Possible Worlds

Humana's new-play docket was rife with muscular ideas and imaginative fervor

By Randy Gener

This is the year without a Pulitzer Prize for drama, the season the Broadway musical died (if you believe the New York Times Arts & Leisure), the year American playwrights abdicated politics (if you believe David Hare). And (if you wish to believe the cabal of seen-it-all critics, hit-seeking producers and glad-handing agents) this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays generated no buzz-worthy original works, either. The drama derby was over before the horses sprinted out of the stable.

The message seems loud and clear: "Console yourselves, you driven but middling playwrights." That family drama set against the shell shocks and psychic damages of World War II (Sharr White's Six Years) may have insights to spare about the Iraq War, but it does not make the cut. That cross-dressing comedy (Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady) may generate a couple of laughs, but it comes up short. That pretty young black performer Rha Goddess may be brave enough to swim in the societal waters of poverty and insanity in Low, but does she really expect the poo-bahs of the institutional theatre to care or even relate to her concerns? And will someone please hand the clueless audiences a Cornell lexicon before entering Charles L. Mee's Hotel Cassiopeia?

The overriding moral of the critique seems to be that writers, new and established, ought to feel grateful that a benevolent, 30-year-old theatre company in Louisville, Ky., still chooses to pay attention to new works at all. The truth is altogether otherwise: In fact, this year's edition of Humana was a genuine occasion for applause. The real problem is the insidious culture of contempt that generally greets new plays. At least the 19-member Pulitzer board had the tact to keep mum about why there was no obvious favorite this year. What's scandalous and meretricious is when a prominent theatre critic sees fit to print this poisonous criteria for evaluating new writing—"There's not much point in aiming high if you can't hit your target"—and goes on to opine, "And is it really necessary for playwrights to dream up new worlds?" Right there, you've got the Molotov cocktail of obtuseness that results in the crumbling of new writing into ashes.

Dreaming up new worlds is the sine qua non of any creative endeavor. In the theatre, it isn't just in the job description of a dramatist, but is the very thing itself. In Act a Lady, Harrison's witty comedy about a group of burly Midwestern guys in the 1920s who dress up as women in a frilly French stage farce to raise funds for a local Elks Lodge, the transforming power of the creative imagination is both a source of camp pleasures and a fount of social commentary. As scrumptiously staged by director Anne Kauffman, Act a Lady actually dreams up three simultaneous worlds: a dastardly play-with-in-a-play melodrama about bloodthirsty ancien regime French aristocrats; the backstage journeys of the three male actors whose happy feminine cavortings generate unsuspected psychological ironies; and a bemused, perceptive inquiry that subtly fuses these two worlds and demonstrates how strict notions of gender can actually bring disparate people together. Originally commissioned by the Commonweal Theatre Company in Lanesboro, Minn., Act a Lady was inspired by a series of pictures of "womanless weddings" in a museum, and though the play isn't always perfectly clear when its two narratives blur impressionistically into each other, Harrison sweetly revels in anachronistic imaginings. He is no kid simple, but is possessed with a kaleidoscopic turn of mind and a clever sense of how costumes and makeup take on amusing lives of their own.

Provocative ideas also abound in Eric Coble's sci-fi invention Natural Selection. This end-of-the-world satire is set in the near future at a Culture Fiesta Theme Park, rather like those World's Fair expos at the turn-of-the-century where America and Europe displayed their imperial power by exhibiting colonial spoils in native habitats. The play kicks off when park curator Henry Carson accepts an assignment to fly to the desert and capture a specimen for the park's Native American pavilion. Informed by Coble's years of living on a Navajo reservation, Natural Selection is comically fired by an awareness of how the march of technology and progress seem to be tearing apart authentic human engagement, but its vision is essentially farcical. Unfortunately, the nerdy curator procures a man who is not an authentic Native American, and the joke is that this very same specimen, who ends up contaminating the pavilions of indigenous culture, becomes the catalyst for the curator's moral and sentimental change of heart.

The function of the imagination is to distill the chaos and ambiguities of the real world and bring them into sharper relief. Mee's heartbreakingly beautiful fantasia Hotel Cassiopeia, directed by Anne Bogart and performed (in 90 minutes without intermission) by the SITI Company, is a continuation of SITI's by-now-familiar American Museum Series, which presents stage disquisitions on various visual artists, including Robert Rauschenberg in bobrauschenbergamerica and Norman Rockwell in Under Construction. The surprise is that in Cassiopeia, Mee and Bogart have turned in a chef-d'ouevre of emotional states and pictorial reverie. In its jumble of realistic and abstract imagery and its quirkily mannered presentation, Mee's celebration in music, memory and movement of the life and vision of the collagist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) might be seen as the stage equivalent of the artist's signature little boxes of reliquaries and odd fragments. Eschewing narrative, the play favors an assemblage of word-play, film clips, astral backdrops, ethereal projections and precise but unexpected stream-of-consciousness. Scenes that depict the shy artist and his cloistered search for human connection and true love flit by or elegantly crop up in bits and pieces.

Life's ephemerality and hidden affinities are the play's true subjects, but it avoids preciousness and abstruse whimsy because of the vibrant physical presences of the SITI cast, notably Michi Barall reading a poem or riding a bike or taking an order as a waitress, and Ellen Lauren as a haughty Lauren Bacall or the eccentric ballerina Allegra Kent with angelic wings. Barney O'Hanlon's embodiment of Cornell's fundamental loneliness is no less acute and is all the more tender because his Cornell so savors the world around him.

Only a fool, of course, would fail to recognize that even the most naturalistic of dreamworlds are writerly constructions. Just because Theresa Rebeck's The Scene, Rha Goddess's Low and Sharr White's Six Years are infused with realistic elements, it does not necessarily follow that they are any less made up. The most incandescent of the three is Low, a solo piece consisting of 25 poems and monologues that chronicle the splintering identity of Lowquesha, a young girl battling with growing mental illness. Goddess, a New York poet and singer who changed her name from Rhamelle Greene, calls her hip-hop style "flowetry," and, with director Chay Yew at her side, offers a stunning portrayal of Low at different ages and in a crumble of emotional states. Low aims to interrogate the theme of insanity, and in its pellucid final moments, Goddess offers a passionate indictment of the American health care system. The play's elegance rests in its poetic restraint and its intimate connection to an activist tradition of African-American theatre that uses storytelling to draw a sharp moral statement.

The Scene, which will be seen again next season at Second Stage Company in New York City, is perhaps Rebeck's most ferociously scathing comedy since The Family of Mann. Crackling and corrosively funny, the play is at once intrigued with and scornful of Manhattan's driven social-climbing set. Entire scenes of the play might be letter-perfect transcriptions of the urban neuroses and chronic self-obsessions that buoy the bottom-of-the-shot-glass chatter of the city's party circuit. There are also strong doses of potboiler drama in The Scene, which follows a dizzy black widow newly arrived from Ohio, Clea (the mesmerizing Anna Camp), as she blithely wrecks the marriage of Charlie (the equally superb Stephen Barker Turner), an out-of-work actor in midlife crisis.

Because of the glittering sheen of Rebeck's dialogue and her attention to urban foibles and behavior (supported by Rebecca Bayla Taichman's sardonic direction), what might be missed is how the writer astutely embeds thinking in her comedies. The Scene has been pegged as just another bauble about the soul-killing shallowness of America's celebrity culture—but the play's surface sizzle and well-trodden storyline mask real anger and moral abyss. Here Rebeck is darkly framing and anatomizing one necessary aspect of urban life—schmoozing to get ahead—with searing wit and a richly observant eye.

Predictability is not always a recipe for failure; sometimes the very familiarity of a storyline offers clues to larger ambitions at work. Ostensibly about lingering effects of war and the depths of post-traumatic stress disorder, Six Years has a time-leaping formula to burn—but what it ignites is an impassioned drama that demystifies the so-called "greatest generation" of the 1940s and 1950s. Through five scenes, each separated by a period of six years, playwright White sturdily illustrates the changes in the lives of a young married couple from 1949 and 1973.

What is most arresting about Six Years is the slow-burn of its words. White is experimenting with dramatic dialogue in a way that few young writers dare to: Words fail. Sentences are often halved. Verbs and subjects trail off. It is strikingly evident in Six Years—and in the entire crop of this year's Humana plays—that American writers aren't just dusting off old ideas and giving them fresh varnish. Instead, they are taking real risks and reinvigorating our repertory of contemporary drama with muscular ideas and imaginative fervor. The bitter irony is that these bringers of new works are treated as if they were glassy-eyed dreamers and beggars in a house of plenty.