Copious Notes

Joanna Jerome is Julia and Aubin Munn is Laura in Crish Barth's "Hill Cattle," part of the Midway Festival of Plays. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Woodford County may be a bedroom community of Lexington, but this weekend it is a hotbed of local theater.

Continuing in Versailles is The Woodford Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which got high marks from the H-L’s own Candace Chaney. Over in Midway, the Thoroughbred Theatre is opening the inaugural Midway Festival of Plays, a lineup of seven 10-minute plays.

Dara Jade Tiller, shown backstage at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2008, is in the Woodford Theatre's production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Photo by David Perry | Herald-Leader.

The 10-minute format has its roots in Kentucky at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, though we rarely get to see the format around here. In a nice little piece of synergy, Earnest features Dara Jade Tiller, a former Acting Apprentice at Actors Theatre who performed in the 2008 Humana Festival.

The whole Woodford theatrical weekend shows nice synergy in the area theater scene. Both productions are creations of Woodford Countians, but have drawn plenty of interest from the Lexington theater community and others.

So, if you’re looking for an excuse to take a little drive out through horse country this weekend, here it is.

Lynn Nottage’s Ruined has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, besting the Broadway hit In the Heights, by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes; and Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw, which had its world premier at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Lynn Nottage.

Lexington has actually seen quite a bit of Nottage’s work and even the playwright herself. Early in the Fall of 2002, Nottage seemed to be all the rage in the Horse Capitol. KET filmed her short play Poof!, about a woman whose abusive husband spontaneously combusts, with Rosie Perez and Viola Davis, at the same time Actors Guild of Lexington was preparing a production of her play, Crumbs from the Table of Joy.  The film brought Nottage to town, and she paid the Actors Guild cast a visit, talking to them about Crumbs’ clash of blues and be-bop culture. During Deb Shoss’ tenure as AGL artistic director, the theater also produced Nottage’s Mud, River, Stone and in 2006, the University of Kentucky presented her Intimate Apparel.

Nottage can add the Pulitzer to a list of a highly prestigious grants she’s received, including a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2007 MacArthur Genius Grant. Ruined, currently playing at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club, is about women during a brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.