Tangled up in blue: political trepidation translates to unfocused theatre at Humana Festival.(Humana Festival of New American Plays)

American Theatre, July, 2005 by Hart, Sarah

In addition to a roster of six new full-length plays and four 10-minute ones, the impeccably run Humana Festival's 29th incarnation featured a collaboratively written exercise subtitled On Democracy and Other Fictions, Featuring Patriotism Acts and Blue Songs from a Red State. It could have been a subtitle for the festival, mounted in March and April at Kentucky's Actors Theatre of Louisville--except that the razor-sharp artists responsible for Uncle Sam's Satiric Spectacular (Greg Allen, Sheila Callaghan, Bridget Carpenter, Eric Coble, Richard Dresser, Michael Friedman and Hilly Hicks) were writing within vaudevillian parameters that allowed for mostly rapid-fire pace, pithy one-liners and blissfully ridiculous showing off.

The problem is that the six...