John Pielmeier’s play Agnes of God received its first professional production in the 1980 Humana Festival. It later ran for a year on Broadway and was adapted for film. He has since had numerous theatre and film credits, including Courage, a one-man show that appeared in the 1983 festival. He wrote the following to commemorate the Humana Festival’s 10th anniversary.

The first time I came to Louisville, in the summer 1971, I hitchhiked in from Trotwood, Ohio, where I was acting for $25 a week in a two-week stock company. I rode into Louisville with a stranger on his way to Fort Knox. He was an affable man who opened me up easily to conversation, a foretaste of the years here to come. I spent a day and half in this fine city, visited friends, saw the riverboat, and bluegrass, and Arnold Stang in a production of Play It Again, Sam at Actors Theatre.

This was my first experience in the real South. A river separated Louisville from its Northern neighbors, and there are many Georgians and Alabamians who would argue that only the Deep South can be honestly Southern. But as soon as I crossed the Ohio, I knew: the smell was in the air, that Southern fried quality of crisp warm tenderness.

I had just come, that summer of ‘71, from my first success as a writer. I had written an adaptation of George Jackson’s prison letters and seen it produced as a student production. The reaction to it was riotously wonderful. It was reviewed in The New York Times, considered by Joe Papp, rejected by a stupid agent. Then I went to Trotwood, and Louisville, and handed over my first submission to Actors, a collection of short plays. I never heard anything again about those plays, but that was OK. They were truly terrible.

I didn’t meet Jon Jory until almost two years later when I was in Chicago for the Theatre Communications Group auditions, a big event in the life of a student actor. I was approached by something like eight theatres—what a day!—and one of those was Actors. I took another offer. The following spring Jon saw me in a nightmarish production of La Turista at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Shortly after that I was out of a job, biting my nails, wondering what to do, and the phone rang. It was Jon, asking me to read for him again.

My best acting experience at Actors was in an "old" play, The Ballad of the Sad Café and I mention it because it illuminates for me one of the wonderful things about Jon’s approach to new work. He approached this one as if it were a new play, just as he treats the new ones as if they were old. He has respect and concern for the text, for clarity, but also for imagination.

In Ballad I played a dwarf. I was harnessed every night into a strange contraption, but the harness was only physical: I felt free to fly to whatever heights I could find.

One day while rehearsing Ballad someone decided that the program cover should consist of a photograph of Adale O’Brien and me standing on a typical Southern farm porch. On a Saturday morning we dressed in our costumes—Adale in coveralls, me in my harness—piled into a car and drove to the countryside. We found a farmhouse and got the owner to allow us to pose on his porch. He was a crusty old man and he kept the wife and daughters inside. One time he looked at me, all dwarfed up, and said, "You don’t see many of them around no more." He wanted Adale to come work his farm for him. But what amazed me was that this man welcomed us unannounced into his yard.
Louisville I loved, and still do, and always will. I don’t know why. It is a city hard for me to describe, to capture. I feel a strong connection to the place, some umbilical call from the past. I slip into a Southern lilt. I feel at home.

I was offered hospitality in Louisville—by Jon, by the man on the porch, by the resident actors, by my friends. Southern hospitality is not so much an open-armed welcome, as it is a whatever-is-mine-may-not-be-yours-but-you-just-help-yourself kind of attitude. I don’t know if I have ever been that generous. As a boy I would develop crushes on those people who had qualities that I lacked. I have a crush on the South, centered in Louisville, and I hope to someday capture that generosity and house it in my heart.

I gave Jon a copy of Agnes of God in the spring of 1979, and I’m afraid to say that I think he forgot about it, because he asked for another copy at the end of the summer. With the theatre’s commitment to the play, I became a professional writer. I found that Actors accepts plays with the same hospitality that it accepts actors. I felt respected and welcomed, by Jon, by Sandy Speer, by everyone at Actors.

That is perhaps the secret of hospitality: You are treated as family, because you are respected as an equal, as someone desirable, and not only are you given the run of the refrigerator, but you are asked back again and again.

Whenever I visit Louisville, I stay with my friends the Sextons, and their friend Maybelle comes in to fix me a batch of her homemade biscuits. They are warm and drip with butter, and each one of them is a perfect creation. Jon’s biscuits are the plays he presents, and though each of them may not be as perfect as Maybelle’s creations, they have you the audience and we the playwrights coming back for seconds. Step on in. Help yourself. Plenty more where these come from. They’re good.