The 22nd annual festival of new American plays, sponsored by the Humana Foundation and staged by the Actors Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, was not, alas, one of the best of these exciting showcases of new American drama; but the buzz was still there as agents and producers and critics watched out for anything that might make a new hit in the US or elsewhere in the world. The audiences had come, as usual, from all around the world and all across America, but the consensus this year seemed to be that only three of the plays presented might have a life after Louisville, and then after some re-writing.
The most rounded and accomplished work was the latest play from William Mastrosimone, who gave us Extremities (a gripping drama about how a woman handled an attempted rape) at the 1981 festival and in many theatres around the world since then. The author has been working more in cinema than theatre in recent times and his new play - Like Totally Weird - is an unnerving, gothic, comedy-tragedy about how some people find it hard to distinguish between the fantasy of film and the reality of life.
Russ Rigel is an obnoxious, egocentric, manipulative Hollywood writer-director-actor who has won two Oscars and whose latest movie, Primordial Rage, climaxes in a shoot-out in which the central character is killed by his old buddy. Mr Rigel (played in a magnificently over-the-top manner by V. Craig Heidenreich, making Jack Nicholson look like one of the most diffident actors in creation) is about to go out to a charity function when his mansion, where he lives with his actor "fiancee" Jennifer, is invaded by two hyper-manic kids, one armed with a hand-gun, who want to meet their idol and re-enact scenes with him.
What follows is predictable, but none the less gripping for that, although it occasionally requires a significant suspension of disbelief. Kenny is the crazier and the more dangerous of the two kids, but Jimmy has moments of insight and lucidity when Kenny is not terrifying him into threatening violence. Kevin Blake and Chris Stafford play the two with boundless energy and a total commitment to the unreal world in which they co-exist. The piece, well directed by Mladen Kiselov, runs for two hours without an interval and ends in death, humiliation (for Jennifer, played bravely by Kim Rhodes with impressive vulnerability) and, of course, blind triumph for the detestable Rigel who roars, with some prescience, "there's a movie in this!", as the stage lights dim on the human ruination around him.
The next most complete drama was the latest offering from the Actors Theatre's pseudonymous Jane Martin, whose Keeley And Du (on the issue of abortion) was seen in the Olympia Theatre in Dublin some years ago. This time, in Mr Bundy, the issue is paedophilia and what a settled neighbourhood does when it discovers that the kindly old man who moved in two years previously has a 13-year-old conviction for child abuse in his past. Truck driver Jimmy Ray Bosun (Norman Maxwell) and his wife Tianna (Peggity Price) had a five-year-old daughter raped and strangled nine years earlier and are committed not only to witnessing the execution of her murderer ("It is my right to be the last thing he sees," says Tianna of the man now on death row) but to the identification of all convicted paedophiles.
It is they who tell Robert Ferreby (Mark Schulte) and his wife Catherine, a child psychologist, (Stephanie Zimbalist) that their next door neighbour, with whom their 11-year-old daughter Cassidy (Margaret Streeter) spends many happy hours, is a convicted child-abuser. Catherine agrees with Robert (a recovered alcoholic) that Cassidy should be forbidden to see Mr Bundy alone again, but believes that the old man's paedophilia has burned out and that he is safe, has paid for his sins and has a right to privacy in his safe and amiable old age.
Thus are all the issues set up for discussion, but one has the feeling throughout that the play was conceived as a vehicle for discussion of the issues, rather than as a portrayal of people who find themselves confronted by a fraught situation. Despite excellent acting by all concerned (including Adale O'Brien as an "ordinary" or "objective" neighbour who comes into the play to express her fuzzy and unformed opinion of the situation) and despite Jon Jory's customarily masterful direction, one has the feeling that one is hearing a didactically balanced discussion rather than getting involved in a human drama.
There was more sense of organic drama arising from the characters on stage in Donald Margulies's Dinner with Friends, but the piece - about two married couples who have been best friends for years - is in great need of cutting and editing if it is to gain the necessary theatrical edge to draw its audience fully into the action. And its dialogue often left this reviewer unsure as to whether the author was trying to be satirical about the tangential or ambivalent language which Americans often use - to be able to speak without actually saying anything clear or significant - or whether he was trying to be literal about the difficulties of communication itself.
Gabe is a writer about food and we discover him and his wife Karen, towards the end of a dinner party in their home, talking about food and a trip to Italy from which they have recently returned. Their guest is their old friend Beth, who suddenly blurts out that her husband Tom (their other old friend) has left her for a stewardess, later to be described by Tom as a travel agent, but no matter. The play is about how Beth and Tom pull apart and find other partners while Gabe and Karen slip into a kind of comfortable, middle-aged, passionless familiarity. It is framed in a sometimes uneasy mixture of inconsequential domestic small-talk and emotional rhetoric which needs some dramaturgical honing if its often perceptive insights into marital discord and harmony are to be brought into sharper dramatic focus. But it is potentially a play of thoughtful and touching substance.
Naomi Wallace's The Trestle At Pope Lick Creek is also a work of emotional substance and social concern but, in dramatic terms, is lethally over-written and over-wrought. It tries too hard to accomplish too much as it portrays the poverty of a depressed small town in 1936 and, within that town, the efforts of two teenagers to break out through a dangerous rite of passage in which they challenge each other to race the night train across a high trestle bridge. Michael Linstroth and Tami Dixon are impressive and authentic as the youngsters but they and the play are over-burdened by words and symbols and the chronological complexities imposed by the author for no good theatrical reason.
Stuart Spencer's Resident Alien carried no such burden. A slight comedy given (for ATL) an unusually incompetent production, in which the director paid no heed to the audience's sight-lines, nor to the fact that it was played in the round of the Bingham auditorium (one of the three ATL performance spaces). For the record, it was about a space-ship which abducted young Billy and left behind a green-skinned alien who found earth's semi-moronic society much more compatible than his own, while Billy's Dad, Michael, too literary and intellectual for Wisconsin, opts to take the alien's place on the space-ship when it heads for outer space.
There was also little of substance in JoAnne Akalaitis's Ti Jean Blues, a kind of Readers' Digest compilation of snatches of Jack Kerouac's life and writing. Energetically danced and spoken by an athletic cast of five dancer/actors, it contained only a few moments of coherent theatricality (notably Kerouac's "courtship" of Maggie Cassidy) and served to remind us that we could get a richer flavour of the Beat Generation from Kerouac's own books.
And that was about it in a Humana Festival which was disappointing overall. Perhaps the best little bit of undiluted theatrical fun came from a 12-minute vignette called Meow by Val Smith, in which two career women, hilariously, expertly and perfectly played by Peggity Price and Stephanie Zimbalist, chatted cattily about their female colleagues over a whiskey sour and a glass of red wine. It remains only to thank the ATL designer, Paul Owen, for his superb set designs and the stage crews for their prodigious and professional work in getting so many plays on and off the three stages in double-quick time, during a week-end in which there was much good work to be seen, even if several of the plays presented were flawed to greater or lesser degrees.
