Some Vigor And Vinegar

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

It was conceived as a public relations gambit on behalf of a little-known Kentucky troupe and a for-profit health-care corporation. Blessed in its early years with remarkable taste, or maybe beginner's luck, the Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville soon developed into a hallmark of the regional- theater movement and one of the nation's prime showcases for new plays. Half a dozen transferred to Broadway or the movies. Two, The Gin Game and Crimes of the Heart, won Pulitzer Prizes. Then the festival fell on hard times. Of 37 works introduced from 1985 to 1988, few went on to major stagings, and none was a real winner.

This year, however, Louisville is on the upswing. Four of the seven shows at the just completed festival seem sure to have further life; one is among the freshest, funniest and most poignant works seen on any U.S. stage this season. Though the writers included Broadway stalwart Arthur Kopit, novelist Harry Crews and columnist William F. Buckley Jr., the best script, aptly for Louisville's tradition of discovery, came from regional-theater veteran Constance Congdon, whose works have never been produced in New York City.

Congdon's Tales of the Lost Formicans takes a weepy topic that might easily have been a TV movie of the week and inverts it into a witty, goofy, almost anthropological look at humankind as viewed by aliens from outer space. The patriarch of a suburban blue-collar family is dying of Alzheimer's disease, while his daughter acts out anger over her divorce through petty crimes of feminist rage and his grandson runs away and ends up sleeping in shopping malls. The extraterrestrials are staging a sort of slide show to explain how human art, society and psychology work. Their mix of sharp insights, off- center observations and occasional wrong guesses eerily parallels the gradual mental deformation of the afflicted man, while the device of narration allows Congdon to avoid prolonged melodramatics. The script benefited from Roberta Levitow's simple, fluid staging and from an able ensemble that alternated as aliens or the family and friends simply by donning or removing sunglasses.

Kopit's Bone-the-Fish is a malicious and effective send-up of David Mamet's Broadway hit about Hollywood greed, Speed-the-Plow. Yet it has a vigor, and vinegar, of its own. Kopit's wry premise is to take the rhetorical excesses of ambition -- people saying they would slit their wrists, eat excrement or give up an intimate body part to achieve some goal -- and render them literally. His hustlers from the fringe of the movie business (Joseph Ragno and Bruce Adler) are more than a little crazy. Even crazier is the fact that their self- abasement might make them as rich as they think. The production hit a long dead spot in the second act, where Julianne Moore could not find much real in the underwritten role of a rock star.

Also promising but in need of a further draft or two is Crews' Blood Issue, an old-fashioned play of a family gathering leading to late-night revelation. The secret is tame by current standards: a man who feared his blood was tainted asked his best friend to sire his children. But the real problem is that the central character, who is a writer and who presumably stands in for the author, is almost devoid of particularity: his only trait is drunkenness. On the plus side were pungent dialogue, believable family conflict and forgiveness, and deft performances by Anne Pitoniak as a mouthy matriarch and Bob Burrus as her sly brother-in-law. The other play of promise, Charlene Redick's slight but touching Autumn Elegy, depicts a man long withdrawn from the world and his protective wife, now fatally ill.

The most ballyhooed work, Buckley's adaptation of his espionage novel Stained Glass, proved stagnant and pointless. Deficiencies that can be overlooked on the page -- cardboard characters, what-if plots about events from decades ago, smugness about how easy it is to distinguish between right and wrong -- are wearisome on the stage. Buckley's dialogue was, if not sesquipedalian, then not serendipitous either. The cumbersome production resulted in set changes longer than the scenes, although the scenes were not necessarily any more interesting.