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"Serious plays today tend to be more political, episodic, cinematic," says Jory. "They tend to be less about wanting, after all these years, to have your father say, 'I love you.'" Yet reconciliation informed many of the festival works, including two lovely playlets, Lucas' What I Meant Was (a young man reimagines the dinner-table arguments he's had with his family, so that everyone is now rueful and forgiving) and Hwang's Trying to Find Chinatown (a Caucasian and a Chinese discover detente in their crisscrossing cultural identities). Joan Ackermann's sweet, funny The Batting Cage takes a comic cliche, the smothering sister (enchantingly embodied by Veanne Cox), and gives her life and depth as she comes to terms with her family.
Louisville's house star is the secretive, pseudonymous Jane Martin, who made her rep with the 1982 Talking With--11 trenchant monologues for women--and has since written eight plays for the ATL. Some think Martin is Jory, perhaps working with other writers; one actor who starred in a Martin play impishly hinted that the real author is George Stephanopoulos. This year's offering was Jack and Jill, an intimate, panoramic look at modern sexual inequality. The play neatly twists audience sympathies on a volatile subject. So did Martin's 1993 abortion play Keely and Du, which was nominated for a Pulitzer but has not been staged in New York City.
"It's unfortunate," Jory says, "but the serious play seems less central to New York theater." And vice versa. A play like Keely and Du can be ignored in Manhattan and still receive some 300 productions in the U.S. and abroad. That's a loss for New York theater and a tribute to Jon Jory's ATL, the most nurturing midwife of new American drama. From now on, maybe Broadway should be called "off-Louisville."
--Reported by William Tynan/Louisville