Perspectives / Lawrence Devine Lawrence Devine recently retired from more than 30 years as a theatre critic for the Detroit Free Press. He also sat on the Pulitzer Prize nominating jury for drama and was chairman of executive committee of the American Theater Critics Association. Way back at the dawn of the 1980s, before God appeared to me driving a gleaming all-white 18-wheeler with the words “Resurrection Express” painted on the side in letters of flame, I’d never heard of Jane Martin, or the Pamela Brown Auditorium, or Victor Jory’s boy, Jon, and I had seen precious few plays about used car salesmen who ate at a place called the Pleased to Meet You, Meat to Please You Steakhouse, or plays that imparted such dignity, hot blood and compassion to women, the American landowner, the brave or desperate, the loveless and always the hapless and funny. Here are brave and hapless and funny and female in one play. In 1989, in a Jane Martin cracker comedy about a crooked promoter and his Econoline van-load of lady wrestlers, a weary combatant sighs: “I got no skills, an armed robbery conviction and a sick dog, so, c’mon, let’s wrestle.” The rasslers in Cementville (pronounced, of course, “CEE-mentville”) on tour in the boonies eat stuff like green beans “that got so much cooking fat they keep slipping out of my mouth.” Out of all those festivals, there are countless examples like this that stick in the memory of the once-a-year visitor from Up North. (Often the visitors themselves in the polyglot festival weekend crowd stick in the memory too. Especially one from way farther Up North: the Finnish person from 1986 whose name was Finn Persson.) It is a personal treat to forage back over more than twenty years and mentally live through them again. In Detroit we did not have a Susan Kingsley or the first serious play about abortion (Keely and Du) or the recurring theatrical wildman like Eddie Levi Lee (Tent Meeting) or the high-testosterone Harry Crews who wrote of sister-in-law Gaye Nell’s banana pudding, Dr.Pepper and “corn whisky that don’t do nothin’ except make men leave home and act sorry.” Like as not, Finn Persson did not have them where he came from, either. Instantly rises up the indelibly detailed vision, for example, of the young, brilliant Kathy Bates padded heavily with her legs wrapped in mud-colored ACE bandages, wearing a godawful hair net and wash dress, flopped on a trailer porch in a swaybacked maroon couch gabbing conversationally about murdering an escaped convict with a shotgun. Or the ineffable Susan Kingsley. When she died in 1984, on an operating table of an Athens, Ga. hospital after an auto wreck on icy roads near there, her obituary said truthfully that whether the Kentucky actress was in red-clay legends of the hill people or unexpectedly beautiful in modern drama, “every critic with an ear for the genuine fell in love with her.” It is joy in one’s profession, not nostalgia, that brings back the image of Kingsley as an Ozark barmaid at the End of the World Cafe in Swop or the dieting society woman in Chocolate Cake who said to a nervous chubbo: “Honey, I’ve been known to cut a Sara Lee cheesecake with my car keys in midtown traffic.” Now, come to think of it, it was not God who appeared to me in that late spring, driving that hotted-up trailer truck, it was Susan Kingsley. She was at the wheel of a highballing Mack diesel, as a Dakotah Indian princess who spoke Phoenician and practiced menstrual seclusion in a tent on the northern badlands. Man and boy, I’ve seen some 4,000 plays and I never have seen another one that had anybody speaking Phoenician and driving a Mack truck, and especially not practicing any menstrual seclusion in a tent near Sioux Falls. Who was in the “Resurrection Express” was somebody else: a waitress in an all-nude truck stop who hitched a ride toward salvation but was dumped in Laramie, Wyo., outside a pizza parlor owned by two Koreans. Early in that story, at any rate, we festival-goers believed redemption was at hand because Jane Martin always comes up with something. The Actors Theatre of Louisville and Jon Jory have delighted us visitors every spring since 1977. Annually we come, though some of us cordially cuss Jory and his devil-friends for routinely scheduling this event – in Kentucky, of all states – during the final games of the NCAA basketball championships. My most personal responses to the work of the Humana Festival have been the exhilaration of its comedies, the voices being usually of the South or Southwest, which is territory rarely covered in theatrical markets northward of 316 W. Main St. Granted, there stays in one’s heart the tenderness of the snowy-haired widow in Martin ’s Talking With or the boldly autobiographical (by Susan Miller) My Left Breast. (This one wrapped up many of that season’s emotional concerns in a cancer patient’s one speech: “I’m a one-breasted, menopausal, lesbian, bisexual, Jewish mom. I’m in!’’ Typical of the frantic Humana Festival schedule, this play was at 10 a.m.) But trust the festival to remember to leaven our daily anxieties with humor carefully spun. Well, most of it is careful: a certain rude group of festival veterans greet each other with the words “Gringo Planet” and then laugh like idiots, the allusion being to a 1987 play in which aliens turned green. For native American humor, the festival has discovered rascals like Kevin Kling who wrote a play about a Minneapolis bus or Murphy Guyer who described a country kid who cut off his toe with his lawnmower and said, “Durn, I wisht I had a nickel for every time that’s happened.” By Sunday afternoon, three days of nine or ten plays, of running back to the hotel to catch a nap between shows, tends to be exhausting. It also is inspirational, a tonic for the back-home blues. Annually, we’ve found ourselves at the birthing of new directions, new ways of looking at our lives, new impulses toward beauty or tragedy or understanding. It has been said that, at its best, the festival is the thermometer of American theatre: it tests the heat of the American playwrights’ new work like no other apparatus. The Humana Festival is also mother: it sends her one- and two-act children all over the U.S. Imagine where the largest number of festival plays have been produced. Dramaturg Michael B. Dixon says it probably is New York. All right, imagine where the second-largest number of festival plays, post-Louisville, have been produced. Clue: It’s near East Lansing. Alert Detroit producers in the past twenty-one years have staged no fewer than twenty-six festival plays in thirty-four different productions, spread over at least eighteen theatres. The trend really got rolling in the early Eighties and it soon became clear that Detroit had a serious interest in what Jory and ATL were doing down there on the banks of the Ohio. The Detroit-area artists picked up on the severe and the giddy, ranging among Execution of Justice, Keely and Du, My Sister in This House (four times) and Getting Out to Zara Spook and Other Lures, Vital Signs and my all-time favorite, Tent Meeting, with the beserk evangelist and his baby, Jesus O. Tarbox. Statistics are a little vague on this, but few (in Michigan) doubt that another U.S. theatre has produced as many festival graduates as Detroit’s Theatre Company, which has staged nine of them. Its leader, David Regal, also happens to be America’s second leading producer of premieres by Jane Martin. Regal has produced one. Jon Jory has produced all the rest; but, knowing of Regal’s affinity for Louisville work, Jory invited him in 1992 to introduce Martin’s Criminal Hearts, which then opened in April that year in his 150-seat house to favorable reviews. Not many people know this.