Strong on words, weak on emotions

IT ought to have been a joyous and triumphant celebration. Several hundred professional theatre goers gathered at the Actors Theatre in Louisville, drawn from all over the world, to mark the 20th anniversary of what has become one of the most creative and productive events in the American theatre calendar: the annual festival of new American plays.

It had started out modestly in the 1976-77 season with just two plays, one of which was D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize a year later. Many more plays and playwrights with Actors Theatre origins were to go on in subsequent years to win more awards and the theatre itself was to get a unique Tony Award from Broadway for the special achievement of its new plays festival.

By any measure, the event has been a huge international success, and its financial under pinning was secured in the 1979-80 season where the Humana Foundation became its main sponsor, since when Humana has pumped in close on 89 million. Neither the creativity nor the productivity has declined in 20 years and over 200 new plays by more than 130 of America's best and most original dramatists have been staged.

First on to the stage this year were the commissioned short plays (supposedly 10 minutes each but double that in several instances) and first of these was David Henry Hwang's Trying to Find Chinatown in which Benjamin a white American from Wisconsin - stops to ask a Chinese American, who is playing jazz on an electric violin in the street, the way to an address in New York's Chinatown. Benjamin is seeking his father's roots and, thus, his own identity. Ronnie, the street violinist, is incensed by the ethnicity of the search, having found his own identity in the music of such as Stephane Grapelli (skin colour does not represent identity). Well directed by Paul McCrane and very well acted by Richard Thompson and Zar Acayan, it was neat and effective.

CRAIG Lucas's What I Meant Was offered us a family, seated as if at the Last Supper, chatting amiably about what had clearly been a very turbulent family life now being viewed retrospectively in the language of sociologists. psychologists and counsellors - the sort of words the family might have used at the time had they had any insight into why they were tearing themselves to hateful pieces.

Very funny, this, and played with the ensemble energy and synergy which has been such a feature of the Actors Theatre company over the years, superbly directed in deadpan by Jon Jory.

Tony Kushner's Reverse Transcription offered six playwrights trying to inter illegally, on Abel's Hill in Martha's Vineyard a seventh of their number. Rich in allusion, elegant in language and satirically funny, this was probably too ambitious for a 10 minute (or 20 minute) slot as it tried to draw parallels between playwrighting, AIDS and Jewishness in a kind of revue sketch format. And Jimmy Breslin's Contract with Jackie was a straightforward polemic against current Republican congressional policies in which Newt offers his post operative wife in hospital the sort of contract that his party offered the American people.

NEXT came Anne Bogart's Going. Going, Gone in which a talented and energetic team of four actors - Ellen Lauren, Tom Nelis, Karenjune Sanchez and Stephen Webber - behaved like the quartet from Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? while speaking only of the universe, reality, quantum mechanics, black holes, protons, neutrinos and the like. We live in a universe we think we understand but our behaviour belies our aspirations? Maybe. It was admirably stylish theatre but ultimately both emotionally and intellectually hollow clever yet uncaring.

Then there was Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare (previously staged at the Bush Theatre in London), set in a smug middle class home in the London of 1665 when the plague epidemic was at its height. For Ms Wallace, a native of Prospect. Kentucky, it was a theatrical home coming, directed by Dominic Dromgoole from the Bush.

Unfortunately, the staging was clumsy and the acting less than perfect so that the characters seemed cardboard and the drama contrived.

John Patrick Shanley's new double bill - rather lamely titled Strange Encounters - started vigorously with Missing Marissa - in which two close friends threaten to turn comedy to tragedy as they discuss their relationships with the woman who was Eli's wife and became Terry's mistress and has now moved on to someone else.

Sharp and bitterly funny, it teeters successfully on the verge of dramatic danger as the two men (Christopher Evan Welch and Daniel Oreskes) dance metaphorically around their mutual relationships and a roasting chicken. But the second play, Kissing Christine, in which a married man called Larry has a date with unmarried Christine in a Thai restaurant, rambled inconclusively and very wordily into sentimentality. Sharpened and shortened, it could have made a very effective counterpoint to the first piece.

THE most substantial new work this year turned out to be Jane Martin's Jack and Jill, a two hander about making marriage work after it has failed before. The eponymous pair talk to each other for the most part not as a couple would naturally talk but maybe as a couple might think, without actually putting the thoughts into words. It seems from the start that they are up against insurmountable problems (and so it ultimately turns out) but there are some chilling and some encouraging insights into the institution of marriage, American style, as the conflict surges and subsides.

Ultimately, it lacks drama because the conflict does not lead to change and we leave the couple very much as we found them, and it is uncomfortable theatre because its language seems too often contrived to make points rather than arising naturally from the personalities on stage. It is, however, a daring work which aims for more than it achieves and Jon Jory's direction of John Leonard Thompson and Pamela Stewart was characteristically unflinching and brave.

Joan Ackerman's The Batting Cage was much less ambitious, but effective enough as a kind caricature comedy about two sisters who go to Florida for a healing holiday" with (or without) the ashes of their older sister Morgan and finally (if inconsequentially) come to terms with themselves. Julianna chatters incessantly and self containedly while Wilson says little with more effect, it's good fun but maybe a bit too culture specific to America to travel much further.

Elizabeth Dewberry made an impressively entertaining debut with Flesh and Blood, one of those marvellously over the top gothic comedies which have been a consistent feature of the 20 years of the festival of new American plays. This was, within its own terms and ambitions, the most wholly successful of this year's offerings as it explored why Crystal, who was to have been wed that day to Mac, arrived back to the home of her dotty mother Dorris in her wedding dress accompanied by mother, sister Charlotte and brother in law Judd.

Gradually we move closer to finding out why the wedding was cancelled, just as the layers of the family relationships are peeled away to reveal the violent resolution of the very funny drama. Nicely directed by Mark Brokaw, Adele O'Brien (Dorris), Karen Grassle (Charlotte), Liann Pattison (Crystal) and V Craig Heidenreich (Judd) act like they've always been part of the same dysfunctional dangerous family. This one could travel some distance down the same road, travelled earlier by such Louisville plays as Crimes of the Heart.

AND there it was, this 20th festival of new American plays. Not a vintage year, with no great new drama to offer to the world of theatre. Too many words, perhaps, and not enough ideas or emotions. But a few good near misses and much of professional interest: more than Broadway had to offer this season.