Mixing it up

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

Share on Google+

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.