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A CurtainUp Feature
An Overview of the 2007 Humana Festival of New American Plays
Another annual Humana Festival of New American Plays—-this year's was number 31—-has come and gone at Actors Theatre of Louisville. While there was much to savor in the seven full-length offerings, especially in individual performances, no single play stood out as a major breakthrough.
For this reviewer two plays rose to the top of the heap: Carlos Murillo's Dark Play or Stories For Boys, a shattering tale of teenage internet machinations, and Sherry Kramer's When Something Wonderful Ends. The superb cast of Dark Play, directed by Michael John Garces, included Matthew Stadelmann as Nick, a sexually confused 14-year-old who assumes a girl's name on the web to get inside the head of a simple boy (Will Rogers as Adam) who wants to fall in love. Liz Morton is Rachel, the girl Nick invents and pretends is his sister; she also plays Nick's later college girlfriend. Lou Sumrall and the astounding Jennifer Mendenhall round out the cast, playing "netizens" and other roles. Kramers's play, a one-woman show, brilliantly performed by Lori Wilner and directed by Tom Moore, connects Kramer's childhood obsession with Barbie dolls to the perilous current and future times resulting from America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
In a class of its own—and audiences seemed to love it or hate it—was Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle, an exuberantly physical, gender-bending take on a common rite of passage that leads the way to marriage. Cooked up by Philadelphia's New Paradise Laboratories and conceived by director Whit McLaughlin and playwright Alice Tuan, who wrote the text, this bawdy, baffling, breath-taking romp kept you edgily wondering what was coming next and how its amazing six-member cast (three men, three women) could so impressively carry it off.
Ken Weitzman's oddly-titled The As If Body Loop, despite an enthusiastic audience response, left me annoyed and cold —though not as cold as Sarah (Kristen Fiorella), the young social worker whose body temperature plunges icily low after she takes on the agonies of her clients. Seems she was one of 36 people in the world called the Lamed Vuv, chosen at birth by God, according to a Hebrew legend, to carry all the pain of the world. You get a lot of football guy-talk since Weitzman's hero, Aaron, the girl's older brother is a video editor for NFL Films. Marc Grapey is good in the role, and so is his loopy young brother Glenn (Josh Lefkowitz) who's undergoing training as a healer by their mystical mother (Jana Robbins). Aaron disdainfully calls her the Attic Lady since she has retreated with her studies to that part of the house. Keith Randolph Smith as one of Sarah's clients walks away with the show as a perpetually angry man with a 9/11 story to uncover. In this weird, sophomoric concoction he was the only believable human.
Plays by Naomi Iizuka have been performed in four previous Humana festivals. Her Strike-Slip this year (the term describes an earthquake fault) can't escape comparison with the Oscar-winning film Crash, in which another diverse group of people in Los Angeles cross paths and find their destinies intersecting. Keith Randolph Smith, as in The As If Body Loop, excelled as a corrupt police detective. Also outstanding under Chay Yew's direction were Romi Dias as a real estate agent whose dreams for her son are dashed when he aborts his education and Heather Lea Anderson and Tim Altmeyer as an attractive couple whose marriage goes on the rocks.
Disappointing because of its derivative quality (subpar Beckett, Kafka, and Kiss of the Spider Woman) and predictable outcome was Craig Wright's The Unseen, directed by ATL artistic director Marc Masterson. In an unnamed totalitarian country two political prisoners (Richard Bekins and Gregor Paslawsky), routinely tortured by a sadistic guard, are in adjoining cells where they cannot see each other but can talk. Their talk is not all that compelling, but the lines spoken and acted in a kind of teenage temper tantrum by the guard (Richard Furlong) grab attention because they're ludicrous.
The Open Road Anthology, short works by playwrights Constance Congdon, Kia Corthron, Michael John Garces, Rolin Jones, A. Rey Pamatmat, and Kathryn Walat, with noteworthy songs by the GrooveLily indie-pop trio, showcased the talents of the theatre's Acting Apprentice Company, directed by Will MacAdams.
Two devilishly outrageous sketches by Rolin Jones stay in the memory. Two possums (hilariously depicted by Michael Judson Pace and Zachary Palamara) mused about life in The Mercury and the Magic while in Ron Bobby Had Too Big a Heart the trash-talking Amy (Zarina Shea), who didn't get elected prom queen, and her sidekick Anya (Eleanor Caudill) inflict mayhem on the small-town people who stood in her way.
There were also three 10-minute plays—I Am Not Batman by Marco Ramirez (a streetwise kid lives out his fantasy), Clarisse and Larmon by Deb Margolin (in lieu of his body the Army sends a middle-aged couple a photo of their dead soldier son's leg), and Mr. And Mrs. by Julie Marie Myatt.— The latter, was a mix of banter with shocking straight talk as a bride and groom do their wedding dance, is lightly amusing but no threat to Noel Coward.
The festival also staged eight plays from the first half of 365 Days/365 Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks. Three of the marvelous actors from Dark Play or Stories For Boys put wickedly funny spins on my two favorites: Father Comes Home From the Wars (Part 1) with Lou Sumrall as Father and Jennifer Mendenhall as Mother and George Bush Visits the Cheese and Olive with Matthew Stadelmann as the commander-in-chief hiding under a restaurant table after he hears a noise, then suddenly bursting out in song and dance with his April Fooling wife and a Secret Service chorus.
Easy-on-the budget super gift for yourself and your musical loving friends. Tons of gorgeous pictures.
Leonard Maltin's 2007 Movie Guide
At This Theater
Leonard Maltin's 2005 Movie Guide
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