April 25-May 1, 2002

theater

Louisville Shrugger

love, parisian style: Christa Scott-Reed and Tom Teti in Limonade Tous Les Jours.

This year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays didn’t pack much punch.

by Toby Zinman

Imagine this as an actor’s nightmare: performing for an audience made up entirely of critics, all of whom are taking notes!

Seven full-length and three short plays in two and a half days: That’s the annual overdose called “Special Visitors’ Weekend” at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. It’s the most famous of U.S. new-play festivals, with an impressive track record of showcasing playwrights who go on to win Pulitzers and Tonys and places in the American canon.

Well, those prize-givers may have to wait for next year. There was much to enjoy and a little to admire, but no big hit to make showbiz buzz, nothing to send you home with the renewed assurance that American theater is alive and well.

It seems to be true generally of theater these days -- both in Philadelphia and New York -- that the production values are tiptop: eye-popping sets and costumes, splendid subtleties of lighting and sound design -- as well as actors and directors so skilled as to fulfill any playwright's wildest hopes for his script. And no place treats scripts better than Actors Theatre.

So the question I ask myself over and over again as I trudge out of the theater is: Where are the authors? Doesn't anybody have anything to say that's worth all this time and trouble and talent?

Here's a sampling of what I saw:

Marlane Meyer's The Mystery of Attraction -- a title that seemed to apply to the entire festival, since so many of the plays were about the inexplicable power that draws unlikely people together. In this one, a kind of Woody Allen does True West, two brothers who have made a criminal mess of their lives and who managed to marry the same woman wind up acknowledging: "We're lost men, Ray, and all we have is each other." The most intriguing character appears at the start of the drama and then vanishes; the script's excessive repetitions suggest this would have made a good one-act with some good editing.

Limonade Tous Les Jours by Charles Mee (whose Big Love was the hit of the festival two years ago). This is a charming show, full of pretty, sticky, pink fluff, like cotton candy, made overlong by pointless video sequences. It stars Philly actor Tom Teti as a middle-aged American who becomes the bemused lover of a Parisian woman half his age (Christa Scott-Reed is delicious); they spend all their time--when they're not in bed -- talking about how impossible an affair between them would be. As she tells him, in her delightfully accented English, "France, this is how it is. You hold your life with a light touch and it's not a tragedy." And so, we have -- how you say? -- a light comedie, n'est-ce pas?

(An additional hometown note: Jim Christy was in attendance, checking out the place, since he returns to Louisville in May to direct for Actors Theatre.)

Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases is a naturalistic druggies-in-the-East-Village play with surreal hard-rock interludes, and one of the only shows in the festival that seemed likely to appeal to less-than-middle-aged audiences. One guy tells his friend who's having a seizure: "Dude, you're twitching all over the place. I wish I could twitch."

A.M. Sunday is about an interracial couple coping with two sons and infidelity: Is the mystery of attraction for someone who is Other or someone who is like oneself? The play, by Jerome Hairston, evades the answer by stopping rather than concluding; his dialogue is intriguing, if slightly overstuffed with symbolism.

The two Big Names were both Big Disappointments: Ann Bogart's Score, a two-and-a-half hour monologue "by" Leonard Bernstein lecturing on the mystery of creativity was a huge pretentious snooze. Tina Howe's Rembrandt's Gift, is about an old, eccentric couple -- an actor and a photographer -- who are about to be evicted from their apartment when, lo and behold, Rembrandt appears, dressed as he is in the famous self-portrait. They take him to the Met to see a retrospective of his own works, and all the predictable cutesiness occurs. The humor is crass, the ideas muddled and the only notion I took away from it was how shallow contemporary artists are when compared to Renaissance artists. But I suspect Howe didn't mean that.

Two of the short plays provided a fine finale:

Classyass by Caleen Sinnette Jennings is a hilarious exposé of racism and elitism; an African-American freshman who DJs a classical music station is assaulted by a visitor from a homeless shelter after he ignores her fax pointing out an error about Poulenc, proving "you don't have to be uptight and white to love classical music."

The last show -- necessarily last since it slops up the stage -- was Bake Off by Sheri Wilner, featuring a female contestant who is outraged that a male contestant has been allowed to compete in a bake-off. Men who cook well get five-star restaurants, she shrieks, but "This -- this -- is what we have." She runs amuck and attacks the Pillsbury Doughboy: "Show some dough balls, why don't you?"

It's always good to exit laughing.