Down Tick in Louisville

By T.E. Kalem

An off-year for experiment at a pace-setting festival

Bear markets are not always on Wall Street. While they do not perform precisely like stocks, all regional theaters fluctuate from year to year. In its sixth annual festival of new American plays, the Actors Theater of Louisville appears to be on a down tick.

The group's highly regarded artistic director, Jon Jory, is an adventurous risk-taker, but this time he may simply have put together too speculative a production portfolio. His gamble on a front-porch theme of exploring U.S. rural small-town roots, ranging in time from 1915 to 1951, produces the unintended illusion of leafing through old Saturday Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell.

As the gravitational centerpieces of its new full-length U.S. dramas, the festival offers adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath and The Informer. This rather dubiously stretches the word new and, in the present instance, has the disconcertingly anti-theatrical effect of making a playgoer wish that he or she were reading the novels or seeing the films. And two sessions totaling 18 monologues are at least one too many.

Louisville may have been slightly victimized by past successes. The Pulitzer-prizewinning Crimes of the Heart (currently on Broadway) originated at the festival, as did Getting Out, My Sister in This House, Agnes of God, and The Gin Game, all of which went on to New York and to other regional theaters.

Even in this season's less than robust crop, there are some potential export candidates. Among the one-acters, The New Girl, by Vaughn McBride is a very winning entry. The setting is a room in the Flossie Patch Nursing Home in Burley, Idaho. Clarissa (Anne Pitoniak) is bedridden, and Flo (Susan Kingsley) tools in on a health" to wheelchair get out the reporting first that time she and she'll "faked do it again. "I'm a lifer," responds Clarissa, but not despairingly. The two women are feisty graveyard jesters and the word terminal is not in their vocabulary.

They gossip, rail at each other, make up, and follow murky, unparallel lines of thought of the "Who's on first?" variety.

Last year Jane Martin (a pen name shielding a woman who refuses to reveal her identity) made her unforgettable debut as a monologuist with Twirlers, in which the heroine likens champion baton wielding to a transcendent experience ("Twirling is the throwing of yourself up to God"). Lisa Goodman repeats her role this year, and ten more Martin monologues have been added. The most powerful, in content and performance, is Handler. The heroine (Susan Cash) belongs to the Holiness Church and handles rattlers: "If you got the spirit, snake don't bite."

From this blunt and colloquial beginning, the piece builds to a Twirlers epiphany of mystic anguish.

The one full-length play that seems certain to travel well is Oldtimers Game by Lee Blessing. This seriocomic drama bears some resemblance to That Championship Season and The Changing Room.

The action takes place in the locker room of the Northshore Otters, a triple-A team in Minnesota. Without sentimentality, Playwright Blessing fills the room with phantom memories of long summer after noons, male camaraderie, ambitions and fears. The explosive humor is capped by a murderous bat-swinging binge.

Blessing gives his characters a pungent flavor. Old John Law (Ray Fry), a legendary pitcher who is being honored, is a laconic curmudgeon who seems to hate baseball now and to have loathed the fans in his days of glory. Add on: the whisky-swigging, pot-bellied manager (Frederic Major), the clubhouse clown (William McNulty), the Hispanic outsider Jesus Luna (Dierk Toporzysek) and the multi millionaire superstar (Mel Johnson).

Blessing's creative gem is the new owner, Mr. Thompson (Michael Kevin), who flies his own Learjet. Thompson is a cross between the Yankees' George Steinbrenner arid a computerized barracuda. He tells the warriors" and players he that "you wants "a can't be franchise perfect of without a perfect attitude." All the actors at Louisville are very nearly perfect, and this year they had to be. -- -- By T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.