Humana Phone Plays

ArtSavant will inform, provoke, & amuse.

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First, the Ten-Minute Play, and now this, the latest in reductive theatre. The 2001 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville brought its third season of Phone Plays. Here's the deal: there's a bank of phones, right? And a line of people. So, you amble on up, pick up the phone, and, with a delicious sense that you're eavesdropping, stand there and listen. Instead of commissioning plays this year, they asked cutting edge small theater companies from across the country for their best three minutes in a receiver.

Martin Kohn talked to our friend Rebecca Reynolds about the Phone Plays in 1999, the first season they were done at the Humana Festival. The festival had previously confined itself to the stage, but that year also played to a packed... vehicle (three passenegrs at a time), with a Car Play, entitled What Are You Afraid Of?, written by Richard Dresser.

Becky wrote one of the phone plays for the 1999 season, entitled Visitation. She lives in Leland, Michigan, and is currently doing a stint in LA working as a writer/producer on HBO's "Arli$$," starring her old friend Robert Wuhl.

related info

Humana Festival 2001

Neo-Futurists Phone Play Participant

Lynn Trenning interviews ATL's Literary Manager, Michael Bigelow Dixon
April 2, 2001

New York Times on changes at Humana
March 11, 2001

more about theatre in Minneapolis, from the New York Times
April 3, 2001