From Library Journal
As a showcase for new American plays, the annual Humana Festival is a major event of the theatrical year. The ten dramatic pieces in this collection were performed at the 18th festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville this past spring. In his introduction, Jon Jory, producing director of the Actors Theatre, notes a central theme of loss running through these plays-loss of youth, ideals, love and country, innocence, limitations, and trust. Several of the plays, including Jane Anderson's The Last Time We Saw Her, Wendy Hammond's Julie Johnson, Tina Landau's 1969, and Susan Miller's My Left Breast, examine issues confronting lesbians and gays directly and sensitively. This collection shows that there is great hope for the American theater. Representing one of America's most important festivals, it is recommended for academic and large public library drama collections.
Howard E. Miller, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Missouri Lib., St. LouisCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The big event of the 1994 Humana Festival of the Actors Theatre of Louisville--a major launching pad for new plays and playwrights--was Tony Kushner's one-act
Slavs! This intriguing companion to the two-part
Angels in America describes with wit and surprising efficiency (as opposed to the epic
Angels' languor) the social dislocations brought about by perestroika and the Soviet Union's breakup; it assures Kushner's place among important 1990s playwrights. Other noteworthy entries were Jon Klein's seriocomic
Betty the Yeti, about a clash between environmentalists and loggers in the Pacific Northwest;
My Left Breast, Susan Miller's autobiographical one-person play about a lesbian mother attempting to raise her son while dealing with breast cancer and the loss of her lover: and
The Survivor: A Cambodian Odyssey, Jon Lipsky's dramatization of Dr. Haing Ngor's memoir of surviving Khmer Rouge-ruled Cambodia and enduring the subsequent, surreal adventure of re-creating his experiences in the film
The Killing Fields (for which he won an Oscar).
Jack Helbig
