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