Louisville's annual Humana Festival is famous as a showcase for new plays and playwrights. The 2002 festival included new works by such big guns as Anne Bogart, Tina Howe, Julia Jordan, Charles L. Mee, and Adam Rapp, while emerging playwrights were relegated to Humana's National Ten-Minute Play Contest. This collection manifests positive and negative sides of Humana's success. The best plays here--Howe's witty, polished fantasy,
Rembrandt's Gift, and Charles L. Mee's literate comedy about a young woman entangled with an older man,
Limonade Tous Les Jours --may be the best new full-length plays produced in America last year. But the results of the National Ten-Minute Play Contest are not included, which means the only truly new voices and risky writing appears in the interesting but gimmicky "Snapshot." Like "The Phone Plays" of previous years, "Snapshot" consists of the contributions of playwrights well-known and not, this time in response to a Lee Friedlander photograph of tourists looking at Mount Rushmore. Of these, Honor Kane's moving meditation on 9/11 is most haunting.
Jack HelbigCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Amy Wegener is the Dramaturg/Director of New Play Development at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she has been on staff since 1997. During that time, she has worked on five Humana Festivals, serving as the dramaturg on numerous new play premieres and actively participating in the reading/script selection process for this annual event. She has also been involved with many projects in Actors Theatre's mainstage seasons, Free Theatre productions, and Apprentice/Intern Company shows. Her writing has appeared in such journals as TheatreForum and Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, and she has co-edited seven published collections of plays. Ms. Wegener is a graduate of Princeton University, and she holds an M.A. in Theater from Northwestern University.
Tanya Palmer is the Literary Manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville. During the 1994-95 season, Ms. Palmer was a Literary Management intern, and served as the assistant dramaturg on a number of shows including From the Mississippi Delta, Beast on the Moon, and Dancing at Lughnasa. As a playwright, her work has been produced at Actors Theatre, The Hangar Theatre, Solar Stage, The Montreal Fringe Festival, and it has been workshopped at The Harbourfront Centre, HERE, and The Wilton Project. She holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from York University in Toronto, Canada.
