Precedent haunts Contemporary American Theater Festival, but little is notable here

Allusions to showbiz, and to literature, pepper the fare now at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, the annual showcase in Shepherdstown, W.Va., for recently minted plays. On the festival's stages, you can find a sequel to Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" and a tense, wisecracking tete-a-tete between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. You can even find a comedy about bumbling Islamic terrorists who treasure "Star Wars" trivia. It's as if, faced with a society that sometimes seems to...