McPherson and More in 2016-17 From the Station Theatre

Urbana's Station Theatre has announced its 2016-17 season, with an interesting mix of pieces. They'll begin with two Conor McPherson plays in a row, with The Night Alive, what the New York Times called "a group portrait of five highly imperfect people fumbling in the dark" followed by The Birds, McPherson's take on the classic Daphne du Maurier story. Interestingly, neither McPherson's Birds nor Alfred Hitchcock's famous film hews to the storyline or character in du Maurier's story. The original angry birds who turn on mankind for no apparent reason are there in all three versions, however.

Every Brilliant Thing, written by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, was originally performed as a one-man show by Donahoe, albeit the one man used lots of audience interaction as he shared an engaging and sometimes amusing list of reasons to stay alive.

Mother and son Adrienne and Adam Kennedy are behind Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which shared an Obie for Best Play with a different short work by Adrienne Kennedy. The action that informs Sleep Deprivation Chamber sounds like it was ripped from today's headlines, with an African-American man beaten by police after a minor traffic stop. It was written in 1996, making it all the more heartbreaking, as we all ponder how long this kind of injustice will continue.

Urbana's own Deke Weaver and Tom Mitchell will direct work that reflects long-term projects they've undertaken, with Weaver weaving (I couldn't help myself) the B story—B for Bear—from his Unreliable Bestiary and Mitchell returning to the work of Tennessee Williams to find St. Louis Stories.

On the lighter side, Robert Askin's Hand to God offers a hilarious and very irreverent puppet show that asks pointed questions about religion and true believers, as does The Christians, Lucas Hnath's respectful, probing look at a successful pastor who has a change of heart about a core principle of his faith. Both shows have seen successful New York runs and multiple award nominations.

If you want a quicker summary, that's two Conor McPherson plays, both involving a young woman who enters a household and blows it up, two one-person shows, two autobiographical pieces, two original adaptations and two examinations of religion and faith. Here are longer descriptions of the plays on the Station's season, direct from their website:

October 6–22, 2016
THE NIGHT ALIVE by Conor McPherson
Directed by Kay Bohannon Holley
Featuring Gary Ambler, Lindsey Gates-Markel, Jim Kotowski, David Butler, and Mathew Green.
"Tommy's not a bad man; he's getting by. Renting a run-down room in his Uncle Maurice's house, just about keeping his ex-wife and kids at arm's length, and rolling from one get-rich-quick scheme to the other with his pal Doc. Then one day he comes to the aid of Aimee, who's not had it easy herself, struggling through life the only way she knows how. Their past won't let go easily, but together there's a glimmer of hope that they could make something more of their lives. Something extraordinary. Perhaps.
"With inimitable warmth, style and craft, Conor McPherson's The Night Alive deftly mines the humanity to be found in the most unlikely of situations."

November 3–19, 2016
THE BIRDS by Conor McPherson
Directed by Thom Schnarre
"Conor McPherson boldly adapts for the stage the Daphne du Maurier short story that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's classic horror film—a gripping, unsettling, and moving look at human relationships in the face of societal collapse. The play takes us to an isolated house, where strangers Nat and Diane take shelter from the relentless masses of attacking birds which are hitting the eastern seacoast in the not-too-distant future. There they find relative sanctuary, but not comfort or peace; there's no electricity, little food, and a constant sense that someone lurks in the shadows to take what little comforts the couple shares. When the young and alluring Julia seeks refuge with the couple, her presence brings both unsettling news of the outside world and a growing discord in their claustrophobic existence. Survival becomes even more elusive as paranoia takes hold of their makeshift fortress."

December 1–17, 2016
EVERY BRILLIANT THING by Duncan Macmillian and Jonny Donahoe
Directed by Katie Baldwin Prosise
"You're six years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she's 'done something stupid.' She finds it hard to be happy. So you start to make a list of everything that's brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for. 1. Ice cream. 2. Kung Fu movies. 3. Burning things. 4. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose. 5. Construction cranes. 6. Me.
"You leave it on her pillow. You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling.
"Soon, the list will take on a life of its own.
"A one-person interactive play about depression and the lengths we will go to for those we love."

January 19–February 1, 2017
HAND TO GOD by Robert Askins
Directed by Mikel Matthews, Jr.
"After the death of his father, meek Jason finds an outlet for his anxiety at the Christian Puppet Ministry, in the devoutly religious, relatively quiet small town of Cypress, Texas. Jason's complicated relationships with the town pastor, the school bully, the girl next door, and—most especially—his mother are thrown into upheaval when Jason’s puppet, Tyrone, takes on a shocking and dangerously irreverent personality all its own. Hand to God explores the startlingly fragile nature of faith, morality, and the ties that bind us."

February 16–25, 2017
BEAR written and directed by Deke Weaver
"Bear is the fourth installment in artist and University of Illinois School of Art + Design faculty member Deke Weaver's lifelong project The Unreliable Bestiary—a collection of performances and books for every letter of the alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered animal. Ultimately a site-and season-specific theatrical triptych, Bear will find Weaver and his collaborators delving into the peculiar myths, rituals, and cycles of living of the stocky-legged, big-pawed omnivores. Bear’s fall chapter will take small groups of adventurers on short hikes to bear-related outdoor installations set in local parklands and will culminate with a final tale told in a close, dark, den-like setting. Information about BEAR’s winter and spring chapters will be updated at unreliablebestiary.org."

March 2–4, 2017
ST. LOUIS STORIES inspired by the works of Tennessee Williams
Directed by Tom Mitchell

March 23–April 8, 2017
SLEEP DEPRIVATION CHAMBER by Adam Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy
Directed by Latrelle Bright
"In this autobiographical drama, a broken tail light leads to the brutal beating of a highly educated, middle-class black man by a policeman in suburban Virginia. The Kennedys interweave the trial of the victimized son (accused of assaulting the offending officer) with the mother's poignant letters in his defense and her remembrances of growing up in the 1940s, when her parents were striving 'to make Cleveland a better place for Negroes.' They have created a gripping examination of the conflicting realities of the black experience in twentieth-century America."

April 27–May 13, 2017
THE CHRISTIANS by Lucas Hnath
Directed by Jaclyn Loewenstein
"Twenty years ago, Pastor Paul's church was nothing more than a modest storefront. Now he presides over a congregation of thousands, with classrooms for Sunday School, a coffee shop in the lobby, and a baptismal font as big as a swimming pool. Today should be a day of celebration. But Paul is about to preach a sermon that will shake the foundations of his church's belief. A big-little play about faith in America—and the trouble with changing your mind."

For more information on the Station Theatre's upcoming season and to find reservation information, visit their website here.

Steppenwolf Theatre Company Announces 2016-17 Season

Steppenwolf Theatre Company has announced its 2016-17 season, the first under new artistic director Anna D. Shapiro. As the 2016-17 season launches, Steppenwolf will offer some changes, with several subscription and flex card options combining shows in the Downstairs and Upstairs Theatres, as well as the launch of a new 80-seat black box theater at 1700 North Halsted. This new space, called 1700 Theatre, is intended to be "casual, intimate and flexible," and it is "dedicated to showcasing the work of the Steppenwolf ensemble and emerging local theater companies."

It will also be home to a performance series they've dubbed Lookout, which will cover a variety of genres and shows, "from dance to live music to spoken word and beyond." The Lookout concept will bow May 31, 2016, with a one-act comedy called Voice Lessons, starring ensemble member (and Illinois State University alum) Laurie Metcalf. Voice Lessons, a comedy by Justin Tanner, concerns a woman who thinks she can sing, played by Metcalf, who looks to a vocal coach, played by French Stewart of Third Rock from the Sun fame, to give her what she needs to get ahead in community theater. Metcalf, Stewart and co-star Maile Flanagan were all with the show when it was in Los Angeles six years ago. Voice Lessons will run till June 12 in the 1700 Theatre.

After Voice Lessons, a production of Byhalia, Mississippi, a play by Evan Linder originally mounted by Linder's New Colony and director Tyrone Phillips' Definition Theatre Company, will move into 1700 Theatre, with performances from July 22 to August 21, 2016. Phillips is graduate of the University of Illinois, making his Steppenwolf debut with Byhalia.

And in the fall, here's what's up in the subscription season:

The world premiere of Visiting Edna by David Rabe, the Tony winning playwright known for Streamers and Hurlyburly, comes to the Downstairs Theatre from September 15 to November 6. Anna D. Shapiro directs Ian Barford, K. Todd Freeman and Sally Murphy in this story about a woman not surprisingly named Edna. "Edna has suffered a number of losses as she has aged, and now faces the stealthy advance of cancer embodied by an intimate figure that she could do without. Home for a visit, Edna’s son Andrew is trying to bridge the gulf between the childhood love they shared and the aggressively polite but baffling relationship they now live with. Mother and son stumble toward honesty as they wrestle with the distractions – both mundane and profound – that keep us from real connection."

That's followed by another world premiere, Erika Sheffer's The Fundamentals, directed by Yasen Peyankov, running in the Upstairs Theatre from November 10 to December 23. Alana Arenas and Alan Wilder will be featured in this "funny and scathing look at America's corporate culture" shown through what happens to Millie, "a smart, resourceful young mother who works as a housekeeper in one of New York’s premiere luxury hotels. When an opportunity to move into management gives her the chance to leave behind her blue collar life, Millie must decide how much, and who, she’s willing to sacrifice to secure her family’s future." 

The winter holidays bring Lucas Hnath's The Christians, part of the 2014 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. After its Kentucky premiere, the play moved to Playwrights Horizons with much the same cast last year, but for Steppenwolf, K. Todd Freeman will be at the helm. The Christians will play in the Downstairs Theatre from December 1, 2016 to January 29, 2017. What's it all about? "Pastor Paul has spent 20 years successfully growing his church from a small storefront to a gleaming megachurch, but now he fears that there may be a crack in the theological foundation. As he shares his new belief in the nature of salvation, the message is met with surprise and then growing trepidation from his closest confidantes in the congregation, threatening to create a schism within the church. Hnath’s fascinating new play looks with great complexity and compassion at the relationship between belief and behavior – and its evenhanded, unbiased take on faith in modern America can be appreciated no matter what you believe." The Christians will represent Hnath's Steppenwolf debut.

Young Jean Lee will direct the Chicago premiere of her play Straight White Men, featuring Tim Hopper and Alan Wilder, scheduled for the Upstairs Theatre from February 2 to March 19, 2017. This "outside look at the traditional father/son narrative" that sheds "new and often hilarious light on a story we think we know all too well" focuses on a widower named Ed as Christmas approaches and his three adult sons come home for the holiday. "Games are played, Chinese food is ordered, and brotherly pranks and trashtalk distract them from the ongoing issue that threatens to ruin the festivities: when personal identity is essential and privilege is a problem, what is a straight white man to do?"

Tracy Letts is back at Steppenwolf after meteoric success with plays like August: Osage County and Superior Donuts. His new play Mary Page Marlowe premieres there in March, but the world premiere of another one – Linda Vista – will bring Letts' work back in March 2017, too. Ian Barford and Tim Hopper will appear in Linda Vista from March 30 to May 21, 2017 in the Downstairs Theatre.  This one is not about anyone named Linda as far as I can tell, but it certainly does sound Lettsian. "Wheeler is 50. His marriage is over, his job is mundane, and the best years of his life appear to be behind him. A move from the cot in his ex-wife’s garage to his own apartment opens up new possibilities for love and sex – complicated, painful and hilarious. Full of opinions, yet short on self-examination, Wheeler is a modern misanthrope who must reconcile the man he has become with the man he wants to be."

The sixth play in the season will be the Chicago premiere of Taylor Mac's Hir, which finished up its run at Playwrights Horizons in January. The Chicago version will feature Francis Guinan and Amy Morton in the Downstairs Theatre from June 29 to August 20, 2017. "The classic dysfunctional family drama has just crashed through into a wholly original place. Meet Paige, a wife and mother liberated from an oppressive and abusive marriage; Max, her newly out transgender son; and Isaac, Max’s PTSD-addled older brother, who discovers a brand new war zone when he comes home from Afghanistan. Hir's crusade to shake up the patriarchy is disarmingly funny, absurd and surprising as it looks at an American family forced to build a new world out of the pieces of the old."

Pass Over, by Antoinette Nwandu, will serve as an additional summer option, with tickets available to "Black Card" subscribers before the public. Featuring University of Illinois grad Jon Michael Hill, Pass Over is described as a "bold, incendiary riff on Waiting for Godot." In Nwandu's take, "two young black men stand around on the corner – talking shit, killing time and hoping that maybe today will be different. When a white man wanders into their space , an escalating crisis threatens to prevent their escape from the block. In Pass Over, pop culture, historical and religious references collide to create a hilarious and disturbing meditation on manhood, race, and the cycle of violence that prevents too many from realizing their full potential." Pass Over will be presented in the Upstairs Theatre from May 25 to July 2, 2017.

For all the information on shows, season subscriptions  and other options, click here or here.

Rebecca Gilman's LUNA GALE Wins Steinberg/ATCA New Play Prize

Every year, the American Theatre Critics Association pairs with the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust to hand out awards to playwrights with new work that premiered professionally outside New York City during the previous year. The Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards give the winning playwrigths a total of $40,000, making this "the largest national new play award recognizing regional theaters."

Rebecca Gilman

This year, Rebecca Gilman was the big winner, with a $25,000 check presented along with a commemorative plaque for Luna Gale, which premiered in early 2014 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre under the direction of Robert Falls. The Goodman called this "powerful and arresting" story about an overworked social worker faced with a custody choice between teenage drug addict parents and a religious zealot grandparent "an unforgettable tale of faith and forgiveness"in their promotional materials, while The Chicago Tribune's Chris Jones named it to his Best of 2014 List and Time Out Chicago's Kris Vires lauded it as Pulitzer Prize worthy material.

When she accepted the award, Gilman noted that the Goodman is her theatrical home. She is the author of Spinning into Butter and Boy Gets Girl, both commissioned and originally produced at the Goodman. Gilman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Harper Lee Award, The Scott McPherson Award, The Prince Prize for Commissioning New Work, The Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, The Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, The George Devine Award, The Theatre Masters Visionary Award, The Great Plains Playwright Award and an Illinois Arts Council playwriting fellowship. Boy Gets Girl was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Play, while The Glory of Living was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Gilman is currently an artistic associate at the Goodman Theatre as well as associate professor of playwriting and screenwriting at Northwestern University.

Additional $7500 citations went to Lucas Hnath's The Chistians, which premiered at last year's Humana Festival, and Nathan Alan Davis's Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea, part of the New Play Network' Rolling World Premiere Program with productions at the Skylight Theatre Company and Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles and the Washington DC Source Theater Festival.

The Christians took a theatrical look at issues of faith in contemporary mega-churches, posing hard questions with no easy answers, while Dontrell examined a young man's attempt to connect with his roots by researching an ancestor who chose to die drowning in the ocean rather than arrive on American shores as a slave.

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. Lauren Gunderson took the top prize last year for her play I and You. For the complete list of winners and runners-up, click here.

For more information on the Steinberg/ATCA Award, contact William F. Hirschman, outgoing chair of the ATCA New Play Committee, at muckrayk@aol.com

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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?

Actors Theatre of Louisville Announces 2014 HUMANA FESTIVAL Slate of Plays

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

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

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

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

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

American legend John Henry on a stamp

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

Lucas Hnath

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

Jordan Harrison

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

Dorothy Fortenberry

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

Kimber Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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