Actors Theatre of Louisville Premieres New Work by Sarah Ruhl at 2015 Humana Festival Tonight

Artistic Director Les Waters and Managing Director Jennifer Bielstein are delighted to announce that Sarah Ruhl's For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday will receive its world premiere at Actors Theatre of Louisville during the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays. For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday was commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville and will be directed by Les Waters and performed in the Pamela Brown Auditorium. The production begins previews tonight, March 8, opens on March 10, and runs through April 10, 2016.

For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday is a moving look at growing up and growing old within a family. In the wake of their father's death, five siblings are stirred to reconnect with childhood dreams and confront the inevitability of the passage of time.

Sarah Ruhl has a relationship with Actors Theatre dating back to the 2002 Humana Festival of New American Plays, for which she was commissioned to write a short piece in collaboration with students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, which would become part of a larger work entitled The Technology Project. Subsequently, Actors Theatre produced The Clean House in 2008, In The Next Room (2012) and her ten-minute play, Two Conversations Overheard on Airplanes, which was directed by Les Waters in the 2013 Humana Festival.

Sarah Ruhl says, "I am thrilled to be working with my long-time collaborator and friend Les Waters. It's a deeply personal play that I wrote as a gift for my mother who played Peter Pan three times in Davenport, Iowa as a child. I grew up surrounded by pictures of my mother in green tights, with Mary Martin's arms around her in one photograph. So I suppose this is a meditation on growing up and growing old and the fantasy of a return to Neverland." She adds, "I'm happy to be returning to Louisville where the bourbon is as excellent as the audiences."

"Sarah Ruhl is quite simply one of the most important artistic influences and collaborators in my professional career. When I approached her about the possibility of a commission, Sarah was interested in developing a work touching on family dynamics and their various complexities, and in particular middle-age and the elderly years beyond, which so often bring an unquenchable desire to discard everything and return to the glories of youth. Or, in Sarah's imagination, a return to Peter Pan," says Actors Theatre's Artistic Director Les Waters. Waters continues, "I think this play is both charming and extraordinarily moving. For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday will offer the opportunity for an extraordinarily rich visual experience, one that will present enormous technical production challenges, including the stage-flight of multiple actors and the recreation of Edwardian theatre conventions, but also the opportunity to meet those challenges and produce a truly moving and mystical theatrical experience."

Actors Theatre celebrates the 40th Humana Festival with its underwriter The Humana Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Humana, Inc. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust.

The full lineup of the Humana Festival of New American Plays will be announced in November 2015. 2015-2016 Brown-Forman Season Ticket packages are now on sale and may be purchased by calling the Box Office at 502.584.1205. Benefits include flexible ticket exchanges, parking discounts and invitations to special behind-the-scenes events. Discounted packages are also available for seniors, students, educators and individuals 35 years of age and under.

Sarah Ruhl's Plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee for best new play), The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2005; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes award); Melancholy Play; Eurydice; Orlando, Demeter in the City (NAACP nomination), Late: a cowboy song, Three Sisters, and most recently, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth.

Her plays have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theater, off-Broadway at Playwrights' Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, and downtown at Clubbed Thumb and Classic Stage Company. Her plays have been produced regionally all over the country, with premieres at Yale Repertory Theater, the Goodman Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Madison Repertory Theater, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Cornerstone Theater, and the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago.

Her plays have also been produced internationally in London, Germany, Australia, Canada and Israel, and have been translated into Polish, Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, German and Arabic.

Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and the Whiting Writers' Award. She was a member of 13P and of New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She was recently the recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright, the Feminist Press' Forty under Forty award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Now in its 51st season, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the State Theatre of Kentucky, is the flagship arts organization in the Louisville community. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Les Waters and Managing Director Jennifer Bielstein, Actors Theatre serves to unlock human potential, build community, and enrich quality of life by engaging people in theatre that reflects the wonder and complexity of our time.

Actors Theatre presents almost 400 performances annually and delivers a broad range of programming, including classics and contemporary work through the Brown-Forman Series, holiday plays, a series of free theatrical events produced by the Apprentice/Intern Company, and the Humana Festival of New American Plays-the premier new play festival in the nation, which has introduced 450 plays into the American theatre repertoire over the past 38 years. In addition, Actors Theatre provides more than 17,000 arts experiences each year to students across the region through its Education Department, and boasts one of the nation's most prestigious continuing pre-professional resident training companies, now in its 43rd year.

Over the past half-century, Actors Theatre has also emerged as one of America's most consistently innovative professional theatre companies, with an annual attendance of 150,000. Actors Theatre has been the recipient of some of the most prestigious awards bestowed on a regional theatre, including a Tony Award for Distinguished Achievement, the James N. Vaughan Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement and Contribution to the Development of Professional Theatre, and the Margo Jones Award for the Encouragement of New Plays. Actors Theatre has toured to 29 cities and 15 countries worldwide, totaling more than 1,400 appearances internationally. Currently, there are more than 50 published books of plays and criticism from Actors Theatre in circulation -- including anthologies of Humana Festival plays, volumes of ten-minute plays and monologues, and essays, scripts and lectures from the Brown-Forman Classics in Context Festival. Numerous plays first produced at Actors Theatre have also been published as individual acting editions, and have been printed in many other anthologies, magazines and journals -- making an enduring contribution to American dramatic literature.

To post a comment, you must register and login.