Play Festivals Around U.S. Set Ambitious Examples

The Humana Festival of American Plays, now in its 13th year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky, has the greatest stature among the nation’s play festivals. It has generated notable work from the very beginning.

The first festival produced just two plays, but one was D.L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game,” which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The second festival, which jumped to six plays, launched Marsha Norman’s “Getting Out.” And the third festival produced Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” which also won a Pulitzer.

Founded by the theater’s artistic director, Jon Jory, the festival has taken its name from the Humana Foundation since 1982, when the foundation began providing a major portion of festival backing.

The festival now runs for 6 weeks, usually in March and April.

“We like to compare ourselves to the Kentucky Derby,” says associate director Merrilee Slater, a former festival coordinator. “The Derby shows the best 3-year-olds in terms of horses, and we show the best 1-year-olds in terms of plays.

“When we began, there weren’t that many places where a playwright could get a new play produced, particularly if he was someone nobody had heard of. Our goal was to provide that place. And we took as a standard that the plays would be well mounted scenically, with top-quality actors.”

In recent years, the Humana Festival has come under attack for shifting its perspective somewhat and going after “name” writers who had never tried their hands at plays. This year’s festival, for instance, commissioned works by Jimmy Breslin and William F. Buckley. Both productions turned out to be critical disasters. Another by novelist Harry Crews fared better.

Slater defends the commissioning of famous authors by noting that “we still continue to work with emerging writers. But there has been a change in the environment. There are more festivals now. In a lot of countries the poets, the journalists and the novelists also write for the stage. Why are we in this country so restrictive?”

The Los Angeles Theatre Center also holds an annual festival of plays. In February, the 10th LATC Festival presented three main stage premieres, four NeWorks Project readings that had been rehearsed for 2 weeks, six Labworks readings and a symposium. Plays that come out of NeWorks are considered for full production at a later time, festival coordinator Lisa Mount says.

Among the notable plays first produced in past LATC festivals are “Etta Jenks” and “Kingfish,” both by Marlane Meyer. “Kingfish” received a full production at LATC last season and will be staged at the Public Theatre in New York this fall. NeWorks efforts that graduated to full productions this season were Thomas Babe’s “Demon Wine,” Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s “Stone Wedding” and Donald Marguiles’ “The Model Apartment.”

Meyer’s “The Geography of Luck,” which has its world premiere May 16 on the SCR Second Stage, was also developed at LATC and received a NeWorks reading in February after winning SCR’s CalFest competition. Crossing back to LATC, “Geography” will open in a full production there Aug. 26.

“We don’t have any competitive feelings about that,” SCR’s David Emmes says. “We’ll just do our best work, and they will do theirs. It’s not about one-upmanship. More importantly, the whole process will allow Marlane to have her play developed. One production rarely results in what we would call the completed or finished play. Sometimes it takes two, even three separate productions.”

“Any playwright would kill for this back-to-back situation,” SCR dramaturg Jerry Patch says. “The only danger is from the critics. One journalist already hit me with the statement, ‘Oh, it’s going to be dueling productions.’ If it turns into a face-off in the press, then it is misperceived.”

Other major play festivals include:

-- PrimaFacie, begun in 1985 at the Denver Center Theatre Company. It has developed 21 new plays, including several by Romulus Linney (“Woman Without a Name” and “Heathen Valley”), Donald Freed (“Circe and Bravo” and “Veterans Day”) and Mark Harelik and Randall Myler (“The Immigrant”).

PrimaFacie customarily chooses 12 scripts from an annual play competition held nationally, then develops them in monthlong workshops that culminate in staged readings. The next year, four of those plays receive full productions as part of the Denver theater’s regular season.

Next year, however, PrimaFacie will start a separate 2-month festival (including rehearsal time). “We will shut down all activity except for the festival,” artistic director Donovan Marley says. “And we’ll have festival premieres playing simultaneously in each of our four theaters. The plays will run from 2 to 5 weeks.” There will also be eight public readings.

In addition to producing plays, PrimaFacie publishes selected festival scripts in an anthology. Four collections have appeared so far. “They really get the work around,” Marley says.

-- Winterfest, which began in 1981 at the Yale Repertory in New Haven, Conn. It was founded by artistic director Lloyd Richards, who also heads the O’Neill Center and Yale Drama School. The festival produces four plays in rotating repertory at two theaters for 4 weeks in January and February.

Plays first produced at Winterfest that have gone on to subsequent productions elsewhere include Lynn Seifert’s “Coyote Ugly,” OyamO’s “The Resurrection of Lady Lester” and Ivan Menchell’s “The Cemetary Club.”

-- The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, now in its 12th year. It customarily has put on four productions in late summer for 6 to 8 weeks in Marin County and is sponsored by the Playwrights Foundation. Some of Sam Shepard’s early works premiered there, as did works by Murray Mednick.

This summer the festival is moving to Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. A new format has not yet been determined, but plans call for two full productions, six staged readings and writers’ workshops.

-- Springfest, a first annual festival of new plays at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Begun by managing director Harvey Seifter, the 6-week festival will premiere three works by emerging writers. “We’ve been looking for a way to to do fully staged productions of experimental new plays outside of the regular season format,” Seifter says.

The first, opening May 17, will be Lynne Kaufman’s “Speaking in Tongues,” a winner of the 1988 Kennedy Center Award for New American Plays, followed by Tom Poole’s “Paraguay” (May 31) and Harry Kondoleon’s “The Poet’s Corner” (June 14).

Another full-fledged festival making its debut at the Magic will be a 6-week Asian-American Playwrights’ Festival, beginning July 14. It will be produced “periodically but not annually” in association with another company, Seifter says, and will feature three plays as well as performance art, cabaret presentations and dance.

-- The Minnesota One-Act Play Festival, produced by the Actors Theatre of St. Paul. This festival, in its third year, puts on 11 one-act plays in rotating repertory over 8 weeks from January to March. Productions have included new plays by unknowns and by such writers as Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee and Michael Frayn.

“We do the festival to expose our audiences to an art form that usually receives little attention and, of course, to give voice to new writers,” the theater’s Timothy Streeter says. “But we also do it to get people out of their houses at that time of year. There’s not much happening in January in Minnesota.”