25th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays (review)

25Th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. 23-25 March 2001.

The 25th anniversary of the Humana Festival of New American Plays marked two important changes at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It was the first Humana Festival for new artistic director Marc Masterson, who replaced Jon Jory after his thirty-one-year stint at the helm. And it was the last Humana Festival for literary manager Michael Dixon, who for the past sixteen years had partnered with Jory in bringing Humana to national prominence as a premiere new play showcase. Nevertheless, the festival itself featured much the same spectrum of work, including Humana regulars (Jane Martin, Richard Dresser), established playwrights coming into the Humana orbit (Charles L. Mee, Mac Wellman), up-and-comers (Melanie Marnich), and a bevy of novelty pieces. If you count the phone plays in the lobby, an anthology piece for ATL's apprentice company on the theme of heaven and hell, and three ten-minute plays in serial form by Arthur Kopit, nearly thirty playwrights had work on view. Still, as usual, the spotlight was on the six full-length pieces.

For the second year in a row, Charles L. Mee walked away with 'best in show' honors, or so it would seem by the popular and critical success of bobrauschenbergamerica, a collaboration with Anne Bogart and The SITI Company. Inspired by the art of Robert Rauschenberg and presented in ATL's intimate Victor Jory Theatre, the piece presents a free-ranging collage of American tropes, types, and topics, played against the backdrop of a giant American flag painted on the floor and upstage wall. The play's guiding spirit is Bob's mom (Kelly Maurer), an all-American Mom circa 1950 who always has a dish towel in her hand and a smile in her heart. She looks on as the other characters--a trucker (Leon Pauli), his bikini-clad girlfriend (Akiko Aizawa), a derelict who lives in a box (J. Ed Araiza), an uptight guy in a tie (Danyon Davis), his romantic interest (Ellen Lauren), a dancer (Barney O'Hanlon), and an astrophysicist (Will Bond)--come and go in a series of loosely connected monologues, vignettes, and dance sequences that add up to an impressionistic and not uncritical celebration of the USA at the beginning of a new century.

Just as American, in a crass and alienating way, was Jane Martin's Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage, an offbeat, gross-out comedy that seemed to be in love with its own poor taste. The play takes place in the roomy, rural Wyoming kitchen of Big 8 (Phyllis Somerville), a spry, thigh-slapping, red-hot mama who takes in injured but virile cowboys and cures what ails them. Her current boy toy, a dolt named Rob Bob (Leo Kittay), sees Life as a B-Western movie, and when he guns down a rampaging Russian biker (Mark Mineart) in the kitchen, a hide-the-corpse caper breaks out that leaves blood everywhere. A punk girl with pink, spiked hair (Monica Koskey), a meatpacker named Shirl (Peggity Price), and an impotent, pot-bellied local sherrif (William McNulty) round out the cast of misfits and oddballs, who, despite their clever eccentricities, amount to little more than stereotypes. Jon Jory, Jane Martin's virtual alter ego, directed the grotesquerie with gusto, but one can't help but wonder why. There was something self-indulgent and defiant in the play's lurid appeal to the lowest common denominator, almost as if Martin/Jory was daring the new regime at ATL to put a stop to "their" Humana gravy train.

By chance or design, the other play performed in ATL's Pamela Brown Auditorium was directed by Jory's successor, Marc Masterson, making his Louisville debut. Richard Dresser's Wonderful World is a savage satire on American family values and relationships, particularly those of the privileged classes. The action centers on two yuppie brothers...