A & E

Prizes for Playwrights

I'm in Louisville for the weekend, attending the 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre. As part of this annual celebration of new work, the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) — of which I am a member — announces its annual Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, which offers significant cash prizes to three playwrights. The announcement is part of a festive Saturday evening that includes the presentation of several 10-minute plays and a big party at which actors, directors, playwrights and critics mingle, drink and graze on buffets of cheese, meatballs and more until the wee hours of the morning.

This year's winner — and recipient of a $25,000 cash prize (considerably more than the annual Pulitzer Prize for drama — is Moises Kaufman's 33 Variations. Plays eligible for consideration must have been produced during 2007 by regional theaters outside of New York City, which has a wealth of new play awards. They are suggested by members of ATCA and screened by a committee of a dozen ATCA critics from across the United States. Kaufman's play debuted in September at Washington's Arena Stage. It offers a fictional imagining of Beethoven's creation of 33 brilliant variations on a prosaic waltz. The composer's obsessive pursuit of perfection parallels a modern tale of a terminally ill musicologist struggling with her own obsession to unearth the source of Beethoven's.

Kaufman is the playwright of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (presented by the Cincinnati Playhouse in 1998) and led the team of writers from the Tectonic Project who created The Laramie Project, a script based on interviews about the gay-bashing death of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.

Wassup, March 28: Movie Directors Resurface, Packed Arts Weekend

Creatively parched moviegoers actually have a few strong options this week.

Acclaimed but little-known filmmaker David Gordon Green is back after a four-year layoff with Snow Angels, another textured, atmospheric story about modest people in small-town America, including a troubled married couple played by Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale (pictured below). (Read my interview with Green here.)

Speaking of layoffs, talented Boy’s Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce finally returns to filmmaking with Stop-Loss, what looks to be an equally compelling investigation of people whose lives have been forever altered by a war with no end in sight.

Stage Door: New Plays Aplenty

Lots of new plays are available to you this weekend. In fact, I'm heading out of town to Louisville for the culmination of the 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre. Check back to this blog next week for more details.

In the meantime, you don't really have to leave town to see new plays. You might want to check out Melanie Marnich's A Sleeping Country at the Cincinnati Playhouse. I saw it on Thursday evening, and the audience gave it a standing ovation. See my review on the CityBeat site later today and check out my earlier blog about a conversation with Marnich.

If I were in town, I'd be going to see Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code at Northern Kentucky University. It's another kind of "new" play — one we've not seen locally, as far as I can tell. It's actually a British play from 1987, but it sounds fascinating. It's about Alan Turing, the fellow who cracked the Enigma Code, an accomplishment that helped turn the tide against the Nazis during World War II. However, Turing was gay, and his lifestyle — another kind of code, I suppose — complicated his life considerably. This is likely a daunting script for a student cast, but the production has been staged by veteran community theater director Ed Cohen, and he has a fine with with complicated work, so I'm pretty sure this one will be worth an excursion to NKU's campus. The show is being performed on Saturday evening (also on April 2 and 4 at 8 p.m. and April 6 at 3 p.m.); it alternates with a production of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, so be sure you know what you've made reservations for. Get details here.

— Rick Pender

A Different Slant

Melanie Marnich is back in town. The playwright whose new script, A Sleeping Country, has its world premiere at the Cincinnati Playhouse tonight (Thursday), actually lived here for six years in the 1990s, when she was a copywriter for an ad agency.

"When I arrived in Cincinnati, I was not a playwright," she told me in a recent phone conversation from Los Angeles, where she works as a writer for the HBO series Big Love. "I started writing plays there. My first experience with really high-quality plays was at the Playhouse. It seemed like such an upper-echelon place, I never imagined myself there."

But she was fascinated with playwriting, and earned several commissions from The Children's Theatre. One thing led to another and in the past decade she's had works presented twice at the much-respected Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Louisville. Nevertheless, she's especially excited to have one of her scripts onstage in Cincinnati. Especially this one, which she says was inspired by her own life.

It's a Start

At the opening of August Wilson's Radio Golf last week, Ensemble Theatre's Lynn Meyers joked with the audience that she was giving them a taste of her 2008-2009 sooner than usual. Because ETC's "product" is new plays, Meyers often has to wait longer than most theaters to learn whether she has the rights to present regional premieres of new plays and musicals. But she has one nailed down to open her season in September, and it's a big deal: 2007 Tony Award-winning musical GREY GARDENS, which is planned for a production opening Sept. 3, 2008, and running through Sept. 21.

It's the more-or-less true story of Jackie O's notorious relatives, Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, who were hot names on the social register in the 1940s, when Little Edie was in line to marry a Kennedy (years before Jackie and JFK became America's dream couple). The musical charts the slide of this mother-daughter duo from wealthy aristocrats to eccentric and penniless recluses who locked themselves away in a dilapidated mansion in the Hamptons called "Grey Gardens." It was overrun with cats and cited by the local health department for its many hazards — and their plight was the subject of Albert and David Maysles' 1975 documentary, which has had a cult following for three decades.

That film became the source of the 2006 Off Broadway hit that transferred to Broadway, where it won three Tony Awards, including best musical. The show's script was written by Doug Wright, author of the 2005 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, I Am My Own Wife, which was a big hit for ETC two years ago.

Meyers indicates that details about the balance of ETC's season will be released shortly.

– Rick Pender

Prepare Your Fringe Plans

The fifth annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival happens in late May and early June, and it looks to be the most ambitious year yet for cutting-edge entertainment. While the Fringe is perhaps best known for its theatrical and performance offerings — 35 acts have been selected, which will offer more than 175 performances — the 2008 Fringe also includes a "Film Fringe" (it received 26 entries this year) and a "Visual Fringe" to be housed at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, perhaps including the execution of a large-scale mural plus an international artist.

The Fringe is coordinated by Know Theatre of Cincinnati (1120 Jackson St. Over-the-Rhine) and its Associate Artistic Director Eric Vosmeier is the ringmaster of all things Fringe. He tells me that most of the Fringe venues this year — there's likely to be at least 10 of them — will be along the 12th Street corridor in Over-the-Rhine, between Main and Vine streets. (Dance performances will be presented at the Contemporary Arts Center as in past years.) That means you can get a Fringe pass and check out numerous performances and galleries over an evening or two.

Says Vosemeier, "There is no better cross-section of this city's arts scene than the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. The energy and excitement that the festival generates for its organizers, participants and patrons is unparalleled by any other event in the region. The Fringe is a time when all artists, regardless of medium, can come together as a community to teach, to learn and to mingle with likeminded artists who want to be push the boundaries of their art form and the minds of our audience. That kind of energy is unique to the Fringe Festival and is truly a pleasure to witness and to be a part of."

Pizza and Golf

Perhaps you've attended August Wilson's Radio Golf at Ensemble Theatre, or maybe you're thinking about it. Either way, you might want to discuss how the themes of this excellent script (and ETC's solid production) relate to Cincinnati and especially neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine and the West End. The play is about the contemporary clash between urban re-development and neighborhood history in Pittsburgh's Hill District, a predominantly African-American section of that city, and raises many issues that have caused conflict in Cincinnati. You can have that conversation on 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 25 at Venice on Vine pizza parlor (1301 Vine St., just two blocks north of ETC, which is at 1127 Vine).

ETC has designated the evening's performance of Radio Golf as a benefit for Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME), which is marking its 40th anniversary this year as well as the same anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. HOME has organized this event at Venice on Vine as a community forum on issues of neighborhood change and race in Cincinnati. For information about Radio Golf, call ETC at 513-421-3555.

– Rick Pender

Wassup, March 21: Movieland Doldrums

The first quarter of the year remains a post-awards season, pre-summer dumping ground for movie studios' weakest fare. A quick scan of recent releases reveals a plethora of critically lambasted offerings, many of which only exist as market-tested, money-making products (think the Mitt Romney of movies).

Sure, big-budget commercial moviemaking is a business first and foremost, but couldn’t a trace of creativity and/or unique thought creep into the process? This week would seem to offer little hope of a respite: Five new movies get conventional theatrical releases (i.e., multiple screenings over multiple days) today, none of which were given a critics’ screening before our deadline — never a good sign.

The continuing first-quarter doldrums makes Cincinnati World Cinema’s presence all the more vital. The local film group screens the acclaimed documentary Nanking at the Cincinnati Art Museum 7 p.m. March 25 and 26. (See Steven Rosen’s review for more detailed take.)

On a similar note, The Esquire Theatre will host another intriguing documentary, Nashville-based filmmaker David Earnhardt’s Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, 7 p.m. March 26. A Q&A with Earnhardt and journalist Bob Fitrakis will follow the one-time screening, which is co-sponsored by Democracy for Cincinnati and Hamilton County Young Democrats. For more information, check www.uncountedthemovie.com.

— Jason Gargano

Stage Door: Doubt, Radio Golf and The Baker's Wife

You can hardly make a bad choice this weekend if theater is your preferred form of entertainment. The Cincinnati Playhouse's production of Tony/Pulitzer winner Doubt is a great drama about moral dilemmas, a nun who suspects a priest of bad behavior. This play is popular all over America, but the Playhouse's cast is especially good. Go see it and leave time for some conversation afterward, because everyone draws her or his own conclusions. Read my review here. Doubt continues through April 4. Tickets: 513-421-3888.

Another excellent option is August Wilson's Radio Golf at Ensemble Theatre. Wilson is not merely an African-American playwright; he's the greatest playwright of the past quarter-century. (He died in 2005 at age 60.) His 10-play cycle documented the life of African Americans in each of the 20th century’s 10 decades; Radio Golf concluded the series with a story set in 1997 in Pittsburgh's Hill district. But watching it, you might feel you're looking in a storefront window in Over-the-Rhine or the West End in 2008. Wilson's plays have not often graced Cincinnati stages, so this one is a must see while it's being offered, through April 6. Read my full-length review here. Tickets: 513-421-3555.

Finally, how about a musical by Stephen Schwartz, whose Wicked has been one of Broadway's hottest tickets for several years and which has set box-office records at the Aronoff Center during two tour stops in Cincinnati? Early in his career (after he wrote Godspell), he created a show called The Baker’s Wife. The charming love story is a cult favorite, although not very often staged. This weekend it gets a concert production at the Carnegie Center in Covington. That's where I'll be on Friday evening. Tickets: 859-957-1940.

— Rick Pender

Slam Dunk

So our local theater scene has its own version of March Madness: It's second-annual Cincinnati Directors Competition, presented by New Edgecliff Theatre at the tiny Columbia Performance Center on Eastern Avenue in Columbia-Tusculum. The event proved so hot this year that the blizzard on March 7-8 couldn't slow it down. After a Thursday night, March 6, set of three plays produced a winner, the snow fell and forced the cancellation of the rest of the weekend. But organizer Nathan Gabriel, NET's associate artistic director, stormed back on Mach 14-15-16 to complete what had been started, with rousing results.

It's not quite the NCAA, but the event does offer head-to-head competition: Three evenings of three plays, each under 30 minutes. One winner per evening, determined by audience voting, with additional input from several theater professionals whose votes balance the "popularity" factor because many friends of each production attend. On Sunday, the winners of each evening get another chance to perform for cash prizes, with the top choice taking home $500 and second place $250. Director Arnie Shayne, presenting Phil Paradise's Footprints of the Polar Bear was the winner, and Kim Popa and Lindsay Jones were selected for the second prize with their staging of The 4 Food Groups, featuring their modern dance performance group, Pones Inc. Laboratory of Movement. The third competitor in the finals was Constance Brenneman's staging of From Me to We.