By Eric Butler
March is just around the corner and while some readers are awaiting the college basketball tournament there is another reason to celebrate the coming spring — and this one’s staged closer to home. Beginning this weekend, Actors Theatre of Louisville will once again play host to the Humana Festival of New American Plays, which for the next six weeks will showcase some of the best new theatrical works in the country.
Now in its 29th year, the Humana Festival is one of the most distinguished cultural events on our city’s calendar. Underwritten by the Humana Foundation, a philanthropic arm of Humana, Inc., the festival is internationally recognized for putting in repertory a handful of new plays that represent the height of contemporary playwriting. The plays are handpicked from almost 3,000 scripts submitted annually to Actors Theatre’s New Play Program. As for this year’s lineup, there are six full-length plays, four 10-minute plays and a “satiric anthology” of vaudevillian humor to round things out.
“We’re quite proud of the scripts turned in each year,” said Festival Coordinator Mike Brooks. He estimated that around 29,000 people per year come to see these scripts play out on the festival stage. Of course, the exposure doesn’t end there. Over 90 million Americans have seen later productions of the over 300 plays that made their debut at the Humana Festival. Three such plays even went on to win a Pulitzer Prize: D.L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game” (which is currently being performed at Actors, apart from the festival, through Sat., Feb. 26), as well as Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart” and Donald Margulies’ “Dinner With Friends.”
“There’s an illustrious list of writers whose first exposure was at the Humana Festival,” said Russell Vandenbroucke, U of L’s Theater Arts Department Chair. Though it wasn’t his first, he’s made an appearance at the festival himself, directing a full-length anthology play called “Snapshot,” which premiered in 2002.
Vandenbroucke said he enjoys the variety of styles and voices that the festival usually supplies. He said he attends every play the Humana Festival puts on each year, and encourages his Theater Arts students to attend a couple as well.
“It’s the most important new play festival in the country, and it’s right in their backyard,” Vandenbroucke said.
Referring to the festival’s never-before-shown plays, he added, “That’s another great thing. New work is still unknown and fragile. So you’re in on the ground floor.”
The first of these unknown works will be Allison Moore’s full-length play “Hazard County,” which has its first public preview this Sunday, Feb. 27 at 7:30 p.m. The play examines the social rift left over from the Civil War between the industrial North and the agrarian South. Moore recounts the Confederate flag-fueled controversy surrounding the real-life 1995 murder of Michael Westerman in Guthrie, Ky., and with this situation — which began to polarize the town as debates wore on — she pairs a second story involving a Northern-raised TV producer and the down-and-out single mother from the South whose story he wants to broadcast to the nation. Moore intertwines these two tales and pulls out the cultural misconceptions to provide the audience a closer, more authentic look at life in the small-town South.
Tickets to this Sunday’s “Hazard County” performance are $25 and $28. The next showing, on Tuesday, Mar. 1, will cost $22 and $25. The play continues through April 3. For all showings, however, students can attempt to acquire unsold theater seats by requesting “Student Rush” tickets, which go on sale 15 minutes before the curtain call of this and all of the festival performances. A Student Rush ticket cuts the regular admission price by more than half, costing only $12, but may not be available for all showings.
Another option is Quick Tix, which are tickets purchased in person, day of show, from 2 to 6 p.m. Quick Tix reduce the general ticket price by half.
With affordable ticket prices and a fresh crop of new plays coming, now might be a good time to start taking an interest in the theater.
For more information about the Humana Festival of New American Plays, visit Actors Theatre online at http://www.actorstheatre.org.
