CATF Looks Through The Outsider's Eyes

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. -- The image of the outsider haunts this year's Contemporary American Theater Festival. The festival's five productions -- artful and engrossing, for the most part -- deal with topics as different as African history, the U.S. social hierarchy and pig farming. But in each of the plays, which run through Aug. 3, an intruder catches a glimpse of a dangerous, or fascinating, self-contained world.

The theme resounds most powerfully in "The Overwhelming," J. T. Rogers's drama about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Directed by the festival's producing director, Ed Herendeen, this richly woven piece unfurls with the taut pace of a thriller. Rogers builds his tale around three outsiders: American professor Jack Exley (Lee Sellars), his wife (Tijuana T. Ricks) and son (Graham Powell), who arrive in Kigali shortly before the outbreak of atrocities. As the trio learns about the country's tensions, the play becomes a wrenching meditation on the role of individual choice in geopolitical cataclysm.

The performances are so robust that they sweep us up in the story. Sellars gives Exley an appealing schlubby vulnerability, and Powell is terrific as Geoffrey Exley, a kid whose depressed worldview expresses itself in slouches and deadpan stares. Michael Goodwin manages to be riveting as a cynical U.S. diplomat, while David Emerson Toney's genteel baritone inflections establish the charm of a suspiciously friendly Rwandan official. Robert Klingelhoefer's set, with its angled wood surfaces, is suitably stark. Todd Campbell's percussive sound design and D.M. Wood's lighting (featuring frequent steel-gray spotlights) ratchet up suspense.

The outsider's vision is less harrowing in Lydia R. Diamond's "Stick Fly" and Richard Dresser's "A View of the Harbor," plays that use similar story lines to ponder class in America. "Stick Fly" is by far the more successful. An absorbing, funny potboiler with a few intellectual points to make, the tale takes place at the Martha's Vineyard home of the LeVays, a wealthy African American family. When brothers Kent and Flip (Maduka Steady and Avery Glymph) bring their significant others, Taylor and Kimber (Ricks and Anne Marie Nest), to meet their father Joe (Toney), stress runs high. Kimber is white, and Taylor, raised by a single mother, has long resented the elitism that the LeVays represent. As insecurities and prejudices flare, the group finds itself contemplating the national fault lines of race and status.

But it is the soap opera quotient -- delectably accentuated by the cast and director Liesl Tommy -- that makes the production so diverting. Glymph slinks around smugly as Flip, a philandering plastic surgeon, and Toney's Joe is a magnetic presence. Actress Joniece Abbott-Pratt supplies a marvelously fidgety interpretation of Cheryl, daughter of the family maid; and Ricks and Nest (sporting "Sex and the City"-worthy shoes, courtesy of costume designer Reggie Ray) convey both the enmity and the grudging respect that connect their characters. Klingelhoefer's set, with its white wicker furniture and glossy books, fleshes out the LeVays' patrician world.

By contrast, "View," which is receiving its world premiere, is a lurching convoy of cliches about limousine liberals and rich-as-Croesus eccentrics. The comedy completes Dresser's trilogy about class. His "Augusta" (about the cash-strapped) and "The Pursuit of Happiness" (about the moderately well off) hit the festival in 2006 and 2007.

"View" unspools at the decaying cliffside mansion of the affluent Townsend clan. (Klingelhoefer furnishes an evocative weathered facade, and sound designer Matthew M. Nielson an underscoring of ocean noises.) When son Nick (Kelsey J. Nash) visits with his Greenwich-bred girlfriend, Paige (Nest), she marvels at his stingy father and sister (Anderson Matthews and Andrea Cirie), whose idea of fun is reading "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" over Campari and lima beans.

Dresser has said he aimed to contrast old and new money, but this cartoonish and incoherent comedy, directed by Charles Towers, offers no real insight into either demographic. Characters who've barely met make sweeping generalizations about each other; Nick and Paige's relationship is not clearly established; there's little momentum; and the dialogue abounds in cutesy one-liners that don't illuminate the world of the play. Matthews is funny as the doddering, gravelly-voiced father -- who at one point wears full Scottish regalia (Devon Painter is costume designer) -- but he can't compensate for the script.

"Pig Farm," by Greg Kotis (Tony-winning book writer and co-lyricist of "Urinetown"), is almost as disappointing. In a program essay, Kotis relates the comedy to his concerns about the environmental hazards of industrial farming, but the script itself skirts this important issue. Instead, we get 90 minutes of repetitive shtick about Tom, Tim and Tina (Sellars, Powell and Cirie), who run a farm with 14,000 hogs. (Klingelhoefer chips in with a farm-kitchen set.) When an outsider -- an Environmental Protection Agency officer (Matthews) -- shows up, farcical mayhem ensues. The four actors, directed by Herendeen, achieve a consistent high-comic style, complete with drawling accents, but the play feels empty.

In Neil LaBute's "Wrecks," also directed by Herendeen, it's the audience members who are the intruders. The venue -- Shepherd University's new Center for Contemporary Arts rehearsal studio -- is tricked out as a funeral parlor. Anodyne pictures of flowers hang on the walls, and tissue boxes sit within easy reach of the chairs, which are arranged around a large coffin. After Edward Carr (Kurt Zischke), a stocky widower in an immaculate black suit, strolls in, he proceeds to reminisce about his beloved late wife, periodically sticking a cigarette behind his ear, and then removing it again. (Margaret A. McKowen handled the production design.)

His story of courtship and a happy marriage at first seems oddly serene: After all, LaBute is famed for his willingness to depict the ugly, the taboo and the politically incorrect. Rest assured, the LaButeian twist arrives before the end of this 70-minute monologue, and Zischke's cool-as-a-cucumber turn as Carr makes the development all the more shocking. The intensely private saga shared in "Wrecks" turns the audience into voyeurs -- and the revelation we're granted is sufficiently unsettling to make us glad to rejoin humdrum existence.

Contemporary American Theater Festival, through Aug. 3 at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va. Visit www.catf.org or call 304-876-3473 or 800-999-CATF (2283).