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. 

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