Offscript - The Humana condition

In all of the Southeast, the premier city for exciting theater, the place that makes new reputations and influences the rest of the country is ... Louisville, Ky.? Where they make the baseball bats? That can’t be right. What does “Loo-a-vull” have that we don’t?

It’s not that Louisville boasts a greater quantity of first-class theaters than Atlanta — Actors Theatre is virtually the only significant playhouse in all of Kentucky. And it’s not that Actors Theatre is a cutting-edge venue all year round, as its current season includes mainstream hits like Proof and chestnuts by the likes of Oscar Wilde.

It’s that for the past 27 years Actors Theatre has presented the Humana Festival of New American Plays, which once a year becomes the center of the theatrical universe. This year’s festival, which began March 2 and concludes April 13, features the work of 25 playwrights and includes six productions of new plays.

In the entire nation, the Humana Festival stands out by having so many full productions of new work, with most other such festivals emphasizing staged readings. Humana offers showcase weekends for theater professionals and critics, while scouts from the television and film industries pay close attention to the festival’s talents. And it gets the word out to the rest of the world by publishing each year’s plays in anthologies.

So how did Humana become such a big deal? It began with the vision of artistic director Jon Jory, who in 1976 established the play festival partly as a magnet to attract theater artists to the Kentucky hills. Perhaps more importantly, it has money, having been handsomely funded by Louisville’s Humana Foundation since 1979. And, with the theater’s prestigious but unpaid acting internship, it has plenty of free labor.

The festival is currently in a transitional period, with Marc Masterson taking over for Jory, who left Actors Theatre in 2000 to teach at the University of Washington in Seattle. Does that mean Atlanta has a chance to steal some of Humana’s thunder? Perhaps, but only with the support of a deep-pocketed local patron. If, say, The Coca-Cola Co. decided to throw major support behind, say, Horizon Theatre’s New South for the New Century play festival, Atlanta could finally give Louisville a run for its money. We should consider it a matter of civic pride.

Onstage/Off-stage

VisionQuest Theatre is hardly the first theater troupe to present repertory productions of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (playing at the Art Farm through April 13). Tom Stoppard’s existential comedy takes the point of view of Hamlet’s clueless courtiers and puts their scenes from the Shakespeare play alongside their “off-stage” attempts to comprehend the Danish revenge story.

Staging the scripts side-by-side lets a company produce two shows with the same actors, same costumes and many of the same lines. Director Montica Pes has found that the tone of each production bleeds into the other. Rosencrantz (Matt Myers) and Guildenstern (John Benzinger) inject more humor than you find in the Shakespeare play, while the role of Hamlet (David Kronawitter) is more sympathetic and fleshed-out than usual in the Stoppard play.

Traditionally, the Stoppard play has the courtiers encounter Hamlet in the Elizabethan staging we expect. But Pes is staging Hamlet the way she would were VisionQuest doing the play by itself, so it’s something of a concept show, which Pes describes as, “if modern American had a monarchy.” Thus, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern won’t just be trapped in a Shakespeare tragedy, but in VisionQuest’s own interpretation.

Showing His Colors

True Colors Theatre Company, under artistic director Kenny Leon, has announced the lineup for its 2003-04 season, which includes, to put it mildly, a significant surprise.

The company’s inaugural season begins with Langston Hughes Tambourines to Glory, which plays Oct. 1-19 at 14th Street Playhouse (the planned venue for the other shows as well) and will be re-mounted at Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. Then March 17-April 11 True Colors offers, of all things, the Southern beauty parlor comedy Steel Magnolias. Neither a neglected classic nor the work of a minority playwright, Steel Magnolias seems wildly at odds with True Colors’ originally stated intention to be a national theater group that specializes in the African-American canon. Leon plans to have an African-American woman director bring a fresh perspective to the show. Finally, the company is developing a new play to be announced that will coincide with the National Black Arts Festival in July 2004.

Currently, Leon is in rehearsals at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where he’s fulfilling a dream of acting in the world premiere of a new August Wilson play, The Gem of the Ocean, which begins previews April 18.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com

i>Off Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.