STAGE REVIEW : Playwrights the Thing at Humana Fest

The Humana New Play Festival at the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville has had its good and bad years. Sometimes they have followed the personal fortunes of artistic director Jon Jory, who went through a divorce and remarriage in the course of his 14-year stewardship.

Eight weeks ago Jory and his new wife had a baby girl and fortune has smiled, with almost equal benevolence, on this year’s festival, which ends today.

Women and variety have been the by-words. This year’s batch of plays was almost entirely written by women (six out of seven), in widely divergent styles and about highly eclectic subjects. They range from people turning into swans (and vice-versa) to the Machiavellian inner workings of the mind of Hermann Goering.

Fiction, of course, but Romulus Linney’s “2,” a piece commissioned by the festival, just about took it away. It is one of the more engrossing and skillful political fantasies to come down the loop in some time. Set in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg in 1945/46, it confronts the prisoner, Goering (William Duff-Griffin in a crackerjack lookalike performance) with the retired German judge who, out of love of Germany, offers to act as his defense counsel (Ray Fry), the Jewish-American Army psychologist sent to run tests on him (David A. Kimball), the prison commandant who’s not afraid to face him down (Bob Burrus) and his guards, wife and daughter, who are of two minds--or more--about him.

Linney, the lone male among the playwrights and a man whose output rarely repeats itself or disappoints, has delivered a densely verbal and exceptionally deft work of wit and imagination, as explosive and unexpected as a mine field, that does the unthinkable: it makes us admire the scathing geometry of the mind of Hitler’s No. 2 man (whence the title), even as we repudiate it.

The women’s contributions to the festival are less robust, but not less penetrating. Two of the playwrights are from California: Jane Anderson and Ellen McLaughlin. McLaughlin’s play, “Infinity’s House,” had been the object of much controversy last year when South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, which had commissioned the piece, decided to forgo it because it considered it unready for production. The Louisville staging only confirmed SCR’s misgivings.

This is an unwieldy, pseudo-lyrical play about the development of the atom bomb, with too many beginnings and endings, and too much reverence for its themes. It overlays the dubious motives of the nuclear scientists and pragmatic military men with the mysticism of the Indians who inhabited what was once sacred land. The play collapses under the weight of its self-importance.

Anderson, in contrast, displays a very light touch with her “The Pink Studio,” a tender valentine to Henri Matisse that constructs fictional events in the painter’s life and whose culminations are then rediscovered in specific paintings by the master. It’s an ingenious, sweetly humorous idea, filled with sunshine and flowers--and a challenge to designers who must go scouting for the elements of each painting to re-create on the stage. The piece is something of a departure for Anderson, a former stand-up comedian, whose darker play about surrogate parenthood, “The Baby Dance,” is currently on view in Pasadena.

This year’s celebrity entrant is Joyce Carol Oates, though her uneven double bill, “In Darkest America,” is not necessarily the most inspired. It deals with an old preoccupation: forms of violence and their effect. Her curtain-raiser, “Tone Clusters,” is an interrogation wherein a middle-aged couple field odd and personal questions from a disembodied voice. We gradually find out that the couple’s son has been involved in a murder. The play focuses not only on the parents massive denial, but also on the drastic way in which the incident forever alters their lives.

The second half of the bill, “The Eclipse,” fixes on the dynamics between a wayward mother slipping into senility (Madeleine Sherwood) and her careerist, caretaking daughter (Beth Dixon). This is a fuzzier piece, chilling in a different cataclysmic sense, and a variant of the mother-daughter tug-of-war modified by the daughter’s unfulfilled dreams and the mother’s not always believable demons.

The festival’s most abstract, off-the-wall play came in the shape of “The Swan” by Elizabeth Egloff, a rather too single-minded fantasy whose potential exceeds its current stageworthiness. And the year’s singular Southern Gothic comedy, “Zara Spook and Other Lures,” a tall tale about a fishing contest and the people in it, was supplied by Joan Ackermann-Blount, though the playwright is in fact from Great Barrington, Mass., and not remotely Gothic. “Zara Spook,” which is receiving its second production here, is superior sitcom--fresh and funny, with a raft of vivid characters, crackling one-liners and one of the sexiest fully clothed sexy scenes in memory.

This year also marked the return of the mysterious Jane Martin who has come up with yet another collection of her inventive, free-form quasi-monologues, generically titled “Vital Signs.” Martin, who has made a specialty of such oddball direct address items, is both limited by the format and remarkably adept at it. Here she sails from one character to the next with the full company wandering on and off stage at any time, lending responsiveness and fluidity--a certain stream-of-consciousness--to the collective piece.

Martin, who burst on the Louisville scene in 1981 with “Twirler,” a monologue that became part of her popular “Talking With” the following year, has never wanted to reveal her true identity. The speculation about her continues (including the possibility that “she” is Jory himself), but mum is staunchly the word.

Measured historically, this has been a more substantive festival than some in the recent past. This annual event took a real dive in the mid-’80s and has bounced back vigorously.

“I don’t take a linear view,” Jory said, philosophically. “It’s a road with a number of jaunts on the side. We’ve tried different things over the years, concentrating at various times on the one-act play, the miniplay, the monologue, the second production, the 10-minute play. An ideal festival,” he said, “would be two or three plays by unknowns, two commissions and two or three second productions.”

With the proliferation of new-play festivals, what this one has managed to retain is the imprimatur of having been the first and the best known, getting national and international attention on a regular basis and receiving a steady 1,200 submissions a year.

“When we began we were about the only game in town,” Jory said. “When we first advertised we received more than 5,000 scripts--some in packages, because playwrights had plays they didn’t know what to do with. We changed all that.”