by dick kerekes dickkerekes@yahoo.com
Theatre lovers and theatre companies, there is good news! New plays are coming, according to Jim Steinberg of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, who each year present a cash award to the playwright of the Best Play as chosen by the American Theatre Critics Association. In a speech before the award at Actor’s Theatre last Saturday, he said with all the new play festivals now up and running, about 500 new plays have been introduced in the past year.
New play festivals go on all over the country now. Settings include Denver, Philadelphia, and lots of other places, but the Humana Festival of New American Plays is the granddaddy of them all and has set the standard. While many festivals do only one full production, along with readings and workshops, Actor’s Theatre does several fully produced plays, with critics and theatre professionals in attendance from all over the world.
This was my 24th festival, and over the years I have seen many of the festival plays done by theatres in the North Florida area, although I won’t claim I had any direct influence on this. The plays selected were good ones; many were award-winning. Our theatres always seek out the best to put stage and Humana produces some of the best.
A couple of months ago, I did a preview of the plays in the 31st festival, so I am not going to go into detail on all of them, just a few that were outstanding.
Playwright Sherry Kramer’s autobiographical one-woman play When Something Wonderful Ends was absolutely marvelous and truly mesmerizing.
The play opens in a large room at the family home in Missouri. Ms. Kramer is there to pack up and sell her large Barbie doll collection on eBay. As she talks to the audience, she tells us about her mother’s recent death linking personal feelings and experiences with her understanding of the history of the oil crisis and the implications for America’s future. You would think that oil, Barbies, and reflections on your mother don’t mix, but indeed they do with Ms. Kramer’s great script and actress Lori Wilner’s excellent performance. I can already envision several Jacksonville actresses in this role when it becomes available.
Carlos Murillo’s dark play or stories for boys is a play about Internet chat rooms, a subject that will probably be explored more and more in theatre scripts.
In this play, l4-year-old Nick (Matthew Stadelmann) creates a fictional girlfriend for 16-year-old Adam (Will Rogers), and manipulates him into performing sex acts in front of his web cam for this “girl.” Well acted, it has a surprise ending, I won’t reveal. This is a play you probably won’t see on any local stages anytime soon.
Over the years, attending this festival, I have seen actors do some innovative plays. Like the car play a few years back, performed in the front seat of a car parked in front the theatre. Yes, the plays were short and the seating very limited but fun. And in 2004, Actor’s bussed the audience to a vacant meat packing plant for Naomi Iizuka’s At the Vanishing Point (story of a meat packer family).
And this year, audiences were on the road again, but this time in trolley buses to a large downtown gay nightclub called The Connection for a play called Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle produced by the New Paradise Laboratories of Philadelphia. The three men and three women in the play alternated male and female roles, used alcohol and drugs, and had simulated sex of all varieties at this party. It featured colorful costumes, including one outfit made of red licorice sticks. (Yum, yum). It had a 360-degree view of the action on four 12x 9 screens, and lot of creative lighting. At 90 minutes in length, it became rather boring, leading me to conclude that my Sunday morning breakfast buffet had a better plot than this show, but heck, I will admit it was different.
The festival always has three Ten Minute Plays that are either done by a commissioned playwright or selected from a competition. This year I Am Not Batman about a street kid who lives his Batman fantasy, by Marco Raimrez, was the best and a crowd pleaser. The problem with these plays is that they are never ten minutes long, but more like fifteen or twenty. Actor’s needs to get back to basics; a ten minute play should be ten minutes long or pretty close to it.
For twenty-nine of the thirty-one years of this festival, the Humana Foundation has provided its generous support, and the result has been dozens and dozens of new works for theatre companies all over the world to embrace and produce.
Actor’s Theatre of Louisville produces plays all year long, and if you find yourself in this area at anytime, be sure to visit this award winning organization. Not only do critics and theatre professionals attend the Humana Festival of New American Plays, thousands of theatre lovers from all over and from all walks of life partake of glorious theatre adventure.
Thanks, Actor’s and Humana, I will be back next year for visit number twenty-five. For more information, check out www.ActorsTheatre.org.
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