Louisville, Kentucky
3/27/2010
Our trip to the Humana Festival was designed as a little experiment. Since our new baby is due in June, we have been a little worried about how Daniel will react when Laura is in the hospital. He has never been away from us since he was born. So, my mom volunteered to babysit while we took a daytrip to Louisville. Our first date in almost a year.
We spent most of the three-and-a-half hour drive glancing into the backseat by instinct. It felt very strange to not have Daniel with us. We have forgotten our lives from before he was born. Those days were just a prelude. Even though we had each other, we felt lonely without him. Nonetheless, I tried to punctuate the trip by singing, “KEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN-tucky!” at every Kentucky license plate we passed. Laura wondered wistfully why I have to think of a new annoying thing to do on every trip we take.
We made it to the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville (where the festival is presented) without any issues. It was kind of neat driving though Louisville again, since we recognized many of the landmarks from our trip in September. We are starting to feel very worldly, in a silly way. For a big city, Louisville seems very friendly and inviting. I’m sure it has its issues like every place, but it makes a tourist feel very welcome.
The Actor’s Theatre is a beautiful building, with more than one theatre-space within it and a restaurant. Theatre-type people were hurrying about, looking very high-strung and having pretentious conversations about the state of the arts. By the way, I have a bachelor’s degree in theatre and have worked as a professional actor, so my ribbing of theatre-people comes with a certain respect for the arts. Trust me – I’ve been that high-strung, pretentious guy. Nonetheless, this is the first play I’ve been to in a couple of years, not since I stopped doing theatre myself. So it was jarring feeling like an outsider looking in. Another life I’ve almost forgotten.
The play we saw was called Phoenix – a new play by Scott Organ. We’ve been joking about the show since we bought the tickets. It was advertised as “a sly comedy” – which we read to mean “not actually funny.” So we weren’t expecting much. We were dead wrong. It was a very funny show, with clever dialogue and excellent performances. There were only two actors, a man (Trey Lyford) and a woman (Suli Holum) – apparently real-life husband and wife. We have to admit that Lyford dominated, which is not always the best thing with a two-person play. Nonetheless, we felt both of the characters were very real and engaging and fun to watch. (The only time we felt the script became insincere was when Suli Holum’s character started talking about this time travelers’ convention [a real incident, by the way]. It seemed like it was something the playwright was dying to talk about, so he crammed it into this play. Suddenly, this very real person started reciting a Wikipedia article.)
Neither Laura nor I agreed with the morality of the script (the major drive behind the plot is planning an abortion), but we’d be naïve to think every character in every work of fiction should have the same moral code as us. It is certainly not a “message” play or some sort of pro-choice propaganda. It was simply “slice of life” and as much as it pains Laura, me, and a lot of other like-minded people, the fact is that some people do have abortions. To pretend it never happens undermines the whole struggle to end abortion in the first place. Ok. Conservative rant: Off.
A little financial tip: If you want to check out one of the shows during the festival, tickets can be up to $40 a seat. However, if you call the box office and tell them you have never been to a play at Actor’s Theatre before, you can buy two tickets for $10 a seat. You can only do this once in your lifetime. This is not a well advertised discount, so aren’t you glad you keep reading this blog?
