Zan Sawyer-Dailey is Actors Theatre's associate director and has been with the theatre for over 20 years.

Each time Zan Sawyer-Dailey watches a general audition, she’s reminded of the tremendous impact the Humana Festival has had over the years.

"I see monologue after monologue from plays we premiered," she says. "And many of the actors don’t even realize it. It’s become a part of the landscape of American theater. The impact of the festival in American dramatic literature is incomparable."

As the associate director for Actors Theatre, Zan’s job is to help directors assemble the casts who will literally embody the words on the page. "Much of the process for my office is to understand the particular playwright’s sense of the play and to help the director stay that course," she says. But even the process of casting can push directors and playwrights in their understanding of these words.

"They discover things they might not have known about the play," she says. "Interesting choices emerge as we hear the words through different actors’ voices."

When Zan first joined the theater in the mid-1980s, the demands of casting for the festival were far different than they are now.

"It was huge those first several years," she recalls. "We used to do really big plays with a lot of cross-over doubling. It was hard to get directors to agree on actors. Infinity's House had something like 25 or 30 characters and 12 actors. One of those first years, there were 12 plays—we were doing a lot of work. There’s more emphasis now on giving plays more development and more time for process."

And she expects that trend to continue in the future, as the theater strives to offer scripts earlier readings and expand commissions.

"We don’t have a history of development work, but we’re interested in that. We recognize the importance of it," she explains. "Commissioning is vital—not only to promising writers, but to established writers, to give them the freedom and time to write."

Even with smaller casts and fewer plays than in the past, each year poses a new set of casting challenges as the festival evolves and unforeseen circumstances crop up. In one case, a festival actor was offered a movie deal and left for filming in Uruguay just days before the show opened, necessitating a last-minute replacement. And when Jon Jory launched a project to commission famous writers of other genres to craft plays for the festival, Zan found that some weren’t quite used to the play-making process.

"One very famous journalist used to show up at rehearsals with dill pickles and salami sandwiches," says Zan, her pixie-like head tilting back in a laugh. "He’d spend the whole rehearsal process pacing and eating. The whole room smelled like garlic!"

The past 30 years have brought a variety of phases to the annual event, she adds. There have been phone plays offered in the lobby, short plays designed to be printed on T-shirts and worn—even a play performed in the front seat of a car parked in front of the theater for audiences of two or three people sitting in back.

There were years when Actors Theatre took new works overseas with a company of about 25 actors to the then-Eastern bloc countries. The 10-minute plays that have become a fixture of the Humana Festival were particularly useful for introducing foreign audiences to American works, she says. "You’d be doing three or four an hour and the actors would rotate. That was a wonderful vehicle to be able to showcase writers’ work. When I was in Poland, it was amazing to those audiences that we were allowed say and do whatever we wanted, without political censorship."

And then there were the years when Jon Jory was fascinated with the docudrama genre. That led to productions such as Whereabouts Unknown, "a spectacular Brechtian event" created from interviews with homeless individuals, and Digging In, which focused on the struggle of Midwest farmers to hang on to family farms. "It was an amazing, startling, beautiful, heart-wrenching production," Zan gushes. "But I don’t think it’s never been done again."

"It has always felt to me like a goal is to press the boundaries: linear vs. nonlinear, realism vs. nonrealism, new voices, new ideas, new ways of thinking. Kid-Simple examined how sound tells the story. We try to cover a range of styles, voices, gender and color. Diversity—not for its own sake, but for its value. We’ll continue to nurture artists and keep those plays moving into the general repertoire, into the American canon. It’s not just about going to New York. Our goal is to try and keep these plays alive so audiences across the country can enjoy them."

— Raven J. Railey