Humana: The Hour of Feeling Review

The Hour of Feeling

Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.
Written by Mona Mansour. Directed by Mark Wing-Davey. Scenic Designer: Michael B. Raiford. Costume designer: Lorraine Venberg. Lighting designer: Brian J. Lilienthal. Sound designer: Matt Callahan. Media designer: Philip Allgeier. Properties designer: Mark Walston. Wig designer: Heather Fleming. Stage manager: Kathy Preher. Dramaturgs: Ismail Khalidi, Sarah Lunnie.

This was the final show I saw at the 2012 Humana Festival, hours before taking a plane out of Louisville, Kentucky (which is just as charming and genteel and bourbon-saturated as you’ve heard). I wonder how many of the attendees were preoccupied by impending shuttles and flights and goodbyes.

Which is one reason to celebrate what may be the grandest, most spectacle-filled production this sweet sociopolitical 1960s-set drama will ever receive.

On paper, The Hour of Feeling appears to require minimal sets, costumes, lighting or sound. It’s about a Arabic couple who marry and journey to London in mid-1967 just as the first shots are about to be fired in the conflict with Israel. The husband, Adham (played by Hadi Tabbal, brash yet reflective and vulnerable) has a dominating mother (Judith Delgado, skirting obvious stereotypes), and when he heads with his clever, independent-minded bride Abir (Rasha Zamamiri, alluringly warm and fresh, the human center of the entire drama) to London so he can lecture on British poetry, they party with some swinging university professors and a freethinking young woman, until they hear the news about their homeland and have to make a decision.

That’s the bare plot, which is fully filled in with the sweet nothings of young lovers, a lovers’ spat or three, the reappearance of the mother figure in dreams (between this and Greg Kotis’ Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards, this Humana marks the Year of Spectral Women) and news updates about the Israel/Palestine situation.

This script could be convincingly staged with a bed and a podium, little else. It could also be done, Humana has proved, with floor-to-ceiling partitions, projection screens, a brash soundtrack of ‘60s pop hits and other grand strokes. When Adham and Abir speak in their native language, which is often, there are projected supertitles. When a setting needs to be explained, a corps of tech staff slather posters on giant blocks to label it in a streetwise fashions. A hotel room scene is immaculately detailed, and the outfits and facial hair are embarrassingly true to the 1960s time period. When Adham must give a speech in a large hall, there’s an echo effect that guarantees a laugh to augment a nervewracking scene.

Now, it is possible to overstage a show—fragile dramas often buckle under aggressive design concepts. But this one survived because of the universal scope of its love story. The Hour of Feeling shares a literary sensibility with Margaret Edson’s Wit, demonstrating how classical poetry (and stuffy academia, for that matter) can be a balm during trying times. The very act of thinking and parsing and deconstructing, concentrating trying to understand the words of others, has deep and lasting value, sometimes regardless of the content of what’s being analyzed.

There were times, when watching the relationship form and fragment, that I beat myself up mentally for not knowing whether there was detailed metaphor at work here, with characters suggesting countries or cultures or religions. There’s a sad finality to the ending that had me leaving the theater downcast rather than excited. The characters may fall into some stereotypes of newlywed behavior, but are otherwise believable, and the actors at Humana were resolutely charming and easy to watch.

Mona Mansour’s script deserves a bright future. I hope it will be staged at regional theaters far and wide, then trickle down to college and community stages. I don’t expect to see any other theater bring to it the resources that Actors Theatre of Louisville provided. It was a wonderful note to have ended my Humana experience on.