Drama Haven

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 6, 1999 | by James R. Brantley

Having just finished its summer season, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, or CATF, in tiny Shepherdstown, W. Va., already is looking toward the millennial year. "The board of trustees has already formed a 10th-anniversary committee and plans are under way for the year 2000," says producing director Ed Herendeen, who founded the festival in 1991. "Next year will be our most exciting and dramatic season to date for our audiences."

Herendeen started CATF because he "felt a need to create a home for new American plays and an artist haven for playwrights to explore daring and provocative ideas, topics and stories." Testaments to his vision and mission are increased ticket sales and the success of some festival plays in larger markets. "We have had an increase in sales over previous seasons and expect to go over the 7,500 mark for the season," says Herendeen.

CATF has grown steadily from its initial two productions in 1990 at Shepherd College, and some productions have gone on to New York. "Last season's Carry the Tiger to the Mountain by Cherylene Lee played off-Broadway at the Pan Asian Repertory and just finished a run at the East-West Players Theater in Los Angeles," says Herendeen. "The recent Arena Stage show [in Washington] of Dimly Perceived Threats to the System by John Klein received its initial stage reading at our festival. Both Black and Bad Girls by award-winning author and playwright Joyce Carol Oates were premieres at CATF and subsequently played off-Broadway."

This year the festival was expanded from three to four weeks, and the number of performances of the four plays was increased to more than 60. The 1999 plays included Coyote on a Fence by Bruce Graham, Compleat Female Stage Beauty by Jeffrey Hatcher, The Water Children by Wendy MacLeod and Tatjana in Color by Julia Jordan.

Tatjana in Color was arguably the most theatrically challenging of the lot. The play is based on a real event in the life of painter Egon Schiele, who at age 21 was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, who then refused to testify against him. Arrested for seducing a minor, he served 24 days in jail.

Such are the facts around which Jordan spins a tale of a girl who is hypnotized by gauzy dreams of life as an artist's model, full of languid afternoons, coffee thick with cream and sweet cakes with glaze. Although the material is disturbing, playwright and director Brad Rouse handles it with sensitivity. Rouse's staging also was interesting -- a series of vignettes broken by blackouts. To maintain pacing, actors and stagehands sometimes are frozen in the shadows during brief scenes, completing their withdrawal during the next blackout.