“Let me start with a confession: I’m pretty tired,” says actor Tom Nelis, portraying composer, conductor and tortured egotist Leonard Bernstein in “Score,” featured in this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, held at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.
He could have been talking about the festival itself. A fuzzy mediocrity clouded the 26th annual Humana lineup, the first slate chosen by ATL artistic director Marc Masterson. The festival’s “visitors’ weekend,” showcasing six full-length plays, a bill of one-acts and various ancillary multimedia projects, concluded Sunday.
Larger conclusions regarding the state of American playwriting shouldn’t be drawn from any six plays. Any long-standing cultural entity can have an off-year. Even with the proliferation in recent decades of new play-development opportunities for American writers, the Humana Festival remains the major place to see a batch of new works fully produced, available for viewing in a handy two- or three-day clump.
Period of adjustment
When a relatively new leader is trying to figure out where he wants to take his festival, a period of adjustment — call it a temporary multiple personality disorder — inevitably follows. And yet, the sum total of the ’02 festival made you wonder: Can Humana reassert its relevance and find an artistic personality to call its own?
This was one of those years when the schmoozing so far outweighed the art, you couldn’t find a scale to weigh them simultaneously.
Various Chicago theater folks from the Court Theatre, Victory Gardens, the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and other organizations said they had a nice enough time anyway.
Russ Tutterow of Chicago Dramatists, in between matinees, said simply that “I should be here, because I should meet people. Plus, of course, see the shows.”
After Saturday’s late-evening performance of “Score,” a disappointing Bernstein portrait from the generally terrific director Anne Bogart and her SITI Company, the Humana visitors — most of whom had already seen three other plays that day — ended up in the lobby where a lot of shrimp had been laid out, with free high-quality local bourbon available at a table over to the right.
There’s usually a fair bit of interest in this table. But this year, several fraught theatergoers (non-Chicagoans, of course) were actually seen going over the top football style, fourth down, two yards to go, to get at it.
For the third year running, a play by Barrington native Charles L. Mee (“Big Love,” “bobrauschenbergamerica”) secured one of the prized slots.
This year’s Mee entry, “Limonade Tous Les Jours,” is a wispy but pleasant piece about a Paris fling, fragrant with regret. Jerome Hairston’s “a.m. Sunday,” an uneven but affecting domestic drama about a racially mixed marriage, avoids the mistake of being only about that subject. Hairston’s worth watching.
I liked the half-speed slapstick in the first hour of Adam Rapp’s “Finer Noble Gases,” a drug-addled slackerfest set in an East Village apartment. The play features a performer urinating, for real, into a snare drum. This alone makes it the dampest of the Humana entries, not counting the play’s real spit and, early on, a fake but impressively realistic incident of vomiting. Following the faux puke, several audience members projectile-exited right out the door.
You could see the thought balloons above their fleeing heads: Wasn’t this the festival that made its reputation on “Crimes of the Heart”? “The Gin Game”? “Dinner With Friends”?
Here is artistic director Masterson’s quandary. He has inherited from former artistic director Jon Jory a famous and attractive launching pad for new plays. The Humana Festival remains a magnet for agents, film and television development people, directors, literary managers, critics, all looking for something to turn their respective cranks.
In his later years at the Humana Festival, Jory managed to sneak in a few non-mainstream, non-realistic voices amid the kitchen-sink realists that made the festival’s reputation in the first place. Masterson has promised more ventures along these lines, and for every old-guard Humana core constituent who wouldn’t see another Adam Rapp play if a gun were put to her head, there’s another theater professional interested if not in onstage urination, then at least in a fuller array of voices.
“I wish a wider range of aesthetics were being served here,” says Mara Isaacs, producing director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.
A wearing experience
Friday afternoon, Masterson hosted a panel titled “New Voices/New Directions in Eastern and Central Europe.”
Zbigniew Brzoza of Warsaw’s Teatr Studio spoke on current conditions in Poland. A few limp, apolitical, verbally gassy American plays later — you didn’t have to be a Polish avant-garde director to weary of the staggering timidity found in Tina Howe’s “Rembrandt’s Gift” and Marlane Meyer’s “The Mystery of Attraction” — the festival clearly had worn Brzoza down.
“What makes me sad,” he said, struggling for polite English phrasing in between cigarettes, “is that (the weakest efforts) are like hamburger. You eat it, you are not hungry anymore, but later you cannot remember eating anything.”
A near-impossible task awaits artistic director Masterson. In order to make his mark, he will likely alienate a certain percentage of the old guard, or the avant-garde, or both. The festival must prove itself anew.
However inadvertently, a year such as this one imparts the impression of coasting on a reputation. And that’s the quickest route to irrelevance.
