41St Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

Abstract

Reviewed by: 41St Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays Scott T. Cummings 41ST ANNUAL HUMANA FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN PLAYS. Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. 04 7–9, 2017. The first Humana Festival that Les Waters programmed as the artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville took place in spring 2013. Since then the scripts featured at this venerable old showcase for new American plays have tended to fall into two categories: ones that Waters wants to direct, and all the rest. In recent years he has staged the premieres of Gnitby Will Eno, Glory of the Worldby Charles L. Mee, and For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthdayby Sarah Ruhl. These are not the early career playwrights often included in the festival. Each of them has shared a long association with Waters and established a unique theatrical voice that skews toward his penchant for the quirky and off-kilter. In a more ominous fashion than Eno, Mee, or Ruhl, Jorge Cortiñas's Recent Alien Abductions, the Humana debut play that Waters directed in 2017, also skews toward the unconventional. It begins with a twenty-five-minute monologue delivered by a teenager named Álvaro about an episode of The X-Filesin which Fox Mulder travels to Puerto Rico on the track of alien conspiracy and encounters a mysterious boy who is later abducted. As Álvaro, Jon Norman Schneider stood stock still in a spotlight down center surrounded by haze and a frame of light as he analyzed this episode with wonder and suspicion, introducing thematic questions that cast a long shadow over the action that followed. That action unfolded in Álvaro's family home in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, twenty-three years later. Álvaro, it turns out, grew up, dropped out of university, moved to New York years ago, eventually became a successful writer, and then committed suicide. Now his friend Patria has come to seek permission from the family he left behind to publish a collection of his short stories. But his older brother Néstor, played with brooding menace by Bobby Plasencia, is reluctant, and Patria's efforts to work around his resistance lead to an eruption of violence that sends her scurrying back to New York without the signed release form she needs. Waters staged the action with a careful hand on a simple realistic interior set surrounded by a lot of empty space. The blocking was conspicuously static—one scene took place out of sight, with the dialogue heard from another room—and the insistent stillness promoted a sense of anxious anticipation. On a superficial level Recent Alien Abductionscan be seen as a conventional domestic drama built around a contested document, a dark family secret, and a violent confrontation that changes everything. But when the play concluded with the young Álvaro talking about another, alleged episode of The X-Files, it became clear that Cortiñas is proposing a complex metaphor for contemporary US–Puerto Rican geopolitics, one that resists reduction to simple allegory or arguments about Puerto Rican independence. Instead, the play generates a lingering, almost creepy sense of discomfort and the hint that "the truth is out there" about Puerto Rico for anyone with the will to go after it. In contrast, as directed by associate artistic director Meredith McDonough, Chelsea Marcantel's Airnessoffered a straightforward feel-good story that was both familiar and enjoyable. The play introduced the audience to a group of eccentric characters with colorful nicknames and a serious passion for air guitar, each of whom is pursuing a national championship and the ineffable quality of perfection known simply as "airness." The story, such as it is, traces the rise of Nina, who thinks air guitar is lame because she plays a real guitar in a real band, from neophyte to national champ. It turns out that she also has a romantic score to settle with her ex-lover, ex-bandmate, and reigning champ "D Vicious" (Brian Quijada), but all this narrative is mainly the armature for a series of songs and scenes that amount to a crash course in Air Guitar. With sincerity, good humor, and a forgivable touch of...