This program is associated with the exhibit, Kentucky Progress: History, Belonging, and Tourism in Public Lands, which will be open for 50 minutes prior to the program.
In the summer of 1960, director C. Douglas Ramey took his
Carriage House Players theater company down the street from their Old
Louisville venue to Central Park, where the actors performed scenes from the
Shakespeare classic Much Ado about Nothing. Buoyed by the
enthusiastic audience response, Ramey's company returned to the park the next
year for the first full season of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. More than
sixty years later, Kentucky Shakespeare is now the oldest free, non-ticketed
Shakespeare in the Park festival in the country. To commemorate the sixtieth
anniversary of the festival, in spring 2020 Kentucky Shakespeare cooperated
with students in the University of Louisville's Department of History to record
twenty entertaining and enlightening oral interviews with longtime members of
the company. In Under the Greenwood Tree, author Tracy K'Meyer
captures the history of Kentucky Shakespeare in a series of carefully selected
and edited transcripts of these interviews. In these pages, past and present
cast and crew share their memories of the company's history, performances in
the park, and the positive impact of its many outreach programs, from its
inception in the 1960s, to its slump in the early 2000s, and on to its recent
renaissance. An illuminating record of the collaborative artistry that brings
Shakespeare's works to life, Under the Greenwood Tree offers
readers a peek behind the curtain at the group's steadfast stewardship of the
most important literature in the English language.
Tracy K'Meyer is professor of US history at the
University of Louisville, where she has served as codirector of the Oral
History Center. She is the author of "To Live Peaceably
Together": The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open
Housing and Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South:
Louisville, Kentucky 1945–1980.