The 23rd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays

The 23rd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays The 23rd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. Actors Theatre of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. 19-21 March 1999.

The 1999 Humana Festival of New American Plays, produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), will undoubtedly go into the record books for the production of the most new plays (twenty-five) in the shortest period of time (five weeks). Of course eight of the new works were ten-minute plays and five were three-minute "telephone plays" (audiences used specially designed pay phones in the theatre lobby to overhear phone conversations created by playwrights Neal Bell, Rebecca Gilman, David Greenspan, Rebecca Reynolds, and Diana Son). Another play (What Are You Afraid Of? by Richard Dresser) was performed for an audience of three squeezed into the backseat of a car parked outside the theatre. Six others were "T(ext) Shirt Plays" written on the back of 100% cotton T-shirts and hawked at ATL's lobby bookstore. The Kentucky-based regional theatre pioneered the ten-minute play concept two decades ago and their 1999 offerings raised brevity to new heights. Can email plays be far off?

The car, phone, T-shirt and ten-minute plays were, by and large, amusing diversions (with the exception of Brooke Berman's short and powerful ten-minute piece on rape, Dancing With the Devil), offering light hors d'oeuvres prior to the main course of new full-length works. Two of the central themes explored by these plays were father-son relationships and technological alienation.

Veteran playwright Arthur Kopit's latest work, Y2K (it was only a matter of time before someone used it as a play title) is not really about the year 2000 compatibility problem in microprocessors. It is Kopit's code phrase for a world full of technological paranoia and conspiracies. Like Kopit's 1984 work, The End of the World With Symposium to Follow, which explored nuclear deterrence through the eyes of a private eye, Y2K is a sinister, Kafka-esque vision of what can happen when technology runs amuck. Joseph Elliot, a successful publisher, and his equally successful wife Joanne were wealthy, beautiful people who were, apparently, ripe for the hacking. Their lives were shattered when two federal agents confronted Joseph with evidence that he was not what he appeared. This "evidence" (computerized phone records, bank...