SHEPHERDSTOWN, W. Va., July 4, 2011 – It’s the first full week of July—time to trek out to impossibly picturesque Shepherdstown, West Virginia, longtime home of the now nationally recognized Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF). Still helmed by its founder and longtime producer-director Ed Herendeen, the month-long CATF annually mounts at least four, and lately five, new or nearly new plays by American playwrights ranging from well-known names to the latest wunderkind discoveries. This year’s plays include works by Broadway veterans David Mamet and Sam Shepard, and dramas by up-and-comers Kyle Bradstreet, Tracy Thorne, and Lucy Thurber.
David Mamet’s Race may be this year’s most controversial entry in a festival that’s never shied away from controversy, particularly if it’s generated from a leftist point of view. But that’s where Race is different. It’s an equal-opportunity destruction-derby of ideas that comes at you from the right, casting serious doubts on the credibility of either side in the nation’s long-running affirmative action sweepstakes.
CATF presents David Mamet's 'Race' this
weekend. (Photo credits: CATF.)
Long a left-winger, like most if not nearly all denizens of Manhattan’s liberal artistic community, Mr. Mamet arguably began to change his doctrinaire point of view circa 1992 with his short problem play, Oleanna, which dealt with the reality—or unreality—of sexual harassment. Recently, he completed his 180-degree political turn toward the right in his new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, a full-bore attack on the unquestioning, knee-jerk Marxism that’s become the way you punch your ticket in today’s literary and entertainment worlds.
It’s with this newly evolved point of view in mind that Mr. Mamet composed Race, which premiered in New York in 2009 to a predictably mixed critical reception—even though it ultimately recouped its investment and made a profit during a highly-successful 297-performance run on Broadway.
Race, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s latest effort, is yet another take on the he-said-she-said sexual harassment theme of Oleanna; but adds extra spice to that by mixing in racial guilt and presumptions as two lawyers, one white, one black, attempt to defend a well-heeled white exec against rape charges lodged against him by a black woman. Adding an entirely unexpected frisson to CATF’s mounting of the play: the astonishingly coincidental juxtaposition of the current Dominique Strauss-Kahn/IMF scandal that almost exactly mirrors Mamet’s plot.
Score one for good timing. Out of all this year’s CATF entries, Race is likely to generate the most post-theater discussion in Shepherdstown this year, and early performances have already begun to sell out.
But this year’s festival isn’t all about David Mamet. Four additional plays remain on tap, one of them by renowned playwright Sam Shepard whose works have periodically been featured by CATF in past seasons.
Mr. Shepard’s Ages of the Moon received its 2009 premiere not in New York but in Ireland at Dublin’s well-known Abbey Theatre. Long home to traditional—and increasingly non-traditional—Irish dramas, the Abbey came in for a bit of controversy for its periodic staging of American playwrights like Mr. Shepard and others. But some Dublin writers have noted what they view as Mr. Shepard’s philosophical affinity with Ireland’s great expatriate playwright, Samuel Beckett. For all their legendary violence, many of the American writer’s plays echo Beckett’s existential concerns, his grappling with the meaning—and essential loneliness—of human existence.
Sam Shepard's 'Ages of the Moon' also on tap
this weekend in Shepherdstown, WV.
Ages of the Moon—receiving its area premiere at CATF after the Abbey brought its production to New York—reunites three close friends: two old guys and a bottle of bourbon. Both men relive fifty years of a rocky, ur-male relationship, exploring those perennial Shepard themes of being and nothingness, punctuated, of course, by some of this playwright’s obligatory stage violence. Aside from this, nothing much really happens, save inside the heads of both men and the audience. The Pulitzer Prize-winner’s latest effort promises to exemplify the essence of Ed Herendeen’s favorite slogan for CATF: “Think Theater.”
Younger playwrights in this year’s CATF season include Kyle Bradstreet, Tracy Thorne, and Lucy Thurber. Mr. Bradstreet’s From Prague will actually receive its world premiere performances in Shepherdstown this season. From Prague revolves around the life and times of a disgraced academic, his over-the-top religious son, and Anna, an attractive expat. It promises to be another play filled with family, ideas, memories, and plenty of regrets.
English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would probably have regarded the subject matter of Mr. Shepard’s and Mr. Bradstreet’s plays as variations on “inscape,” or the intimate but random journeys through the landscape of the human mind. Likewise the subject matter of We Are Here, Tracy Thorne’s latest drama which focuses in on an extended family’s attempt to cope with tragedy and loss. Ms. Thorne’s play was first staged just last year as part of Vassar’s New York Stage and Film series in Poughkeepsie, and was apparently well received there.
CATF’s final 2011 effort is The Insurgents, another world premiere performance, this one actually commissioned by CATF and supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Penned by trendy Lucy Thurber, the play is a riff on the thematically-entwined careers of John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and—surprise—Timothy McVeigh. Heroes or villains? Martyrs or terrorists? Presumably, Ms. Thurber will report and we will decide. But given that we’ll hear from these characters themselves, it might be hard to figure out who’s who at the final curtain.
Stay tuned. Festivities begin in Shepherdstown mid-week with a few preview performances before CATF actually gets underway on Friday, July 8. All plays will open this weekend and run in repertory throughout the month of July along with several other special events. We’ll be attending the whole festival and reviewing this play and the others starting this weekend.
CATF logo. Festivities begin this weekend.
For tickets, information, directions, and suggestions for nearby accommodations (if you want to pack in all five plays in three or four days) call 1-800-999 CATF (2283) or visit CATF’s website, www.catf.org.
Helpful hint for those who’d rather daytrip a play or two: Shepherdstown is an easy, roughly two to two-and-one-half hour drive from DC and environs either via I-70 (DC and Maryland) or via the Dulles Toll Road/Greenway, Rte. 7 bypass, and VA-WV 9 thru Kearneysville.
Read more of Terry's news and reviews at Curtain Up! in the Entertain Us neighborhood of the Washington Times Communities. For Terry's investing insights, visit his WT Communities column, The Prudent Man in Politics.
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