Shepherdstown 2012 and the Rise of the Rolling Premiere

Take a healthy organism, deny it the environment in which it grows, and it may seek a new environment and new ways of propagating. Serious American theater has negotiated that kind of change.

Once upon a time, plays were nurtured to maturity in a system of tryout houses in places like New Haven and Philadelphia. But those showcases largely disappeared over the second half of the last century. Even for musicals, the tryout theater system has largely been replaced. This does not remotely mean that most new plays are, out of the box, "ready for their closeup," i.e., the Broadway or Off-Broadway production that garners a review in The New York Times, a sort of stamp of approval that then makes the play marketable for production in regional theater. Rather, new plays are apt to run through a more complex system of developmental venues that seems to be still evolving.

One sort of venue that lends itself to this purpose is the theater festival (for example the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville each year). Another is regional theater itself, although regional theaters are more apt to be the places where new plays are transplanted, after having successfully blossomed in the nursery of New York. It is uncommon, however, for seedling plays to pop up just once in one of these locations and then go direct to New York. Rather, the tryout seems to have been replaced by what Ed Herendeen, Producing Director of the Shepherdstown (West Virginia) Contemporary American Theater Festival, described to me as a rolling world premiere.

The rolling premiere differs from tryouts because the former involve a single creative team (playwright, actors, directors, tech people) honing a play, whereas the latter typically involves different productions of the same play at different places around the country, timed closely together. The creative teams may be collaborating to some degree, but the productions will remain separate. However, the playwright and the play benefit from being able to build on what works and what does not.

Shepherdstown, which this last summer presented its twenty-second season over four July weeks, typifies the "rolling premiere" approach. Five new plays appeared there, all of major league caliber, unexceptionably acted and directed. This was the first production of Johnna Adams's Gidion's Knot, the second of Bob Clyman's The Exceptionals, the second American production of Neil LaBute's In a Forest, Dark and Deep (after a 2011 West End production), the second of Evan M. Wiener's Captors; and Bess Wohl's Barcelona, which premiered here, will go next to People's Light & Theatre in Malvern, Pa. It is likely that each play will end up in New York, but equally unlikely that most if any of them will go there directly.

At Shepherdstown, the plays are timed so that a theatergoer can take them all in over one weekend, and experiencing the plays that way is highly recommended. As we shall see, a picture emerges, not only of the plays chosen, but perhaps of the state of serious American playwriting at this point.

The strongest of this year's entrants was Barcelona, which takes two characters from completely different worlds and frames of reference, united only by a hollow core in each of their lives. In little more than a stage hour, each has put a name to the other's problem, has challenged the other to surmount it, and has met the challenge received in return. At the end of this luminous play, the stage is, fittingly, flooded with light. The miracle that each has wrought in the other's life is tiny and deliberately underplayed, it is interesting, and it is believable. At the same time, it is quite possible to believe that by forcing the other to make an important alteration in plans, each has fundamentally saved the other. A playwright who can pull off something this wonderful deserves all the stagings I predict this play will receive.

The two initially lost souls are Irene (Anne Marie Nest), a Colorado real estate agent who has come...