The search for identity - how we define ourselves and how others do it for us - is a common theme running through the 20^th Annual Contemporary American Theater Festival, in Sheperdstown, WV, now running through August 1.  Whether it's a search through the individual shapings of the past (Breadcrumbs , Lidless), the pervasive impact of society (White People, The Eelwax Jesus), or the pernicious effects of the war and culture (Inana) , the mirror is held up, and the image is found wanting.  

The 5-play festival is a celebration of new and almost new theater, with two world premieres and three re-stagings of recently developed works.  If you're wondering what's in the pipeline for American theater, a journey to West Virginia's eastern panhandle will provide a quick overview.

The four dramatic works are mostly well crafted; some were stronger than others, but all were engaging and provocative.  The lone musical - perhaps best described as performance art, with an on-stage band, big and diverse cast, and participating (if only voyeuristically, at times) audience - seems like a work searching for its long tail, that of niche or cult following.  How well you connect to the avant-garde, will likely determine your acceptance or rejection of its sprawling premise.  However you view the plays, if you see them all, you'll find another bonus item in this repertory production:  the opportunity to see actors in multiple roles.  It's a rare pleasure these days, and a distinct one, still found in festivals.      

Two of the more satisfying offerings, short pieces performed in intimate spaces, are the world premiere of Breadcrumbs by Jennifer Haley and White People by J.T. Rogers.  Ms. Haley's poetic work dealing with the onset of dementia is sensitively shaped by director Laura Kepley and a pair of fine actresses, Helen-Jean Arthur playing the aging writer Alida and Eva Kaminsky, the sometimes caregiver Beth, at other times the maternal projection of Alida's younger self.  Ms. Haley's big premise is that words form the stories that we share, but we select each of them freely and creatively, discarding both along the way, like so much scaffolding, becoming the persons that we are.  Though their personalities are diametrically opposite, their stories seem identical.  Beth is caught up in Alida's tale - she wants to find out how it turns out - and so will you.  Set designer Robert Klingelhoefer, a creative force in his own right figuring in four of the five plays, has provided an economical set here, with curvy overhanging papier-mâché forms, suggestive of neurofibrillary tangles.  DC area designers Colin Bills and Matt Nielson supply the lighting and sound respectively for this strange and shared journey.

White People was the biggest surprise for me in terms of its theatricality.  A talking heads type of play - sort of a Molly Sweeney without the nostalgia - a static 3-person rant about ills of the latest marginalized class, seemed as appealing as The Three Faces of Andrew Dice Clay. And yet Mr. Rogers has given us three complex characters to articulate the rage felt by these dispossessed whites in the changing landscape of the times.  Credit director Ed Herendeen for finding the sweet spot in this staging, a triptych of White angst, inhabited in three discrete spaces, tellingly designed and lighted by Tsubasa Kamei with collage wall art by Michael McKowen, and inhabited by a superb cast of actors:  Kurt Zischke playing Martin, a St. Louis attorney, Lee Sellars as Alan, a New York professor, and Margot White embodying Mara Lynn, a North Carolina housewife.  At first blush Mr. Zischke's character appears like an upwardly mobile, middle-class Archie Bunker.  His world defines the standards that he sees slipping everywhere, in his workplace and in his family; without them, he's nothing.  Clothes (words, rules, law) don't define the man, they are the man.  Mr. Sellars delivers his progressive narrative as apologetic stand-up, but he's settled on the apt metaphor for his character's view of the world:  squinty.    Whether it's to bring the world into focus or see it through a kind of tunnel vision is the conundrum left open.  Ms. White, fresh off her triumph at the Studio Theatre in Reasons to Be Pretty, delivers a sensational performance as the disenchanted Mara Lynn.  She's got the "down home girl" nailed, whether recounting her glory days as a cheerleader, negotiating the realities of domesticity, or describing the hell of a very small place. Each of her character's choices - and there have been a number of them starting with her husband - have been the wrong ones, many her own, but several others due to chance.  With each, she falls further behind the socio-economic curve, and she's still falling right up until the end of the play.  All she's asking for is a fair shake, her place in line, which all the eleventh-hour minorities, in her view, keep grabbing.  She wants us to know, she was there first.  This is a raw and unsettling play that will reveal some troubling developments for each of the principals by the conclusion.  How they interpret and act on them is a lesson for us all.

CATF has staked out some big territory with Inana by Michele Lowe, a play about the war in Iraq, specifically the depredation caused by the removal of cultural objects, and Lidless, a rumination on the torturing (one specific form indeed) of prisoners at Guantanamo, both plays directed by Mr. Herendeen.   Ms. Lowe's play is a tale of suspense and intrigue inhabited by a world of duplicitous characters and institutions.  These cultural caretakers and their interlopers aren't The Monuments Men chronicled by Robert Edsel, and Lynn Nicholas in The Rape of Europa, but the people inhabiting the murky chaos that existed in the run-up to the Second Gulf War.  Mr. Klingelhoefer's Middle Eastern scenic design of a hotel in London, with Islamic iconography, allows flashback sequences in the old country to unfold while giving the actors plenty of space to complete the puzzle of their lives, the figure in the magic carpet illuminated with great effect by Paul Black.  It turns out that the figure is of Inana, the one-armed goddess of sexual love and war.  She bears a blessing and a curse; which shall it be?  When the play opens Yasin (Barzin Akhavan), a museum curator, is waiting in the bedroom for his new bride Shali (Zabyrna Guevara), whom he is playfully trying to cajole out of the WC.  With this one-man, 10 minute opening sequence, this play begins badly and the helter-skelter assemblage of characters and numerous narrative sidebars do not enhance the clarity of the storyline.  The play feels like a short story that's been broken up to increase dramatic tension.  Yet the tale is a compelling one and it seems unfair to criticize a genre piece for placing story over characters:  we are happy to dig through the stereotypes as long as the prize at the bottom conforms to the rules of the game whether it be mystery, romance, tall tale, or quest, or as in the case here, a little bit of all.  In this, I think Ms. Lowe was successful: there are at least a half-dozen surprises (and one big red herring) along the way to peak your interest, if not sate your appetite.  Reema Zaman has a couple of sparkling turns as Yasin's first wife Hama and Shali's sister Mena while Michael Goodfriend plays the intrusive waiter and conniving museum head.  James Rana, Jonathan Raviv, and Gregor Paslawsky round out the cast.    

I was looking forward to Lidless, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, if for no other reason than to see the excellent Eva Kaminsky again in action (what range!), this time playing interrogator Alice joined with about half of the cast from Inana.  There again is the solid and sensitive Barzin Akhavan as Bashir mostly on the receiving end of Alice's attentions.  But the rest were almost unrecognizable:  Zabyrna Guevara as the diminutive bride is transformed into the mature friend Riva, Reema Zaman is an exuberant and sometimes moody young teen Rhiannon, and Michael Goodfriend is now an ex-junkie, Alice's Tai Chi practicing husband Lucas, whose patience with his family knows no bounds.  The playwright has taken one of the questionable practices of the war on terror - that interrogators were allowed for a period of time to employ an "invasion of space by a female" - and run with it.  We're to believe that Alice not only sexually intimidated him, she molested him and more.  That in itself would be a stretch, but when Bashir comes back looking for something other than a payback (I was expecting a Death and the Maiden type of scenario), the plot of the play passes into the unbelievable.  On one level, though, a broad-minded one, you might view what has transpired between the interrogator and prisoner as a form of infection, a genetic passage of evil from one generation to the next, in which all parties are still victim (Fifteen years will have elapsed from the opening scene taking place in 2004).  For the evil that men and women sow lives on in the air that they and their world breathe.  And they are practicing a certain sort of control to get to the next level.  Is it an unsuccessful effort of containment - keeping the lid on - or (more likely) are they all forced to see the bright light of truth through open eyes?  I thought about the behavior modification scene in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.  You won't have much time to puzzle this one out before a series of events, with a Tower of Babel denouement, culminates in the most unlikely of endings.  Mr. Klingelhoefer's spare set, which might have been borrowed from the earlier Coyote on the Fence (CATF `99), combined with the probing lighting and piercing sound design of Messrs. Bills and Nielson, made for a powerful effect, as did Ivania Stack's functional costumes.  If Inana's subtleties might have been improved on a smaller stage, I thought that Lidless would have definitely benefited from a larger space.  The experience seems too striking to absorb and believe in such a small setting. 

Magic was everywhere and nowhere in Max Baker's (book and lyrics) and Lee Sellars's (music) world premiere of The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show.  The creators' intention of reflecting the technology of the 50s onto a neo-postmodernist world feels right at home in the retro, ahistorical age in which we live.  The conceit that a nuclear family - one and a half women and a bit of a guy - tune in to the eponymous radio variety program - which provides the entertainment in their emotionally stunted lives seems an odd one, but hey, we're hip, aren't we?  The show features a bunch of off-beat characters in a tableaux vivant throughout the play.  Off to the side is a perennially ironing housewife (Margot White) with more than a touch of paranoia, balanced stage left by a homeless man with a similar psychic deficit who watches a coin operated TV.  There's more, much more:  a man in a gas mask, a bride, a troutman, a Tap Dancing Vagina (don't ask), and an emcee.  A show with 17 songs and as many characters (who are appealingly dressed by costumer Trevor Bowen) as well as two projection screens (nicely done by Andrea Pemberton & Max Baker) in sync with a 4-piece band sounds like a lot to digest in 105 minutes.  It is.  This is Spinal Tap for the Gen Y's, but it may not be for your cohort.  The low wattage dialogue reflective of 21^st century anomie doesn't make for a memorable copy. Technology's not so much run amuck on these psyches as burrowed in. You won't want to miss Kurt Zischke's high intensity performance as Mr. Shine.  That alone is worth the price of admission.  Claire Schmidt is striking as Meredith, a Thursday's Child, and she'll get there before the catastrophe strikes, though not before her big picture brother James played with nerdish intensity by Jonathan Raviv gives her something to ponder.   Also entertaining are Michael Pemberton on a wailing lead guitar and Mr. Sellars belting them out vocally and instrumentally.  Ms. Arthur (a hoot with her dog Sarah Palin) and Mr. Rana both have a lot to say creatively; you'll determine who was the clearer.  Leslie Hencke, Kate Nielson, Steve Pritchard, and Ryan McKinney complete the program in various roles of dread and anxiety.  When it works, the music's catchy and the lyrics well matched with the video.  But the book is another matter.  We theatergoers had the experience, but missed the meaning.  On the other hand, if your taste runs toward The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this may be for you.

CATF, as it has for 20 times in the past, has created a place for us to meet, reflect, and discuss those 800-pound gorillas in the room.  I hope you get a chance to see and hear what they've created for us this year.  Consult their website for dates and times www.catf.org.

Runtimes:  Breadcrumbs (65 minutes w/o intermission); White People (80 minutes w/o intermission); Inana (110 minutes w intermission); Lidless (80 minutes w/o intermission); and The Eelwax Jesus (105 minutes w intermission). 

Medical terms and conditions are mentioned throughout. You might want to check out www.WebMD.com to separate fact from fiction.

Warnings: All but Breadcrumbs contain explicit language and/or adult situations.

© John F. Glass July 16, 2010 - All rights reserved.