By Rick Pender

Finer Noble Gases

Our attention spans must be shrinking, based on evidence from the 26th Humana Festival of New American Plays, concluding this weekend at Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL). Of six full-length plays, every one was designated: "There will be no intermission." Five ran well under two hours. (After some tinkering, Tina Howe's Rembrandt's Gift, took on an intermission after running for a week or so, making it two hours and 15 minutes long.)

This year's full-length plays sparked the usual vigorous debate among theater devotees at the April 5-7 visitors weekend when ATL compacts the schedule into three days. Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases was the show everyone wanted to talk about: At the conclusion of the nightmarish work about four slackers who claim to be a band, living in an apartment filled with trash, half the audience stood up and cheered wildly. The other half sat in stunned, appalled silence. It was a generational gap, to be sure.

Rapp is a young writer (his script, Nocturne, was recently produced by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival) who says the play was inspired by some people he lived with, in their 30s, living as they did in their 20s. "There was one particular night when I came out of my room at four o'clock in the morning, and from the hallway, I could see one of my friends -- this multi-talented artist guy -- sitting and staring at the TV." When Rapp got up at 5:30 a.m., "He was in the exact same position. There was something in that image that was very startling to me, and it was like a wake-up call."

Rapp's play taps into the ethos and ambience of these characters: drugs, paranoia and alienation. Although the script has many moments of real humor (acted convincingly, especially by Dallas Roberts and Robert Beitzel, who spend most of the play on a decrepit couch), many story elements have shock value. One character urinates -- for at least three continuous minutes -- onstage, while another vomits explosively. Two characters are dead by the play's conclusion, and another appears to have murdered someone. Only once do the four central characters come to life and connect: To play music. Finer Noble Gases might have ended convincingly at that moment of crystalline linkage, which evoked tears, cheers and gape-jawed astonishment from the audience. Unfortunately Rapp added one more scene of too-grim reality, making it into an overstated downer.

At the other end of spectrum was Charles Mee's Limonade Tous les Jours, a delirious romance in Paris between a middle-aged divorced guy (Tom Teti) and a young beauty (Christa Scott-Reed). The work was lyrical and lush, played on a minimalist white stage washed with video projections, some transmitted live from a digital camera as if they were snapshots from their romantic interlude.

Some found Mee's work trivial after his previous two Humana entries: Big Love (2000), was a passionate tale based on a Greek tragedy, while bobrauschenbergamerica (2001) was a pastiche piece about the American painter. But I'd argue that the lighter emotions made a fine story, and Limonade's refreshingly positive emotionality was delivered with the good spirits of a lighthearted devil's advocate. Directed by ATL's artistic director, Marc Masterson, it was indeed a pleasantly draught of lemonade. A concluding scene hammered home the outcome unnecessarily, but Limonade was a lovely balance to the serious, darker themes often prevalent in the Humana schedule.

After a strangely disconnected opening scene, Marlane Meyer's The Mystery of Attraction seemed to be a funny story about two brothers, Ray (Steve Juergens) and Warren (David Van Pelt). Warren is married to Ray's ex; Ray, remarried and awash in gambling debt, still hasn't gotten over his ex. There's a lot of exploration about the motivation for romantic feelings, but the play's tawdry resolution didn't follow from what preceded it.

Jerome Hairston's a.m. Sunday was a realistic piece about an interracial marriage and its impact on two generations of a family. Experi-mental writer/director Anne Bogart created Score, reincarnating composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein (Tom Nelis) in a spirited lecture and personal memoir. The inventive 90-minute monologue, while energetically delivered, was a long sit. ATL has canceled several performances of Score this week because tickets simply weren't selling.

Howe's Rembrandt's Gift portrays an aging couple: Aging actor Walter (Josef Sommer) has compulsively collected thousands of costumes, and now faces eviction from the New York loft he shares with his wife, Polly (Penny Fuller), a photographer at her wit's end over the future. Magically -- and without explanation -- the painter Rembrandt appears, live and in the flesh. They take him to the Met to see a retrospective of his work, resulting in some funny encounters with modern inventions and art. But the story seems contrived -- in particular a romance between Polly and Rembrandt -- and it resolved in a way that was neither logical nor emotionally satisfying.

Among the most satisfying performances were three 10-minute plays, packaged as a one-hour program. Two hilarious satires had audiences howling with laughter: Classyass by Caleen Sinnette Jennings (a sassy piece about racial stereotypes and high culture set in a college radio station) and Sheri Wilner's Bake Off (the battle of the sexes is fought amidst flour and eggs). Both pieces were proof perfect that humor can be a tool for analysis and understanding.

Limonade Tous les Jours

The Humana Festival annually offers a beautifully executed barometer of the American theater. It's the place to be if you're serious about new plays, which this year seemed to be more concise, less narrative, more inconclusive, less literal ... and still fascinating.

E-mail Rick Pender

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