Tagged: theater

If downtown feels a bit more dramatic than usual next week, it’s not your imagination. It’s more than 4,000 actors, theater designers, producers, administrators, educators and theater students gathering for the country's largest regional theater convention. The annual Southeastern Theatre Conference convention runs March 6-10 at the Galt House.  

Actors Theatre of Louisville opens its 37th Humana Festival of New American Plays this week. The theater has produced more than 400 world premieres during the annual event since it founded the festival in 1976, and will welcome more than 40,000 patrons to nine new plays by eleven playwrights over the next six weeks.

"I passionately believe that it’s important that artists have champions, and Actors Theatre is honored to be able to provide a creative and supportive space for playwrights to develop their work," said artistic director Les Waters at a press conference today.

In the Victorian era, genteel young ladies were expected to be proficient in those arts considered appropriately feminine , like sketching, singing and dancing. But photography, with its bulky, messy equipment, wasn't thought a suitable hobby for a young lady. Alice Austen (1866-1952) was a bit of a rebel, though. The daughter of a well-t0-do Staten Island family, Austen discovered photography at age 10 and grew up to be one of the groundbreaking American female photographers of the  19th and early 20th century.

Neurotic writers manipulating their self-aware fictional characters isn’t a new device, but unlike similar stories, The Bard’s Town’s funny and engaging “Chasing Ophelia” isn’t concerned with picking the navel of the writer’s creative processes or artistic tensions. For a romantic comedy, this play’s concerns are remarkably, well, theological: is an unseen, omniscient being really in charge of us, and how do we deal with feeling abandoned by him?