In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Theatre Journal 54.4 (2002) 635-638



[Access article in PDF]
26Th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays.Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. 5-7 April 2002.
[Figures]

In the past decade or so, the Humana Festival has been as impressive for the quantity of new plays on view as for the quality. In 2002, counting three ten-minute plays, an anthology project of [End Page 635] scenes and monologues inspired by a photograph, and three technology-based pieces performed in the lobby between shows, more than thirty playwrights were represented. Searching for a unifying theme amid the festival's variety is like panning for fool's gold. Nevertheless, the title of one of the six featured full-length plays in the festival, The Mystery of Attraction, suggested a familiar leitmotif. Why do opposites attract? What is this thing called Love? What happens when it goes bad? Questions like these circulated through much of the work to be seen during one of the Humana Festival's marathon weekends for out-of-town visitors last spring. Here then is an overview of this year's highlights and lowlights.

After three productions at the American Repertory Theatre in the span of eighteen months, Adam Rapp made his Humana debut with another new play, Finer, Noble Gases. Adding to Rapp's growing menagerie of offbeat American losers, the play depicts a down-and-out rock-and-roll band living in a dingy East Village apartment, with crud-encrusted dishes stacked high in the sink and a pyramid of discarded Happy Meal boxes in one corner. In this bleak, grotesque, and forcefully static comedy, grunge takes on a whole new meaning.

On a bitter cold winter night, the two principals, Staples (Robert Beitzel) and Chase (Dallas Roberts), spend most of the play on a ratty yellow sofa tripping their brains out on "the pinks" and "the blues." The plot, such as it is, turns on their hapless effort to steal a TV to replace the one kicked in by band-mate Lynch (Michael Shannon). Through most of the action, the drummer, Speed (Ray Rizzo), lays comatose on the floor in nothing but a pair of urine-soaked underpants. As the play oozes forward, the drug-induced torpor approaches sheer inertia. This is the boldness of Rapp's conceit—let the stoned be stoned—and director Michael John Garcés and his convincing cast give over to it, to great effect. Time slows down, and the trivial and the stupid become fascinating for these guys in a way that is funny at first, just plain gross at moments, and then comes to mark an unspoken desperation. As catastrophe looms more and more imminent, being wasted takes on an odd, haunting pathos. For some, Finer, Noble Gases was self-indulgent silliness; for me, it provided a troubling thrill.

Of this year's featured playwrights, Tina Howe is perhaps the most accomplished. Directed by John Rando (2002 Tony Award winner for Best Director of a Musical, Urinetown), her new play Rembrandt's Gift was a disappointment. Set in a cave-like Soho loft, it tells the story of an eccentric couple in their sixties. Walter (Josef Somer) is an actor well past his prime, struggling with a weak prostate and a lifelong case of obsessive-compulsive disorder; Polly (Penny Fuller) is a successful self-portrait photographer who gave up a promising art career to care for him. Their marriage is threatened when Rembrandt, palette and brush in hand, materializes in their apartment on the eve of their eviction for fire code violations.

Howe makes poor use of her fantastic conceit. Her Rembrandt (Fred Major) speaks a kind of fake-Shakespeare dialogue that is silly and sophomoric, as is the humor wrung from the Renaissance man's introduction to such modern commodities as club soda and compact discs. The budding romance that develops between Polly and the painter is as predictable as it is pallid. And then, once Rembrandt has triggered the desired transformations in the aging couple, he conveniently returns to his own time. With the evil landlord and the...

pdf

Share