LOUISVILLE, KY As the Christian Right sets the national agenda with increasing ease, the beleaguered liberal playwrights of the nonprofit American theater are feeling more and more like the apocalypse is nigh.
That, at least, is the sensation at the Actors Theater of Louisville during the 29th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, running from Feb. 27-April 9. The government, Big Media and arrogant American self-interest are all taking it on the chin from a mix of up-and-coming playwrights.
Times are indeed ripe for hard-hitting political theater.
But with one barn-storming exception -- Carlyle Brown's rollickingly accomplished "Pure Confidence," a funny show about black jockeys in the Civil War-era South -- this year's Humana slate lacks structural rigor and feels unsure of itself.
That's partly because too many of the plays are trying to paint too many deep thoughts onto canvases that cannot stand up to so much paint. Playwrights have a lot to be angry about, but most of the plays at the fest don't have a sufficiently developed or expansive structure to hold it all.
Kia Corthron downloads every liberal lament in the book into "Moot the Messenger," an extensively researched but singularly unsubtle polemic about a once-idealistic black journalist.
The piece goes after all the main conservative constructions of the past two years -- from Jessica Lynch to Fox News to the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Many of its points are worth the making, but it takes a hell of an imagination to build a world where all of this fury can live with artistic merit. And this is not that play.
The most controversial play is John Belluso's sensationalist "A Nervous Smile," which happens to tap into the national obsession with caring for the severely handicapped. Herein, two affluent Gotham families (one headed by a single mom having an affair with the other's married dad) decide to ditch their time-consuming kids with cerebral palsy -- leaving them on someone's doorstep with a key to a safe-deposit box -- and then run off to Rio as if they were characters in "Ocean's 11."
There are moments of lucidity here. When the play is exploring the incompatibility of our love of personal gratification with our moral obligations, this writer is on useful ground. But the play's adventure-movie setup is so preposterous and so full of narrative holes, you don't really believe anybody could actually exist. And to make things worse, David Esbjornson's production is acted and directed with all the subtlety of the writing.
Kathleen Tolan's "Memory House" has some of the opposite problems. This one-act, one-scene, real-time, uber-realist affair is composed of a domestic conversation between a college-bound kid (superbly played by Cassandra Bissell) and her divorced, liberal, ex-dancer mother (Taylor Miller).
The rub? The kid was adopted from Russia as a tyke and, apparently, is just now dealing with that. With a due-tonight college biographical essay there to provide stension, Mom and daughter battle and banter away, trying to come to terms with the nasty, imperialist side of international adoption.
There's a certain sweetness to the proceedings at times, but this is a dull and predictable play.
Adam Bock's "The Shaker Chair" is a good deal better than that -- and it offers enough to suggest that Bock is a name to watch. The deftly written piece, which features the best acting of the festival, centers on a woman in later middle age (Kathleen Butler, in superb form) who cannot quite decide how involved to get in the travails of two close relationships: an environmental-activist best friend and a sister stuck in a seemingly abusive marriage.
Bock, clearly, is writing about the rebirth of activism in an older demographic that often suffers in a dignified silence.
Everything toddles along well -- the writing is uncommonly smart and humanistic -- until the playwright kills off one of the characters and resorts to the empowering ending that we've been predicting for the last hour. But with an overhauled second act and some juicier cushions on its too-thin slats of thematic wood, "Shaker Chair" could re-emerge to useful effect.
One might wish the same for Allison Moore's "Hazard County," another piece that starts promisingly but self-destructs long before the end. Herein, Moore uses the ongoing national love of "The Dukes of Hazard" as a kind of metaphor for the complexity of our relationship with the less gentle sides of Southern culture.This play at least engages with the other side -- it follows a young, idealistic reporter (again) into a backwater Southern town, where he tries and fails to understand what happened when a rural white guy was murdered by a bunch of young blacks.
If Moore left it as an essentially personal quest, she'd have a smart and decent play. But she does not. Instead, "Hazard" wants to go after that old enemy, Big Media, from its exploitational reality TV to its biased news. The play collapses under all that weight.
That leaves "Pure Confidence," the only show here this year that might provoke someone to open a checkbook. Brown, best known as the author of "The African Company Presents King Richard III" is one of this country's most overlooked playwrights.
Maybe this terrific play -- imagine "Seabiscuit" written by August Wilson -- will change that.
In the first act, which proceeds at a joyously frantic pace, we meet a jockey called Simon who is riding to secure his own freedom, but must also negotiate a complex relationship with white slave-owners of varying stripes. By the second, the jockey has hit some hard realities.
"Pure Confidence" pulls no punches when it comes to the importance of black self-determination and the ability of white liberals to understand that. But it's no polemic. Indeed, it manages to get to the complex core of black-white relations in the South, exploring the limits and possibilities of human sympathy in an inhumane system.
Complex, funny and with appeal for audiences of all stripes ,"Pure Confidence" has a big, juicy vision, a stylistic verve and a credible story that supports its ideas.
One second-act scene, wherein the inevitable reporter interferes (again), needs some work. But otherwise, this is one big and decent Kentucky play. And with a brilliant lead performance from Gavin Lawrence, Clinton Turner Davis' production could run on any kind of track.
Contact the Variety newsroom at
news@variety.com