Humana Festival 2017: RECENT ALIEN ABDUCTIONS Continues to Haunt

If there is one play from this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays it's hard to forget, it's Recent Alien Abductions by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, directed by Actors Theatre of Louisville Artistic Director Les Waters.

The thing is, Recent Alien Abductions isn't about alien abductions. Instead, Cortiñas unspools a story about family secrets, betrayal, and the violent aftereffects of American Colonialism, as a Puerto Rican man named Álvaro, played beautifully by Jon Norman Schneider, concocts a conspiracy theory around a 1994 episode of The X-Files called Little Green Men. That episode supposedly took place in Puerto Rico, even though Álvaro recognizes from the beginning that the foliage isn't remotely Puerto Rican, and the character he identifies with, a boy also named Álvaro, speaks English with a Mexican accent.

Most of us are familiar with that kind of dramatic license (or dramatic laziness), but to Álvaro, the errors bespeak something deeper. He also thinks that the episode in syndication has been changed from the one he saw the first time. And when he adds that up, he finds a message just for him, straight from The X-Files.

But the story Cortiñas is laying out doesn't stick with Álvaro or his X-Files obsession. Just as Little Green Men sent Mulder to a fake Puerto Rico, Cortiñas sends the action of his play to a fake Puerto Rican house created on the stage of the Pamela Brown Theatre, where we meet Álvaro's mother, who is in poor health physically and mentally, and his brutish brother Néstor, along with Néstor's wife and a friendly neighbor. Bobby Plasencia takes Néstor, a creep and a bully, to uncomfortable places, while Mia Katigbak is sad and affecting as his mother, Carmen H. Herlihy adds warmth as neighbor Beba, and Elia Monte-Brown does her best as Néstor's wife, whose role is somewhat underwritten.

The conflict arises with the arrival of a visitor from the United States, a woman named Patria played by Ronete Levenson with competing strands of strength and naivete. Patria knew Álvaro, who we now learn is dead, and she wants permission from his family to publish the stories he wrote -- science fiction, of course -- as a way of honoring her friend and creating a legacy for him. But there was a reason Álvaro left, a reason he never came back, and a reason he immersed himself in writing far-out stories. When the truth of his past was too hard to bear, Álvaro wrapped himself in fantasy and fiction.

Recent Alien Abductions sets its own pace, with quiet moments where you really need to pay attention, and an explosive scene of violence where you'd really like to look away. Cortiñas has built his play with significant challenges and landmines as part of its structure.

First, there's the 30+-minute monologue that opens the play, with Schneider alone on stage, framed by a ghastly green light around the proscenium. That sets a heavy burden for Schneider, since he is carrying the whole story without any technical bells or whistles to help. He is a very engaging performer and there is certainly justification for setting the character of Álvaro apart from the action. Still, that's a long time to sit with one image.

Jon Norman Schneider in Recent Alien Abductions
Photo by Bill Brymer

Later in the play, Cortiñas sets up an extended scene played off-stage, where we can hear the voices of actors Herlihy, Katigbak and Monte-Brown, but we can't see any of them. That, too, is well supported by the script, as unseen -- but heard -- action from the past is a critical piece of the mystery. But again, even if the reason for the scene is clear, it's somewhat difficult to follow as executed here.

There is no denying that Recent Alien Abductions is a tricky script from beginning to end. And yet... And yet, it is compelling, intense and haunting in the end.

Plan Ahead: Plays and Ticket Info for 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays

The 41st annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville has announced its lineup for spring 2017. The Humana Festival is probably the best-known New Play Festival in the country, launching works like D. L. Coburn's The Gin Game and Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart in its early years and Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Appropriate and Lucas Hnath's The Christians more recently. Directors, producers, literary managers, scholars and a whole lot of theater critics attend every year to see what's new before the hottest Humana plays show up in major theaters from New York to LA and Chicago in between.

If you're interested in attending one of the four weekends between March 17 and April 9, ticket packages are now on sale. Options range from world premieres of three full-length plays in the First Look Weekend March 17 to 19 to four plays, a keynote address and a panel discussion during Discover Weekend March 24 to 26; a five or six play package plus "a presentation by a leader in American theatre and more" for Ovation Week March 31 to April 2; and a five, six or seven play package, including brand new ten-minute plays and a showcase written for Actors Theatre's "professional training company," during Encore Week April 5 to 7. There are special options for college and university theater faculty and students, audience members under 35, and industry professionals. Check out all the details here.

And if you purchase one of those ticket packages, what will you be seeing? The 2017 schedule of full-length plays includes I Now Pronounce by Tasha Gordon-Solomon, directed by Stephen Brackett and opening March 1; We're Gonna Be Okay by Basil Kreimendahl, directed by Lisa Peterson and opening March 7; Cry It Out by Molly Smith Metzler, directed by Davis McCallum and opening March 10; Recent Alien Abductions by by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, directed by Actors Theatre Artistic Director Les Waters and opening March 17; Airness by Chelsea Marcantel, directed by Associate Artistic Director Meredith McDonough and opening March 24; and The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield, with pieces written by Jeff Augustin, Sarah DeLappe, Claire Kiechel and Ramiz Monself to be performed by the actors of the professional training company, directed by Eric Hoff and also opening March 24.

That last offering involves stories of inspiration and invention from Kentucky's "unsung dreamers," while the others cover an air guitar competition, babies and new moms, bomb shelters and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a lost episode of The X Files, and a wedding with a great deal of drama. If you're trying to figure out which is which, the titles of the plays should be a hint, but I encourage you to click on the links under those titles to get all the details.

This year's ten-minute plays will be revealed later. Last year, we got that news in February. Stay tuned to find out who's who and what's what if ten-minute plays are your thing.

But in the meantime... Ticket packages are now available, with "early bird" discounts in place if you book before February 10, 2017. Just a tip: If you want the full array of plays, including the ten-minute plays, on the last weekend, things tend to fill up fast, so you might want to act now.

Humana Festival 2016: Sarah Ruhl's FOR PETER PAN ON HER 70th BIRTHDAY

If there was a marquee event at this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays, it had to be Sarah Ruhl's For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday.

Ruhl is currently at the top of the American playwriting ladder; her In the Next Room, or the vibrator play had a Broadway production with multiple Tony nominations, while Stage Kiss, eurydice, Dead Man's Cell Phone and The Clean House (among others) played Off-Broadway and have subsequently been produced all over the country, including across central Illinois. Ruhl was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, as well as winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Whiting Award, the Lilly Award and a PEN Award.

When Ruhl came to Louisville for the Humana Festival, her play got Actors Theatre's artistic director, Les Waters, as its director, with an A-list cast, including Kathleen Chalfant, a multiple Tony nominee herself. It doesn't get much better than that.

Kathleen Chalfant in For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday.
Photo Credit: Bill Brymer

So how did her Peter Pan do? In performance, Ruhl's script for Peter Pan showed enough wit to keep it buoyant, a sweet affection for its characters, especially Ann, the one played by Chalfant, and just a shade of sadness. You might expect "I don't want to grow up" as a theme, given the title, and that's definitely there, but it's part of a larger issue, when growing up involves saying goodbye to the generation ahead of us.

It's become something of a running joke that critics inevitably try to find some sort of overall theme for each year's Humana Festival, although the people at Actors Theatre swear they don't pick plays to suit any one idea. This year, American Theatre's Russell M. Dembin touches on the theory that ghosts provided the Festival's throughline. While there were certainly a number of ghosts, for me, confronting mortality emerged as a more pervasive theme, especially within parent/child relationships. That's front and center in For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, as Ann and her siblings gather to deal with their father's death.

The cast of For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday.
Photo credit: Bill Brymer

When the play opens, Ann, her sister Wendy, and her brothers Jim, John and Michael sit and wait in their beloved dad's hospital room. Two of Ann's brothers are doctors, as was their father, so they're well aware he doesn't have much time. From there, the play moves to the five of them at the old kitchen table, drinking, reminiscing and arguing during Dad's wake, and then into a sort of dream sequence where each takes on a role in Peter Pan, which Ann starred in as a child.

I don't know how many 70-year-old actresses there are in the world who'd be willing to step into Peter Pan's tights and fly around the stage, but Chalfant is game, as are the younger-but-not-exactly-young Lisa Emery, who plays Wendy, and Scott Jaeck (John), David Chandler (Jim) and Keith Reddin (Michael). The roles they play in Ann's life are reflected in their Peter Pan roles, as well, although the political talking points they hurl at each other and how that sets up Captain Hook in the play-within-a-play come off somewhat forced as a dramatic device.

What was best about the Humana Festival For Peter Pan was, in a word, Chalfant. She had the audience in the palm of her hand from her curtain speech to her flying game, and she made Ruhl's words come alive with the elegance and expertise of her delivery. Looking at the words on the page, I found they don't seem nearly as funny as they did when Kathleen Chalfant was saying them.

Ron Crawford, who played the father they'd all come to honor, also emerged as a major presence in the play, even when he was lying motionless in a hospital bed. His contributions to the second scene -- what Ruhl calls "Movement Two: The Irish Wake" -- were especially well-received, as his timing and wry humor paid off nicely.

Chandler, Emery, Jaeck and Reddin each etched an individual portrait and together with Chalfant, they created a recognizable family dynamic, the kind where being together throws you right back up against the same buttons you've been pushing since you were kids. We don't really ever grow up, after all.

One other strength: A local marching band that came in to cover the scene change between Movements One and Two, playing "When the Saints Go Marching In." It was perfect. Here's hoping other productions will find their own marching bands if For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday pops up in regional theaters.

Checking Into Laura Jacqmin's RESIDENCE at the 2016 Humana Festival

A hotel can be a weird little world of its own. You can sleep, eat and entertain yourself there, and communicate with the outside world without ever leaving your room. And for the employees...

I speak from experience when I say that a hotel can become your world, too. A long time ago, I was a front desk clerk (and before that, switchboard operator, pool attendant, room service waiter and hotel babysitter) at a large resort near my parents' house. Every summer, I would dream of a job elsewhere -- maybe at the mall where I could get a discount on clothes -- but I always ended up back at the hotel, picking up a uniform and getting to work. Let's just say I had a love/hate relationship with that hotel.

The characters in Laura Jacqmin's Residence , the first play I saw at the 40th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, have a similar outlook. There's Maggie, checking in for four weeks while she tries desperately to make a sale with medical equipment, Bobby, a charming man on staff who appears to fill in wherever he's needed -- bellman, chauffeur, whatever -- and Theresa, the bright-eyed management trainee who dreams of earning a "manager" badge. All three have issues that interfere with their jobs, issues from the outside world that push them closer toward a precipice of no job, no prospects, no hope. Who will fall over the edge first?

Danielle Slavick in Residence. Photo credit: Bill Brymer

During Residence, we see the connections they make together, as each tries to maintain some kind of stability. Theresa is determined to show every guest (and in this case, that means Maggie) a "five-star experience," while Bobby wants to get high and flirt with Theresa. As for Maggie... We see her secrets unwind over FaceTime conversations with her husband and baby back in Wisconsin.

Jacqmin writes smart, sharp dialogue that pulls us in and makes us hope for the best for these three, even if Maggie's job selling ultrasound equipment, her back story and Bobby's outside life dovetail a little too neatly. There are mixed messages in the script -- Is it about friendship and community in a strange place? Growing up and becoming a responsible adult with all the burdens, financial and emotional, that entails? The American way of debt, especially when it involves education and healthcare? -- and some of the plotlines get a little lost as it moves on. Under the direction of Hal Brooks, the Humana Festival production looked so good and moved so well it disguised some of the lapses in the script, but it seems unlikely other theatres will be able to recreate Daniel Zimmerman's fantastic set that dropped a pool deck and firepit over a hotel room in Actors Theatre's black-box Bingham Theatre. Still, for me at least, the hotel environment and the real, recognizable characters made an emotional impact.

Leah Karpel (L) and Alejandro Rodriguez in Residence. Photo credit: Bill Brymer

Among the cast, Alejandro Rodriguez is perfect as Bobby, the catalyst for much of what happens at the Residence hotel, and Leah Karpel gives us a Theresa who is so sweet and adorable I felt like offering to kick in to a GoFundMe for her fictional tuition bill. Danielle Slavick makes Maggie as edgy and unhappy as she needs to be, building nicely to an explosive confrontation where her acting partner is on screen instead of in person, but also telegraphing early on that there is something very wrong with this woman. Would any husband really send someone so fragile out into a hostile world for four long weeks?

The good news is that Residence made me ponder issues like that.

Residence ran from March 2 to April 10, 2016, at Actors Theatre of Louisville's 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Humana Festival, Part 3: Erin Courtney's I WILL BE GONE

The premise behind Erin Courtney's I Will Be Gone is moody and evocative, creating mysteries and intrigue before the first line.

Teenage Penelope, called Pen for short, has come to California to live with her aunt following the death of her mother. Aunt Jo lives very near an abandoned mining town, Bodie, a real place where the dilapidated remains of old buildings are protected as a historic site.

Pen eventually gets a job as a tour guide in Bodie, coming a little too close to some of the ghosts -- of her mother's past and the town's past -- who haunt the ghost town. As tensions rise, Jo runs into her old love, now the town's mayor, a gawky teenage boy starts hanging around Pen, and a homeless man the other townspeople protect begins to get a little more erratic.

It's all intriguing as you find yourself puzzling out who's connected to whom in what way, what happened in the past, and how Courtney's story will unspool. The play's dramatic quotient is aided immeasurably by Andrew Boyce's scenic design, with a whole miniature ghost town that descends from the rafters when it's needed. It's detailed and spooky at the same time, giving director Kip Fagan lots of nooks and crannies to play with as actors crawl underneath the level that carries the ghost town.

Ultimately, however, the script doesn't support its characters as strongly as the set does, as storylines and characters end up more vague than compelling, more fluky than fully developed. The one exception is the character of Jim, the homeless man, brought to life nicely by Triney Sandoval. The others all seem like ciphers, like character fragments.

What lingers in your mind is Boyce's haunted, haunting set. For I Will Be Gone to resonate, its ghosts need to become more substantial. 

Humana Festival, part 2: Memory, Change and Family in Colman Domingo's DOT

When submissions come in for Heartland Theatre's annual 10-minute play festival, it's pretty much a guarantee that there will be a substantial number dealing with Alzheimer's and dementia. Those are topics very much on playwrights' minds, very much part of the current zeitgeist.

Colman Domingo, the playwright behind Dot, perhaps the most approachable offering in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays, has said he was influenced to write his play after watching four different friends deal with a parent with dementia or Alzheimer's. He noted that they found dark comedy in their crises, even as they all recognized "this huge elephant in the room about memory and change."

The Dot in the title is Dotty, a widowed mother with three adult children and one grandchild. She still lives in the same West Philly home where she raised her kids, in a neighborhood that is deteriorating around her in a clear parallel to her own declining health. Her oldest daughter Shelly, a Type A lawyer with a young son, has pretty much moved in to help Dotty, even though they are driving each other crazy. Dotty repeats the same questions again and again, forgets to eat, has acquired a new, salty vocabulary, frequently insults and annoys her daughter, and gets confused about who's who and whether her long-dead husband is still there.

Shelly thinks it's time to send her mother to assisted living, but Dotty has a different solution. She dropped a hint that it may be time to end it all, which freaked out Shelly and prompted her to demand that her siblings -- onetime golden boy Donnie, a gay playwright with a new husband but not a whole lot of money, and wannabe Youtube sensation Averie, who is so strapped she is living in Shelly's basement -- come back to the family home for Christmas and get behind her plan.

Along with Dotty's children, we see Jackie, a white girl as well as an old neighbor who was once in love with Donny, and Fidel, Dotty's undocumented Kazakh caregiver. Although Fidel is more low-key, the others are vivid, stubborn people, given to emotional outbursts and meltdowns, and Domingo's play throws us into their lives when the burners are already lit underneath them.

As directed by Meredith McDonough, associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Dot is lively and funny, with the anxiety underlying the comedy never far out of sight. McDonough's cast is strong, with excellent work from Marjorie Johnson as Dotty, veering from lucid and snappy to lost and confused; Sharon Washington as Shelly, the one who gets stuck with all the thankless work; Kevin R. Free as adorable Donnie, who has chosen the wrong time for a juice cleanse; Sean Dugan as Adam, Donnie's husband, a feisty redhead with a taste for flashy leisure wear; and Megan Byrne as Jackie, the other redhead and the ultimate outsider in this group, still feeling pangs of unrequited love for Donnie even as she deals with her own crisis. I also enjoyed Vichet Chum as Fidel, the sweet if inexplicable immigrant from Kazakhstan who stirs even more issues into the pot, and Adrienne C. Moore's energetic take on Averie, who blows into the house like a tacky hurricane.

The script's strength lies in its comedy and conflict, both timed well in this production, although it starts with its dial turned to 11, which doesn't give it much room to build. That leaves the second act feeling a little soft and unformed, with both Dotty's tape recorded speeches and Donnie's "dementia kit" moments feeling a bit preachy and out of place. Still, the moment when Dotty recreates a dance memory with Adam is lovely, heartfelt and an emotional highlight.

There is definitely heart in this portrait of an African-American family at Christmas, but at times it seems more superficial than it should, more cuddly and cute than real or revelatory. It was certainly warmly embraced by its Humana Festival audience, and its issues will continue to be of concern to those struggling to handle loved ones with dementia. Which is quite a large group, after all....

Humana Festival, Part 1: Jen Silverman's ROOMMATE Makes an Uneasy Match

At first blush, the women who shared a house in Jen Silverman's The Roommate, the first play I saw at last weekend's Humana Festival of New American Plays, seemed like familiar types living out a familiar premise. They couldn't be more different and yet here they are, forced to share the same space. The More the Merrier, The Goodbye Girl, The Odd Couple...

In this Roommate, Sharon, an Iowa housewife divorced from her husband and somewhat estranged from her son, has advertised for a roommate to share her house and cut her expenses. Sharon is sweet and perky, naive and sheltered. She tells us she is originally from Illinois, which means to her that she is more sophisticated than a mere Iowan, but she still seems pretty limited in life experiences and mental reach.

The roommate she gets is Robyn, a vegan, lesbian smoker from the Bronx, who comes into Sharon's orbit with a lot of baggage, both literal and figurative. Robyn is edgier and more guarded, and she serves as a surprise and a source of fascination to her new roomie. So, of course, we see a clash of cultures, a gradual revealing of secrets, and a plot reversal or two as these two women look past their differences and come together as... What? Friends? Maybe.

Silverman has said that she was trying to write a play with roles for bad-ass women over 50, and on the surface, I suppose Sharon and Robyn could be described that way. Silverman's idea to provide more fully-drawn roles for actresses of a certain age couldn't be more welcome in today's theatrical landscape. But how she carries it out in The Roommate is a bit more problematic.

As we (and Sharon) poke into who and what Robyn is, the play moves away from the "odd couple" aspect and more into Thelma and Louise territory, but that is a major leap, especially for the character of Sharon. We understand that she is looking for a new direction, but the one she takes seems more destructive and ill-conceived than bad-ass, more off the rails -- or, to continue the Thelma and Louise theme, over a cliff -- than convincing story-telling.

Still, Silverman's writing is funny and entertaining, and Margaret Daly's warm, sweet performance as Sharon made her a rootable character in the Humana Festival production directed by Mike Donahue. Tasha Lawrence also did fine work as Robyn, creating someone real and keeping her compelling even as the dynamic shifted.

Andrew Boyce's scenic design in-the-round in Actors Theatre of Lousiville's Bingham Theatre set the right mood around Sharon's kitchen table, while Daniel Kluger's original music was a highlight, keeping the transitions fun and fizzy and moving the play along.

As you might expect from Actors Theatre, the play looked and sounded great. But the overreaching takeaway was a little trickier. Was Sharon's journey supposed to teach us that you should only venture outside your Iowa comfort zone with trepidation? Look before you leap? Or that latching onto someone new and scary, losing yourself but finding crime, drugs and cruelty, is a better idea than sitting in your kitchen by yourself?

By the end of the play, neither of those extremes was the right match for the material.

Actors Theatre of Louisville Announces 2014 HUMANA FESTIVAL Slate of Plays

Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays, the one that's been setting the standard for new play festivals since 1976, has announced the six full-length shows that will be on the schedule in Spring 2014. The four weekends that make up Humana Festival 2014 begin March 14 and end April 6, with a different array of choices every weekend, tailored to suit college students and faculty (College Days), theater critics, directors, producers and agents (Industry Professionals), hometown fans in Louisville (Locals Pass) and theater fans in general (New Play Getaways). One of the most amazing things about the Humana Festival is how good Actors Theatre personnel are at juggling all those different visitors as they pass from one show to the next. There are four theater spaces inside Actors Theatre, plus they've explored cars, t-shirts, phones, museums, and a local elementary school as performance spaces over the years.

This year, the playwrights represented in the festival lineup will tackle religion, a distinctively American brand of folklore, finding adulthood, the possibility of hope in the wake of tragedy, and a sort of retrospective of Humana Festivals past.

That last choice is called Remix 38, and it will serve two functions. First, the five commissioned playwrights -- Jackie Sibbles Drury, Basil Kreimendahl, Idris Goodwin, Justin Kuritzkes and Amelia Roper -- will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Actors Theatre through their work, picking up on the history of the Humana Festival in short pieces designed to "pay playful homage to iconic plays from past Humana Festivals." Anybody want to guess which plays will show up in this "playful homage"?

You have to think the three Humana plays that won the Pulitzer Prize deserve mention. Those three are D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game, Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Donald Margulies' Dinner with Friends. Other notable plays from Humana Fests Past I'd expect to see referenced include Keely and Du and Talking With... by Jane Martin, Agnes of God by John Pielmeier, A Piece of My Heart by Shirley Lauro, Big Love by Charles Mee, After Ashley and Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo, Omnium-Gatherum by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros and Theresa Rebeck, Marisol by José Rivera, and TAPE by Stephen Belber. Since Jane Martin is a pseudonym widely believed to belong to former Humana Festival Artistic Director Jon Jory, and pretty much everything "Martin" wrote ended up at the Festival, I have a feeling there might be an overview of sorts of the "Jane Martin" oeuvre from 1981's Twirlers to Listeners in 2006.

Remix 38 will also function as the annual showcase for Actors Theatre's Apprentice/Intern program, with Actors Theatre's corps of apprentice actors taking on all the roles. That includes Illinois State University grad Devon Nimerfroh, who appeared in plays like Picnic and Mother Courage while at ISU and in several roles in last summer's 10-Minute Play Festival at Heartland Theatre.

American legend John Henry on a stamp

Anne Bogart will be back at Humana Fest in 2014, this time with Steel Hammer, a piece performed and created by Bogart's SITI Company. Julia Wolfe, of the musical group Bang on a Can, did the music and lyrics for this exploration of the legend of John Henry, the railroad man with a hammer who raced against a steam-powered drill in a contest of steel-driving strength and speed. The script for this piece has been provided by playwrights Kia Corthron, Will Power, Carl Hancock Rux and Regina Taylor.

Lucas Hnath

Also back: Lucas Hnath, whose short play nightnight was one of my favorites last year. Hnath set his sights on the intersection of death and money in Death Tax, a Humana entry in 2012 that got a lot of notice as well as a nomination for the Steinberg New Play Award. This time, he'll look at the intersetcion of religion and money in The Christians, about a pastor at a megachurch who changes his mind about what's important.

Jordan Harrison

Jordan Harrison is another familiar name; his time-warped Maple and Vine was a hit at the Humana Festival in 2011, while full-length plays Act a Lady (2006) and Kid-Simple (2004) and a short play called Fit for Feet (2003) kept audiences talking in previous years. Harrison is back this time with something called The Grown-Up, which Actors Theatre calls "a time-bending, sad, funny adventure about how to survive growing up."

Dorothy Fortenberry

Dorothy Fortenberry's Partners also involves the whole growing up thing, as it examines what happens to a pair of BFFs when money and relationships and what it really means to be an adult get in the way. Fortenberry is a new name to me, but she is a writer for the television show The 100 on the CW network, winner of the 2011 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and a two-time finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.

Kimber Lee

The last full-length play on the schedule, Kimber Lee's brownsville song (b-side for tray), looks at how a family tries to cope when a boy who hasn't had a chance to grow up yet is taken from them. Tray is killed in the kind of stupid, senseless violence we see in the headlines every day. Lee's "scattered rhythms" take Tray's family before and after the tragedy to show how they struggle to find hope.

For all the details on Humana Festival 2014, keep an eye on Actors Theatre of Louisville. Ticket packages go on sale November 12 (yes, that's tomorrow) while single tickets will be offered starting the 14th.

High-Flying SLEEP ROCK THY BRAIN Rocked at the Humana Festival

Every year, Actors Theatre of Louisville adds an anthology show to its Humana Festival line-up as a way of showcasing its 22-member Apprentice Company. In the past, we've seen numerous short pieces on a single theme written by a variety of playwrights and performed by those apprentice actors, with themes ranging from the appeal of the open road to Uncle Sam and Las Vegas and America's relationship with food. (Last year's Oh, Gastronomy! had them making brownies during the show and handing them out afterwards, which was a nice touch.)

These short pieces are not really intended for future full-scale productions, mostly because the quality of the pieces varies within the show and because there is no guarantee anybody will want to pick up the whole lot of them, but they do show up in anthologies fairly often. This year's Sleep Rock Thy Brain featured longer pieces -- maybe a half hour each -- giving playwrights Rinne Groth, Lucas Hnath and Anne Washburn the chance to more fully develop their ideas than in Apprentice Showcases of the past. Each play in Sleep Rock explored the notion of sleep and sleeplessness along with aerial acrobatics choreographed by Brian Owens and ZFX Flying Effects.

The idea -- combining sleep with flying -- was conceived by Actors Theatre's Amy Attaway, associate director of the Apprentice/Intern Company, and dramaturg Sarah Lunnie. And even though all three playwrights visited the University of Louisville's sleep center to get ideas about the science of sleep, each playwright interpreted that notion very differently.

When Sleep Rock Thy Brain played as part of the 2013 Humana Festival, it was performed at Louisville's Lincoln Performing Arts School, an elementary school with a huge, open black box space big enough for all the rigging and machinery necessary to fly the apprentices. Future prospects for the show are likely to depend on whether anybody else has that kind of space and access to flying equipment. But if they've put on Peter Pan or gone for flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, a flying angel in Angels in America, or any kind of Cirque du Soleil, harnesses and actors in flight ought to be doable.

The third piece in the Sleep Rock program, Lucas Hnath's nightnight, definitely deserves an afterlife. This look at what happens to a trio of astronauts when one can't sleep was riveting, scary and heavily dramatic, all at once, with Hnath's idiosyncratic dialogue and carefully crafted rhythms revealing a great deal about the relationship between humankind and science and humankind and sleep. Hnath's script integrated the aerial technology, used to show the astronauts in zero gravity, beautifully, while the actors ramped up the emotional tension as they navigated the tricky vocal patterns in the script. Jeff White was especially strong as the astronaut with insomnia, but his colleagues in space, played by Samantha Beach and Ethan Dubin, and at Mission Control, with Laura Engels, Kim Fischer, Chalia La Tour, Liz Ramos, Andy Reinhardt, Ben Vigus and Christa Wroblewski, were also impressive as they kept up the pace of this fractured, intricate, affecting text.

I also enjoyed Rinne Groth's Comfort Inn, about a nice young woman named Sylvie, sweetly played by Madison Welterlen, who works at a somewhat unorthodox sleep clinic run inside a hotel. As Sylvie's evening gets continually crazier, with three oddball patients (Chalia La Tour, Andy Reinhardt and Ben Vigus, all quite good), co-workers and an entire wedding party converging on the clinic, we wonder what's real and what's inside Sylvie's REM cycle. Comfort Inn was fun, if somewhat chaotic and confusing.

Dreamerwake, Anne Washburn's take on the sleep/flying intersection, combined bits of both Comfort Inn and nightnight, as Washburn went behind the scenes of the entire enterprise, placing her action inside the Apprentice Company as they rehearsed. She centered on a guy named Nick (Joseph Metcalfe) as he struggled with recurring nightmares about an aerial mishap involving his friend Lou (Derek Nelson). The use of darkness and shadow and haphazard plotting certainly approximated dreaming, but in the end, Dreamerwake seemed obvious and forced, like a lesser episode of The Twilight Zone where you can see the end coming a mile away.

All in all, Sleep Rock Thy Brain made for a nifty Apprentice Showcase with one standout piece that lingers in my mind. Here's hoping nightnight, at least, finds a life after Louisville.

Humana Festival: APPROPRIATE is More than Appropriate

I don't know about you, but when I think "plantation," I don't think Arkansas. The Walmart State may just be something I don't think about all that often in general. But Branden Jacob-Jenkins' Appropriate, one of the new plays produced as part of the 2013 Humana Festival, makes its Arkansas plantation -- or the remains and consequences of it -- unforgettable. After seeing this play, it's impossible not to think of Arkansas as a plantation state.

By the way, I'm thinking the title is Appropriate, as in the verb appropri-8, meaning to steal, purloin, take and make your own, not the adjective appropri-it, meaning suitable or acceptable. That's important as the story goes on, as Jacob-Jenkins' haunting family drama dredges up painful memories of the plantation's terrible past, when people were property, something a slaveowner like the one who bought this plantation could appropriate.

In the present, the Appropriate story unfolds around siblings Toni, Bo and Frank Lafayette. They were mostly raised elsewhere, but now they've returned to try to sell the place after their father's death. Was Dad crazy? Alcoholic? A hoarder? Or maybe a racist who kept horrifying memorabilia related to his home's unspeakable past?

As the siblings argue over who owns what and who is responsible for what, they reveal details of their unhappy lives, accompanied by a rising cacophony of cicadas from outside. It's a ghostly, disturbing sound, and you can't help but think it has something to do with all the slaves whose bodies and bones were tossed into the woods behind the house when their "service" to the plantation had ended. Are there unquiet spirits out there haunting this place? Will anybody ever find peace here?

The legacy of slavery, of cruelty and inhumanity and toxic power, hangs heavily over Appropriate. Whether they were raised in the place or not, the Lafayettes are poisoned by its past, and there is no more escape for them than there was for those slaves buried out back.

In the Humana Festival program, Jacobs-Jenkins says that he is "interested in the relationship between collective memory and collective forgetting." As dramaturg Amy Wegener puts it, "[A]bsolution from past wrongdoings doesn't come easily, and moving forward without taking a clear-eyed look backward comes with a price." Even if that look backward brings up memories your family would very much like to forget.

Jacob-Jenkins has created a provocative, disturbing play, one that deals with buried secrets of the family and national variety. For Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival, director Gary Griffin brought out all the mystery and conflict beneath the surface of the play, with excellent performances from Jordan Baker, Larry Bull and Reese Madigan as the Lafayette sister and brothers, Natalie Kuhn and Amy Lynn Stewart as the in-laws, and Gabe Weible, David Rosenblatt and Lilli Stein as the mixed-up kids. Antje Ellerman's decaying mansion house was grand and a mess, all at the same time, while Matt Frey's lights and Bray Poor's sound design contributed very nicely to the Gothic atmosphere.

Appropriate will open the 2013-14 season for Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, again directed by Gary Griffin, and I'm not surprised at the rapid pick-up. There are a lot of issues to dig into in this murky, messy mansion.

Save the Date: Humana Festival 2013 March 29-31 or April 5-7

Actors Theatre of Louisville has announced the dates -- March 29-31 and April 5-7 -- for the "industry professionals" part of its 2013 Humana Festival of New American Plays, the first festival with new Artistic Director Les Waters at the helm. The announcement of what plays Waters and Actors Theatre staff have chosen for next spring's Humana Festival schedule won't come till this Sunday, but during the "industry professionals" event, you can bank on about 10 events, including around 6 new plays by some of America's best playwrights, a trio of 10-minute plays and some kind of compendium/anthology/showcase piece put together by a group of playwrights and performed by Actors Theatre's apprentice troupe.

The whole Humana Festival, which takes place over several weekends in March and April to accommodate press, producers, directors, agents, students, faculty, arts advocates and just plain fans of new plays, generally takes place in the three theatre spaces at Actors Theatre, although there have been offerings in cars, on t-shirts, and in a museum that took audiences a little farther afield. The theatrical offerings "run the gamut from comedies to dramas to plays that forge new theatrical territory. Combined with world-class design and performances, this celebration of American playwrights’ innovation and imagination has something in it for everyone," according to Actors Theatre materials.

This year, the special college weekend will be March 22-24. That experience involves four productions, career development workshops, networking, audition and intern opportunities, and a very good introduction to the Humana Festival process at a reduced rate.

They also offer New Play Getaway options for theatre fans who want more flexibility, with packages available March 15-17, 22-24, 29-31 and April 5-7. 

The Industry Professional weekends overlap the last two of those on March 29-31 and April 5-7, offering the complete lineup of plays as well as other panel discussions and networking opportunities.

Tickets for all of these packages go on sale Tuesday, November 13. For more information, you may contact the Actors Theatre of Louisville box office at 502-584-1205.

And remember to stay tuned for the big announcement on November 11 about what plays will go up this year.

Humana Fest #5: "Michael von Siebenburg" Misses the Mark

Greg Kotis is a genius. He's hilarious. His "Urinetown" (he wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics) is one of the funniest and best meta-theatrical, neo-Brechtian pieces ever. And his “An Examination of the Whole Playwright/Actor Relationship Presented as Some Kind of Cop Show Parody” was one of the highlights of last year's Humana Festival for me.

That's why it's such a disappointment that this year's full-length piece presented at the Humana Festval -- "Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards" -- seemed so off the mark. The story itself, about a sort of eternal cannibal/serial killer who knocks off young women to eat them and stay forever young, is complicated and grisly, not offering a whole lot of opportunities for the smart, clever humor that usually marks his work. We all expect Greg Kotis to be a little on the icky side when it comes to humor (remember, his biggest hit was called "Urinetown"), but main characters who snack on Ground Girl are are not exactly sympathetic, even though the rest of the plot tries to make us care that Michael von Siebenburg is going to melt and fade away. Program notes tell us the play was meant to be "a meditation on obsolescence, a bloody valentine to American progress, and a hilarious elegy for the glory days of vampire cannibalism," but it really doesn't play as any of that. Instead, I'd call it mixed-up, vague and somewhat tedious, wandering through minefields of sexism, religious zealotry and horror rather than making a statement on any of them.

The premise of "Michael von Siebenburg" sounds like it might be "Young Frankenstein" meets "Dexter," with a little sarcasm at the expense of "Twilight" or "True Blood" just for kicks. We see a dying 15th century Austrian soldier named Otto, brought to life with gusto by John Ahlin, a member of the army sent to defend Constantinople against "infidel" Turks. He and his fellow warriors, including a count named Michael von Siebenburg, are besieged with nothing to eat. (Cue Donner Party music.)  So, yes, Michael von S joins his fellow survivors in eating their enemies and friends, including his pal Otto. And somehow that gives him and the other Austrian cannibals eternal life.

Rufus Collins and John Ahlin appear in "Michael von Siebenburg"

Fast forward to modern day New York City, where Michael von Siebenburg, played as a slightly scruffy but well-meaning aristocrat by Rufus Collins, and a helper named Sammy, given a sheen of Eurotrash smugness by Micah Stock, target, woo and then butcher nubile young women. His landlady (perfectly performed by veteran actress Rita Gardner, the original Luisa in "The Fantasticks," according to her bio) suspects something is up and keeps calling the cops, who happen to be female, as well. Without fresh meat, Michael and Sammy are getting faint. And ghosts of Michael's past -- cranky Otto, who wants him to get back to the Quest for Constantinople, and lovely Maria (played by the lovely Caralyn Kozlowski), his wife back in Austria in 14-something -- have started to haunt him.

For me, "Michael von Siebenburg" turned out to be an odd and not very well seasoned stew. At well over two hours, it was also much too long to sustain the humor. And the addition of characters like the landlady and the hapless cops felt very old-fashioned, with its dark humor more like "Arsenic and Old Lace" than Monty Python. All in all, not a good mix for me.

MICHAEL VON SIEBENBURG MELTS THROUGH THE FLOORBOARDS
By Greg Kotis

36th Humana Festival of New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville

Director: Kip Fagan
Costume Designer: Lorraine Venberg
Lighting Designer: Brian J. Lilienthal
Sound Designer: Matt Callahan
Properties Designer: Sean McArdle
Wig Designer: Heather Fleming
Fight Director: Joe Isenberg
Dialect Coach: Rinda Frye
Production Stage Manager: Paul Mills Holme
Dramaturg: Zach Chotzen-Freund
Casting: Laura Stanczyk

Cast: John Ahlin, Rufus Collins, Ariana Venturi, Micah Stock, Laura Heisler, Caralyn Kozlowski, and Rita Gardner.

Running time: 2:10, including one 15-minute intermission

Performances continue through April 15.

Humana Fest #4: The Birth of Hip Hop in "How We Got On"

I will admit right up front that I am not a hip hop fan, that I don't know a whole lot about hip hop, and the idea of Idris Goodwin's "How We Got On" -- the "flip side to the A story of hip hop's rise in the late 1980s" -- did not inspire me with confidence.

But Goodwin did several very smart things when crafting his story. He linked what he wanted to say about this "flip side" to three appealing characters, he used a wise narrator who assumes many roles as she spins her records and clues us in on the history, and he and director Wendy C. Goldberg cast the play beautifully, to make those characters come even more alive.

The "flip side" refers to the fact that the kids Goodwin focuses on are not in the South Bronx, where hip hop culture began, but instead, in the middle of the country. Where isn't specified, except outside some Midwestern city. Could be Chicago. Could be Detroit. Maybe even Cleveland. But these characters are not street kids. They're living in predominantly white suburbs, and they are "forging a cultural identity" in the midst of nowhere when they battle it out with poetry and boomboxes in the wide open parking lot at the shopping mall.

Goodwin gives us Hank, a black teenager whose dad would prefer his son get good grades and concentrate on something more high-brow than hip hop; Julian, biracial and looking for his own way to shine since he comes from a family of overachievers; and Luann, a prim-looking schoolgirl whose dad is in the NBA. Hank can write poetry like nobody's business, but he's not the best performer. Julian is a terrific performer, but has no talent for rhymes, so he's not creating anything, just memorizing other people's stuff. And Luann is good at everything, but nobody will take her seriously since a) she's a girl, and b) her preppy exterior looks anything but fly.

Terrell Donnell Sledge, Brian Quijada and Deonna Bouye are all excellent in the roles, hitting the right note of youth without making their characters too young or too silly or stereotypical in any way. I especially liked the surface note of brash confidence Quijada brought to Julian, while exposing so much vulnerability underneath.

Tying it all together is Crystal Fox as the "Selector," the voice of all the parents/DJ/MC who serves up context and history in a very entertaining way. Fox is fabulous, the kind of DJ everybody wants to spin the soundtrack of their lives.

The humor and real feeling in "How We Got On" make it work as a piece of theater as well as a slice of history, and I thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end.

HOW WE GOT ON
By Idris Goodwin

36th Humana Festival of New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville

Director: Wendy C. Goldberg
Costume Designer: Connie Furr-Soloman
Lighting Designer: Kirk Bookman
Sound Designer: Matt Hubbs
Properties Designer: Sean McArdle
Stage Manager: Bret Torbeck
Dramaturg: Hannah Rae Montgomery
Casting: Harriet Bass

Cast: Crystal Fox, Terrell Donnell Sledge, Brian Quijada and Deonna Bouye.

Running time: 90 minutes, performed without intermission

Humana Fest #3: Bruised and Broken Hearts in "Eat Your Heart Out"

I'm not sure what I think of Courtney Baron's "Eat Your Heart Out."

It's an odd place for a theater reviewer to be, that demilitarized zone of not knowing. Actually, it leaves me something like the characters in Baron's play, which reflects on the awkwardness of our interactions with each other. She focuses on a mother and daughter who are antagonists more than family, on a pair of teen outcasts whose friendship is the only thing keeping either of them afloat, on an infertile couple desperately in search of a child, on a pair of lonely adults looking for companionship through match.com. These are people just floundering around being people, doing and saying and deciding the absolute wrong things at the absolute wrong moments. And those moments are achingly, hauntingly real in "Eat Your Heart Out," making the audience at times as uncomfortable as the characters.

"Eat Your Heart Out," which was among the Humana Festival plays to be mounted in the in-the-round Bingham Theatre, was inspired, Baron tells us in program notes, by an actual medical condition, the Broken Heart Syndrome, "which is brought on by an excess of adrenaline caused by stress, or by grief so overwhelming that your body has a chemical reaction that simulates a kind of heart attack."

In the play, there are six characters, each suffering a broken heart of some sort, living their lives in Pasadena, California. There's Nance, someone we first meet as she shows up for a blind date with a guy in a museum, and Tom, the divorced man in the museum who seems nice and funny, if a little desperate. But who isn't desperate on a first date? Nance is caustic and snappy, but funny, too, even as she tells Tom she is having a really terrible day. Baron's play switches us from the museum where Nance and Tom are meeting to a plush suburban home, where Alice and Gabe, a couple of beautiful, prosperous people, nervously await someone from the adoption agency that can give the go-ahead to a baby for them, and to a teenage girl's bedroom, where that girl, Evie, has a chat with her only friend, a geeky but also cool kid named Colin.

Evie is overweight. Not just a little. A lot. She's been called "fat ass" and generally harassed about her size at school, and her weight is clearly on her mind, as well as her mother's. Her mother is skinny. Her mother is Nance, the woman on the date in the museum, as well as the social worker who visits Alice and Gabe. Edgy, sarcastic Nance is the connector between the three stories, the one who tries but doesn't love her daughter as much as she should, judges Alice and Gabe more than she should, and connects, just a little, with Tom, even though she probably shouldn't.

If Nance represents the intersection of the plots, the other five are just as real, just as raw. We see each of them trying to make some sort of emotional connection, and each one really struggling. It's easy to feel your own heart break a little for each of them. And especially Evie. But that's where my own feelings get tricky. We see Evie's misery as she tries to buy clothes, baring her vulnerability to the world, and baring the actress who plays her to the entire audience. And it pulled me out of the story a little, as I wondered how the actress felt to be standing in her skivvies in front of all of us. Maybe she is proud of her size. Maybe she empathizes with Evie's problems and wants to bring that issue to the world. But still... It's an uneasy theatrical moment.

In the end, though, I think I have to come down positively on "Eat Your Heart Out." The fact that I am still chewing on it (pun intended) days later, that I am still worried about Sarah Grodsky, the actress who played Evie, and how she feels about that scene, that I still want to smack Nance (not the fine Kate Eastwood-Norris, who plays Nance, but Nance herself) for being so wrong-headed as to insist on a dress in a smaller size than Evie wears as incentive to make her lose weight before Homecoming, that I still hope Colin (in a spot-on performance by Jordan Brodess) finds Evie on Homecoming night, that the lovely Alice (beautifully played, complete with Texas shades in her accent, by Chicago actress Kate Arrington) and smart, snarky Gabe (also beautifully played, by Mike DiSalvo) get their baby and make friends with Evie, that Tom (brought to life as a sweet dope by Alex Moggridge) can provide some support for Nance and that he, too, can be a friend to Evie... Yes, I am still chewing it over, aren't I?

That all tells me that I need to stop pondering. If it made me think this much, if I'm still worrying about its fictional characters, Baron's play is clearly a success.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT
By Courtney Baron

36th Humana Festival of New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville

Director: Adam Greenfield
Scenic Designer: Tom Tutino
Costume Designer: Connie Furr-Soloman
Lighting Designer: Kirk Bookman
Sound Designer: Benjamin Marcum
Properties Designer; Joe Cunningham
Stage Manager: Kimberly J. First
Dramaturg: Amy Wegener
Casting: Kelly Gillespie

Cast: Kate Eastwood Norris, Alex Moggridge, Sarah Grodsky, Jordan Brodess, Kate Arrington, Mike DiSalvo.

Running time: 1:20, performed without intermission

Humana Fest #2: Stark, Intense, Unpleasant "Death Tax"

I was unabashedly enthusiastic about "The Veri**on Play," Lisa Kron's adorable agitprop piece about striking back against bad customer service, but less so "Death Tax," by Lucas Hnath, the second play on my Humana Festival schedule.

Hnath has written "Death Tax" as a way of looking at the American way of death, as complicated by money. Or maybe it's a way of looking at the American way of money as complicated by death. In any event, his scenario is that a woman named Maxine, who happens to have a lot of money, is lying in a bed in an unremarkable nursing home sometime before Christmas in 2010. She knows that the law on estate taxes is due to change as of January 1, and she believes that her daughter is paying her nurse, Tina, a Haitian immigrant, to kill her in order to get at her full estate before the new law takes effect and also chops off a sizable portion of her inheritance. Tina swears she has no such motives and has not been paid to kill Maxine, but Maxine does not believe her. And that's how the drama begins, with everybody pushing each other around, plotting, counterplotting, lying, telling the truth, maneuvering and using and mocking, with the unspeakably vicious old dragon at the middle of the mess sitting on her golden treasure.

The play may very well be a cautionary tale about advances in medicine that can keep you alive forever, as long as you can pay for it. But it really doesn't stick with that topic, and by the end, it felt more to me like an argument for pulling the plug on patients who've been around too long. I certainly would've agreed to drop the unspeakable Maxine on an ice floe somewhere and wave buh-bye.

It's not that "Death Tax" isn't powerful. It is. But it's also unrelentingly stark in tone, unrelentingly intense in delivery, unrelentingly unpleasant in terms of character and plot. Hnath's dialogue is idiosyncratic, with long monologues for each of its four characters, lots of repetition and circling back to take one more poke at sore spots, that got more and more tiresome for me by the end. I don't think any play can maintain that kind of verbal battering ram for the entire show, although this one certainly tries.

Still, the actors are committed and, yes, intense. Quincy Tyler Bernstine is compelling and more sympathetic than the rest as Nurse Tina, setting up a (mostly) well-meaning woman caught between what she most wants -- to bring her son back from Haiti -- and an evil offer from a demonic old woman. The absence of Nurse Tina, and the off-stage resolution of her plotline, which otherwise carried us through the play, is sorely felt in Scene 5, the last part of the play.

Danielle Skraastad does some very good things with her one scene as Maxine's daughter, showing us the complexity and difficulty in this mother/daughter relationship. And Paul Niebanck, someone we saw last year as a perfect prototype 50s dude in "Maple and Vine," finds his inner weakling as Todd, Tina's supervisor, who harbors a bit of a crush on her and lets himself get tangled in the mess because of that crush.

And then there's Maxine... Judith Michaels is fierce and venomous as as the lady in the bed, the one who simply refuses to die. She spits fire. She shows her claws. And I simply didn't believe that anybody wouldn't have tossed her out a long time ago, whether she has a fortune or not. Or maybe I'm just naive. But I didn't see anything to put me on her side for even a moment. She's the villain. That's it. Yes, I felt sympathy for Nurse Tina, caught up in her plan, and definitely for her daughter, who has suffered plenty, and even a little for her grandson, Charlie, who shows up at the end and may be manipulated, too. But Maxine... She tells a social worker that she knows everyone at the nursing home will have a party when she leaves. Yeah. I totally believe that. And I also believe they would've thrown their party -- and Maxine out on the street -- a long time ago.

DEATH TAX
By Lucas Hnath

36th Humana Festival of New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville

Director: Ken Rus Schmoll
Scenic Designer: Philip Witcomb
Costume Designer: Kristopher Castle
Lighting Designer: Brian H. Scott
Sound Designer: Matt Hubbs
Properties Designer: Joe Cunningham
Stage Manager: Christine Lomaka
Dramaturg: Judy Bowman

Cast: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Paul Niebanck, Judith Roberts, Danielle Skraatad. Running time: 1:40, performed without intermission

Remaining performances: Saturday, March 31 at 2 pm, Sunday, April 1 at 3:30 pm

Hilarious "Veri**on Play" Sends Up the Horror Story of Customer Service

Today was my travel day to the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. We were up at the crack of dawn (maybe before the crack of dawn) to drive to Louisville in time for our first play, Lisa Kron's "The Veri**on Play."

The word with the ** in it is obviously Verizon, as in the phone company. Er, telecommunications empire. Giant? Conglomerate? I don't know if the asterisks are there to indicate swearing directed at Verizon or because she thinks she might have legal troubles if she puts their corporate name in her title. Whatever the reason, the target is definitely Verizon, all because the customer service people there made the mistake of ticking off a playwright. In dramaturg Amy Wegener's notes accompanying the play, she says that Kron herself had a run-in with the phone company, one that ended up as "one of those Kafkaesque experiences one has that goes on for many months," in Kron's words. She continues, "I was in a state of apoplectic rage, and found myself screaming at this poor customer service person: 'I'm going to write a play about this!'"

Although the rep on the other hand didn't laugh out loud or anything, it seems likely he or she was not impressed with the threat of theater.

But Kron persevered, writing her "primal scream" of a play as a smart, hilarious trip down a rabbit hole of unseen enemies, empty promises, frustration, crazy people, more crazy people, and a whole lot of romping around. Kron targets technology in general in what she calls a combination of "my love of theatrical craft, my devotion to cheap laughs, and my interest in the alchemy that occurs between stage and audience and lifts us into that delicious 'we're all in this together' feeling."

Well, Lisa Kron, I can honestly say: Mission Accomplished. From beginning to end, I found "The Veri**on Play" funny and entertaining, with all kinds of amusing theatrical tricks, all employed in the best wiseacre tradition. In performance, with a terrific cast that switched roles (and kept fooling me into thinking I was seeing new actors), the play came off creative, surprising, and just plain adorable. "The Veri**on Play" was a great way to kick off my Humana weekend.

Kron herself plays the lead role, one Jenni Jensen, who makes one tiny mistake in which box she checks while paying a bill on-line. After that, the amount she already paid keeps showing up on her bill month after month, no matter how many blithely indifferent customer service people she speaks to. Then the phone calls threatening to turn off her service begin. She hooks up with what she thinks is a support group for people like her, those treated badly by customer service, only to find out they're really an underground Up With People/Down With Faceless Drones and Corporations kind of movement.

Director Nicholas Martin has staged it all in the brightest, most cheerfully ridiculous way possible, with lots of sharp blackouts and changes to new locales, with one quick trip around the world near the end just to show that German and French money machines are just as negative as American ones. Kron's script goes increasingly off the deep end, and Martin navigates those waters beautifully.

I also really loved the costumes from designer Kristopher Castle, showing us an array of hipster doofus pieces put together in bizarre combos, and the fun, fizzy music contributed by sound designer Benjamin Marcum to carry us from one scene to another and from composer Jeanine Tesori, who has created a big honking anthem to urge us all to take a stand and rise up against bad customer service.

If it sounds like a soapbox, trust me when I say it's too funny for that. And too adorable.

Kron's charming presence and comic timing set the mood for the show, with excellent help from the clever, hard-working actors in the ensemble (including Carolyn Baeumler, Joel Van Liew, Kimberly Hebert-Gregory, Ching Valdes-Aran and Clayton Dean Smith). Calvin Smith and Hannah Bos deserve special mention for being absolutely unrecognizable as different characters, and Bos and her sparkly beret and lightning quick changes (as well as her inexplicable Russian accent when she plays a paranoid cigarette-smoking underground activist named Ingrid) are as funny as it gets all the way through.

I haven't got a clue if any other company can pull off the bravura (and fairly shameless) comedy act that is "The Veri**on Play," but I'd sure like to see it if they try.

Trivia note for ISU fans: Alum Sabrina Conti is a member of the Humana Festival Apprentice Company this year, and she appears in the ensemble of this show.

THE VERI**ON PLAY
By Lisa Kron

36th Humana Festival of New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville

Director: Nicholas Martin
Original music by: Jeanine Tesori
Scenic Designer: Tom Tutino
Costume Designer: Kristopher Castle
Lighting Designer: Kirk Bookman
Sound Designer: Benjamin Marcum
Music Supervisor: Scott Anthony
Properties Designer: Joe Cunningham
Wig Designer: Heather Fleming
Movement Director: Delilah Smyth
Stage Manager: Stephen Horton
Dramaturg: Amy Wegener

Cast: Lisa Kron, Carolyn Baeumler, Joel Van Liew, Kimberly Hebert-Gregory, Ching Valdes-Aran, Clayton Dean Smith, Calvin Smith, Hannah Bos, Sabrina Conti, Chris Reid.

Running time: 1:40, performed without intermission

Remaining performances: Sunday, April 1 at 3:30 pm