New Crop of Kentucky Foals

By T.E. Kalem

A festival of fresh dramatic talent in Louisville

Every year at about this time, the Actors Theater of Louisville, in Kentucky, puts on a dramathon. Nine new American plays are presented in three days. The guiding themes this year might be labeled God, country and family, the last just barely above the TV sitcom level. Thanks to Jon Jory, Louisville's producing director, every play, whatever its aesthetic caliber, comes off with skill, finesse and devotion. Herewith, three of the rewarding best:

REMINGTON by Ray Aranha

Companion-in-arms to Indian fighters, writer-memoirist, painter laureate of the Old West, Frederic Remington is the subject of this one-man show. Playwright Aranha's personality portrait breathes with a sense of the untamed times of Remington's youth.

The play's conceit is that Remington has invited the audience to be his guests in his home in New Rochelle, N.Y., in 1902. Remington is middleaged, but one can sniff gunpowder in his temperament. Remington (played with granitic force by Michael Kevin) begins on an elegiac note. He recalls sitting beside a wintry campfire and hearing a gnarled veteran of the receding frontier say: "In a few years, the railroad will come all along the Yellowstone ... the wild riders and the vacant lands are about to vanish forever " But for a boy of 19, there were plenty of adventures left. In a yeasty anecdotal vein, Remington tells tales of canoeing shallow rivers and being spilled into the foaming rapids.

Then came the years attached to Army units on Indian border duty. During the skirmishes, he came to learn about bravery and endurance and to watch boys suffer terrible deaths. For the rest of his life, he felt that the U.S. soldier, at his courageous, selfless best, was the noblest creature he had ever known. This leads to some scathingly bitter comments on Congress. Remington's invective cuts deep, since it is untempered with any of Mark Twain's or Will Rogers' humor. At one point he says, "Politicians ... men who will conserve their own well-being in times of peace, and who in times of war are in a state of frantic bewilderment. Who can they lead? And where will they lead them?"

SUNSET/SUNRISE by Adele Edling Shank

This is the most piquant of the family plays, an agile display of comic irony and sociocultural observation. It takes place on a California patio, that never-ever land. It includes a middle-aged husband whose wife has been made desolate by his supposed philandering. Actually, the poor devil has long been impotent, his only mistress being an omnipresent slug of 100-proof oblivion. The couple's unemployed son lives in a '51 Pontiac in the garage. He objects to a mobile home on the grounds that it would be "too permanent." Their daughter is a nude, neurotic recluse, hidden in the recesses of the house, who only communicates, facially, via a television set. Scads of characters wander in and out of this quasi-Feydeau sweet-bitter farce.

It is refreshing to encounter a dramatist who can people a stage rather than depopulate it. Playwright Shank's specific insight into the modern temper is that most people nowadays are talking to themselves under the guise of talking to others. Fortunately, the Actors Theater of Louisville is conversing on a national network.

AGNES OF GOD by John Pielmeier

The dead body of an infant strangled by its umbilical cord has been found in a wastebasket. The wastebasket belongs to Agnes (Mia Dillon), a nun of a contemplative order. There is no reason to doubt that Agnes gave birth to the child in her room and then murdered it.

A court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr Martha Livingstone (Adale O'Brien), arrives at the convent to question Agnes in order to ascertain her mental state and to find out who impregnated her. A third party, Mother Superior Miriam Ruth, acts as a buffer between the two. Mother Miriam (Anne Pitoniak) has been married and mothered two children, but her vocation has convinced her that there is a realm of the saints and she apprehends that Agnes may be one.

What follows is almost a rerun of Equus. Like the psychiatrist in Equus, who examined the deranged boy who blinded horses, Dr. Livingstone quizzes Agnes only to receive similar rebuffs and elusively Delphic answers. Like the psychiatrist in Equus, who was forced to question his reasoned image of civilization vs. the boy's irrational Dionysian passion, the psychiatrist in Agnes of God is forced to question her reliance on scientific knowledge vs. Agnes' beatific display of faith.

One difference must be stressed. Playwright Pielmeier has performed the difficult feat of creating a credible innocent, a plausible saint. Agnes cannot hear the voices of the world because her heart is trust to God. In one telling interchange, Pielmeier captures the inner guilt and grief of those who, reared as Christians, yearn to believe again. Agnes has told of speaking with God.

Doctor: Couldn't I talk to Him?

Agnes: You could try. I don't know if He'd listen to you.

Doctor: Why not?

Agnes: I don't know. Because you don't listen to Him.

--T.E. Kalem

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