A SUNDANCE FOR THE STAGE

By RICHARD CORLISS/LOUISVILLE

IF YOU HAD SCOURED BROADWAY THE last weekend of March for a new American play--one of those unfashionable things with a few actors and no singing cats--you would have come away famished and depressed. A paltry five new works were on display, including one in previews and another limping to a close. If you had gone that same weekend to a single venue in Kentucky, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, you could have feasted on a banquet of meaty new drama: six full-length plays and six shorter ones, including the latest work of such luminaries as Tony Kushner, Jane Martin, David Henry Hwang, John Patrick Shanley, Anne Bogart and Craig Lucas. And you would have left the 20th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays with a subversive thought: yes, theater has a place, a reason, a future.

The festival (half of whose million-dollar annual budget is underwritten by the Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., the Louisville-based health-care company) is not exactly a secret. "What we've tried to be," says Jon Jory, the ATL's guiding light for 27 years, "is a freshet for the American repertoire." Among the 224 new plays in the fest's 20 years are two Pulitzer Prize winners, The Gin Game and Crimes of the Heart, as well as Agnes of God, Extremities and off-Broadway's current Below the Belt. And however perilous the playwright's lot, plenty of folks want to join the wake. Each year, Jory and his staff read an astonishing 3,000 scripts.

This time the festival attracted visitors from Britain, Denmark, Israel, Syria, Australia and China. Even Hollywood showed up: ABC, NBC, TNT, Warner Bros. Television and Carsey-Werner all sent emissaries. Some were looking to snag writers and actors for the mainstream entertainment maw. Others came to join the collegial ferment. Says Janet Blake, a veep at Walt Disney Television: "Where else can you have a lively discussion with Jimmy Breslin"--who presented a savagely witty skit about Newt Gingrich haranguing his first wife in her hospital bed--"and two minutes later be talking to Tony Kushner? Only in Louisville."

Camaraderie is swell, but the play's the thing, and this year Humana had the goods. The big find was Naomi Wallace, a Kentucky native whose work has been produced by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company but virtually not at all in the U.S. Her luxuriously poetic One Flea Spare is set during the London plague of 1665, when "at night the rats came out in twos and threes to drink the sweat from our faces." The stage is a canvas of convulsive emotions and pristine images of four tortured refugees from the pestilence. Only a 12-year-old girl promises spiritual absolution; as an older woman says, "The breath of a child has passed through the lungs of an angel." Wallace is similarly blessed; she weaves a sorcerer's web of words.

"Serious plays today tend to be more political, episodic, cinematic," says Jory. "They tend to be less about wanting, after all these years, to have your father say, 'I love you.'" Yet reconciliation informed many of the festival works, including two lovely playlets, Lucas' What I Meant Was (a young man reimagines the dinner-table arguments he's had with his family, so that everyone is now rueful and forgiving) and Hwang's Trying to Find Chinatown (a Caucasian and a Chinese discover detente in their crisscrossing cultural identities). Joan Ackermann's sweet, funny The Batting Cage takes a comic cliche, the smothering sister (enchantingly embodied by Veanne Cox), and gives her life and depth as she comes to terms with her family.

Louisville's house star is the secretive, pseudonymous Jane Martin, who made her rep with the 1982 Talking With--11 trenchant monologues for women--and has since written eight plays for the ATL. Some think Martin is Jory, perhaps working with other writers; one actor who starred in a Martin play impishly hinted that the real author is George Stephanopoulos. This year's offering was Jack and Jill, an intimate, panoramic look at modern sexual inequality. The play neatly twists audience sympathies on a volatile subject. So did Martin's 1993 abortion play Keely and Du, which was nominated for a Pulitzer but has not been staged in New York City.

"It's unfortunate," Jory says, "but the serious play seems less central to New York theater." And vice versa. A play like Keely and Du can be ignored in Manhattan and still receive some 300 productions in the U.S. and abroad. That's a loss for New York theater and a tribute to Jon Jory's ATL, the most nurturing midwife of new American drama. From now on, maybe Broadway should be called "off-Louisville."

--Reported by William Tynan/Louisville

With reporting by WILLIAM TYNAN/LOUISVILLE