A PARADE OF NEW PLAYS IN LOUISVILLE

The annual Humana Festival of New American Plays offers such a quick fix on what new, or new-ish, American playwrights are doing that more than 80 theater critics and “professional observers” (read producers and agents) convened at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville last weekend to look in on nine plays.

Here is what they saw.

Thursday night:

Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller’s “Smitty’s News” deals with an unmarried mother’s attempt to make a new life with her teen-age daughter. One night, while she’s out with a new-found lover, the daughter is raped and beaten so badly that she’s left mute and paralyzed. A smart lawyer dredges up enough of the mother’s past to get the rapist off.

This is bleak, progressively unfocused play saturated with sexual hostility. It has the feel of an early work, where the first discovery of the world’s evil leads to hapless self-pity.

Friday morning:

Martin Epstein’s “How Gertrude Stormed the Philosopher’s Club” and Kevin Kling’s “21A” played under the rubric “Transports.”

Epstein’s play takes place in a philosopher’s club, where two of the regulars discuss who will take the blame for the fatal shooting of a recalcitrant waiter. Then Gertrude--captain of a softball team that has just lost its season opener by 74 runs--steals into the club and leads the men to violate, in mind at least, the maxim of “leaving one’s body at the door.”

This is a play about the absurdity of assumed coherence. Tom Stoppard did well with a similar approach in “Jumpers,” but Epstein’s play is so broad and fanciful that the tension of reasoned nonsense is dissipated.

“21A” is a Minnesota bus where all sorts of shenanigans go on. Gladys, who carries two big bags of groceries (one for her husband Big Bob and one for her cat, Little Bob), tells us of her life and times in the early days with her husband. “He had premature ejaculation,” she notes. “I hear 39 million Americans suffer from it.” Pause. “But they’re not the ones who suffer.”

Other passengers include Not Dave, who calls himself that because he doesn’t want people to hassle him; Captain Twelve Pack, a vagrant sort with Dickensian airs; schizophrenic Steve, who says of his other self “Boy, do I tick him off”); and Jim Shiply, an irate gunman who insists that people pay their fares. Playwright Kling, a thin ethereal young man, plays all the roles in a manner reminiscent of Eric Peterson in “Billy Bishop Goes to War.”

“21A” is cleverly written engagingly and played.

Friday afternoon:

Mary Gallagher’s “How to Say Goodbye” deals with a couple whose marriage founders when their young son becomes terminally ill. The action traces the chill that sets into people’s lives when the blush of youth begins to fade.

Gallagher has a great ear for girl talk (the play is set in motion by the meeting of three school chums), and she invests her characters with a great deal of sympathy. But the husband is not a full-blown character and as time goes by the girls begin falling into suspiciously contrived patterns of confusion and guilt. The child is never more than a symbol.

This play was developed with New Dramatists, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Foundation in Ireland, the “In the Works” program at the University of Massachusetts, and the Ensemble Studio Theater. Plays are like children: after a while they should be let go or else they become stunted. That seems the case here.

Friday night:

John Steppling’s “The Shaper,” which premiered at Los Angeles Theatre Works in the 1984-85 season, deals with the Southern California surf culture. Bud is the over-the-hill surfer who runs a one-man surfboard shop. His friend Del traffics in drugs and existential anarchy. They are two men who live for the same thing--a score that charges the adrenaline and their sense of self.

They’re so close to each other that the women in their lives are frozen out, which makes young Reesa’s sexual advances the more blatant. The women here are frozen satellites around the men’s lives.

There’s much to be said for “The Shaper” and for Steppling’s ability to finger the inarticulate impulses of muffled lives. But the playing here was so deadly that the majority of critics poured into the Downstairs at Actors bar fairly seething with indignation.

“I’m giving this festival about a minute and a half more,” said one.

Throughout the weekend you heard reference to “The Shaper” as though it represented a standard of tolerance rubbed raw. This observer felt some of that as well. It’s a difficult trick to get inside the rhythms of fitful, dispirited lives without plunging an audience into a fitful, dispirited mood.

Bob Glaudini’s direction allowed the play to drift away from any visceral link with the audience. It’s one thing to suggest disconnection by flattening speech and clipping it off with vacuous silence, but an overused device quickly becomes an artifice. “The Shaper” violated the prime tenet of the theater: it was a play that didn’t play.

Saturday morning:

The Actors’ Theatre’s artistic director, Jon Jory, held a meeting with the press. He said the ATL was no longer accepting unsolicited full-length scripts, but would take one acts from unknowns, which should be enough to locate fresh talent. Jory talked of how “premiere-itis” has dominated the American theater for years, and how it was important, not only to see plays in second or third production, but to do something for the numerous playwrights who had already proven their talent to see that they had careers instead of chance employment.

Asked about trends in writing, he replied: “There’s a movement away from naturalistic form. What we see is tearing down the walls, playing with time, using images. To what end, we won’t know for a decade. It’s still a new paint pot.”

Later that morning:

Larry Larson and Levi Lee’s “Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends: A Final Evening With the Illuminati” is an antic work that moves like a shot. Lee plays Reverend Eddie, a crackpot cleric dressed in cherry-red long johns who holds forth at his pulpit located in a faintly Stygian church, attended by his acolyte, a hunchback who bears a suspicious resemblance to the Igor of “Frankenstein” renown.

“Illuminati’s” language is highly charged, Larson and Lee are knowledgeable in their scriptural references and myths--which they send up at every turn--and they know how to play a crowd. The theme of Reverend Eddie’s speech is “life is a basketball game.” Act 2 opens with the reverend emulating Christ’s pained march to his crucifixion site. But instead of a cross on his back, the reverend is carrying a basketball backboard and hoop. It’s that kind of show, and they don’t miss a trick.

Saturday afternoon:

Constance Congdon’s “No Mercy” underscored Jory’s note on playing with time and imagery. It begins in 1945 at the Jornada del Muerto area in New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists were putting together the atom bomb, and it moves into the present through the life of a soldier, Ray, who was one of the witnesses to the first blast. He’s been a country singer in his time, and is enlisted by a Christian fundamentalist television lecturer to warm up her show.

Ray finds faith; the evangelist moves away from it. All the children in the play either die or are emotionally damaged. A lyrical, befuddled Oppenheimer escapes to his underground lab when it gets to be too much. Something terrible has happened, and no one quite knows what it is.

There’s an elegance to “No Mercy,” a sense of suspended opinion, that lends it a mysterious, evocative air. Some of its pieces are either missing or cryptic, but Oppenheimer’s line about the beauty of pure knowledge is echoed in the gentle theatrical inquiry about a phenomenon we’ve been reacting to for 40 years.

“No Mercy” is a rare work in the theater in that it doesn’t make a judgment on nuclear technology except to say that we created something terrifying in the name of the highest human enterprise in ingenuity, and 40 years later we still don’t know what to do about it.

Saturday night:

Jonathan Bolt’s “To Culebra” would play well on Masterpiece Theatre. The story of the aged Ferdinand de Lesseps’ attempt to re-create his success at building the Suez Canal by forging a canal for the French government in Panama has spectacle, sweep, the weight of a grand sort of history, a character in De Lesseps who considers himself a man of mythic force, and a court of lesser mortals jockeying for a piece of the action.

The duplicity of the French aristocracy is here exemplified by Lt. Lucien Wise, a distant descendant of Napoleon, who is sent on a fact-finding mission to Central America and the United States, has himself a high time and returns to France with a State Department handout that he tries to palm off as an exclusive report. We see how the scandal surrounding the canal rocked France and how De Lesseps’ well-meaning son took the brunt of it.

“To Culebra” represents yet another virtue of the theater on this varied weekend--its capacity to tell a tale.

Sunday:

Claudia Reilly’s “Astronauts” brings together a gay music teacher; a naive typing instructor who is his colleague at a mental asylum for Catholic schoolgirls called “Our Lady Queen of Martyrs”; a homicidal inmate who wants to fly to Jupiter in a rocket ship; a downstairs neighbor and her ex-boyfriend, a rock star.

“Astronauts” is an old-fashioned comedy, a crowd pleaser, a laugh getter. Some of its improbabilities are too improbable, even for the theater, and there are occasional questions of taste. (“Doesn’t your dog move?” “Only her bowels”).

But Reilly’s characters are different from each other, her up-tempo timing is sharp, and her one-liners are free of snide TV-sitcom staleness. Too, she smartly sidesteps any conclusion about the gay and the girl who fancies him.

Some weeks ago Arthur Miller mentioned that the American playwright works and lives in enemy territory, and that the sooner he realizes it, the better his chances for survival. Jory was asked to comment. He said:

“That’s an aptly phrased way to say your work is not esteemed. Miller has had to endure one of the chief tortures of our society, early success, followed by derogatory re-evaluation, and then silence. It’s not my favorite cultural response. We talk about developing talent, but the best talents you don’t develop, except maybe in the beginning. All you can hope to do is provide an audience, a conversation, an interest.

“The regional theater is so much better than it was 20 years ago. The talent pool is better, the range is broader, the technical expertise is there. Our job is putting the passion back in this functioning structure, this huge machine that took us so long to figure out. That’ll be the work of the next decade.”

But what about the decade that’s passed? If the Humana Festival represents the state of the art, and is the theater festival to which the world is invited, what does it say about the scope, the depth and the expertise of the American writer it purports to represent?

Immature would be the word to describe the work as an aggregate. “To Culebra” represented energy over style, and faltered in the second act. “Astronauts” would never hold a sophisticated audience. “Illuminati” is a high-class camp show. “No Mercy” dissipates its energy in allusiveness. “How To Say Goodbye” degenerates into the category of women’s fiction. “The Shaper’s” dead souls emit dead air. “Smitty’s News” is cold and repellent. “Transport’s” clever bill is slight.

There was nothing to challenge the intellect. If there was an abundance of technique, there was no boldness, nothing to give us a deep pleasurable shiver of recognition about what it means to be alive in this or any other society. Not a single psychologically rich or memorable character flew out of Louisville in the mind of the departing visitor. Who knows if passion will come in the next decade of the regional theater, or the theater the Humana fest considers representative? Right now, the thrill is gone.