Guilt and grief take center stage

If the playwrights at the 31st annual Humana Festival of New American Plays are any gauge, Americans are on the verge of an enormous nervous breakdown.

Characters all across the Actors Theater of Louisville’s multiple stages are having trouble figuring out where someone else’s grief ends and theirs begins.

No, the Iraq war wasn’t an explicit theme, but nearly all the plays seemed darkened by its pall. Unmentioned yet unmistakable, post-traumatic stress disorder was the diagnosis du jour. And making matters worse for many of the afflicted protagonists was the sense that, as bystanders to brutality rather than victims of it, they’re not entitled to our full sympathy. These civilian casualties of everyday life are not just shattered; they’re guilt-wracked about it too.

None of the six major world premieres unveiled here had the confidence of craft to signal a theatrical breakthrough, and a few bogged down in the tedium of self-importance. One often felt in the presence of a tentative dramatic vision, as though the writers were trafficking in styles that weren’t comfortably their own. But the two more intriguing offerings, Naomi Iizuka’s “Strike-Slip” and Carlos Murillo’s “Dark Play or Stories for Boys,” boldly held the mirror up to our damaged nature. The reflections weren’t pretty, but neither could they be dismissed.

The same can’t be said for the others, which struck me as serious-minded but dully derivative. Craig Wright’s “The Unseen,” a drama about two tortured prisoners trying to puzzle out the reality lying outside their neighboring cells, lends topicality to a familiar existentialist setup, but the writing is stilted and contrived. Ken Weitzman’s “The As If Body Loop,” a play registering 9/11 aftershocks, apes the tragic whimsy of Craig Lucas and David Lindsay-Abaire to mundane pop-psychological effect. Sherry Kramer’s “When Something Wonderful Ends” melds a folksy solo meditation by a Midwestern woman packing up her childhood Barbie collection with, of all things, a lecture about the history and fallout of America’s oil-addicted economy.

New Paradise Laboratories’ “Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle” (staged at an off-site nightclub) might not have anything urgent to say, but boy, is it a throwback. A performance collage conceived by Alice Tuan and Whit MacLaughlin, the piece churns out some fun gender-bending imagery in the name of surreal horseplay. But this sendup of those pre-wedding-day rites of acceptable debauchery lacks the philosophical acuity of Richard Foreman, the emotional depth of Joseph Chaikin and the choreographic precision of Anne Bogart -- three obvious sources of inspiration superficially combined into a colorful but ultimately pointless hallucination.

Newly minted theater needn’t be such a chore. And issue-oriented drama shouldn’t have you visualizing grains of sand in an hourglass. Iizuka demonstrates that it’s possible to care passionately about the near apocalyptic state of the world while creating characters of ensnaring individuality. In fact, close attention to the way two ordinary people interact can tell you more about the zeitgeist than the most keenly worded political critique.

Set in L.A., where the playwright lives, “Strike-Slip” demonstrates, in “Crash”-like fashion, the interconnectedness of the city’s seemingly disparate populace. The characters include Dan Morse, a Caltech seismologist who is buying a dream house in Santa Monica with his writing-teacher wife Rachel; Viviana Ramos, a real estate agent, who worries that her high school-age son, Rafael, is following in the footsteps of the boy’s thuggish father; Lee Sung Cho, a Korean immigrant convenience store owner who’s single-handedly raising his daughter, Angie Lee, a teen ready to bust out of her oppressive home with her boyfriend (none other than Rafael); Vince, Angie’s distant brother, who has a one-time fling with Dan that sets off far-reaching tremors; and Frank Richmond, a mysterious and tough-talking African American guy (he’s apparently a police detective and a drug lord) who turns up when the members of this motley crew start colliding.

Yes, the daisy chain stretches credulity even as you make allowances for it as a narrative conceit. And the various strands of plot (involving a murder, a marital breakup and a gigantic cocaine deal, to name just a few) aren’t equally well-developed. Yet the scenes are intimately drawn (and sharply directed by Chay Yew), and the material is everywhere burgeoning with a diversity that is routine in our lives, less routine on our stages. The struggle to live and love with meaning and dignity is shown to be universal -- and, in our ever-more greedy and floridly violent society, universally embattled.

The refreshingly suspenseful play is structured, fittingly enough given the geological title, on fault lines. Some are socioeconomic, others existential. Iizuka meditates on the problem of predicting seismic activity in human lives. Is there any way to know when a big one is heading your way? Her dramatic web tangles a bit too much in the second half, but the encompassing intelligence of her work allows for the possibility of a master design and complete randomness. What’s vital, Dan helpfully sums up in a lecture on forecasting actual quakes, “is how we live our lives in the face of uncertainty, how we understand our relationship to a large and indifferent universe in which we play the smallest part.”

In “Dark Play or Stories for Boys,” Murillo, a Chicago-based dramatist, paints a portrait of chaos that’s very much self-generated. His protagonist, Nick, is a college dweeb from Southern California who can’t believe a pretty young thing has just spent the night in his dorm room. She notices strange scars on his abdomen and questions him about them. Freaked out, he jumps off the bed and into the past, where he narrates and reenacts the bizarre story that led to his disfigurement. The rambunctious tale that unfolds revolves around the Internet, that inviting forum for fantasies that might not otherwise have the courage to declare themselves. Nick, cyber-masquerading as a high school girl, lures a fellow teenage boy into a perilous romantic obsession. Who knew bisexuality is just a click away? But the deeper subject of Murillo’s enjoyably hyper-theatrical play concerns the infinite latent possibilities within us, and the disturbing way in which our alienating and atomizing world encourages the furtive pursuit of one’s kinkiest desires.

While it’s not always easy to credit the sexual twists and homicidal turns, “Dark Play” underscores the instability and unconscious flux of contemporary character. The self and the other have become less discrete in an age in which screen names provide instant anonymity, globalization has blurred borders and the so-called war on terror has everyone feeling unsafe.

As a psychological casualty in “The As If Body Loop” puts it, “Seeing someone suffer is very much like suffering yourself. A nearly identical biological response happens in the body of the witness as happens in the body of the actual sufferer.”

The scientific explanation for the phenomenon is where Weitzman got his uncatchy title. In the olden days, it was called empathy. But no matter the less poetic terminology, it’s still an essential component of playwriting.

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com