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Woodrow J. Hinton
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Marc Masterson (right) steps in at Actors Theatre of
Louisville, whose longtime Artistic Director Jon Jory is
heading to Seattle.
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Marc Masterson loves fresh new theater. For 10 years he made regular pilgrimages from Pittsburgh to Louisville, Ky., for the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, relishing the opportunity to scope out writers and plays for City Theatre Company (CTC), which he founded in 1980.
Masterson won't have to make that trek any longer. Late last summer he was named the artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL). So the Humana Festival is now his baby, delivery set for Feb. 27. Masterson's two decades at CTC -- "two weeks short of 20 years," he chuckles -- where he commissioned new plays and regularly staged premieres of new works, prepared him for his new responsibilities.
Masterson succeeds the legendary Jon Jory, ATL's artistic director for 31 years and the creator of the festival, which marks its 25th anniversary this month. ATL points with pride to the fact that more than 300 American plays have premiered at the festival, including last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Donald Margulies' Dinner with Friends, first produced in Louisville in 1999.
Shortly after last year's festival, Jory announced his departure after three decades in Louisville. In September, he began new responsibilities as teacher and director at the University of Washington School of Drama in Seattle. Masterson and Jory conferred about the current season, including selecting works for the 25th festival.
"Jon picked about half the shows, and I picked the other half." (Masterson declines to identify who picked which shows.) "So there's both a foot in the past and a foot in the present and future. That's kind of cool, I think, that we were able to do that together."
Jory will be back to direct a new play, Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage by the mysterious Jane Martin, an award-winning playwright who many theorize is Jory's alter ego. Described as "a 'B' Western Horror Flick for the Stage," Guns sounds strangely familiar to Keith Glover's Dark Paradise, currently getting its own premiere at the Cincinnati Playhouse.
Masterson will stage Richard Dresser's Wonderful World. Jory and Masterson are directing their productions in the same theater. The festival is a logistical maze, juggling eight productions and staff across three stages for six weeks. Audiences often attend multiple performances in a two- or three-day span.
In Pittsburgh, Masterson established CTC as the alternative stage to the larger Pittsburgh Public Theatre, much in the manner that Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati relates to the Cincinnati Playhouse. He founded CTC in 1981 on a $40,000 budget. By last fall, his budget rose to $2 million for an organization producing plays on two stages seating 125 and 300 loyal patrons.
"Over a period of time, that little group of people started doing edgy things, started to get noticed," Masterson recalls. While he never sought the "alternative" label, "It's what people called us because there was a larger theater in town. I started to wonder what that meant, to be an 'alternative' artist. Alternative to what? Whose alternative is it?"
As Masterson and his theater matured, he increasingly positioned CTC as a player in Pittsburgh. "I'm continually fascinated by the role a theater plays in a community, and how people see it, and why they go to it, and how we fulfill or don't fulfill those expectations by the work we do."
Masterson believes his ability to engage his theater in a larger community appealed to the ATL board committee that chose him. "I have a lot of experience in doing art that's kind of based in and grows out of community. We did a number of different kinds of community-based programs that got noticed on a national level. That was what this theater was looking for as a way of re-engaging with the community of Louisville." He's already thinking about outreach and education programs in and around Louisville.
Of course, ATL also sees itself as serving the national theater community, which looks to the city on the Ohio River annually for a shot of inspiration. The Humana Festival (Masterson points out how arts and business can collaborate by citing the 22-year sponsorship of the festival by the big health insurer whose corporate offices are in Louisville) attracts theater professionals from around the world and attention from the entertainment industry, including those who make films and television shows. It's a great place to scope out some of America's best writing talent.
Take Dresser's play, Wonderful World, which Masterson will direct. The first time he saw one of Dresser's modern comedies was at ATL, a production of Below the Belt. Dresser, says Masterson, "writes these comedies about people who are kind of struggling to know how to behave in modern life. (Wonderful World) is about a family, two brothers and their wives and the mother of the brothers. It's a comedy about the way we handle and mishandle the truth, the way we reveal and don't reveal how we truly feel about each other."
In addition to making his Humana directing debut with this show, Masterson has begun to put his own mark on the Festival. He's tweaked the concept of phone plays -- three-minute, pre-recorded performances that audiences listen to on pay phones in the theater lobby -- by turning to several avant-garde theater companies that have working relationships with young playwrights. The results are seven phone plays by five small theater groups: Jump Start Performance Co. of San Antonio; New York City's Clubbed Thumb; the African Continuum Theatre Co. of Washington, D.C.; San Francisco's Thick Description; and Chicago's Neo Futurists.
While the Humana Festival has been ATL's annual claim to fame, some observers have felt the remainder of ATL's season was not as imaginative. Masterson thinks he knows why: ATL expanded its physical facilities in the mid-'90s, building a third theater and a parking garage. "By producing more and more popular work, (ATL) tried to earn its way out of that hole. The debt was not created through bad management, but in terms of expansion that in the long run will be to the great benefit of the organization. ... Others noticed it, too, and talked about that with me. I think now that problem is behind us." A gift from a board member dissolved the debt. "The theater is poised for another stage of growth."
Masterson has a clear vision for that growth, building on ATL's solid foundation and reputation. "Every play we do should have risk associated with it. Excitement comes from doing that, from not knowing the answers to things. And from respecting the audience and being willing to take risks. Risk is at the heart of it." Risk, he says, isn't always just picking plays. It can come in the form of casting, or staging a new adaptation or using a director with a new approach.
That's what Jon Jory did in creating the Humana Festival, and it's a tradition Masterson has no problem perpetuating. "This organization has Jon Jory's personality running all the way through it," he observes, "primarily in this huge work ethic. This company is producing more full-length productions than any theater in America that I can think of."
So Masterson no longer has to drive 400 miles to see the Humana Festival. But he hopes many others will. That includes Cincinnatians. "Your city is culturally rich," Masterson says, "and there are many reasons to stay there and celebrate that. But truly one of the great theaters in the country is an hour-and-a-half away. Why not take a chance and see what happens?
"The fun of the festival is its intensity," he says. "The mixture of things you feel when you go down to the restaurant or you stand outside the theater and talk to somebody who saw the other show. 'What did you think of that?' The conversations between performances are as exciting as the performances themselves. You don't have to love everything you see in order to have the time of your life. You can see things that you fall in love with, surprise you, blow you away, and the next minute see something that just ticks you off. That experience, really, truly, is the Humana Festival." ©
Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville
The 2001 festival lineup offers plays, full-length and shorter, created 30 different playwrights. Shows are staged in revolving repertory from Feb. 27 to April 7 using ATL's three stages: the Pamela Brown Auditorium (637 seats), the Bingham Theatre (318 seats) and the Victor Jory Theatre (159 seats). The titles and their playwrights:
Wonderful World by Richard Dresser
When the Sea Drowns in Sand by Eduardo Machado
Quake by Melanie Marnich
Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage by Jane Martin
bobrauschenbergamerica by Charles L. Mee
Description Beggared; or the Allegory of WHITENESS by Mac Wellman
Chad Kurtiss, Lost Again by Arthur Kopit (three 10-minute plays in serial form)
Heaven and Hell (On Earth): A Divine Comedy, collectively written by 16 playwrights (including Rebecca Gilman, Jane Martin, William Mastrosimone and Keith Glover, whose world premiere, Dark Paradise,is currently onstage at the Cincinnati Playhouse) performed by ATL's intern acting company.
Ticket information at: 800-428-5849 or www.actorstheatre.org.
