Multi-talented Zoe Kazan's family drama, Absalom, a satisfyingly old-fashioned,
well-made play is the third work to open in this year's 33rd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville.
Kazan, a true wunderkind, began crafting Absalom in 2003 as a 20-year-old Yale undergraduate (she's now 25) in Donald Margulies' playwriting class. Since then, she has won acclaim as a Broadway actress in The Seagull and Come Back, Little Sheba. That's not all. In addition to working on two original screenplays, she has appeared in several feature films -- most recently the highly praised, "Revolutionary Road."
If the name sounds familiar, it's because her grandfather was Elia Kazan, Oscar-winning director of "On the Waterfront" and "Gentleman's Agreement" and noted director of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He's also the man who paved the way for Marlon Brando and James Dean's huge stardom. Both Ms. Kazan's parents are well-known screenwriters.
As for Absalom the writing is tough-minded and compelling (and probably drawn more than a bit from her own family history) as this extremely intellectual family (all writers or editors) wrestle over ownership of plots derived from their own contentious relationships in the shadow of their all-powerful patriarch, a self-made man celebrating publication of his autobiography.
Peter Michael Goetz is Saul Weber, a hard-driving "Big Daddy" type, an immigrant Polish orphan who rose from poverty to the top of the literary establishment.
Sons Adam (Todd Weeks),a divorced blocked novelist mourning a son's death by drowning, and Teddy (Benjamin Huber), Knopf editor of his father's self-serving book, plus unmarried daughter Sophia (Katie Kreisler), who selflessly looks after her domineering father, and Teddy's wannabe writer wife Julia (Stephanie Janssen), once a student and girlfriend of Adam, respond in different and surprising ways when a long-alienated, adopted brother Cole Maddox (J. Anthony Crane), now a writer of a TV cop show, shows up at the party.
Cole has issues with Saul and Adam over a novel called "A Tender Currency" that he contends Saul stole from him 12 years ago. Adam could clear this up if he would.
Directed by Giovanna Sardelli, the six-member cast is uniformly excellent. Scenic designer Michael B. Raiford's elaborate set includes part of Saul's country house in the Berkshires, an adjacent porch where most of the action takes place, a walkway to an orchard/lake area where unseen literati are being wined and dined for the occasion, and a tree loaded with fruit that nimble Sophia climbs to gather apples for applesauce.
Saul exhibits obvious delight with the baby daughter Teddy and Julia have brought with them from Los Angeles, where they live. Could he be thinking this child will be a future star in the family's long line of writers? He's confident the female baby (passed gently as if it were a real one from actor to actor) "is just a very small woman; she'll do what I say."
Impressive as Absalom is, especially coming from such a young playwright, it must be said that the denouement is less than plausible, depending as it does on two notes, one supposedly to Cole and the other from him. These notes are hand-delivered by Teddy, who appears to be the perpetrator. But it's a stretch to believe he could get away with things so easily.
