Tagged: actors theatre of louisville

This week on The Big Break, the Louisville Ballet rehearses for its upcoming mixed repertory program, Breaking Ground while trainee Claire Horrocks gets called up to the stage for a surprise bonus role. Over at Actors Theatre of Louisville, acting apprentice Samantha Beach finishes up rehearsals for "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," the apprentice anthology play that opens this weekend, and she reflects on the new play rehearsal process. 

As the curtain rises on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Appropriate," a rattling chorus of 13-year cicadas fills the Pamela Brown Auditorium. Far from a gentle nocturne, the sound swells with the pregnant heat of a southern summer night, conjuring images of rattling bones. Low lights reveal a man and a younger woman slipping through an open window into the living room of a plantation house that had, to be kind, seen better days.

Billed as a willfully unfaithful adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic picaresque tale “Peer Gynt,” Will Eno’s “Gnit” up-ends the classic man’s-search-for-meaning quest with an ambitiously absurdist self-discovery journey that stubbornly chafes against the conventions of the genre.

The New York Times calls playwright Will Eno “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.” In this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, he’s turned his keen sense of irony and compassion to a loose adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Norweigian classic picaresque “Peer Gynt.” 

"Gnit," Eno's re-imagining of Ibsen's play, is the story of a man’s journey to find his true self, which happens to be disintegrating as he searches.