Michael Bigelow Dixon worked with Actors Theatre from 1985 to 2001, first as dramaturg, then literary manager and associate artistic director. He is currently the literary manager at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

For playwrights, there’s no formula for success — every new play is an experiment. Put some ideas in the cyclotron of human imagination, spin those neurons, and sometimes a new play emerges. And sometimes it doesn’t, because the equation of playwriting is full of variables. The playwright’s only constant is her or his talent, but otherwise there are no rules or binding conventions. There are traditions, of course, but with tradition comes the practice of breaking traditions, and that’s provided subversive pleasure for playwrights for centuries.

Recognizing that to be the case, Jon Jory has used the Humana Festival of New American Plays not only as a showcase for new plays and playwrights, but as a kind of laboratory. In his quest for new dramatic riches, he has continually encouraged playwrights to break with tradition and explore new possibilities in form, content and collaboration. Sometimes his encouragement came in the form of unusual commissions; other times it was manifested by a willingness to produce unconventional work — Gary Leon Hill’s environmental Food From Trash, complete with dump truck and dumpster, comes to mind. These choices sent the following message to vigilant American playwrights — the Humana Festival would be a venue for theatricality and talent informed by but unbounded by tradition.

In the early years of the festival, Jon and his staff targeted under-utilized forms for exploration. Their creation of special projects for short plays and solo performances contributed to international interest in the ten-minute play and to the development of new voices for the American stage. Robert Schenkkan, for example, was among the early soloists whose success with The Survivalist in 1982 aided his career move from actor to dramatist. Jane Martin’s first work, Talking With, a collection of eccentric character monologues, premiered that same year before moving off-Broadway and then overseas, where it garnered the Best Play of the Year Award from Theatre Heute magazine in Germany.

Jon next whetted his appetite for experimentation with documentary theatre. Beginning with Execution of Justice by Emily Mann, Actors Theatre embarked on a five-year investigation into the possibilities of docudrama. These plays included: Digging In by Julie Beckett Crutcher and Vaughn McBride, an encounter with Kentuckians whose lives were sorely tested by 1980s farm policies; Whereabouts Unknown by Barbara Damashek, a musical call-to-action for the homeless; Steven Dietz’s riveting exposé of bigotry and murder in the white supremacy movement, God’s Country; and A Piece of My Heart, Shirley Lauro’s moving account of women who served in the Vietnam War. These playwrights orchestrated personal testimony into compelling socio-theatrical events whose revelatory powers emanated as much from their sense of “authenticity” as from their conventional dramatic elements.

In the 1990s, we broadened our outlook on the ways in which new plays could be “written,” and Actors Theatre embarked on a decade-long experiment with ensemble-created work. Paul Walker’s satirical deconstruction of Anthony Comstock’s crusade against pornography, A Passenger Train of Sixty-One Coaches, launched the series. It was followed by Brian Jucha’s descent into the chaos of human passion, Deadly Virtues, Tina Landau’s spirited tale of sexual liberation, 1969, and Joanne Akalaitis’s celebration of Jack Kerouac’s literary life force, Ti Jean Blues. Anne Bogart and The SITI Company premiered several works, including War of the Worlds, SITI’s first collaboration with a playwright, Naomi Iizuka. In each of these productions, the ensemble’s unconventional wedding of text to choreography and design produced virtuosic offspring in performance.

The Humana Festival’s 20th century ended with a series of wild experiments in media, venue and collaboration. The most critically successful of these was Richard Dresser’s car play, What Are You Afraid Of?, which took place in the front seat of an automobile while audience members watched this wicked comedy from the back seat. The T(ext) Shirt Project transformed spectators into performers by outfitting them in t-shirts with entire plays printed on the back. The Phone Plays brought drama into the theatre lobby via pay phones, allowing theatregoers a chance to eavesdrop on “private conversations.” And Back Story, conceived as a two-character play for twenty-two actors, began as a short story commission from Joan Ackermann, which was then adapted for the stage by eighteen playwrights.

There have been other experiments in the history of the Humana Festival — commissioning plays from novelists and journalists, for instance, or The Mentor Project, which brought together established and emerging playwrights for thematically unified bills of one-act plays. All these programs had their share of successes and near misses, but focusing on individual plays or projects obscures a larger vision for the Humana Festival.

In the creation of new theatre, experiment is meaningless without tradition, and vice versa. Each has value, each informs the other, and together they create a powerful dialogue that speaks to the history and future of theatre. By promoting that dialogue through play and project selection, Jon ensured the Humana Festival would retain its fascination — for himself, the staff, audiences, critics and artists. Did we leave anyone out?