Susannah Schulman as Hermione, Queen of Sicilia (with Adina Verson and Sheria Irving as her attendants), in the Yale Rep production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, directed by Liz Diamond and playing through April 7 at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The Winter’s Tale
Presented through April 7 by the Yale Repertory Theatre, at the Yale University Theatre, 222 York St., New Haven. (203) 432-1234, www.yalerep.org

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Liz Diamond. Composer: Matthew Suttor. Choreographer: Randy Duncan. Scenic Designer: Michael Yeargan. Costume Designer: Jennifer Moeller. Lighting Designer: Matt Frey. Sound Designer: Elizabeth Atkinson. Production Dramaturgs: Catherine Sheehy, Ilinca Tamara Todorut. Vocal and Text Coach: Grace Zandarski. Stage Manager: Catherine Costanzo. Musicians: Paul Brantley (Cello), Michael Compitello or Adam Rosenblatt (percussion), Jason May (Woodwinds). Performers: Rob Campbell (Leontes), Susannah Schulman (Hermione), Felicity Jones (Paulina, Shepherdess), Hoon Lee (Polixenes), Tyrone Mitchell Henderson (Camillo), Tim Brown (Florizel, Lord 2), Lupita Nyong’o (Perdita), Luke Robertson (Autolycus, Lord 1), Richard Ruiz (Clown, Servant 1), Francis Jue (Gaoler, Dion, Mariner, Shepherd 1), Brian Keane (Antigonus), Thomas Kopache (Old Shepherd, Officer, Time), Adam O’Byrne (Cleomenes, Guard 1, Servant 2, Shepherd 2), Sheria Irving (Dorcas, Lady), Adina Verson (Emilia, Mopsa), Remsen Welsh (Mamillius, Shepherd Boy), Chris Van Zele (Bear).

Don’t ask me why it took so long to post a review of this show. I was there opening night nearly three weeks ago, and now it’s closing Saturday.

You could blame spring fever. The Winter’s Tale is full of it. It’s got a clean, clear vision of what is often perceived as a muddy, misshapen play. In the capable directorial hands of Liz Diamond (who always seems to excel when doing huge-cast shows, whether it’s Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Moliere’s School for Wives, or this), The Winter’s Tale plays like that final scene of Bambi where everyone’s grown up but still frolics in the forest. It’s like Shakespearean climate change.

Bohemia's a party town in the Yale Rep production of The WInter's Tale. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The last time the Yale Rep traipsed through The Winter’s Tale, back in 1986—with the same set designer, Michael Yeargan!—it was a cold, dark, post-modern affair with metal scaffolding and ironic distancing and sluggish pacing. This time, The Winter’s Tale is a joyous, frolicsome harbinger of a frightfully early Spring.

That’s the wondrous nature of Shakespeare’s so-called “problem” play. Is it tragedy because of the Othello-esque overtures of its opening act, or comedy due to the constant clowning of its middle bit, or romance thanks its moony-eyed ending? Is it wintry like its title, or summery like its Sicilian and Bohemian coastal settings? “Problem plays” don’t seem so problematic anyhow in the age of cable TV series such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Weeds or Hung, where laughter turns to despair on a time, comical crimes earn tortuous punishments and all sexual situations are psychologically fraught. Sixteenth century plays which 19th century audiences tagged as inconsistent and superficial seem, in the right director’s hands, a rich lode of gems shining out from a finely tilled surface.

Certainly The Winter’s Tale doesn’t carry the stigma it once did. The Elm Shakespeare Company had no qualms about doing it for several weeks in Edgerton Park two summers ago, and Connecticut Repertory Theatre has a production up now, simultaneous with the Rep’s. Considering the size and intricacy of the play, it’s saying a lot that regional, college and community-based outdoor companies have all embraced it.

The Rep knows how to play it up big. It’s hard to explain what a thrill it is to see 14 people—plus a three-piece live band!—onstage at one time, in this age of economical drama where a cast of three or four can be called an “ensemble.”
It’s party time, from the opening moments, when the cast interacts in an elaborate introductory tableau, right through several scenes of ceremony and pageantry (including a fertility dance) to the finale when longlost family members start piling up in a bleak ballroom where the chandeliers have been shrouded in sorrow.

When the size of the audience is as hale and hearty of that as the cast, the show guarantees—and earns—big laughs, big applause, even the kind of big gasps which you only usually associate with parodies of suspense thrillers, not with actual live theater. The reactions come so strongly because the material is delivered that well. The crowd understands the dangers and delights, and turn into appreciative groundlings.

Shakespeare has a lot to do with this wonderment, of course—even his lesser-known works are intriguing and playable. But it helps when you have a strong staging like Diamond’s. I sense a lot of input from dramaturg (and longtime Yale School of Drama professor) Catherine Sheehy in the sheer good humor and knockabout hilarity on show here; it’s similar in frivolity to the Evan Yionoulis-directed Yale Rep production of King Stag in 2004 which Sheehy had a hand in adapting. Yet where King Stag leapt into the disco stratosphere, The Winter’s Tale keeps its feet on solid ground, illuminating basic human values of honesty, trust, loyalty and generosity and showing why it’s not a good idea to toss your family out of the castle and pick fights with the gods.

Rob Campbell as Leontes in The Winter's Tale at Yale Rep. Photo by Joan Marcus.

As Leontes, the play’s great transgressor and chief plot-motivator, the extraordinary Rob Campbell veers credibly from delusional jealous rage to penance and the mocking of omniscient deities to humble penance and gentle bewilderment. The scenes set in Leontes’ Kingdom of Sicilia carry the bulk of the serious drama and character development. The outdoor episodes in the much looser land of Bohemia bring the mirth and merriment and feisty-farmer jokes.

This production in fact sees these lands as flip sides of each other, down to double-casting the play so that all the actors have a key role in one place and a subordinate one in the other. Yes, I said this was a large ensemble, but we’re faced with around 30 characters here, and a certain economy is still required. Diamond et al. have turned that to their advantage; there are no small parts, only players hanging back as butlers or farmhands until they have their moment in the sun over in the other kingdom.

Some of those performers are exceptional. I’m particularly happy to see Luke Robertson on a Yale stage once again. As a Yale School of Drama student a few years back, he was a valued team player in an an assortment of big ensemble shows, and it’s wonderful to see him older and bulked up a bit, sinking his teeth into the key comic role of Auolycus the thief. Robertson not only brings a new level of shtick to another lively show, he’s a match for the one of the funniest guys I’ve seen on a New Haven stage in many a moon, Richard Ruiz as Autolycus’ patsy Clown. Ruiz, who did a decent Nicely Nicely in the Long Wharf Theater’s downsized 2004 production of Guys and Dolls, at one point gets a huge laugh for, get this, walking across the stage. He has the timing and visual appeal of a silent movie comedian, yet he also handles the Shakespeare dialogue beautifully.

Richard Ruiz, in yellow, leading the dance in The Winter's Tale at Yale Rep through April 7. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Just as classic physical comedy types are used to full advantage (Ruiz is rounded, Robertson more wiry and angular), this production plays up the generational differences among the characters as if they were doing Romeo and Juliet or King Lear instead. Children are believably cast off and belittled by bitter parents. They’re just misunderstood. This really enhances the young romance between the play’s lead lovers, Perdita and Florizel (played by current Yale School of Drama students Lupita Nyong’o and Tim Brown).

Old Shepherd Thomas Kopache flanked by Tim Brown as Florizel and Lupita Nyong'o as Perdita in The Winter's Tale at Yale Rep. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The older generation lines up as either uncomprehending (the aforementioned Rob Campbell as Leontes, or Thomas Kopache commanding the stage for the comic Old Shepherd monologue which opens the Bohemian half of the play) or empathetic in a doting-older-relative sort of way (the divine Felicity Jones, as no-nonsense as she was last year in The Diary of Anne Frank at Westport Country Playhouse yet as highborn and indignant as she was in Mark Lamos’ production of Lulu at Yale Rep in 2007).

The mannered elders and the impetuous youth march around Michael Yeargan’s massive sets of curtains and stairs and thresholds, soundtracked by that neoclassical trio of musicians, as if they each own the place and don’t quite know what to do with it. The scene is perpetually set for revolution, and it happens.

The whole enterprise is so well thought through and so well cast that it almost has you believing that The Winter’s Tale isn’t one of the vilest bits of sexist, classist, ageist and misogynistic claptrap the bard ever devised. Women and children and trusted servants are treated horribly. Poor farmers are mocked and minimized. Redemptions and revelations, when they come, aren’t really equivalent to depths of the evildoing. The bad guys get off easy in this one, and the impoverished gain respect not by changing the opinions of the wealthy but by becoming wealthy themselves, or through the realization that “the prettiest lowborn lass that ever ran on the green-sward” was in fact an abandoned princess.

Considering the shaky morals at work here, best that the Yale Rep heightens the hilarity and refrains from preaching overmuch. This Winter’s Tale is a statue come to life, a play that reads weird and often acts worse yet now dances and sings with a spring in its step.

I cull these theater-themed comic strips from www.dailyink.com and www.gocomics.com, services to which I have subscribed for many years now. I heartily recommend both sites, and honor those artists who can bridge the extraordinary gap between live performance and cartoon caricature.

The Mary Worth episode here, by the way, does not mark the first time the strip has quoted Oscar Wilde. Considering the sinning, redemption and deception rampant in Wilde’s works, and in Sunday’s Mary Worth, it’s a natural fit.

A few final observations of the 36th annual Humana Festival of New Plays.

• The festival’s sponsor, the Humana health insurance company, got thanked a lot, and deservedly so, not just for the level of their support but for the length and breadth of it—one of the longest and neatest bondings in the regional theater. So I thought it noteworthy that my own two favorite productions in this year’s festival, Death Tax and Eat Your Heart Out, involved hospitals and healthcare.

• NY Public Theater poobah Oskar Eustis showed up sometime Saturday, and was in the audience Sunday to see Mona Mansour’s The Hour of Feeling, which the Public had done a reading of in 2009. By Saturday, those of us who’d been part of the industry weekend since Thursday were used to the same old faces, so Eustis’ appearance was something fresh to buzz about. But, honestly, whenever the guy arrives anywhere—my own away-from-NY glimpses of him include a party for Gordon Edelstein’s 10th anniversary as Artistic Director of Long Wharf, the opening night of the musical February House at Long Wharf Stage II (the show’s a co-production with the Public), the Radar L.A. festival last summer and now Humana—there always seems to be a chorus of mutterers in the crowd: “Why, it’s Oskar Eustis! That’s Oskar Eustis over there.” It’s the regional theater brand of celebrity sighting, and I’m all for it.

• One of my interests in coming to Humana was to see if it felt different from the various new-play gatherings I’ve covered in Connecticut over the past quarter-century. All have their quirks (there’s just no other place on Earth like the lawn of the Eugene O’Neill Center), but there was so much that was familiar about this experience. Every one of the nine-plus shows I saw had at least one actor I recognized from East Coast regional theater or the Yale School of Drama—the talent pool is more national than I knew. The productions mirrored high-end presentations of new plays I’ve seen regularly in New Haven, though Humana really raises the bar by doing so many at one time.

• The physical resources that Actors Theatre has at its disposal are impressive, but what had me reeling was the army of human beings who throw heart and soul into this endeavor. Warm, high-spirited, Southern-hospitable theater-savvy folks all. The 20- and 30somethings in the ATL apprenticeship program—who work on various aspects of the Humana Festival for nearly a year and may be running tech on one show, performing in another and helping with front-of-house duties as well—seem to be getting and broad and real a hands-on education in the workings of professional theater as one could find anywhere (and I write as one covers the gold standard of such an education, The Yale School of Drama).

• There a central panel discussion on Friday about Criticism, its role in the theater and the changes in that profession due to the decline of print journalism. An undercurrent from that discussion persisted throughout the entire festival, rising into fresh debates at the unlikeliest (and likeliest) places. Rest assured that some of us ink-stained wretches are brainstorming ways to assure that Humana will be covered extensively and competently in future. The festival could well become a center for new models on national arts journalism. At the very least, it’s inspired worthy debate.

• I was struck by how Humana is a thing unto itself, even in its own headquarters and press office. I looked in vain for posters or brochures advertising Actors Theatre of Louisville’s year-round subscription season. When I finally asked, an ATL staffer dug some brochures from last season out of an office. The idea of cross-promoting the various facets of the theater isn’t a given. The Humana behaves as a separate entity. The year-round season was derided by some I asked as “commercial” and “mainstream,” and that’s certainly true of its perennial productions of A Christmas Carol and Dracula. But the 2012-13 slate of Romeo and Juliet, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, True West, Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man and a new musical based on Matthew Sweet’s power-pop album Girlfriend is nothing to sniff at.

• Speaking of sniffing, I ate several entire meals which consisted of nothing but cream-based appetizers, and I’m lactose-intolerant. There are things in the Louisville air which made my nose run like nothing my hay-feverish nose has ever encountered in a concrete city. I had a sore throat for my entire time in Kentucky, and was told it was a common disorder there.

Then there was the sniffling and gulping and stuck-in-throat emotional feelings I had at the better shows.

All told, it’s good that I got back to New Haven. I can breathe again.

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.

My first time at the Humana Festival (I’ve only missed 35 of them) was eye-opening for the sheer focused verve of the thing. On the East Coast—as well as the two weeks I spent last summer covering festivals and theater conferences in L.A.—I’m used to sprawling festivals at numerous venues, where there’s so much to see that when you connect with other festgoers, the conversations are usually about what you’ve missed or what you should feel obliged to see next.
Here at Humana, there’s a steady stream of shows (I saw nine full-length shows in two and a half days, plus the three 10-Minute Plays held as part of the Saturday night awards ceremonies), but they’re all in the same place, and everybody here for the Industry weekends of the month-long Humana sees the same things, often on the same exact schedule.

This makes for deep, enriching debates in the lobbies, as long as one is willing to speak one’s mind, as I always am. I didn’t have to let discussions of the plays dwindle to one-line descriptions. I could discuss structure and sets and specific lines and performance moments. I could get to know a theater space well. I could dispense with Google Maps and confused directions, knowing that I could see a show, dash back to my hotel room a block away, post a review and make it back to the Actors Theatre of Louisville complex for the next offering without anxiety.

The ATL is an impressive operation on many levels. I’m used to East Coast regional theaters in out-of-the-way locations, lucky to have to second stage or with separate venues spread out over several blocks or even towns. ATl has three gorgeous spaces in the same building—a 150-seat black box, a 300-seat arena stage and a 400-plus seat mainstage. There’s a ballroom-sized inner lobby, an expansive box office area, and a cafe downstairs. It couldn’t be comfortable, or more completely used during festival time. And it’s in the heart of a huge Southern city with a population of something like a million.

The ATL is a comfort zone as well as a place which reacts to the urban frenzy all about it.

Conversations erupt everywhere. They spill onto the sidewalks, where they hold their own against the grumbling sports fans heading home from some big dispiriting game that got played last night.

An informal event for critics and journalists Saturday night at a nearby restaurant, Hillbilly Tea, became an hours-long extension of the too-short “Critiquing Criticism” debate officially which had been held as part of the Humana Festival Friday morning.

Even the parties were inspirational. Late last night a group of us snuck off for an impromptu reading of a short play by my friend Lou Harry (arts editor and columnist for the Indiana Business Journal).

Connections have been made professionally, socially and otherwise. Potential is unlimited. Being able to contain all the farflung fancies of a festival under one roof creates untold opportunities for refined, extensive exchanges, and the opportunities to run into the same interesting people over and over.

My festival experience was a widely shared one, and I’m a better individual for it.

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Oh, Gastronomy!
Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.
Written by Michael Golamco, Carson Kreiter, Steve Moulds, Tanya Saracho and Matt Schatz. Directed by Amy Attaway. Co-conceibed and developed with Sarah Lunnie.

Ordinarily on a Friday this time of year, I’m at the Yale Cabaret for a dose of youthful, well-devised, openly experimental live theater.
Friday night at the Humana Festival out here in Louisville, Kentucky, I felt utterly at home with Oh, Gastronomy!, a large-cast, youth-fueled thematic revue of short-short sketches. The main capitulation to mainstream tastes is the chosen theme—not sex or generational angst or sick sociopolitical but food, glorious food. Oh, Gastronomy’s title pays tribute to the classic progressive Ken Tynan revue Oh, Calcutta!, but instead of sex it serves second helpings of family feasts and second scoops of symbolic ice cream cones.

Any concerns that Oh, Gastronomy’s portions are too small, or half-cooked, are cleared away with the sure knowledge that another succulent morsel is coming around on the next tray. The show encompasses 28 separate scenes, a couple of which are serialized episodes with the same characters but nearly all of which are stand-alone vignettes.

The material—from five playwrights plus Sarah Lunnie, who’s given a “co-conceived and developed” credit, plus a director (Amy Attaway) who’s distinct from the writing team—is more hit than miss, with admirable range and style. What really makes it delectable, though is the spice added by the young ensemble cast (culled from Actors Theatre of Louisville’s year-long Apprenticeship program). There are unpredictable performance choices, deft deliveries and multi-talents (music, banana-eating), which take the writing to unexpected levels.
Considering that some of the scenes are literally wordplay games and little else—a few interludes consist of folks simply sitting in the theater aisles making puns on Shakespeare play titles—such punching-up is profound.But the overall standards of acting and comedy here are much higher than what’s actually required to put this material over.
This is a tight ensemble whose members are keen on impressing each other, not letting down the team, and doing stand-out independent work. The revue shifts fast enough that none of these precious black-out sketches overstays its welcome. There’s no pandering, waiting for the audience to “get” each routine before moving on.
A bout of grand comic characters (the multi-part “Fear and Loathing at the Food Truck, about hook-ups at a Farmers Market) might yield to inspired psychocomedy where diners at a restaurant order childhood memories instead of food, which might give way to gentle melodrama or a sensitive musical duet such as “Tastes Like Home” (expertly harmonized by vocalists Katie Medford and Alexander Kirby). The laugh-out-loud moments are frequent, and more honestly earned than in some of the calculated knockabout stuff elsewhere in this year’s Humana festival.

A moveable feast indeed, a tremendous showcase for a horde of hungry young actors. And, for me who missed this weekend’s Yale Cabaret offering, a comfy home away from home at 11 p.m. on a Friday night. Oh, Gastronomy has its final performance this morning at 10 a.m. and I might just go back for seconds.

Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards

Through April 15 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival.

Written by Greg Kotis. Directed by Kip Fagan.

This cosmicomic love and international relations parable has little of the theatrical self-awareness of Kotis’s bestknown script, Urinetown. That
avoidance of style parody turns out to be its saving grace. Structure- and plotwise, however, it skews so alarmingly close to Bram Stoker’s original Dracula that Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards is hard to accept on its own merits.

Not unlike another Humana Festival comedy misfire, The Veri**on Play, this one is way too sure of itself, thinking the audience is keen to its vicissitudes and will follow willingly when it wants to be make a gentler, romantic and world-peacey point at the end.

Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards’ inability to turn on a dime is more due to directorial and environmental incursions. Director Kip Fagan opens the show with grand, obvious physical shtick and chainmail, and plays up every (repetitive) round of cannibal grotesquery in what could indeed be a more tender and evenhanded comic romance about a thousands-year-old man (the Michael of the title, suavely played by Rufus Collins) and what he still believes in. Michael B. Raiford’s scenic design is am opera-scale mix of medieval castles and modern-day city apartment. Why this play, with a smallish cast, minimal set requirements and no major scene changes, gets an overstuffed production on the ATL mainstage is a quandary.

There’s a simplicity and vitality to Kotis’ central idea—what do we do to survive, and what beliefs do we relinquish?—that’s lost in a production which goes for elaborate bow-and-arrow special effects and arch playing, Pythonesque playing styles.

Other easy outs include over-the-top heavy Austrian accents, especially from Micah Stock, who has the Renfrew-esque role of “Sammy,” the odd sidekick who helps procure victims so that he and age-old charming eccentric Michael Siebenburg can live forever.

The play would be all about catching, drugging and eating young women—the whole first half is—if it did not grow a conscience during intermission. But the denouement is nothing but forced, a dues ex machina (dea ex fenestra, actually) which turns into a de rigeur bloody swordfight.

Some of the jokes are stand-alone stitchbusting, and it’s certainly nice to see a comedy for a change that stays in its defined moment and doesn’t break out of itself to make fun of the theatrical conventions it’s chosen. But I couldn’t get around the feel of a propped-up melodrama studded with stay-awake jokes. A better script would have the potential to muster the empathy, suspense AND bad jokes which it clearly wants to.

Eat Your Heart Out

Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.

Written by Courtney Baron. Directed by Adam Greenfield.

This is the sort of “new play” which may not break any fresh ground but which impresses with its surehandedness, its wondrous pacing and timing, and its ever-popping dialogue.

It’s a play theaters would want to produce because it’s engaging, entertaining and has great roles for a wide range of actors. The cast covers two generations, a couple of social strata, and (in a pivotal dramatic moment) a dress size.

It’s a snapshot of the interlocking events of three separate couples in Pasadena, culminating in one big night. Nance (Kate Eastwood Norris, who telegraphs stressed-out modern woman with her every sigh) and Tom (Alex Moggridge, a reliable everyman whom Connecticut theatergoers know for his recent turns in the Jimmy Stewart role in It’s a Wonderful Life at Long Wharf and brother Andrei in Sarah Ruhl’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at Yale Rep) are on a blind date. Nance has just come from work, interviewing a couple (tightly-wound, immaculately dressed Kate Arrington and Mike DiSalvo) about their desire to adopt a child. Nance’s daughter Evie (Sarah Grodsky), meanwhile, is preparing for a night out on the town with her platonic BFF Colin (Jordan Brodess), who’s pining for his girlfriend back in New Hampshire. The encounters veer from the archly comic to the crass and pitiable.

It’s a juggling act, all right, but the real trick is that the scenes intersect so neatly and tightly yet don’t exclude the audience. The play constantly reenergizes itself, not just with its contrasting scenes and contradictory feelings, but with some smart design choices by scenic designer Tom Tutino and costume designer Connie Furr-Soloman.

The structure, tone and melodramatic qualities of Courtney Baron’s well-crafted yet admirably open-ended script are reminiscent of Alan Ayckbourn, a high compliment since he’s the master of the intersecting multi-relationship comedy/drama. Baron keeps all six characters realistic but master the tougher past as well—an even tone for the entire play regardless of who’s going off the rails at any given time.

That’s because there’s a higher purpose than wacky situations here. Eat Your Heart Out is about how we want ourselves to be seen, how we lie to others by lying to ourselves. Everyone in this show backtracks, parses the sentences they’ve just spoken, clarifies to the point of embarrassment, then ultimately speaks his or her mind.

It’s a great show of truth and beauty and honest emotion, wrapped up in familiar, comfortable comedy situations. Not new, as I say, but extremely welcome.

Death Tax
Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.

Written by Lucas Hnath. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll.

Death Tax took my breath away, not because one of its characters is an elderly woman on life support, but because it upends expectations at every turn while maintaining an admirable level of respect and concern for the essential humanity of its irascible, scheming characters.

Best of all, it refuses to get bogged down in its own drama. This is the latest show I’ve seen in what I feel is a growing trend of modern thrillers which use noir and suspense elements to drive dark dramas about contemporary paranoia and social relationships. (The Yale Rep premiere of Amy Herzog’s Belleville is another good example.)

Death Tax is loaded with compelling human situations—a dying rich woman estranged from her daughter. A hospital nurse is caught in the middle, and has passions of her own which distort her judgement—and the audience’s sense of her own priorities. There are other self-serving characters to wonder about as well.

It could easily become a mess, but playwright Lucas Hnath has the whole mesmerizing drama under control. He gives you a Double Idemnity-quality plot motivation, then inserts some great dialogue lines which I wish had existed in more classic noir films, lines in which some characters question the sanity and clarity of others: “That’s all you know, and you made up a whole story about it,” for instance or “I say murder, they say dementia.”

There is no surety about how competing schemes and dreams will pan out. Even better, when things finally come to a head, Hnath has the good sense to simplify rather than complicate, shedding baggage and honing in on his point: death and loss is hard on everyone, and we don’t always behave well when confronted with it.

There are wonderful pages-long monologue of Athol Fugard quality. But there’s also genuine suspense, heightened by the fact that we’re told at the outset that there are five scenes in the show, and when the fifth scene comes it’s a total mindfuck.

Brian Quijada and Terrell Donnell Sledge in Idris Goodwin's How We Got On at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival through April 1.

How We Got On

Written by Idris Goodwin. Directed by Wendy C. Goldberg.

Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.

The concept of suburban hipsters in derided “fly-over states” falling for the coastal urban culture tropes disseminated by MTV Raps! has been plumbed before, from a brilliant Danny Hoch sketch to superficial Saturday Night Live routines. Playwright Idris Goodwin, who as a New York-schooled Break Beat Poet who’s taught in Iowa would seem to have a special grasp of his subject matter here, finds a comin-of-age drama in what to others has been an anachronistic joke about Nikes in the cornfields.

Goodwin crafts a number of credible scenes around how rap fans meet, circle each other warily and ultimately band together. But he falls prey to other social stereotypes that keep his young characters from unleashing their loudest voices. Making the female element of the teen drama a prim girl in a school uniform really puts her at a disadvantage, as does not introducing her at all until a third of the way through the play (even though she admits later on that she was present at a formative event in How We Got On’s first act.)

All three teen protagonists—that tidy young woman Luann (Deonna Bouye, reserved and restrained), the skittish and unsure lyricist Hank (Terrell Donnell Sledge) and his aggressive Latino friend/frontman Julian (Brian Quijada)—are given overachieving, domineering parents with a disdain for their kids’ tastes in music. Where they live in the suburbs is made potent while grander issues of race and culture are downplayed.

Goodwin also wants to instruct the play’s audiences in the history of hip-hop, which he does through some awkward reference-laden dialogue but especially through the interlocution of a omniscient overlooking DJ dubbed Selector. Crystal Fox excels in this tricky part, which requires her to teach, spin discs and assume multiple supporting roles in the drama. She’d given way too much to do, and you often don’t know what’s up—like, whether one of the incipient rap crew’s rhymes and beats are supposed to be any good or not—until she tells you.

I got the feeling that Goodwin doesn’t think regional theater audiences venture into hip-hop clubs, or watch MTV for that matter. That may in fact be the case with the middle-aged white Louisville crowd I saw this show with, or with the New London, Ct., audience which attended an earlier workshop at the Eugene O’Neill Center. Personally, I felt talked down to. I found the ubiquitous historical rap references lightweight and chronologically scattered—they bogged down the drama (ostensibly set in the late 1980s) rather than illuminating it. As for whether Hank’s and Julian’s and Luann’s raps are meant to be honestly exceptional, or if these kids just think they’re great, well, that’s probably the most interesting debate which comes out of this interestingly structured by largely conventional teens-with-dreams drama.