The Humana Festival of New American Plays has been a leading home for extraordinary playwrights and their imaginations for more than four decades, making Actors Theatre of Louisville one of the nation’s preeminent powerhouses for new play development. For six weeks every spring, Louisville exerts a gravitational pull on producers and theatre lovers from around the country, who travel from far and wide for the adventure of seeing a diverse slate of fully-produced new plays. Many Humana Festival plays have gone on to garner awards and subsequent productions, making a sustained impact on the international dramatic repertoire. Humana Festival 2019: The Complete Plays brings together all five scripts from the 43rd annual cycle of world premieres, featuring a remarkable array of work by some of the most exciting voices in the American theatre. This anthology makes the Humana Festival plays available to an even wider audience, allowing readers to experience the collision of perspectives, styles and stories that makes the festival such an invigorating celebration of the art form. This compilation features the full-length plays Everybody Black by Dave Harris; The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath; The Corpse Washer, adapted for the stage by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace, from the novel of the same name by Sinan Antoon; How to Defend Yourself by Liliana Padilla; and We’ve Come to Believe, a collaboratively-written play by three writers—Kara Lee Corthron, Emily Feldman, and Matthew Paul Olmos.

“The marvel of Mr. Eno’s new version is how closely it tracks the original while also being, at every moment and unmistakably, a Will Eno play. After climbing the craggy peaks of Ibsen’s daunting play, Mr. Eno has brought down from its dizzying heights a surprising crowd-pleasing (if still strange) work.” — Charles Isherwood, New York Times “Gnit is classic Will Eno. By that I mean I was thrilled by it.” — Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago “If ever a play made me want to be a better person, this is it.” — Bob Fischbach, Omaha World-Herald Peter Gnit, a funny enough, but so-so specimen of humanity, makes a lifetime of bad decisions on the search for his True Self. This is a rollicking yet cautionary tale about (among other things) how the opposite of love is laziness. Gnit is a faithful, unfaithful and willfully American misreading of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (a nineteenth-century Norwegian play), written by Will Eno, who has never been to Norway. Will Eno’s most recent plays include The Open House (Signature Theatre, New York, 2014; Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Best Play) and The Realistic Joneses (Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, 2012; Broadway, 2014). His play Middletown received the Horton Foote Prize and Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Eno lives Brooklyn.

54 monologues from plays first performed at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, 1977-1991.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, two average American families build a slapdash bomb shelter on their shared property line. With nuclear warfare looming, they wonder: Is it the end? The end of baseball…and table manners…and macramé? But as they fret about the fall of civilization, they start to worry that something more personal is at stake. A slyly hilarious, compassionate look at anxiety in America, WE’RE GONNA BE OKAY is about finding the courage to face who we are—and who we want to be.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays has been a leading home for extraordinary playwrights and their imaginations for more than four decades, making Actors Theatre of Louisville one of the nation’s preeminent powerhouses for new play development. For six weeks every spring, Louisville exerts a gravitational pull on producers and theatre lovers from around the country, who travel from far and wide for the adventure of seeing a diverse slate of fully-produced new plays. Many Humana Festival plays have gone on to garner awards and subsequent productions, making a sustained impact on the international dramatic repertoire. Humana Festival 2018: The Complete Plays brings together all six scripts from the 42nd annual cycle of world premieres, featuring a remarkable array of work by some of the most exciting voices in the American theatre. This anthology makes the Humana Festival plays available to an even wider audience, allowing readers to experience the collision of perspectives, styles and stories that makes the festival such an invigorating celebration of the art form. This compilation features the full-length plays Do You Feel Anger? by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, Evocation to Visible Appearance by Mark Schultz, we, the invisibles by Susan Soon He Stanton, Marginal Loss by Deborah Stein, and God Said This by Leah Nanako Winkler, as well as You Across from Me, a collaboratively-written play by four writers—Jaclyn Backhaus, Dipika Guha, Brian Otaño, and Jason Gray Platt.

A collection of all eleven scripts from Actor's Theatre of Louisville's 2013 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Collection of 20 one-act plays chosen from the Humana Festival.

Silverman isn't interested in the dull details of conventional storytelling...Delicious [and] surreal. ...A play that gives two noningénues strange [and] meaty roles. (New York Times) Sharon's never had a roommate before. In fact, there's a lot Sharon's never done before, but Robyn's about to change all that. Jen Silverman's The Roommate shatters expectations with its witty and profound portrait of a blossoming intimacy between two women from vastly different backgrounds, as they navigate the complexities of identity, morality, and the promise of reinvention. Being bad never felt so good as it does in this riveting one-act about second acts. This revised and updated edition was published to coincide with the 2024 Broadway production which starred Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone.

The thin place is a place where the line between this world and another one is very thin; where the living and the dead can reconnect. Ever since she was a little girl, Hilda tried to make contact with that "other place" by listening very carefully, not with her ears but with the space just behind and a little above her eyes. She was never all that sure that the things she could hear were real, until she met Linda, a professional psychic, who can talk to the dead. That's what Hilda wants to do, and so she befriends Linda. But as their friendship deepens, Linda unveils some uncomfortable truths. The Thin Place is a horror story about what's really going on in the space just behind and a little above your eyes.

Northern Uganda on the eve of the millennium: The daughter of American missionaries and a local teenage girl steal into a darkened church to seal their love in a secret, makeshift wedding ceremony. But when the surrounding war zone encroaches on their fragile union, they cannot escape its reach. Confronting the religious and cultural roots of intolerance, Cardboard Piano explores violence and its aftermath, as well as the human capacity for hatred, forgiveness, and love.