Louisville: Where New Plays Go to Be Born

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Michael Brosilow

The cast of Under Construction

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The Hard Weather Boating Party, by Naomi Wallace, suffers from something like the opposite problem. The play knows where it's going; the problem is getting there. Three apparently unrelated men gather in a seedy motel room to plan a murder. Yet the first act is padded out with mostly aimless talk; only in the second act, when the three return after the semi-botched operation, do we learn what's on Wallace's mind. The men's target, it seems, is the chief executive of a chemical company that has been polluting the waters and sickening workers. It's nice to find a small-bore character drama with a big social agenda, and the play takes some intriguing allegorical and fanastical turns. It doesn't quite work, but Wallace may have opened up a new genre: environmental noir.

Absalom, a first play by 25-year-old actress Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of director Elia), is a more conventional family drama, set in Berkshires home of an aging book editor, who is having a party for his new memoir revealing some uncomfortable family secrets. Kazan stuffs her play with characters and incidents; old feuds and private griefs; sibling rivalries and the inevitable outsider — a prodigal adopted son, now a hot TV producer, who arrives at the party uninvited. Kazan manages all this with some flair, but the gears show too much; it's one of those plays where characters keep stumbling into the end of conversations they're not supposed to hear, or witnessing smooches they're not supposed to see. The clan, moreover, seems too derivative — not of real life, but of some hothouse literary fantasy world: everybody here seems to be either writing a book, has just abandoned one or is brooding over the one that got away. Why don't dentists have these problems?

The festival's center of gravity, however, was far away from this kind of well-made dramaturgy. Three of the six full-length works presented (along with a program of 10-minute plays, one of the festival's signature events, and an evening of sketches showcasing the apprentice troupe) were experimental, non-narrative works. Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry, directed and co-written by artistic director Masterson, is a gracefully staged pastiche of the writings of bucolic Kentucky poet Wendell Berry, but is a little too high-minded and low-energy for my tastes. I had more fun with the raucous urban energy in Ameriville, from the New York-based troupe Universes, which uses a mix of song, poetry and movement to express the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, even though its hectoring tone eventually becomes wearing.

There's no hectoring in Under Construction, and more moments of genuine emotion too. Amid all the absurdist chaos, there's a brief scene in which all the actors, one by one, pull a ringing cellphone out of a bucket, answer a call and proceed simultaneously to have a hushed, fraught conversation with a lover — a Babel of romantic pain. Later the actors gather to recite a round-robin reverie for icons of mid-century American life, with no irony whatsoever: "I remember my father's collection of arrowheads." "I remember loafers with pennies in them." "I remember game rooms in basements." "I remember come-as-you-are parties..." I'll remember that clown dragging the iron, but even now he seems kind of sweet.

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