actors theatre of louisville

New Voices Festival Celebrates Young Playwrights

Erin Keane — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Actors Theatre of Louisvilles' apprentices open their final production of the season tonight. The New Voices Young Playwrights Festival is a bill of ten-minute plays written by eight area high school students.

The Big Break: The Grand Finale

Erin Keane — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:00:00 +0000

The first season of our audio diary series “The Big Break,” comes to a close this week. Since last fall, understudies and apprentices take us behind the curtain at the Kentucky Opera, Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Louisville Ballet.

We'll launch the next season of The Big Break with a new class of up-and-coming artists in the early fall.

'Sleep Rock Thy Brain' Play Uses Science As Inspiration

Erin Keane — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:49:24 +0000

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Well, now a more subjective study of dreams. It comes from the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. The festival was founded by Actors Theatre of Louisville. And each year, that theater commissions a new work for its company of apprentice actors.

The Big Break: The Next Steps

Erin Keane — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:00:00 +0000

On our audio diary series “The Big Break,” understudies and apprentices take us behind the curtain at the Kentucky Opera, Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Louisville Ballet. The season is almost over for the actors and dancers. Her time in Louisville is almost up, so Actors Theater apprentice Samantha Beach has to decide where she wants to build the next phase of her career. Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks makes plans for her summer that will help her prepare for a possibility every dancer fears -- the day she can't dance anymore.

The Big Break: High Notes and Early Calls

Erin Keane — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000

This week on The Big Break, Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice Samantha Beach reflects on tech week for "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," the apprentice play that opened last weekend in the Humana Festival of New American Plays. (The music in this week's episode is from "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," composed and performed by Scott Anthony, the show's composer and sound designer.)

Over at the Louisville Ballet, trainee Claire Horrocks, who also teaches at the ballet school, describes the joyful madness that is a spring showcase, a true community effort at the Louisville Ballet School.

REVIEW | Immerse Yourself in 'O Guru Guru Guru'

Erin Keane — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:53:45 +0000

Playwright Mallery Avidon had an unconventional upbringing. As a kid and young teen she lived, on and off, in an ashram -- the same ashram that later cropped up as a setting in Elizabeth Gilbert's nonfiction book "Eat Pray Love," later made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Avidon mines those experiences in her engaging autobiographical play, "O Guru Guru Guru or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you," an attempt to reconcile several complicated, competing emotions about contentment, identity and spirituality.

An Audience of One: Playwright Mallery Avidon on Writing for Herself

Erin Keane — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:31:41 +0000

Playwright Mallery Avidon mines her unconventional childhood for her new play, “O Guru Guru Guru, or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you.”

"Part of that unconventional upbringing has to do with the ashram that Elizabeth Gilbert goes to in the book 'Eat Pray Love,' that Julia Roberts goes to in the movie 'Eat Pray Love.' The play is an investigation of the way that unconventional spirituality affected my life," says Avidon.

The Big Break: On Your Toes

Erin Keane — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000

This week on The Big Break, the Louisville Ballet rehearses for its upcoming mixed repertory program, Breaking Ground while trainee Claire Horrocks gets called up to the stage for a surprise bonus role. Over at Actors Theatre of Louisville, acting apprentice Samantha Beach finishes up rehearsals for "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," the apprentice anthology play that opens this weekend, and she reflects on the new play rehearsal process.

REVIEW | Family Secrets Fester in 'Appropriate'

Erin Keane — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:08:28 +0000

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.

REVIEW | Smart, Funny, Tough to Love: Will Eno's 'Gnit'

Erin Keane — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:37:16 +0000

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.