Humana Festival 2008 wrap-up

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.

It was the story of a man who commandeered his ex-step daughter for a cross county drive in an attempt to reconcile with her after his infidelity caused him and her mother to break up. It took a while to burn away the acid of their early conversations to get to some meaningful exchanges and a conclusion that, like Shaw, felt honest.

Falls, Shaw and newcomer Carly Mensch’s terrific All Hail Hurricane Gordo created a overall theme of profoundly damaged people at this year’s Humana. Max and Becky both  suffered humiliating, staggering rejections that are keys to their characters. Pretty much the same was true for Gordo’s Chaz and Gordon, brothers who were abandoned by their parents in a parking lot.

In this trio, Humana gave us three solid plays this year that deserve lives in theaters across the country.

Robin Lord Taylor as a video-game addicted teen and Kate Hampton as his concerned mother in Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom. Below, Brad Heberlee as a pastor at New Life Church in This Beautiful City.

Where Humana came up short this year was areas where it had excelled in recent outings: innovation and plays specific to new technology.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s the break/s was billed as a look at the history of hip hop, but came across as a blurry portrait of music, identity and memoir augmented by some cool dancing and amateurish video. Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom was the most intriguing idea on paper: A video game set in a cookie-cutter suburb became manifest in a real neighborhood where the kids are addicted to it. But Jennifer Haley wasn’t quite able to pull the numerous ideas in her script and the gimmick together into a satisfying whole.

This Beautiful City had quite a bit to recommend it. The New York-based troupe The Civilians, which creates works based on interviews with people in specific places or situations, wrote the play about American evangelical Christianity and its unofficial capitol of Colorado Springs, Colo.

It definitely scored in authentic portrayals of contemporary worship and ministry. And it arrived at keen observations of why the evangelical movement has succeeded and its inherent flaws. But it’s preachiness against the faith were a bit too detectible to be the objective observation it purported to be, and it needed some editing to trim its two-and-a-half-hour length.

File City and Neighborhood under “needs some work.”

But still, Humana 2008 gave us three complete works ready for the road and even some awards consideration. In Louisville in March, that’s a very good batting average.