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The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2006 Humana Festival

ACT A LADY
Dorothy is an upstanding, unflappable Midwesterner, the accordion teacher in her small Prohibition-era town of Wattleburg. So when Miles, her husband of twenty years, tells her he’s taking part in a play to raise money for the Elks, she’s ready to listen. But when she learns that he’ll be playing his part in "fancy-type, women-type clothes," she fears for his sanity and his soul. She agrees reluctantly, sure he’ll soon see the error of his ways. But as rehearsals begin, everyone touched by the play is changed. Casper, a young photographer, is drawn to another actor in ways he doesn’t have the words to describe. True is a man with a past and a penchant for pumpkin gin, offered a chance to change his ways when he meets Lorna the makeup girl, just back from Hollywood. Miles has scraped together a down payment for a general store, but soon his dreams ring with the voices of the women in the play. As for Dorothy, she’s just trying to keep her marriage going in tough times, and has fierce demands for art: It better bring you closer to God.

Behind the red velvet curtain, Lady Romola is plotting to win the emerald—and hand—of the Vicomte Valentino Ufa from her friend and sincerest enemy, the Countess Roquefort, whose fortunes have waned in the years leading up to the French Revolution. As these ingénues of a certain age face off, it’s the maid Greta who seems to win the day (and the Vicomte) thanks to the resourcefulness she’s learned from her bloodthirsty rivals. But as Miles, True and Casper spend more time in front of the footlights, gender lines blur and everything’s up for grabs in this thoughtful, exuberant tale about the woman in every man, the man in every woman and the power of theatre to uncover both.

Act a Lady grew from a set of pictures. Jordan Harrison was commissioned to write a play by Commonweal Theatre Company in Lanesboro, Minnesota, pop. 788. Looking for a subject that would speak to the theatre and community, Harrison found several sets of pictures in the town’s historical museum documenting a series of "Womanless Weddings" which peaked in popularity throughout the Midwest during the 1920s-1950s, and can still be found today. These productions featured a town’s most prominent men dressed for a formal wedding, from flower girl to mother of the bride. What struck Harrison in these pictures was how elegant these men had made themselves, how much effort they’d clearly gone to. "I started asking myself questions like: What would it be like to finish a day on a farm and walk around in heels? What was the conversation these men had with the female characters they were playing?"

From there, Harrison’s imagination started to run wild, and the wordless Weddings shifted to the carnival of Wildean entendres and baroque stage business of the French melodrama he’s written for his Wattleburg characters.

Act a Lady explores this experience of living two lives, and as the play progresses, the stage world starts to bleed into Wattleburg in surprisingly tangible forms. When Harrison started in the theatre as a teenage actor, he was wary of the transformative power of wigs, makeup, and costumes. "I didn’t like losing track of myself," he says. Act a Lady exploits acting’s capacity for radical transformation. "When you memorize someone else’s words and track their experience from beginning to end every night, you might find a corner of yourself you weren’t familiar with." Everyone in town surprises themselves with the corners they find themselves exploring once they start wearing someone else’s clothing. Harrison exploits the audience’s sartorial confusion as well: "The characters’ changes are partly a visual experience; after the curtain falls, you can see the residue of the Countess character on True as he talks about the power of a man in a dress. After all, he’s still wearing the Countess’s costume. Since the audience is seeing the men in gowns for almost the entire play, I’m hoping they'll start to mistrust traditional codes of dress."

Ultimately, the play is the story of these characters’ journeys to more complex understandings of themselves and their desires. If life—and gender—is nowhere as simple as the Wattleburg residents thought, they begin to draw strength from the ambiguities they’ve been plunged into during their contact with the play. In the end, even Dorothy is willing to give theater a chance, grudgingly praying: "Lord…help [the play] be art somehow, not just fellas stretchin’ out my delicates."

— Adrien-Alice Hansel

JORDAN HARRISON
Jordan Harrison’s plays cannot be trusted. As soon as he establishes the rules of his world he subverts them: the living room starts to shrink, a wax statue of Napoleon lurches to life, and human speech disintegrates into a cacophony of bangs and whistles. Costumes, props, and set seem to turn against the characters: these changes grow increasingly invasive and unpredictable, propelling the play towards chaos "till everything explodes and then we settle back to earth again," Harrison explains. But the characters’ world, once the dust settles, is forever changed.

The looking-glass physics of Harrison’s physical environment drives characters to introspection. Once inside they must sharpen their wits and their senses as they take on the messy world with a childlike sense of wonder. Every new encounter is an experiment in living as they forge their physical identities afresh. In the same way, they must reexamine other areas of their lives they’ve taken for granted. Every new encounter is an experiment in living as they forge their physical identities afresh. In the same way, they must reexamine other areas of their lives they’ve taken for granted. Kid-Simple rebuilds sound from the ground up, and even Dorothy’s tried on pants by the end of Act a Lady.

Each of Harrison’s full-length plays features a different design convention. Props come to life in The Museum Play, where curated exhibits scurry from room to room. The set of Finn in the Underworld constricts as the plot tightens around the characters. In Kid-Simple, misapplied sound corrodes human communication, and in Act a Lady, costumes become characters in their own right, walking off with the bodies that happen to be wearing them. Harrison’s fascination with dismantling conventions is rooted in his earliest theatre experience. He regarded costumes and makeup with a kind of cautious wonder. "I was afraid of Halloween, or any kind of pretending without the permission of the stage," he recalls. This discomfort impressed upon him how unfamiliar, even threatening, theatricality can be when audiences are thrown to the wilderness of a dream world where the compass arrow is in tailspin, and the map redraws itself.

Though he writes about worlds in chaos, Harrison’s own world is falling neatly into place. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, but his work is in demand at many distinguished theatres around the nation. Harrison is a recipient of the prestigious Jerome and McKnight Fellowships from The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. He is also writing a new play for The Empty Space Theatre in his native Seattle. And we are of course delighted to welcome Harrison back to Actors Theatre of Louisville. Kid-Simple premiered at Actors Theatre at the Humana Festival in 2004, and Harrison is the only playwright to have a full-length play produced at the Humana festival the year after he won the Heideman Award for a ten-minute play. Harrison fondly remembers past Humana productions, and thinks of the festival as "my debutante ball and my homecoming dance—the first big theater to take a chance on my plays, and the first theater to welcome me back. Playwrights are all looking for an artistic home, and so far mine has been Actors Theatre of Louisville."

— Jamie Bragg