TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/041789/04178900.065

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 77 lines

THEATER, Page 70

Some Vigor And Vinegar

Louisville's festival of new plays is again on the upswing

By William A. Henry III


    It was conceived as a public relations gambit on behalf of a
little-known Kentucky troupe and a for-profit health-care
corporation. Blessed in its early years with remarkable taste, or
maybe beginner's luck, the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of
Louisville soon developed into a hallmark of the regional-theater
movement and one of the nation's prime showcases for new plays.
Half a dozen transferred to Broadway or the movies. Two, The Gin
Game and Crimes of the Heart, won Pulitzer Prizes. Then the
festival fell on hard times. Of 37 works introduced from 1985 to
1988, few went on to major stagings, and none was a real winner.

    This year, however, Louisville is on the upswing. Four of the
seven shows at the just completed festival seem sure to have
further life; one is among the freshest, funniest and most poignant
works seen on any U.S. stage this season. Though the writers
included Broadway stalwart Arthur Kopit, novelist Harry Crews and
columnist William F. Buckley Jr., the best script, aptly for
Louisville's tradition of discovery, came from regional-theater
veteran Constance Congdon, whose works have never been produced in
New York City.

    Congdon's Tales of the Lost Formicans takes a weepy topic that
might easily have been a TV movie of the week and inverts it into
a witty, goofy, almost anthropological look at humankind as viewed
by aliens from outer space. The patriarch of a suburban blue-collar
family is dying of Alzheimer's disease, while his daughter acts out
anger over her divorce through petty crimes of feminist rage and
his grandson runs away and ends up sleeping in shopping malls. The
extraterrestrials are staging a sort of slide show to explain how
human art, society and psychology work. Their mix of sharp
insights, off-center observations and occasional wrong guesses
eerily parallels the gradual mental deformation of the afflicted
man, while the device of narration allows Congdon to avoid
prolonged melodramatics. The script benefited from Roberta
Levitow's simple, fluid staging and from an able ensemble that
alternated as aliens or the family and friends simply by donning
or removing sunglasses.

    Kopit's Bone-the-Fish is a malicious and effective send-up of
David Mamet's Broadway hit about Hollywood greed, Speed-the-Plow.
Yet it has a vigor, and vinegar, of its own. Kopit's wry premise
is to take the rhetorical excesses of ambition -- people saying
they would slit their wrists, eat excrement or give up an intimate
body part to achieve some goal -- and render them literally. His
hustlers from the fringe of the movie business (Joseph Ragno and
Bruce Adler) are more than a little crazy. Even crazier is the fact
that their self-abasement might make them as rich as they think.
The production hit a long dead spot in the second act, where
Julianne Moore could not find much real in the underwritten role
of a rock star.

    Also promising but in need of a further draft or two is Crews'
Blood Issue, an old-fashioned play of a family gathering leading
to late-night revelation. The secret is tame by current standards:
a man who feared his blood was tainted asked his best friend to
sire his children. But the real problem is that the central
character, who is a writer and who presumably stands in for the
author, is almost devoid of particularity: his only trait is
drunkenness. On the plus side were pungent dialogue, believable
family conflict and forgiveness, and deft performances by Anne
Pitoniak as a mouthy matriarch and Bob Burrus as her sly
brother-in-law. The other play of promise, Charlene Redick's slight
but touching Autumn Elegy, depicts a man long withdrawn from the
world and his protective wife, now fatally ill.

    The most ballyhooed work, Buckley's adaptation of his espionage
novel Stained Glass, proved stagnant and pointless. Deficiencies
that can be overlooked on the page -- cardboard characters, what-if
plots about events from decades ago, smugness about how easy it is
to distinguish between right and wrong -- are wearisome on the
stage. Buckley's dialogue was, if not sesquipedalian, then not
serendipitous either. The cumbersome production resulted in set
changes longer than the scenes, although the scenes were not
necessarily any more interesting.