Lisa Dillman's bluntly-titled Ground, the third full-length offering in this year's 34th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is breathtaking in every way -- writing, plot, acting, direction and presentation.
Set on and around the U.S.-Mexican border in southern New Mexico, the play puts a human face on insurmountable family and community suffering stemming from efforts to control immigration. Never preachy or didactic, Dillman's illuminating work, incisively directed
by ATL artistic director Marc Masterson, invests its American and Mexican characters with such distinctive personalities that their intertwined histories and destinies would be a natural fit for one of those panoramic generation-spanning novels.
Twenty years after she and her now dead mother left him, her father -- much cherished by his workers, both legal and undocumented -- has died, leaving his pecan farm to never-married daughter Zelda Preston (Jennifer Engstrom in a powerful performance).
Back in Fronteras, she must diplomatically address the concerns of her father's aggrieved longtime helper Chuy Gallegos (sympathetically portrayed by Ricardo Gutierrez), who believes he is owed a part of the land for his faithful service. She also is drawn to her old Mexican-American boyfriend Carl Zelaya (Dale Rivera, outstanding), now a conflicted Border Patrol officer married to bitter Zelda-hating Angie (scorchingly acted by Sandra Delgado), whose beloved aunt was deported.
That makes it impossible for Tia Rosita to be on hand as midwife when Angie's six-months-pregnant younger sister Ines (the extraordinary Liza Fernandez, emoting hysterically as a kind of Hispanic Butterfly McQueen -- and that's a compliment) gives birth to her firstborn while her husband is serving in Iraq.
Skulking around them all is good ole boy Cooper Daniels (Rob Riley, persuasively oily and ruthless with an occasional redeeming quality), who has his eye on Zelda's farm; her father owed him money for a well he financed. Daniels also heads up the Citizens United volunteer group that set itself up to hunt down illegals and erect a border fence.
In this volatile, depressing area where the daily strain of living takes its toll it's to be expected that tragedies will explode, though it's nevertheless a shock when they do.
Scott Bradley's pecan grove set is marvelously realistic with its trees towering over a wide area on the Pamela Brown stage. Interior scenes are played within the setting. Lighting designer Brian J. Lilienthal and sound designer Matt Callahan complement each other's striking contributions -- a starry sky, crowing roosters, night-time whispers among the trees, roaring helicopters, flashlights, wind chimes, soft guitars.
