IF YOU HAD SCOURED BROADWAY THE last weekend of March for a new American play--one of those unfashionable things with a few actors and no singing cats--you would have come away famished and depressed. A paltry five new works were on display, including one in previews and another limping to a close. If you had gone that same weekend to a single venue in Kentucky, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, you could have feasted on a banquet of meaty new drama: six full-length plays and six shorter ones, including the latest work of such luminaries as Tony Kushner, Jane Martin, David Henry Hwang, John Patrick Shanley, Anne Bogart and Craig Lucas. And you would have left the 20th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays with a subversive thought: yes, theater has a place, a reason, a future.
The festival (half of whose million-dollar annual budget is underwritten by the Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., the Louisville-based health-care company) is not exactly a secret. "What we've tried to be," says Jon Jory, the ATL's guiding light for 27 years, "is a freshet for the American repertoire." Among the 224 new plays in the fest's 20 years are two Pulitzer Prize winners, The Gin Game and Crimes of the Heart, as well as Agnes of God, Extremities and off-Broadway's current Below the Belt. And however perilous the playwright's lot, plenty of folks want to join the wake. Each year, Jory and his staff read an astonishing 3,000 scripts.
This time the festival attracted visitors from Britain, Denmark, Israel, Syria, Australia and China. Even Hollywood showed up: ABC, NBC, TNT, Warner Bros. Television and Carsey-Werner all sent emissaries. Some were looking to snag writers and actors for the mainstream entertainment maw. Others came to join the collegial ferment. Says Janet Blake, a veep at Walt Disney Television: "Where else can you have a lively discussion with Jimmy Breslin"--who presented a savagely witty skit about Newt Gingrich haranguing his first wife in her hospital bed--"and two minutes later be talking to Tony Kushner? Only in Louisville."
Camaraderie is swell, but the play's the thing, and this year Humana had the goods. The big find was Naomi Wallace, a Kentucky native whose work has been produced by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company but virtually not at all in the U.S. Her luxuriously poetic One Flea Spare is set during the London plague of 1665, when "at night the rats came out in twos and threes to drink the sweat from our faces." The stage is a canvas of convulsive emotions and pristine images of four tortured refugees from the pestilence. Only a 12-year-old girl promises spiritual absolution; as an older woman says, "The breath of a child has passed through the lungs of an angel." Wallace is similarly blessed; she weaves a sorcerer's web of words.