PLEASURES OF A COLLEGE STAGE FEST

It’s cotton-ginning time along the Cane River, and there are faint beige columns of dust against overcast skies. The stripped fields and the big wire-walled cotton wagons are flecked with white, as if some misplaced snowstorm had about melted off.

Over at the university, Northwestern Louisiana State, they’ve just finished the first rung of what you might call the act-offs in the annual American College Theater Festival: nine plays in five days from eight campuses in Louisiana and one in Texas.

One production, possibly two, will go on to a regional competition in El Paso later, and finally six plays from around the United States will be staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington in April. The festival is the World Series and Academy Awards of college theater-making, an activity subsidized in part this year by NBC and Ryder truck rentals.

A visitor, arriving on a kind of busman’s holiday, might well ask what mystic significances are to be noted in this first round of the festival.

One is that the professional theater is well supplied with eager applicants, driven and talented young people for whom Broadway and Hollywood do not seem impossible dreams.

For others, college theater is a lark, or maybe a test drive to see if it pleases, a time to decide if you ought to be an actor. But the hard, true wisdom is that if you’ve got to ask, the answer is no. Acting, like writing, is what you do because your soul can’t breathe doing anything else, and only the passionate and addicting love of it sees you through the hard going and the rejections.

Fairly easy to spot the performers who are going to go for it, as against those who will remember, pleasurably, the chaos and the numbing fatigue and the applause, and who will carry with them an insightful empathy for the theater forever after, whatever they do. It’s hard not to wince for those who will go for it, because it’s so hard, and so cruelly disappointing. (So many have the calling; so few are chosen.)

Like the Oscars, the festival, through a history of honors bestowed, imposes invisible ground rules of which the theater arts chairpeople appear all too well aware. You know that some movies, whatever their excellence, won’t make it to the nominations. You can guess--but ought not to be able to--that some things are understood not to work in the festival.

Shakespeare is studiously avoided, which may be as well because all his plays arrive bearing the ghosts of great performances past that even gifted undergraduates ought not to have to be measured against. The ghosts of performances past unkindly haunted an earnest production of “The Little Foxes” given here.

There were no originals among the nine offerings, which is disappointing. A Shreveport critic, who had judged a festival with originals in an earlier year, said, “Be glad, be glad.” But new work is the lifeblood of the theater, and it would be nice to think there is a budding Maxwell Anderson as well as a potential Judy Holliday on every campus.

You settle instead for brave choices from the existing literature. The winning entry at Natchitoches was “Female Transport,” a tough-voiced and demanding play from England by Steve Gooch, about some women convicts being shipped to the prison colony of Australia in 1799.

Done by Tulane, “Female Transport” had a stylized set, with a fan of sails surrounding a two-level space of quarter-deck up and malodorous hold below. Impeccable Cockney accents were sustained through storm and calm and some violent hand-to-hand combat. Best of all, the play’s resonances to a later day, with sisterly support flowering and surviving in hard circumstances, came through implicitly.

The runner-up reflected another kind of festival achievement, the well-mounted--and invincibly safe--well-made play. From Centenary in Shreveport came a smooth and lustrous production of J. Hartley Manner’s 1912 Valentine to his wife Laurette Taylor, “Peg O’ My Heart.” The elegant period costumes and the expansive and richly detailed set would have perfectly served a Broadway revival.

Like many of the productions, it was at least a semiprofessional job, mixing undergraduate, faculty and even off-campus talent. For the undergraduates, the opportunity to learn in a Class-A environment seems no bad thing, if now and again the experience is with a text of urgency and relevance.

The real crowd-pleasers in Natchitoches (which is pronounced, approximately, “Nack-i-tish”) were “Greater Tuna,” a tour de force spoof in which two talented young men play a total of 20 Texas male and female characters, and “Stadium View,” a comedy out of Grambling State University by a Grambling alumna (Judy Mason-Williams).

“Greater Tuna” (Tuna is the third-smallest town in Texas) is sure-thing material, splendidly delivered by Richard Beaugh and Kendel Smith. “Stadium View” has a sitcom set and a sitcom structure (after college, Mason-Williams wrote for Norman Lear on “The Jeffersons”). But beneath its jokes about the school’s football emphasis and the athletes’ appeal as husband material for the co-eds, the play takes a hard look at pro sport as both a dream and a life-skewing trap for black undergraduates.

What “View” might have lacked in artfulness, it more than made up in energy and immediacy. (A couple of the actors are in fact on the football team.) “Tuna” was performed in a tiny, steep-raked theater, which suited it perfectly, establishing a cabaret intimacy that was a blissful remove from the cavernous reaches of the main auditorium.

It is a further question about festival choices whether there is room, or an adequate hearing, for the small production (small in cast, small in sets) that works best in an intimate environment. I hope there is, because that linkage between performance and audience is the heart of theater, and the shrink-wrapped cake-box prettiness of the big, big show, whatever its satisfactions, may not grab the heart.

Another way to say it is that excellence comes in a variety of sizes, a lesson the Academy voters appear to be learning, slowly.