2008 Humana Festival

The Coasts will converge in Louisville to take a look across the American landscape in the 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, Feb. 24 to March 30.

The theatrical rite of late winter/early spring at Actors Theatre of Louisville will feature familiar faces and new voices in its main stage lineup, exploring topics from evangelical American to the history of hip-hop music to the uncomfortable reality of video game violence. Here's a quick look at the lineup, based on play descriptions from ATL:

Great Falls by Lee Blessing: A father and step-daughter try to piece their lives together on a road trip across the American west. New York-based Blessing is an acclaimed stage and screen writer whose works include Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music and A Walk in the Woods.

This Beautiful City by Stephen Cosson and Jim Lewis with music lyrics by Michael Friedman: The Civilians, a New York-based company that creates theater pieces based on investigations of real life, has made a musical about the evangelical movement in America set in Colorado Springs, an evangelical community that has recently been beset with scandal and tragedy.

Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo: New York-based Gionfriddo is the author of one of the Festival's most recent hits, After Ashley, which explored the effect of a woman's violent murder on her husband and son. This appears to be lighter fare, a dark comedy about playing match maker.

Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley: Reality meets video game fantasy when kids in a cookie-cutter suburb start playing an online horror video game set in a cookie-cutter suburb. This will be a Humana debut for Los Angeles-based Haley.

the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Joseph: In the description, this sounds like a multi-media exploration of the history of the "hip-hop generation," by Joseph, an HBO Def Poet and current resident artist at Stanford University.

All Hail Hurricane Gordo by Carly Mensch: Sometimes, you just have to go with the supplied description:  "The routines of daily life get blown apart when two brothers take in a plucky young houseguest. While India is running away from her relatively normal family, Chaz is struggling to find normalcy in the one he already has. Is it possible to be your brother's keeper and have a life too?" Mensch is currently a fellow in the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright's program and Gordo is a co-production with the Cleveland Playhouse, which will present it later this year.

~ This year's Festival will also include the usual bill of ten-minute plays and a dramatic anthology, Game On, which looks at American culture through sports and asks the question, "what do sports tell us about ourselves?"

Comments

[Dini]

Nice, thanks for the heads up on this. Just PCS'd to Indiana in October and am finally close enough to visit my home again (first time in 14 years) and enjoy some of the things you are mentioning.

By the way, there is a HUGE convention coming to Louisville next summer year for magicians the world over. IBM/SAM 2008.