Perspectives / Ben Barnes Ben Barnes became the artistic director of Abbey Theatre, Dublin's century-old playhouse, in 2000. He wrote this look at the Humana Festival the same year. Louisville Landing From where I live it was always quite an operation getting to Actors Theatre. In the days when the convenience of clearing American customs in Dublin was unheard of, you flew to New York where, after that tedious procedure was successfully negotiated, you dashed between terminals to pick up a flight to Louisville, more often than not, routed through Pittsburgh. The palaver of the journey, however, was happily dispelled by the warmth of the welcome. The friendly ATL representatives at the airport, the neo-colonial splendor of the Seelbach Hilton, the linking up with old friends in the foyer of the Pamela Brown, the sumptuous dinner in a suburban mansion and all that before your head hits the pillow for the first time in this play-packed weekend. I came to Louisville in 1985 and was to return there on three occasions (1987/1990/1993). What brought me there and why did I keep going back? As a young director at the Abbey Theatre I had staged the work of James McLure and Beth Henley and had counted among my earliest directing assignments at the famous Project Arts Centre in Dublin Wendy Kesselman’s searing and beautiful drama, My Sister in this House. These productions allied to the fact that I had spent a year of my undergraduate studies at Amherst resulted in my acquiring a reputation as an enthusiast and an expert on contemporary American drama! Enthusiast, certainly. Expert, far from it. So when the chance came to acquaint myself with the crucible from whence emerged many of the plays I had staged in Dublin, I was not slow to grasp the opportunity. What brought me to Louisville was curiosity, and what I found there was a remarkable pioneering theatre dedicated to fostering the voices of new American playwrights, a theatre which invested serious resources in dramaturgical support and into the technical skills and stagecraft which gave its new and established American dramatists the best possible showcase for their work, and a theatre which drew to its performance spaces playgoers, producers, directors, agents and impresarios from all over the world. The international success of the ATL-premiered Agnes of God, Extremities, Crimes of the Heart, Getting Out, The Gin Game, and many more, speaks to the vibrancy and importance of the American voice in the drama of the English-speaking world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Based in a city more renowned as the birthplace of Muhammad Ali and the home of good bourbon and even better horse racing, Actors Theatre has, for twenty-five years, been the nerve centre of this movement, and the English-speaking European has been significantly enriched by, and indebted to, the enlightened and enabling work of this small theatre in the American South. So that’s why I came and that’s what I found. This is why I came back. I came back intermittently through the years because ATL’s visitors weekend never failed to turn up drama which was, at the very least, efficiently produced, provocative and well crafted, but which was often moving, inspired, ground-breaking, anarchic or just downright funny. In Louisville I met the legendary Jimmy Breslin and the queen of American theatre, Marsha Norman. I crossed swords with Tony Kushner and bemoaned the fact that James McLure was before my time. I hobnobbed with Irish and British journalists to whom I probably would have given a wide berth on my home patch. Improbably, I loved a play called To Culebra which charted the folly of Ferdinand de Lesseps as he tried to repeat in Panama what he had done at Suez. And in a Festival littered with imaginative play titles my favourite was the little known How Gertrude Stormed the Philosopher’s Club. I was stimulated by the work, and as we might say in Ireland, I enjoyed the craic in the bars and restaurants of Louisville and met dozens of people, some forgotten and some fondly remembered: the effervescent Elizabeth Clark and the eternally boyish dramaturge with the knapsack, Michael Dixon, whose incisiveness, commitment and infectious enthusiasm always, it seemed to me, epitomised the spirit of Actors Theatre of Louisville, which confidently promised so much and rarely failed to deliver on that promise.