Arts and Humanities

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.

Oprah Winfrey once explained this way her outlook on life after rising from a difficult childhood to a status of wealth and influence:

"Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn't changed who I am," she said in her magazine. "My feet are still on the ground. I'm just wearing better shoes."

Which brings the (maybe not obvious) question: What do those shoes look like?

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.