Copious Notes

Joanna Jerome is Julia and Aubin Munn is Laura in Crish Barth's "Hill Cattle," part of the Midway Festival of Plays. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Woodford County may be a bedroom community of Lexington, but this weekend it is a hotbed of local theater.

Continuing in Versailles is The Woodford Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which got high marks from the H-L’s own Candace Chaney. Over in Midway, the Thoroughbred Theatre is opening the inaugural Midway Festival of Plays, a lineup of seven 10-minute plays.

Dara Jade Tiller, shown backstage at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2008, is in the Woodford Theatre's production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Photo by David Perry | Herald-Leader.

The 10-minute format has its roots in Kentucky at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, though we rarely get to see the format around here. In a nice little piece of synergy, Earnest features Dara Jade Tiller, a former Acting Apprentice at Actors Theatre who performed in the 2008 Humana Festival.

The whole Woodford theatrical weekend shows nice synergy in the area theater scene. Both productions are creations of Woodford Countians, but have drawn plenty of interest from the Lexington theater community and others.

So, if you’re looking for an excuse to take a little drive out through horse country this weekend, here it is.

Actors Guild of Lexington’s production this month appears to need a little clearing up.

The March production was originally announced as The Waiting Room, which would have opened next week for a four week run. Then, the economy happened, and the show was changed to a three-week run of Robert Hewitt’s one-woman show, The Blonde, The Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, starring Leslie Beatty and directed by Walter May.

Then some rights issues happened.

So now, we will still have a one-woman show starring Leslie Beatty and directed by Walter May, but it will be Teresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates. In the end, this may be the best of the three options for the company, as Rebeck’s name and this show have been fairly prominent in theater circles in recent years. Rebeck has had two recent successes at the Humana Festival of New American Plays: the post-9/11 drama Omnium Gatherum, co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, in 2003 and The Scene in 2006. Rebeck also writes for film and television, including episodes of Third Watch, L.A. Law and the feature film Harriet the Spy.

Bad Dates is about a single mother trying to get back into the dating scene while running a restaurant. It runs March 19 through April 5 at the Downtown Arts Center.

Louisville arts groups have announced a new program that will offer $10 rush tickets to more than 70 performances during the balance of the 2008-09 arts season, including propductions by Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Louisville Orchestra, Louisville Ballet and the Broadway series.

The program is part of an effort to battle the faltering economy that is putting a pinch on arts groups and patrons alike. Last month, Louisville arts groups saw their city funding cut by 50 percent.

“As an arts community, we are very grateful for the enormous support and positive feedback we receive each year,” Stephen Klein, President of The Kentucky Center, said in a news release. “This is a way for us to give back, something especially important in light of the current economic crisis. Patrons will now have the opportunity to see award-winning live performances for the price of a movie ticket.”

Discounted performances at the Kentucky Center will include the Mark Morris and Alvin Ailey dance groups. Other groups will be offering shows such as productions in the Humana Festival of New American Plays and Leonard Bernstein celebration by the Louisville Orchestra.

The Arts Rush tickets will be available in person at the box office two hours prior to the selected performances.

Actors Theatre of Louisville’s 2009 Humana Festival of New American Plays will include works by writers from near and far, familiar and new.

Wendell Berry.

For Kentucky theater fans, there are two marquee names in the program. Leading the lineup for the 33rd edition of the fest, which attracts critics and theater professionals from around the world to Louisville, is Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry, which will play March 26-April 8. The show is adapted from the Henry County native’s writings by ATL artistic director Marc Masterson and ATL literary manager Adrien-Alice Hansel.

Naomi Wallace.

The festival also features a new work from Prospect native Naomi Wallace. Wallace, who now resides in England, has had four plays produced at the Humana Festival before, including the full length plays One Flea Spare in 1996 and The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek in 1998. Her new work is The Hard Weather Boating Party, March 14-April 4, for which she used research of Louisville’s Rubbertown neighborhood to write her play about three men conspiring to commit a crime against a powerful entity.

The other main-stage plays in the schedule will be:

■ Absalom by Zoe Kazan, March 10-April 11: Drama unfolds in the family of an aging literary giant when he releases his memoir.
■ Under Construction by Charles L. Mee, directed by Anne Bogart and performed by the Saratoga International Theatre Institute, March 17-April 5: A reunion of the artists who brought us bobrauschenbergamerica to tell a Norman Rockwell-inspired story of America.
■ Slasher by Allison Moore, March 6-April 5: An aspiring actor thinks it’s her big break when she’s cast as the “last girl” in a low-budget slasher flick, but her feminist mom is bent on killing the production.
■ Ameriville by Universes, a multidisciplinary ensemble, March 1-April 5: An examination of the state of the United States through the lens of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

Also scheduled is Brink!, March 20-April 5, a comic anthology about rites of passage from six playwrights.
The Humana Festival will be March 1 to April 11 at Actors Theatre.

The actors in This Beautiful City did an extremely good job portraying contemporary worship. Below: Brad Heberlee portrays a New Life pastor. Photos by Harlan Taylor | Actors Theatre of Louisville.

When I walked into a rehearsal of This Beautiful City at Actors Theatre of Louisville last month, I had to reorient myself: Yes, I was indeed in Actors Theatre, in the midst of preparations for the Humana Festival of New American Plays, not down the road at Southeast Christian or some other contemporary worship church.

The writers, director and actors in This Beautiful City spent several weeks researching the play in Colorado Springs, which they identified as the unofficial capitol of evangelical Christianity in the United States, and with the presence of megachurch New Life Church and organizations such as Focus on the Family in the town, it’s hard to argue. Embedding in the places or situations they portray on stage is the modus operandi of The Civilians, the New York-based company that created This Beautiful City. The intention of the chief creators — director/writer Steve Cosson, writer Jim Lewis and composer Michael Friedman — was to research a movement that had exerted a tremendous influence on the country over the last several decades, but with which they were relatively unfamiliar, as is most of the New York performing arts crowd.

God love NYC artists, they’re tremendously talented, but sometimes you want to say to them, "you’ve gotta get out more."

To The Civilians’ credit, they did. And true to those first few moments I saw in rehearsal, their portrayal of contemporary worship, the brand that is fortifying growing churches across the country, was spot on. But, as a writer who covers both performing arts and Christian popular culture, I went in wondering what it would say about the Christian faith and how the evangelical community would come across.

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Annie Parisse as Becky Shaw and David Wilson Barnes as Max in Gina Gionfriddo’s brilliant Becky Shaw. Below, Barnes, Mia Barron as Suzanna and Davis Duffield as Andrew in Shaw. All photos in this post by Harlan Taylor | Actors Theatre of Louisville.

It isn’t uncommon to look at the Humana Festival of New
American Plays lineup, get all excited about a new work from a familiar author,
and then walk away deflated by an effort that wasn’t quite all it could have
been – maybe wasn’t even near. This year, the marquee names were Gina Gionfriddo and Lee
Blessing, well known writers with solid resumes of stage hits.

And it is exhilarating to report that the results were a
masterpiece and a great play from the pair.

Gionfriddo’s Becky
Shaw was the masterpiece at the festival that wrapped up March 30 at Actors
Theatre of Louisville.

It is a play that has everything going on: witty banter, a
compelling story and wise observations about the human condition. You only realized it was a long journey after the standing
ovation died down.

We started in a tense hotel room meeting. Following her
father’s death, Suzanna and her mother Susan were locked in a bitter argument
about Susan’s financial status and new boy toy. Attempting to mediate was Max,
the financial planner who was taken in by Susan and Suzanna’s family after his
mother died when he was 10. The scene ended with Susan storming out and Max and
Suzanna consummating their relationship.

Fast forward a year, and Suzanna was married . . . to
Andrew, a guy Suzanna met on a ski trip that Max told her to take to help heal
after her father’s death. Andrew and Suzanna have set Max up on a date with
Becky Shaw. The moment you saw Becky, you knew this would not go well with
perfectionist Max. Becky was flighty, living the life of an aimless high school
graduate at age 35. But she also showed an early ability to cut to the heart of
situations, avoiding a lot of the analysis Suzanna piled on.

That’s the first act. Act II twists and turns several times,
coming to a surprising but surprisingly real ending. It also made you think a
lot about the characters and how they interacted along the way.

Max was at many moments an incredible jerk. Casting him
correctly will be a real key in future productions, because we need to maintain
some sympathy for him for the play to work. But sometimes, as much as you hated
to admit it, Max was right.

Suzanna and Andrew are good folks, but it was sort of a
surface goodness, and Gionfriddo made us contemplate how useful it was.

Becky Shaw was the
best exploration of relationships and emotions at Humana since Donald Margulies
Dinner With Friends, which came out
of the 1998 festival to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

And Blessing’s Great Falls was also an outstanding and
searingly honest play.

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Patrick James Lynch (in the Chargers helmet) as Gordo and Matthew Dellapina as Chaz in Carly Mansch’s All Hail Hurricane Gordo at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Copyrighted photo by Harlan Taylor | Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Carly Mensch’s All Hail Hurricane Gordo raises concerns before the show even starts.

In a filthy living room, a greasy-haired guy plays Nerf basketball, calling a little play by play for himself and whooping it up when he gets a basket. Eventually, his nerdy housemate comes in and they face off in an aggressive game in which the fellow with bad hair emerges victorious.

It’s not that the intro isn’t fun. It’s just that it raises the question of whether this is just the latest hipster, slacker show at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. That’s not a blanket slam. Just last year, Carlos Murillo’s dark play or stories for boys was a youth-oriented effort that emerged as the best of the fest. But Actors Theatre of Louisville has picked some clunkers in pursuit of younger audiences such as Alexandra Cunningham’s 2000 effort No. 11: Blue and White — plays which seem to have something to say, but in reality say little except for using in lingo that will be so last year by the time the next Humana rolls around.

Gordo leaves you wondering if this one will fall into the latter category for a while, but also lays out enough mysteries to keep you involved long enough to find out it is actually an excellent piece of theater from a clear and compelling young voice.

Those mysteries include, why does Chaz have all of these phone books piled up around his desk?

Why does Gordon have outbursts where he slams his head into the wall?

What exactly happened here?

The two are adult brothers living on their own. Gordon clearly has issues and limitations, and though Chaz seems more together, it appears he definitely has his issues to. A new young roommate, India, helps bring some of these problems to the surface and to a semblance of resolution.

Casting in the top roles really helps draw us in. Patrick James Lynch has the manic energy of the spastic Gordon, and though he would  clearly be tough to live with,  we see the sweetness and lost child residing beneath that facade. That same child exists in Matthew Dellapina’s Chaz, though with a job, a schedule, and even some volunteer work, he appears more together. Whatever happened to them, we know early on, it must have happened when they were young to arrest certain aspects of their development.

The play leaves us thinking about loss and our responsibilities to our loved ones and how they may conflict with our responsibilities to ourselves. And it leaves us thinking about brotherly love, which will always be hip, no matter what generation you hail from.

Halley Wegryn Gross and Tom Nelis in Lee Blessing’s Great Falls at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Photo by Harlan Taylor | Actors Theatre.

Great Falls doesn’t look like much when you walk into the theater. The set is a beige carpet with some brush on either side, suggesting the vast western United States Lee Blessing is driving us into.

As the play gets going though, we discover we don’t need much in terms of bells and whistles for a powerful night of theater. We get that from Blessing’s words, achingly honest performances from Tom Nelis and Halley Wegryn Gross, and sensitive directing from Lucie Tiberghien. At first it seems we may be witnessing a kidnapping, as Gross’ character taunts Nelis about what will happen to him in prison. But we quickly see that with all that ‘tude, there’s little fear. The 17-year-old girl may not have counted on a long trek from Omaha to Wyoming when she hopped in her ex-stepdad’s car, but she’s more along for the ride than her words suggest. And his affection is somewhat fatherly, not sinister. He’s a writer who sees brilliance in the words his ex-stepdaughter pens, and he wants to maintain a relationship with her.

The pseudo-kidnapping is an effort to explain himself and the infidelities her perpetrated that eventually broke up his marriage to her mother.

So, it’s not a kidnapping per se, but these two have a lot of baggage, and over the course of 90 minutes, they do engage in rough, bloody verbal combat. They both come across as authentic people who want to be good but have deep flaws, starting with their mutual narcissism. And the play itself goes into some uncomfortable areas. Let’s just say the girl has experienced a bunch of things you hope would never happen to a teenage girl, but the police blotter and the courts affirm they happen far too often at the hands of predatory males.

Humana can frequently get wrapped up in high concepts and bells and whistles — and scenic designer Paul Owen does have some nifty ways of introducing things such as hotel rooms and a museum to the play. But Blessing’s play reminds us the essence of great theater is a strong script with acting and direction to match.

Click here for information on this and all shows at this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays.

This will be my 10th year covering the Humana Festival of New American Plays, which starts this week.
Yes, it is about 75 miles down Interstate 64 from Lexington, and there
is a lot going on here. But Humana has held a special place on my
calendar since I got here because, in the grand scheme of American
arts, it’s very important and very cool.

Here’s my list of the top 10 reasons I’m excited about Humana, and I think you should be too.

1. It’s an annual national event that takes place right here in
Kentucky: No, we don’t have to scurry to the coasts to see the newest
plays from award-winning authors and hot young talents. They come to
Louisville, and critics, producers and directors from around the world
follow.

2. Say you saw it first: Many Humana plays have gone on to win awards.
Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart and Donald Margulies’ Dinner With
Friends both won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Many others enjoy lives
in theaters — some in regional houses, some on Broadway.

3. These are full productions: No actors standing around with scripts
in hand here. These productions have professional actors, with set and
costume designs by Actors Theatre’s crack staff.

4. Catch a rising star: Actors who have appeared in Humana productions
include Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Kathy Bates and Lili Taylor.

5. Many plays are timely: At least a few plays each year are ripped
from the headlines. In 2003, Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros and Theresa
Rebeck addressed terrorism and the post-9/11 world in Omnium-Gatherum.
Last year, Carlos Murillo’s dark play or stories for boys looked at
relationships in the MySpace world, and this year’s Neighborhood 3:
Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley looks at video gaming and the
real world.

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The Coasts will converge in Louisville to take a look across the American landscape in the 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, Feb. 24 to March 30.

The theatrical rite of late winter/early spring at Actors Theatre of Louisville will feature familiar faces and new voices in its main stage lineup, exploring topics from evangelical American to the history of hip-hop music to the uncomfortable reality of video game violence. Here’s a quick look at the lineup, based on play descriptions from ATL:

Great Falls by Lee Blessing: A father and step-daughter try to piece their lives together on a road trip across the American west. New York-based Blessing is an acclaimed stage and screen writer whose works include Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music and A Walk in the Woods.

This Beautiful City by Stephen Cosson and Jim Lewis with music lyrics by Michael Friedman: The Civilians, a New York-based company that creates theater pieces based on investigations of real life, has made a musical about the evangelical movement in America set in Colorado Springs, an evangelical community that has recently been beset with scandal and tragedy.

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo: New York-based Gionfriddo is the author of one of the Festival’s most recent hits, After Ashley, which explored the effect of a woman’s violent murder on her husband and son. This appears to be lighter fare, a dark comedy about playing match maker.

Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley: Reality meets video game fantasy when kids in a cookie-cutter suburb start playing an online horror video game set in a cookie-cutter suburb. This will be a Humana debut for Los Angeles-based Haley.

the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Joseph: In the description, this sounds like a multi-media exploration of the history of the "hip-hop generation," by Joseph, an HBO Def Poet and current resident artist at Stanford University.

All Hail Hurricane Gordo by Carly Mensch: Sometimes, you just have to go with the supplied description:  "The routines of daily life get blown apart when two brothers take in a plucky young houseguest. While India is running away from her relatively normal family, Chaz is struggling to find normalcy in the one he already has. Is it possible to be your brother’s keeper and have a life too?" Mensch is currently a fellow in the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright’s program and Gordo is a co-production with the Cleveland Playhouse, which will present it later this year.

~ This year’s Festival will also include the usual bill of ten-minute plays and a dramatic anthology, Game On, which looks at American culture through sports and asks the question, "what do sports tell us about ourselves?"