Humana Festival '99 (Humana Festival) [Paperback]

M. Dixon (Author), Amy Wagener (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1575252074 | ISBN-13: 978-1575252070 | Publication Date: October 1, 1999 | Edition: 1

The seventh volume in Smith and Kraus' annual series of plays produced at America's premiere New Play Festival. This year's volume includes: Cabin Pressure by Anne Bogart, Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls by Naomi Iizuki, Y2K by Arthur Kopit, The Cockfighter by Frank Manley, God's Man in Texas by David Rambo.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Nineteen ninety-nine was a year of daring experiments at the Humana Festival. Richard Dresser wrote a short play meant to be staged in a car: actors in the front seat, audience in the back. Five other playwrights wrote pieces to be performed on the phone to audiences listening on specially prepared payphones. Several prominent writers, such as Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, and David Henry Hwang, penned very short plays to be printed on T-shirts. Topping things off, Anne Bogart unveiled Cabin Pressure, the culmination of two years' research into the audience-artist relationship: a wild, eccentric, thought-provoking quilt of selections from famous plays--Coward's Private Lives, Albee's Virginia Woolfand interviews Bogart and others conducted with audiences. The anthology gives us Bogart's extensive notes instead of a full text, but otherwise captures it all, both playful experimental forays and more traditional new plays by established and struggling playwrights. Noteworthy among the longer offerings is Arthur Kopit's intelligent exploration of cyberculture, Y2K, and the minifestival-within-a-festival of short works by young writers, "Life Under 30." Jack Helbig

About the Author

Michael Bigelow Dixon has served as literary manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville throughout the second decade of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. He's also held positions as literary manager at the Alley Theatre and literary associate at South Coast Repertory. He has been a Theatre Management Fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught at North Carolina Central University, UC-Riverside, Rice University, and Action Theatre in Singapore. He has co-edited ten volumes of plays and criticism, and co-written more than twenty plays, fifteen of which are published. He is now the associate artistic director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 358 pages
• Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc; 1 edition (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575252074
• ISBN-13: 978-1575252070
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,579,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)