About the Book:

Humana Festival 1999: The Complete Plays showcases plays selected from the 23rd annual cycle of world premieres, featuring a remarkable array of work by some of the most exciting voices in the American theatre.

The Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) – the Tony Award-winning state theatre of Kentucky – in 1976 produced two new works at its first Humana Festival – as it is known because of its corporate sponsorship. One was D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and helped launch what became the nation's most respected New American Play festival. For six weeks every spring, Louisville exerts a gravitational pull on producers and theatre lovers from around the country, who travel from far and wide for the adventure of seeing a diverse slate of fully-produced new plays. Many Humana Festival plays have gone on to garner awards and subsequent productions, making a sustained impact on the international dramatic repertoire.

This anthology makes the genius of American playwrights available to an even wider audience, allowing readers from around the world to experience the collision of perspectives, styles and stories that makes the festival such an invigorating celebration of the art form.

• Cabin Pressure created by Anne Bogart and the Saratoga International Theatre Institute. After a year of public and private discussions with 47 diverse Louisville audience members, Bogart and Co. explore actor-audience relations, drawing on practices from Greek theatre festivals to past Humana fests.
• Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls by Naomi Iizuki. A quirky, wildly imaginative look at how people enter and leave each other's lives as they search for a family or tribe.
• Y2K by Arthur Kopit. A drama about a couple's worst nightmare – a world with no secrets – with results that prove alarming, sinister and erotic. For this couple, the future has arrived, and they are the first casualties. The play was remounted under its new title, Because He Can. (Cast: 1 female, 4 male)
• The Cockfighter by novelist Frank Manley adapted by Vincent Murphy. Inspired by the courage and fierceness he associates with fighting cocks, a young man rebels against an adult world tainted by his father's flawed vision of manhood. The traditional bloodsport of cockfighting is presented in a "highly theatrical" way.
• God's Man in Texas by David Rambo. A collision course of wits, egos and ideologies with a preacher auditioning for a job at a Baptist university. A drama about institutional power struggles, fathers and sons and religion in the age of mass marketing. (Cast: 3 male)

About the Editor:

Michael Bigelow Dixon is an Americn playwright, director, and retired professor of theatre. For 17 years, he supervised the reading and selection of plays for the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Amy Wegener is the literary director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she heads the literary department and coordinates the reading and selection process for the Humana Festival.