Erin Keane

Louisville playwright Brian Walker is having a busy week. The revival of his 2006 comedy "Great American Sex Play" opens Thursday at the Kentucky Center's MeX Theatre, and tonight, his new play "The Friend Factory" will receive a staged reading at Tennessee Repertory Theatre in Nashville. 

Louisville Repertory Company closes its 20th season this week with a titillating revival. Louisville playwright Brian Walker’s “Great American Sex Play,” which premiered in 2006 with Walker’s own Finnigan Productions, opens in the Kentucky Center’s MeX Theatre Thursday. The new production features a refreshed, streamlined script and an all-new cast.

The Bard’s Town Theatre continues its season of notable newer work with Jonathan Marc Sherman’s 2007 “Things We Want,” a satisfying dark comedy about three emotionally-stunted adult brothers still living in their childhood home while attempting to figure out how to overcome their various fragilities before they kill themselves or each other. That sounds heavier than the play actually is—tonally, it’s a gallows humor-charged fight between the id and the super-ego with flashes of brilliance that resists taking its characters seriously enough to let them fall apart in any kind of realistic disintegration.

Challenging the out-of-date idea that libraries are only quiet places for reading and research, the Louisville Free Public Library brings its How-To Festival back for a second year. The library will present experts on everything from Bollywood dancing to gardening Saturday at this popular community learning event. 

The short classes range from quick practical tutorials, like how to tie a bow tie or sing the national anthem, to introductions to larger projects, like backyard chicken farming and going back to college as an adult.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his scant month in Louisville in the cold, punishing days of March and early April, when spring's promise still feels quite remote to those left weary by the winter. But his sumptuous descriptions of Jay Gatsby's glittering parties in West Egg remind us of something ... a certain handful of nights in early May, when the city knots its bowties tighter and grips its champagne and bourbon cocktails with a fierce determination to wring the very life out of Derby week: 

Louisville's Shakespeare Behind Bars is in its 18th season producing the works of Shakespeare with a company of incarcerated men. In June, they’ll open “Richard III,” the Bard's dramatization of the rise and fall of Richard, the Machiavellian Duke of Gloucester, and England's House of York, at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange.

The gonzo branding experts at Kentucky for Kentucky (the folks behind the guerilla state motto campaign "Kentucky Kicks Ass") have re-imagined Louisvillian Hunter S. Thompson's famous essay "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved" as a witty racing program poster, featuring illustrated details from the story rendered in jockey silks. The poster was designed by Rachael Sinclair and printed by Lexington's Thoroughbred Printing.