"Ten-Minute Plays," a sort of icing on the cake that concludes each annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, hit a finger-licking good home run at festival number 34 with the wordily titled "An Examination of the Whole Playwright/Actor Relationship Presented as Some Kind of Cop Show Parody."
Set in a theatre dressed to look like an interrogation room, this hilarious off-the-wall concoction was by Urinetown book-and-lyrics writer Greg Kotis, also playing a playwright called Greg being subjected to good cop/bad cop treatment about the meaning of a script.
As in the real thing, it gets physical, and there are gunshots. Flawless along with Kotis are good cop Ben (Gamal Abdel Chasten) and bad cop Bill (Gregory Maupin), flawlessly directed by ATL associate artistic director Sean Daniels.
None of the other three offerings comes close to the Kotis piece. Chasten's somber, Let Bygones Be Bygones questions the way "progress" has led us to downsized hopes and lives for so many.
Diana Grisanti's Post Wave Spectacular is one of those plays in which women fed up by a male who used them set out to bond with his newest trick and enlist her in their sisterhood.
Dan Dietz's Lobster Boy takes the form of a lecture delivered by the older brother (Trey Lyford) of a boy born with an inability to feel pain. An experiment to find out if scaring the boy could give him that ability goes horribly wrong. It's macabre, forced, and unsatisfying.
There was no lack of variety in this year's festival with its parade of one-word titles: Sirens (laugh-out-loud sit-com funny), Fissures (subtitled "lost and found" about memory and illusion), Heist! (a cartoon-like caper for audience interaction), Ground (a serious contemporary look at immigration and border control), and Phoenix (a smartly written and acted two-hander with a rather frivolous take on abortion).
The Method Gun, a Rude Mechs exercise about a fictional acting teacher and her weird approach to doing A Streetcar Named Desire without the four major characters, admittedly found favor with some professionals at the festival but was a total wash-out in the opinion of this reviewer, who thought it not worthy of the festival and way short of what it could have been.
The biggest and most surprising disappointment, however, to many at the festival as well as numerous local theatergoers was Dan O'Brien's The Cherry Sisters Revisited, a fictionalized portrait of the real-life Iowa girls who were so terrible on stage that vaudeville audiences threw fruit, vegetables and all sorts of things at them while they were performing. But people paid to see ,them and they became headliners in New York. At ATL, several ticketholders left after intermission and some confessed it was an effort to return. What went wrong? The characters, except for the morose but determined Effie (the excellent Renata Friedman) were little more than symbols -- the pretty one, the jokey one, the motherly one, the slow-witted one.
O'Brien may have departed too far from what they were in real life -- supremely ugly (according to accounts) prudish spinsters. Would it have been politically incorrect to have shown them with warts and all? That probably wouldn't have worked either.
In the musical numbers devised by Michael Friedman they come across as more talented, though probably not by much, than they actually were. O'Brien set himself an impossible task, it seems.
