The best plays at Louisville's Humana Festival radiate promise
The theater community has found a new rite of spring. On the last weekend of March, some 400 professionals—actors and agents, playwrights and directors, critics from every major U.S. publication and from a dozen foreign countries—convene in Louisville in hopes of seeing early productions of significant American dramas. The optimism is often justified. Since its inception six years ago, the Humana Festival of New American Plays has introduced, among other works, The Gin Game, Getting Out, Crimes of the Heart, Agnes of God and Lone Star, all of which have gone on to win a place in the repertoire and two of which have won Pulitzer Prizes. For his efforts, Producing Director Jon Jory has earned his Actors Theater of Louisville a Tony Award and his festival a reputation as the year's headiest theater binge. In three days this year the visitors were exposed to 13 plays (including five one-acters) and enough lively conversation and fast food to keep them stuffed till summer.
In any festival this compact, where impressions and insights jostle for retention in the playgoer's cluttered mind, similarities among plays are easier to spot than originality. This year's crowds chuckled every time barking was heard offstage. Canines figured in nine of the plays, from the howling hounds of hell in Timothy Mason's In a Northern Landscape to the title creature in Patrick Tovatt's Bartok As Dog. Feminism, incest and home cooking were other recurrent themes. But on half a dozen occasions one could hear distinctive voices rising above the collective murmur—and, in Kathleen Tolan's A Weekend Near Madison, the unmistakable cry of an infant hit.
Two of the one-act plays brazened through the cliche barrier to make provocative comments on the battle between artistic integrity and professional survival. In Kent Broadhurst's lovely The Habitual Acceptance of the Near Enough, a Manhattan gallery owner (Frederic Major) instructs a brilliant, unknown painter (John C. Vennema) in the art of compromise; fortunately the lesson does not take. In Jeffrey Sweet's The Value of Names, Benny (Larry Block), a blacklisted actor who has revived his career on a TV sitcom, crosses rusty swords with Leo (Frederic Major again), the theater director who had testified against him before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The play's political prejudices are clearly on Benny's side; its emotional sympathies are subtle and shifting. Benny uses his aggressive wit to humiliate any sparring partner, while Leo's views on politics and art are wryly ruminative:
"Trotsky was killed with a pickax, you know. I imagine some day John Carpenter will make a movie of it." Emily Mann, the play's director, is alive to both the passion and the ambiguities in each man's argument and, by staging the piece at a ferocious pace, demonstrates that the drama of ideas can be the most exalted of blood sports.