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Anne Bogart: Viewpoints. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith, editors Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1995. pp 224 $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper
Widely known for its annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville, under the direction of Jon Jory, also produces a Classics in Context Festival. In the past, the Festival has focused on a specific historical period or individual artist through a variety of multi-disciplinary events. As noted in the back of the book reviewed here, "this exploration provides an opportunity to examine the social, political and aesthetic contexts within which plays were written and to celebrate important artistic movements that have shaped theatre in a number of ways." Molière, Pirandello, the Moscow Art Theatre and the French Romantics have been the focus of past Festivals.
Last year, Classics in Context put a contemporary spin on the Festival and examined the work of Anne Bogart, Associate Professor at Columbia University and Co-Artistic Director of the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI), which she founded in 1992 with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki. She is the recipient of two Obie Awards and a Bessie Award. Her list of directing credits includes titles from the American canon (Claire Booth Luce's The Women, Inge's Picnic, and Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime), world premieres (Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz, for which I served as dramaturg, and Charles L. Mee, Jr. 's Another Person is a Foreign Country), European classics (Brecht' s In the Jungle of Cities and Buchner's Danton's Death), and numerous "derived from/inspired by" productions developed in collaboration with various companies.
Performance in the 1995 festival (January 4-29) included The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice; Small Lives/Big Dreams, based on (or "derived from") the five major...