Actors Theatre of Louisville on Tuesday announced the lineup for the 40th Humana Festival of New American Plays. Six world premieres of full-length plays are planned for the acclaimed festival, along with three new 10-minute plays to be announced in February.
Among the highlights of this year's festival is a new play by Sarah Ruhl, "For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday." Ruhl is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of "In the Next Room, or the vibrator play," seen at Actors Theatre in 2012. "For Peter Pan" tells the story of a group of siblings saying goodbye to their dying father, and will be directed by Actors Theatre artistic director Les Waters.
Other titles include:
- "Residence" by Laura Jacqumin: A saleswoman befriends two employees of an extended-stay hotel, and discover that they have more in common than they knew.
- "This Random World" by Steven Dietz: Stories of missed connections and serendipity among one group of family members.
- "Wellesley Girl" by Brendan Pelsue: America in the year 2465 has been reduced to a few New England towns behind a wall, and there's a foreign army at the border.
- "Cardboard Piano" by Hansol Jung: Set amid the civil war in northern Uganda, the tale of a secret marriage between the daughter of an American missionary and a local teenage girl.
- "Wondrous Strange" by Martyna Majok, Meg Miroshnik, Jiehae Park, and Jen Silverman: The Acting Apprentice Company performs this collection of plays taking inspiration from Kentucky ghost stories.
The festival runs March 2 through April 10, 2016. More information can be found here. Tickets go on sale later this week.