Actors Theatre of Louisville has been a staple in the Louisville community since 1964, when Actors, Inc. and Theatre Louisville merged. The combined organization was designated the “State Theater of Kentucky” in 1974. Known as one of the America’s most innovative theatre companies, Actors Theatre hosts almost 400 performances annually and welcomes an annual attendance of approximately 150,000 guests.
Audience Publisher, Douglas Dreisbach, caught up with Actors Theatre Chief External Relations Officer, Patrick Owen, to talk about how the team at Actors is working through the current crisis and what we can look forward to in the 2020-21 season. This interview was also featured in the April edition of Audience Magazine.
We are all saddened about the need to cancel so many Louisville shows and events due to situation with COVID-19. However, we also understand we need to follow the proper protocol recommended by government officials to do whatever we can to reduce the further spread of the virus.
Below is a listing of closures and postponements for upcoming events, shows and performances in Louisville.
If you have tickets to any affected events, please consider ‘donating’ your tickets rather than asking for a refund. It is a big blow to the groups not having the shows and every little bit helps. Thanks!
The exchange of dialogue between two of the three characters of Hype Man: a break beat play hits like a gut-punch when its deployed by Idris Goodwin’s script to set up the second act of his microcosm of racial tensions in the era of Black Lives Matter.
The trio represent a Goldilocks-esque set of perspectives on excessive police force against African-Americans and what to do it about it. Too cold? Too hot? Is “just right” even possible in the era of double-down politics?
Pinnacle (Shane Kenyon), a white rapper in the style of an up-and-coming Eminem, is the most reluctant to take a controversial stand among the small, up-and-coming hip-hop group. Verb (Mykele Deville) is an appropriate stage name for a man who is about action at almost any cost. A black man, he is red-hot to use their increasing fame to speak out against the police shooting of an unarmed minority motorist named Gerrod, which sets up the conflict for the play. Peep One (Angelica Santiago) is a mash-up of ethnicities, unwilling even to open the results of a DNA test that could illuminate her racially diverse background. Vacillating between a seemingly incompatible desire to propel reform and a passion to grow her solo career as a beat-maker, her dilemma stands in for the kind of moral ambiguity that confounds many who don’t have to worry about Driving While Black yet struggle with what to do about the phenomenon.
Hype Man: a break beat play.
by Idris Goodwin
Directed by Jess McLeod
Through October 13, 2019 Go here for tickets and more information
The play is a series of varyingly intense conversations punctuated by brief exposures to the group’s performances, first on The Tonight Show and then in concert. Both are knocked off stride by Verb, the hype man, a position in a hip-hop group intended to amplify the message of the lead performer with his own dynamic physicality and verbal reactions to it. He cannot, it seems, stop himself from hyping the injustice of Gerrod’s death, and his resolve threatens to destroy everything the three have tried to build.
His protests are well intended but set up trouble with the group’s sponsors and jeopardize Pinnacle’s trajectory, already challenged as he confronts rejection from all sides as a white man trying to make it in a black man’s world. How far can Pinnacle go to accommodate the activism of his childhood friend and now music partner without permanently alienating one of the constituencies he needs to maintain street cred, sell records and book concerts?
Ultimately, it’s up to Peep to set the rhythm for both the tracks Pinnacle performs and the maintaining of the dynamic among them (if doing so is possible) as they navigate loyalties to art, fame, justice and, most complicated of all, friendship.
Director Jess McLeod does an admirable job keeping the small cast moving and enlarging the action so that the approximately 90-minute play feels larger in scope than what those elements might suggest. The musical numbers provide welcome relief, keeping the play from becoming too dense on ideology; I’ll leave it to hip-hop devotees to judge whether the performances pass muster. But the greatest moves may be those of playwright Goodwin. Without once letting his characters devolve into preaching or smacking the audience in the collective noggin with a Message, he manages to present evenly for our judgment various perspectives on how the woke world ought to respond to BLM. The play, then, is not so much about the villain, or even how to defeat him, but when and how it may be best to take him on.
One of the great treasures for the thinking community in Louisville is the 138-seat Cinema that opened as part of the Speed Art Museum’s expansion. Equipped with state-of-the-art technology, including 16mm, 35mm and DCI-compliant 4K digital projection systems, the venue screens films that otherwise would never be shown locally. Look for features that offer the Cinema+ experience, where after-screening talks and conversations feature artists and filmmakers tied to the projects.
Hype Man is one of Actors Theatre of Louisville’s production for the 2019-2020 season. The hip-hop centric drama touches on issues of race, class and music. Here’s what playwright Idris Goodwin had to say Actors’ resident dramaturg, Hannah Rae Montgomery.
Hannah Rae Montgomery: What inspired you to write Hype Man?
Idris Goodwin: On a basic level, Hype Man is about a band. It’s a workplace drama, the business just happens to be rap music.
Hype Man is the latest of my “break beat plays.” I made a commitment, starting with How We Got On (which premiered in the 2012 Humana Festival), to write a series of plays about hip-hop. And I don’t just mean that the plays feature rap. They’re also investigating how the invention of hip-hop has affected America, our relationships to one another around issues of race, and the importance of this music for young people trying to find a voice. Hype Man addresses questions like: what does it mean to be an ally? If you’re participating in an art form that came from protest movements and represented the disenfranchised, do you have a responsibility to honor those roots?
Labor Day barbecue menus haven’t even been planned yet, but already we’re ramping up for Halloween. The U.S.’s second-favorite holiday (spending for it falls behind only our spree at Christmas) seems to get our attention earlier each year. And if you live in Louisville, the first whiffs of pumpkin spice means one thing: Fifth Third Bank’s “Dracula” is stirring, ready to storm from the cave for a flight and a bite at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
