LOUISVILLE, Ky.

Far from the gaudy shop window of American commercial theater on Broadway is the headier marketplace for the nonprofit, art-theater universe, the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky. And yet, for all the hard questions about art and entertainment that undergird the Humana, the event itself is one very giddy weekend.

Staged each year over five or six weeks in February and March, the Humana comes to its head in its two final Special Visitors Weekends, which gather theater people and critics from all over the country for intense two- to three-day marathons of new plays in three theaters.

Those weekends are the crossroads of the American art theater -- the universe of some 467 established not-for-profits plus smaller wannabes. It's a noisy, festive, opinionated marketplace, akin to a trade show, an Irish race weekend or an NCAA Final Four.

As playwright Arthur Kopit told me in 2001, "It's not like novelists -- no one is hoping your play will fail so theirs will succeed. It's revitalizing."

There were some 230 theater pros and critics attending (mixed in with real theater-goers) the last weekend in March, including artistic directors, agents, literary managers, producers and critics -- all greedy for new plays and old friends and delighted to have a grand communal time.

It's hard to tell where the work ends and the party begins, since Actors Theatre's hallways and lobbies, bars, restaurants and even sidewalks throng with theater folk from morning until early morning the next day, with hearty spillover into the restaurants of downtown Louisville.

Every year I put that final visitors' weekend on my schedule, and then the press of Pittsburgh theater intervenes. I've gone only three times, all during the reign of Actors Theatre artistic director Marc Masterson, but it's made me a Humana junkie and taught me that it's called Looa-vull, not Looey-ville.

Masterson came to Actors Theatre in 2000 after 20 years growing Pittsburgh's City Theatre into a vibrant home for new plays. His first Humana Festival in 2001 was my first, and I was able to return in 2004.

Among the crowd, I ran into a number of former Pittsburghers, including Steven Libman, once of the Pittsburgh Ballet, now with California's La Jolla Playhouse; Lorraine Venberg, costume designer at Actors; and David Jobin, former business manager at City Theatre, now at San Francisco's Magic Theatre. And its always good to see Masterson and his wife, Patti Melvin, who seem to have taken to Louisville as much as Louisville has taken to them.

As to the plays, which it's all about, it was a good year. Of the eight shows, my travel schedule confined me to six, but I enjoyed all and saw four with definite prospects. (The two I missed were Carly Mensch's "All Hail Hurricane Gordo" and a program of short plays and skits.)

These are full-scale productions, with sets varying from sumptuous to spare but direction and acting at a high level. The 32 years of support by the Humana Foundation, offshoot of health insurance giant Humana Inc., have had a spreader effect, not just on the many plays produced there but on the hunger for new plays in general.

I didn't get any new take on the zeitgeist -- the Humana isn't a themed festival and it's rare you can spot some new wave bubbling up in the theatrical heartland. "It's more theater than makes any rational sense for anyone to see all at once," Masterson once said, but what fun it is.

Lee Blessing, "GreatFalls"

We meet a middle-aged man (Tom Nelis) driving across the plains states with an angry teenage girl (Halley Wegryn Gross), his stepdaughter. His marriage has ended, and he's run off with her hoping to prove himself a father at the last minute. Blessing makes this abductor sympathetic by dramatizing the girl as foul-mouthed and manipulative, even though she has cause.

The stepfather is also trying to relive a trip he took with his parents, though his memories leave her cold. His desire to be a good parent is sorely tested when she tells him she's pregnant and demands his help. Their prickly interdependence is paralleled by the places they pass through and their charged relationship ends with a sense that something has been salvaged.

It's a 90-minute two-hander that's a delicious challenge for actors and director Lucy Tiberghien, who must give it human urgency. As the father of daughters, I can testify to its pull on the heart. Best known for "A Walk in the Woods," Blessing's skills guarantee it a future.

Gina Gionfriddo, "Becky Shaw"

Many call this the hit of the festival. Suzanna (Mia Barron) and opinionated Max (the skilled David Wilson Barnes), her family's business advisor, were raised almost as siblings, but as they talk brilliantly about a history we don't know, we see they might be something more. "Love is a happy byproduct of use," says cynical Max. In scene two, just a half-year later, she's married another man, the softer Andrew (Davis Duffield). They fix Max up with the title character (Annie Parisse), who's eccentric and disturbing.

Something happens between Max and Becky. Andrew tries to make it better, and this and Suzanna's unresolved feelings for Max open a space between them. Becky's story gets more bizarre, all the relationships fray and then we meet Suzanna's truly eccentric mother (Janis Dardaris, memorable from 15 or more years ago at the Public Theater and Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival).

I admit to not understanding these people, and I'm not sure playwright or director Peter DuBois do, either. Everyone except the robustly selfish mother seems emotionally crippled in some way, and they're all difficult to like, especially Max. But Gionfriddo's writing is so knowing and they say such provocative things that you want to know them better. It feels like a brilliant sketch still seeking closure -- perhaps like life.

Jennifer Haley, "Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom"

Certainly the flashiest play of the festival, this is the one I'd most like to see realized more fully. Beneath the surface of a boring, regimented suburb, it discovers a parallel teenage culture of multiplayer, online computer horror games, which, with a creepy, directorial voiceover, provide the framing metaphor. We see scenes between teenagers and between them and adults, always refracted through the sensibility of the game, so that it's hard to tell which is real and which is virtual.

It's a fabulous concept, carried out initially with great panache. But as it approaches a scary conclusion in which the two worlds frighteningly merge, it gets a trifle obvious. Maybe this is in deference to audience members who need things spelled out, but some of us want to do more of the work ourselves. That aside, I think Haley has a winner. Kip Fagan directed a cast of four playing three or four roles each.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, "the break/s"

This hip-hop drama/dance/poem was the most challenging show, introducing me to a form I don't know. It's a solo piece performed with great range and poetic and physical intensity by its author, supported by music and rhythms courtesy of an interactive DJ and by an emcee who works the crowd to start and then plays percussion. The author/performer takes us on a personal, culture-bending journey that one critic compares to Ulysses, fighting his way past monsters, chimeras and seductions to find himself.

The Civilians, "This Beautiful City"

The biggest show of the festival was this full-scale, documentary, political/exploratory musical (you can see me trying to place the form) written by Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis, based on interviews and with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. It tells the tale of the evangelical movement and its unofficial headquarters, Colorado Springs, at the base of the Rocky Mountains.

Interwoven with the re-created interviews are travelogue material and park rangers advising us how to proceed, a caution we also need in approaching the highly charged religio-political story of Ted Haggard, the evangelical guru who, you may recall, was outed as a client of a gay prostitute. That happens in the middle of the 2¹/₂-hour show, after a first act presenting evangelical utopia, then opening up to an Act 2 of reconsideration.

The voices represented are pro and con, evangelical and not. It's a powerful mosaic, a dynamic picture of a nation still seeking to make good on the utopian dreams mixed into its foundations, set in a beautiful place to which humans can barely measure up. It's funny and weirdly beautiful, something like a modern-day equivalent to the politically-charged theater of the mid-20th century.

Ten-Minute Plays

Why can't we make short one-act plays more widely available? The Humana has been producing them for years, and these well represent the genre. I wish there were a theater in Pittsburgh willing to give us an evening of proven one-acts. We know what fun it can be from the New Works Festival.

I was taken with the disturbing "One Short Sleepe" by Naomi Wallace (Actors Theatre playwright in residence), a monologue by a Palestinian (Ramiz Monsef) whom you realize, with a gulp, is already dead; Elaine Jarvik's "Dead Right," a delicious kitchen-table debate between a couple (William McNulty and Dori Legg) over the obituary page; and M. Thomas Cooper's "Tongue, Tied," about a young couple (Emily Ackerman and Stephen Plunkett), who express themselves via argumentative sock people and meet cute in a psychiatrist's waiting room -- all three well directed by Masterson.