In the 25 years since Jon Jory, the then producing director of the Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, (ATL) initiated that theatre's annual festival of new American plays, the theatre itself has won a Tony Award for being an outstanding regional theatre in the United States. Two of the early plays which originated there have been nominated for Tony Awards on their presentation on Broadway - D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game and Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart. Two further plays from ATL have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize: Lee Blessing's affectionate comedy about minor league baseball, Old Timers Game, and Jane Martin's clear-headed discussion about the realities of abortion, Keely and Du. Three have won the Pulitzer: The Gin Game, Crimes of the Heart and Donald Margulies's Dinner With Friends.
Significantly - because ATL has always given particular encouragement to female playwrights - the theatre has produced 14 plays which have got into the final lists for the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, plus five which have won that prestigious prize, including Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in this House, which was given a luminous production, directed by Ben Barnes, in the old Project in Dublin in the 1980s.
It has been a productive, creative and often exciting quarter of a century, and between 15 and 20 of the plays which originated in Louisville have been staged subsequently in Dublin, with dozens more appearing on stages literally around the world.
The headiest, most hectic times were in the first decade of the event, when this international and professional audience would be expected to see up to a dozen productions in the three days of the "visitors' weekend". Eyes glazed and brains stumbling, they would turn up as early as 9.30 a.m. and stay in the theatre until close on to midnight to watch new plays. In 1981, the Humana health care corporation, which has its headquarters in Louisville, started a generous subvention of what is now known as the Humana Festival of New American Plays. In more recent decades, as many other American regional theatres took heed of the success of ATL's new play festival and started their own new play programmes, there has been something of a decline in the number of scripts being submitted for production in Louisville. This year there were just eight new works to be seen.
PROBABLY the most interesting and potentially durable of this year's crop of plays was Jane Martin's gory comedy, Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage, which, in addition to its surreal plot, managed to confront two ideologies, only to find both of them wanting. It concerns a woman called Big 8, who has just been retired from rodeo for reasons of age. Her live-in lover, young Rob Bob, is goofy enough to believe that people in life are good guys or bad guys, and that, as long as they are good guys, it doesn't much matter what they do. This belief is based, he says, in the Cowboy Code. The only problem is that his knowledge of the Code comes from countless B movies.
But his code is about to be confronted with the invasion of his and Big 8's home by the kookiest young girl that even Jane Martin has ever penned. Shedevil (as she calls herself), with a hair-do that most resembles a strawberry milkshake gone astray, is pregnant and is looking for her baby's father, Lee, who she believes lives hereabouts in Casper, Wyoming. But she is being followed by a psychopathic Ukrainian biker on a Harley Davidson known as Black Dog who, she claims, has already axed off her right hand. Rob Bob and Big 8 agree that the likes of Shedevil and Black Dog and their way of life are un-American and must, therefore, be the bad guys in terms of the Cowboy Code.
But the Cowboy Code turns out to be every bit as destructive as unAmericanism when the Casper folk try to put a stop to Black Dog's rampaging, with the aid of Big 8's sister, Shirl, who works in butchery, and her impotent boy-friend, Baxter Blue, who happens to be the local sheriff. Black Dog does not die easily, despite several shootings and stabbings, but is finally despatched, dismembered and dumped in several big black plastic sacks in the boot of Baxter's patrol car. I found the comedy too ghoulish to be genuinely funny. Although it received a rapturous welcome from the largely American audience, it is by no means the best of Jane Martin's work - her wry onslaught on the realities of regional American Theatre, Anton in Show Business, staged last year in the festival, was honoured as the best new American Play of 2000 by the American Theatre Critics' Association. Also interesting this year was Mac Wellman's clumsily titled Description Beggared; or the Allegory of Whiteness, which was imaginatively directed by Lisa Peterson and splendidly acted by Adale O'Brien, Anne O'Sullivan, Edwin C Owens, Lia Aprile and Claire Anne Longest as the mystical Ring family of a mythical Rhode Island (here extended to a vast interior region stretching for 3,000 miles), all interacting creatively with a small live orchestra to bring music and dance to a highly metaphysical confection. We overseas visitors probably lost a great deal of the implicit history of the New England White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, with its past sins against a more polyglot American culture. But it was an imaginative piece of entertaining theatre, even if it did not ultimately have anything significant to say. Despite the clever verbiage, it was dramatically no more than whimsy.
Perhaps the brightest offering of the festival was bobrauschenberg-america, scripted by Charles L Mee, based on Robert Rauschenberg's art, directed by Anne Bogart and created by her SITI Company of actors. An hour- and-three-quarters of lively action played in a folded-out Stars-and-Stripes, it started (and continued at intervals) with the artist's mother stating that "art was not a part of our lives" as she picked up the daily newspaper thrown into her front yard. The style was very much that of Bogart and SITI, dependent on actions and images and words without explanation, but the portrait it offered was one of a happy America, singing and dancing and playing, although one seemingly innocent setdancer was shot without apparent cause or lasting anxiety, and a man delivering an unordered pizza to the house turned out to be a triple murderer exercising moral blackmail on the rest. Still, it was more cheerful than Wisconsin's purple sage.
Distinctly not cheerful was Richard Dresser's new comedy (as the programme called it) Wonderful World. This was staged and directed by Marc Masterson (Jon Jory's successor as Artistic Director of ATL), as if it were a boulevard comedy of high style, although the play's fragmentary structure in a series of short scenes, as if for television, led to a frequency and duration of set changes that became tedious. And the play itself was about a seriously dysfunctional extended family, whose members kept lying to one another while everyone persisted in apparently believing what everyone else said. It was probably making an apt comment on one aspect of the American way of life, but it was not very edifying and not very funny.
EDUARDO Machado's When the Sea Drowns in Sand, directed by Michael John Garces, was about the possibility of reconciliation between Castro's Cuba and the United States. It followed the first visit home to Cuba of Federico (whose father had owned a bus company on the island) and his friend Fred, a gay American, and their taximan escort, Ernesto, who had stayed to support the revolution but was now showing signs of entrepreneurship in a small way.
The play and its characters wear their hearts on their sleeves, and the whole is suffused with sentimentality. But the three performances by Joseph Urla, Ed Vassallo and Felix Solis were exquisitely balanced and convincingly interactive in both argument and emotion, managing to raise the text far above its overt sentimentality and emphasising its fascinating and engaging ambivalences about friendship, culture and reconciliation itself.
Most of what was offered will probably emerge again in other American theatres and elsewhere. There was some experiment. There was some daring. There was some high quality and some excellent acting. And there was some failure - there cannot be innovation and experiment without some failure. This kind of mixture has been central to the overall success of this important festival of new American theatre which has enlivened and enriched stages in the US and around the world for the past quarter of a century. Long may it continue to show the world the main concerns of emerging American playwrights and the quality of American grassroots drama.
