Tagged: Arts

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. 

Actors Theatre of Louisville will celebrate its 50th anniversary next season. The anniversary season is rich in familiar, crowd-pleasing fare, including Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," a kitschy production from Chicago of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance" and Michael Frayn's backstage comedy "Noises Off." Holiday favorites "Dracula" and "A Christmas Carol" return as well.