Perspectives / Joan Ackermann Joan Ackermann is co-founder and artistic director of Mixed Company theatre in Massachusetts. Her plays include Zara Spook and Other Lures, Stanton's Garage, The Batting Cage and Back Story. The Humana Festival is an indescribably thrilling event for a playwright. Hawks love thermals; cellists love Carnegie Hall; playwrights love the Humana Festival. It’s such a supportive milieu in which to cavort and stretch and be fully awake in one’s passion. From the rehearsal period – a stimulating month with actors, directors, and new plays swarming and brewing – to the big weekend which is a wildly exhilarating experience. There is nothing like it. I’ll never forget my first festival, arriving at Kentucky Towers in a car that had broken down en route in Cleveland and died for good in Louisville. (The experience inspired Stanton’s Garage which got me back to the festival.) Michael Dixon met me and helped me schlep piles of unpacked clothes, an iron, and boots up to my room. I don’t know why I didn’t have a suitcase back then. Thanks to my career, which was launched at the festival, I now own suitcases and a car that works. And so many wonderful memories and great friends from Actors Theatre. Writing plays is a lonely venture and the company that the Humana Festival offers, even when it’s not going on, is profound. I am always aiming for the festival. I set my internal clock to it, to having a play done by the end of the summer to submit for consideration for that splendid event in the spring.