Two anticipated features of each year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville are a themed anthology showcasing ATL's vibrant young Acting Apprentice Company and three Ten-Minute Plays in which selected apprentices display their talents. For the 33rd festival, the choices were a rites of passage anthology called "Brink!" and a half-hour show that included two comic episodes and one serious.
Brink! hurled itself on stage with a hilarious "Big Birth Opening Number" that had the ensemble racing around as sperm in a skit by all six anthology playwrights: Lydia R. Diamond, Kristoffer Diaz, Greg Kotis, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, and Deborah Stein. Sean Daniels, ATL's associate artistic director, amusingly directed.
Other highlights were Diaz's "Grandpa's Cologne" (seen in three parts) with music and lyrics by Kotis that poignantly dealt with adolescent angst over asking for a date, Nachtrieb's two-part double entendre, "My First Trojan," with characters Ramses (Eric Eteuati) and Durex (Jon Riddleberger) discovering long-lasting love as they head off to war, and Kotis' sardonic "American Dream" persevering and crying out for revolution in the midst of Ponzi schemes and other economic horrors.
High praise goes to Kotis, who wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics for Urinetown (the Musical) and to David Keeton for orchestrations and vocal arrangements, music supervisor Margret Fenske, and movement director Delilah Smyth. The Busby Berkeley take-offs joyfully raise the roof.
Laufer's "Evolution," which takes place beneath the ocean with a fish family upset that daughter Lizzie (Allison Moy) has developed little doggie paddle hands and is hoisting herself to a rock on the land, is charmingly played.
