Perspectives / Wendy McClellan Wendy McClellan is in her fourth season as director of the Apprentice/Intern Company. As the director for Actors Theatre’s Apprentice/Intern Company, Wendy McClellan coordinates educational and professional development opportunities for the dozens of actors and interns who volunteer an entire season. During the Humana Festival, she directes the apprentice show, an anthology where several playwrights contribute short pieces around a theme —such as Trepidation Nation or Uncle Sam’s Satiric Spectacular. These plays perform during the last two weekends of the festival, which she says is the highpoint of the whole year. "There are a hundred more people on staff," Wendy says. "There’s a different community that comes to Louisville. It’s a national community. It’s actors, designers, writers and directors—and stage managers even—from all over the country. Different people to feed ideas off of. There’s a lot more artistic energy in Louisville at that time. "For me, it’s not just exhausting because of the amount of work, but also the amount of excitement that happens over the course of two months. The apprentices’ schedule also goes haywire during that time." Apprentices will be working in rehearsals and set changeovers from 8 a.m. to midnight, she says. "There’s never a moment during the month of March where anybody has any down time." For some apprentices, Humana means a big break. "Everybody knows about the Jesse Hooker story," Wendy says. "He did a great audition for After Ashley. Jesse was perfect for this part, the role of Justin. They didn’t go with him initially. They went with somebody else and a week before rehearsals started, he got a movie and didn’t come. They put Jesse into the role. The same season, Kibibi Dillon got cast as an 8-year-old girl in Sans-culottes in the Promised Land, Kirsten Greenidge’s play, and got a lot of notice from that play. Every year there’s something." Before coming to Actors Theatre, Wendy was involved in new play development in Los Angeles. She hadn’t attended Humana Festival, but "I knew these fabulous plays came out of it." The first year working on the ATL staff, "I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. There’s so much fluctuation that happens. I developed the ability to roll with the punches during that time—it really taught me how to work quickly, how to make thoughtful decisions on your feet." She finds Humana particularly valuable because so many other theatres nationwide are scaling back their investment in new plays and new playwrights. "On the West Coast, they’re dismantling new play programs right and left. The opportunity for a playwright to have a fully produced work is unusual these days. The opportunity to sit in a room with a director and a designer and actors and say, ‘What is this going to look like?’ is not as common as we’d like it to be. There are just not that many theatres willing to take the risk. I think that’s what the theatre community values when they come here. They value the risk factor that we take on. "My favorite play. . . ? I fall in love with all of the ones that we do. I’m part of the selection committee. Every year we sit in a room and argue about these scripts. At the end of the argument time, you really understand why we put what we put into the festival. And you really do fall in love with each one of the scripts. Whether or not I did initially, it’s discussed to a point where I fully get behind it." — Raven J. Railey