STAGE REVIEWS : The Gems and Dross of Humana Festival : Stage: Jose Rivera’s ‘Marisol’ and David Henry Hwang’s ‘Bondage’ spark the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s annual event of new plays.

The Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival is like a family reunion. It’s an annual event. A lot of the same faces show up. Everyone comes in from some other place for the celebration. The spirit is effusive. And the fare, like Aunt Margaret’s pecan stuffing, varies widely, year to year.

It was the 16th consecutive year for this Festival of New American Plays. About 400 out-of-towners (an international mix of members of the press, agents, casting people and theater practitioners) crowded into two theaters from morning till night in one jampacked, energizing weekend.

Of the eclectic assortment of six full-length plays, two longish one-acts paired together and a bill of three 10-minute pieces, 1 1/2 plays qualified as fascinating, four as satisfying and only 2 1/2 as dispensable. In the Byzantine annals of new play festivals, that makes 1992 a pretty good year.

This year’s specials: Jose Rivera’s “Marisol,” a doomsday play on the schedule of this summer’s La Jolla Playhouse season, and David Henry Hwang’s “Bondage,” an intellectual dissection of cultural, racial and sexual identity by the author of “M. Butterfly.”

The descent into hell-on-Earth of one law-abiding Latina is the thrust of “Marisol.” The place is a bombed-out New York City where Rivera, whose “The Promise” was seen at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1988, abandons magic realism for a grim Apocalypse.

From Marisol’s guardian angel (a terrific Esther Scott in guerrilla garb and white wings), we learn that God is old and that the angels plan to depose Him. Human beings are invited to join the revolution or survive at their own peril.

Rivera paints a horrific landscape of urban chaos, real and emotional, filled with menace and acrimony and held together by taut, sardonic humor. Karina Arroyave was the dainty Marisol and V. Craig Heidenreich played a panoply of deranged or destroyed males who dragged her into a final, traumatic, surrealistic collapse.

Darron West provided a haunting sound score and Marcus Stern’s staging was uncommonly resourceful under spatial and budgetary constraints. It’s a cinch La Jolla will know what to do with this play, and a bigger stage and budget won’t hurt either.

Hwang’s “Bondage” is a different animal altogether. It chronicles an hourlong encounter in a bondage parlor between a customer (B. D. Wong) and a hired dominatrix (Kathryn Layng), both clad from top to toe in anonymous chains and leather. As the session intensifies, it also changes. Captivating issues of identity, self-esteem and the ability to love provoke an unprecedented--and tender--unmasking.

There is no greater nakedness than the voluntary and mutual surrender of anonymity. The play is subtle, if the build too slow. Its final 20 minutes are mesmerizing.

“Bondage” was paired with the disappointing “Devotees in the Garden of Love,” a pointlessly protracted exercise on marriage, war and finishing schools by Suzan-Lori Parks, delivered in bizarre bits of scrambled French by a woman named George (another super performance by Scott).

If “Devotees” was at least visually pleasing, with performers in wedding gowns inhabiting a garden in bloom, much less can be said for scenic designer John Conklin’s “The Carving of Mount Rushmore.” This Robert Wilsonesque non-play, indulgently written, designed and staged by Conklin, littered the stage with chairs and portentous gesture, droned a static litany of facts about the nature of granite and the decision to carve those presidential faces into the mountainside--and not much else.

It left history in the lurch, unlike Marsha Norman’s “D. Boone,” commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “ ‘night, Mother,” which gleefully revised it. This benevolent comedy deflates the legend of Daniel B., one of Kentucky’s favorite folk heroes, with a tall tale of time travel back to frontier days by a museum caretaker named Flo (Catherine Christianson).

Infatuated with Boone, Flo breaks through time to join him and is followed into history by a meddlesome pack of her contemporary suitors. In time, the right guy gets the girl, another gets the buffalo and the audience gets the prize: a witty Southern charmer, with a luscious deadpan performance by Dave Florek as the fellow who won’t take no for an answer.

John Olive’s “Evelyn and the Polka King” (with music by Carl Finch and Bob Lucas, and lyrics by Lucas) is a more modest saga of Evelyn, a young woman adopted at birth by wealthy Texans, who sets out in search of her natural mother. The centerpiece was a terrific polka band, camouflaging a thin story.

A slender premise also besets Mayo Simon’s “The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival” ( not to be confused with TV’s “Golden Girls”). The play tracks the travails of Netty (Lynn Cohen), an elderly widow who is going blind, and her neighbor Shprintzy (Shirl Bernheim), with incipient Alzheimer’s. The two find solidarity in adversity, as lame and blind unite to form “one complete person.”

Bernheim was a heartbreaker as the scattered Shprintzy, and the piece can stand to lose about 15 minutes. But there is a Talmudic dignity to this play that bypasses sentiment to remind us that independence, not pity, is the key to a tolerable old age.

The weekend’s deepest mystery was Ross MacLean’s “Hyaena,” a peculiar play about a peculiar man who hangs out in hospital wards preying on the dying. Just why is unclear and there is no payoff. Since not much is believable and neither patient, wife nor best friend are any more attractive than the ghoul, why did the Actors Theatre of Louisville bother?

Almost as clinical was Joyce Carol Oates’ “Procedure,” on the bill of 10-minute plays. This was theater by default, as two nurses, a rookie and a veteran, go through the step-by-step process of preparing a body for the mortuary.

The tiny hook at the end was more an excuse than a reason for the play, unlike Lanford Wilson’s “Eukiah,” a dialogue in a stable about a plot to steal horses that has an all-too-real twist at the end.

The third piece on this bill was Jane Anderson’s “Lynnette at 3 a.m.,” delicious whimsy about a woman who can’t sleep, her husband and the ghost of her Puerto Rican neighbor who makes love to her as he passes through the room on his way to heaven.

Odd?

As they say, you really had to be there.