Copious Notes

Warren Hammack, the longtime artistic director of Horse Cave Theatre, will be at the Kentucky Book Fair Saturday in Frankfort to support a new book of plays that premiered at the theatre during his tenure.

World Premiers from Horse Cave Theatre compiles 14 scripts from writers including Sallie Bingham, Billy Edd Wheeler and Liz Bussey Fentress, who co-edited the book with Hammack. From 9:30 until 11 a.m. Saturday, Hammack, Fentress and other actors will present cuts from plays featured in the anthology in the Glass Room of the Capitol Plaza Hotel, adjacent to the Book Fair. They will then be at the fair, which runs from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. to sign books and talk to visitors.

During his years at Horse Cave, now Kentucky Repertory Theatre, Hammack established a tradition of presenting new works from Kentucky authors, some of which were filmed and presented on KET, through a project called Kentucky Voices. The anthology, published by Motes Books of Louisville, includes a preface from Hammack, an afterword from Fentress and notes from the playwrights about their shows and the productions of them.

Tom Eblen writes about the Book Fair and Kentucky’s literary tradition.

Robert Brock in front of Kentucky Repertory Theatre in Horse Cave, which he hopes to save by alerting people to its financial plight. Photo by J. Barrett Griffin | Kentucky Repertory Theatre.

Five years ago, Horse Cave Theatre fell into a ­financial ditch.

Some accumulated debt and shortfalls put the ­company in a position where it couldn’t even make payroll. So theater ­director Robert Brock ­approached two of the company’s largest donors. He spent time detailing the ­situation to them and explaining his plans to make sure it didn’t happen again.

The donors gave Horse Cave the money it needed to stabilize, “and nobody ever knew what happened,” Brock said.

That’s the way arts groups like it.

Just like no one wants to bet on a lame horse, people want to be associated with a successful enterprise. That is why most arts groups will try to put on a happy face, even in times of deep crisis.

But faced with a life-threatening $350,000 deficit last month, Brock took a different course of action.
Kentucky Repertory ­Theatre, the name Horse Cave theatre adopted in 2004, launched the Save a Kentucky Treasure Campaign to raise $350,000 by March 15.

On Feb. 1, The ­Courier-Journal of Louisville ­published a story detailing how a perfect storm of high gas prices, a 50 percent ­tourism drop in the Mammoth Cave region last summer and a shortfall in donations put the theater in danger of closing.

“It shocked some people, probably in a good way,” Brock said Tuesday.

He went public with the theater’s plight because “I don’t have any place to go,” he said, “and the economy has never been like this in the entirety of the theater’s existence. A theater in San Francisco put out an appeal like this and made it.”

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UK symphony violin players Ella Chang, left, and Jihee Kang make a portrait together on the stage of the Kennedy Center concert hall. Photo by Jonathan Palmer.

Check out Jonathan Palmer’s slide show from Our Lincoln.

WASHINGTON – Last February, the Kentucky Humanities Council and the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre claimed Abraham Lincoln as the Bluegrass State’s own through music and words in the Our Lincoln concert at the Singletary Center for the Arts.

Monday night, the same artists staked that claim on a national stage: the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.

The performance of Our Lincoln at the Kennedy Center was a chance for the artists involved, including the Lexington Singers and the UK Symphony Orchestra, to play on the stage of one of the most prestigious arts venues in America. It was also a chance for Kentucky to show off.

“When I heard about this, I said, in one fell swoop, you could change a lot of people’s minds about our state,” Robert Brock, artistic director of Kentucky Repertory Theatre, said, recalling receiving his invitation to portray Lincoln’s law partner, Billy Herndon, in the show.

Brock’s performance was one of numerous pieces meant to portray the 16^th President, usually associated with Illinois, from a distinctly Kentucky perspective. The performance was created as part of the celebration of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in Hodgenville.

Our Lincoln included Augusta’s Nick Clooney narrating Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, UK alum and Metropolitan Opera tenor Gregory Turay singing a new musical setting of The Gettysburg Address, Kentucky Poet Laureate Jane Gentry reading her poem about a Lincoln portrait in her house, and excerpts from River of Time, a forthcoming opera about Abraham Lincoln by UK composer Joseph Baber.

The program was narrated by national radio host and Louisville native Bob Edwards, and it was attended by a who’s who of Central Kentuckians including Lexington Mayor Jim Newberry, and U.S. Reps. Ben Chandler and Hal Rodgers.

“This is a proud night for the State of Kentucky because of what we are about to show the nation,” University of Kentucky President Lee Todd said to about 400 people at a pre-show reception in the Kennedy Center.

The crowd included Kentuckians who made the trip to Washington, expatriate Kentuckians living in Washington, people invited by their Kentucky friends and pure concertgoers.

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