Rising Above the Murmur

By RICHARD CORLISS

The best plays at Louisville's Humana Festival radiate promise

The theater community has found a new rite of spring. On the last weekend of March, some 400 professionals--actors and agents, playwrights and directors, critics from every major U.S. publication and from a dozen foreign countries--convene in Louisville in hopes of seeing early productions of significant American dramas. The optimism is often justified. Since its inception six years ago, the Humana Festival of New American Plays has introduced, among other works, The Gin Game, Getting Out, Crimes of the Heart, Agnes of God and Lone Star, all of which have gone on to win a place in the repertoire and two of which have won Pulitzer Prizes. For his efforts, Producing Director Jon Jory has earned his Actors Theater of Louisville a Tony Award and his festival a reputation as the year's headiest theater binge. In three days this year the visitors were exposed to 13 plays (including five one-acters) and enough lively conversation and fast food to keep them stuffed till summer.

In any festival this compact, where impressions and insights jostle for retention in the playgoer's cluttered mind, similarities among plays are easier to spot than originality. This year's crowds chuckled every time barking was heard offstage. Canines figured in nine of the plays, from the howling hounds of hell in Timothy Mason's In a Northern Landscape to the title creature in Patrick Tovatt's Bartok As Dog. Feminism, incest and home cooking were other recurrent themes. But on half a dozen occasions one could hear distinctive voices rising above the collective murmur--and, in Kathleen Tolan's A Weekend Near Madison, the unmistakable cry of an infant hit.

Two of the one-act plays brazened through the cliche barrier to make provocative comments on the battle between artistic integrity and professional survival. In Kent Broadhurst's lovely The Habitual Acceptance of the Near Enough, a Manhattan gallery owner (Frederic Major) instructs a brilliant, unknown painter (John C. Vennema) in the art of compromise; fortunately the lesson does not take. In Jeffrey Sweet's The Value of Names, Benny (Larry Block), a blacklisted actor who has revived his career on a TV sitcom, crosses rusty swords with Leo (Frederic Major again), the theater director who had testified against him before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The play's political prejudices are clearly on Benny's side; its emotional sympathies are subtle and shifting. Benny uses his aggressive wit to humiliate any sparring partner, while Leo's views on politics and art are wryly ruminative:

"Trotsky was killed with a pickax, you know. I imagine some day John Carpenter will make a movie of it." Emily Mann, the play's director, is alive to both the passion and the ambiguities in each man's argument and, by staging the piece at a ferocious pace, demonstrates that the drama of ideas can be the most exalted of blood sports.

Many of the characters in this year's plays inhabit a landscape of dead or deferred dreams. In John Pielmeier's Courage, the Scots playwright James M. Barrie laments "the fierce joy of loving too much. It is a terrible thing!" Courage avoids the standard pitfall of the full-length monologue: that of making its subject too ingratiating. It keeps Barrie at a respectful distance from his audience and his own feelings until late in the play, when he relates the awful fates of the four children who inspired characters in his Peter Pan. Actor Paul Collins gives Barrie and the play a slow, mournful dignity.

Dignity is a quality that Shroeder Duncan, the laid-back loser of Murphy Guyer's Eden Court, would gladly settle for. Murphy has a dead-end job, a cluttered mobile home, a cynical pal (Steve Rankin) and a wife (the elfin Holly Hunter) who still carries a torch for Elvis Presley. This comedy's ambitions are no loftier than Shroeder's; it is just a tasty slice of lowlife, but full of sweet feeling for its tattered eccentrics. As Shroeder, Actor-Playwright Guyer is a brown study of the good ole boy, wondering what ever happened to the kingdom of machismo.

That particular dictatorship, as a number of the Louisville plays make clear, has been overthrown. Now, in the emerging sensibility of equality, men and women must find-new places for themselves and each other. It is a challenge eagerly faced by the five young people in A Weekend Near Madison. Four of them--David (William Mesnik), a psychotherapist; his wife Doe (Robin Groves), a short-story writer; his brother Jim (Randle Mell), a painter; and Jim's former girlfriend Nessa (Mary McDonnell), a singer--shared a giddy faith in revolution while at the University of Wisconsin in the early '70s. When they meet again it is 1979; time and events have tamped down their political ardor. But Nessa has become a radical feminist who "had to give up sleeping with my oppressors" and has taken up with a girlish member of her back-up group (Holly Hunter again). Nessa's litany of "Heavy"s and "Oh, wow"s, her laser-beam stare and the brightest, most intimidating smile since Sissy Spacek's identify her as a spirit of the '60s. For the others, life is more complicated, the vision more blurred. Doe even daydreams about returning to Manhattan, "where the radiators hiss in whiter and I never see the horizon."

In three acts and at 2 1/2 hours, A Weekend Near Madison might benefit from losing ten or 15 minutes and one offstage death. But even in its present form, as directed by Mann and performed by a pristine ensemble, Playwright Tolan's work radiates promise and achievement. Its theme, of community under pressure, also helps define this Louisville weekend, where actors may appear in three or four different plays, turn their talent to playwrighting and even schmooze with the critics. The beleaguered American theater can take hope from these artists, all stretching to see the same horizon.

--By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.