Louisville, Ky. – For the 2003 Humana Festival of New American Plays, Kia Corthron wrote about one of the most urgent issues of the day. Two years later, cloning almost seems quaint.
At this year’s Humana, Corthron’s “Moot the Messenger” took on widespread voter fraud, censorship, misplaced patriotism, the massive failure of U.S. intelligence in Iraq, the consequences of a conglomerated media, the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, an insidious Army recruiting campaign to lock underage minorities into future military service long before they turn 18, and the sexual abuse of female soldiers.
And all that before intermission.
Michael Moore has nothing on Corthron, the leader of a re-energized group of American playwrights who have refocused on their fundamental responsibility to serve as a mirror of their times – no matter how harsh that reflection is.
“I think there are just too many things going wrong in the world right now to waste time writing a play about an angst-ridden person who is having problems with a relationship,” said Allison Moore, author of the dark comedy “Hazard County,” which targets the media, pop culture and even “The Dukes of Hazzard” with a wry sense of humor. “There are bigger fish to fry right now.”
Other plays selected for production at America’s premier new-play festival took on such hot-button issues as ecoterrorism, environmentalism and racism, while another seemed an eerie premonition of the quality-of-life issues raised in the Terry Schiavo case. And a commissioned work by the host Actors Theatre of Louisville charged seven prominent playwrights with turning U.S. foreign policy into a comic musical vaudeville titled, “Uncle Sam’s Satiric Spectacular.”
Playwrights have been unleashed by world events since the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election, taking on not only Sept. 11 but more pointedly the subsequent actions of the American government.
Judging by the six new plays selected by Humana this year, the passion is back in American playwriting. In the incendiary work of Corthron, Moore and John Belusso’s “A Nervous Smile” – in which a weary couple shockingly abandon their disabled child – one easily can find the commonality of current events, a strong point of view and moral outrage.
“We sure aren’t seeing a lot of sit-com-type plays right now,” said Actors Theatre artistic director Marc Masterson. “You know the curse – ‘May you live in interesting times.”‘
Humana occupies a prominent role in determining the direction of American playwriting. Though its selections are seen by only a lucky few thousand, make no mistake – the plays performed here today are the plays performed elsewhere tomorrow. Humana bowed the Pulitzer winners “Dinner With Friends,” “Crimes of the Heart” and “The Gin Game,” and last year’s six already have been slotted for 13 productions, including “After Ashley” at the Denver Center.
This year, five of the new plays are based on real events or people. “The shift in playwriting we have noticed,” Masterson said, “is from introspection outward. If you think about what was in its heyday in the ’90s, it was all about very personal stories. But after Sept. 11, a lot of playwrights faced the problem of how they might possibly process that magnitude of tragedy.
“What seems to have changed is that these writers are profoundly aware now that they are living in a global culture – and there are all kinds of ways of responding to how you see America within that global culture.”
Corthron always has written political theater, and so from her perspective, the trend toward the political has mostly affected the not previously disaffected: “white men,” she said.
“People of color always have written politically, if nothing else about race, and I think women playwrights often write politically, at least about issues of gender. But two weeks after 9/11, we had a huge town meeting of playwrights in New York. We were all so shaken, and I could see that really everybody was now wanting to write more meaningfully. And now that we are in a time of war, I think it is even more so.”
“Moot the Messenger” is a “Born on the Fourth of July” for the stage, an epic that follows an idealistic young black Wal-Mart checker named Briar as she gets her college degree, lands an affirmative-action TV job and is soon an embedded reporter in Iraq. Her big break comes with the prison scandal, but her worlds collide when she learns that many of the accused hail from her own small town in West Virginia.
One is a simple girl she once babysat but is now imprisoned, a pawn in a larger system of tolerated abuse. Briar returns to the U.S. to find both her soldier brother’s limbs and her journalistic ideals shattered.
Two questions that politically charged material raises are whether it makes for good art, and whether audiences looking for an escape from the news will embrace it. Audiences historically prefer comedy to drama, which bodes well for “Hazard County,” while the more polarizing “Moot the Messenger” likely will attract the same left-leaning demographic as the film “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But it also could benefit should its productions become a similarly polarizing lightning rod.
“Moot the Messenger” is clearly a polemic, but the term isn’t the dirty word in the theater that it became for Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It is bludgeoning in its politics, but is deeply rooted in the character and plot that make for good storytelling.
“Kia has a point of view, and her play is a strong, passionate expression of that point of view,” said Masterson. “I firmly believe plays with strong political messages have value.”
Moore’s “Hazard County” includes a tabloid television producer whose attempt to segue into a more respectable news career becomes mired in the prejudices and politics that have divided the races in the South for decades.
At the center of a murder story is the victim’s possession of a Confederate flag, which to some is a symbol of white supremacy while other dimwits think of only as a “Dukes of Hazzard” prop.
“All of us who pay to see Jessica Simpson in the upcoming ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ movie, which completely trivializes the meaning of the Confederate flag, or dismiss that show as just funny camp, are actually validating a symbol of slavery,” Moore said. “And whenever we laugh at the stereotype of the redneck with the Bubba teeth, we are validating the disenfranchisement of an entire class of people.”
Those who fare the worst in all this are the Bush presidency and the media, but Moore does not let the public off the hook.
“I think our situation in this country is pretty dire in a lot of ways, but sadly we have a culture that doesn’t validate real deep meditation about a lot of subjects,” she said. “One of the things theater is particularly well-suited for is really exploring a lot of different sides to one issue, and it is a huge relief to me that this group of plays really looks deeply at subjects we just don’t see often in the mainstream media.”
An inherent danger is that plays that are so of their moment run the risk of becoming quickly dated. But if that’s the case, Corthron isn’t worried.
“If I write something about a particular issue that’s really, really disturbing me, and five years from now that issue no longer exists,” she said, “then believe me – that’s good.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com .
