Copious Notes

Evangelical Christianity meets theater in 'This Beautiful City'

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.

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.

Humana Festival: 'All Hail Hurricane Gordo' review

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.

Humana Festival: 'Great Falls' review

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.

10 reasons to get psyched about Humana

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.

2008 Humana Festival

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?"

Zev weighs in

Zev Buffman, the impresario of Owensboro, weighed in on my post a few days ago about selling the arts in Kentucky short, and I thought I would share:

My comment Rich, is that yes, there is much going on in our state on the "regional" level, but still, this is a perfect time for change and thinking/creating out of the "box."

A new model of 'The Regional' is evolving nationally, mostly out of sheer financial necessity (money is drying up), PLUS a true need to generate more economic development opportunities and tourism to help those who always help us.

By creating a new "clean industry" (YES BROADWAY MUSICALS) here, that generate some 90 days a year of the actual production (jobs, hotel room, restaurants) for shows that then tour the US, Canada & the world (yes Japan too, is a regular recipient of "made in Owensboro" "product)it becomes a more even "trade" - they sell us Toyotas -- we sell them  Broadway. When you attach to each new Tony award winner guided "product, then bring in hundreds of KIDS to YATA: the new and hard to duplicate "Young Adult Theatre Academy" to work for weeks, shoulder to shoulder with the "Tony pros" and receive college credit for their intense summer month -- you create EDUCATION that will soon become a staple in KY colleges and universities in Western KY.

Finally, when you produce ORIGINAL mystery and thriller plays, screenplays, teleplays, children's mysteries and the extension on "Books on Tape" with full companies, original music, full reading cast, sound effects (both old & new) all in front of live audiences learning and loving their first time in a BIG SCREEN AUDIO theater, you then teach, you entertain and you produce innovative NEEDED product for the sweepingly growing XM and SIRUS plus NPR re-emerging radio programming. That's is how you anticipate a new market need and beat the competition by being there FIRST and with a big Library.

Rich, I swear I could go on for columns. Eventually our colleagues will see the opportunities and expand the wonderful product they already create to more "commercial and Educational" way.

We are standing ready to go anywhere in the State and help in the early beginnings.

Best bets for the coming arts season

Sunday, SUNDAY, SUNDAY is the day your 2007-08 arts preview section will be in the Herald-Leader. You can get the information online, but in print it is 10 pages packed with concerts, plays, exhibits and other cultural opportunities for Central Kentucky.

If you’re like me, after reading it, you’ll be excited. Anyone who says there’s no culture in the Bluegrass has to argue with the 10 pages of our special section. Good luck with that.

Like any season, there are a few dates in the 2007-08 calendar that are particularly intriguing. So, here are some of the events that pop off the page for this observer:

The Lexington Philharmonic’s conductor search
The Phil has built in marketing hooks for the next two seasons. First, there are the final four concerts from music director George Zack (Sept. 14, Dec. 14, April 25 and then the grand finale next September). And included in those concerts are a Brahms piano concerto, Messiah and two Beethoven symphonies, including the Ninth. Then, there’s the real “get your score card” event of the two-season search for his successor. We have five guest conductors slated to come across the Singletary Center stage between now and March, playing an interesting mix of music and hosting a diverse group of soloists including a classical guitarist and an organist. The concerts will be compelling opportunities to sit back and wonder what it would be like to see the conductor du jour on the podium all the time and pick a favorite as the announcement of Zack’s successor approaches, in the spring of 2009. Kayoko Dan, photo left, will be the first contestant, conducting the Oct. 26 concert.

UK Opera Theatre’s world premiere
In the past decade and a half, the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre has done a lot of noteworthy stuff, including grooming a Metropolitan Opera National Council Audition winner and several singers who have gone deep into that competition, going overseas to record a great American opera and hiring one of the most noteworthy figures in opera education. Collaborating with the San Francisco Opera for the co-world premiere of Thomas Pasatieri’s Hotel Casablanca Oct. 12, 13, 19 and 20 is yet another milestone. The first production was in August as part of San Francisco’s opera training program, and this review snippet from the Contra Costa Times’ Georgia Rowe should whet your appetite for the new opera: “The Hotel Casablanca is one of those rarer-than-hens-teeth works: contemporary, well-crafted, richly musical and riotously funny, with a brisk two-hour running time and plenty of roles for energetic young voices.”

Actors Guild presents the masters
In recent years under the leadership of Deb Shoss and now Richard St. Peter, Actors Guild has been supplementing its contemporary fare with more and more classics. This year we get a high-water mark with two certifiable masterpieces and four shows by iconic playwrights. It feels funny to say August Wilson and William Shakespeare are making their debuts with any company, but they are with Actors Guild, which presents Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom from Sept. 12 to Oct. 7 and the Bard’s Hamlet from Oct. 17 to Nov. 11. (Adam Luckey, photo left, will play Hamlet.) Then, we get David Mamet with Boston Marriage from Jan. 30 to Feb. 24 and Tom Stoppard with Arcadia from March 12 to April 6.

George C. Wolfe comes home
For more than two decades, Frankfort native George C. Wolfe has been making Kentucky proud with his Tony Award-winning directing career, as a celebrated playwright and his leadership of New York’s Public Theatre. Actors Theatre of Louisville is bringing Wolfe home in several ways this season. The fall calendar includes Spunk, three Zora Neale Hurston stories adapted for the stage by Wolfe, from Nov. 13 to Dec. 16. Then Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama which Wolfe directed off and on Broadway, plays Jan. 17 to Feb. 3. Finally, the man himself comes to create and direct a new work at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, Feb. 24 to March 30.

Kronos Quartet are (l-r) violinist John Sherba, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, violinist David Harrington and violist Hank Dutt.

Kronos Quartet inaugurates Transylvania University’s new concert series
The Dorothy J. and Fred K. Smith concert series gets an amazing launch Oct. 10 with the Kronos Quartet playing Haggin Auditorium on the Transy campus. My enthusiasm for this performance went into orbit when I saw the program, which you can check out at the Kronos website. It includes Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet and Scott Johnson’s It Raged.

See you there.

For Summer 2007, Lexington actors held their own

~ Make sure you check out our Summer Theater 2007 photo album.

From June 21 to Aug. 2, eight theatrical productions opened in the Lexington area.

Was there enough talent to go around?

Certainly, there were some stellar casts, particularly the ensembles for Shakespeare at Equus Run’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and SummerFest’s The Crucible. (Darell Kincer's photo, right, is of Jack Pattie, Jason Meenach, Kevin Hardesty and Gene Arkle in The Crucible.) But some directors will tell you they saw the local talent pool being stretched thin with so many shows. “Some people were cast in roles larger than their résumés would have suggested,” says Michael Grice, artistic director of SummerFest and director of The Taming of the Shrew. “Fortunately, they all stepped up.”

Studio Players’ Working was set to be a co-production with the new theater program at Bluegrass Community and Technical College and include students from the program. When auditions rolled around, program and play director Tim X Davis says, “I wound up with the opportunity to cast more of my students than I originally expected. We had some really green actors on the stage, without a lot of theatrical experience. But they really grew as the show went on.”

Some actors shuttled between a few productions, among them Adam Luckey, who played leading roles in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Working. But in many cases, actors and directors found they had to make choices.

“For performers, it gives them choices of places to go,” says Larry Snipes, director of Lexington Children’s Theatre, which presented Beauty and the Beast. “They audition for two or three shows and take the best role they’re offered. That puts the burden on us to be the place they want to work.”

LexArts president and CEO Jim Clark says he thought the local talent pool held up well with all the demands. Helping to spread the talent around, Clark says, was the variety of companies with different goals. Part of the mission of SummerFest, which took over the Arboretum space once occupied by Lexington Shakespeare Festival, was to give main stage opportunities to students in the Kentucky Classical Theatre Conservatory. Specifically, it cast teens in roles in Romeo and Juliet and The Crucible, including numerous leads that probably would have gone to adult actors otherwise. “Everyone was really impressed that the students took on these roles and gave strong performances,” Clark says.

The myriad shows also helped elevate several actors, such as Grice’s leads in Shrew, Josh Branham and Olga-Maria Cruz. Branham had been a reliable supporting player at the Shakespeare Festival for years, and Cruz has primarily worked as an opera singer in Louisville.

“Some people told me they thought the actors were better than they’d ever seen them before,” Grice says of his and the other SummerFest shows.

The plethora of shows didn’t come without some drop-offs that showed up in places like the supporting casts of musicals at Studio (Working), Paragon Music Theatre (Kiss Me Kate) and Lexington Children’s Theatre (Beauty and the Beast). So, can Lexington’s artistic community handle it? What if the summer of 2008 arrives with even more shows?

If that happens, Clark, Richard St. Peter of Actors Guild and others say companies might need to bring in some talent from out of town, like Louisville or Cincinnati, to supplement the Lexington actors. Taking a cue from next weekend’s Lexington Chamber Music Festival, led by Lexington native and Chicago Symphony violinist Nathan Cole, the theater community could ask performers who’ve made it big to return home fora summer fling, Clark says. That would require real long-range planning.

“You have to be working with a three- to five-year calendar if you’re going to try to book Laura Bell Bundy,” Clark says, citing the star of the Broadway musical Legally Blonde as an example.

That could be the future, but for one crazy summer, the Lexington theater community held its own.

~ This post is a companion to our Arts& Life story wrapping up the extraordinarily busy summer theater season in Lexington.

Tonys: A Lyndy update

While some Broadway-based Kentucky actors were trying to sleep through the Tony Award announcements -- ahem! -- Lyndy Franklin was dutifully up with her TV tuned to New York 1 when the nominees were announced Tuesday.

She had several rooting interests in addition to her own show, A Chorus Line, including her lifelong friend Laura Bell Bundy in Legally Blonde and her old roommate Jonathan Groff in Spring Awakening. The early reveille paid off handsomely as all of her concerns wound up in contention for Broadway's biggest honor.

Lyndy (photo, above, by Aaron Lee Fineman) did not go so far as to admit she knew Chorus Line would be nominated for best revival of a musical, but she did say, "You never fully believe it until you actually hear it . . . I screamed and I cried and I jumped up and down and I immediately text messaged Laura and Jonathan both, like, 'Oh my God, can you believe this?!' She just texted me back, 'AAAAHHHH!'"

Lyndy says she didn't sleep the night before the nominations, though it sounds like she may need all the rest she can get between now and June 10.

A little update: Since we last wrote about Lyndy, she was promoted to dance captain on Chorus Line. So, it's a good bet that Lyndy will be heavily involved in preparing the show's number for the Tony broadcast from Radio City Music Hall. Traditionally all nominated shows have performed during the broadcast, so there's also a chance we may see Steve Kazee, depending on what number 110 in the Shade chooses to perform.

If Lyndy needs to lean on someone with a little Tony experience, there's always her Lexington buddy Adam Miller, Chorus Line's associate company manager. Chorus Line is Miller's third Tony-nominated show, after Urinetown in 2002 and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 2005. Miller said that his first Tony campaign made him sick with all the work he had to do. Now, he's got a better handle on it, but he says being with a Tony nominated show, "never gets old, the excitement and possibility are always there."

OK, we are fully briefed on our Kentucky Tony nominees, and I promise we'll move on to a different topic tomorrow. But we will also keep you updated here, like when we find out what familiar faces will be on the Tony broadcast.

Wolfe at Actors Theatre

Actors Theatre of Louisville announced its 2007-08 season in yesterday's Louisville Courier-Journal and it is loaded with Frankfort-native George C. Wolfe's influence, as well as a few shows we've already seen in Lexington.

The exciting news first: ATL's lineup includes these touches from Wolfe (Copyrighted 2003 photo, right, by Peter K. Kramer for Getty):

~ Spunk, Wolfe's adaptation of three stories by Zora Neale Hurston, will be presented Nov. 13 to Dec. 16.

~ Jan. 17 to Feb. 3, the theater presents Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer Prize-winner for drama, Topdog/Underdog. Wolfe is not as involved, as far as we know, but he did direct the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway and Broadway productions of the show.

~ But Wolfe is coming home to Kentucky as ATL artistic director Marc Masterson has commissioned him to create a work for the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays, Feb. 24 to April 5.

Wolfe was born and raised in Frankfort and has gone on to a storied and award-winner career helping bring shows such as Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk and Angels in America to the stage. From 1993 to 2004, he served as artistic director of New York's Public Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival. His work received a nationwide audience in 2006 with his film directorial debut, HBO's production of Ruben Santiago-Hudson's Lackawana Blues. Kudos for Actors for bringing Wolfe home.

Actors season also includes two recent Actors Guild of Lexington shows: Steve Martin's adaptation of Carl Sternheim's The Underpants, Oct. 2 to 27, and David Sedaris' The SantaLand Diaries, Oct. 31 to Dec. 30.

There's another Lexington touch with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Sept. 11-30, which was written by John Cameron Mitchell with music by Lexingtonian Stephen Trask.

The season will open with Fire on the Mountain Aug. 28 to Sept. 22. The show by Randy Myler and Dan Wheetman, creators of Love Janis and Lost Highway, focuses on the lives and music of Appalachian coal miners.

Sense something of a Kentucky theme here?

Rounding out ATL's season are:

~ William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Jan. 2 to Feb. 2.

~ Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House, Jan. 28 to Feb. 23.

~ John Patrick Shanley's Tony Award-winner for Best Play, Doubt, April 16 to May 11.

Straight outta 'Anton'

Actors Guild of Lexington artistic director Richard St. Peter sent around a story that he correctly said sounded like something straight out of AGL’s next show, Anton in Show Business.

Seems plans were afoot to stage a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with an all-black cast, including Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker as Big Daddy, Tony-winner Phylicia Rashad as Big Mamma and four-time-Tony-winner Audra McDonald (Copyrighted 1998 photo, right, by Jim Cooper for the Associated Press) as Maggie, under the direction of Kenny Leon, who brought the critically acclaimed revival of A Raisin in the Sun starring Sean “P. Diddy” Combs to the stage.

According to the New York Post’s Michael Riedel, Leon and Whitaker pulled out after clashing with producers, who he identified as a group of wealthy hedge fund managers with no previous theater experience,  on numerous occasions. Among the conflicts were the producers’ threat to replace Whitaker with Danny Glover because he hadn’t signed his contract, and they wanted to bump McDonald in favor of Whitney Houston or Beyonce, calling the multiple-Tony-winner, “a regional theater actress.”

Apparently everyone else has abandoned ship, and now Debbie Allen is attempting to get the show up.  There’s no cast, and the producers’ option on Cat expires at the end of this year.

I’m sorry, but if you consider Audra McDonald a “regional theater actress” you have no business producing Broadway shows.

~ By the way, check out our Anton in Show Business video.

~ Required reading: Jamie Gumbrecht's story on the sad state of the building that houses the University of Kentucky Art Department.

Humana Festival 2007: Show me some emotion . . .

Toward the end of seeing shows at this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays, I was walking around Actors Theatre of Louisville with the Hoodoo Gurus’ tune Show Some Emotion stuck in my brain.

The festival picked some big scripts with powerful topics. But too often, the productions seemed to want to keep their distance, engaging a cute premise or a political agenda instead of the genuine feeling that was there for the taking.

The prime offenders in this category were Sherry Kramer’s When Something Wonderful Ends, which subjugated the powerful emotions of packing up a childhood home to a political treatise, and Ken Weitzman’s The As If Body Loop, which was far too cute to engage us in its characters’ plights.

That said, there was a genuine success in Carlos Murillo’s dark play or stories for boys. Humana has launched several scripts about Internet communication, but this was far and away the best. Telling the story of an Internet relationship gone very wrong, it used the device of actors reciting often bizarre and naked chat room chatter for a gripping story. Humana also forged a relationship with another avant garde theater troupe, Philadelphia’s New Paradise Laboratories, which yielded the intriguing, if not entirely successful Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle.

Here’s hoping New Paradise returns to Humana.

Now, in previous years, my fellow critic Dag Ryen and I put together an Oscar-like list of festival awards for the main-stage plays. Dag is now enjoying life in the great American Southwest, but we’ll keep the Herald-Leader/Kentucky.com tradition of Humana bouquets alive. So, here’s one critic’s best of the fest:

Best play: Carlos Murillo's dark play or stories for boys. It’s a new American play for a new America, where people meet in cyberspace, with sometimes dire consequences. It’s the best play I’ve seen at Humana for potentially attracting young audiences, though the content will probably put it out of bounds for any school productions. The play may be the single biggest factor in convincing me not to put a computer in either of my children’s rooms, in part because Murillo’s authentic script leaves little doubt that scenarios such as dark play’s have occurred around the country.

Best male actor: Matthew Stadelmann as Nick in dark play. About half way through dark play, we find out that the charismatic Nick, who has been guiding us through this tale, is actually a pretty friendless, faceless guy in real life. Stadelmann finds a perfect balance between the two personas and the space in between them for a brilliant lead.

Best female actor: McKenna Kerrigan as Betsy Competitive in Batch. You know, it wasn’t a great festival for women’s roles in the main-stage plays. And Batch was an ensemble piece, but Kerrigan definitely stood out as the blushing bride, and she was really the performer that took this play deeper than a simple sight and sound spectacle of pre-nup debauchery.

Best supporting male actor: Richard Furlong as Smeija, the guard, in The Unseen. Craig Wright wrote The Unseen so that the torturer really illustrated the pain the prisoners were enduring. Furlong dove into the role, showing that the victims are not necessarily the ones whose souls are destroyed by man’s inhumanity to man.

Best supporting female actor: Ali Ahn as Angie Lee in Strike-Slip. Angie has to traverse a lot of ground in Naomi Iizuka’s play, from goofy teenager in love, to young pregnant mom, to frustrated wife, to the play’s sublime - albeit far-fetched and idealistic - conclusion. In the true ensemble cast, Ahn emerged as the heart of the show.

Best director: Michael John Garces for dark play. I’m a firm adherent of the idea that the best show is directed by the best director. But Whit MacLaughlin’s direction of Batch had me sorely tempted to pick him for the multimedia spectacular. Dark play’s success, however, owed a lot to Garces’ work. He focused his actors on their individual roles in the larger story, so we got the idea of self-absorbed people sitting at their keyboards even as they conversed with one another in the theater. And that was a key step in making this a play that knew what it was about.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays continues through April 1 at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and As If Body Loop continues through April 7. Click here for show and ticket information.

Humana review: 'Strike Slip'

Strike-Slip, by Naomi Iizuka - To be completely blunt, my ticket to Strike-Slip came at the end of a long week and a long day. Having heard generally negative things about the show, I seriously contemplated following an impulse to get in my car and head home to Lexington after The Unseen Friday afternoon. But there's a voice in my critical brain that says, "See things for yourself." That, and having liked Iizuka's previous Humana shows - 2004's At the Vanishing Point is my favorite play in nine years of covering the festival - kept me in Louisville, and I'm glad I stayed. Strike-Slip isn't a great play, and certainly not Iizuka's best. You can see the comparisons to Crash, as it is the story of a culturally diverse group of people in Los Angeles who intersect due to some unfortunate circumstances. But Iizuka makes those connections in some unexpected and meaningful ways, and deftly weaves threads through the show such as the seismic theme of the title and the story of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Like we said, it's not perfect. The diversity occasionally leads to some of the stereotyping, the conclusion seems a bit fanciful and some people may be put off by it. It also felt a bit TV-drama-ish at points. (Maybe TV could be another outlet for Iizuka's craft.) But a fairly simple set design and attractive story that seemed to please people around me may make it a good bet for theaters that are willing to spring for the eight-person cast. For a night at the theater, Strike-Slip was well worth it, even worth getting to bed a bit later than you hope.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays continues through April 1 at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click here for show and ticket information.

Humana review: 'The Unseen'

The Unseen, by Craig Wright -- Wallace and Valdez are prisoners. We don't know where they are prisoners or why they are prisoners. We just know that every day for 11 years, they have been subjected to grueling torture by a masked guard who struggles mightily with the misery he perpetrates. In Wright's quick play, we see the men dealing with their situation, trying to hang on to hope, and forming a strong bond, despite never having seen one another. They play word games that transport them to sunny beaches, they concoct baseless scenarios for freedom. But in many ways, they have become accustomed to their situation, even their torturer. Director Marc Masterson and Richard Bekins as Wallace and Gregor Paslawsky as Valdez make the most of their small cells drawing us into their fantasies and predicaments. The highlight of the production though is Richard Furlong as the conflicted guard who finds he cannot stand looking into the eyes of his victims. His visceral anguish is actually what draws us into the pain of his victims, more than the recollections of Wallace and Valdez, who are actively trying to modify their torment. To the end, we don't know the circumstances, but we get a lot of insight into how hope survives.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays continues through this weekend at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click here for show and ticket information.

Humana review: 'When Something Wonderful Ends'

When Something Wonderful Ends, by Sherry Kramer - Theater is an amazing forum for ideas, statements and thought provocation. But there is a difference between a play and an essay or an op-ed piece. It's a lack of feeling for that difference that dooms When Something Wonderful Ends, Kramer's "one woman, one Barbie" play. The setting is Sherry's childhood home in Springfield, Mo. Her mother died five years ago and her father is going to an assisted living community, so he she is packing up her childhood toys, namely, her Barbie dolls and accompanying Dream Houses, Dream Cars and whatnot. It all serves as a metaphor for loss of innocence, be it about religion, international affairs or politics. The through line of the play is that at the precise time 10-year-old Sherry was buying a choice Barbie dress in 1964, the United States was signing a treaty with Iran that put U.S. soldiers in the country out of the reach of Iranian law, setting up a chain of events that led to the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, the Gulf War and the current conflict in Iraq. There's also the idea that our dependence on cheap oil makes us all complicit in current Middle East crises. These are all ideas worth thinking about and exploring. But Sherry frequently slides into stern lectures, complete with slides, that are a complete departure from wrapping up the playroom, which she does over the course of the show. And the extent of these thoughts feel quite out of place at a time when she is putting away her home and going through the emotions of remembering her mother and her childhood. The play is not devoid of entertainment. There are many amusing stories and Lori Wilner, who plays Sherry, is an engaging hostess. But too often, it feels like we were sold a play that turned out to be a lecture.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays continues through this weekend at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click here for show and ticket information.

Humana review: 'The As If Body Loop'

The As If Body Loop, by Ken Weitzman - Between the funky concept of a Hebrew legend about 36 people who must carry the pain of the world and Weitzman's second-career perspective, As If came with a lot of promise. Weitzman's plays have been widely produced by companies such as Steppenwolf and the Mark Taper Forum, but in his previous career, he produced sports documentaries. Indeed, that automatically makes you wonder if the central character in As If, Aaron, is a bit autobiographical. Aaron makes films for the National Football League, and football has a prominent place in the play. Aaron is constantly seized by searing stomach pains, his sister's body temperature is dropping perilously low, and his brother and mother - both self-taught "healers" -- are convinced the fate of mankind is at stake in their pain. The play resolves in revelations and observations about unspeakable pain and trauma, but it's a bit too caught up in its mythology and cuteness to engage genuine emotions. It also has several plot holes that need to be closed up. Director Susan V. Booth bears some blame for this play coming up short. She has an accomplished group of actors at her command, but the performances are uniformly cartoonish, making the play hard to take seriously. To Weitzman's credit, As If is a show I'd love to see again, but guided by a director more attentive to the seriousness that lies beneath the silliness.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays continues through this weekend at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click here for show and ticket information.

Humana review: Batch

Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle is probably unlike any prenuptial throw down you've ever attended. But, depending on your experience, it may be how you remember it.

Personal disclosure here: I have never been to a bachelor party. My friends seemed to favor things like rounds of golf with the guys before taking their vows. I have heard the legends though, and this Humana Festival production by Whit MacLaughlin's New Paradise Laboratories and playwright Alice Tuan seems bent on pushing the legends as far as they can stretch. (The copyrighted photo, right, by Angela Shoemaker is of Matt Saunders, Lee Ann Etzold, and McKenna  Kerrigan in a rehearsal of Batch.)

The show is Actors Theatre of Louisville's latest collaboration with an outside theater for a Humana show. It is also its latest venture into avant garde theatre and its latest off-site production. The venue is The Connection, a Louisville nightclub where drag queens have been using Batch's tall, square stage with a trapdoor when the New Paradise cast isn't on it.

New Paradise employs a lot of multimedia, primarily video screens that surround the stage and video cameras that are seemingly everywhere. Sometimes we see a different perspective on what's occurring on the stage and sometimes we're seeing pre-taped sequences, such as the revelry in a hotel room. Video Designer Jorge Cousineaeu comes up with a lot of things during the show, and it seems safe to say Humana has not seen live video design like this before.

It all goes toward creating an experience more than telling a story. We have Betsy and Taggis, our happy couple, who gaze at each other longly before the show -- her (McKenna Kerrigan) coquettishly on stage while he (Aaron Mumaw) circles her in a video projection. Immediately, they are whisked off to their respective soirees, which begin stereotypically -- the women debating between going to a spa or getting a stripper, the men having no questions about the stripper aspect of their drunken revelry. Then, it starts getting increasingly bizarre as Taggis, Betsy, and their friends to an extent, go through episodes of questioning, searching and discovery until they are hand-in-hand, wandering uncertainly into a confusing new world.

Along the way, there are indelible images such as Betsy's empty embrace, the boxing ring portrayal of the bachelor party and the satyrs in boxing gear. And, like most good abstract art, it is thought provoking, usually turning your questions of "what was that?" into larger, more universal considerations. It is not entirely successful, frequently becoming so bogged down in sophomoric sexuality it was hard to take the show seriously. But unlike some clunkers of avant garde creation at Humana, this had resonance, and like it's title celebration, you probably won't forget Batch, even if you try.

Click here for tickets to the show, which runs through April 1.

Humana review: dark play

Since the late 1990s, the Humana Festival of New American Plays has been dipping its toes into the Internet, exploring the new and sometimes frightening worlds created in cyberspace. But it has never done this as successfully as Carlos Murillo's dark play or stories for boys.

Murillo's play is dark, no doubt, but the first phrase in the title actually refers to a dangerous type of game in which not all of the pawns know they are playing. It is a type of game that can easily take place in cyberspace where identities are easily concealed.

Nick is a lonely teenager who likes to cruise through Internet chat rooms messing with people, convincing them he is one person and then pulling off the mask at a crucial moment -- let your imagination run wild. One day, Nick spots Adam, a lonely heart who naively states on his myspace page, "I want to fall in love." Nick can't resist convincing Adam that he is the girl of Adam's dreams. But Nick finds he cannot stop playing the game, even when it becomes much more tangible.

Murillo's masterstroke is dramatizing the intrigue and bizarreness of much Internet chatter. Indeed, a lot of the dialogue is actual digital conversation  come to life, illuminating how people get drawn into these games, and then it seamlessly tumbles into the real world. Matthew Stadelmann as Nick, Will Rogers as Adam, and Liz Morton as the fictional dream girl all have a keen sense how to animate this, and director Michael John Garces moves the action around the Bingham Theatre floor like an ever-tangling web.

Lou Sumrall is an invaluable supporting player, bringing many Netizens such as perverts and conspiracy theorists to life in often entertaining fashion.

But the real key to this play is Murillo, who seems to be writing from something he knows. The dialogue and the characters feel authentic, and even though the answer to the "question" Nick is asked throughout the play is quickly obvious, you want to find out how he gets there.

With a relatively small cast and minimal set requirements, it seems likely dark play will start popping up around the country, and properly marketed, it could be a prime piece for attracting younger audiences to live theater.

(Both copyrighted photos above are by Harlan Taylor for Actors Theatre of Louisville. In the top photo, Liz Morton as the fictional dream girl seduces Will Rogers as Adam. In the bottom image, Matthew Stadelmann as Nick and Adam down vodka shots at their first face-to-face meeting.)

Humana 2007 looks intriguing

One of my favorite days of the year is when I run over to Louisville to work on advance stories about the Humana Festival of New American Plays (actually, it's often several days). Actors Theatre of Louisville crackles with energy as all varieties of actors, directors, designers and other talent shuttle between the theaters and the rehearsal studio past Dot, ATL's genial receptionist who never appears to let the chaos phase her.

Our advance story in the Herald-Leader is about how virtually every Humana actor with a TV credit has been on Law & Order, or one of its many spin-offs. But a day in ATL's fifth floor rehearsal space also let me have a look at what's being prepared for the Humana crowds this year, and it's an interesting bunch.

The festival opened this week with The Unseen, Craig Wright's play about two prisoners of a totalitarian regime that the Courier-Journal's Judith Egerton called thought provoking. (The photo above, by Harlan Taylor for Actors Theatre, is of Richard Furlong and Richard Bekins in The Unseen.)

Naomi Iizuka, one of Humana's mainstays the past few years, is back with Strike-Slip. It's a play that is drawing comparisons to Crash, as it's about how a violent act reverberates through the lives of a diverse group of Los Angeles residents. It's hard to look at a rehearsal without thinking Crash, but it also looks like an intriguing group of characters, and creating interesting characters is one of Iizuka's strengths.

Every once in a while, you can sit in a Humana rehearsal for a good half hour and still not have much of an idea what the show is about. Such is a the case with Ken Weitzman's The As If Body Loop. It has something to do with very gifted people and people meant to shoulder the pain of the world -- not totally sure if they are the same person. A lot of this should become clearer with the show's full staging. But it does look very funny, and this is one of those Humana casts that runs a gamut from well-traveled and experienced to rather young.

Carlos Murillo's dark play or stories for boys leans young, with a tale about an Internet relationship gone wrong. Rehearsal rooms at Humana always boast wall displays that show the world of the play being worked on, and this one included the characters' myspace pages and celebrity snarkiness such as "Ben Affleck, so lame." This was also the rehearsal from which you frequently heard a lot of yelling and loud sound effects, and director Michael John Garces had the action snapping.

Also piquing interest is BATCH: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacular, which will be staged at a Louisville nightclub, The Connection. We'll be writing about that one more in the coming weeks.

Another highlight late in the festival will be performances of eight plays from Suzan-Lori Parks' (photo, right) 365 Days/365 Plays project. That sort of illustrates what makes Humana so great for Kentucky. For a month early in the year, it brings the national conversation about theater to the Bluegrass State. Sometimes, it's an ongoing conversation, like the 365 plays or the ATCA/Steinberg award we wrote about earlier. But often, when you think of all of the theater mainstays and Pulitzer Prize winners that come out of Humana, the conversation simply starts here.

New play award nominees

A Humana Festival premier and script by screen actor Jeff Daniels highlight the nominees for the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. The winner will be announced March 31 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville:

Guest Artist by Jeff Daniels explores hero worship and artistic risks when a burned-out playwright comes to a small-town theater that has commissioned him to write what could be his last play. Daniels wrote the play for his Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Mich. It sounds like it may be similar in spirit to Jane Martin's Anton in Show Business, which won the ATCA award in 2000 and will play April 18-May 13 at Actors Guild of Lexington.

The Scene by Theresa Rebeck premiered at last year's Humana Festival and was recently staged by New York's Second Stage Theatre in a production starring Tony Shaloub. The play is about the emotional toll of an affair between an arrogant writer and a vapid newcomer to the city. OK, I have to admit, I was not a fan. But then, I'm admittedly worn out on plays about witty Manhattanites. Apparently, I'm in the minority, and it is yet another feather in Humana's cap.

Hunter Gatherers by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb premiered at Killing My Lobster, a San Francisco sketch-comedy troupe. (My kids love that name.) It is described by ATCA as an "inky dark comedy" about two couples giving into their primal urges. (Don't think my kids will see this show, anytime soon.)

Just a Kiss by Catherine Bush is about two heterosexual actresses who become closer than they thought they would while rehearsing a play about sexual attraction between women. It premiered at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Fla.

Opus by Michael Hollinger is about the strained relationships in a string quartet. It premiered at Arden Theatre Company in Philadelphia and has enjoyed two other productions.

Vestibular Sense by Ken LaZebnik is described by ATCA as a funny and uplifting look at an adult with autism. It premiered at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theatre.

Humana prelude

Here in the months leading up to the Humana Festival of New American Plays, we're getting a bit of a Humana prelude from theaters in the region. Closest to home, here in Lexington, is Studio Players, which is opening Steven Dietz's (photo, left) 1997 Humana entry Private Eyes on Jan. 18.

In Humana Festival: 25 Years of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Private Eyes has one of those perplexingly thick Humana play descriptions:

In Stephen Dietz's new comedy of suspicion, honesty is only the last resort. Matthew's wife Lisa is having an affair with their director . . . but oh, if it were only that simple! From their rehearsal room to a restaurant to a therapist's office, deception becomes a matter of perception until this play within a play within a play (within a play . . . ) gives over to the true reality -- the simple fact of two people alone, eye to eye, with nowhere left to hide.

Yeah.

Well, once it hit the stage, people figured it out as Private Eyes has been produced coast-to-coast and garnered mostly good reviews. Studio's production is directed by  Richard Foley and will star playhouse favorites Bob Singleton and Allie Darden Tipton as Matthew and Lisa. The show will run through Feb. 4 at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays (and Thursday, the 18th) and 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $14 general admission, $10 students, and available by calling (859) 225-0370 or clicking here.

Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park is also offering two plays that debuted at Humana. Rha Goddess' Low has a short engagement tonight (Jan. 10) through Saturday. Showtimes are 7:30 tonight, 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 4 and 9 p.m. Saturday. Click here for tickets. Low is a riveting monologue about poverty and addiction combining spoken word and hip hop. It premiered last year at Humana.