Humana Festival 2006

Actors Theater of Louisville Humana New Play Festival  Fest ’06 –A 30^th 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 30^th Anniversary of the Humana Festival eclipses that if the 29^th 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.  

 To give you some idea of what might pop up on local and national stages, below is a short description of plays this viewer particularly liked: