Variations On Living In America

Five-Play Festival Opens In Shepherdstown, W.Va.

A Greek tragedy turned inside out, hints of impending genocide, fault lines within families, races and social classes, and pig farming -- yes, pig farming -- will go under the microscope at the 18th Contemporary American Theater Festival ( http://www.catf.org). The five-play rep runs tonight through Aug. 3 in Shepherdstown, W.Va.

Artistic Director Ed Herendeen hopes to establish a "collaborative professional relationship" with the four dramatists new to the festival, including the high-profile Neil LaBute. "What better way to do this than produce their 'new work' . . . even if it is not a World Premiere," Herendeen wrote in an e-mail, adding he wants to avoid "World Premiere 'itis,' " excluding fresh plays just because they have been produced elsewhere.

Neil LaBute, "Wrecks"

In this solo piece, a seemingly ordinary businessman named Edward tells the story of his marriage while standing near his wife's coffin in a funeral home. SPOILER ALERT: The title is a homonym for a Greek tragic hero, but LaBute's latter-day Oedipus broke the incest taboo purposely, not unwittingly. The playwright says he found himself writing "the complete reversal" of the myth, with its sense of irrevocable fate:

"Part of the feeling that no doubt this man carries around is of loss, of rejection . . . so the notion that he . . . as a grownup would then track this person down and make them love him was intriguing to me. What would that impulse be? Why would that be so important? Why would you do it in that way . . . that's at the root of what I do, which is ask questions, and I don't know that I always have to have the answers."

-- Neil LaBute

"Wrecks" previously was done in Ireland and New York with actor Ed Harris; LaBute directed. Film buffs know LaBute's take on human nature's nastier edges from "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors," which he wrote and directed. His "Bash: Latter Day Plays," "The Shape of Things," "Fat Pig," "This Is How It Goes" and "Autobahn" have played at the Studio Theatre. "Reasons to Be Pretty" is now in New York.

J.T. Rogers, "The Overwhelming"

On the cusp of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an American professor and his family are almost fatally unable to discern the portent of disaster in what the people are telling them. The playwright is working against archetypal images of the Ugly American and the all-wise foreigner, images that seem "pretty simplistic and not a very accurate shorthand to use," says Rogers, who lived overseas as a child, when his college professor father went on research sabbaticals. He researched the atrocities in Rwanda "out of horrible curiosity," he says.

"Slowly it dawned on me . . . this would be a remarkable backdrop for a rather gripping play. The more I read . . . the more I was fascinated by how spotty the information was and how, in general, the U.S. media response was, well, 'These people do this once in a while' . . . but if you're a journalist or a playwright, you know that nobody just 'does' things."