D
oing anything for 40 consecutive years is a noteworthy feat, especially when that “thing” is producing new plays. That’s been the work of the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Louisville for four decades.
The 2016 festival offered six world premieres; Louisville’s renowned regional theater gives each show a full production. That entices theatergoers from across America and around the world. They show up for a long weekend at the end of the festival’s run (plays were presented between March 2 and April 10) when all shows are in production, using the theater’s three performing spaces.
The 40th festival was one of the best I’ve attended; at least two or three of the 2016 shows will certainly be produced subsequently. (Next season, Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati will stage Kimber Lee’s brownsville song (b-side for tray), a show from the 38th festival in 2014.) Perhaps it’s just coincidence that with the festival turning 40, an age when many of us begin to sense mortality, several shows had a whiff of the evanescence of life.
Sarah Ruhl, this year’s high-profile playwright, contributed For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday, a show about the impact of a parent’s death on his aging adult children. In one 90-minute piece with three long scenes, staged by Actors Theatre’s artistic director Les Waters, we moved from sad reality to magical realism, a path Ruhl often follows. (Her play The Clean House, produced by the Cincinnati Playhouse in 2006, moved in that direction.)
The play opened with five siblings in a hospital-room vigil where their father clung to life by a thread and then died. We moved to the family home where they tossed back Jameson shots around a dining table, recalling memories of their father and pondering when they felt truly grown up while their father’s ghost silently drifted in and out, unnoticed by his offspring.
In the final scene, the eldest daughter Ann (played by stage and screen actress Kathleen Chalfant) donned a Peter Pan costume from her youth and, with her siblings as other characters, revisited that legendary musical — flying included — but with front-and-center acknowledgement of the passage of time and the age of the performers. This struck me as delightful nod to a yearning for youth and the magic of the theater, but some audience members found it far-fetched.
In a more mundane tale that still required audiences to suspend disbelief, Steven Dietz’s This Random World traced a series of events in the lives of seven intertwined characters who repeatedly missed connections in ways that were sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant. The intriguing stories denied typical expectations: Every time you thought, “Oh, this will be the ‘aha’ moment,” you were denied the satisfaction that theater often delivers. The result: Frustration, rather like real life.
A third show that wrestled with mortality, belief and the passage of time was my favorite: Hansol Jung’s Cardboard Piano. Set in Uganda at the end of 1999 and then a decade or so later, it was initially about two adolescent girls in love, one American, one Ugandan. A boy soldier trying to escape from a paramilitary army interrupted their impromptu wedding ceremony; the result was tragic violence. The second act used three of the four actors in new roles for the more recent action, with the young American woman revisiting the scene of the earlier tragedy.
The play’s title is built around an anecdote related in the first act, revisited in the second act with a very different meaning and planted a third time at the play’s end with a powerful message of forgiveness. Interestingly, the playwright is Korean, telling a story set in Uganda, yielding perspectives and cultural attitudes that were new to many people watching. For some, the lesbian theme was too far-fetched for a repressive culture, but the emotional impact of this show was cited more than that of the other plays by those in attendance.
Brendan Pelsue’s Wellesley Girl is a story about America’s dystopian future that was staged by Lee Sunday Evans. Set in 2465, it was about the shrunken remains of America, down to four small communities in Massachusetts with 56 residents, struggling with how to answer a likely invading force. The concept provided a lot of rabid philosophizing about governance, justice and destiny. And mortality, as they wrangled and feared about what their future might hold.
The fifth production, Laura Jacqmin’s Residence, landed somewhere outside of these themes, focusing on issues of stress and employment in America today. A medical equipment sales rep who is also a recent mother lands in Tucson, perhaps on the run from parental responsibilities. Maggie stays at a long-term stay hotel (“Residence”) and interacts with Theresa, a by-the-book management trainee, and Bobby, a laissez-faire guy who works the front desk.
These two became more interesting characters dealing with contemporary plights such as college loans and unintended fatherhood; Maggie was so jangled and unsympathetic it was difficult to connect with her. This script probably needs more work, but the acting with direction by Hal Brooks kept the production extremely engaging.
The sixth production, Wondrous Strange, a showcase for the theater’s apprentice company, featured nine scenes by a quartet of writers. The diffuse collection of Kentucky ghost tales employed this intriguing theme, but there was little coherence, and several pieces felt truncated or not fully developed.
The weekend’s other entertainment, three 10-minute plays, offered three more writers with pieces about the end of the world (This Quintessence of Dust), office banter (Coffee Break) and boredom (Trudy, Carolyn, Martha, and Regina Travel to Outer Space and Have a Pretty Terrible Time There).
The Humana Festival provides a forum for the American Theatre Critics Association to recognize several outstanding plays presented by regional theaters during the previous year. Steven Dietz, the playwright of This Random World, won a $7,500 citation for another play, Bloomsday, inspired by James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Cincinnati audiences will see this one at Ensemble Theatre a year from now.
The beat goes on.
For more information on the HUMANA FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN PLAYS, visit actorstheatre.org/humana-festival-of-new-american-plays.
This article appears in Apr 20-27, 2016.
