was murdered in a gas station argument turned deadly, meets budding television reporter Blake (Sean Dougherty) after her business folds and she and her children (Jesse Hooker and Mary Baker)are forced to move in with her over-sexed friend Camille (Elizabeth Meadows Rouse). Blake aspires to do a story on the possibly racially motivated killing of Ruth's husband by a black man but it quickly becomes apparent that neither he nor Ruth are what they appear to be. Economically directed by Chris Coleman in-the-round, in the 318-seat Bingham Theatre, Paul Owen's evocative scenic design (with a distracting and dust-raising wood-mulch floor) sets the mood for rednecks, long-neck beers and the Confederate flag. However, Moore's use of The Dukes of Hazard as a connecting device is unnecessary and quickly gets in the way of the real story that she only draws in two-dimensional characters. Hazard County aspires to examine redemption but Moore's gimmicky writing undermines the potential in an interesting story based on a real-life 1995 murder that occurred in Kentucky.

    John Belluso's provocative A Nervous Smile, a disturbing piece about the moral dilemma facing parents taking care of severely handicapped children who make shocking and repugnant choices, was wonderfully directed by David Esbjornson in the Bingham on a smashing set, again by Owens. Belluso, who has been in a wheelchair himself since he was thirteen, writes crisp and realistic dialogue, as recently evidenced in Keen Company's recent production of Pyretown at Urban Stages. In A Nervous Smile, Brian (Sean Haberle) and Eileen (Maureen Mueller) are a very wealthy Upper West Side couple who have befriended Nic (Mhari Sandoval) in a support group for parents whose children have cerebral palsy. Brian and Nic are carrying on an affair that Eileen knows about when they proposes to Nic a brazen plan to abandon their children and start new lives. Nic is horrified but, in her emotionally exhausted state, she agrees despite the guilt-inducing ramblings of Brian and Eileen's Dostoyevsky-quoting maid, Blanca (Dale Soules). Belluso's premise is terrific and he's crafted a heart-wrenching ending involving a voice-acted computer that's a coup de theatre. The main flaw in his plot is that a couple as wealthy as Brian and Eileen (reputed to have more than $20 million) would never abandon their child; they would simply institutionalize her or pay for round the clock care at home. To be sure, the emotional toll that long-term care takes on caregivers knows no income, but A Nervous Smile would be far more plausible if Belluso's villains were merely upper middle class as opposed to filthy rich.

    The first show in the 637-seat, proscenium stage Pamela Brown Auditorium, Adam Bock's superb new drama The Shaker Chair directed by ATL Artistic Director Marc Masterson, was the highlight of the festival. On a bare stage designed by Owen and lit by Mary Louise Geiger, The Shaker Chair revolves around the choices of three women all facing change, and how those choices affect their lives. Marion (Kathleen Butler), a widow in her sixties who lives a meticulously ordered life, finds herself at a crossroads with her sister Dolly (Sarah Peterson), who's trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship with a philandering husband Frank (Larry John Meyers), and her best friend Jean (Geraldine Librandi), an environmental activist who keeps asking her to join her on one of her ‘actions.' To her surprise, Marion finally agrees to join Jean and her cohorts Tom and Lou (Andy Prosky and Brie Eley) in an effort to stop the groundwater contamination by a local pig farm with dire consequences that lead everyone to question both their actions and inactions. It's noteworthy that Bock, an openly gay playwright, has written three roles for women over 50 with such command and acuity. His realistic dialogue crackles with authenticity making The Shaker Chair a powerful piece of writing that dares to ask a surprisingly basic question that affects us all: when does someone change? It reflects our humanity and is less about activism than it is about the simplicity of the Shakers' humanist ideology.

    The fourth offering of the festival, Kia Corthron's Moot the Messenger, is a 2 1/2 hour political rant that becomes a crashing bore quickly after it begins. Directed with casual laziness by Marion McClinton in the Bingham, Corthron's writing can't be called a play since it's an endless stream of left-leaning exposition that sounds like she's taking dictation from a liberal op-ed piece. Characters don't interact with each other to create drama so much as they talk at each other to further Corthron's political point of view. In short, Briar (Tamilla Woodard), is an aggressive African-American journalist who gets an entry-level job at a television station that immediately sends her to cover the war in Iraq just as her brother Tax (Erik LaRay Harvey) loses his legs in that same conflict. Back at home, Briar argues with her boss Harmon (Bob Ari) and watches her fellow black journalist and mentor Vaughn (Brenda Thomas) lose her job before taking a moral stand and switching film footage that results in her own firing. There are also subplots involving female soldiers wrongly accused and more, but it's all just an endlessly self-indulgent exercise in wish fulfillment that found many in the audience fleeing for the lobby at intermission.

    Carlyle Brown's Pure Confidence, on the other hand, is an exercise in biographical drama that makes the mistake of continually telling its audience what emotions to feel, simultaneously relieving them of guilt and entertaining them in equal measure. Set from 1860-1877, Pure Confidence tells the story of Simon Cato (Gavin Lawrence), a fictionalized amalgamation of a series of historical black jockeys that Brown researched. Cato is owned by Colonel Wiley Johnson (William McNulty) and his wife Mattie (Jane Welch) and ‘hires himself out' to the Colonel to win races aboard his horse, Pure Confidence. Soon he falls in love with Mattie's maid Caroline (the exceptional actress Kelly Taffe) and begins his journey to buy both his and Caroline's freedom and start his own horse-racing business. It's almost impossible to believe that any black slave would speak to their white masters with the bold arrogance Cato exhibits and Brown seems to go out of his way to play up both the ‘step-n-fetch-it' aspect of his delivery along with an appropriately contrite sensibility on the part of the Colonel and his wife. It's a choice that would come under heavy criticism by a white playwright but, in spite of that, Pure Confidence is more charming than it is manipulative. It's also smoothly directed by Clinton Turner Davis on an impressive turntable set by Owen in the Brown Auditorium.

    Finally, the last entry at Louisville this year was Kathleen Tolan's Memory House, directed by Sandy Shiner on another pitch-perfect set by Owen in the intimate, 159-seat, three-quarter Victor Jory Theatre. An intriguing mother-daughter drama that takes place in real time, Memory House listens in on a 90-minute conversation between Maggie (Taylor Miller, who played Nina Cortland for many years on All My Children) and her internationally adopted daughter Katia (Cassandra Bissell). It's New Year's Eve and Katia has only a few hours to finish an essay that's to be included with a college application under a postmark deadline. Her mother, whose friendless life is supposedly a mess, bakes a blueberry pie (a clever gambit that works as the smell of baking pie fills the theatre) while they argue over the adoption, Katia's future and Maggie's impending life alone once Katie goes away to school. On the one hand, it's a lovely piece of writing that unfolds naturally; a touching slice of life narrative about new hopes and lost dreams. But on the other hand, some of the dialogue feels a bit contrived with Maggie coming off far too strong and in control while Katia registers as an ungrateful brat, especially as portrayed by the lovely Miller and the self-conscientious Bissell. Interesting enough, a new production of Memory House directed by David Esbjornson and starring Dianne Wiest is about to open at Playwrights Horizons in New York so it will be interesting to see it again so soon after its run at the Humana Festival. One can envision that, with Maggie played a bit more frayed and Katia played a bit less stridently, Tolan's play has the potential to be a very affecting work.

  • Thursday, March 31, 2005 | Link to this feature


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