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Loney's Show Notes

By Glenn Loney, April 15, 2006

Glenn Loney
Caricature of Glenn Loney
by Sam Norkin.

Please click on " * " to skip to each subject in this index:
Off to Louisville for the 30th Annual Humana Festival! *
Lee Blessing & Other Playwright Award-Winners!
*
Bogart & Mee Collaborate with Joseph Cornell & His Boxes!
*
Cross-Dressing Fund-Raiser in Centerville, USA: There's a Little Bit of Woman in Every Man, And Vice-Versa!
*
Vet Goes Berserk: Kills Wife & Kids on Christmas! Missed Opportunity in New Play: Six Years?
*
Actor-Loser Goes Berserk: Strangles Chick in Tech, But She Revives To Goad & Gloat in Opener: Why oh Why oh Did She Ever Leave Ohio?
*
Natural Selection
Not a New Idea in Theme-Park Dramas
*
Low
Features Rha Goddess, Author, Mystic, & Performer!
*
How Long Is a Ten-Minute Play Anyway?
*
Apprentice Showcase: Las Vegas Laid Bare in Neon Mirage: Lisa Kron, Liz Duffy Adams, Dan Dietz & Others Offer Mini-Visions
*
After Ashley & Omnium Gatherum Great at Humana: But Both Bombed in New York, Whys & Wherefors?
*
Speaking of Hotels: How About the New Museum Hotel?
*
On Departing, Take Some Bourbon, But Not a Slugger Bat!
*

Off to Louisville for the 30th Annual Humana Festival!

Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Humana Foundation's unwavering corporate support of the Actors Theatre Louisville and its annual festival of New American Plays had this year a special significance for the Performing Arts in general. At a time when major American industries are imploding, or outsourcing themselves to the Cayman Islands and Bangladesh, it is encouraging that some important American enterprises are still solvent and dedicated to aiding the arts, as well as their own clienteles.

Consider the sudden abandonment of the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts by Texaco as a negative example. Among many… Over sixty years, several generations of young Americans came to know and love opera, even out in the windswept Hinterlands, thanks to Texaco. But when its highly-paid Oil-Executives discovered, from a scientific-survey, naturally, that the people who listened to the Opera Broadcasts weren't, in general, people who bought Texaco gasoline, or who even owned cars, it cancelled its sponsorship.

Yet another argument for America's adoption of the European Model of subsidizing the arts, all of them, as an aspect or an extension of Life-long Learning and as a major contribution to improving the Cultural Quality of Life! In many European Union nations, arts-subsidies are administered by the various Ministries of Education, Science, and Culture.

Just imagine an American Cabinet-post such as: Secretary of the United States Department of the Arts & Culture! Now who would President Geo. W. Bush appoint to that position? Perhaps the Head of FEMA? He did so well in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

So, once again, American theatre-fans, as well as theatre-people, and playwrights, in particular, owe a deep debt of thanks to Humana for its dedication. And, of course, to Actors Theatre for a provocative festival. Humana's primary function is Health Care, and its arts-subsidies are certainly related to an aspect of that: Healing wounded hearts and damaged emotions.

Humana's remarkable Michael Graves Post-Modernist Tower certainly gave new life to the once blighted and dying downtown-center of Louisville. As did the leadership of Actors Theatre in Historic Preservation of the Victorian façades of Main Street, which is on the way to a vibrant new life as a Culture & Tourist Center.

Now Louisville is much more than just the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs!

 

Lee Blessing & Other Playwright Award-Winners!

To win the $25,000 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, the drama has to have received at least one production in an American Regional Theatre. This year's winner, Lee Blessing, had his A Body of Water produced in Minneapolis, by the Guthrie Theatre. The play focuses on a man and woman who wake up one morning in a house they do not know, and no memory of who they are…

ATCA is the American Theatre Critics Association, understandably eager to encourage new playwrights and plays: something fresh to review! But the larger portion of these awards is provided by the Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, which also supports the former American Place Theatre in Manhattan, as well as many other theatre-related initiatives.

Amiable Trust Trustee Jim Steinberg says: "We're delighted to help support the unique telling of tales on the American stage."

There are also two New Play Award Citations, each this year adding $7,500 to the traditional Award Citation. The late Arthur Miller won one of these not so long ago, but for an inferior play, The Ride Down Mount Morgan. And the check was less then.

This year's Citation winners are the late August Wilson, who won the main award three times, for Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Two Trains Running, and Adam Rapp. Wilson's prize-winner was Radio Golf, the final drama in his ten-part Cycle of about the Black Experience in 20th Century America, notably in Pittsburgh.

Rapp won for Red Light Winter, currently on view Off-Broadway, and reviewed in this column recently. He is also the author responsible for Finer Noble Gases, a Humana Festival choice several seasons ago. They peed onstage, among other thespian novelties!

Lee Blessing, who teaches playwriting at Rutgers University, won the Steinberg/ATCA Award in 1987, for A Walk in the Woods, starring Sam Waterston and Robert Prosky. Your scribe admired this woodland meeting of East and West on Broadway and was pleasantly surprised to see it yet again on tour in Lithuanian Vilnius, on its Lucille Lortel-sponsored tour in the former Soviet Union.

Congratulating Blessing on the award, I told him of that experience, for he had not been able to accompany the ensemble, under the leadership of director Lloyd Richards. And also that the performances had come during a very tense time in Vilna, as Soviet tanks were poised to put down demands for Independence from the Soviets!

The day following the premiere of A Walk in the Woods in the City Theatre, I was invited to join the cast and techies on a yacht for a trip to a restored 13th century Lithuanian castle on an island in the middle of a great lake.

A sever hailstorm suddenly broke upon us, but the Russian sailors did not know what to do to save the yacht. Sam Waterston and some Yale Drama techies saved the day!

Blessing commented: "Well, Sam has done a lot of sailing up there on the Connecticut coast."

 

Bogart & Mee Collaborate with Joseph Cornell & His Boxes!

Charles L. Mee's "Hotel Cassiopeia."

My favorite of all the premier productions of new plays at the Humana Festival was Charles L. Mee's Hotel Cassiopeia. His wildly amusing Big Love also had an exemplary production in an earlier Humana fest.

For some who had never heard of Joseph Cornell, this wonderfully surreal staging, by Anne Bogart and her SITI ensemble, was baffling. Even some critics who had seen Cornell's box-collages in museums were puzzled by Mee & Bogart's imagic & symbolic survey of this lonely man's life and art.

Set in the tiny Victor Jory theatre-space, the production discovered Cornell seated at his white desk on a Map of the Constellations, including that of Cassiopeia, that curved upward to form a backdrop as well.

The work's title is inspired by one of Cornell's tiny boxes of cut-out images, mirrors, and small objects. Then there's also the Medici Slot-machine, among other intriguing Cornell titles and box-collages.

Cornell's uncut umbilical to his dominating mother, and his devotion to his impaired brother, are interspersed with images of his adventures in Manhattan, fleeing Queens for visits to museums and the movies: Fascination with Bogart & Bacall, among other filmic classics.

Is Anne Bogart making a Family Quote in using this footage? It does present an intrusive problem in this Cornell-Box of a production, however. With soundtrack and backdrop-filling black & white action, the film-clips tend to take over, distracting from the set-collage and the intent Cornell.

Otherwise, this is an enchanting tribute to, and exploration of the Intimate World of, Joseph Cornell. Barney O'Hanlon, who was also a fascinating Orson Welles in another SITI staging, is sweetly baffled as Cornell.

The SITI ensemble was, as usual, excellent in executing Anne Bogart's visions, inspired by Mee's texts, some taken from Cornell himself. SITI previously presented his Bobrauchenburgamerica at the Humana, in the same space. This duo of Mee-plays are part of an artist-tetralogy, to include Norman Rockwell and James Castle.

Neil Patel designed a kind of Cornell open-box for the set, with costumes by James Schuette.

 

Cross-Dressing Fund-Raiser in Centerville, USA: There's a Little Bit of Woman in Every Man, And Vice-Versa!

Initially, I was puzzled by playwright Jordan Harrison's decision to deal with Gender Issues in terms of putting on a French Revolution Period Melodrama in a small Midwestern town, with local men dressed as Women. It seemed totally implausible, and not only because his characters are not fully drawn, but, rather, close to small-town cinema-stereotypes.

The idea is that the show, staged by a French lady-director who favors masculine-attire, will raise money for the Elks [B. P.O.E. or Benevolent & Paternal Order of Elks]. The plain and pious Dorothy fears for the sanity of her husband, who longs to open his own theatre in the town. She plays the accordion badly, but teaches mastery of the instrument locally. Arts & Culture do not loom large here.

The time is Late Prohibition. Roosevelt & The New Deal are waiting in the wings, but the locals don't know it.

In the process of rehearsing the play, the panniered-skirts and powdered-wigs almost take over. And the men dressed-as-women in the ridiculous period drama gradually become the characters, so that in some scenes, they seem to have two identities. This is an interesting idea, but the script still needs work… As well as the characterizations.

Only after several of my critic-colleagues raved about the play and the production did I recall a long-forgotten similar event in my High Sierra hometown of Grass Valley.

A lady-director, ostensibly from Hollywood, was touring small California valley & foothill towns in the late 1930s, with wigs & dresses, offering to mount The Women, casting local Lions & Rotary gents as High Society Manhattan ladies for charity. In the event, it was hilarious to see the Family Doctor, the Methodist Minister, the Used-Car Salesman, and the Cal-Farm Insurance Agent wobbling on high heels in tight dresses.

Harrison says he was inspired by viewing some photos of Midwestern "Womanless Weddings," in which leading local men dressed up as brides, bridesmaids, even mothers-of-the-brides. These affairs were current from the 1920s through the 1950s, and some even survive today, apparently.

What were they thinking of? Were they, even then, trying to get in touch with Their Inner Woman?

As for men playing women in Clare Boothe's The Women, in the run-up to World War II, soldiers in training-camps also got into the act. In fact, LIFE Goes to a Party, a popular photo-feature in Life Magazine, took its cameras down to an Army Camp in Alabama to photograph enlistees backstage in bras and panties and onstage in the latest Manhattan High Fashions.

It was remarked how lovely some of the young men looked in feminine-attire. Even the playwright, married to the publisher of LIFE, Henry Luce, was impressed. This also was good publicity for her catty drama…

What she could not have known was what would become of young Infantry Riflemen who found they really liked wearing ladies-underwear. Army Policy was to arrest them and give them a Dishonorable Discharge. Usually under "Section 8," which indicated psychological "problems."

Fortunately for Harrison's local effeminate, young Casper, a one-way ticket to Chicago is only $5!

 

Vet Goes Berserk: Kills Wife & Kids on Christmas! Missed Opportunity in New Play: Six Years?

The Big Problem on the Home-Front, in the wake of World War II, wasn't Cross-Dressing. It was the inability of many Returning War-Heroes to adjust to their pre-war lives, jobs, and marriages.

Hardly a Holiday Season passed without a lurid headline such as: Vet Goes Bersek, Kills Wife & Kids on Christmas! It didn't seem to matter what Theatre of War they had served in: Europe or the Pacific.

Some who had survived the Bataan Death March, reduced to eating stray cats in Japanese Prison-Camps, when they could find them, were especially prone to violence against civilians and their own families.

Such a Troubled Vet would have made Sharr White's Six Years much more interesting and compelling. As the charming Mr. White seems almost too youthful to have served Overseas, in even the Vietnam Conflict, he may lack the Historical Perspective that living through the years 1945 through 1951 could have given him.

Your scribe just missed the Second World War, but the draft caught up with him for the Korean Police-Action, as it was called. It was not a War… But even then, no one knew what "Infrastructure" was, one of a number of references that seemed out of place in Six Years, at least to someone who wasn't born so late in time…

Although requests for almost every item on the mess-hall menu was preceded by: "Pass the fuckin' ------," The F-word was never used back home among civilians. Not even after Korea…

It's interesting to compare Six Years with Rose Franken's A Soldier's Wife, revived recently by Manhattan's Mint Theatre. Writing immediately after World War II, Franken showed the problems of a returned Vet who barely knows the Wife He Left Behind Him, who has now learned to cope for herself. Their walking-on-eggs adjustments possibly helped theatre-audiences of that time, notably matinée-ladies who didn't know how to deal with hero-husbands.

Maxwell Anderson wrote a play about Socrates, Barefoot in Athens, and he was about 2400 years too late to get the local patois right. Of course, if you must write about the Civil War, you can always get some verbal clues from The Red Badge of Courage. Or Walt Whitman's wartime diaries…

So, if you had no personal experience of the years 1939-1950, why would a troubled vet's problems have to begin in that time-frame? Rather than Post-Vietnam?

I can only guess that White's characters are involved in an actual family-situation to which he is in some way related. Even if only suffering in the aftermath?

White's Vet [Michael J. Reilly] has a distinct problem: You Can't Go Home Again. Instead of returning to his wife [Kelly Mares] and community, he has been wandering around the country for several years. She tracks him down. She is first seen in a wet raincoat.

After various family disputes and disasters, including the death of their only son in the army, for which she blames her damaged husband, it is he who tracks her down for reconciliation, entering in a wet raincoat.

This wet-raincoat image is my most vivid memory of Six Years, as the characters were not all that interesting or powerfully-drawn. This script has the whiff of a TV pilot about it, but it will be interesting to see what Sharr White can do with more compelling characters in a situation more immediate to his own experience.

 

Actor-Loser Goes Berserk: Strangles Chick in Tech, But She Revives To Goad & Gloat in Opener: Why oh Why oh Did She Ever Leave Ohio?

Theresa Rebeck's "The Scene."

By far the favorite New American Play of many of my colleagues was Theresa Rebeck's The Scene, staged by Rebecca Bayla Taichman. It was certainly ably acted, especially by Stephen Barker Turner as Charlie, a raging self-destructive unemployed actor. His bravura performance actually made the play seem more interesting than it reads on the page.

The action-spark is provided by the rear-end of a young blonde chick, looking out over Manhattan from what must be a luxury penthouse, but is, in fact, an elevator risen up from the floor of the Bingham Theatre.

Clea [Anna Camp] speaks in the Chic-rhythms of latter-day Valley Girls: Every sentence is upwardly inflected. The French also do this, but they can't help themselves: it's built into their spoken-language.

For younger American women, however, the effect is rather like floating a declarative-statement tentatively: If no one agrees, or someone argues against your statement, it was only a question, after all…

This can be maddening, especially coupled with "like" and "I mean," not to overlook "What you're really trying to say", but Clea is so cute, so pretty, so sexy, so suggestive that Charlie's lackluster buddy, Lewis [David Wilson Barnes] thinks he has a chance with her.

But she has her sights set, for the moment, on the Conquest of Charlie, although he's married to a plain but clever TV ad-producer, Stella [Carla Harting]: "Low-Calorie Pasta?" Get real…

Unfortunately for their marriage, she's not only paying the bills, but she catches him in their bed with Clea.

It was reported that, driven beyond endurance, Charlie killed Clea in the original version. And on the penthouse balcony. But, in tech, it was decided that she should survive his choking and arise to taunt him with her new role as personal assistant to his most hated Authority-Figure.

If he'd broken her neck, as Bush's Surveillance Agents do to an ordinary American woman in Jane Martin's Listeners, the play would have been Over.

But its production-life certainly is not over, and it's sure to be seen soon in New York, as was Rebeck's Omnium Gatherum, also premiered at the Humana Festival.

For me, the production's real strength was in the powerful out-of-control Charlie of Barker Turner.

But Camp's Clea was certainly annoying enough to earn at least a very sore throat, if not a broken-neck.

She says she's from Ohio. That conjured up memories of those other girls from Ohio, as in My Sister Eileen, by Ruth McKenney!

Theresa Rebeck's recycled Valley Girl is a long way off from Darlin' Eileen…

 

Natural Selection Not a New Idea in Theme-Park Dramas

After Hotel Cassiopeia, I enjoyed Eric Coble's Natural Selection the most of the varied Humana Festival productions. Both the physical-production itself, designed by Kris Stone, and the scripted-execution of the concept were inventive.

But, having recently seen at PS I22 a similar dramatization of essentially the same concept, based on the fictions of George Saunders, notably Pastoralia, the idea of Coble's play: a Theme-Park peopled with either imitation or Authentic Ethnics, placed on view for an Orwellian Future, completely homogenized and out-of-touch with the Historic Past, was not such an astonishing novelty.

Eric Coble's "Natural Selection."

But it did have much better Production-Values than are possible at PS 122. And it should surely have a promising life in Regional Theatre, dealing, as it does, with people who live, not in the Real World, but in some kind of Virtual Reality.

Some colleagues faulted Coble's script for apparent inconsistencies in what they perceived as the unseen, offstage world that the characters lived in, when not at home or at the Culture Theme Park's clinically sterile offices. I think they may have missed the point of his satire. Voltaire's Candide also has its charming inconsistencies…

This farcical Futurism was amusingly staged by Marc Masterson, Artistic Director of Actors Theatre of Louisville.

 

Low Features Rha Goddess, Author, Mystic, & Performer!

Rha Goddess in "Low."

This was a riveting mixture of Rap, Hip-Hop, and African-American insights into the states and problems of Mental Illness and Insanity, and the community's inability to deal with afflicted people. The program-materials are essential to a fuller understanding of the performed-content, however. Frankly, I was initially not quite sure what I was looking at, or understanding what I was hearing.

Rha Goddess deplores the stigmatization of people who suffer from Depression and even delusions. But what is to be done? She seems on course to explore the problems in a Goddess Trilogy, of which this appears to be Part One.

Choreographer Rennie Harris created a "meta-physical movement vocabulary to support her beatbox language and rhythms." This is the kind of program-note that is invaluable, as I was not clear about the performance's meta-physical movement's meaning.

 

How Long Is a Ten-Minute Play Anyway?

There was a time at the Humana Festival when the Ten-Minute Plays really tried to keep to that time-limit. But it is much easier to Write Long than it is to Write Short. Wasn't it Schiller, or was it Goethe?, who said: "I would have written you a much shorter letter, but I didnt have time…"

The best of the three plays on offer was Jane Martin's, and/or Jon Jory's, funny & frightening song-&-dance satire about US Government Surveillance of Ordinary Citizens without Warrants or Overview: Listeners.

"Listeners"

Eleanor [Melinda Wade] is astonished at the arrival of a Tweedledum & Tweeledee team [Mark Mineart & Jay Russell] of "Listeners," assigned to duty in her home. They have brought their suitcases with them, prepared to settle-in. They have enjoyed her sex-talk on the phone and look forward to other interesting phone-conversations.

In the murky background are what must be CIA Monitors on headphones, with the huge lurking shadow of what must be the Big Guy framed upstage.

Eleanor wonders whether the surveillance works both ways: Can she talk back to the Big Guy?

Assured she can, she unleashes such a bitter & passionate indictment of the various Lies & Disasters of the Administration that her personal Listeners are forced to strangle her and break her neck.

Jon Jory, former Artistic Director of Actors Theatre, may soon be on a No-Fly List or facing an IRS Audit, if he keeps on in this critical vein. He also staged this powerful satire.

Rolin Jones' Sovereignty, in contrast, deals with community-ability to ignore unpleasant possibilities in the houses next door. Three mailboxes front three doors. On stage-right, the happy householder fusses over her lawn & plants as letters spill out the mailbox. Some of them desperate pleas for help…

In the middle, the lady of the house receives a box of chocolates. At stage-left, three party-balloons hover over the mailbox. An obviously abused, starved little boy comes out.

Householder #1 offers the boy householder #2's chocolates. He runs off with all of them.

Noises of beatings and screaming come from House #3. When the father appears, the ladies note the balloons: the boy's birthday, perhaps? [They weren't invited.]

He immediately & savagely punctures all three balloons.

A Man's Home Is His Castle, after all…

Adam Bock's Three Guys and a Brenda deals with three construction-workers, the youngest getting up courage to compliment their female-foreman on her good-looks and ask for a date. The three guys are all played by actresses! Frank Deal directed, but this is no big deal.

 

Apprentice Showcase: Las Vegas Laid Bare in Neon Mirage: Lisa Kron, Liz Duffy Adams, Dan Dietz & Others Offer Mini-Visions

This collage of short plays mocking various aspects of Life in Las Vegas provides a thematic & design-integrated evening, or matinée, of comedic theatre. Lisa Kron's Montecore is especially inventive.

Currently on Broadway with her "not about me and my mother" comic exploration of Illness & Health, aptly titled Well, Kron evokes the mind-sets of two of Siegfried & Roy's Tigers the day after Montecore has attacked & savaged Roy before paying-customers.

Tiger 2: …What did he expect. I mean -- Hello! We're TIGERS.

This hilarious skit can certainly stand alone, as can most of the other playlets. But, for the Humana Festival, they were all framed by a glamorous MGM Grand musical spectacular. This should have special appeal for high-school & college theatre groups.

Among the other short Vegas Visions are another by Kron, Charity, Dan Dietz's Breaking Even & Dog Shot, Rick Hip-Flores' Air-Conditioning & The Odds Aren't Good, Julie Jensen's Don't Talk, Don't See & Lion Tongue, Liz Duffy Adams' Some Such Luck, plus Chay Yew's Imelda and Cher.

Before there was Downtown Vegas and the Strip, there was dusty dry desert. Who would have thought that Bugsy Siegal could save his life from a gangland wipe-out by thinking of Air-Conditioning to make the desert bloom? Rick Hip-Flores makes this hilarious. But eventually Bugsy was snuffed anyway…

Your scribe taught at Nevada Southern University in the mid-1950s, when the Strip was still mostly desert. Not a week went by that some Unfortunate, having Lost It All on the Tables or the Slots, drove out into the desert to commit suicide: Carbon-monoxide or a bullet. They didn't think to pawn the car!

Not funny at all, although suicide-attempts in Neon Mirage do comically misfire. But, way back then, it was also not so funny if some Loser broke into your apartment, looking for more loose-change to pump into the One-armed Bandits

Today, Vegas pushes itself as a Paradise of Family Entertainment. But for a Family-Values-Oriented group to check-in, Mom, Dad, and the Kids have to pass through the acres of slots to get to the registration-desk. The same applies for jaunts to the pool, the exercise-rooms, the cafeteria, and the show-theatres.

Surely this is not Family-Values Conditioning? To see pathetic old women, cigarettes dangling from their slack lips, as they dip into their cardboard cups for the last quarter, before boarding the "free" tour-bus back to Bakersfield.

But the Casino-Owners are not totally devoid of consideration for those Unfortunates addicted to Gaming, as it is now called, in preference to the detested "gambling." Often, along a back wall of one of a casino's restaurants, you may find a small box with printed warnings about the dangers of gaming, taken to excess, plus a phone-number you can call for counseling. If you still have a quarter left for that call… Before you put a gun to your temple.

 

After Ashley & Omnium Gatherum Great at Humana: But Both Bombed in New York, Whys & Wherefors?

As with any play-in-development that gets even a reading at the O'Neill Center in Waterford, CT, most of the Humana scripts produced in Louisville will turn up later in some sort of production in Manhattan. The Actors Theatre imprint does not, however, guarantee success.

I thought then, and still believe, that After Ashley is an impressive and witty satire of commercial exploitation of Family Tragedy. Nonetheless, it was a lackluster disaster as staged, cast, and designed at Manhattan's Vineyard Theatre.

The same fate awaited Theresa Rebeck's challenging End-of-Days Omnium Gatherum, crammed onto the small stage of the Variety Arts Theatre, one of New York's earliest Photoplay theatres. As a large dinner-table is the central and essential prop of this political & social satire, a tiny stage facing a tiny seating-space is the very last venue that should have been considered.

Oddly enough, Hotel Cassiopeia does need a small venue for its greatest effect. But it is exactly the kind of avant-garde experiment much beloved at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where both potential theatres are large. But better to see it at BAM, than not at all…

 

Speaking of Hotels: How About the New Museum Hotel?

Having just experienced a fascinating and luxurious Art-Museum boutique-hotel in Turin, Italy, your scribe was amazed to find a 21st Century counterpart opening on Louisville's Main Street, housed in a noble Victorian office-block.

This is the aptly-named 21 C Museum Hotel. Its Post-Modernist foyers, halls, galleries, chambers, restaurant, and even its rest-rooms are decorated with amusing and/or outrageous cutting-edge 21st Century artworks and Video-art.

How about a Chandelier that sings & dances? Or a long row of red plastic Penguins?

There are 91 rooms, plus 8 suites, 12-foot ceilings, 42" plasma TV screens, and IPods tuned to your favorite station. Regular rates are, gasp!, $209-$359 per night. But there's a weekend special: $119-$269.

[Phone: 502-217-6300; FAX: 502-217-6301; www.21cmuseumhotel.com]

Maybe next Humana Festival, I'll try the Weekend Special? If I were a Travel-Writer, as I once was, perhaps they'd extend Professional Press Courtesy?

 

On Departing, Take Some Bourbon, But Not a Slugger Bat!

As Downtown Louisville's formerly derelict, almost abandoned Main Street comes back to life with theatres, restaurants, museums, and galleries, one of the most popular tourist-attractions is the Louisville Slugger Museum, where you can watch the famous wooden bats turned on lathes.

You can also buy a tiny souvenir-bat. But this will be confiscated at the Louisville Airport, for fear you may use it to club the pilot into insensibility and personally fly the plane to Boise, Idaho.

Fortunately, as there are a lot of famous Bourbon Distilleries in the area, no one will confiscate your alcoholic-souvenirs. No one is going to get the pilot drunk, in order to take control of the plane and fly off to Moscow, Idaho…

Copyright Glenn Loney, 2006. No re-publication or broadcast use without proper credit of authorship. Suggested credit line: "Glenn Loney, New York Theatre Wire." Reproduction rights please contact: jslaff@nytheatre-wire.com.

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