The upcoming festival is “a revolution that honors Actors’ legacy and celebrates Kentuckiana artistry,” according to Actors Theatre managing director Emily Tarquin.
Actors Theatre and the Louisville Fringe Festival announced The Storytelling Revolution Festival on Thursday. The festival will take place this spring, and theater leadership said it will showcase a diverse collection of new work by Kentucky and Southern Indiana playwrights.
From April 1-12, more than a dozen productions will open at Actors Theatre’s Main Street Complex. This will include a slate of new plays written by students from the Kentucky School for the Blind.
Festival codirector and Actors artistic director Amelia Powell said the performances will offer a mix of family-friendly, educational and comedic programming.
“We're really excited about that range and breadth that we can not only share ourselves here at Actors Theater of Louisville, but that we can convene with so many amazing organizations and artists from around Louisville and Kentucky,” she said.
Shannon Woolley Allison, the cofounder of Looking for Lilith Theatre Company in Louisville, said her group will perform “Because you were, I am” for the festival. The production is an interactive performance about ancestral stories the group collected from women in Kentucky and beyond.
This new work originated from a larger project the theater company created under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Woolley Allison said.
“It's sort of a hybrid performance and workshop where the audience can participate at their own comfort level,” she said. “They travel with us on a journey through all these ancestor stories, and then they also have opportunities to share and perform their own ancestor stories.”
Cofounder Jennifer Thalman Kepler said joining the play festival strengthens the “connective tissue” among local playwrights and creatives.
“That's something we take pretty seriously in our company, creating community around our artists and with the community groups we work with,” she said. “So it just feels right up our alley, part of our DNA.”
The Storytelling Revolution Festival will replace Louisville Fringe’s annual festival, Powell said.
Louisville Fringe Festival offered experimental and nontraditional theater for six years until its last play festival in 2024. That was the first time Actors Theatre partnered with Louisville Fringe, and Powell said she is excited to continue the collaboration this year.
“You will see some indications on the work of if you are a tried and true Fringe fan,” she said. “But all of it has been co-curated together, and it's been a real labor of love.”
Powell said the festival honors Actors Theatre’s dedication to Louisville’s theater community after a four-decade partnership with Humana which created the famed Humana Festival of New American Plays, which ended in 2021.
“Our entire community here in Louisville has grown and grown in its capacity to imagine new stories and to tell those in creative new ways,” she said. “So this new Festival, The Storytelling Revolution Festival, is an opportunity for a different kind of new work festival that will honor our region.”
Tickets for the festival will go on sale Feb. 17. The performance schedule is available online.
