Actors Theater of Louisville Humana New
Play Festival Fest ’06 –A 30th Anniversary
Extravaganza
For
the second year in a row, I attended Humana Festival (The Actor’s Theater of Louisville
Festival of New Plays). The 2005 Fest reminded me of never-ending earnest,
honest and but tedious acting class scenes presented as final exams – interesting,
but…. This year, I saw eight plays in two and 1/2 days and I am still smiling!
This
year, the offerings exploded - seven new plays and three one acts that
challenged, intrigued, frightened and inspired me over the course of 96 hours
of thrilling theater. Some local Philadelphia producing faces spotted in the
audience included Sara Garonzik of PTC, Terry Nolan of the Arden Theatre, Bill
Felty from the Wilma, along with reps from the Walnut, Interact, and other
Philadelphia area theaters.
The show
selection was brilliant this year - suiting a variety of tastes ranging from
abstract imagery for the intellectual crowd to angry hip-hop-oriented theater
of protest, to new explorations of the WWII generation, to a tour de force for
the environmentally activist - the magic of theater ruled.
The
level of playwriting, design and acting in the 30th Anniversary of
the Humana Festival eclipses that if the 29th festival. From what I
saw in the first four plays (three more to review in next posting), the theater
arts are alive and well in 2006. Hopefully all those familiar faces of regional
and local producers in the audience took note.
