If "the play's the thing," as Shakespeare claimed, Louisville was the place to be last weekend. More than 500 theater professionals and journalists from around the world gathered on the banks of the Ohio River for the 21st Humana Festival of New American Plays, an important, if not infallible, baro-meter of trends in American theater.
This year's prevailing theme was intimacy, both physical and intellectual. Six full-length and three short works fleshed out the bill. But only a handful of the offerings hold the prospect of continued life at regional theaters.Chief among these is "Lighting Up the Two-Year-Old," an urgent drama by neophyte playwright Benjie Aerenson about horse racing. At a failing horse farm in northern Florida, two men conspire to kill a thoroughbred and collect the insurance. The farm is hemorrhaging money, and trainer Carl (Bob Burrus) knows it's only a matter of time before the creditors move in. He persuades stable hand Bud (Lou Sumrall) to electrocute a prized 2-year-old that failed to live up to its promise. In doing so, the men set in motion a chain of events that can only lead to betrayal.
In Aerenson's hands, a complex subject is rendered surprisingly simple. Yet the play benefits mostly from a 40-minute second act as crisp and compelling as a real life photo finish.
Edwin Sanchez proves entertaining in quite a different way with "Icarus," yet another telling of the Beauty and the Beast saga, this time in a human context. Deformed drifter Atagracia (Denise Casano) breaks her disabled brother out of an institution and sets up shop in an empty California beach house. She wants her brother Primitivo (Nelson Vasquez) to swim every day, to grow strong by reaching for the sun. She uses her ugliness as a shield against the world, behind which Primitivo can hide.
But shields can crack, and hers does with the arrival of another refugee, this one with permission to use the house. Beau (Ross Gibby) arrives wearing his own stocking mask, pretending to be disfigured as he deals with the recent murder of his brother. This is the stranger Atagracia falls hard for, only to recoil in terror when she removes the mask and discovers a man as beautiful as a god beneath.
Sanchez details the collision between love and pity. And on the fringes of the plot are two characters trapped in their own disillusions: A fading beauty queen and an old man with a suitcase full of dreams.
Fine acting, an impeccable set (Paul Owens remains one of the stage's premier designers) and genuine tenderness inform a plot that could use a bit of polishing but has its heart firmly in the right place.
Polish could also benefit Steven Dietz's "Private Eyes," certainly the festival's most playful offering with its play-within-a-play motif. This is new ground for Dietz, whose 1988 drama "God's Country" has been produced dozens of times around the world and remains topical for its focus on neo-Nazism and the slaying of Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg.
"Private Eyes" details the affair between an actress and a director in pithy, comic fashion. The hook? The actress (Kate Goehring) is co-starring in a play with her real-life husband (Lee Sellers). And the subject of the play, directed by her lover, Adrian (V. Craig Heiden-reich), is adultery. Thus, every time the husband utters a line from the script, director and actress are left wondering if he knows about them. Once the reality of his knowledge hits home, the question becomes: What will he do?
Dietz is a solid stylist; the plot folds back on itself, then folds over again. Nothing is ever what it seems in this work, which seethes with biting humor at every turn. Still, "Private Eyes" can be a chore. No one begrudges a playwright excessive creativity, but Dietz throws too much at his audience. You barely have time to decipher one inside joke (the play is as much about theater as marriage) before he races to the next. The result is a good play, a nimble play, but something short of a great one.
Greatness also eludes Richard Dresser's "Gunshy," though it will likely receive the most productions from its festival showcase. The conceit is sitcom perfect (thus a natural for dinner-theaters and community stages): The divorce of Evie and Duncan (Maryann Urbano, William McNulty) is going none too well. Each has found a new partner - she an anal-retentive coffee salesman, he a selfabsorbed co-ed - but when the quartet is snowbound in New England for a weekend, Evie and Duncan quickly realize their fractious separation may have been premature.
"Gunshy" makes intimacy farcical, questioning what we expect of our respective partners and punctuating those expectations with punch lines. Yet Dresser breaks too little ground to be noticeable. His play is funny (Urbano in particular made her role memorable), yet such abject familiarity at a new play festival can't help but breed a modicum of contempt.
That said, only two of this year's plays were out-and-out disappointments. Robert Scanlan's "In Her Sight," a drama, set in the 18th century, about a blind pianist and the quack court physician who attempts to cure her, takes us into the Mozartian world of classical Vienna. Mozart, in fact, is a character here, as are Franz Anton Mesmer (who inspired the word "mes-merize") and Benjamin Franklin.
Yet "Sight" offers the one thing the theater can do without: plodding historical drama. The odd delightful moment isn't enough to stem a sense of malaise. Watching this play is like being back in a high school history class. You find yourself sitting through it out of duty, not desire.
Naomi Iizuka's "Polaroid Stories" differs only in its ambitions, not its outcome. One wag described it as "'Rent' without the music," a reference to its bohemian landscape in relating the story of a group of street kids who frequent a rundown pier at the edge of a big city. Each has a story to tell, an angst to excise. Yet Iizuka plays metaphorical hardball here, naming her characters Dionysus, Eurydice, Narcissus et al. for mythological ballast. It's the sort of play that's great fun for actors and directors: a meaty staging for a slight story. Which may explain why much of the audience came away perplexed, asking, "What was that?"
Six full-length plays and nary a home run to equal "Agnes of God," "Crimes of the Heart" or "'night, Mother." Does that translate as failure? Not hardly. New play festivals are the life blood of the theater, forums for exploring even unpopular possibilities.
Individual moments may fail to inspire, but the larger goal remains unassailable.