New American Plays

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Hornby, Richard

SINCE THE HUMANA FESTIVAL AT THE ACTORS THEATRE of Louisville is the leading venue today for new American plays, its productions are not only significant in themselves but can be seen as indicators of trends in American playwriting generally. The six full-length plays presented last spring were all set in America today, or within the past eighty years. Thus, realism predominated. One piece took on the style of an old radio adventure series, while two others injected occasional mysticism into the realistic action, but these turned out to be the weakest plays of the six. Otherwise, the playwrights had assumed that their audiences want to see plays about people like themselves, characters who talk, dress, and behave like contemporary Americans. Social problems were taken up, and sometimes belabored, but there was none of the radical, outrageous style of contemporary left-wing English or German theatre. Two plays were outstanding, one was of interest, and three (as noted above) were weak, but none represented a threat to George W. Bush's self-satisfied America.

By far the most common topic was the media, which was practically an obsession. Four plays dealt with television, radio, publishing, print journalism, photography, or film, but oddly, none touched on the theatre. The festival also included four "ten-minute plays"-which actually lasted about twenty minutes each-of which two involved TV, but all once more avoided the stage as subject matter. The play-within-the-play is a staple of Western drama going back to the Renaissance but is rarely found in American drama today. In writing for the stage about technological modes of communication, the Louisville playwrights may have ironically demonstrated their own obsolescence.

Gina Gionfriddo's After Ashley is a satire of American television that manages to be simultaneously mordant and jovial, even humane. It opens on a hilarious note and remains funny to the end, despite the death of the best character between the first two scenes. A mother and her fourteen-year-old son, home from school because of mononucleosis, are watching an idiotic television talk show. "Dr. Bob" drones on in endless, portentous metaphors: "If you don't have a map, you will lose your way. If you lose your way, you will be late for dinner. If you are late for dinner, you won't get dessert." The mother, Ashley Hammond, finds this stuff fascinating, while her son Justin is appalled, especially with Dr. Bob's dreary parade of screwed-up individuals who expose the most intimate details of their lives in exchange for a moment of fame. In fact, Justin seems more mature than his mother in every way. He is even a bit stuffy and moralistic, while she is a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking, wide-eyed hippie, an irrepressible clown (wonderfully played by Carla Harting) whose role reversal with her child is a constant delight.

Justin's father Alden is an education reporter for a major newspaper. A bleeding-heart liberal who used to thrill Ashley, he now drives her nuts. He announces that he has hired a homeless man to do their yard work, a typically charitable act for Alden, but one that will also save money, since the poor fellow works cheap. In a horrible case of getting what you've paid for, he turns out to be a schizophrenic who rapes and murders Ashley.

We learn this in the second scene, yet another TV talk show, where the father, three years after the murder, is hyping a book entitled After Ashley. Like his hiring of the homeless man, the book is of course another case of fraudulent altruism; its real purpose is to give Alden a lucrative career on the sob-story circuit. He is offered his own sex-crime television show, complete with "tasteful" reenactments. As his television appearances multiply, his relationship with his son deteriorates. Justin was devastated by his mother's death, and even more by being touted by People magazine as "the 911 kid" for making the emergency phone call, so that his former prudishness has been replaced by a sarcastic detachment. In the denouement, Jason sabotages the grand opening of Ashley House, a battered women's shelter complete with gym, pool, and spa. (Justin wisecracks, "I wish I were a battered woman!") In the televised ceremony, he manages to slip in a pornographic video that his outrageous mother appeared in, destroying her image as a martyred saint, and with it, Alden's TV career.

Gionfriddo's satire is always deft and hilarious, and often surprising. The pornographer, for example, is not the sleazy, cigar-chewing crook we might expect, but instead yet another self-righteous therapist type. ("Your mother was bored, I unlocked her.") The orgy on the video (not shown to us, of course, but audible) sounds like a convoluted dance staged by some martinet choreographer, leading Ashley to remark, "If I wanted sex to be a monotonous chore I'd have stayed home with my husband." Even after death, her quirky charm lingers.

After Ashley is the best satire I have seen (or read) about the way our culture simultaneously glorifies and exploits suffering. The production had superior acting, especially by Carla Harting as Ashley, as already mentioned, but also by Stephen Barker Turner as Alden and Jason Pugatch as the pious pornographer. Jesse Hooker, an apprentice with the company who had to come in at the last moment, was splendid as Justin, the smart-ass young raisonneur. Marc Masterson's staging was awkward; he tended to limit action unnecessarily to small parts of the stage and to scatter furniture about at random. The play was done in the company's Bingham Theatre, which is in the round, the hardest kind of space for a stage director to work in. Nevertheless, the other two shows I saw in the same theatre, with other directors, managed much better, primarily by using differing levels (including traps in the stage floor), while After Ashley remained stuck on a single plane.1