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Atlanta takes Humana
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When playwright Ken Weitzman was kicking around ideas for a new play, he started thinking about diseases with fancy names and elusive meanings. Things like chronic fatigue syndrome and Alzheimer’s.
Working on his master’s at the University of California in San Diego, he sent a group of actors out to do interviews and create monologues on the topic of health and healing. And then his wife told him about the Hebrew myth of the Lamed- vavniks, which contends that there are 36 people on Earth whose job it is to carry the pain and suffering of the rest of the world.
“If any one of them is lacking,” Weitzman says, “then the world is in trouble.”
All of this material, plus other ideas about science and spirituality, became the grist for his new play, “The As If Body Loop,” which is getting its world premiere at the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky.
As fortune would have it, the Long Island, N.Y., native and his wife, Amy Cook, moved to Atlanta last August, both to teach at Emory University. And when Humana artistic director Marc Masterson decided to produce “Body Loop,” he sent it to Susan V. Booth, artistic director of Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. Booth was so impressed that she replaced herself as director of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” (on the Alliance’s Hertz Stage through April 8) and got on a plane to Louisville.
“Ken’s play is on one level a comedy about a dysfunctional family,” Booth says. On a moral level, she says, it’s “about the cost of caring for another person vs. the cost of not caring.”
The title refers to a theory, developed by University of California neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, that a person who witnesses pain will have a response similar to that of the person feeling the pain. “It seemed to me in a way the scientific proof of empathy,” says the 37-year-old Weitzman, whose other plays include “Arrangements” and “Spin Moves.” Before becoming a full-time playwright, Weitzman made sports documentaries, including a history of NASCAR.
“Body Loop” — about a deathly sick social worker named Sarah and her family — has gotten good reviews at Humana, where it runs through April 7.
Writing in the Louisville Courier-Journal, critic Judith Egerton says: “This hopeful, frequently funny two-act play … moves with amusing snap under the kinetic direction of Susan V. Booth.” Egerton also called the play “one of the more polished works of the festival.”
The other full-length world premieres at this year’s Humana are Craig Wright’s “The Unseen,” Carlos Murillo’s “Dark Play or Stories for Boys,” Naomi Iizuka’s “Strike-Slip” and Sherry Kramer’s “When Something Wonderful Ends” — plus “Batch: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle,” a collaborative effort by Alice Tuan, Whit MacLaughlin and New Paradise Laboratories.
More information about the Humana Festival can be found online at www.actorstheatre.org or by calling 1-800-428-5849.
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