Humana Nurture

“Sometimes when people come to the Humana Festival, I feel like they’re looking to pick a winner as if they were coming to the Kentucky Derby,” says Marc Masterson, artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, which hosts the annual festival (which this year runs through April 7). “I don’t see it that way. It’s about a spectrum of work and these plays finding a place in the American theater as a whole, not just in the commercial theater. I’m very happy when plays get produced multiple times by small and mid-sized theaters, and am equally happy when a play from a past festival goes Off-Broadway and has a successful run. It’s all important, and it’s my hope that the festival is a good sampling of the great energy and vibrancy of American theater today.”

Indeed, this year’s festival showcases seven new full-length works from some of America’s most noteworthy playwrights: Strike-Slip by Naomi Iizuka, When Something Wonderful Ends by Sherry Kramer, dark play or stories for boys by Carlos Murillo, Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle by Alice Tuan in collaboration with New Paradise Laboratories, The As If Body Loop by Ken Weitzman, The Unseen by Craig Wright, and The Open Road Anthology by a group of playwrights consisting of Constance Congdon, Kia Corthron, Michael John Garcés, Rolin Jones, A. Rey Pamatmat, and Kathryn Walat. There’s also an evening of Ten-Minute Plays with works by Deb Margolin, Julie Marie Myatt, and Marco Ramirez.

Wright’s piece centers on two prisoners who are being mercilessly tortured for unknown crimes; their lives change when an enigmatic third prisoner arrives and starts communicating with them in code. “The Unseen is not a play about Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib,” says Masterson, who is directing the play himself. “It’s more allegorical. Obviously, we’re all thinking about torture in ways that we’ve never thought about it before, so there is a contemporary context for understanding what that is, but it’s not a political play nor is it referencing a specific culture.”

Garcés is pulling double duty at this year’s festival. Two of his short plays — “The Ride” and “On Edge” — are part of The Open Road Anthology, and he is directing Murillo’s dark play. “I really love working here,” he says. “This is my third experience at Humana. The first time, I worried that it would feel very competitive, but it’s been the exact opposite. There’s something about the energy around you — with five or six new plays happening at the same time — that feeds the other work. Everybody talks about taking risks. But at other places, they want to seem risky without being risky. Here, they really go for it, risking failure. There’s not that sense that we’re going to fix something to make it work; rather it’s more we’re going to find what this play is and make it as much as it can be.”

Murillo’s dark play takes several risks. In it, a teenage boy grapples with issues of intimacy in both his fictional internet identity and his real-life sexual relationships. However, it’s the play’s structure, which attempts to mimic the experience of being online by opening various “windows” to other realities, that excites Garcés. “Carlos is doing some really sophisticated, sort of brainy stuff with the structure in his play and thinking about the nature of storytelling,” he states. “It’s a little bit like a Rubik’s Cube, but at the same time it’s so connected to the characters’ needs and passions.”

For Tuan, the Humana Festival experience has opened her up to an entirely new way of creating theater. Two years ago, the Actors Theatre of Louisville paired her up with the Philadelphia-based New Paradise Laboratories and its director, Whit MacLaughlin. “Batch is a dialogue between physically-generated dramaturgy and playwright-generated text,” says Tuan. “This is the first time that Whit and his company has worked with a playwright. Our process has been about learning each other’s process, and having egos checked. This is the second of NPL’s trilogy of American rituals; the first was Prom. Batch is the ritual of friends hazing and humiliating the groom/bride-to-be in order to ready them for married life.”

The site-specific piece will be performed at The Connection, a gay and lesbian nightclub in Louisville. “A huge part of the show is its hermaphradism,” says Tuan. “Each of the six NPL actors plays a bachelor and a bachelorette. This collaboration has sought to pursue the tradition of bachelor/ette parties by providing its known elements but then taking it further into a live, experiential event. We chose to keep the fourth wall up and not make it interactive in the literal sense, but then we go coursing into the fifth wall, with video screens above the audience, which also dialogue with the live stage play.”

Tuan is extremely grateful for the Humana Festival’s dedication to nurturing new works, particularly one as unusual as Batch. “From a playwright’s point of view, to be commissioned to write a piece with the promise of a slot in two years is a completely different kind of focus than one just commissioned on spec,” she states. “And it’s supremely vital in making new experimental American theater work happen.”