1996 Olympic Arts Festival: AT&T Theater Series (review)

Under the umbrella of the nine-week Olympic Arts Festival (1 June–4 August 1996), The Theater Series presented twelve plays at two venues located in Atlanta’s Arts district, the Alliance Theatre and the 14th Street Playhouse, each of which house two performance spaces. The series also included five productions at Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts’ two stages. Noticeably lacking was the international scope of the Barcelona and Los Angeles festivals. Instead, theatre was selected and commissioned to achieve the first of the three stated goals of the Cultural Olympiad, “to explore . . . the diverse cultural experiences of Atlanta, the State of Georgia and the American South.” When all the productions are taken together, the series succeeded not only in presenting diverse perspectives on “the South,” but also in underscoring its particular historical tensions.

Forced to compete with other cultural and sporting events, most local companies revived commercially successful past productions. In spite of the emphasis on entertainment, each theatre’s particular artistic vision emerged. Offerings by the area’s smaller theatre companies took two forms: those concerned with broader American issues from the perspective of Atlanta’s most powerful factions—white liberals, black men, and gay men—and those concerned with representing the American South. Of the former, the Horizon Theatre Company reprised its area premiere of Linda Barry’s musical cartoon on American race relations, The Good Times are Killing Me. Actors’ Express revived its 1991 musical, The Harvey Milk Show written by two Atlanta natives, Dan Pruit and Patrick Hutchison. Jomandi Productions, Atlanta’s most prominent black theatre company, revived Thomas W. Jones II’s 1994 musical entertainment on black male identity, Hip 2: Birth of the Boom. The decidedly unlocal John Houseman Theater Company’s production of Ali, a one-character play by Geoffrey C. Ewing and Graydon Royce starring Ewing as Ali, paid homage to the battered figure also honored at the Olympic opening ceremony. The production, previously mounted in New York and London, ventured into the politics informing the sports figure’s life. For these productions, both casts and audiences were diverse (or at least black and white).

Productions set in the South were all written and directed from a white Southern perspective and played to predominately white audiences. The Alabama Shakespeare Company remounted Lizard, a play set in Alabama and Louisiana adapted by Dennis Covington from his novel in ASF’s Southern Writers’ Project. ART Station offered a World Premiere of Harmony Ain’t Easy, a one-act play adapted and directed by artistic director David Thomas from an autobiographical short story by Ferrol Sams.

The Alliance, Atlanta’s regional theatre, appealed to the various factions in its anticipated audience with four relatively new plays. Under the artistic direction of Kenny Leon, they included the newly commissioned The Last Night of Ballyhoo, by Alfred Uhry; the revival of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky; the hosting of the United States premiere of the Royal National Theatre’s Dealer’s Choice; and cosponsoring, with Theatre Emory, the Saratoga International Theater Institute’s production of Anne Bogart’s Small Lives/Big Dreams. While the first three plays will undoubtedly enjoy commercially successful production throughout the country, only Cleage’s play attracted a visibly significant African-American audience.

Figure 1.

Boo Levy (Dana Ivey), Lala Levy (Mary Bacon), and Reba Freitag (Valerie J. Curtin) in the Alliance Theatre Company’s production of Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, directed by Ron Lagomarsino. 1996 Olympic Arts Festival, 14th St. Playhouse, Atlanta. Photo: Janece Shaffer.

Figure 2.

Kelly Maurer in the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI)/Alliance Theatre/Theater Emory’s production of Small Lives/Big Dreams, directed by Anne Bogart. 1996 Olympic Arts Festival, 14th St. Playhouse, Atlanta. Photo: Annmarie Poyo.

Local playwrights Alfred Uhry and Pearl Cleage reinvestigate particularly rich historical settings to explore the internal complexities of their respective Jewish-American and African-American cultures. Uhry sets the action of...