Lucas Hnath, Michael Golamco & Carson Kreitzer to be Part of 2012 Humana Festival

This content is sourced from The Louisville Courier-Journal.

Each year, Actors Theatre of Louisville tests the limits of the marketing adage that audiences only like what they know by bringing new works to the stage in its Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Since 1976, those efforts have helped put Louisville on the map of theater and arts enthusiasts worldwide with some plays and playwrights going on to grace the stages of Broadway and those beyond America’s borders.

In 2012, the theater produces six new full-length plays and another new play created through a collaboration of five playwrights.

Many years, members of the theater’s artistic staff, notably those in the literary department, read through hundreds of scripts to choose the lineup — with the artistic director making the final decision on what makes it to the stage. That process was a bit different this time around because Marc Masterson, who was the artistic director, left last April to take a job with South Coast Repertory in Orange County, Calif.

So this year, Amy Wegener, the theater’s literary director, oversaw the collaborative process of choosing the lineup for the 36th festival, which she said wasn’t really all that different from other recent years. “We just built on that culture of conversation and collaboration to run this year’s selection process,” she said.

What she and her colleagues looked for were original stories with sincere voices and a diversity of cultural perspectives. And Wegener said they found it in works by a mix of playwrights that includes three making their festival debut.

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The Louisville Courier-Journal

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