Tagged: humana festival of new american plays

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Well, now a more subjective study of dreams. It comes from the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. The festival was founded by Actors Theatre of Louisville. And each year, that theater commissions a new work for its company of apprentice actors. This year's show, a series of three one-act plays, is called "Sleep Rock Thy Brain."

Erin Keane of member station WFPL got a front row seat.

Playwright Mallery Avidon had an unconventional upbringing. As a kid and young teen she lived, on and off, in an ashram -- the same ashram that later cropped up as a setting in Elizabeth Gilbert's nonfiction book "Eat Pray Love," later made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Avidon mines those experiences in her engaging autobiographical play, "O Guru Guru Guru or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you," an attempt to reconcile several complicated, competing emotions about contentment, identity and spirituality.

Playwright Mallery Avidon mines her unconventional childhood for her new play, “O Guru Guru Guru, or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you.”

"Part of that unconventional upbringing has to do with the ashram that Elizabeth Gilbert goes to in the book 'Eat Pray Love,' that Julia Roberts goes to in the movie 'Eat Pray Love.' The play is an investigation of the way that unconventional spirituality affected my life," says Avidon.

As the curtain rises on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Appropriate," a rattling chorus of 13-year cicadas fills the Pamela Brown Auditorium. Far from a gentle nocturne, the sound swells with the pregnant heat of a southern summer night, conjuring images of rattling bones. Low lights reveal a man and a younger woman slipping through an open window into the living room of a plantation house that had, to be kind, seen better days.