A word to the wise: Book your accommodations even before you buy
your tickets at
www.spoletousa.org - you'll want to
be as close to the historic district of old Charleston as possible,
so you can walk those cobbled streets to the events.
Louisville, Kentucky
The epicenter of
Louisville's cultural modernity may be one of its
oldest landmarks: The Seelbach, now a Hilton Hotel, dates to 1905
and has a place in F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby.
So if you can tear yourself away from the marble and mint juleps,
take a leisurely stroll through a few blocks of one of the
country's nicest efforts at downtown renovation and you'll find
yourself at the stately pillars of a
former bank, the airy domed
ceiling of which now is the grand lobby of Actors Theatre of
Louisville.
This fully professional company, now in its 40th season, is onstage
most of the year - schedules for its three theaters are at
www.actorstheatre.org.
But Louisville really starts turning up on cultural tourists'
itineraries in March because that's when the theater's annual
Humana
Festival of New American Plays produces a springtime blizzard of
world premières to audiences, artists, and critics from around the
world. First mounted in 1976, the Humana is known for finding new
works that then find their way to bigger stages and to Hollywood -
The Gin Game,
Agnes of God, and
Extremities
are some of the best-known examples.
This year's Humana Festival runs to April 10 and takes an
intriguing turn by commissioning a new play from Los Angeles-based
playwright Naomi Iizuka, called
At the Vanishing Point,
about Louisville's own Butchertown, a preservation district on the
edge of the city's downtown area.