With Its Future Uncertain, the Humana Festival Will Not Return in 2022

Opportunities for emerging playwrights to break into the industry are few — and now there’s one less.

The Humana Festival of New American Plays, one of the premiere showcases for new work by contemporary American playwrights, will not take place this year, either in person or online, Actors Theater of Louisville confirmed in a statement this week. When the theater announced its fall and spring programming in September, it did not include the annual event, and the status of the 2022 festival had remained unclear.

“In order to uplift, celebrate and expand the tremendous legacy of the festival, it is necessary to reimagine a 21st-century model that is sustainable, equitable and radically accessible,” Robert Barry Fleming, the theater’s executive artistic director, said in the statement. He did not specify what that might look like.

The last in-person festival was held in 2019. Actors Theater, a regional company, canceled the 2020 festival because of the pandemic, scrapping five world premieres, though it pivoted to streaming some of the plays that had managed to open. In 2021, the theater hosted a virtual exhibition of digital plays, virtual reality productions and an interactive video game, with premieres scattered throughout the year. (A number of them are still available online.)

Amelia Acosta Powell, the theater’s impact producer, whose focus is on outreach to donors and audiences, said a decision had not yet been made on whether the festival would return — or what form it would take — in future years.

Instead, she said, the theater is focusing on developing work from the virtual exhibition held last year, including an in-person production of “Still Ready,” originally a musical docu-series celebrating Black artistry, that will have its premiere at Actors Theater in May.

Fleming told WFPL, the Louisville NPR affiliate, in October that festival organizers believed it was less important to try to cram the development of new plays into “a six-week kind of window” than to be “contributing to the canon, and continuing to innovate.”

The Humana Festival, which was founded in 1976, typically takes place over multiple weeks in March and April at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky. It attracts an international audience and has hosted the premieres of work by Anne Washburn, Will Eno and Sarah Ruhl.

Since 1979, the festival has been sponsored by the Humana Foundation in Louisville and has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Powell declined to share the cost of producing the event, or to specify how much the foundation contributes, but she said it had been less than half of the overall cost, with the remainder coming from Actors Theater’s operating budget, as well as from other corporate, foundation and individual gifts.

Mark Taylor, a spokesman for Humana, a health insurance company based in Louisville, said that the foundation’s most recent grant to the theater ended last year. “Humana and the Humana Foundation look forward to continuing to support the arts in Louisville and other communities in creative new ways,” he said in an email.

Several of the more than 400 plays presented at the festival have gone on to win wider accolades — “The Gin Game” by D.L. Coburn, “Dinner With Friends” by Donald Margulies and “Crimes of the Heart” by Beth Henley, all won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — and the event is often regarded as a milestone in the careers of emerging playwrights. Programming is a mix of short pieces, 10-minute plays, one-acts and full-length shows.

Recent world premieres have included Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” Lucas Hnath’s “The Christians” and Eno’s “Gnit.”

Washburn, the author of “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” has premiered work at the festival. She said that what was most beneficial about the event was the collegiality — the impromptu meetings with critics, directors, apprentices and fellow playwrights — in a setting outside New York.

“You’d have playwrights from around the country, but it’s also super set in Louisville,” she said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “You’d explore the city, have lots of bourbon and banana pudding, and the playwrights would get together and drink and despair about the world.”

It was also one of the few places where an up-and-coming playwright could get work produced, she added.

“New York was much less set up for new plays,” she said. “There were very few of these smaller, secondary stages or development production programs. A lot of playwrights started at Humana when they couldn’t get a production in New York. It’s a big deal, but it doesn’t have the same pressures as a singular opening.”

Eno, whose play “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” was a finalist in 2005 for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, said in an email that it would be disappointing if the festival didn’t return as an in-person event.

“Playwriting is almost impossible, and this just makes it a little harder, and a little less, I suppose, heralded, or communal,” he said. “It’s like the death of a hardware store or a coffee shop people liked.”

Powell, the impact producer, said that it was unlikely that any future iteration of the event would be structured as it was prepandemic, but that the theater recognized the value of certain aspects of the annual gathering, which “we would hope to capture in new ways.”

Among them: giving artists from around the country the opportunity to collaborate in the development of their works-in-progress, as well as to “engage in creative and intellectual discourse.”

But the in-person aspect of the gathering, Eno said, can’t be replicated.

“We all learned something over the last couple years about the importance of people, people gathering, physically assembling for some higher or greater or more mysterious purpose,” he said, “And it’s too bad it won’t happen anymore at Humana.”