Humana Festival, Day 2
No exaggeration: This was my best day of playwatching ever.
The morning started with what still remains my favorite play from this Humana Festival: Lee Blessing's "Great Falls."
Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati has done a few Lee Blessing plays, including four world premieres, and I remember that I interviewed him in advance of one of them, but it's been a while and I'm not sure which (and I'm feeling too lazy to try and look it up right now), so I was looking forward to this one anyway, but that doesn't mean I was prepared for this journey.
And it was a journey. Even before the lights go down, we hear a car starting. When they come back up, we see a middle-age man and a young girl in a car, obviously on a long journey. It immediately reminded me of me and my daughter on our recent road trips, except this girl is very surly and the first words out of her mouth are: "You're going to get raped in prison."
It turns out the girl, who we know only as Bitch, is not the man's daughter, but ex-step-daughter, a few days shy of her 18th birthday, and whether she's actually been kidnapped or not is a matter of perspective. Maybe the man, known only as Monkey Man, has just misrepresented his intentions. He just wants to talk to her, he says, but they've ended up in a motor tour of the the American West, in a way recreating a road trip that Monkey Man took with his family as a child. He wants to explain to her the reason why he divorced her mother. He is desperate to make that connection, and before the play is over, he makes one, though probably not in the way he envisioned. Certainly, he never envisioned what it would cost the girl.
To say much more would be to give away the play's secret treasures, but suffice it to say this is one of the rare plays that left me literally speechless at the end for fear of breaking out into tears. It wasn't quite the breakdown I had when I first saw Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," but once I was safely outdoors and around the corner I did release a few sobs to take some of the pressure off so that I could start talking about this amazing play.
Personal resonance aside, Blessing's script is rich in its poetry and deft in developing two characters so familiar and so rich without ever giving us their names. It's a perfect piece of theater: Two actors and a couple of props (including one hilarious jackalope) on a bare stage creating a universe centered on human drama.
It seems that several of the plays at this Humana includes themes of reaching out to family. "Great Falls" was followed by "Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom" by Jennifer Haley. This is the story of a neighborhood that through the marvels of gaming technology and satellite imaging has fallen victim to either a bevy of zombies or a group of teenagers so game-obsessed that they're not allowing a little bit of murder and mayhem — or alienation from their family — stop them.
It's an interesting concept and an interesting enough script, but some of the staging proved a little difficult. An ensemble of four actors (male and female adult; male and female teen) to play all the characters of similar demographic, but only the male adult (John Leonard Thompson) was successful enough in making each character distinct to avoid confusion, so we spent too much time trying to orient ourselves while the action rushes ahead.
Gina Gionfriddo's "Becky Shaw" turned out to be another well-written and entertaining play. Gionfriddo's "After Ashley" was also one of the highlights of the 2004 Humana Festival. "Becky Shaw," however, is more of a straight-ahead comedy concerned with personal issues while "After Ashley" turned more on societal concerns.
The title character is not exactly the lead character, but more of a catalyst for Suzanna Slater and her sort-of adopted brother Max Garrett, whom Suzanne's parents took in to raise when he was 10 years old. The play opens four months after Suzanne's father's death. Her mother has moved on, much to Suzanne's chagrin, by taking up with a much younger aspiring filmmaker named Lester, while Suzanne still wears black, feeling alone and adrift. Max has grown up to be a savvy and wealthy on his own financial manager, and brings the others together in a vain attempt to settle the estate. Several months later in Scene 2, Suzanne is married and she tries to fix Max up with one of her husband's co-workers, a delicate little bird named Becky Shaw. But the date ends tragically — to Becky's mind, at any rate — and the repercussions of the event haunt the other characters for months to come.
Gionfriddo's script moves quickly and covers a lot of time, but also generates some good, hearty laughs. Max is a particularly engaging character, and I suspect Suzanne would be, too, but actress Mia Barron didn't make her real enough to allow us to love her. That is, Barron's body language and manner of delivery never once convinced us that Suzanne was actually experiencing the emotions she laid claim to.
The evening ended with the only stinker in the Festival so far, Carly Mensch's bit of juvenilia, "All Hail Hurricane Gordo," an anemic comedy about a group of late teens-early 20-somethings trying to make it on their own after being abandoned — some literally, some figuratively — by their parents.
There is one idea in there that had promise: Chaz collects phone books and writes to everyone he can find with the same last time in an attempt to find his parents. It seems to me that a visit from a stranger in this regard might have had more interesting results.
