At The Vanishing Point

Another highlight of the 28th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays was At the Vanishing Point, a commissioned piece by noted playwright Naomi Iizuka. The playwright is a frequent presence at the Humana Festival, having had a number of her works produced here. This time, she was asked to create a community portrait of a working-class, meatpacking district in Louisville called Butchertown. Not surprisingly, she tells the story through the eyes of those who have lived in this district, both past and present. The piece opens with a long and compelling monologue by the area's optometrist (Bruce McKenzie). Fascinated by how the eye functions within the body, the optometrist is compelled to start a side career in photography. He muses on a number of things, such as man's ability to put the world into focus. McKenzie creates a quiet but memorable portrait as the optometrist, reminding one of the narrator of Our Town.

The story of At the Vanishing Point is told through the eyes of 11 characters, split about evenly between men and women. Although each character is "introduced" by a name that appears on one of the warehouse's walls, it is not immediately clear how the characters connect with each other. One must listen carefully to pick up the threads that bind these characters together. The monologues, though interesting in themselves, do not offer much in a dramatic sense. Eventually, it gets a bit tedious, and one wishes the playwright had trimmed about 40 minutes from the play's running time.

A number of the actors double in interesting ways, such as Suli Holum, who first appears as the blind Victorian teenager, Nora Holtz, and later shows up as a sassy, disillusioned contemporary young woman, Tessa Rheingold. The acting is uniformly good, and this includes a trio of children who fill various roles.

The production is staged in a warehouse located in Butchertown, not far from the Actors Theater complex. The site-specific piece doesn't differ dramatically from what one would see in a conventional theater, however; and it's difficult to understand why ATL went to all the effort to construct a temporary performing space. Production values suffer in this unconventional setting. The set's series of ramps and stairs aren't used much by the characters.

The play's title, At the Vanishing Point, is taken from a particular park-like place in Louisville, where people can escape the city's bustle. As the optometrist explains in the beginning, it can also refer to a place in a photograph where the eye cannot go, where things eventually disappear. At the Vanishing Point explores both the physical and metaphysical aspects of the term, with sometimes satisfying results.