Actors Theatre of Louisville
The non-profit organization began when a pair of theatre companies, Actors, Inc. and Theatre Louisville, merged under the title Actors Theatre of Louisville. Housed in a tiny loft, formally the Gypsy Tea Room at 617 1/2 S Fourth Street, the company's founding directors were Richard Block and Ewel Cornett. Quickly outgrowing its 100-seat domicile, the fledgling troupe moved to an abandoned Illinois Central Railroad Station at Seventh Street and the Ohio River. Louisville architect Jasper D. Ward converted the building into a 350-seat theatre, preserving most of the station's interior structure.
In May 1969, Jon Jory was appointed the theatre's new producing director. Jory's October 1969 Louisville directing debut with Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood marked a renaissance for the organization. Alexander Speer, former executive director whose tenure of forty years began in 1965, became Jory's partner.
Due to demolition of the station to make way for a connector highway, the company's final production at the station was Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in May 1972. As final performances were presented, sentimental audiences recalled how the station had been a good home-a place where Actors Theatre had grown from several hundred season subscribers to over 9,000, and where over 65 productions had been staged.
ACTORS THEATRE LEADS REVITALIZATION OF MAIN STREET
The theatre established a new complex in the old Bank of Louisville building and the adjacent Myers-Thompson Display Building on downtown's Main Street between Third and Fourth Streets. Erected in 1837 and designated a National Historic Landmark, the bank was designed by prominent 19th-century architect James H. Dakin and is one of the best examples of small-scale Greek Revival architecture in the country.
The Chicago-based firm Harry Weese and Associates melded the two diverse structures and constructed at the rear of the two buildings the 637-seat Pamela Brown Auditorium, with a thrust stage, which opened in October 1972. The 159-seat Victor Jory Theatre, a three-quarter arena performance space, opened in April 1973. The building is the third-oldest building still standing in downtown Louisville, and is a copy of the Bank of America building at the corner of Wall Street and Williams Street in New York City, which was built in the early 1830s. The two buildings in Louisville which predate the Bank of Louisville building are The Old House on S Fifth Street (built 1829, housed the city's first electric lights) and Christ Church Cathedral on S Second Street (the main part built 1824).
ACTORS THEATRE STARTS HUMANA FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN PLAYS
In 1976, Jory started the internationally celebrated Humana Festival of New American Plays, the preeminent annual showcase of new theatrical work, underwritten since 1979 by The Humana Foundation, that draws theatre-lovers, critics, producers and playwrights from around the world. The theatre has produced over 300 Humana Festival plays (full-lengths, one-acts, monologues, T(ext) shirt and car plays) representing the work of more than 200 playwrights.
Over three-fourths of the Humana Festival plays have been published in 25 Actors Theatre anthologies as well as individual acting editions, making them part of the permanent canon of American dramatic literature. The theatre's distinguished New Play Program also includes a national Ten-Minute Play Contest, started in 1989, that evolved from the National One-Act Contest (1979-1989). Parallel to the growth of the New Play Program, attention was warranted for the forgotten play form, the one-act. Shorts became the theatre's festival of premiere one-act plays and in the five seasons, 1980-1985, the Shorts Festival introduced nearly 100 new short plays to American audiences. Now these mini-plays are part of the Humana Festival.
The Humana Festival has premiered the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Dinner with Friends (Donald Margulies), Crimes of the Heart (Beth Henley) and The Gin Game (D.L. Coburn) and Pulitzer finalists Becky Shaw (Gina Gionfriddo), Keely and Du (Jane Martin) and Omnium-Gatherum (Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros and Theresa Rebeck) as well as Getting Out (Marsha Norman), Agnes of God (John Pielmeier), Lone Star (James McLure), In the Eye of the Hurricane (Eduardo Machado), Courtship (Horton Foote), Extremities (William Mastrosimone), My Sister in this House (Wendy Kesselman), Tales of the Lost Formicans (Constance Congdon), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (John Patrick Shanley), Marisol (José Rivera), One Flea Spare (Naomi Wallace), Slavs! (Tony Kushner), The Batting Cage (Joan Ackermann) and Y2K (Arthur Kopit).
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