(2 of 2)
Many of the characters in this year's plays inhabit a landscape of dead or deferred dreams. In John Pielmeier's Courage, the Scots playwright James M. Barrie laments "the fierce joy of loving too much. It is a terrible thing!" Courage avoids the standard pitfall of the full-length monologue: that of making its subject too ingratiating. It keeps Barrie at a respectful distance from his audience and his own feelings until late in the play, when he relates the awful fates of the four children who inspired characters in his Peter Pan. Actor Paul Collins gives Barrie and the play a slow, mournful dignity.
Dignity is a quality that Shroeder Duncan, the laid-back loser of Murphy Guyer's Eden Court, would gladly settle for. Murphy has a dead-end job, a cluttered mobile home, a cynical pal (Steve Rankin) and a wife (the elfin Holly Hunter) who still carries a torch for Elvis Presley. This comedy's ambitions are no loftier than Shroeder's; it is just a tasty slice of lowlife, but full of sweet feeling for its tattered eccentrics. As Shroeder, Actor-Playwright Guyer is a brown study of the good ole boy, wondering what ever happened to the kingdom of machismo.
That particular dictatorship, as a number of the Louisville plays make clear, has been overthrown. Now, in the emerging sensibility of equality, men and women must find-new places for themselves and each other. It is a challenge eagerly faced by the five young people in A Weekend Near Madison. Four of them—David (William Mesnik), a psychotherapist; his wife Doe (Robin Groves), a short-story writer; his brother Jim (Randle Mell), a painter; and Jim's former girlfriend Nessa (Mary McDonnell), a singer—shared a giddy faith in revolution while at the University of Wisconsin in the early '70s. When they meet again it is 1979; time and events have tamped down their political ardor. But Nessa has become a radical feminist who "had to give up sleeping with my oppressors" and has taken up with a girlish member of her back-up group (Holly Hunter again). Nessa's litany of "Heavy"s and "Oh, wow"s, her laser-beam stare and the brightest, most intimidating smile since Sissy Spacek's identify her as a spirit of the '60s. For the others, life is more complicated, the vision more blurred. Doe even daydreams about returning to Manhattan, "where the radiators hiss in whiter and I never see the horizon."
In three acts and at 2½ hours, A Weekend Near Madison might benefit from losing ten or 15 minutes and one offstage death. But even in its present form, as directed by Mann and performed by a pristine ensemble, Playwright Tolan's work radiates promise and achievement. Its theme, of community under pressure, also helps define this Louisville weekend, where actors may appear in three or four different plays, turn their talent to playwrighting and even schmooze with the critics. The beleaguered American theater can take hope from these artists, all stretching to see the same horizon.
—By Richard Corliss