Humana Festival 1996: The Complete Plays [Paperback]

Michael Bigelow Dixon (Author), Liz Engelman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1575250330 | ISBN-13: 978-1575250335 | Publication Date: December 1996

1996 marks the 20th anniversary of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Thanks to the generosity and vision of the Humana Foundation, the festival has introduced to the American repertoire more than 200 plays by 130 playwrights. - Michael Bigelow Dixon & Liz Engelman

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Every year the annual Humana Festival of new plays at the Actors' Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, continues to grow in scope and influence. This fourth collection of play scripts covers just the class of 1996, and still manages to include Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare, which had a run at the New York Shakespeare, ushered in by a New York Times magazine article; Jack and Jill, which won the American Theatre Critics Association citation as outstanding play of 1997; plus Anne Bogart's Going, Going, Gone; Jimmy Breslin's Contract With Jackie; Tony Kushner's Reverse Transcription; Craig Lucas's What I Meant Was; and John Patrick Shanley's Kissing Christine; among others. This book is a primer on contemporary playwrighting.

From Booklist

The best thing about this year's Humana collection is the appended "Humana Festival History," a listing of every play produced at the prestigious festival of new American playwriting, now 20 years old. Each entry in the list includes a brief synopsis and information on where to obtain a full script of the play (not all the plays are in print). Otherwise, this edition of the anthology, reprinting the plays of the 1996 festival, is a bit disappointing. Many of the American theater's shining lights--Tony Kushner, David Henry Hwang, Craig Lucas, John Patrick Shanley, for instance--are represented, but, with a few exceptions, by plays that are far from their best work. (Kushner's one act about playwrights mourning the death of a colleague reads like a poor parody of his epic Angels in America.) Still, two plays are magnificent: Shanley's wise and witty meditation on love and fidelity, Kissing Christine, and Lucas' beautiful What I Meant Was, about a gay man making peace with his parents. Jack Helbig

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Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc (December 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575250330
• ISBN-13: 978-1575250335
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,084,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)