Humana Festival 2019: All hits, all the time

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

It's spring, and once again I made the annual pilgrimage to the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL). As we have done for the past few years, my fellow KDHX critic Tina Farmer and I posted instant video blog mini-reviews from the festival on YouTube. We're also posting our own individual festival reports. Here's mine.

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This year the festival consisted of five brand new plays. Four were performed by ATL's resident professional company and the fifth, as usual, by the members of the Professional Training Company. This year the productions and scripts were of such high quality that I abandoned my initial plan to rank them and instead I'm just reviewing them in the order in which we saw them.

L-R: Arash Mokhtar and Diana Simonzadeh
Photo by Jonathan Roberts

"The Corpse Washer" adapted for the stage by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace from the novel of the same name by Sinan Antoon; directed by Mark Brokaw

The setup: In an Iraq beset by decades of war and occupation, Jawad (Arash Mokhtar) faces a difficult choice. Must he follow in the footsteps of his father (J. Paul Nicholas) washing the bodies of the dead--an honored Muslim tradition--or can he pursue his dreams of being an artist? His uncle Sabri (also played by Mr. Nicholas) made the break and went to live in Europe; why shouldn't he?

The story of a young man in conflict with his father because he feels called by the arts rather than the family business is an old one, but placing it in a nation being destroyed by continual warfare put a very different spin on the familiar tale. The fact that the family business is also a quasi-religious calling added even more depth. Jawad isn't just being asked to run the family store; he's called to help the souls of the dead move on to meet God. The stakes could hardly be higher.

Mr. Khalidi and Ms. Wallace crammed a lot of story into the play's one hour and forty minute running time, including subplots about Jawad's lover Reem (Mehry Eslaminia), Jawad's relationship with his brother Ammoury (Gus Cuddy), who plans to become a doctor but is killed in the war, and Jawad's friendship with security guard (and eventually fellow soldier) Basim (Abraham Makany). I assume they're all in the original novel, but overall it felt like the authors were trying to stuff too much story into a long one-act.

Still, it was a compelling and sometimes emotionally wrenching story. Seeing America's video game wars in the Middle East from the perspective of Iraqi people trying to get on with their lives is a reminder that our actions have consequences that we have found far too easy to ignore over the decades.

The strong performances by everyone in the cast had a lot to do with the impact of "The Corpse Washer". Mr. Mokhtar was very credible in a large and demanding part and Mr. Nicholas did an excellent job keeping the roles of Father and Uncle Sabri distinct; ditto Diana Simonzadeh as both Mother and a guard later in the show.

"The Corpse Washer" isn't an overtly political play but, as Hannah Rae Montgomery writes in her program notes, "fostering empathy for underrepresented narratives is a vital part of what theatre can accomplish." Sometimes empathy itself is a political act.

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The cast of Everybody Black
Photo by Jonathan Roberts

"Everybody Black" by Dave Harris, directed by Awoye Timpo

The setup: Beneath an LED display promising "The Black Experience (tm)" in a cheesy "Soul Train" font, The Black Historian (J. Cameron Barnett), in an equally cheesy gold leaf sports coat, confesses that he's not actually a historian and has never met another black person. But a bunch of white historians with money are paying him to deliver Authentic Black History and, by golly, he's going to deliver.

What followed was a raucous send-up of a wide range of mass media stereotypes of The Black Experience (tm), including a tacky TV sitcom complete with laugh track, a talk show about black people addicted to dating white people, and an absurd rap competition. Barack Obama (played by the Historian) made an appearance, and eventually even the playwright (played by Galen Ryan Kane) took the stage to put his personal stamp on The Black Experience (tm) with a touching story that may or may not be true. There was even a final loopy dance number.

I was reminded bit of Robert Townsend's 1987 film "Hollywood Shuffle," which took aim at the cartoonish boxes into which white Hollywood liked to stuff black actors, but Mr. Harris's agenda was broader, including an explicit critique of the very notion of historical authenticity. As he said in an interview earlier this year for San Diego CityBeat, the play "is tracking theater as a method of storytelling and history as a method of storytelling, and asking how do we reconcile the two of them?"

"Everybody Black" was something of a theatrical carnival, and if it didn't completely come together, there was a lot of awfully entertaining stuff in it. And it did raise interesting issues about the way fact and fiction get commingled when we try to tell our stories. I think Mr. Harris went too far in suggesting that there's no difference between history and his (or anyone else's) story, though.

Aside from Mr. Barnett and Mr. Kane, the stunningly versatile cast for "Everybody Black" consisted of Ashley N. Hildreth, Sharina Martin, NSangou Njikam, and Christina Acosta Robinson. They took on around 40 characters during the show's two-hour run time and did so with such credibility that they created the illusion of a large ensemble.

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The cast of The Thin PlacePhoto by Jonathan Roberts

"The Thin Place" by Lucas Hnath, directed by Les Waters

The setup: Everyone who ever died is here, just in a different part of here. And if you listen, really listen, you can hear them--in the thin places--the places where the line between our world and some other world is very thin. It's like if you were to imagine an octopus in an aquarium, pressed up against glass...except that there's no glass, and no octopus.

This remarkably compelling and creepy play began by shamelessly (and successfully) violating one of the rules of playwriting: show, don't tell. As the lights came up, mousy and timid Hilda (Emily Cass McDonnell) told us, at great length, about a telepathy game she used to play with her grandmother and how it so incensed her mother that grandma got banned from the house. Despite Hilda's timid demeanor, the story was pretty gripping.

Then she talked about how her meeting with a professional medium, Linda (Robin Bartlett) led to a friendship of sorts and invitations to parties with Linda's somewhat mysterious friends Jerry (Triney Sandoval) and Sylvia (Kelly McAndrews). We saw Linda "reading" a room. We saw her explain to Hilda that it's all an act. We saw Hilda fade into the background in a party with the voluble Jerry and opinionated Sylvia. Then Hilda was finally coaxed into talking about her mother and things took a sharp turn toward the weird.

Everything about this production was perfect. Mr. Hnath's characters are sharply and credibly drawn, and the combination of his intelligent script and Les Waters's impeccable direction delivered all the chills you could want from a proper theatrical ghost story. The cast was excellent, headed by Ms. McDonnell's compelling Hilda, who gave the character a near-spectral shyness that became progressively more unsettling as the play progressed.

Mr. Hnath designed "The Thin Place" specifically for Actors Theatre's Jory Theatre, but it looks like a piece that could easily be produced by almost any small theatre. Don't be surprised if it shows up on a stage near you in the next year or two.

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The cast of How to Defend Yourself
Photo by Crystal Ludwick

"How to Defend Yourself" by Lily Padilla, directed by Marti Lyons

The setup: Your body is a weapon. So says Brandi (Anna Crivelli), who starts teaching sorority pledges Mojdeh (Ariana Mahallati) and Diana (Gabriela Ortega), shy student Nikki (Molly Adea) and sorority sister Kara (Abby Leigh Huffstetler) self-defense after fraternity brothers assault one of Brandi's sorority sisters. Male classmates Andy (David Ball) and Eggo (Jonathan Moses Olivares) show up to show their support, and the group learns how to fight back, while wrestling with their own complicated experiences and desires.

A play dealing with issues like toxic masculinity, consensuality, and the ways in which women have been conditioned to accept being pushed around could easily become strident or preachy. This one didn't mostly because Ms. Padilla created characters that looked and sounded entirely real. Her female characters dominated the story, as they should, but Andy and Eggo were also drawn with enough depth to insure that they didn't become cartoon bad guys.

The actors all completely inhabited their characters with uniformly strong performances. I was especially struck with the way Ms. Adea's Nikki moved from near-invisibility to rage as she realizes that Brandi's promises might not match up with reality, but everyone did fine work here. Kudos are also due to Movement Director Stephanie Paul and Fight Director Drew Fracher for their effective combat choreography.

"How to Defend Yourself" fell apart a bit at the end, with a final scene that did a quick rewind through the life of the unseen assault victim, Suz. It made a valid point about the ways women can be conditioned to accept unwanted attention from childhood, but it felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the play. Still, this is an important script with plenty of food for thought, and it deserves a post-festival audience.

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The cast of We've Come to Believe
Photo by Jonathan Roberts

"We've Come to Believe" by Kara Lee Cothron, Emily Feldman, and Matthew Paul Olmos, directed by Will Davis

The setup: Fads, cults, and irrational beliefs that defy reality are the subject matter for this collection of six short one-acts performed by members of the Professional Training Company.

In an interview with my colleague Tina Farmer, the three playwrights talked about how their scripts for "We've Come to Believe" were developed independently, based on an information packet they each received about the theme behind the show. Director Will Davis then put it all together. That might explain why "We've Come to Believe" didn't necessarily work as a whole, although parts of it were certainly fascinating.

Ms. Cothron's "Pure Love Now" tackled the theme of cults head-on with a sharp parody of groupthink and her "Our Impact on the World," was a trenchant observation of the dark side of social media. Mr. Olmos's three plays--"the asleep," how do the lonely live," and "the awake"--were more oblique in their take on witch hunts (literal and figurative). Ms. Feldman's "Winning at the Games of Life" was perhaps the most satisfying of the lot, with its incisive takedown of the mindless psychobabble of self-help gurus and corporatespeak.

The performances by the student ensemble were polished and solid. Director Davis, though, was a bit too fond of having his cast create elaborate patterns on the darkened stage with luminescent socks and light-up sneakers. It was visually arresting, but it wore thin eventually.

The quality of the scripts at Humana can be variable, but this one of the strongest collections I have seen there. To paraphrase rock critic Jon Landau, I have seen the American theatre's future, and its name is the Humana Festival.

Humana Festival 2018: Habits of highly defective people

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

L-R: Megan Hill, Tiffany Villarin, Amir Wachterman,
and Bjorn Dupaty
Photo by Bill Brymer

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In Mara Nelson-Greenberg's wildly energetic (if ultimately exhausting) comedy "Do You Feel Anger?," the world premiere of which is on stage at the Actors Theatre of Louisville's 2018 Humana Festival through April 8th, empathy coach Sofia (Tiffany Villarin) has been hired to conduct compassionate listening classes at a debt collection agency plagued by lawsuits. Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that Hercules had an easier job in the Augean Stables.

L-R: The company's two male employees--the constantly enraged Howie (Amir Wachterman) and the terminally egocentric Jordan (Bjorn DuPaty)--aren't just lacking in empathy, they literally don't know the meaning of the word (Jordan thinks it might be a kind of bird). But then, they also don't know the meanings of a lot of other words for emotions that don't involve eating, sex, or anger. They snigger, make crude jokes, and generally carry on as if they were still in first grade.

The company's only female employee Eva (Megan Hill) is so traumatized by being mugged in the break room on a regular basis that she's afraid to display any emotion at all, a situation that boss Jon (Dennis William Grimes) resolutely ignores. Worse yet, Sofia finds that her own self-image is eroding as she tries to break through the wall of smug entitlement thrown up by Jordan, Howie, and Jon. It gets to the point where she can't even return calls from her mom (Lisa Tejero) until it's almost too late to do so.

"Do You Feel Anger?" is populated, in short, by the kind of broadly drawn caricatures often encountered in improv comedy, a form in which the playwright has considerable experience. That works well for short comic sketches in which a joke has to be set up quickly, but becomes tiring in a ninety-minute one-act like this one. Repeating the same gag over and over again doesn't generally improve it. As it stands, "Do You Feel Anger?" either needs to be a lot shorter or a lot more nuanced.

That said, the script's satiric jabs at toxic masculinity and the emotional impoverishment that goes with it are well placed. As a friend pointed out afterwards, it delivers a very visceral demonstration of the mix of male arrogance and condescension that provoked the #Metoo movement. It also demonstrates the limits of empathy. It's hard to listen to someone when that person is mainly interested in shouting you down.

L-R: Tiffan Villarin and Megan Hill
Photo by Bill Brymer

The play is certainly well performed, in any case. Mr. DuPaty and Mr. Wachterman make Jordan and Howie just as comically repellent as they need to be. Mr. Grimes makes Jon pristinely vacuous and Ms. Hill gives Eva just enough depth to make her character development credible. Ms. Villarin does the same for Sofia, making her unraveling towards the end of the play that much more shocking.

Ms. Tejero does nice work as both Sofia's mom and the mysteriously missing Janie, and Jon Huffman has a fine cameo appearance as the Old Man, although the character himself seems rather irrelevant.
Director Margot Bordelon keeps the pace and the decibel level high, which while appropriate for the script, eventually becomes tiring. The bottom line (to lapse into corporate speak for a moment) is that "Do You Feel Anger?" is a thought-provoking and relevant piece, but in its current form it feels like a sketch that goes on far too long.
The 2018 Humana Festival of New American Plays runs through April 8th at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Humana Festival 2018: Turning the tables

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

The National Foosball Championships
Photo by Bill Brymer

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I've been attending the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville since 2011, and one thing I've noticed over the years is that some of the most experimental and innovative work has been on display in the late-night show featuring the young performers of ATL's Professional Training Company.

This year's entry, "You Across from Me," which runs through April 8th, is no exception. As usual, the show consists of a series of short one-act plays--often little more than sketches--written by multiple playwrights and organized around a common theme. This time the unifying concept is "The Table" which, as Jessica Reese observes in her program notes, is "a place of contrasts--as site of communion and conflict, tradition and rebellion."

Over the course of twelve playlets, Jacklyn Backhaus, Dipika Guha, Brain Otaño, and Jason Gray Platt (the four authors) use tables in creative and innovative ways. Ms. Guha, for example, uses a 1950s-era dinner table as the focus for "A Date With the Family," in which a cheesy educational film goes horribly and comically wrong. She also uses a long, white table at which a large, pseudo-Amish family eats their evening meal as the departure point for a weirdly ambiguous bit of dystopian science fiction in "Mother's Blessings."

Mr. Platt makes a wobbly dinner table the central prop in the most drop-dead funny entry of the evening, "Mabel and Clare." It's a precisely composed and perfectly executed bit of non-verbal slapstick that evokes the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, as actors Marika Proctor and Nayib Felix try (and fail) to combat the laws of physics. Mr. Platt also wrote the clever "Prologue," delivered in mock iambic pentameter by the apparently disembodied head of actor Jack Schmitt.

Mabel and Clare
Photo by Bill Brymer

Widely separated end tables in a hospital waiting room tell a simple story of how the things that divide us are less important than the things that unite us in Mr. Otaño's "Olive." And Ms. Backhaus (in collaboration with the acting ensemble) provides the hilarious finale to the evening with "The National Foosball Championships", in which the rivalry between champion Trent (Joseph Miller) and challenger Lilly-Anne (Emily Kleypas) mirrors the competition between commentators Chip (Calum Bedborough) and Junie (Emily Kaplan).

At around an hour and twenty minutes, the evening moves quickly under Jessica Fisch's direction, with creatively choreographed scene changes by members of the ensemble. It has its hits and misses, but is great fun overall and offers an encouraging look at the next generation of theatre stars.

The 2018 Humana Festival of New American Plays runs through April 8th at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Humana Festival 2018: One degree of separation

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

L-R: Ted Koch, Carla Duren, Jessica Wortham, and Nancy Sun
Photo by Dana Rogers

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The importance of sheer dumb luck in human affairs is something that was well understood in the ancient world. These days we seem determined to deny it, no matter how often it dope slaps us.

The characters in Deborah Stein's compelling "Marginal Loss," the world premiere of which is part of the 2018 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, have been slapped rather hard. Through sheer accident, they have escaped being victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and now are trying to rebuild their brokerage business from the ashes.

As the play opens, John (Ted Koch) and Allegra (Nancy Sun) are reporting to work in a spartan New Jersey warehouse just 48 hours after the attack. Together with Margaret (Carla Duren), a freshly minted college graduate hired as a temp, they struggle with the dual challenges of recovering from their firm's financial losses and their own personal losses as they realize how many of their coworkers are among the missing. Cathy (Jessica Wortham), their de facto leader, tries to take charge, but she, too, is dealing with a serious case of survivor guilt.

Inspired by the playwright's own experiences as a temp in the days after 9/11, "Marginal Loss" tells a fast-paced and generally very intriguing tale of people coping with the unimaginable by immersing themselves in the mundane. The need to reconstruct a client list from old files and find a way to engage in stock and bond trades with nothing more than boxes of paper files and a singe computer on a dial-up modem (remember those?) allows them to avoid grief.

But they can't avoid it entirely. In one brief scene, for example, Allegra sits with a boom box listening to a recording of a call made by a coworker in the last seconds of his life. She's wearing headphones, so we can't hear it, but the grief on her face tells us all we need to know.

L-R: Ted Koch, Carla Duren, Jessica Wortham, and Nancy Sun
Photo by Dana Rogers

Even so, Ms. Stein's characters do such a good job of burying their emotions in the herculean task of business recovery that the emotional stakes in the script are ultimately far too low, and the underlying issues tend to get swamped in the minutiae of investment banking. The big emotional revelation, involving a white lie told by Margaret early on, felt like pretty small beer.

Meredith McDonough's direction is crisp and focused, and her actors do excellent work. You can see the emotional turmoil just below the surface as they struggle to keep their business afloat. The text calls for finely shaded acting, and they deliver it.

"Marginal Loss" may not be great theater, but it's an interesting story that presents an unconventional take on a bit of recent American history that I thought had been done to death. I'm glad to see I was wrong.

The 2018 Humana Festival of New American Plays runs through April 8th at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Humana Festival 2018: Not much sympathy for the Devil

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

L-R: Suzy Weller, Luke F. LaMontagne
Photo by Bill Brymer

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In her essay of Mark Schultz's "Evocation to Visible Appearance," the world premiere of which is part of the 2018 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Amy Wegner quotes the author as saying that his notion of the Devil is "an absence, a void--not in the sense of something that's beyond our comprehension, but just nothingness." His intent in the play, he says, was to present that Devil onstage.

I'd say he succeeded. "Evocation to Visible Appearance" is, in fact, just under two hours of ennui-inducing nothingness. The plot, such as it is, revolves around 17-year-old Samantha (Suzy Weller). She may (or may not) be pregnant by boyfriend Trevor (Lincoln Clauss) but in any case the future looks bleak. Her father Russell (Bruce McKenzie), who appears to be dying, spends all this time asleep on the couch and Martin (Daniel Arthur Johnson), her boss at Bear Burger, has little to offer outside of motivational bromides. Wannabe "black metal" guitarist Hudson (Luke F. LaMontagne) seems to share her angst but her institutionalized sister Natalie (Ronete Levenson) just can't be bothered.

L-R: Daniel Arthur Johnson, Bruce McKenzie
Photo by Bill Brymer

The characters are little more than gestures, and there is no actual dialog between them in any case. They talk around, over, and through each other but never interact. The show is effectively a collection of lengthy and repetitious monologues punctuated, toward the end, by a brief bit of pointless violence and capped by the most boring heavy metal song imaginable.

Evil, in short, was never this banal.

The plodding direction by Actors Theatre Artistic Director Les Waters gives the audience plenty of time to examine the play's many weaknesses, although even with better pacing this would be a slog. The members of the cast do credible work with their thankless parts, with perhaps the best performance coming from Mr. McKenzie as the heartbreakingly broken Russell, but ultimately there's just no reason for the script to exist.

The 2018 Humana Festival of New American Plays runs through April 8th at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in downtown Louisville, KY.

Humana Festival 2018: Family feud

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

L-R: Jay Patterson and Ako
Photo by Jonathan Roberts

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The prolonged illness and death of a parent can put stress on the most durable of families. When the family is as fragile as the one Leah Nanako Winkler depicts in "God Said This," the world premiere of which is part of the 2018 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the results can be devastating.

"God Said This" is centered on the Lexington, KY, hospital room where Masako (Ako) is undergoing chemotherapy for an especially aggressive form of cancer. Her daughter Hiro (Satomi Blair) has returned from New York to offer support, even though she has never forgiven her alcoholic father James (Jay Patterson) for the abuse he inflicted on the family before he got sober and even though she finds the born-again Christianity of sister Sophie (Emma Kikue) baffling. Hiro tries to reconnect with her old classmate John (Tom Coiner), a single dad with issues of his own, with mixed results.

There is much to admire in "God Said This," beginning with the credible and often moving scenes between Masako and James. The parents are the most fully developed characters in the script and are exceptionally well acted by Ms. Ako and Mr. Patterson, both of whom completely inhabit their characters. The comic relief scenes between Hiro and John are hilarious (although there are probably too many of them), and John's ruminations on the challenges of parenting offer an ingenious way for the playwright to shed light on James's failures in that area.

But there are issues. The daughters are both fairly one-dimensional and frankly unappealing characters, and their dialogue feels more trite than that of the parents. The scenes between John and Hiro in John's car get repetitious after a while. And the playwright relies far too heavily on the monologues James delivers to his fellow AA members (played by the audience) to advance the story.

L-R: Jay Patterson, Satomi Blair, Emme Kikte, Aku
Photo by Jonathan Roberts

Those monologues are an issue for another reason: they present the entire story from the point of view of the sober James, allowing him to essentially whitewash the years of abuse the drunk James heaped on the family. We see a bit of that in a powerful scene in which Masako rails at James for creating the stress that, in her mind, brought on her illness. "You gave me cancer," she screams at one point. But then the scene dissolves in hugs and we move on.

"God Said This" raises worthwhile concerns, not the least of which is the way Americans do (or don't) deal with mortality. But it does so unevenly and could probably stand some editing. There's not quite enough material here to cover its two acts and some story elements felt a bit like padding.

In any case, Morgan Gould's direction makes smart use of the Bingham Theater's in-the-round space and the cast generally turn in strong performances. The technical aspects are impeccable, as they generally are at Actors Theatre, with a special shout-out due to M.L. Dogg's clever sound design.

The 2018 Humana Festival of New American Plays runs through April 8th at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in downtown Louisville, KY.

Variety is the spice of the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays

This review originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Photo: Justin Philalack

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It's spring, and once again yours truly and a coterie of local theatre folk made our annual pilgrimage to the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. As we have done for the past few years, my fellow KDHX critic Tina Farmer and I posted instant video blog mini-reviews from the festival on YouTube. Unlike previous years, however, Tina and I have agreed to split up the written reviews.

Over the course of last weekend (March 31 - April 2), we saw six plays: Tasha Gordon-Solmon's comedy I Now Pronounce, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas' drama Recent Alien Abductions, Chelsea Marcantel's Airness (a love letter to air guitar), the comedy/dramas We're Gonna Be Okay by Basil Kreimendahl and Cry it Out by Molly Smith Metzler, and The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield, a collection of eleven mini-plays written for the acting interns of the ATL Professional Training Company. Tina is reviewing the first three and I'm covering the others.

Cry it Out by Molly Smith Metzler

Andrea Syglowski and Jessica Dickey
Photo: Bill Brymer

The best of my three was unquestionably Cry it Out. The play is set in Manorhaven, a Long Island village described in the script as "directly on the ocean, heavily populated, and, depending on the block, either middle-class or quite rundown." The action takes place in the back yard of Jessie (Jessica Dickey) a new mother who left a job as a high-powered lawyer to start a family and now isn't sure whether or not she wants to go back —a thought she has yet to share with her husband.

The yard behind hers belongs to Lina (Andrea Syglowski), a brassy but loveable community college dropout. She and her husband are living with his alcoholic mother. Jessie and Nate are comfortably upper-middle class; Lina and John are barely holding on to blue collars. But Jessie and Lina had bonded in the Stop and Shop over the joys and woes of infant care and are now getting acquainted over coffee in the no-man's land between their houses where the coverage of their baby monitors overlaps.

The play starts out as a smart, funny, and completely believable story of two very different women thrown together by the demands of motherhood and drawing strength from each other while growing in the process. That all by itself would be enough to recommend it, but things get more complex when Mitchell (Jeff Biehl) drops in on one of their meetings with a request that they invite his wife Adrienne (Liv Rooth) to join them. She's also a new mom and he thinks "it would do her a lot of good to get out and talk to some moms like you."

Mitchell and Adrienne live in Sands Point, the über-wealthy neighborhood on the cliff above town ("we look down on you," says Mitchell, a phrase he immediately regrets), and while Mitchell is affable, Adrienne proves to be a bundle of hostile snobbery inside of which is a woman who is not at all sure she likes being a mother.

The play that spins out of these complications addresses issues of social class, economic disparity, lack of access to health care, and the confusing expectations placed on American women without ever becoming preachy or even directly bringing any of these issues up. This is a play that asks you to think about its message instead of beating you over the head with it—for which I was very grateful.

I was grateful as well for the fine performances of the cast. Ms. Dickey and Ms. Syglowski, in particular, did a marvelous job of distinguishing their characters both verbally and physically. As soon as they appeared on stage, their body language made it obvious that Lina was an outgoing free spirit while Jessie was more reserved and even a bit defensive. Ms. Rooth's Adrienne, like Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, was apparently "born sneering" and Mr. Biehl's Mitchell was clearly hiding something behind his affability. David McCallum's direction was precise and sure-footed. Cry it Out is, in short, a first-rate play that is likely to have a life after Humana.

We're Gonna Be Okay by Basil Kreimendahl

The cast of We're Gonna Be Okay
Photo: Bill Brymer

Basil Kreimendahl's We're Gonna Be Okay, on the other hand, seems unlikely to survive the festival — partly because its technical requirements are significant, but mostly because it's simply not a very good play.

Set during the run-up to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, We're Gonna Be Okay is, in some ways, similar to Cry it Out in that it concerns neighboring families whose economic circumstances are very different. Efran (Sam Breslin Wright) is a middle-class motor mouth who browbeats his more taciturn blue-collar neighbor Sul (Scott Drummond) into cooperating with him on the construction of the bomb shelter because, Efran is convinced, "it ain't a matter of 'if' but a matter of 'when'" nuclear war breaks out. Their interactions were so reminiscent of the 1960s comedy routines of Burns and Schreiber that I have a sneaking suspicion Mr. Kreimendahl might have been inspired by them.

Adding to the comic mix are Efran's wife Leena (Kelly McAndrew) with her bottomless bag of arts and crafts projects, Sul's quietly desperate wife Mag (Annie McNamara), Efran's sexually confused son Jake (Andrew Cutler), and Sul's daughter Deanna (Anne-Marie Trabolsi). Described in the script as "feminine but a little rock and roll masculine," she comes complete with sardonic attitude and a guitar.

Efran's verbosity is sometimes grating but overall the first act of We're Gonna Be Okay is often quite funny and, Efran aside, Mr. Kreimendahl's characters are endearing, if a bit superficial.

All that changes in the second act, which moves the action from the front yards to the bomb shelter where both families have fled in what feels like oddly chaotic haste immediately after President Kennedy's speech announcing the presence of missiles in Cuba. The shelter isn't fully stocked or completely finished (although it has somehow acquired a surface door that wasn't there at the end of the first act) and over the ensuing few days conflicts within and between the families erupt as secrets are shared and everyone but Deanna begins to question their life decisions.

None of this really goes anywhere or resolves, and after a while it begins to become repetitious. By moving his characters below ground, Mr. Kreimendahl has left them nowhere to go, both literally and dramatically. He has also left himself with no convincing way to end the play, and his final scene makes very little sense given what has gone before.

As is usually the case with Actors Theatre, though, the play got very strong performances from a fine ensemble cast. The younger actors were particularly impressive, and Ms. Trabolsi's musical contributions added a great deal. Her "Break It to Me Gently" was a welcome high point of the second act.

Director Lisa Peterson made the best possible case for this script, although the many anachronisms in both the dialog and costuming sometimes made it difficult for someone like me, who actually lived through the missile crisis, to take it all very seriously. This one needs to go back to the drawing board.

The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield by Jeff Augustin, Sarah Delappe, Claire Kiechel, And Ramiz Monsef

Henriettas
Photo: Bill Brymer

The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield is also unlikely to have a life after the festival, but that's mostly by design. Every year, the festival commissions an evening of short one-acts to be performed by the acting interns. The plays are always performed without pause and always deal with a common theme. Last year's Wondrous Strange, for example, dealt with the supernatural, while 2015's That High Lonesome Sound was a tribute to Kentucky bluegrass music.

The theme for this year's show was a bit more vague. As described in Jessica Resse's program notes, it's all about "the slippery nature of innovation, and the myths we tell about it." A secondary theme is the state of Kentucky itself. The titular character, for example, was a Kentucky farmer who came up with the principle of wireless telephony but failed to capitalize on it and died in obscurity.

Other plays approach the topic in more indirect ways. In Sarah DeLappe's Henriettas, for example, four hilariously decrepit elderly ladies named Henrietta rattle off an increasingly silly list of inventions for which they didn't get credit.

I Will Survive
Photo: Bill Brymer

The relevance of some of the plays is a bit harder to discern. Ms. DeLappe's I Will Survive, for example, seems to be about the quick rise and fall of "roller disco," as company members quickly alternate between gliding around the stage in spangled outfits and tediously assembling disco balls while dressed in jump suits. As the play progresses, the ensemble shrinks until it's down to just one actress (Alice Wu) who turns to the audience and says "It's definitely lonely." Although I never cared much for disco, I found it a curiously touching piece. Its connection to the theme felt tangential until I learned (via Twitter) that Louisville was the disco ball manufacturing center of the USA back in the day.

That's a minor complaint, though. As has always been the case with the PTC shows, The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield benefitted from very solid performances from a cast of performers who, while still learning their craft, are already extremely talented and professional. Eric Hoff's fluid direction pulled it all together nicely.

The 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays concluded on Sunday, April 9, but the Actors Theatre of Louisville's regular season continues with the New Voices Young Playwrights Festival April 24-26. For St. Louis theatre fans willing to make the four and one-half hour drive, ATL is well worth a visit, and the Louisville area has many other tourist attractions to divert you when you're not in the theatre.

Rites of Spring: The Humana Festival of New American Plays

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Actors Theatre of Louisville
Photo: Bill Brymer

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"In the Spring," wrote Tennyson, "a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." Were he still with us today, he might have added, "and, if he's a theatre geek, to thoughts of the Humana Festival of New American Plays."

All right, so it doesn't scan. But the fact is, anyone who is interested in the state of theatre in the USA today can't afford to pass up the Humana Festival. Now in its 41st year, the festival is a seven-week celebration of new plays produced by the Actors Theatre of Louisville. The company presents seven new works (winnowed down from an average of 500 submissions each year) in the course of the festival, which takes place in their sumptuous downtown digs.

How sumptuous? Located in historic structures on Main Street, the Actors Theatre consists of the 637-seat Pamela Brown Auditorium, with a thrust stage; the 159-seat Victor Jory Theatre, a three-quarter arena performance space; and the 318-seat Bingham Theatre, a flexible arena space.

Add in the palatial lobby, a nine-story parking garage, and a restaurant (called Milk Wood because it's located under the theatre — a punning reference to Dylan Thomas' famed verse play Under Milk Wood) and you have the kind of facility most theatre companies dream about. Better yet, it's only part of a general revitalization of downtown Louisville that includes fine hotels, restaurants, and bars, all within an easy walk of the theatre.

The Humana Festival is a valuable resource for other theatre companies as well as folks who simply love theatre. I'm on the board of directors and play reading committee at the West End Players Guild here in St. Louis (our motto: "big theatre in a small space"), and I can attest to the festival as a source of new plays for our seasons.

For the past seven years now I've been attending Humana and reviewing the new plays for 88.1 KDHX here in St. Louis. I have been posting short video blog reviews from the festival and longer written reviews at KDHX and on my Stage Left blog. For the past few years my fellow KDHX critic Tina Farmer — who sees more theatre every year than just about anyone I know — has joined me on those video blogs. This year we're sharing the written reviews as well, and Tina will also be publishing feature articles on the festival at KDHX.

Tina is reviewing Tasha Gordon-Solman's comedy I Now Pronounce, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas's drama Recent Alien Abductions, and Chelsea Marcantel's comedy Airness. I'm covering Molly Smith Metzler's comedy/drama Cry It Out, Basil Kreiemendahl's comedy/drama We're Gonna Be OK, and The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield, an unclassifiable collection of eleven short one-act plays written specifically for the young Acting Apprentices of the Professional Training Company at ATL. Look for our articles later this week right here at KDHX and check out our video blogs on YouTube.

At the Humana Festival, "Wellesley Girl" displays untapped potential

L-R: Jeff Biehl, Pun Bandhu, Lynda Gravátt, Kelly McAndrew
Photo: Bill Brymer

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One of the great things about the Humana Festival of New American Plays is the valuable exposure it gives to new playwrights.  Their work is sometimes rough around the edges or even, as is the case with Brendan Pelsue's Wellesley Girl at this year's festival, a bit of a mess.  But as far as artistic growth goes, there's just no substitute for the experience of seeing one's work performed by a professional company for a paying audience.

The concept behind Wellesley Girl is intriguing, especially during our fractious political season.  Set in the year 2465, the play takes place in a walled enclave in New England whose 435 inhabitants are, as far as they know, the sole surviving population of the United States of America.  They're all members of Congress, and the Supreme Court is now one woman—the only one with legal training and the books to back it up.

Barney O'Hanlon, Rachael Leslie
Photo: Bill Brymer

Their stable if limited world is threatened when an army from Texas suddenly and inexplicably shows up, insisting that they are the real U.S. government and making a list of impossible demands.  The population soon splits into two camps, one insisting on negotiation and another on "scorched earth", which appears to mean abandoning the enclave and fleeing into the wilderness.  Neither alternative makes much sense, though, since the invading army appears to be invincible and the water supply outside of the enclave is supposedly poisoned.  Only the enclave's filtration system makes it drinkable.

This setup has the potential to offer a satirical look at our current political dysfunction and possibly an examination of how people behave when there are no good choices.  Unfortunately it offers neither.  The arguments among the enclave's residents become little more than shouting matches and the moral dilemma they face becomes buried in political maneuvering. 

L-R: Philip Taratula, Jeff Biehl
Photo: Bill Brymer

The plot also doesn't hold up to much scrutiny and much of it simply makes no sense.  If the water is poisoned, what are the mighty Texas forces drinking?  How did they even find out about the New Englanders in the first place, given that there appears to be no communication infrastructure?  If the army has them surrounded, how will they escape to the woods? 

Worse yet, the feeble final scenes seem to indicate that the playwright simply wrote himself into a corner and couldn't find a way out.  When the final blackout came, nobody clapped because it wasn't clear whether or not the play had actually ended.

The show isn't without its moments.  A scene in which Donna, The Supreme Court (Lynda Gravátt) hears arguments at her kitchen table with a hand-made "SCOTUS" sign in the center have real charm.  And Barney O'Hanlon's robot Hank is a wonderfully precise piece of acting.  Indeed, the cast as a whole is quite good, even if some of the characters they portray are a bit one-dimensional.  There's also some real comedy in the public meetings before they descend into chaos.  But ultimately this play's reach far exceeds its grasp.

That said, this is still an interesting first effort, for all its flaws.  Mr. Plesue is clearly an original voice and, given that he is still working on his M.F.A., it's reasonable to assume that he might have a bright future ahead of him.  Very few creative people get everything right the first time, after all.

Wellesley Girl runs through April 10th in the Pamela Brown Auditorium at Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays.

At the Humana Festival, Sarah Ruhl's "For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday" never quite gets off the ground

Scene 1
Photo: Bill Brymer

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"Having been unpopular in high school," observed Fran Lebowitz in her 1978 essay collection Metropolitan Life,  "is not just cause for book publication."  If she had seen Sarah Ruhl's For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, the world premiere of which is part of the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays, she might have added that a death in the family is not just cause for play production.

As the play opens, five adult siblings (the oldest, Ann, is 70; the others are in their 50s and 60s) are gathered in the remarkably large hospital room of their comatose father George.  In what feels like the strongest of the play's three scenes, the siblings ruminate on death, the afterlife, and what it means to really be an adult.  The tension of waiting for the end that they both dread and anticipate is palpable and believable.

Scene 2
Photo: Bill Brymer

The remaining two scenes are less impressive.  In the first, Ann and her brothers and sisters gather in George's house for an impromptu wake.  Fueled by liberal doses of Jameson, they tell stories from their childhood, share jokes, and engage in political arguments which, given the play's setting during "the Clinton era", feel rather dated.  Meanwhile, the ghost of George wanders in and out, repeating the routines of his daily life—and generating some of the funniest moments.

Finally, everyone toddles off to bed and Ann, who serves as the play's narrator, dreams of repeating the role of Peter Pan—the part she played at a local theatre before heading off to college—with her siblings as the Darling family and brother Jim as Captain Hook.  Like the previous scene, it has no real dramatic shape and doesn't really go anywhere.  A final scene between Ann and her ghostly father suggests that she is coming to terms with his departure, but it essentially comes out of nowhere, dramatically speaking.

Scene 3
Photo: Bill Brymer

Kathleen Chalfant leads a strong cast as a sympathetic and engaging Ann.  There's good work here as well from Keith Reddin as Michael, David Chandler as Jim, Lisa Emery as Wendy, and Ron Crawford as the spectral George.  Barney O'Hanlon was a late substitution in the role of the youngest brother, John, but you wouldn't have known that from his assured performance.

Les Waters directs with a sure eye for both the comedy and drama in the script, but even so For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday is a bit too specifically autobiographical for its own good.  It feels less like a play for a general audience than a home video.  Ms. Ruhl is a highly regarded playwright with a string of frequently performed and justifiably praised shows, though, so I'm inclined to cut her a little slack with this one.

For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday runs through April 10th in the Pamela Brown Auditorium at Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays. 

At the Humana Festival, student interns deliver a "Wondrous Strange" collection of ghost stories

Hannah Karpenko in "The Bonnets"
Photo: Bill Brymer

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Every edition of the Humana Festival features a program of short one-act plays organized around a common theme and performed by the students of the Actors Theatre of Louisville's Acting Apprentice Company.  This year's show, Wondrous Strange—which takes its title from Horatio's exclamation of astonishment after seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father ("O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!")—focuses on ghosts and the supernatural.

"Kentucky's supernatural lore fills anthology after anthology," writes Jessica Reese in the program book, "and every year, thousands of visitors head to the state's haunted landmarks, from posh hotels and mansions to dive bars and Civil War sites…This season, four fearless writers—Martyna Majok, Meg Miroshnik, Jiehae Park, and Jen Silverman—have been invited to venture into the spirit realm and examine the unexplained and the uncanny."

L-R: Alejandro Hernandez, Addison Williams
Jayson Speters in "Ghost Bros"
Photo: Bill Brymer

The resulting short (70 minute) collection of nine plays, sketches, and "blackouts" is a bit uneven, but taken as a whole it's great fun and performed with skill and versatility by a company of 20 talented young actors.  Even though we saw it at a 10:30 a.m. matinee, the show still created an appropriately spooky atmosphere, punctuated with moments of inspired comedy.

Most of the latter comes from Jen Silverman's two contributions. "Ghost Bros" is a hilariously on-target send-up of supernatural "reality" TV and juvenile macho as the titular "bros" (Alejandro Hernandez, Jayson Speters, and Addison Williams) blunder their way through a long-abandoned insane asylum in unsuccessful pursuit of a ghostly little girl (Walls Trimble). "The Bonnets", which concludes the show, is an enthusiastic celebration of murder and mayhem by the female members of the company, dressed in modest nightgowns and bonnets.

Martyna Majok contributes one of the best pieces, a touching little character study about an inexperienced prostitute (Glenna Brucken) who advertises herself as a psychic to stay ahead of the law, only to discover that her customer (Mr. Hernandez) is really interested in a reading.  Instead of playing this for laughs, Ms. Majok makes it a charming portrait of two troubled people looking for comfort in a cold world.

Tracey Green in "Something Like"
Photo: Bill Brymer

One of the creepiest entries is Meg Miroshnik's "The Holler", about a group of friends who have made the mistake of trying to turn part of a former abattoir into an apartment—with unpleasant results.  Her zombie tale "Bug" is a close second, but I thought its predictability spoiled it a bit.

Jiehae Park's "Something Like" takes the ghost story into cyberspace as a young woman (Tracey Green) becomes addicted to interacting with an artificial intelligence program (Adenike Thomas) modeled after her deceased lover.  It downplays the supernatural element to deliver a moving illustration of how we deal with loss.

Directors Marti Lyons and John Rooney make good use of the Bingham Theatre's versatile space, assisted by Paul Toben's dramatic lighting and Christian Frederickson's sound, both of which go a long way towards establishing a disturbing atmosphere.

Wondrous Strange runs through April 10th at Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays. 

At the Humana Festival, "This Random World" abounds in comic coincidences

L-R: Shirine Babb and Beth Dixon
Photo: Bill Brymer

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One of the great pleasures of the novels of Charles Dickens is the often comical way in which he arranges for characters from very disparate walks of life to be connected, often by wildly improbable coincidences.  In his new comedy "This Random World," veteran comic playwright Steven Dietz stands that convention on its head. 

In Dietz's anti-Dickensian story, characters who are already related to each other, however tangentially, repeatedly miss making connections as a result of coincidences that are as unlikely and comical as anything the great British novelist ever dreamed up.

Renata Friedman and Todd Lawson
Photo: Bill Brymer

As the play opens, Scottie—in her 70s and ailing, but still energetic—is preparing for a trip to the Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto with her assistant and general dogsbody Bernadette.  Bernadette convinces Scottie to send Bernadette's younger sister Rhonda instead, but events conspire to force a last-minute cancellation on Scottie's part, sending Rhonda to Japan on her own.  Meanwhile, Scottie's daughter Beth, who believes her mother to be a shut-in, has taken off on an adventurous and expensive trip of her own to Nepal where, because of a missed connection, she is thrown together with Gary, a new-agey life coach and the ex-boyfriend of the outrageously neurotic Claire, who is the ex-girlfriend of Scottie's son Tim.

As for Tim, he's a failed writer and computer hacker whose already off-track life is sent into a genuine tailspin when his prank hack of a mortuary's server results in the publication of his own fictional obituary.  His attempts to explain to Rhonda—who just happens to work at said mortuary—that he is actually alive prove to be as funny as they are frustrating.

Nate Miller and Brenda Withers
Photo: Bill Brymer

I could have used the word "coincidentally" a lot in those last two paragraphs, but you get the idea.  As the characters' lives spin merrily out of control, the connections that might get them back on track are repeatedly missed in absurdly unlikely ways.  In one scene, for example, Bernadette just happens to leave her cell phone behind in a hospital waiting room at exactly the point when Beth, who just happens to have lost her cell, is calling from a pay phone to find out what's going on with Scottie.  As the phone rings, Tim just happens to walk in.  He answers it just as Beth impatiently hangs up.

Apparently, the phone just happens not to have voice mail.

Not all of the missed connections are funny, of course.  Dietz is too smart a playwright not to throw in a few scenes that are genuinely touching.  And those scenes work because, with the possible exception of the absurdly unhappy Claire, his characters are all well drawn and believable.

Deonna Bouye
Photo: Bill Brymer

The actors do well by these characters.  Brenda Withers's Beth is as confident as Nate Miller's Tim is lost and perennially baffled.  Beth Dixon is an appealingly feisty Scottie, nicely contrasting with Shirine Babb's patient Bernadette.  Todd Lawson's Gary is perfectly clueless and Deonna Bouye's Rhonda is hilariously motor-mouthed.  Dietz has made the role of Claire fairly one dimensional, but Renata Friedman makes her interesting nevertheless.

Dietz's script calls for a set that suggests "a world that is warm, mysterious and evocative", and designer Daniel Zimmerman has certainly delivered that.  Director Meredith McDonough keeps the action focused and smoothly flowing among the play's many scenes.

"This Random World" is essentially a one-joke play, but the variations on that joke are so ingenious that it never goes stale or wears out its welcome, remaining thoroughly entertaining right up to the surprising final scene.  Given its relatively simple technical demands, I'd expect it to start appearing on other regional stages in the coming years; it certainly deserves to be seen.

"The Random World" runs through April 10 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, as part of the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays.  For more information: actorstheatre.org.

At the Humana Festival, "Cardboard Piano" examines the fragile quality of mercy

L-R: Nike Kadri, Jamar Williams, Briana Pozner
Photo: Bill Brymer

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Dramatizing contemporary political events is a risky proposition.  A story "ripped from the headlines" can have immediate impact but fade quickly as the latest outrage takes center stage.  Fortunately, Hansol Jung's gripping drama Cardboard Piano manages to balance immediacy with a contemplation of deeper issues.

It's New Year's Eve, 1999, and in a church in Northern Uganda Chris, the daughter of an American missionary, and Adiel, a local teenage girl, are preparing to welcome the new millennium with a secret wedding ceremony.  Their celebration is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Pika, a child soldier in the infamous Lord's Resistance Army fleeing the brutal commander who has cut off the boy's ear for failing to carry out a sadistic command.

Chris and Adiel patch his wounds but, as subsequent events demonstrate, the damage to his soul runs much deeper.  As the first act comes to a violent end, it seems that the play has nowhere to go, but when the second act opens in the same church ten years later, it's clear that Ms. Jung's concerns go beyond a simple contemplation of the horrors of war. 

Nike Kadri and Michael Luwoye
Photo: Bill Brymer

As Paul, the church's Ugandan pastor, rehearses a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan with his wife Ruth (the Biblical resonance of the names will prove significant), the scene looks peaceful enough.  But, as in the first act, that peace is shattered by the appearance of a third party—Chris, now an adult and hoping to bury her late father's ashes in the church garden.  Her arrival sets in motion a series of dramatic explosions that strike at the heart of Christian concepts of mercy and forgiveness.

Interviewed in the program book, Ms. Jung notes that "religion can do two opposite things.  It can destroy, hurt, and be an instigator of violence, but it can also be the only thing capable of controlling that violence…I am a Christian, but I've always interrogated what that means.  That really influenced the writing of this play."  Forgiveness, as the subsequent action of the play suggests, is not an easy thing to truly grant—and may not always be justified.

Cardboard Piano uses the same cast for both acts, with the performers playing the roles of Adiel, Pika's commander, and Pika appearing in the second act as, respectively, Ruth, Paul, and Francis, a gay teenager who is leaving town to escape the rabid homophobia of the town's populace.  That adds interesting resonance to the characters and gives the actors an opportunity to demonstrate their impressive range.

Jamar Williams
Photo: Bill Brymer

As Paul and Pika's commander, Michael Luwoye has perhaps the biggest challenge, since the roles are so radically different. He meets it brilliantly, creating two sharply contrasting and credible characters.  Nike Kadri also makes Adiel and Ruth different enough to make suspension of disbelief easy, as does Jamar Williams as Pika and Francis. Briana Pozner very effectively differentiates the teenaged and adult versions of Chris with subtle and consistent changes in vocal inflection and body language, assisted by Ms. Jung's smartly crafted dialog.

Director Leigh Silverman guides this all with a sure hand and Scenic Designer William Boles's set makes creative use of the Jory Theatre's intimate black box space.

As our own domestic political process plays out the conflict between a version of Christianity based on mercy and compassion vs. one based on anger and judgment, the issues in Cardboard Piano feel both immediate and timeless.  I'd be surprised if this play didn't have a life after Humana.

Cardboard Piano runs through April 10 in the Jory Theatre at Actors Theatre of Louisville, as part of the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays.  For more information: actorstheatre.org.