Third Running of the Derby

By T.E.Kalem

Kentucky's Festival of New American Plays

Ancient Greece and Elizabethan England staked enduring claims on the minds and hearts of generations to come through the power of their dramatists. Whatever the glories of the U.S. musical, the chances are that the laurel wreaths of posterity will rest on the brows of dramatists whose stature equals that of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. To foster potential successors to such playwrights is the worthiest of theatrical aims. Under the venturesome leadership of Jon Jory, that is precisely what Kentucky's Actors Theater of Louisville does.

This is the third time in three years that Jory has run a kind of alternative Kentucky Derby called the Festival of New American Plays. Clearly, the seedling has become a sapling. It can be as much cram course as festival. This year, thanks to the prodigious efforts of the theater's staff and the resident actors, one could attend, within the space of two days, six plays and three workshop productions. Playwrights, like Thoroughbreds, are notoriously unpredictable. The best one can do is to spot a "natural."

James McLure looks like one. His two relatively short works, Pvt. Wars and Lone Star, are ready for instant transfer as a back-to-back double bill to other resident theaters or to off-Broadway. Both works are three-man plays, and the characters are temperamentally similar. One is macho aggressive, one is flailingly dumb, and one is provokingly prissy. McLure writes with his fist, and his characters punch out at adamant walls. Pvt. Wars takes place in a mental ward for brain-bruised war veterans. In a series of blackout scenes, Richard Bowne, Leo Burmester and Daniel Ziskie place banderillas of rage, revenge and practical jokery in each other's heads, but their heads are the arena from which they will never escape. In Lone Star, a Viet Nam veteran named Roy (Patrick Tovatt) longs to escape from a changed Texas and preserve the past of his youthful high jinks. He loves to guzzle beer and maul his button-headed brother Ray (Leo Burmester), and worships his 1959 pink Thunderbird convertible. When that is totaled by Cletis (Peter Bartlett), the moment of maturity arrives. McLure's effervescent gift for black comedy makes both of these plays bubble with the champagne of laughter. -- T.E. Kalem

A searing anatomy of pain is charted by Playwright Olwen Wymark, an American woman who lives in England, in Find Me, a drama about a disturbed young girl and her progressive deterioration at the hands of bureaucratic bumblers. While the key role is shared, Lisa Goodman is most affecting in suggesting the child's agony. In a totally different vein, suicide, adultery and attempted murder become almost folksy episodes in Crimes of the Heart. Playwright Beth Henley spins out a web of relationships among three Mississippi sisters, and, though the actresses (Kathy Bates, Susan Kingsley and Lee Anne Fahey) are uniformly fine and the play a potential crowd pleaser, the tenor of the evening is mostly that of an afternoon TV soap.

What seems to knit these new U.S.

playwrights together is a spontaneous and frequently ribald sense of humor, a robust zest for life and, in emotional terms, the quality F. Scott Fitzgerald called "a willingness of the heart." The ardent workers and supporters of Louisville's Actors Theater certainly share that willingness.

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