Actors Theatre of Louisville

Founded in 1964 and designated the State Theatre of Kentucky in 1974, Actors Theatre has emerged as one of America’s most consistently innovative theatre companies. For more than 30 years, it has also been a major force in revitalizing American playwriting through the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Because Actors Theatre values collaboration, creativity, and the wide range of human experience, they bring people together through live theatre to celebrate, challenge, and explore. Actors Theatre is committed, through a curated season of contemporary, classic, and popular plays, to engaging local patrons, the most of any performing arts group in our region. The theatre endeavors to be a place where community conversation begins, where patrons are challenged by new ideas and better understand the human experience. In 2001, Actors Theatre first initiated its education department, dedicated to engaging the next generation of theater patrons and artists through in-classroom workshops and student matinee productions. Their education department has since expanded to include playwriting residencies and the annual New Voices Young Playwrights Festival. In the 2011-2012 season, the company offered over 37,000 education encounters.

As part of Shakespeare for a New Generation, Actors Theatre of Louisville presented student matinees of Romeo and Juliet directed by Tony Speciale. In addition, the company provided pre-performance workshops, a professional development seminar, and play guides. A total of seven performances and 68 educational activities benefitted more than 3,100 middle- and high-school students from 45 schools located in Indiana and Kentucky.

A comment from Director Tony Speciale:
Words cannot express how meaningful it was for me to be directing the most famous play ever written about love in the town where I first fell in love. And the fact that this production happened at Actors Theatre is a dream come true. The Theatre became my second home from 1998-2000. It’s nice to be contributing to my Louisville community by making at the place that gave me my artists start fourteen years ago.