2015 Contemporary American Theater Festival

The Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in picturesque Shepherdstown, WV has grown over 25 years while producing only new plays — this year, four world premieres and one (barely) non-virgin. Surviving, let alone thriving, through only new plays is very difficult. No Philadelphia theater does it, though many produce premieres; the last professional company to do it was the late 1980s-90s Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays (founded by BSR contributor Carol Rocamora).

The National New Play Network (NNPN) counters this by arranging “rolling world premieres,” in which a new play is staged by several companies around the country, giving it more development and exposure and hopefully allowing it to jump the gap from precious virgin to respected established play. As Gage explains, this is otherwise nearly impossible, unless there is a strong premiere production involving a major company, a large media market, and/or rave reviews.

Distraught mother, brainwashed daughter

CATF participates in NNPN, represented last year by Philadelphia playwright Thomas Gibbons’s Uncanny Valley (also produced by InterAct Theatre Company), and this year by Steven Dietz’s creepy thriller On Clover Road. This smart twisted drama, directed by CATF artistic director Ed Herendeen, is set in an abandoned motel, where a deprogrammer (Lee Sellars) brings a distraught mom (Tasha Lawrence) to prepare for the liberation of her 17-year-old daughter from a cult.

Everyone lies and harbors disturbing secrets, and the action builds suspensefully despite some awkward stage combat on opening night (more distressing to me than the brutal violence it tries to portray!) and a compromised ending that abruptly flips the tone. Still, I loved it.

Johnna Adams’s Gidion’s Knot started at CATF in 2012 and was a Barrymore Award-winning InterAct hit, so I had high hopes for her new play World Builders. I wasn’t disappointed. This love story — staged in the round in CATF’s studio theater by Nicole A. Watson — features two psychiatric patients who, yes, fall in love, while also coping with the experimental drug that may “cure” (i.e. erase) their imaginary worlds. Terrific performances from Chris Thorn and Brenna Palughi navigate this tricky territory effectively.

Rollicking fun, shocking tragedy

Sharing a stage with On Clover Road (CATF is a rep theater, with two plays each in two of its three theater spaces, which allows seeing all five plays in only two or three days) is Sheila Callaghan’s ambitious Everything You Touch. Callaghan has been well represented locally by That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play (Theatre Exile) and Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) (Flashpoint Theatre Company). May Adrales’s production and Peggy McKowen’s costumes makes glorious spectacle of 1970s high fashion in New York through moody designer Victor (Jerzy Gwiazdowski) and his assistant Esme (Libby Matthews), but the dark comedy primarily concerns present-day IT drone Jess (Dina Thomas), whose fantasies are framed by six models playing not only passersby but furniture. Her adventures, which reveal her connection to Victor, are rollicking fun punctuated by shocking tragedies, though some major characters feel perfunctory and undeveloped.

Everything You Touch, CATF's sole not-premiere production, premiered last year in Pasadena produced by The Theatre @ Boston Court and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. How many people in West Virginia — or Philadelphia, for that matter — flew out to catch it? This is the quandary Gage dissects: For most plays, a second production is nearly impossible to get, though a play only once produced is obviously still “new.” CATF does a mitzvah by producing this play.

A pretentious mess

Two plays share the Marinoff Theater, a flexible black box arranged this summer with audience on four sides, and they represent the range of new plays (which are always a gamble) at CATF. At one end of the quality spectrum is Barbara Hammond’s commissioned WE ARE PUSSY RIOT, a play cobbled from public domain statements, trial transcripts, and online publications.

Unfortunately, director Tea Alagić’s staging is a pretentious mess: The audience crams into the small lobby until curtain time, when Pussy Riot runs through, creating a “happening.” We're finally given access by actors playing Russian guards and find a male prisoner onstage (T. Ryder Smith as Sergei) who engages us in discussion. “What did you think of that little demonstration,” he asks, “did it offend you?” Some predictably sheepish audience participation leads to Pussy Riot’s Kafkaesque trial, with audience dragged up as “witnesses.” Leaving the dialogue to random patrons seldom works, and I squirmed. “Madonna” and Pussy Riot screaming and dancing on the catwalk above us later didn’t help. The show ends without a curtain call, the kind of sophomoric gesture that every college student briefly thinks profound but (hopefully) soon realizes does not work; the audience just feels cheated out of applauding and clueless about what’s happening. “What, is the play over?” is not a satisfying or illuminating ending.

Cozy and wacky

Much more accomplished is Michael Weller’s The Full Catastrophe, a comedy based on David Carkeet’s novel, directed by Herendeen. Tom Coiner — appropriately unctuous as On Clover Road’s cult leader — plays a hapless linguist hired by eccentric billionaire Roy Pillow (Sellars) to study marriage. Armed with a thick binder of instructions, he’s placed with Beth (Helen Anker), Dan (Cary Donaldson), and their son Robbie (Sam Shunney) to save their marriage. His efforts — dictated by Pillow’s daily instructions, provided in sealed envelopes — make a mess of things, as does his desire for Beth, who reminds him of old girlfriend Paula, also played by Anker in flashbacks. PUSSY RIOT’s Smith shows up again as everyone else the linguist meets, including several women, which is always good for laughs. The play combines a romantic comedy’s predictable coziness with wacky musings about billionaires and commitment. It’s not the season’s most ambitious play, but it might be its most complete script and self-assured production.

Picking risks

All in all, CATF’s season is as diverse and solid as any regional theater’s season is likely to be. Producing five new plays is much riskier than the regional formula (a classic, a musical, a recent Off-Broadway hit, a black play, etc.), but the results are similar. The challenge is for the company — and the audience — to commit to sharing different risks. Producing Hamlet, for example, is no slam-dunk either: It comes with a huge reputation and 400 years of heavy history. All theater is risky.

Will we ever see an all-new-play company in Philadelphia? With so many theaters producing new plays, as well as the unique presence of developmental company PlayPenn (which has sent several plays to CATF; their conference of free readings continues through July 26), we’re pretty close. Orbiter 3, a company formed by playwrights to produce their own new work, just premiered its first of six new plays, James Ijames’s Moon Man Walk.

Meanwhile, CATF is merely three hours away, and Shepherdstown and its historic countryside make a great weekend trip.

Top to bottom (all photos by Seth Freeman, courtesy CATF):

Tom Coiner and Tasha Lawrence, On Clover Road

Libby Matthews as Esme, Everything You Touch

Cary Donaldson as Defense, Sarah Nealis as Judge, and T. Ryder Smith as Prosecutor, WE ARE PUSSY RIOT

Coiner and Helen Anker, The Full Catastrophe