Tagged: humana festival of new american plays

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. 

“Cry Old Kingdom” is playwright Jeff Augustin’s professional debut, an examination of how artists function in times of oppression set in his family’s native Haiti. Directed by Tom Dugdale, “Cry Old Kingdom” is the ambitious story of three individuals searching for a clear pathway through a terrifying political climate. It’s a strong, if slightly uneven, debut from a young playwright with great potential.

Part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, “Cry Old Kingdom” runs through April 7 in the Bingham Theatre.