Playwright Naomi Iizuka's At the Vanishing Point, the fourth entry in this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is an imaginatively and lovingly crafted paean to one of Louisville's most historic and fascinating neighborhoods -- the aptly-named Butchertown. This is the area where the stockyards and meatpacking plants shared space with homes of butchers, distillery workers, and others in collateral jobs. At the Vanishing Point is not your typical commemorative pageant that recites names, places, and incidents in chronological order. Iizuka's impressive achievement lets us dwell in past and current times inside the lives of flesh-and-blood people created from composites developed through her extensive interviews and research.
Under the fluid direction of Les Waters, the intermissionless play is performed in an industrial warehouse in the heart of Butchertown. Five adult and three child actors (as schoolchildren, a children's church chorus, and ghostlike emanations of adults as younger selves) portray multiple characters, all strikingly delineated. Bruce McKenzie is The Photographer (the only role he's assigned), inspired by famed Kentucky photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. McKenzie's slide show and reminiscences about the area that open the play recall Meatyard's photos of derelict buildings. The Photographer, an optician by profession, frames the work and guides our seeing. Emerging then into view are the people of Butchertown with names that occur repeatedly through the generations, with stories of marriages and hard times, with tall tales of human foibles, with joyful satisfactions about survival and small victories, and with sad remembrances of death. Yet, as the feisty Fischer Packing Company worker Ronnie Marston (Claudine Fielding) says, "The dead live on as free flowing particles of energy."
That belief is palpable in Iizuka's writing and its apropos title. "The Point" was a Butchertown neighborhood washed away by the 1937 flood. It has indeed vanished as has the way of life its residents shared. Butchertown, however, has not become totally trendy. While many old industrial buildings are being revamped for other uses, and while modest homes are attracting upscale buyers, coexistence still holds sway.
Through Iizuka we hear from such composites as Pete Henzel (Trey Lyford), an overly excitable, work-challenged young man who got fired for letting all the hogs loose at the Fischer plant; Nora Holtz (Suli Holum), a Kentucky School for the Blind graduate (she had scarlet fever as a baby) who was Miranda in the school play, The Tempest, and died young after marriage; Mike Totten (Lou Sumrall) whose girlfriend Tessa Rheingold (Suli Holum again) would rather produce her own art than paint plates at Hadley Pottery, and Ida Miller (Claudia Fielding again), the "maiden lady" teacher at the Blind School who tells about rowing down Main Street during the 1937 flood and seeing a house float by with a cow on its roof while a couple of nuns paddled by in a canoe.
Picking out these bits and pieces fails to do justice to Iizuka's beautifully constructed monologues with their overlapping references and connections to people and events we've come to know. What Edgar Lee Masters did with "Spoon River Anthology," Iizuka has done for Louisville and Butchertown. "You never realize (what was there or what you had) until it's gone," says The Photographer as he returns toward the play's end. And the cliche doesn't sound like a cliche at all; it resonates like something newly minted.
