Stage Review: 'How I Learned to Drive' at Off The Wall

I finally made it down to Off the Wall Productions in Little Washington the weekend before last. (That it took me so long to write this review suggests what it means to be semi-retired -- i.e., as busy as ever.) And I discovered that Off The Wall is an ambitious little art theater with a big appetite for challenging plays, witness its current show (current only through Saturday), "How I learned to Drive."

Context is a big part of it, of course. "How I Learned to Drive" wouldn't be as big a surprise staged in Pittsburgh, where you expect edgier subject matter. In fact, in Pittsburgh it was first staged by the Public Theater, not the most cutting-edge company in town. That was in 1999, during the regime of previous artistic director Eddie Gilbert, hard on the heels of its New York debut in early 1998.

But playwright Paula Vogel's theme, the sexual abuse of a girl by her uncle, 27 years her senior, and its effect on her life, is legitimately disturbing. And it's made even more disturbing, perversely enough, by being presented as such a comical, confiding, all-American family memory play, and using the whole gamut of possible metaphoric connections between two of the rites of maturity, learning to drive and sex.

(In the picture, Erika Cuenca as L'il Bit is at the right. The others are Allison Cahill, F.J. Hartland and Lissa Brennan, who play different roles but principally L'il Bit's aunt, grandpa and grandma. Click here for a picture of L'il Bit and Uncle Peck.)

Of course we like L'il Bit, now nearly 35 as she narrates her own story. But astonishingly, we rather like her Uncle Peck, too, even though we know right off that he has some far-from avuncular designs on her. But he seems more a chivalrous romantic than a pedophile, and he brings something appealing into L'il Bit's life, so it's easy enough for us to close our eyes to the seamy side and the potential effects of what he's up to.

His wife does that. As apparently often happens, she rather blames L'il Bit for attracting her husband. She doesn't want to call him on whatever he's doing -- she'd rather blame the victim and hope that her husband will come back to her eventually. In other words, she's a co-conspirator, if only by inaction.

L'il Bit herself is also guilty of downplaying Peck's abuse of her, if only in avoiding until the last minute her full revelation of what it was. But lest we wax censorious, we should notice that we're implicated, too, because, as I say, we've also wanted to make excuses for Uncle Peck.

Gradually we discover the costs that L'il Bit has hidden. At the end of the play, in re-living for us her first sexual encounter with Peck, when she was just 11, L'il Bit finally tells us that was "the last time I ever lived in my body." And that's even though, when she turns 18 (as she tells us from the vantage point of 17 years later), she breaks clear of him. But she does it only by dropping out of college and cutting herself off from her family, too. Now, almost twice as old as she was when she last saw him, she still suffers emotionally.

As this brief plot summary suggests, the play jumps all over time-wise, driving forward and then looping back, and then back again, the better to introduce us to the story from many angles, before finally making its full import clear. Along the way, there's plenty of humor, but it's often of the slightly queasy, rueful kind, such as the social consequences of L'il Bit's discomfort with her large breasts. We watch her memories of suffering in gym class, showing a self-consciousness that oddly mirrors Peck's.

There are clearly similarities between them, and not just because they share embarrassment over their hapless, trashy relatives. Just as he's addicted to liquor and young girls, even though he knows both are bad for him, so too she is addicted to him, as the most worldly guy around, even though she knows that even the circumscribed sexual relationship they develop is bad for her.

Erika Cuenca is a feeling, delicate actress who balances L'il Bit carefully on the thin line between insightful and obtuse, giving a very fine performance. Her bouts of apparent happiness are constantly shadowed by ominous clouds -- you yearn for her, even though you know it's not going to turn out well. All I find lacking is an early touch of the hurt that we know is festering, even though she hasn't told us about it.

As Peck, Ron Siebert matches Cuenca in delicacy. He doesn't have quite the scope for comedy that she does, and his performance lacks variety, but within its carefully circumscribed limits, it has a perverse heroism, freeing her at the end to seek herself in flight. We don't get inside Peck the way we do L'il Bit, but what the playwright and actor do show us is cautionary and deeply sad.

In addition to the two principles, the play's "Greek Chorus" (F.J. Hartland, Lissa Brennan and Allison Cahill) plays a variety of (mainly) dim-witted relatives, getting lots of laughs in the process. The firm, clarifying direction is by Linda Haston, and all the designers' work helps support the play.

Inevitably, there's rude language of different kinds, extended by double-entendre. Pedophilia, L'il Bit tells us, "has nothing to do with bicycling." This isn't a play to take young students too. For that reason alone, it's indeed a surprise to see it in Little Washington, even though that's a college town.

It's even more of a surprise to find such an ambitious little theater, using Equity actors and staging plays with polish and professionalism, in an intimate theater carved out of an old house. I say I just "discovered" Off The Wall, as though that were somehow to my credit, when it's actually been there right along, for a year. I've been meaning to get there to see what they can do, and I'm glad I finally made it. Thanks to artistic director Virginia Wall Gruenert and managing director Hans Gruenert, Washington apparently has a capable small professional theater in its midst. 

For the final performances (Fri.-Sat. 7:30 p.m.), call 724-873-3576 or visit www.insideoffthewall.com. Off The Wall is at 147 N. Main St. in Little Washington.

'Parade': musical tragedy powerfully realized at Point Park

This is the fourth time I've seen "Parade" -- Broadway, the tour (at CLO), CAPA and now Point Park. But it's still a shocker.

"Phantom of the Opera," "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and others aside, the default mode of Broadway musicals is comedy, but "Parade" is firmly in the tragic camp. And it's not just the personal tragedy of Leo Frank, the young northern Jew lynched in 1915 Georgia, but a gut-wrenching history of deeply institutionalized racism, stirred up by politicians and media for their own profit and aggrandizement.

It is, in short, a shocking story of social dysfunction. Frank was supposedly lynched for murder (a murder he never committed), but his real crime was being Jewish and a Yankee. As the local law enforcement officials say, the public outrage over the 1913 murder of 13 year-old Mary Phagan wouldn't be satisfied with railroading a black person, the usual recourse: this occasion required something extraordinary, so the supposedly wealthy, alien Jewish Yankee was the perfect scapegoat.

As Alfred Uhry's book and Jason Robert Brown's lyrics and music make clear, "Parade" is the blood-chilling story of a society stuck emotionally in the past and performing a double revenge, on Jews for a 2,000 year-old judicial murder and on the North for a 50 year-old civil war.

That festering resentment is clear in the musical's great opening number, "The Old Red Hills of Home," which has the inevitable resonance of a soaring civic hymn. But it works like "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in "Cabaret," another wonderful song which gradual curdles as we realize that the patriotism it expresses is fed by virulent racism.

So the parade with which "Parade" begins is a double-edged sword, a popular celebration which reveals how populism can be the refuge of scoundrels. Even knowing the show as well as I do, I was startled to find myself sitting through Act 1 white-knuckled with anger at the racist Southern resentment that hurtles Frank through a show trial toward death.

Act 2 offers some respite as, against all odds, the musical turns into an improbable love story. Under unimaginable pressure, the repressed, embittered Frank begins to open up to his Southern Jewish wife, Lucille, and they begin to discover each other on the brink of his unavoidable fate.

It's not a comfortable experience. But there's a lot to be said for a show that can stir passion so deeply. Out of this ugly material, Brown, Uhry and Hal Prince (co-conceiver and original director) create a powerful dramatization of the seamy side of American self-conceit.

And they have worthy collaborators in guest director Michael Rupert, such skilled creators as the Playhouse designers and music director Douglas Levine and a large and talented Point Park University cast.

Point Park says they couldn't get the rights to the revised 2000 tour version, so they used the 1998 Broadway text. But I notice that they've adopted some of the later cuts. Whatever that involved, Levine must have had his hands full just in adapting a full Broadway score so it could be played by the current orchestra of 11. And Rupert shows the same skills he exercised in Point Park's "Ragtime," using a huge cast to tell a difficult story.

I'm sorry that this is too late in a run that began Feb. 27 and then took a week off for spring break for a full-scale, traditional review. But it's not too late for you to see a remarkable, handsomely staged musical of a very different kind.

"Parade" still has four performances in the Playhouse's big Rockwell Theater (Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2 and 8 p.m. and Sun. 2 p.m.). And Point Park makes it easy: the usual ticket prices are $18-$20, but there are student discounts, and for the Saturday matinee, anyone can pay whatever they want ($1 minimum).

-- Post-gazette senior theater critic Christopher Rawson.    

For more on "Parade," follow these links:

Preview of the Point Park production, Feb. 29, 2009.

Controversy at CAPA over ‘Parade,' June 12, 2005.

Interviews with Jason Robert Brown and Hal Prince about the revised tour, Aug. 10, 2000. 

Review of the tour at CLO with composer Brown conducting, Aug. 16, 2000. 

On the Aisle: Gene Collier, Naomi Wallace, Bob Qualters, Off the Wall and the world goes round

So much happened last weekend, I haven't yet been to the Public's "And the World Goes 'Round" (already reviewed by Sharon Eberson), which I'm looking forward to a lot, because ever since I saw its 1991 off-Broadway premiere I've considered it the gold-standard of revues, packed with juicy-witty Kander & Ebb gems that aren't as well known as their great numbers from "Cabaret" and "Chicago."

And I'm looking forward to Mark Southers' "I Nipoti," the third in his comic Culture Clash series, in which black Americans get entangled with other cultures -- here, Italian. I've been told by a well-known performer who might not have been speaking on the record (but she knows her comedy, having performed for many years with Don Brockett, hint, hint), that this is the best of the Culture Clash shows -- and she was in the first one. That was "Hoodwinked," in which an elderly Jewish couple moved back to the Hill." The second, "James McBride," in which a black American wins an Irish poetry contest, has already gone on to successful productions in other cities.

I did go to "Barnum" at Keystone Oaks High School (my story appears Thursday in South), where I learned where the school name came from. The school district is cobbled together from Dormont (that's the key - "door-mont," get it?), Castle Shannon (the stone) and Green Tree (the oaks) -- and yet the school is actually in Mt. Lebanon. The things you learn, that you can't imagine you didn't already know.

I also went down to Little Washington with Bill and Ruth Ann Molloy and Richard Rauh (he driving, which is excitement enough for any night) to the professional Off the Wall Productions to see a fine cast led by Erica Cuenca and Ron Siebert in Paula Vogel's disturbing "How I Learned to Drive," and afterwards we were invited by generous producer Hans Gruenert to crash the opening night party (fortunately Richard stuck to his usual diet Coke). And at the Playhouse I saw Point Park's solid version of the Leo Frank musical tragedy, "Parade." Reviews of both these should appear here online in a day or two.

There was also Bob Qualters' "Autobiographical Mythologies: a Life in Art," a wonderful big show of new work at the handsome new (to me) Borelli-Edwards Galleries in Lawrenceville, which had the added attraction of gathering several Post-Gazette friends. ("Autobiographical mythologies" is a great title that could be appropriated by any of us geezers.) 

(Here's Bob's memory of Downtown, 1948 -- I hadn't known Pittsburgh had one of those smoke-blowing billboards, like the one I used to love in Times Square.)

I noted a Grey Box Theatre beside the Borelli-Edwards, a new performance space I hadn't seen before. And then that night was commandeered by the NCAA basketball draw, which is the kind of thing you can let happen when you're semi-retired. All of this counts as theater -- civic theater, having to do with the surge of the seasons and the rhythms of life -- as I explained in my Steelers comments a month back.

Stand-up is theater, too. This weekend I finally caught up with the comic stand-up of long-time PG sports columnist and all-around wit, Gene Collier, at the Cultural Trust's Cabaret Theater. But first . . . .

NAOMI WALLACE (here this week)

The Kentucky playwright (and screenwriter and poet) whose plays include the marvelous "One Flea Spare" (Playhouse Rep, 2005) and "Things of Dry Hours" (Public Theater, 2004) is in Pittsburgh this week, brought here by Susan Smith (once the very smart theater critic for the Pittsburgh Press), who's teaching a seminar in Wallace's work for the Pitt English Dept. As Tony Kushner has said, Wallace is one of our few playwrights (he's another) writing about big issues of "class and oppression, alienation and exploitation."

Friday at 4 p.m. in 501 Cathedral of Learning, Wallace will give a public talk on "Big History from the Small Self: Imagination and Writing for the Theatre." It's a subject that interests me a lot, not least because of its relevance to August Wilson, who also wrote modern history plays. And that night she's going to CMU to see a workshop production of "Things of Dry Hours."

I'll get to see Wallace again, soon, or at least her work: Her "The Hard Weather Boating Party" is part of this year's 33rd Humana Festival of New American Plays, and I'll get to see it on "special visitors weekend" (formerly Critics Weekend, back when there were more critics), April 3-5.

GENE COLLIER DOES STAND UP

I can't believe I've never seen Gene do stand-up before, but first, I have to tell you right off that he's performing this week at the Improv at the Waterfront in Homestead (412-462-5233) as an opening act for Billy Gardell (Thurs. 8 pm, Fri. 8 & 10, Sat. 7 & 9, Sun. 7). I'm not up on Gardell, but Gene calls him "the great Billy Gardell, the best touring comic of the new American century (via Swissvale, 'Yes Dear' and 'My Name is Earl')."

And in any case, the opening act is pure Pittsburgh curmudgeon, but not just that. If you've been reading Gene's columns all these years, you know you can read him just for the pleasure of the deadpan-ironic style. I recall a friend once quoting from Gene's All Star Game story, "The National League went to the ninth having nursed a 2-1 lead long enough to have brought it to puberty." His annual cliché of the year commentaries give a good sense of his style in person (and also provided one segment of Saturday's show). I just went back and re-read his Trite Trophy column for 2007, and I'm still laughing.

If you recall Gene's forays into political commentary -- and his preemptive strikes against media idiocy, of which his rants about sportspeak and triteonics are examples -- you know he also can muster up the principled anger that is the serious satirist's chief armor. Like any satirist, he has (or convincingly feigns) a deep innocence, which is to say, a sharp moral sense, however camouflaged by good-old-boyishness, that insists we can do better.

It's a tonic to hear him rant. Even if you don't share all his antagonisms, it's good to know someone cares enough to zero in on folly. Call it the satiric comedy of disappointed idealism. Or maybe I'm the fool to take it so seriously. No, I don't think so. You can't help but like a guy who uses the word "nettlesome" without affectation.

It's funny stuff. I won't repeat any of his riffs, whether on Irish music, "legally drunk," futility infielder, etc., etc. because he claims he has only so much material and he may use it all again this week. I hope so.

Saturday, his opening act was Bill Crawford, a bracingly rude comic, most of whose stuff won't bear transcribing on a respectable website like this. You hadda be there.

By the way, this Saturday's late night show at the Cabaret is the monthly Pittsburgh Pundits on "It's the Economy, Stupid," featuring John McIntire and Gab Bonesso, with panelists Bill Peduto, Mark DeSantis and Rob Rogers. 

Christopher Rawson on Horton Foote and Gilbert & Sullivan; ShowPlane offers Broadway On Sale, May 6-10

Horton Foote

The sensitive, prolific and surprisingly tough Texas playwright died last Wednesday, age 92. I suppose Horton Foote was about as close as an America playwright has gotten to Chekovian -- his comi-tragic dramas set in small town Texas have a similar feeling of found-drama, of the mundane revealed to be transcendent. He doesn't match Chekhov for incisiveness, of the huge depths revealed in the day-to-day, but who does?

A better, American parallel might be August Wilson. Foote's nine-play "Orphans' Home Cycle" is the only such extended achievement I'm aware of by a major American playwright that can bear any serious comparison to Wilson's more expansive 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle. Of course Foote was blessed with a far longer career than Chekhov or Wilson, who both took a while to discover their true vocation and then died far too soon.

(This recent picture of Horton Foote was taken by Ross Taylor of the Harftord Courant.) 

Foote also had time for another substantial career as a successful writer of screenplays. He was a wonderful American writer. His "Dividing the Estate," just revived on Broadway, which I admired in my December review, is just one of the plays we look forward to appreciating more fully in the years ahead.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him a couple of times in 1988, when the Pittsburgh Public Theater staged the world premiere of his "The Habitation of Dragons," set, like most of his plays, in fictional Harrison, Texas, based on his own hometown, Wharton. I had met him at a theater critics convention in Houston that May, and he came to Pittsburgh in September to work on "Habitation," in which his daughter, Hallie, played a lead, as she often did in his plays. Looking back, I see it had a huge cast of 19, nearly half of them local (including David Butler, Doug Reese, Bill Mott, Bill Thunhurst and Ben Tater).

I don't think "Habitation" had a very active career thereafter, but it did become a TNT movie in 1992. My most vivid memory, however (as I wrote in a column at the time), was discovering that Horton Foote and my father, Richard Hart, had studied acting together in the early 1940s; that my father had been in one of Foote's very first plays, as he was discovering he was a playwright; and that he had even met me as a baby, in the brief period when my parents were still together. You can imagine how welcome I found his admiring memories of the father I never knew, who died when I was nine.

While "Habitation" was running, Horton and his wife Lillian came to lunch at our house, and we all sat around the fireplace and ate Mary's delicious carrot soup. What a gracious couple they were. But for all his gentleness and gentility, he certainly had stamina, to survive for so long, through fertile periods and dry, in theater and movies, and continue to write so well.

G&S

Here's another personal reminiscence (maybe this is proof that I'm better off semi-retired). Seeing the Pittsburgh Savoyards' latest version of "Iolanthe" (review in tomorrow's Weekend section), I had occasion to reflect on my long affection for Gilbert and Sullivan. It's sort of an anomaly, since my theatrical enthusiasms often run to sterner stuff. But I do have a decided taste for silliness, and in the case of G&S, it started very early.

To the best of my recollection, the first professional stage production I ever saw was the D'Oyly Carte tour of "The Mikado" in Providence, R.I., in about 1951, with Martyn Green as Ko Ko.

And a couple of years later, I saw my handsome older cousin, Clay Hart, play one of the Dragoon Guards officers in "Patience" at Moses Brown School. Clay went on to be a country-western singer and star on the Lawrence Welk show, an unusual fate for a New Englander, but I'm sure I never admired him so much as in his high school G&S show. (The picture shows the three Dragoon Guards in a professional 1938 production.)

Maybe it's because of him and Martyn Green that I've been a fan of G&S for more than a half-century. There are hundreds of shows I've seen in recent years that I can't recall at all, but I can still summon up images of those two, so long ago. Or maybe I'm a G&S fan more because of the operettas' historical arcana, Gilbert's wit and Sullivan's melodies. I've seen all 13 surviving G&S shows at least once and 50-some productions in all, of which I've reviewed about three dozen for the PG.

Thanks to the Savoyards, now in their 70^th season, for feeding my addiction.

Broadway on Sale, May 6-10

It's time to sign up for the PG's 89^th ShowPlane, which flies to Broadway, May 6-10. Included are air, New York transfers, four musicals ("9 to 5," "West Side Story," "Billy Elliot," "Guys and Dolls"), Marriott Marquis Hotel, welcoming dinner, post-show discussions led by senior theater critic Chris Rawson, guides and optional extras, all "stimulus priced" at the lowest level in five years. Click here for more details, or email crawson@post-gazette.com or call 412-441-3131.   

On the Aisle: Rob Marshall's ladies, Pitt vs. CMU, cognition 'n'at

STAR POWER: Did anyone register that three of the star actresses presenting the actress Oscars, plus the best supporting actress winner, are all to be featured in Rob Marshall's upcoming film of the musical "Nine"? They're Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard and Penelope Cruz -- quite a bevy of beauty and talent for Rob's film, due out in late November. But that isn't all: his other female stars are Judi Dench, Kate Hudson and Stacy Ferguson. And Guido Contini, the man around whom all these women circulate, is being played by no less than Daniel Day-Lewis.

Shooting finished in London before Christmas, with additional shooting in Italy now complete, and Rob, his partner John DeLuca and others (how many does it take?) are now editing back on Long Island. You can find more credits on iMdb.com, but they're still incomplete.

NOTE TO PITT STUDENTS (CMU and POINT PARK, TOO): A good friend who's an undergrad in the Pitt Theater Dept. reports that some students thought I dissed them in last week's post (Feb. 26) by saying they weren't as talented as those at CMU.

Well, whether or not that's true, I didn't say it. In discussing CMU's "London Cuckolds" and Pitt's "Angels in America, Part 1," I said: "The Pitt undergraduates aren't generally as talented or well-trained as those at CMU, because Pitt's theater major is a liberal arts program, while CMU's is a professional conservatory. But these Pitt students honor the play with their work ... " (you can scroll down below and read the whole context, if you care).

Nothing shameful in what I said. After all, CMU scours the country to stock its acting program; so, to a lesser extent, does Point Park; Pitt's program is different. But it goes without saying that at any given time Pitt's best student actors might be comparable to those at CMU or Point Park. The real underlying issue is the extent to which these three programs don't know each other, even given their close proximity. My impression is that theater students usually don't go see the other schools' shows, although exposure to as much theater as possible ought to be a valuable part of any training. They should. You never know when you're going to lean something -- or get a fresh perspective on yourself.

SPEAKING OF STUDENTS: The August Wilson course I'm teaching this term in the Pitt English Dept. has gotten a grant from the Dean to help subsidize a trip to New York to see a late-March preview of the Lincoln Center revival of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." Interestingly, my class includes some cross-registrations from CMU, making it a small beachhead of inter-college collaboration.

ACADEMICS YET AGAIN: Even though I could only dip in and out, last weekend's Symposium on Cognitive Studies at Pitt proved fun and enlightening. As I said in advance, I didn't have much idea what Cognitive Science is all about, but the little I do suggests that it's a natural fit for theater studies. At the simplest, these theories of cognition argue that meaning is embodied -- that is, centered in the body -- and that language, including metaphor and even so-called abstract thought, arises out of the experience of the body, not from some disembodied, abstractly-reasoning brain.

This may be controversial in philosophy, but it's what theater people have long known -- that you have to locate emotion and thought and every kind of speech in the body for it to be persuasive on stage. You have to embody it. The speechless body can be far more expressive than bodyless speech (Beckett's attempts at pure language notwithstanding). Note how often we quite naturally speak of a body "speaking" to us - I don't think that's just a metaphor. And physically, of course, speech is impossible without the body.

There was also a lot of discussion of images. To one trained in literature, this is practically a tautology: naturally images depend on bodily knowledge (the senses) -- that's what they're all about.

So now I've got some new ideas to ponder and books to read. I want to thank the three members of the panel I moderated, John Lutterbie (Stony Brook U.), Amy Cook (Indiana U., the one actually in Indiana) and Rhonda Blair (Southern Methodist) for making it so easy for a layman. (That's how they run in the picture, starting with me on the left.)

And thanks also to Doug Mertz, who played such a vivid Roy Cohn in "Angels" and who turned up early Saturday morning to add an articulate actor's point of view to the discussion.   

August Wilson contest, three high school students heading from Pittsburgh to Broadway

Although conceived in Pittsburgh, it was born at True Colors Theatre Company in Atlanta. But the August Wilson Monologue Competition returned Sunday night to the playwright's home city. At the Pittsburgh Playhouse of Point Park University, three high school students were chosen from 19 finalists to go on to represent Pittsburgh in the national finals at Broadway's August Wilson Theater on April 27, the playwright's birthday.

The winner was Carter Redwood (CAPA), who has already had plenty of stage experience at Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre and elsewhere. Imari Payne (West Mifflin High School) and Laneece Patterson (CAPA) were first and second runners-up. Each received cash prizes and will compete on Broadway against regional winners from Atlanta and New York City. The alternate is Dezmick Matthews (Westinghouse High School), who came in fourth and also received an award from the August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

(The picture, left to right: Hilda Wilis, True Colors education consultant; Todd Kreidler; Laneece Patterson; John Amplas; Carter Redwood; Bill Nunn; Imari Payne.) 

The competition was conceived here in two senses. First, of course, came August Wilson, native of the Hill District, nine of whose Pittsburgh Cycle of 10 plays, each set in a different decade of the 20^th century, are set on the Hill. Then came the Shakespeare Monologue and Scene Contest, begun at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1995 by education director Rob Zellers and now in its 15^th year. A former staffer at the Public, Todd Kreidler, went on to become Wilson's dramaturg and friend. Now a playwright, he is also associate artistic director at True Colors to artistic director Kenny Leon, who directed the last three Wilson plays on Broadway.

Leon and Kreidler began the Wilson contest in Atlanta in 2007, using the Public's Shakespeare contest as a model. Last year, they expanded it to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. This year it involves Atlanta, Pittsburgh and New York.

The Pittsburgh contest is organized by Point Park's Conservatory of Performing Arts and its Bill Nunn Theatre Outreach Project, run by actor Nunn and actor/director John Amplas. This year's program extended only to CAPA, West Mifflin and Westinghouse. But the Shakespeare Contest started small, too, and now regularly draws more than 1,000 annual entrants from all over western Pa., which is probably why the Public passed on its chance to organize the Wilson contest, too.

Point Park's Rockwell Theater proved a lively venue for an audience mainly of the contestants' family and friends. In future years, as word gets out, it should be thronged.

This year's judges were Lynn-Hayes Freeland of KDKA; John Shepard, chair of Point Park theater; Mark Clayton Southers of Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre; Sala Udin, an actor, longtime friend of Wilson's and CEO of Coro Center for Civic Leadership; and yours truly. Support was provided by Point Park, the Multicultural Arts Initiative and the Pittsburgh and Heinz Foundations.

The kids were great.

They were black and white, male and female, short and tall. Of the 19 performances, five were of Rose's great, angry speech to Troy in Act 2 of "Fences," and three were of Mollie's dismissive view of men in "Joe Turner." The others were spread widely. Still, I hope in the future the contest expands to include scenes, in order to multiply the Wilson excerpts the students can explore.

And, now, on to Broadway. There, the finalists will attend workshops and go see the Lincoln Center revival of "Joe Turner." The three national winners will be offered Point Park scholarships worth $10,000, $7,000 and $5,000.