Humana Festival of New American Plays Strives to Serve Growing Market

The 34th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, the nation's pre-eminent and longest-running new play festival, wrapped up on March 28. As with previous years, this year's offerings included a range of works from a slew of emerging and established playwrights. Gordon Cox of Variety takes a look at how the 2010 festival lineup strived to serve a growing regional market of new works.

From Variety: "During the past decade, about 80% of the plays that debuted at the annual Humana Fest have gone on to future lives, with 15 outings from the last five years showing up in Gotham. Gina Gionfriddos Becky Shaw and Theresa Rebeck's The Scene were two of its hits to play New York in recent seasons."

"But the 34th edition of the Humana Festival of New American Plays had a slightly different vibe. That's partly because the org has changed its development and producing model, in an effort to meet the needs of an evolving regional marketplace -- and partly because this year's slate reflects Humana's shifting role in a changing national marketplace for legit fare, according to Marc Masterson, a.d. for the Actors Theater of Louisville, Ky., that hosts the fest. The rise of the small and midsize company in the U.S. is a significant market, and one that we've been paying attention to," he says. 

The article also touches on the proliferation of new works in recent times. "When the festival -- funded by the Humana Foundation, the charitable arm of the health insurance company -- launched in 1976, there were far fewer legit orgs focusing on new work in the U.S. That's due in part to the fact that there were fewer theaters around in general, since the tide of nonprofits that swept the country in the second half of the 20th century had yet to reach a high point."

"These days, however, legit troupes have proliferated, and more and more theaters and organizations are focusing on new work. (It helps that a lot of foundational funding is earmarked for world preems, thereby encouraging companies to choose to program a new play over a
revival.)"

To read the rest of the article in Variety, please click here.

Now in its 46th season, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the State Theatre of Kentucky, is internationally acclaimed as one of America's most consistently innovative non-profit professional theatre companies. Founded in 1964, it has won a host of coveted awards and worldwide recognition for excellence. For over 30 years it has been a major force in revitalizing American playwriting, with over 300 Actors-debuted scripts now in publication.

For more information on the Humana Festival, visit http://actorstheatre.org/humana.htm

 

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