Theater: Straight from the Heartland

Family squabbles and political scandal on display in Louisville

For most Kentuckians, the first week of spring has come to signal the agitated ecstasy of college basketball. For the past two years, cross-state rivals at the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville have met in the N.C.A.A. tournament to settle Bluegrass bragging rights. But roundball is not the only sport in town these days. Last Thursday, on the night of The Game, a smaller but no less demanding group of enthusiasts from all over the U.S. and a dozen foreign countries convened in Louisville to search for the future of the American theater. Now in its eighth year, the Humana Festival of New American Plays has helped nurture such authors as Beth Henley and Marsha Norman from early promise to mature achievement. The festival—nine full-length plays in three days, all produced by Jon Tory’s Actors Theater of Louisville—continues to solidify its reputation as the theater’s most exhilarating rite of spring.

Geographically and artistically, this festival occupies the center. Most of its plays come straight from the regional-theater heartland, in which everyday characters, often from the Midwest middle class, respond to family crises in the plainsong cadences of naturalism. For these people communication is hard enough; eloquence would be a suspect luxury. You have to listen hard to catch both the humor and the despair in a mother’s complaint on returning from the supermarket: “Why are modern groceries so heavy?” (from Lee Blessing’s Independence, a mother-and-daughters drama that plays like Crimes of the Heart without Henley’s savory moonshine kick). Often in these works, nothing happens; usually, that is the point. In Horton Foote’s Courtship virtually all of the “action,” except for one chaste kiss, occurs offstage and is relayed to the audience as a Texas family’s gossip. The play’s teen-age sisters might be called Rosie and Gilda; they are as irrelevant to their small town’s melodramas as Hamlet’s foppish courtiers were to the royal carnage. Life is a soap opera they will be able to experience only vicariously.

When melodrama did surface at the festival, it could seem as out of place as a punk in an Amish Sunday school. John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea sets a couple of urban pit dogs—a Bronx hoodlum (John Turturro) and a vagrant young mother (June Stein)—at each other’s throats with coarsely romantic results, but the conclusion is too optimistic to be quite convincing. The Undoing, by William Mastrosimone, offers promise of a fascinating character: a woman (Debra Monk), now running her late husband’s poultry business, whose rage is so pure and carnal that it alone keeps her alive and kicking. Along comes a plot twist that was hoary when Shakespeare used it, and Mastrosimone ends up with a fowl play.

The three strongest works on display: Husbandry by Patrick Tovatt. Les (Ray Fry) is an endangered species: the independent farmer who loves the land and rotates his crops, scrabbling for survival. Now he is tired and just about broke, ready to extend “the chain of stewardship, or better yet, of husbandry” to his son Harry (Ken Jenkins), who works in a city parks department. Les’ wife (Gloria Cromwell) demands this sacrifice-fulfillment from her son; Harry’s wife (Deborah Hedwall) denounces it. The play simmers so gently for so long, as each potential confrontation is deflected with Chekovian shrugs and silences, that when it boils into hostility it sears the audience. Husbandry ends in a stalemate between spouses and generations that has the abrupt finality of a domestic tragedy. All four actors are splendid under Jory’s acute direction.

The Octette Bridge Club by P.J. Barry. Or: Morning’s at Seven times two. This canny comedy-drama concerns the eight Donavan sisters, all Rhode Island Catholics of a certain age, who spend every other Friday night from 1931 to 1944 playing cards, swapping pieties and gibes, and often giggling like ticklish Munchkins. Yes, there are private agonies that not even the trill of Irish laughter can successfully smother, but the lingering mood is fond and bantering, as if the playwright had stumbled into some improbable locker room of maiden aunts. It takes no imagination at all to see this play on Broadway next season with an all-star cast. Before they consider that, producers are invited to check out the A.T.L.’s near flawless octet of biddies.

Execution of Justice by Emily Mann. Dan White was a Viet Nam paratrooper, then a policeman, a fireman and supervisor of San Francisco’s Eighth District. On Nov. 27, 1978, he shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first avowed homosexual elected to high city office. The trial of Dan White was a horrifying sensation; the verdict, guilty of voluntary manslaughter, was an outrage, especially to San Francisco’s large population of gays. When White was released from prison this January, a little more than four years after the trial, some militant homosexuals called for his death.

Compelling facts do not always cohere into riveting drama. But Mann, author of the social documentary play Still Life, has shaped the trial transcript and other relevant comments into antiphonal form: the lament of a hard-nosed cop will be answered by a raucous drag queen; the surreal anguish of Dan White (incarnated with creepy brilliance by John Spencer) will be followed by some wildly comic testimony that might have come from Carol Burnett’s blooper barrel. Execution of Justice, directed by Oskar Eustis and Anthony Taccone, is a major work that seems to stand outside the perimeters of most Humana Festival plays. Yet its concerns are the same: to examine, with care and craft, the rending dynamics of American society. In life and art, these plays argue, get back to essentials.

—By Richard Corliss