Southern Gothics, Sad Betrayals

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

They came from Ireland and Iceland, Italy and India, Bulgaria and Ghana and Egypt and Brazil. The 350 emissaries represented newspapers and magazines, theaters and festivals, production companies, agencies and television networks. They saw a dozen new or unknown plays in three days in late March, not on Broadway or in London's West End, but in Louisville. Lately, that modest Kentucky city has become a part-time international theater capital, the site of perhaps the most important annual showcase for emerging American playwrights. In the nine years of the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville, many works have surfaced only to sink without trace; others have gone on to Broadway or Hollywood. Among them: Agnes of God, Extremities and The Octette Bridge Club. Two, The Gin Game and Crimes of the Heart, have won the Pulitzer Prize.

& This impressive history has ensured a respectful audience for the festival. Yet it has also imposed the unrealistically high expectation that every play produced there must have a floodlit afterlife. If there were no surefire contenders for SRO signs among this year's offerings, that should count for less than the fact that most showed some merit and four glowed with intelligence and passion.

Customarily, the festival plays seem to be chosen to link up at least loosely in theme. This year there were fewer continuities. Of six full-length shows and six one-acts, three were Southern gothics, two more were raucous absurdist fantasies, three others dealt with diseases and hospitals, two depicted the betrayal of noble people by political movements they had served loyally, one was a heartfelt if muddled historical melodrama, and the last was a conventional two-character problem drama about a marriage. Although the scripts varied in diction and temperament, fully half were in essence realistic, and all but two were set in current or recent America. None could be categorized as truly avant-garde. This artistically conservative nature may reflect a rediscovery by playwrights of the values of traditional narrative theater, or it may indicate Actors Theater's eagerness to maintain a high mainstream profile.

By far the most enthusiastically received work was Tent Meeting, an uproarious portrait of a daffy Southern family: the patriarch, a self- anointed reverend who believes he gets messages directly from God--and who just may be right; a son, a self-aggrandizing deserter from World War II who has a diminishing grasp of reality; a daughter who copes with life's problems by stuffing her ears with an endless supply of cotton wool, then humming loudly; and the daughter's infant child, who is hopelessly deformed yet somehow survives. The action starts with the family's kidnaping of the baby from a hospital; it ends, after a cross-continental trek, at a revivalist religious meeting in Moose Jaw, Sask., where the infant, Jesus O. Tarbox, is to be put forward as a new Messiah. The play is performed at fever pitch by its authors, Levi Lee, Larry Larson and Rebecca Alworth, and their dual roles have made them a little undisciplined: they have tended to retain anything that gets a laugh or a gasp of astonishment. Thus the first act ends with startling visual evidence that the infant really possesses spiritual powers; the second act does nothing to explore that provocative notion. Still, the , show's energy never flags, and its lunatic characters are perversely endearing.

The Rain of Terror proves the power of simple storytelling. Its two characters never move from their ratty old sofa; one hardly speaks. The tale they relate has already reached its resolution, and its outcome is revealed almost immediately. Yet the description of the calculated murder of an escaped convict by a greedy old woman (Kathy Bates) and her submissive husband (Andy Backer) is spellbinding. Credit belongs in equal measure to Playwright Frank Manley and to the brilliant Bates, who reveals a deadly malevolence with matter-of-fact simplicity.

Days and Nights Within portrays the relationship between a suspected spy (Beth Dixon) and her Communist interrogator (Ken Jenkins). Playwright Ellen McLaughlin has devised some imaginative, lyrical dream sequences, and the acting, especially Dixon's, throbbed with suppressed emotion, but the story provides no revelatory payoff.

Advice to the Players, by Bruce Bonafede, is based on an actual dilemma that confronted two black South African actors several years ago in Baltimore: ordered by a revolutionary organization in their home country to withdraw from a U.S. drama festival as a protest against their government, they had to choose between the punitive wrath of South African officials and the equally ruinous ostracization by their peers. Bonafede's narrative does little more than state the problem with heartbreaking clarity. But his crisp, clever dialogue, enhanced by the enchanting performances of Tom Wright and Delroy Lindo, brings out all the poignancy of an enforced privacy for those vulnerable people whose life is, above all else, their very public art.