Variations On Living In America
Five-Play Festival Opens In Shepherdstown, W.Va.

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

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."

-- J.T. Rogers

"The Overwhelming" premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2006 and ran in New York last year. Rogers's previous plays include "White People" and "Murmuring in a Dead Tongue."

Lydia R. Diamond, "Stick Fly"

A passionate debate on race and class erupts among members of an upper-crust African American family and their guests at the family's Martha's Vineyard retreat. The power of lighter or darker skin tone to affect one's fate fuels a subplot in this dramedy.

" What defines elite in the black community is SO not connected to money. People often say there are so many issues in the play . . . it's just the landscape of being African American in this country. . . . If I seem overly passionate about it, it's because I think it's misunderstood when in a family play the talk turns to race and class. Because it's not something that HAS to be discussed in a white family."

-- Lydia R. Diamond

"Stick Fly" premiered in 2006 at Chicago's Congo Square Theatre Company and has been performed at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., and by L.A. Theatre Works, where it was recorded for public radio. Diamond, who teaches at Boston University, also wrote the fact-based tragedy "Voyeur de Venus," about a 19th-century African woman who was abducted and carted around Europe as an exhibit. Her much-praised adaptation of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" was done by Theater Alliance in 2006.

Richard Dresser, "A View of the Harbor"

In this last installment in the darkly comic "Pursuit of Happiness" trilogy about class, the young scion of an old-money family has been working at a factory, trying to escape his roots. He and his nouveau-riche girlfriend (who thinks she's slumming) visit his father and sister, who live like eccentric paupers in the family's beach house, and soon "the awesome power of the family" reels the son back in.

"I wanted to write as much about power as about money. There are people in Maine, the way they live, the way they dress, the way their house looks -- there's no difference between them and people who are really poverty-stricken. . . . They look like the sort of people that couldn't keep it together to be lobstermen . . . and they're on Wall Street."

-- Richard Dresser

The only CATF veteran playwright ("Rounding Third," "Below the Belt," "Gun-Shy," "Something in the Air") in this summer's lineup, Dresser set his entire trilogy in Maine, where he has vacationed since childhood. The first play of the three, "Augusta," about two cleaning women, premiered at CATF in 2006. "The Pursuit of Happiness," which premiered in 2007 at the Laguna Playhouse in California and played CATF last year, is about middle-class parents whose daughter refuses to go to college. The people in "A View of the Harbor," Dresser says, "have what the people in the first two plays would practically kill to get, which is endless wealth . . . the point of telling this particular story to end the trilogy is that there's a burden to it as well."

Greg Kotis, "Pig Farm"

The tongue-in-cheek comedy with alliteratively named characters Tom, Tim, Tina and Teddy -- men and women of few words workin' the land, fussin' with one another and standin' up to the Feds -- plays with the idea of big-time agribusiness and the muck that can drain from its fields. In this case, the polluted waterway is the Potomac, and the inspector from the Environmental Protection Agency is armed. The playwright says he chose the river so his characters could refer to a mess of "fecal sludge" washing up near the U.S. Capitol.

"I'm sending up that whole American mythic kind of feeling . . . archetypal struggles and crises and battles. These sorts of American-feeling situations."

-- Greg Kotis

Premiered in 2006 by both Roundabout Theatre Company in New York and the Old Globe in San Diego, "Pig Farm" is as mock-serious as the playwright's "Urinetown." Kotis won two Tonys as book writer and co-lyricist of that irreverent toilet musical.