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.

Humana Festival 2015: A perfect mix of comedy and tragedy makes Colman Domingo's "Dot" the festival hit

L-R: Kevin R. Fee, Sharon Washington, and Marjorie Johnson
Photo: Bill Brymer

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: Dot by Colman Domingo
When: March 10-April 12, 2015

[Watch my video capsule review with co-critic Tina Farmer.]

I've been attending the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville for five years now, and every time there has been at least one show where the combination of script, acting, and direction was so perfect that it just blew me away. This year, that show is Colman Domingo's "Dot."

The play takes place during the two days before Christmas in the inner-city home of Dotty Shealy in West Philadelphia. A long-time neighborhood activist who refused to join the flight to the suburbs, Dotty has long been the matriarch and anchor of her family, especially after the death of her husband. Now, though, Dot is suffering from dementia, and the stress of dealing with her mood swings, confusion, and memory loss is falling heavily on daughter Shelly, a single parent and lawyer.

L-R: Sharon Washington and Megan Byrne
Photo: Bill Brymer

That's because, to quote the synopsis in the program, "Shelly's brother Donnie, a New York playwright, doesn't know the extent of his mother's decline until he returns home for the holidays. Their sister Averie hasn't been much help, either—she's been too wrapped up in trying to make a name for herself to realize how much Dotty has deteriorated." Throw in the presence of Donnie's husband Adam and Donnie's former high school sweetheart Jackie, along with Dotty's part-time Chechen caretaker Fidel, and you could have the recipe for either a tacky comedy in the manner of Del Shores or a turgid soap opera.

Mr. Domingo, though, is too good a playwright for that. His characters are all fully fleshed out and his portrayal of the effects of dementia on both Dotty and her family is vividly real. As someone who has a parent going through this, I speak from experience. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments in "Dot," as well as many that call for a hanky.

Allow me to offer some examples.

The opening scene, in which Shelly and Dotty have the same conversation repeatedly, is painfully plausible. Dotty keeps forgetting what day it is, loses track of the time, and gets lost trying to come back from the bathroom. Shelly's building frustration and increasing consumption of watermelon vodka are funny, sad, and completely credible.

And then there's a moment towards early in the second act when Dotty, mistaking Adam for her dead husband, asks him to dance with her. The family tries to intervene but Adam waves them away, and the two have a bittersweet moment in which Dotty takes momentary refuge in her memories. It's touching and allows us to see, for the first time, what a deeply compassionate person Adam is.

L-R: Marjorie Johnson and Vichet Chum
Photo: Bill Brymer

Perhaps the best combination of comedy and tragedy, though, comes later in the second act, when Dotty gives her children an object lesson in what the world looks, feels, and sounds like to someone coping with dementia. I won't go into details because I don't want to divulge spoilers, so I'll just say that it's funny and heartbreaking at the same time.

And it's brilliantly written—as is the rest of the script. There is simply not a single false note or cheap joke anywhere. The humor emerges naturally from the characters and their interactions.

As good as this script is, though, every member of the cast makes it better. Marjorie Johnson carries much of the weight as Dotty, fading in and out of reality and struggling to hold on to her mind. Her performance is entirely genuine and convincing.

Sharon Washington's Shelly is the very picture of the alpha family member trying to hold everything together. Her frustration with what she sees as the ne'er-do-well behavior of her siblings is palpable.

As Donnie and Adam, Kevin R. Free and Sean Dugan radiate reality as a couple deeply in love and just as deeply embroiled in the kind of superficial spat that inevitably erupts in a committed relationship.

Adrienne C. Moore rounds out the trio of siblings as the sassy if rather feckless Averie. Her monolog about chitterlings is a comic gem.

Vichet Chum is an engaging a sympathetic Fidel and Megan Byrne is the endearingly off-balance Jackie, pregnant by Mr. Wrong and not at all sure what to do about it.

The show is technically solid as well. Meredith McDonough's direction is clear and focused, creating great stage pictures in Dane Laffrey's impressively detailed sets. The first act kitchen set even has a functioning rangetop. Mark Barton's lighting and Christian Frederickson's sound also contribute greatly to the realism of the setting.

L-R: Kevin R. Fee, Sharon Washington,
Marjorie Johnson, and Sean Dugan
Photo: Bill Brymer

"I've had four friends who've had a parent with dementia or Alzheimer's," says Mr. Domingo in a program interview. "I was watching one friend and the way that she dealt with her mother. It as a bit of dark comedy that was going on—I think between the both of them." The absolute truth of his experience informs every minute of this powerful, funny, and gratifying show. "Dot" offers no easy answers, but the way the family finally comes together in the final moments is, in a way, a kind of Christmas miracle. This is a script that deserves and will likely get attention elsewhere after the Humana Festival has closed.

"Dot" runs through April 12th in the Pamela Brown Auditorium at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It's part of the 39th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. For more information: actorstheatre.org.

Humana Festival 2015: Multi-talented acting interns shine in 'That High Lonesome Sound'

The cast of "That High Lonesome Sound"
Photo: Bill Brymer

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: That High Lonesome Sound by Jeff Augustin, Diana Grisanti, Cory Hinkle, and Charise Castro Smith
When: March 27-April 12

[Watch my video capsule review with co-critic Tina Farmer]

Every Humana Festival has a late night show consisting of short plays with a common theme and featuring members of the Acting Apprentice Company. "That High Lonesome Sound"—this year's show—is all about bluegrass music and the mountain culture that spawned it. And it's a real winner.

"Punk Bitch"
Photo: Bill Brymer

The show's title, according to Hannah Rae Montgomery's program essay, "comes from a phrase commonly used to describe the wistful tenor twang of many bluegrass singers." I'd say it also describes the way this music conjures up the remote woods and mountains where bluegrass originated, and where the membrane separating the worlds of the living and the dead seems more permeable. Ghosts put in regular appearances in traditional music, and at least three of these plays contain elements of the supernatural.

The eight short pieces in this eighty-minute show are the work of playwrights Jeff Augustin (whose "Cry Old Kingdom" so impressed me at Humana in 2013), Diana Grisanti, Cory Hinkle, and Charise Castro Smith. They're a varied and beautifully written collection of comedy and drama. Most involve some live music, and all of them use music as a dramatic element.

"Dot and the Guitar"
Photo: Bill Brymer

My personal favorite is Ms. Smith's "Dot and the Guitar," about a young girl in a traditional mountain family who saves up for a guitar. When it arrives, the simple beauty of her playing and singing inspires the rest of her fatherless family—and angers her bullying older brother. The script reminds us that this music originates in a culture that can be violent and sexist—and that beauty and ugliness often co-exist.

I was also taken with Ms. Grisanti's "Florence Reece Goes to Camp," about a campaign to co-opt Reece's classic union anthem "Which Side Are You On?" for a corporate marketing campaign. It's a reminder of what happens when we lose touch with our origins.

Ms. Smith's brief "Miss Faye and the Banjo," about an elderly spinster who is convinced—not without reason—that she's turning in to a musical instrument, was also great fun. Cory Hinke's "The Peace of Wild Things" is also about transformation, as a young woman searches for a vanished sibling who may or may not have changed into something else entirely.

"A Buried History"
Photo: Bill Brymer

Every actor in the 21-member student cast does impressive work here, acting, singing, dancing, and playing up a storm. Blake Russell was a standout as the bluegrass-inspired rapper in Mr. Augustin's "Punk Bitch" as was Erika Grob as the guitar-playing Emily. Taylor Abels was spot on as the spoiled rich kid with the marketing inspiration in "Florence Reece Goes to Camp." Lexi Lapp, who has a lovely cameo in "I Will Be Gone," did nice work here as well. Kayla Jackmon had a powerful opening monolog in Mr. Augustin's "A Buried History." And John Ford-Dunker perfectly captured Miss Faye using only a pair of glasses, a walker, and solid vocal and physical acting.

They are all, in short, tremendously talented young performers. It was a joy to watch them. Seeing this level of skill always makes me hopeful for the future of theatre in this country.

Director Pirronne Yousefzadeh keeps it all moving with fluid scene changes and blocking that shortchanges nobody in the Bingham Theater's in-the-round space.

Bluegrass is not one of my favorite musical genres, but I nevertheless found "That High Lonesome Sound" utterly captivating—as did my wife, who is much more of a "trad" music fan. Yes, the 11 p.m. curtain time is a bit late for some of us, but it's worth staying up until well after midnight for theatre as good as this.

"That High Lonesome Sound" runs through April 12th in the Bingham Theater at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It's part of the 39th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. For more information: actorstheatre.org.

Humana Festival 2015: Jen Silverman's "The Roommate" is part Neil Simon, part Quenten Tarantino

L-R: Tasha Lawrence and Margaret Daly
Photo: Bill Brymer

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: The Roommate by Jen Silverman
When: March 4-April 12, 2015

[Watch my video capsule review with co-critic Tina Farmer.]

Jen Silverman's comedy-drama "The Roommate" puts a decidedly original spin on a shopworn theatrical device. The end result isn't entirely successful, but the story is inventive enough and the dialog smart enough to make for a worthwhile evening.

As the play begins, we're in what looks like familiar territory. In her mid-fifties, Iowa City housewife Sharon finds herself "retired" from her marriage and looking for a way to make ends meet. She advertises for a roommate to share expenses and specifies that only women in their fifties need apply.

She hopes, in short, to find someone much like herself. She winds up with Robyn, a vegan lesbian from the Bronx. From Sharon's perspective, she might as well be a resident of Oz.

The two are chalk and cheese. Sharon is solid and frumpy while Robyn is slim and graceful. Sharon is open, honest, and unsure of herself. Robyn, on the other hand, radiates self-confidence and is cagey about her prior personal and professional lives—with good reason, as it turns out.

Photo: Bill Brymer

As they try to get to know each other, it looks like we're in for yet another iteration of Simon's "The Odd Couple," with the mismatched pair becoming pals, growing and learning together, and eventually winding up better and stronger in the process. Soon, though, it becomes apparent that playwright Silverman is much more original than that. Growth and learning occur, but not entirely symmetrically, and not entirely for the better. Before long, things take a turn away from Simon and towards David Mamet. Or maybe Quentin Tarantino.

"I've been particularly interested in stories of how people transform themselves," says the playwright in an interview in the press kit, "or in people who are drawn or driven to a point in their lives where no choice is left to them but self-transformation." Both Sharon and Robyn are at that point, but as Sharon becomes increasingly enamored of Robyn's shady past, it becomes clear that transformation can be a two-edged sword.

I'm being deliberately vague about the story because Ms. Silverman's plot twists are part of what make "The Roommate" so much fun. Let it suffice to say that both Sharon and Robyn make some decisions that (to quote the playwright) "require a lot of boldness and recklessness, out of both desperation and desire for life."

Sharon is Margaret Daly, who St. Louis audiences will recognize as the down-to-earth Mrs. Drayton from the Rep's stellar production of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" earlier this year. Her Sharon appears similar at first, but appearances are deceiving. As the evening progresses it becomes clear that there's much more to this woman than the naïve Midwesterner we see in the opening scenes. Ms. Silverman's script puts Ms. Daly's character through some radical changes, and Ms. Daly makes even the less credible ones look and sound real.

Unlike Sharon, Robyn is closed and sly. The character goes through her own set of changes, but they're less overt. Tasha Lawrence's understated performance is pitched perfectly. She remains cool on the surface while still making it plain that there's turmoil underneath.

Photo: Bill Brymer

Mike Donahue's direction makes good use of the Bingham Theater's 360-degree playing area and sight lines appeared to be good everywhere. Andrew Boyce's detailed set looks exactly like the kind of kitchen Sharon would have. The show is, in short, technically perfect.

There are minor issues with the script. Subplots involving Sharon's absent son and Robyn's absent daughter never seem to go anywhere. Some of the more drastic changes in Sharon's character seem to come out of nowhere, and the final scene lacks the sense of dramatic resolution that I think the play needs. My co-critic Tina Farmer suggested that perhaps "The Roommate" would work better as a two act play (right now it's a 75-minute one act) that explores these issues in more depth.

Even so, in its current form this is an entertaining piece with two very strong and well-developed characters for middle-aged woman—still a relatively rare thing. And its technical demands are modest enough to make it a strong contender for smaller regional theatres. I would be very surprised if "The Roommate" didn't have a life beyond Humana in the coming years.

"The Roommate" runs through April 12th in the Bingham Theater at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It’s part of the 39th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. For more information: actorstheatre.org

Humana Festival 2015: Loss, longing, and life after death make for a compelling mix in "I Will Be Gone"

Amy Berryman
Photo: Bill Breymer

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: I Will Be Gone by Erin Courtney
When: March 13-April 12, 2015

[Watch my capsule video blog review with co-critic Tina Farmer.]

In Erin Courtney's drama "I Will Be Gone," almost all of the residents of a small town in California's Sierra Nevada mountains are haunted by something, be it painful memories, unfulfilled desires, or actual ghosts. Their attempts to come to grips with both the impermanence of life and the occasional visit by a traveller from Shakespeare's "undiscovered country" are the basis for a play which, while not without its flaws, is still intriguing and compelling.

As the play opens, seventeen-year-old Penelope is still hurting from the death of her mother, Theresa, only a month earlier. She's now living with her mother's sister, Josephine, in the small town where the two sisters grew up—and which Theresa left as soon as she could.

It's a typical small town where everybody knows everybody else. Josephine's old high-school sweetheart, Liam, is now the mayor, and their brainy friend Jim has become the local homeless eccentric, driven by his schizophrenia to endlessly rattle off tangentially related facts. When Penelope meets Elliot, the boy next door who is battling drug addiction, they find common ground as the town outsiders and become friends.

L-R: Birgit Huppuch and Amy Berryman
Photo: Bill Breymer

At a loss for what to do with herself, Penelope takes a job as a docent, leading tours of Bodie, the nearby ghost town, now preserved by law in a state of "arrested decay." As Penelope becomes more familiar with Bodie and its history, the town and the ghosts that might inhabit it take on added importance, and it becomes apparent that the adults around Penelope may be in their own states of arrested decay.

A terrific ensemble cast is led by Amy Berryman as Penelope and Birgit Huppuch as Josephine. It's nice to see a new play with big, multi-layered roles for women, and both of these actresses completely inhabit their parts. Alex Moggridge perfectly captures the fading charm of Liam, who has never quite grown up, and Triney Sandoval is unnervingly credible as the troubled Jim, unable to shut off the flow of thoughts from the once-brilliant mind that has betrayed him.

Ms. Courtney has created a painfully real character in Jim. A scene late in the play in which the teenage Jim has a romantic interlude with the young Theresa (perfectly played by Hernando Caicedo and Lexi Lapp, respectively) makes the character's fall all the more poignant, since it allows us to see the brilliant young man he once was.

Rachel Leslie does fine work as Liam's sharp-tonged wife Liz, and Seth Clayton is endearing as the troubled Eliot. Eighth grader Elise Coughlan has a nice cameo as Young Josephine in an opening ghost scene.

Scenic designer Andrew Boyce has filled the floor of the Bingham black box theater with weathered-looking doors and windows that suggest both the ghost town and its living neighbor. A large scale model of the ghost town descends from the ceiling on wires for scenes in Bodie, and then flies up to become the big, open sky characteristic of the high country. When it's lowered, it dominates the stage, reminding us of just how large a presence the ghost town is.

L-R: Lexi Lapp and Hernando Caicedo
Photo: Bill Breymer

Kip Fagan's direction is precise and crisp, but he often violates the First Law of blocking for theatre in the round by having actors face each other directly instead of working on diagonals. As a result, there are times when parts of the audience see nothing but performers' backs.

Original music and sound design by Daniel Kluger and Seth Clayton produce vivid soundscapes, including disturbingly realistic earthquakes and otherworldly manifestations.

At one hour and forty-five minutes with no intermission, "I Will Be Gone" felt a bit long. A couple of scenes, such as a punk rock band rehearsal in the city hall, seemed to serve no useful purpose and could probably be cut. Some elements of the supernatural subplot also felt a bit under-developed. On the whole, though, this is a very strong script that says intelligent things about loss and life transitions, and does so with compassion and humor.

This play deserves a life beyond Humana. It could be very attractive to regional theatres looking for new material. Even smaller companies with more modest technical resources should be able to pull it off.

"I Will Be Gone" runs through April 12th at Actors Theatre of Louisville, as part of the 39th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. For more information: actorstheatre.org.

Humana Festival 2015: An inglorious birthday party for Thomas Merton

Photo: Bill Brymer

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: The Glory of the World by Charles Mee
When: through April 12, 2015

[Watch my video blog capsule review with co-critic Tina Farmer.]

Charles Mee's "The Glory of the World" was written to celebrate the centenary of the birthday of author and philosopher Thomas Merton. Born in France but a long-time resident of Kentucky, Merton was a man of many parts. Although baptized in the Church of England, he was a devout Catholic who embraced Zen Bhuddism. He was an ascetic who had a child as a result of an extramarital affair. He was a cloistered Monk who, as a result of a spiritual revelation on a street corner in downtown Louisville, threw himself back into the world to become a political activist. He was a pacifist, Communist, adventurer and much more.

He was, in short, a man of dualities. "Mee's play," writes Amy Wegener in her program notes, "adopts a structure that reflects those dualities, beginning in silence and evolving toward cacophonous celebration. It unfolds as a series of toasts that erupt into a raucous party."

Photo: Bill Brymer

That looks good on paper. As directed by ATL Artistic Director (and script co-creator) Les Waters, though, it was rather like a drunken, coked-up frat party where you, as an audience member, are the only sober person. Many of the college kids in the audience apparently found it hilarious. The adults looked bored. Some of them walked out.

The play begins on a bare stage with a large overhead door upstage center. It looked like a massive industrial garage, complete with drywall and power outlets. Mr. Waters (presumably representing Merton) enters and sits, facing upstage, at a table. Sentences are projected on the set left and right that suggest the kind of thoughts that might run through your mind while trying to calm yourself for meditation—the awareness of ambient sound and so on.

Long after this becomes tedious, the garage door opens and the stage fills with male partygoers. A series of toasts to Merton degenerates into an argument that consists mostly of dueling quotations culled from everyone from Mother Theresa to Lady Gaga. From that point on, the audience is subjected to an increasingly noisy, chaotic, and surreal series of skits and sight gags.

The younger members of the cast engage in a duel of silly muscle-flexing body builder poses. Two of the actors perform a cheesy nightclub version of "Oops, I Did it Again." A pantomime rhinoceros is led across the stage. Two actors strip down to Speedos and glide back and forth across a water-soaked plastic mat. And so on.

Finally, it all degenerates into a smartly choreographed (if sometimes sloppily executed) fight scene that leaves the stage strewn with trash.

Photo: Bill Brymer

The actors leave through the garage door and Mr. Waters returns, this time facing the audience. Now the projected sentences pose a series of questions about existence and our place in the world. After an hour of empty sound and fury, silence is now a bit of a relief. There's a final question and then a blackout. The play (if you can call it that) is over.

At around 80 minutes with no intermission, "The Glory of the World" is far too long, given the paucity of its ideas. The point about the contrast between meditative silence and the chaos of the world could have been made more effectively and economically in half the time. This isn't so much a play as it is a collection of other people's quotes alternating with sight gags and pop culture references. It's the sort of thing the Leonard Pinth Garnell character on "Saturday Night Live" lampooned: "Bad Conceptual Theatre."

That said, I have to congratulate the seventeen-member cast (eighteen, if you count Mr. Waters) for their unwavering energy, stamina, and physical acting skills. This looks like an exhausting and exhilarating piece to perform, and they deserve applause for the quality of their work.

A thinker of Merton's depth and importance deserves a much better 100th birthday celebration than the one provided here. As it is, "The Glory of the World" seems to be more about Les Waters and Charles Mee than Thomas Merton.

"The Glory of the World" runs through April 12th in the Pamela Brown auditorium at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It's part of the 39th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. For more information: actorstheatre.org

The soul of wit

"Winter Games"
Photo: Tom Legoff

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: Ten Minute Plays
When: April 5 and 6, 2014
Where: 38th Humana Festival of New American Theatre

It may be trite to say that big things come in small packages, but as a description of this short (45 minute) trio of one-acts, it's also completely true.

The program opened with Rachel Bonds's charming slice of life vignette "Winter Games," directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh.  On an early winter morning in a small Pennsylvania town, bakery employee Mary (Julia Bynum) is smoking out back, waiting for the morning rush of customers.  She's been up all night watching the winter Olympics and is grumpy as hell.  She's joined by fellow employee Jamie (Jason Huff).  He's well rested and a compulsive optimist.  She seems to be just the opposite.  But as they talk about the games and the feral cats that hang around the bakery, they soon find that they're not as different as Mary might have thought. 

Will they become friends?  Lovers?  Who knows?  The important thing is that they make a connection and that, in a ten-minute play is enough.  Ms. Bynum and Mr. Huff were utterly credible and comfortable in their characters and Ms. Yousefzadeh's minimalist direction served the piece well.

Next was Jason Gray Platt's one-actor play, "Some Prepared Remarks (A History in Speech)," directed by Les Waters.  Bruce McKenzie is the protagonist, who takes us through his life—from an awkward child giving a report in front of class to an elderly man delivering a eulogy at his wife's funeral—using notes on pieces of paper.  Brightly colored construction paper at the beginning, then index cards and small notes until, at the end, his life lies scattered in front of him.  Like paper, Mr. Platt seems to be saying, our lives are fragile and easily swept away.

Mr. McKenzie's performance was a masterpiece of understatement, beautifully illuminating this often funny and heartbreakingly real script.  His Parkinson's tremors at the end were, perhaps, a bit overdone, but by then he had so thoroughly inhabited this character that it hardly mattered.

The set concluded with Gregory Hischak's absurdly surreal "Poor Shem," in which three office workers—Kendel "a dominant male" (Andrew Garman), Kaitlin "a woman of easily diluted passions" (Jackie Chung), and Kyle "a less-dominant male" (Matthew Stadelmann)—discover that the paper jam in their copy machine contains not just 8-? by 11 sheets but also (preposterously) the titular Shem.  What should they do?  Call the repairman?  Call a priest?  Hit "reset"?  The only thing they all agree on is that it would be a bad idea to hit "print" again.

"Poor Shem" started out as a purely spoken word piece and I can see how its silly premise might work better as a radio play.  Nevertheless this trio of actors and director Meredith McDonough had great fun with it, delivering exactly the quota of laughs the audience needed after the emotional depths of Mr. Platt's script.

I've been coming to Humana for four years now, but this was my first opportunity to catch the ten-minute play program.  If this one was typical, I have apparently missed some good stuff.

Mixing it up

Zach Wymore and Mirirai Sithole in "War of Attrition"
Photo: Bill Brymer

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Who: Actors Theatre of Louisville
What: Remix 38 by Jackie Sibblies Drury, Idris Goodwin, Basil Kreimendahl, Justin Kuritzkes, and Amelia Roper
When: March 21 – April 6, 2014
Where: 38th Humana Festival of New American Plays

Every Humana Festival has a late night show that features the members of the Acting Apprentice Company.  In previous years, the format has been an evening of short plays with a common theme. 

This year, the festival took a different approach.  "In a nod to the many world premieres that have made the Humana Festival what it is today," writes Hannah Rae Montgomery in her program note, "we complied a list of arresting dramatic elements, structural conceits, and vivid images from a representative sampling of particularly influential plays.  We then invited our intrepid playwrights to create several short scenes which incorporate items on the list."

The result was a varied and variable collection of nine one-acts running around 90 minutes and reflecting an impressive variety of themes and styles.  Some worked better than others and a few wanted some trimming, but none was lacking in imagination.  For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to single out the plays that struck me as the most effective; you can see a complete list of all nine plays at the end of this review.

Justin Kuritzkes contributed one of the best pieces in the set.  Performed entirely in mime, "War of Attrition" neatly skewered the idiocy of armed conflict as the generals of two opposing eighteenth-century armies (Zach Wymore and Mirirai Sithole) repeatedly fail to compromise while volley after volley reduces the numbers of their armies.  When the last soldier on each side has fallen, the generals load and fire their muskets at each other—and miss.  Because, after all, they're generals and haven't the foggiest notion of how to actually fight.  As the lights dim, they're still at it.

Idris Goodwin (whose "How We Got On" was, hands down, the best show of the 2012 festival) gave us an amusing, in-jokey look at the audition process with "is that what I look like?" as well as a creepy portrait of a psychopath in "The Sharpening Man.”

"Finger Play (not a real title)" by Basil Kreimendahl had the darkly comic feel of a Cohen brothers film, as an accidentally amputated finger becomes the subject of an intense search and (weirdly) an object of religious veneration.

Easily the finest piece of the evening, though, was Jackie Sibblies Drury's "and now I only dance at weddings," in which a young woman (Peregrine Heard) tries to explain what she hates about weddings.  Anyone who has ever been to a wedding probably recognized the absurd situations acted out by the members of the ensemble—the smarmy DJ, the drunken antics, and of course, the often abandoned and lubricious dancing.  And yet when, in the final touching scene, the protagonist walked down her own aisle, we were reminded that behind all the lunacy is a great deal of love.

Ian Frank's direction kept the evening moving along briskly and his blocking insured that nobody in the Bingham Theatre's black box space missed any critical action.  Lindsay Jones's pre-show music, which  remixed classic songs from the last 40 years, was also great fun. Taken as a whole, "Remix 38" was one of the better late night shows I've seen at Humana.  It wasn't perfect, but it never wore out its welcome, and even the plays that didn't entirely succeed still had something worthwhile to offer.

The plays in "Remix 38" were (in order of performance): "Every Show You've Ever Seen" by Amelia Roper, "Like We Do" by Basil Kreimendahl, "If…Then…" by Justin Kuritzkes, "a love song // a remix /" by Amelia Roper, "is that what I look like?" by Idris Goodwin, "War of Attrition" by Justin Kuritzkes, "The Sharpening Man" by Idris Goodwin, "Finger Play (not a real title)" by Basil Kreimendahl, and "and now I only dance at weddings" by Jackie Sibblies Drury.