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.

Humana Festival 2017: Surviving a Wedding in I NOW PRONOUNCE

When I made my living writing romance novels, I wrote a lot of books set in and around weddings. Runaway brides, runaway grooms, bridezillas, bridesmaids hooking up with groomsmen, the bride and her identical twin sister switching places before the wedding... You name it, I wrote it. I did not, however, write anybody dropping dead at the altar.

That is the premise of Tasha Gordon-Solmon's I Now Pronounce, which was the first play I saw at this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays. At Actors Theatre of Louisville, Solmon's play starts with the rabbi who is officiating, played by the adorable Ray DeMattis, all alone in the middle of the Bingham Theatre. DeMattis has the skill and charm to hold the stage with ease, even as the rabbi he's playing goes farther and farther off track. He's so cute you don't mind that he's calling the groom something different every time he mentions him -- Aaron, Abraham, Anton -- or that he's really not well. And then disaster strikes. Before the "I do" part of the proceedings, the rabbi keels over, and we've lost him.

Ray DeMattis in I Now Pronounce by Tasha Gordon Solmon
Photo by Bill Brymer.

What happens next is the aftermath. Is the wedding cursed? Does anybody really want to get married in the wake of a dead rabbi?

The bride is holed up by herself, refusing to speak to anyone, while the groom is hanging out with two groomsmen, a cynical player who thinks marriage is a horrible idea, anyway, and a sweet but sloppy guy whose own marriage is in tatters. There are two bridesmaids, as well, trying to convince the bride to come out of hiding. One is very, very drunk and saying inappropriate things, while the other is a control freak. Neither has a date for the wedding, and that's an issue, too. We also see three tiny flower girls in matching outfits, shrieking and running around the wedding venue looking for ghosts and speculating on whether the rabbi's death means everybody else is going to drop dead, too.

By the end of the play, both bride and groom have pondered what it means to be committed to somebody else and have contemplated fleeing, insults are hurled, mortality is pondered, one couple has sex under the chuppah, and everybody pretty much gets skewered by everybody else. Most of the invective seems warranted as, all in all, they're a pretty unpleasant bunch without a whole lot of coping skills. Well, except for the flower girls. They're expected to be juvenile, after all.

Gordon-Solmon's script is especially hard on Eva, the controlling bridesmaid, as she gets ripped up and down for not being able to hang onto a man. Actress Satomi Blair makes Eva appealing enough that the attacks seem excessive, and when they're coming from Jason Veasey's slick groomsman Dave, they slide right over the line into misogyny. Against the backdrop of a wacky romantic comedy, the sexist tone doesn't play well, and the fact that both bridesmaids are desperate for a man heightens the problem.

The issues Gordon-Solmon raises are messy and complicated in a world where Say Yes to the Dress may never end, but Girls, The Mindy Project and New Girl -- all shows pitched to Millennials and centered on issues of growing up and finding or rejecting love and commitment -- are winding down*. And then there's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which takes the insanity of modern relationships one step farther.

Clearly people are still getting married. Clearly people are still breaking up. Clearly people are still pinning all their hopes and dreams on a fantasy wedding that may or may not end in disaster even if the rabbi doesn't meet his maker in the middle of the ceremony. There's conflict and real emotion to be mined there. I'm just not sure how much I Now Pronounce adds to the conversation.

*Girls just ended, The Mindy Project is finished after one more season, and New Girl is probably not coming back.

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.

Steven Dietz Sweetly Eludes Serendipity in THIS RANDOM WORLD

Playwright Steven Dietz is both prolific and versatile. His plays range from God's Country, a scary, fact-based exposé of white supremacists in the Northwest, to Private Eyes, a theatrical and romantic play that peels away layers of lies and fantasy around lovers who also happen to be actors, Lonely Planet, which piles up chairs to talk about AIDS, adaptations of Dracula and Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, several musicals, and Bloomsday, the recent Steinberg/ATCA citation winner that deals with two mismatched people who meet on a tour of Dublin centered on James Joyce's Ulysses.

You'll see a lot of relationships, especially thwarted or flawed relationships, in Dietz's plays, as well as a message about getting out in the world and actually living life. That's certainly on display in This Random World, the play Dietz premiered at last month's Humana Festival of New American Plays. The play's subtitle is "the myth of serendipity" and that describes This Random World rather nicely, as a collection of sweet, nice, eccentric people fail to connect with each other, often passing like ships in the night.

There's sister and brother Beth and Tim -- she's taking a trip to Nepal in an attempt to LIVE before she dies, while he's a stay-at-home guy who has failed at love and work and isn't quite ready to push past his perceived failures -- and their mother, Scottie, whose life is a lot more interesting than her children think. Around their axis spin Bernadette, Scottie's warm and competent aide; her sister Rhonda, who works at a funeral home; Tim's ex, loopy Claire; and Gary, Claire's current boyfriend who is about to break loose.

Their plotlines intersect, but never really connect, and that kind of almost-but-not-quite is Dietz's main point. He sets up the standard dramatic expectation that when these characters finally meet, there will be dramatic sparks and a POW! SOCKO! payoff. But that's what Dietz is exploring, the notion that serendipity is more likely to make us miss each other than collide.

And so This Random World actively and purposely avoids the expected payoffs. Or, as Actors Theatre of Louisville's materials on the play frame it: "Mining the comedy of missed connections, This Random World asks the serious question of how often we travel parallel paths through the world without noticing." In that way, This Random World ends up giving its audience the same "if only" ache the characters feel. It's a whole lot more satisfying than you might expect from a play that sets out to leave its characters unsatisfied.

In its Humana Festival production, This Random World was lovely and real, quite funny and quite sad. Part of that is on the page, as Dietz and the surprises he built in keep the characters and action moving smoothly.

And part was due to director Meredith McDonough's inventive staging, which employed a stream of costumed stage hands from Actors Theatre's apprentice company sliding in, out and through the Bingham Theatre's in-the-round space between scenes, showing us more of those people traveling "parallel paths through the world" even as they seamlessly changed the scenery. It was a neat trick that underlined the central idea.

Deanna Bouye (L) and Beth Dixon in This Random World at the Humana Festival
Photo credit: Bill Brymer

McDonough's cast did fine work across the board, with Beth Dixon terrific and vivid as Scottie, who knows her own mind and brooks no objections, and Deanna Bouye a delight as Rhonda, the one who thinks it's perfectly normal to offer coffee to a spirit who just walked in the front door. Nate Miller's Tim and Renata Friedman's Claire were also appealing and absolutely believable.

Dietz's plays have enjoyed a great deal of success in regional theaters over the past thirty years. Let's hope This Random World shows up, too. I'd like to see it ten or twelve more times, myself.

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.

New Plays Await, but the Deadline for Humana Festival Reservations Looms

Although Actors Theatre of Louisville's 39th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays has already begun, there's still time -- a little time -- to reserve a package of tickets to the "Industry Weekends" that wrap up the Festival in April. The deadline for registration for the Industry Weekends is March 11, which means it's time to get moving if you want to be there!

There are other new play festivals around the country, but the Humana Festival remains one of the most accessible, prestigious and enjoyable. The Industry Weekends -- the last two weekends of the Festival -- bring together press, producers, directors, agents, artistic directors, literary managers, playwrights, publishers and other theatre professionals, gathered to see a crop of new works by rising and established playwrights.

From the descriptions offered by Actors Theatre (although they always claim there is no overriding theme), this year's slate seems to be about how we embrace life and each other, bridging gaps or falling in between. Actors Theatre rolls out their Humana Festival choices over the weeks between March 2 and April 12, with weekend packages offering the possibility of three plays March 20 to 22, five plays March 27 to 29, six plays April 4 to 5, and all six plays plus a program of 10-minute plays April 10 to 12.  Here's what you'll see if you come that last weekend, when the full array is being performed:

THE ROOMMATE
by Jen Silverman.
Sharon considers herself a sensible, middle-aged Midwestern woman. But when she finds herself in need of a roommate to pay the bills, she ends up with Robyn, a vegan from the Bronx who is secretive and a smoker. Sharon is persistent in her efforts to get to know Robyn and to show her that sharing and growing can be good things. But it may be Sharon who changes the most.

DOT
by Colman Domingo
At Christmas time, the Shealy family -- Dotty and her three grown children -- is in need of a whole lot more than a tree to brighten their inner-city home. In this "wild and moving dark comedy," Dotty Shealy and her kids will find open up issues of elder care and midlife crisis along with their Christmas gifts.

I WILL BE GONE
by Erin Courtney
Ghosts, earthquakes, haunted memories... That's the world seventeen-year-old Penelope discovers after her mother dies, when she movies to a small town in the mountains in California to live with her aunt. Set next to a ghost town, I Will Be Gone looks at "the beauty and awkwardness of living with the knowledge that everything ends."

THE GLORY OF THE WORLD
by Charles Mee
Thomas Merton was a world traveler in his youth, but a Trappist monk in Kentucky by the age of 26. He wrote some 70 books on faith and social justice before he died at 53. In this play, Mee celebrates what would have been Merton's 100th birthday with "a wildly theatrical meditation on happiness, love, the values of solitude and...seeking heaven on earth."

I PROMISED MYSELF TO LIVE FASTER
Text by Gregory S. Moss and Pig Iron Theatre Company
Philadelphia's Pig Iron Theatre Company brings its "unique method of performance research and collaborative creation, plus a signature physical approach to character" to Louisville with this delirious science fiction allegory about intergalactic nuns in search of a Holy Gay Flame.

THAT HIGH LONESOME SOUND
by Jeff Augustin, Diana Grisanti, Cory Hinkle and Cherise Castro Smith
This year's showcase for Actors Theatre's Apprentice Company is all about bluegrass. Or, as Actors Theatre puts it, "In a lively theatrical album of scenes...four writers respond with playfulness and poignancy to the signature sounds, inherited stories, and cultural impact of this very American—and very Kentucky—music tradition."

Note that Charles Mee's The Glory of the World is the one Actors Theatre's Artistic Director Les Water has chosen to direct.

In addition to these six full-length plays, the Humana Festival also features a program of three 10-minute plays during the second Industry Weekend. Those are Rules of Comedy by Patricia Cotter, Joshua Consumed an Unfortunate Pear by Steve Yockey and So Unnatural a Level by Gary Winter. Winter's play won this year's Heideman Award, granted by Actors Theatre to the winner of its national 10-minute play contest. The Heideman Award also comes with a $1000 check to the winning playwright. To read more about the three 10-minute plays chosen to be performed as part of the Humana Festival, click here.

For more information about the entire Humana Festival of New American Plays and to find reservation information, visit Actors Theatre's website here.

Hnath's CHRISTIANS Shows the Theatrical Side of Faith

From the moment the stage was revealed for Lucas Hnath's The Christians, a Humana Festival play set in Actors Theatre of Louisville's Pamela Brown Auditorium, it was obvious we were going to church.

Instead of a theatrical stage, this was an evangelical one, with pretty blue carpet rising in tiers, a choir at the back, a pulpit, a couple of screens showing off images of doves and blue skies, and a few posh chairs facing us, flanked by microphones. It was quite clearly the chancel of a prosperous mega-church. All it needed were the worship leaders. And in they marched.

One of them, Pastor Paul, took the mic, starting a sermon. That began the particular convention of this play, that we would hear almost everything -- dialogue, monologues, inner thoughts, even a dialogue tag or two -- through microphones. I can recall exactly two lines where a character dropped the mic. One involved a parishioner expressing distrust, and the other occurred when a rival preacher demonstrated his own vocal strength didn't require amplification.

But all that dialogue delivered from the altar plus the microphones translated to one thing: church as theatre. Pastor Paul is used to using his voice and his calm, comforting persona to bring in new parishioners and keep the old ones happy. Pastor Paul is playing a role.

As his church has grown, the pastor has done his best to keep the coffers full. But now, with their building fund debt paid off, he feels free to discuss a crisis of conscious. He doesn't believe in hell anymore. That's a huge deal for this particular church and a huge betrayal for some of his parishioners. Those debates, those faith-based conflicts, are played out in the same way, as if they were announced right there in church, in front of God and everybody.

To Hnath's credit, he doesn't stack the deck. Each side gets its due and its arguments on the central issue. How do caring people who believe that Jesus is the one path to Heaven deal with the innocents in other cultures and other faiths who are then consigned to the fires of Hell as non-believers?

If this is an issue that has never occurred to you before, The Christians may be an eye-opener, an impassioned debate, a revelation as to what happens to one man when a crack appears in the foundation of his life built on faith. His ambitious assistant pastor is the first to go. Members of the congregation follow. The church's leadership is wavering. And the pastor's wife, a woman of faith, is beginning to wonder where her greatest loyalty lies.

Faith vs. love. Faith vs. ambition. Faith vs. humanity. As the pastor grapples with what he believes and why he believes it, as well as just how much he's willing to lose in the name of his newly found religious convictions, The Christians becomes more than an academic exercise. As the pastor in the center of The Christians, Andrew Garman is very strong and smooth, and his conversations with his wife, played by Linda Powell, who is silent for a good, long time, are some of the most affecting in the play.

The idea of casting religion in theatrical garb certainly makes it point about the artifice, the decorations and finery that decorate and amplify churches to make them palatable to the public, and the various conflicts are well articulated. Still, the way this play is staged -- with people either just sitting or standing around the altar and talking mostly to us instead of each other -- tends to create the very distance Pastor Paul says he feels.

In the end, The Christians sets up some impossible but compelling questions, but few answers. But isn't that the way of faith?

Probing PARTNERS at Humana Festival

The word partners carries a lot of weight if you think about it. We call romantically involved people partners, gay, straight, married or otherwise. We call people who put a business together or dance together or play cards together or write a book together or take their act on the road together partners. But what does that mean in terms of the basic qualities -- loyalty, honesty, trust, support -- we expect from a true partner?

Those are some of the things Dorothy Fortenberry investigates in her play Partners, one of this year's selections at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Fortenberry is mostly interested in domestic partners -- one married straight couple, one unmarried gay couple -- and how their choices at home echo through another partnership, a longtime friendship between the straight wife and one of the gay men.

Clare, who went to culinary school and has a real talent for things like fig foam and teeny tiny pork belly bits on a cracker, has been besties with Ezra for absolute ever. Ezra has a plan to launch a food truck based on Clare's recipes and his entrepreneurial ideas. But Clare has been missing meetings, dragging her feet on the video Ezra needs to sell their idea to potential backers, and in general, letting Ezra down.

Clare is much more eager to talk about Ezra marrying his boyfriend Brady than she is to talk about the food truck. She also seems much more invested in their relationship than her own with her husband, Paul, an IT guy for a law firm who we're told doesn't pull in much money. Clare's own job arranging food for photos is also not lucrative, meaning she and Paul are not exactly living high on the pork belly.

Over in the other household, Ezra temps here and there and Brady teaches at a school with disadvantaged children, a job that's is more rewarding than remunerative, even though his wealthy parents do help out now and again.

All of this sets up the first of Fortenberry's major focuses, which is money and how we share it with our partners. Who pays for whom? Who owes whom? Paul's modest salary keeps his life with Clare afloat, but when Clare gets a financial windfall, she isn't all that into sharing the news or the money with Paul. Ezra wants Clare and Paul to kick in some cash for the food truck or at least lend him a credit card. Brady's parents don't want to subsidize Ezra. And Ezra doesn't want to marry Brady just to get the health insurance he otherwise can't afford.

The other elephant in the room is sex. Or lack of it. Clare is fascinated by what she imagines of Ezra and Brady's hot life, while we find out late in the play that her romantic life with her husband leaves a lot to be desired. Meanwhile, back in Brady-and-Ezra-ville, when marriage is put on the table, issues of monogamy and fidelity serve as a major obstacles toward wedded bliss.

And then there's the bigger issue: When it comes to sex, money and how we support a partner financially and emotionally, how do we know and articulate what we really want?

There are some interesting ideas floating around in Partners and all three relationships (Clare/Paul, Ezra/Brady and Clare/Ezra) have their moments of clarity and conflict in director Lila Neugebauer's Actors Theatre of Louisville production. But I found myself wishing Clare had been written with the sparks of charm and reason the male characters get. We see and hear about her acne, the medical woes in her past, her lies of omission and some serious self-sabotage. No matter how many times Ezra tells us that Clare is too adorable to be mad at, she comes off miserable, dishonest, and a little whiny instead. I wanted Ezra and Paul to hold her accountable for her passive aggressive ways and unwillingness to step up and tell the truth. Neugebauer is working with an actress, Annie Purcell, who really is kind of adorable, but the way Fortenberry's script treats Clare undermines the actress's personal charm.

In contrast, the Ezra we see is a lot of fun, if sometimes maddeningly unable to read people, and Kasey Mahaffy navigates the tricky bits nicely, especially as the conflict in his relationships escalates. The two partners -- Clare's husband Paul and Ezra's boyfriend Brady -- come off quite well throughout, with a strong performance from David Ross that makes Paul seem forthright and complicated in all the rights ways and good work from LeRoy McClain that gives some heft to Brady's life and opinions.

In the end, Partners looked beautiful, with a sleek set from Daniel Zimmerman that framed the action on the ground and in the air, but seemed a bit unformed or overstuffed as it played out. Why did these two marry each other? Why did these two move in and hook their lives together? And why in the world did these two stay friends so long?

Those are not questions Partners deals with. They're just the ones that nagged at me.

Weighing a Life in brownsville song (b-side for tray)

One of the best things about the Humana Festival of New American Plays, held annually at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, is the mix of works presented. There's almost always something a little (or a lot) out there, something crazy, something sad, something sweet... And something more traditional.

This year, even though playwright Kimber Lee has given her play brownsville song (b-side for tray) an unusual title and even though the structure of the play is nonlinear and fragmented, brownsville still plays like a traditional, heartfelt, earnest piece of American theater.

It starts at the end, with a grandmother who does not want to talk about the loss of her grandson, Tray, lost to stupid, tragic violence on the streets in Brooklyn. The actions plays out in short, overlapping scenes from now and then that show us who Tray was, who was important in his life -- his little sister; the grandmother who has mostly raised the two of them; and Tray's one-time stepmother, re-entering their lives after she fell off the deep end but has tried to reclaim herself -- and the hole he's left behind. We understand that it's a tragedy that Tray is gone and we root for these conflicted, interesting people to find a way.

But brownsville never really rises above the issues presented. We are told early on that Tray is not just some statistic, one more name on the list of kids lost in America's inner-city wars. His grandmother argues that he was different, he was special, he was not just one more like all the other faceless, nameless victims. As embodied by John Clarence Stewart, Tray is charming, vibrant and alive. And in that, this story succeeds in telling us that his death was as wrong as wrong can be. 

Actors Theatre Associate Artistic Director Meredith McDonought directs, eliciting fine performances from her entire cast. Cherene Snow effectively etches the grief and anger fueling Lena, the grandmother who wants Tray to be remembered, while 10-year-old Sally Diallo is adorable as Devine, the little girl who keeps getting left behind by the adults in her life. Jackie Chang does good work with the difficult role of Tray's former stepmother, but who exactly she was to Tray is unclear for much of the play, and her appearances seem coincidental and forced at times. 

And in the end... brownsville song doesn't sing. The play is earnest. Its heart is most definitely in the right place. It makes its case that random violence is tragic and terrible. But the scenes Lee has written don't build intensity or make a case for Tray beyond "just another kid," the very thing it set out to do. Yes, he was a great kid. Yes, he had a bright future. But how is that different from the others, the ones whose names we don't know? Lee's script doesn't gives us that spark.

Dane Laffrey's set, with sliding panels and moving pieces that fill all of the stage (and some offstage) spaces at the Pamela Brown Auditorium, Actors Theatre's biggest space, is slick and smooth in terms of transitions, but its size and mechanics create a certain distance from the audience, another reason brownsville doesn't make the emotional impact it's trying to achieve.

In the end, it's easy to understand the heartbreak in brownsville song (b-side for tray) but hard to truly give it your heart.

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.

2010 Humana Festival, Part 3: Memory, Method and Madness

This year's Humana Festival featured two free-form, ensemble pieces performed by innovative theatrical troupes. And, no, neither of them involved Anne Bogart or her SITI Company. A third show also involved an ensemble, although it was a different sort of group, and much more traditional story-telling.

First up was “Fissures (lost and found),” a moody little piece on the nature of memory, created by a whole team of playwrights, including Steve Epp and Dominique Serrand, former co-Artistic Directors at Minneapolis’ Theatre de la Jeune Lune. That theater’s influence (including a vibrant performance by Serrand) is written all over “Fissues,” with its spare, poetic movements and surrealistic style.

There isn’t much to “Fissures” in terms of character or action, but what it has is mood and emotion. Memory is a tricky thing, after all, with remembering and forgetting hidden in dark corners of our brains, resonating in both sad and happy ways. Reflecting that, “Fissues” includes some beautiful, poignant moments, as the white-clad actors wander in and out of the all-white set, sticking Post-Its hither and yon one moment, marking out the lines of a forgotten street in black marker the next, or just sitting down to talk to us about the ghosts in our collective memory.

The Actors Theatre of Louisville production, also directed by Serrand, got a little repetitive, a little too artfully quirky for me at times, but the overall evocative, contemplative mood has stayed with me, and I suspect that was the whole point. I keep thinking about one particular speech delivered by Emily Gunyou Halaas, telling us how memory is like a folded and unfolded map, illustrating how points in time can overlap. Terrific writing, perfectly delivered.

“The Method Gun,” a product of an Austin Texas troupe called the Rude Mechanicals (Rude Mechs, for short) is an animal of an entirely different color. In performance, this one was brash and silly, lampooning the techniques of an acting guru named Stella Burden who supposedly disappeared in the 70s, leaving her actors, a gun inside a bird cage, a soapstone tiger, and some very strange acting exercises behind. After their mentor departed, “The Method Gun” tells us that the Burden disciples kept rehearsing the piece they’d already started – “A Streetcar Named Desire” without Blanche, Stanley, Stella or Mitch – for nine years, until they finally managed one performance.

The Rude Mechs’ take on Stella Burden’s “Approach” is highly theatrical and a little crazy, showing us some of the bizarre exercises Burden put her actors through. If any of this really happened. I honestly have no idea if Stella and her Approach are real or made-up. And maybe it’s better that way.

I found “The Method Gun” and its hippy, dippy nonsense entertaining throughout, but everything that came in the first 3/4 was trumped by the absolutely breathtaking ending sequence. It involved swinging lights, the iconic, oddball “Streetcar” we’d been promised, and then a small homage to teachers and mentors everywhere. I found myself unexpectedly moved by that ending.

Again, I am guessing that was the intended effect – to demonstrate the power and beauty that can lurk under even the most misguided, out-there kind of theater.

Like “Fissures,” “The Method Gun” has no hope of being produced by anybody else anywhere else. Both pieces were inextricably tied to the collaborative process and to the performers who lived, breathed and moved through the words.

And now for something completely different... The third ensemble piece of the weekend, “The Cherry Sisters Revisited,” looked a lot more like a standard musical comedy at first glance. As the lights came up on the nifty barn set designed by Scott Bradley, former scenic designer at U of I and the Station Theatre, “Cherry Sisters” seemed as if it might be some pseudo-“Annie Get Your Gun” romp.

Instead, Dan O’Brien’s script tried to be a ghost story, a comedy, and a look at the delusions of fame, with a few songs and “fruit and veg” thrown in for good measure. A kitchen sink, what appeared to be entrails, and a wooden leg were also thrown on stage to express the audience’s displeasure with the sisters and their terrible, terrible vaudeville act.

Although I can’t say for sure that Stella Burden existed, the Cherry Sisters definitely did. They were five Iowa farmgirls who leapt onto the stage in the 1890s. They couldn’t sing or dance, they weren’t good-looking, they showed no evidence of talent whatsoever, and in fact, their performances were dreadful. But audiences came out in droves to see (and throw things at) these delusional vaudeville “stars.”

How could these women not know how bad they were? Were they fully aware of their own shortcomings, cynically pocketing the public’s cash and laughing all the way to the bank? Or did they tromp out onto the stage every night, blissfully unaware of the reality?

It’s a fascinating premise, directly related to the William Hungs and other talent show caterwaulers of the current age, but none of that really comes across in O’Brien’s script, as directed by Andrew Leyne. O’Brien messes with history a little, although those changes don’t matter all that much. But playing it as a ghost story or some vague dreamscape where Effie (here the youngest sister, although she wasn’t in real life) remembers how it used to be, good and bad, doesn’t really work, either.

Renata Friedman’s Effie was certainly sympathetic, but also a bit too twitchy and gloomy to seem related to the others. I loved Cassie Beck’s warm take on Ella, the “slow” sister, and Katie Kreisler, Kate Gersten and Donna Lynn Champlin provided sharp characterizations as the other sisters. But their drunken lout of a father and fast-talking agent, played as comic caricatures by John Hickok, seemed as if they belonged in a different show. “Paint Your Wagon” by way of “Cat Ballou,” maybe?

It was that uneasy mix of pop culture hijinks with a psychological study of the fame bug that made “The Cherry Sisters” falter for me. I love the idea. I wanted to love the play. I didn’t.

I do find myself wondering what O’Brien might do to further develop this work, however. Michael Friedman’s songs were fun and fizzy, and went fine with that half of the story. If O’Brien can get the unwieldy book under control and find a narrative thread that showcases his premise better, “The Cherry Sisters Revisited” will really have something to say.