My Humana Weekend

Wrapping up a heavenly spring break. First, the family got out of town to Bend and Mt. Bachelor for a couple of blissful days of hiking and skiing. Stopped through the High Desert Museum on the way home, which I highly recommend. Then I got on an overnight flight late Thursday, heading for the Humana Festival. Stroke of luck: at O’Hare, they needed to bump two people off the Chicago-Louisville flight, and since I was traveling solo and didn’t have any obligations till late Friday, I was happy to take the delay and the free round-trip ticket to use sometime this year.

Arrived Friday afternoon, got some fresh air, and headed to the theatre.

First show was one I was very much looking forward to: This Beautiful City, a musical based on interviews with residents of Colorado Springs, evangelical stronghold. I was extra keen for a couple of reasons: I absolutely loved the previous Civilians show I’d seen, plus I’d just reread Fast Food Nation, which makes a million references to Colorado Springs as a kind of breeding ground for corporate supremacy. I was intrigued to see a show that would explore another weird side of this weird place. Plus my friend Matt was in it!

The show was great, moving and always fascinating even when rough around the edges. The first act established the power and influence of the giant churches and Christian groups in the area (among many other points), and then the second act explored reactions to Ted Haggard’s downfall (among many other points). The whole thing could use 10% more focus and/or 10% less sprawl, but it had some real and unique strengths. The genius of The Civilians is in drawing out, identifying, mobilizing the eye-opening and poetic and brutal truths expressed by the people they interview.

Possible quirky opinion alert: I think the show would have worked better with a bigger company. There were six actor/singers playing dozens of roles, and then an ensemble of singers. I am a big fan of doubling and tripling and more, but in this case characters often came back around a number of times, and it seemed like an unnecessary kind of mental work to be playing “oh yeah, who is this again?” when the roles could have been spread among, say, eight or ten instead of six. Mind you, these are performers who are gifted at physical and vocal characterization, but still there were times when it undercut the storytelling to have the same body appear in quite similar roles.

All in all, though, a memorable and challenging piece. I want to mention the writers, because even though the company members did the interviews, the book and music didn’t write themselves: Steve Cosson, Jim Lewis (whose bio suggests that he has had one of the grooviest careers of anyone currently working), and Michael Friedman.

As soon as Beautiful City came down, I ran to the box office for a pass to see the apprentice show Game On. It was classic late-night theatre: loud, crude, lots of easy laughs. A bunch of shorts (12? 14? between the actual short plays and the transitional material and the transitions that feel like plays and vice-versa, you lose count) purpose-written for this event and for these 22 twenty-something actors, all variations on sports themes.

Later, when I was able to study up with my program, I found that the ones that landed best for me were both by Rolin Jones (Extremely, about a couple of Sizzler employees seeking meaning in extreme sports and featuring a balls-out staging of badminton, complete with about six ninja stagehands, and Chronicles Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass, about the playground dominance of a badass fourth-grade girl tetherball champ. My favorite line: “I will cut you back to Miss McKinley’s class, where your head can read A Wrinkle in Time to your neck.”). Almost all the pieces were at least a lot of fun—and clearly from audience reaction it was a something-for-everyone deal. My boy Matt shone in Ken Weitzman's I Hate Lacrosse about a geeky high-school kid whose geeky friend whips up homemade steroids to start leveling the playing field.

Friday night, drinks at the Intermezzo with Matt and basically everyone else associated with ATL. The energy around the festival is such a pleasure.

Quirky experience alert: I got back to the hotel at around 2:30 and slept 9 uninterrupted hours, something I haven’t done for at least fifteen years. Yes, I realize this is a pathetic thing to be excited about, but maybe some parents will understand.

Saturday morning I took a nice walk along the Ohio River—was sad to see it looking really brown and mucky, but people say that’s mostly because of the recent flooding and unusual snow storms. Then a matinee of the break/s, written and performed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. It is an explosive and gorgeous composition that uses hip-hop to explore inner and outer worlds—mediated by a precise intellectual understanding of hip-hop culture, but also raw, hilarious, joyous, and heart-rending in places.

Pre-show, one of Joseph’s company ran through the audience with a mike asking a couple of questions that would come up in various ways in the show: what do you think of women in hip-hop? if you could ask Jay-Z one question, what would it be? Mostly people’s answers were just like mine would have been—uninformed, generic, out of it. I was uncomfortably aware of the ongoing noise among theatre people about aging audiences. Young or old, the theatre crowd is not the hip-hop crowd, and perhaps in a gentle way this pre-show business was there to remind us of exactly that so we would open our ears with a little more humility.

An hour coffee break, then the bill of ten-minute plays. These seem to have a much different position in the festival than they used to. I remember there being a ton of them, like twelve a year, and their being kind of a centerpiece, but this year there was a bill of four pieces that ran exactly twice. It is a good bill, anyway, and I’m glad I got to see it.

Michael Lew had already half won me over with his title: In Paris You Will Find Many Baguettes but Only One True Love. Bearing the advisory that “this show features a mime,” it is hilarious and sweet. (Sidebar: a few years back, a playwright friend of mine identified a growing genre she called the stalker play, in which the avid pursuer is first resisted, then in the end rewarded with love, acceptance, sex, and/or romance. She pointed out that a huge number of “romantic comedies” are actually convoluted whitewashings of stalking behaviors, and without knowing it she nailed me on one of my plays, which I immediately and permanently stopped sending out. Now I think we are perhaps in a second wave of stalker plays, where the stalkers know they’re stalkers, and one feels like a politically-correct dork raising an objection. Good, bad, I don’t know. Certainly, I’ve become less politically correct in my writing in the last few years, and not accidentally. I mention all this of course because In Paris is one such play. And hilarious, with good and varied use of baguettes. And this Michael Lew’s bio suggests that he is a certified genius, and probably about twelve years old.)

One Short Sleepe by Naomi Wallace is an exquisite, searing monologue spoken by a Lebanese university student as he digs a grave for himself and his little sister. It was perfectly performed by Ramiz Monsef and was possibly my favorite piece of the festival.

Dead Right by Elaine Jarvik is a sharp two-hander, a real actor’s piece for two seasoned pros in which a perfectly healthy woman frets her husband over breakfast about the details of her obituary.

Tongue, Tied by M. Thomas Cooper was funny, gimmicky, nothing revelatory but again a good actor’s piece. A young man and a young woman and the quirky sock puppets on their four hands all meet in the waiting room of a therapist’s office. (Hmm. Something old-fashioned about the premise—like all the quirky high-concept shorts of twenty years ago.)

Last of Saturday, one more full-length play: Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw. Gangbusters. Complex horrible tragic familial and romantic relationships, and funny as hell. At the end of the first scene, I found myself not just exhilarated from the breakneck pace but also exhilarated from being made to keep on top of a huge amount of personal and emotional information in very little time. I can’t think of too many plays that challenge the audience in this exact way up front—and the script continues from there to drill through more and more layers of emotional life. I am really excited about this writer. Among other things, she made me ree-hee-heely want to see two people kiss at the end of that first scene. Like, really. Because they were so fully fleshed out and their relationship so loaded. And unlike a certain massive Broadway show that is currently being vaunted for bringing new life to the American dysfunctional family drama, this one felt completely fresh—and the shocking! revelations! when they happened, really did make me gasp.

Great acting completed the package, especially from David Wilson Barnes, who nails a certain kind of ice-cold efficacy (and the hollows beneath it) and is drop-dead funny.

Now, a weird thing about this show is that several more or less extrinsic things conspired to throw off the balance or focus. The title is the name of a character who essentially functions as a catalyst in a couple of very unstable and tenuous relationships. Not a bad choice for a title. But then that role was filled by the one semi-name actor in the festival--a TV actress from Law & Order, etc. And the dress that character wears on her first appearance was the icon used in the posters and programs and so on. Some kind of lesson here, maybe, in that you spend about the first 2/3 of the show thinking the play is in some way about this Becky Shaw. What it's about, really, in its smart and subtle but relentless way, is what we do or don't owe to people who happen into our lives. I found myself squarely on the side of the designated bad guy, but then seeing things play out in black and white and a blazing green cocktail dress in front of you is often different from discovering that someone psychotically needy has sidled into your life. (BTW, an insider mentioned that the show was originally named Gun Focus, and now I'm trying to decide which I like better.)

Slept a rock-solid 8 hours. Honest to Christ, if Elliott Spitzer had been paying for sleep instead of sex, I would have been completely sympathetic. If Bill Clinton had been caught curling up in the Oval Office with a blanky and a cup of warm milk, I would have sent money to his defense fund.

Sunday morning, I decided on a whim to see Game On again, since it was a last chance to see Matt on stage and also since I’d been a little frustrated Friday night, feeling like between the noise level and the 360 staging, I’d only caught maybe half the dialogue. Up and at ‘em, got a seat pass and installed myself at the opposite point in the house from where I’d been before, and I ended up very glad I’d returned. The whole show felt cleaner, more intentional, less like a fun mess and more like a show. Of course, the trade-off was losing that gonzo late-night energy, but that’s why it’s called a trade-off.

Took another walk and did some writing (you see, this trip really was a rare gift!), then mid-afternoon was Lee Blessing’s Great Falls. This one was all about acting for me, the acting of Tom Nelis (of the SITI company). As the ex-stepfather of an alienated 18-year-old girl with whom he aches to connect, Tom wore sorrow across the field of the play like a glass skin. There are things about the script that, on reflection, push my ability to buy in, but the power of this one performance blew all such quibbles away while I was watching. He committed entirely to a depth of remorse and anger attending middle age and parenthood—not pretty but shatteringly true. And how does someone make you feel so included, how does someone extend such generosity, while playing someone tragically self-absorbed? This is the kind of paradox that keeps me really interested in what we do.

The last show on my schedule was so not my cup of tea that I’m going to skip reviewing it. All I could think for its ninety minutes was “Wow. Shut up.” This despite the four actors' sound and likable performances. But really, this play was written by, about, and probably for, 20-year-olds, and so it and I should just give each other a pass. And actually, if everything in a new-play festival suited any one person, that would be a bad sign, really.

I was sorry to miss one show entirely, Jennifer Haley’s Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, by all reports very exciting. But it ran in the smallest theatre with no standing room, and it was sold out for this weekend well in advance. Still, happy to see seven out of eight.

This morning, I walked over to the Frazier Historical Museum and took in an exhibit on the recovered slave ship the Henrietta Marie, which sank off the coast of Florida in 1700. Very hard to take in but too important to pass up.

An hour there, and then I had plans with darling Matt. (He, by the way, is a last-year’s graduate from my department, and I am so proud of him—not just for landing this outstanding apprenticeship, but for absolutely making the most of it, and more amazingly appreciating it even while working his ass off endlessly for the last eight months.)

We took in the Louisville Slugger factory tour, very interesting, then hit the gift shop for my boys at home and still had time for coffee and a good long talk before I had to get to the airport. At which point, everything fell the fuck apart when I learned that there was weather in Chicago (when is there not?) and my return to Portland would be delayed by fifteen hours. And the United Airlines employee assigned to help me get home just plain old couldn’t have been stupider.

So here I sit in the Louisville airport Executive Inn, missing a day’s work and looking forward to my 5 AM wakeup call. Karma for the free ticket I bagged on the way here, I guess.

And even this limbo has its bright spots, like walking over to the bowling alley for dinner a little while ago. "Wuddya need, baby?" is officially my new favorite greeting.