Actors Theatre of Louisville (Photo: By Bill Brymer. Courtesy Actors Theatre of Louisville.)
by Elizabeth Kramer
Although the Humana Festival of New American Plays runs for roughly a month each spring at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the cycle of choosing and mounting the plays is a year-long process. The steps to choose the plays for the 2017 festival began in April – just after the last festival closed.
“We canvas as much as we can,” said literary manager Amy Wegener, who leads a four-member team in her department who read scripts. From the spring and through the summer, that team recommends “plays we think are promising” to the artistic team, including artistic director Les Waters and associate artistic director Meredith McDonough. The following plays made the final cut for the 41st festival.
‘I Now Pronounce’
Tasha Gordon-Solmon. March 1-April 9, Bingham Theatre
Tasha Gordon-Solmon wrote the play “I Now Pronounce,” which is part of the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (Photo: Courtesy Actors Theatre of Louisville.)
Tasha Gordon-Solmon’s “I Now Pronounce” comes just after her debut at the 2016 festival, where her play, “Coffee Break,” was part of the Ten Minute Play production during the festival’s last weekend.
“She has such a distinct comic voice, so imaginative in particular,” Wegener said. “I Now Pronounce” begins with a rabbi dying and doesn’t show everyone on their best behavior,” said McDonough, who directed “Coffee Break.”
Wegener describes the scenario as “an auspicious start for the couple who is surrounded by a wedding party that includes cynics and skeptics as well as hopeful romantics.”
Stephen Brackett directs the production. He has directed other productions at Chicago’s Theater Wit, Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, Two River Theater Company in New Jersey and The Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut.
‘We’re Gonna Be Okay’
Basil Kreimendahl. March 7-April 9, Pamela Brown Auditorium
Basil Kreimendahl wrote the play “We’re Gonna Be Okay,” which is part of the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (Photo: Courtesy Actors Theatre of Louisville.)
Former Louisville resident Basil Kreimendahl returns after making a festival debut in the 2014 festival with “Remix 38.” That production included other playwrights as part of an anthology performed by Actors Theatre’s Professional Training Company.
With this full-length play, Kreimendahl presents two families working to build a bomb shelter in the fall of 1962 as the Cuban Missile Crisis looms.
“There’s anxiety about what they will lose and what they can hang onto when the end does come and how they will live together,” Wegener said.
These families, also next-door neighbors, include one that is middle class and the other working class. And there are teenagers in both families enduring ideas about repopulating the planet. Wegener said Kreimendahl has “a finely tuned ear” that captures the voices and sensibilities of both families as they are caught up in the vortex of national anxiety.
Obie Award-winning Lisa Peterson, who directs, has directed several plays by Louisville native Naomi Wallace as well as works by Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill.
‘Cry it Out’
Molly Smith Metzler. March 10-April 9, Bingham Theatre
Molly Smith Metzler wrote the play “Cry it Out,” which is part of the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (Photo: Courtesy Actors Theatre of Louisville.)
Molly Smith Metzler brought a hit to the 2011 Humana Festival with her play “Elemeno Pea.” Now, she returns with a new play commissioned by the theater.
“I read hundreds of plays a year, and I’ve never read anything like this play,” Wegener said.
Like “Elemeno Pea,” this new play – set in socio and economically diverse Long Island town of Manorhaven – deals with characters from different classes. It also explores with how their status in the economic hierarchy affects their decisions as new mothers.
“One woman is a corporate lawyer who has moved out of the city and is on maternity leave. She’s really starved for adult conversation and befriends her neighbor, a new mom and very frank and funny women living with her boyfriend’s mother as she and her partner try to stabilize their financial situation,” Wegener said.
Davis McCallum, who directed “Elemeno Pea” returns to the festival to direct “Cry It Out.”
‘Recent Alien Abductions’
Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas. March 17-April 9, Pamela Brown Auditorium
Jorge Ignacio Cortinas wrote the play “Recent Alien Abductions,” which is part of the 2017 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (Photo: Courtesy Actors Theatre of Louisville.)
Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, an award-winning Cuban-American writer, has a questionable episode of the popular television show “The X-Files” figure largely in “Recent Alien Abductions.” The issue – teenager Álvaro finds a lost episode and believes it to be altered from the original that aired. Meanwhile, there are secrets in Álvaro’s family.
“This play contains such mystery and sucks you in. I don’t remember taking a breath when I read it,” Wegener said.
Cortiñas, who is making his festival debut, has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists and received commissions from the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, Hartford Stage and Playwrights Horizons. He also studied with esteemed playwright María Irene Fornés.
Actors Theatre’s artistic director Les Waters directs the production.
‘Airness’
Chelsea Marcantel, March 24-April 9, Victor Jory Theatre
photo by Ryan Bourque
“What one is trying to achieve in air guitar is airness,” said Meredith McDonough, who directs this comedy about a newcomer to the world of competitive air guitar by Chelsea Marcantel. “Air guitar taps into the vibrant childlike joy that comes when a person is young and finds joy playing air guitar before knowing what embarrassment is.”
Marcantel, a Louisiana native who now lives in New York where she writes and directs, recently completed a Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Fellowship at The Juilliard School.
McDonough called this comedy a great illustration of “what it means to find your tribe”
‘The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield’
March 24-April 9, Bingham Theatre
Jeff Augustin, Sarah DeLappe, Claire Kiechel, and Ramiz Monsef
Every year, the festival assembles a team of up-and-coming playwrights to work with Actors Theatre’s Professional Training Company to create an anthology of plays around a given topic.
This time around, playwrights Jeff Augustin, Sarah DeLappe, Claire Kiechel and Ramiz Monsef take on ideas surrounding success and failure, curiosity and risk relating to inventors and inventions of Kentucky.
Among them is Nathan Stubblefield, a farmer from Murray who in 1908 patented a battery-operated, wireless telephone and Thomas Edison, who was fired from his job in Louisville as a telegraph operator only to return 16 years later to oversee the installment of thousands of lightbulbs at the 1883 Southern Exposition.
Eric Hoff, who has worked extensively in Chicago theaters as well as in New York, returns to Actors Theatre to direct “The Many Deaths of Nathan Stubblefield.” He also directed “I Promised Myself to Live Faster,” created by Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company that premiered at the 2015 Humana Festival.
Augustin, who returns to Actors Theatre, made his Humana Festival debut with “Cry Old Kingdom” in 2013 and returned to the festival in 2015 with his contribution to “That High Lonesome Sound.” His work also has been produced by La Jolla Playhouse and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
DeLappe has achieved recognition with her current Off-Broadway hit “’The Wolves,” playing an extended engagement at New York’s at Playwrights Realm. The play uses soccer as a point of entry into the world of teenage girls.
Kiechel, who was a finalist in Actors Theatre’s Ten Minute Play Contest last year, is a 2016 recipient of South Coast Repertory’s Elizabeth George Emerging Writers Commission and an alumna of The Civilians 2015-16 R&D Group. Her play “Pilgrims” is slated for an upcoming production at Chicago’s Gift Theatre.
Monsef, an actor who has appeared in Actors Theatre productions of “The Glory of the World” and “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety,” returns to the theater for his debut as a playwright. He also has been a company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was a co-creator of the musical “The Unfortunates,” which premiered in 2013.
Reach reporter Elizabeth Kramer at 502-582-4682 and ekramer@courier-journal.com. Follow her on Twitter @arts_bureau and on Facebook at Elizabeth Kramer – Arts Writer.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: 41st Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville
WHEN: March 1-April 9
WHERE: Actors Theatre of Louisville, 316 W. Main St.
DETAILS: The festival includes six new plays. In January, the theater will announce the titles and playwrights for a bill of three 10-minute plays to premiere.
TICKETS: Go on sale Wednesday, Nov. 16. Season ticket holders can purchase tickets via a special pre-sale Tuesday, Nov. 15. Festival ticket packages are available for the weekends of March 17-19, March 24-26, March 31-April 2 and April 6-9.
INFORMATION: 502-584-1205; actorstheatre.org
