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: O GURU GURU GURU Looks to Julia Roberts for Answers

Playwright Mallery Avidon likes to stand at "the intersection of individual and collective experience," she writes in program notes for her new play O Guru Guru Guru or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you, an autobiographical (sort-of) piece that premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville.

First, the individual. Like the heroine of O Guru Guru Guru, Avidon really spend some of her formative years in an ashram and now has a complicated, somewhat troubled relationship with the hierarchy. The issues in the play -- figuring out how to be an adult, finding out who you are, getting past a central unease and unhappiness you can't identify  -- are focused on Avidon's singular childhood.

Adding the collective mass media experience, Avidon was partially inspired to write O Guru Guru Guru by the popularity of the book and movie versions of Eat Pray Love, which creates a sort of capitalist/spiritual/pop culture contradiction she found intriguing, as well as a path to bring an audience into the specifics of her childhood.

That conflation of different ideas is what creates the very specific, very distinct three-scene structure of O Guru Guru Guru (with one Guru for each part of the play). In the beginning, we see Lila, Avidon's stand-in, at a lecture where she attempts to explain the ashram and its personages as well as the title question. Her aversion to going to yoga classes with pals has nothing to do with posture or breathing or stretching or lack of skill or lack of friendship, she tells us. Instead, it's rooted in what it felt like to be a child in the ashram's immersive environment, and the cracks she saw in its foundation. For others, the ashram and its all-important guru provided answers to life's questions. But for Lila, it only created more alienation, more questions, less sense of her place in the world.

Actress Rebecca Hart, who played Lila for Actors Theatre of Louisville, was our only guide to that entire first section. Hart's warmth, humor and engaging performance kept the piece alive as she navigated a slide show with no pictures and a presentation based on notecards and observations.

The tone changes considerably as we segued into the second part of the play, one where the audience is invited to come down to the floor of the playing space, take off their shoes and participate in yoga, as guided by a very serene guide in a beautiful sari, played by Daphne Gaines. The audience is asked to chant, to listen to speeches on the spiritual peace to be found in yoga's methodology, to do a little breathing, and to watch a shadow puppet play about how the god Ganesh came to be. The colorful saris and lovely young guides (Maya Lawson, Kristin Villanueva and Gisela Chipe) made it pretty to look at, if a little odd and unformed.

After that, Avidon pulls back the curtain to reveal that what we've just seen is not what we thought at all, not at an ashram at all, but a scene being shot for the movie Eat Pray Love. And our girl Lila is an extra in the movie because of her yoga skills, even though she really still hasn't found herself. Just when you think our heroine is hopelessly adrift in the modern world, here comes a deus ex machina in the form of... Julia Roberts! Actress Khrystyne Hadje, a beautiful woman who once appeared on TV's Head of the Class, stands in for Roberts, acting as Lila's final guru, a font of wisdom and advice learned in Hollywood instead of yoga class.

If nothing else, O Guru Guru Guru created a lot of discussion amongst audience members. Around me, I heard some say they were only interested in the first section, with Lila's straighforward, uncomplicated lecture, while others were drawn to the third, where Julia Roberts Ties It All Together for You, as a satisfying answer to the questions illuminated in Part I.

As usual, I'm staking out my own turf. For me, the highlight of O Guru Guru Guru was the shadow play in the second piece, which employed some of the magic of theatre -- shadows and light, puppetry, art design -- to tell its story.

What's interesting about these discussions, however, is that almost everyone felt the need to embrace one part and reject the others, as if there were a competition among those discrete Gurus. While Avidon was attempting to set up and pay off one story, she ended up with three competing parts. I also found the ultimate answer -- that Julia Roberts will invite you over to her place for Taco Night -- sweet, but unconvincing. No Guru can ultimately offer peace or answers or a place in the world. Not even Julia Roberts.

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.

Top Steinberg/ATCA Prize Goes to Robert Schenkkan for LBJ Drama

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards are handed out every year during the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville. This year, the finalists were Johnna Adams for her script Gidion's Knot, a teacher/parent drama about suicide and grief; Ayad Akhtar for his political thriller The Invisible Hand; Luca Hnath for Death Tax, a life, death and taxes struggle that premiered at last year's Humana Festival; Mia McCullough for Impenetrable, about beauty and its impossible standards; Dan O'Neal for The Wind Farmer, a mythic piece about hanging on to old traditions in a changing world; and Robert Schenkkan for All the Way, a new play about President Lyndon Johnson.

A committee within the American Theatre Critics Association reads scripts suggested by its membership, choosing six finalists -- new plays first produced outside New York City -- from among the field submitted. The ATCA reports that this year, they evaluated a record 42 plays for consideration for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play citations, which awards a total of $40,000 to the winning playwrights. That sum represents "the largest national new play award focusing on regional theaters as the crucible for new plays in the United States."

Robert Schenkkan

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan was the big winner, with a $25,000 check presented along with a plaque, for his LBJ play, All the Way, which was commissioned to be performed last summer as part of the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Schenkkan is no stranger to American history; his Kentucky Cycle won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1991. Characters like Hubert Humphrey, J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr. populated the landscape of Schenkkan's play, an exploration of how Lyndon Johnson came to power and how this "charismatic, conflicted Texan hurl[ed] himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil." The ATCA judges called the play "an engrossing, epic" play and described Schenkkan's version of LBJ as "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless." 

Actor Jack Willis as Lyndon Johnson in the OSF production of All the Way

The two $7500 citations went to Adams' Gideon's Knot and Hnath's Death Tax, both gripping dramas about the American way of life and death.

Adams' play premiered at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Gidion's Knot involves a grieving mother who clashes with her dead son's teacher to try to find some explanation for his suicide. Fifth-grader Gidion wrote a horrifying story for school, something powerful and violent and strange, but no more violent, no more strange than the medieval literature his mother studies. Was Gidion too aggressive to stay in school? Or pushed around by other aggressors? Either way, who's to blame?

The issues in Hnath's Death Tax are equally compelling, as we see a withered old woman, a dragon sitting on a pile of money, who tries to bargain with her nurse in an assisted care facility to keep herself alive. Nurse Tina is not on the take to murder her patient, even if she can't convince the old dragon of that. "Without positing easy answers, the play dissects greed, dysfunctional human relationships and the potential implications of a medical paradigm that can keep people alive indefinitely," noted the ATCA. 

Since its inception, the Steinberg New Play Award has singled out and honored playwrights like
Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson. Yussef  El Guindi took the prize last year for his play Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World. For the complete list of winners and runners-up, click here.

For more information on the Steinberg/ATCA Award, contact William F. Hirschman, chair of the ATCA New Play Committee, at muckrayk@aol.com or 954-478-1123; Jay Handelman, ATCA chair, at criticjay@gmail.com,or 941-361-4931; or Christopher Rawson, ATCA communications chair, at cchr@pitt.edu or 412-216-1944.

Humana Festival: Tension and Neurotic Writers Clash in THE DELLING SHORE

Playwrights love to write plays about writers. Writing is a tough world to try to make a living, with most writers spending a whole lot of time scrambling to be successful enough to consider writing a career instead of a sideline,  so it's only natural that playwrights and screenwriters and novelists would all be attracted to the conflicts, dashed hopes and complete injustice of the world of books. Plus, of course, if you write about people who write, you get to use all your best words.

Conflict, dashes hopes, injustice -- along with lots of books and lots of words -- are on display in Sam Marks' The Delling Shore, the first play I saw yesterday at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays. Marks' central notion is familiar to anyone who's written books over a period of time, where you band together with friends and colleagues at the beginning, everyone supporting each other as you line up at the start. But when the race begins, it often happens that one friend pulls away, lapping everybody else. It may be that this writer is just really superior, really talented. It may be that he or she worked hard to make connections, find a path, blaze ahead. Or it may be that it makes no sense at all, that it was a random and crazy occurrence in a random and crazy career.

The two writers at the center of The Delling Shore grapple with that complex question of success in the writing biz. Grad students together 25 years ago, Frank and Thomas thought they were both good writers. But Thomas has become a superstar, a guy with awards and money and movie rights, while Frank is still struggling, editing a third-rate journal just to scrape by. With a new book in hand and a daughter who is desperate for an internship with Thomas -- she wants to learn from the master, a sentiment not lost on her dad, who realizes he is not that master, not even to his own daughter -- Frank arrives at Thomas's lovely summer home, a place as scenic as it is remote.

There are tensions right from the get-go. Frank (Bruce McKenzie) and his daughter Adrianne (Catherine Combs) are hours late. Thomas (Jim Frangione) and his daughter Ellen (Meredith Forlenza) are peeved at the tardy arrival, unconcerned that their guests are hungry or that they were unable to get through on cell phones to get directions or warn of the delay. Things only get worse from there. Frank's jealousy of his old friend's fame and fortune overshadows everything, but Thomas isn't exactly gracious about their supposed friendship, either. And neither man is on great terms with his own daughter.

I enjoyed the bookishness of The Delling Shore and I suspect other writers will, too. I may've lived in the world of romance writers (who get a pot shot in the script. Of course.) rather than literary writers, but the bruised and inflated egos, desperation for a chance, and complete identification with one's literary product are familiar to me. It's a writer-eat-writer world, no matter where you're at in that world.

And I would love to incorporate the Book Game into an evening's entertainments. As far as I know, that game, much discussed and threatened before they actually get to it, was invented for The Delling Shore. If it is original, it's a good idea, not too difficult, designed to make literary folks feel smart. But it is also in no way a sufficient pay-off for all the ominous discussion that precedes it. Let's just say the build-up feels like we're headed toward "Humiliate the Host" or "Get the Guests" from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and instead it's Fictionary. That's just not good enough to get us to buy into or get behind these characters and their squabbles. Yes, they're familiar as neurotic writers. But there's just not enough at stake here. We know from the start and Thomas's general behavior that he is not going to do anybody any favors, and from the chip on Frank's shoulder that he's not going to emerge a victor. Thomas is such a jerk that it seems much better for Adrienne if she does not get the internship. Only Ellen, the spoiled, pretty daughter with the six-figure income from a job in banking -- the one character outside the writers' circle -- has the energy and spark to seem like a real human being.

I could definitely be into an examination of the power dynamics and destructive nature of The Writing Life. There are also intriguing hints here of the effects of privilege and money on one's talent and character. In the end, however, those hints don't really pay off. Kind of like the Book Game.

THE DELLING SHORE
by Sam Marks

Humana Festival of New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville

Director: Meredith McDonough
Scenic Designer: Daniel Zimmerman
Costume Designer: Lorraine Venberg
Lighting Desgners: Russell H. Champa and Dani Clifford
Sound Designer: Benjamin Marcum
Media Designer: Philip Allgeier
Stage Manager: Zachary Krohn
Dramaturg: Hannah Rae Montgomery
Casting: Henry Russell

Cast: Catherine Combs, Meredith Forlenza, Jim Frangione, Bruce McKenzie.

Running time: 1:30, played without intermission

Remaining performances: April 6 at 7 pm and April 7 at 2:30 pm.

For information on Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Humana Festival of New American plays, click here.

2013 Humana Festival Array of New Plays Announced

As promised, Actors Theatre of Louisville has announced what new plays will be on the schedule for its 2013 Humana Festival of New American Plays next spring.

This time out, there will be full-length plays from Jeff Augustin, Mallery Avidon, Will Eno, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sam Marks, with a piece created for Actors Theatre's Apprentice Company by Rinne Groff, Lucas Hnath and Anne Washburn. There will also be a program of 10-minute plays, with Sarah Ruhl the only announced playwright so far, since Actors Theatre's 10-minute play competition is still underway and one or more of the other plays may be chosen from that contest.

New Actors Theatre Artistic Director Les Waters will direct Will Eno's play, called Gnit. As you might guess from the name, Gnit is a new take on Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen's rambling adventure about a shiftless sort of man who travels around the world, running into a king, dairymaids, trolls, brownies, nixies, gnomes, Bedoins, madmen, missionaries, the Sphinx and the Devil. This Gnit promises to be a "rollicking and very cautionary tale about, among other things, how the opposite of love is laziness."

Appropriate is the title of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' new play, although without hearing it said aloud, I don't know if the piece is supposed to be the adjective appropriate, as in suitable or fitting, as opposed to the verb appropriate, as in, borrow without permission. Given that the play's action begins when the three adult children in the Lafayette family "descend upon a crumbling Arkansan plantation to liquidate their dead patriarch’s estate," I'm going to guess it's the verb appropriate, the one that is just a stone's throw from steal.

Gary Griffin, who is the Associate Artistic Director at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, where he recently directed a phenomenal production of Sunday in the Park with George, will be at the helm of Appropriate, his first directing gig at Actors Theatre.

Meredith McDonough, Actors Theatre's Associate Artistic Director, directs The Delling Shore, Sam Marks' look at competing novelists -- one successful and one struggling -- and their daughters, who also aspire to write. It's really hard not to take sides when push comes to shove, when wordplay becomes just as cutting as knives.

Cry Old Kingdom, about an artist trying to survive in Papa Doc Duvalier's Haiti, marks Jeff Augustin's professional debut as a playwright. It will be directed by Tom Dugdale, recipient of the 2012 Princess Grace Award in Theater with La Jolla Playhouse.

You can probably surmise from the title of Mallery Avidon's O Guru Guru Guru or why I don’t want to go to yoga class with you that it involves yoga or the lack thereof. Directed by Lila Neugebauer, O Guru Guru is a "disarming look at the precarious process of becoming yourself." Whether that means yoga or not.

The subject matter of the apprentice showcase, conceived by Amy Attaway and Sarah Lunnie, directed by Attaway, and penned by Rinne Groff, Lucas Hnath and Anne Washburn, is also apparent from the title. Sleep Rock Thy Brain is about... Sleep! Or at least the "rich complexities of the sleeping brain," explored through science, spectacle and theatrical invention.

Last year's apprentice piece was about food, and we got brownies on the way out. Maybe this year, they'll give us pillows. That would be exciting.

The Humana Festival, which is supported and sponsored by the Humana Foundation, begins February 27 and runs through April 7, 2013. Various packages and weekend deals are available for different audiences throughout that time period, with specific information on who goes when here.

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