This spring, theatre critics, actors, agents, playwrights, musicians and theatre lovers from around the world will return to settle among the eaves of Actors Theatre of Louisville. The occasion is the 33rd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, which has fixed our city indelibly in the firmament of American theatre. For nearly a decade, Artistic Director Marc Masterson has labored to reflect the variety and diversity of the American story on his three stages. This season, in collaboration with Adrien-Alice Hansel, director of new play development, Masterson will direct his own work: Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry.
AH: As director of new play development, I’m head of the literary department. I go to the most meetings, but we all work on the Humana Festival.
SD: How many works do you read each year?
AH: We probably get between six hundred and nine hundred full-length plays in any given year. I read a lot of those. Amy Wegener, our literary manager, and Julie Felise Dubiner, our resident dramaturg, also read their share of plays. We evaluate them and pass along to Marc those we find most interesting.
SD: About what percentage of plays make it through your initial read?
AH: I would say one out of nine is read by the larger group that includes Marc; Zan Sawyer-Dailey, associate director; and everyone in the literary department.
MM: We have a weekly book club.
AH: The book club convenes from mid-May through September. We get together and review all of our notes. Ultimately, of course, final decisions wind up on Marc’s shoulders.
SD: You are making a lot of people very jealous right now.
AH: I have one of the best jobs in American theatre. We produce a lot of new plays, so the work I do really matters. Marc can’t read six hundred plays alone, so he has to trust us. I get to read for a living; I can’t believe it’s a job – much less mine.
SD: How did you come to be in this enviable position at such a young age?
AH: After graduating from Smith in ’98, I was a summer intern here with Michael Bigelow Dixon. It totally changed my life! He convinced me that if I could get a job in the theatre, I would enjoy it. While I was here, I worked on Cabin Pressure with Anne Bogart and was brought back to dramaturg that for the 1999 Humana Festival. I went to Yale for dramaturgy and criticism. I was very lucky to meet Marc in 2004 and joined the company.
SD: Have you kept costumes from other shows that might work?
DL: Sure, we’ve done Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, so I’ll be able to pull some pieces upstairs. But we have a responsibility to be as historically accurate as possible.
SD: Actors Theatre of Louisville is the epicenter of New American Theatre. Tell me about the six full-length plays you selected and the personality of this year’s festival.
MM: I’m sort of like a deejay. My goal is to create an interesting mix. What I’m looking for in putting a festival together, or a sea-son for that matter, is variety. The culture we live in is full of variety in terms of style, generation, ethnicity – so the theatre should reflect that. I’m trying to find different kinds of theatrical experiences for people. I want emerging playwrights; I want experienced playwrights, women and men. I’m not going to capture all of that diversity in one Humana Festival; but over time, that’s what it ought to do. It’s really fun to play with that mix and look at all of those options.
SD: Were there any plays that immediately jumped out at you?
MM: We have a play by Naomi Wallace that was the result of a two-year residency in Rubbertown. She spent a lot of time in Louisville, and The Hard Weather Boating Party came out of that experience. It was one of the first things to fall into place. From there, I began to build outward. We committed early to Anne Bogart, Charles L. Mee and SITI Company. SITI is an abstract, resident theatre company, so we have that paired with a realistic drama by an interna-tionally known Louisville native (Wallace).
SD: Let’s talk about the pieces you chose to fill in around these core works. Tell me about UNIVERSES.
MM: They have been in Louisville a couple of times. We brought them in my first year here to do a work called Rhythmicity. It started as hip-hop poets doing a panel discussion, but a play burst out of it; that was really fun. Later we brought them back to do Slanguage, which had been a hit off-Broadway. They tour and have quite a following because of their intelligence and energy. Ameriville is about the ideas of race and class in America as seen through the filter of New Orleans. It is an interesting socio-political piece of theatre that is also entertaining.
SD: Of course, the presidential inauguration will still be fresh in everyone’s minds when this is staged. Barack Obama in the White House will necessarily change the way we tell the American story.
MM: I think it will, and they are responding to that. They just went to New Orleans again, and there is more material coming all the time. They will be writing during rehearsal.
SD: Speaking of process, let’s talk about Wendell Berry and Wild Blessings. What was the genesis of this idea?
MM: It started last November as I was directing The Tempest. Several people suggested that I consider presenting an evening of Wendell Berry’s work. As I began thinking about it and reading more of his work, it seemed like a great idea. So I decided to do it before I knew what it was going to be. In fact, I think we gave it a title before we had any ideas about the piece; but we have had a wonderful process. Essentially, Adrien read the bulk of Wendell Berry’s writing and did the first cobbling together.
AH: I got it down from fifteen hundred to about two hundred poems.
MM: I took that and some other books of poetry, essays and short stories and literally went off into the woods for a week. I read it all, thought about it and tried to give the piece some structure and form. That draft went back to Adrien, who did more work on it. Then we took it to a new play retreat in Colorado, where we workshopped and added some music with Malcolm Dalglish.
SD: What did you gain from that?
MM: We learned a lot. We did a performance for a couple hundred people and put it through another evolution. We were really trying to get the “through-lines” right. That was this fall and, based on that, we’ve done another draft that will be ready for rehearsal.
SD: I’m sure there are some people reading this who don’t know Wendell Berry’s work. Describe some of the themes you uncovered and used as through-lines for this piece.
AH: What’s interesting about his work is that while themes do emerge, there are also strong personalities. People who know Berry will recognize the persona of the “mad farmer.” The way the play unfolds, we follow this young poet into Manhattan, then follow him quickly away from the city to a farm he makes his home. There is a love story for each couple. It’s a five-figure piece: four actors, and a musician who sings and speaks occasionally. We get to know the younger couple through their romance and see the different figures that come into their lives. We see their long apprenticeship to the farm. There are poems about work and about rest and the satisfaction of both. That apprenticeship of the physical parallels his spiritual appren-ticeship as a poet. Wendell Berry has some poems about being a poet – which is our excuse to put in some of his most beautiful pieces. Eventually he turns his attention back to the world and we see him wrestling with the wars and his thoughts on citizen-ship. There is a wonderful poem about his great-grandfather’s slaves and a beautiful exploration of how to make your life in the world every day and over time.
MM: I would like to point out that within forty-five minutes of our presentation in Colorado, the bookstore had sold every bit of Wendell Berry’s writing they had on the shelves. I don’t think it is necessary to be a student of his work to enjoy this. People who are familiar will find surprises and satisfaction – those who don’t know his work will discover something they will want to follow up on.
SD: How did you come to choose Malcolm Dalglish to provide the music?
MM: It was circuitous but very satisfying. I had an LP of his hammered dulcimer music from the ’70s. Once we had the idea to add music to the show, we started looking for musicians who had set Wendell Berry’s poetry to music. Interestingly, a lot of the musicians who have done this are more classically based. But I thought our particular piece wanted something that was a little more from the folk tradition. The hammered dulcimer has an ethereal quality that resonates deeply with the poetry. We discovered in the workshop that we wanted some other kinds of instrumentation as well, so we cast people with musical skills and added the guitar, fiddle and a little percussion – which gives us a fuller sound.
SD: Is Mr. Berry involved in this project?
AH:We had a pilgrimage to Henry County the day after Derby. We sat in his kitchen and had an enlightening conversation about his work and the things he hates when other people interpret his work.
MM: But he also read poetry to us and quoted Shakespeare and Chaucer off the top of his head – he was quite impressive.
AH: That put us in the right mindset. He gave us his blessing and we sent him the first draft of the script.
MM:He marked it up, but in a very supportive and generous
way. He offered to come to rehearsal, and he will come to the opening.
I don’t
know that we will see him a whole lot, but I hope to
make him happy.
The 33rd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays opens March 1 at
Actors Theatre of Louisville. For tickets and more information, call 502.584.1205
or go to www.actorstheatre.org.