Kentucky Derby

By T.E.K.

U.S. drama off and running

Some 4,000 scripts descended on the Actors Theater of Louisville this year. For the fifth annual festival of new American plays, Producing Director Jon Jory and his staff winnowed out the plays to five one-acters, five full-length works and a collection of short pieces. As a profile of the U.S. psyche, three main characteristics emerge: a mercurial violence simmering just beneath the surface of everyday life, bizarre, zany, irrepressible humor, and wistful reverie about the past or the future. Americans like to dream out loud. Herewith, a sampler:

Extremities by William Mastrosimone. This is an explosive melodrama about a would-be rape and the woman's stark revenge. Alone in a New Jersey farmhouse, Marjorie (Ellen Barber) is accosted by an intruder, Raul (Danton Stone). At first, the jaunty stranger claims to be looking for a man who owes him money. But after some verbal sparring, he wrenches her to the floor by her hair and clamps a pillow to her face. Using the threat of suffocation, Raul systematically degrades Marjorie: "Touch my hair. My mouth. My neck . . . Now touch me down there and say you wanna make love!" At the last moment, she makes a desperate lunge for an aerosol can and sprays it in Raul's eyes.

Vengeance begins. She trusses him up with an extension cord and rope and parks him in a screened fireplace that looks like an animal's cage. She kicks him viciously in the groin, pokes him with a broom handle, soaks him with ammonia and singes his arms and hands.

When Marjorie's roommates (Kathy Bates and Peggity Price) arrive, other surprises ensue, some of them contrived and short on logic. What Mastrosimone has achieved is a precarious balance between the man's physical pain and the woman's mental anguish. Ellen Barber's Marjorie moves from inner hurt to towering fury, like an immutable law of gravity.

My Sister in This House by Wendy Kesselman had its genesis in a famous French murder case that inspired Jean Genet's The Maids. In 1933, in Le Mans, Lea and Christine Papin killed their employer, Mme. Lancelin, and her daughter. Kesselman has retained the names of the sisters, but otherwise the play is very much her own. The playwright focuses on mother-daughter relationships, intimate sisterly affection and a rigid class structure that borders on the feudal droit du seigneur.

Christine (Cristine Rose) and Lea (Patticia Charbonneau) have been schooled in a convent so that obedience is second nature to them. Their venal mother has farmed them out as domestic servants. In one revealing scene, an early employer flicks through a pile of dinner napkins that Lea has ironed and airily tosses half of them on the floor as insufficiently impeccable. The eventual demise of their present mistress, Mme. Danzard (Anne Pitoniak), is built on such moments, and the murder is a strange admixture of revolt and matricide. Throughout, the play is charged with the alternating currents of cozy domesticity and a sense of how the French Revolution began.

Swop by Ken Jenkins. Folk tales have retained their appeal through the centuries partly because they are parables of good and evil. The man of good in Swop is H.E. Rowe (Ken Jenkins), an 81-year-old who communes with nature, wears hawk masks and goes "buck-dancin' " with his favorite deer. The man of evil is Lanny (Robert Schenkkan), a mean-spirited drunk and a cancerous coward of a man who relishes dashing a kitten to death against a wall. A surprisingly animated wooden Indian presides over the pair's rendezvous with destiny.

Twirler. Twice a year the Actors Theater encourages everyone connected with it to participate in a short-play contest. The winner who created Twirler has chosen to remain anonymous. A pity: he or she is dramatically gifted. In a ten-minute monologue, the author moves from the mundane ("People think you're a twit if you twirl") to the realm of a mystical religious experience ("Twirling is the throwing of yourself up to God").

What lends the role immense emotional conviction is the performance of young Lisa Goodman. She is like a natural force--sun, wind or rain. Right now, it looks as if her future is written in the stars.

--T.E.K.

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