Perspectives / Holger Teschke Holger Teschke has been attending the Humana Festival for more than 15 years. A former director and dramaturg with Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, he began teaching and directing at Mount Holyoke college in 1996. My first visit to Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Humana Festival took place ten years ago. In addition to all his dramaturgical duties for the performances and events of the festival, Michael Dixon organized a panel with theatre people from the other side of the iron curtain. The curtain fell in 1990 along with the Berlin Wall. Michael asked my colleagues and me to envision what the future might look like for the carefully watched theatre previously financed by the state and which plays and authors we wanted to perform and support. I remember that the prophecies and anxieties were just as different from one another as the different biographies and backgrounds, artistic and political positions of the invited directors and dramaturges from the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria and East Germany. Despite all the controversies it was an intensive and exciting discussion out of which many working relationships and friendships evolved. The Humana Festival became an international meeting place, well beyond Kentucky’s borders. The German past was also present in that spring of 1990 in Louisville: the first play that I saw in the Pamela Brown Auditorium was 2 by Romulus Linney, a play about Goering’s trial between 1945 and ’46 in Nuremburg. The performances of Joyce Carol Oates’ In Darkest America and Jane Martin’s Vital Signs especially impressed me; two plays that have long since been translated and performed on German stages. The cliché about American kitchen-sink naturalism, that still held sway in some German dramaturgy circles, was soundly refuted for me by this festival. Even more – through the contacts to Actors, I saw and first read new plays by American authors about whom I had never heard: Suzan-Lori Parks, Jane Anderson, Tony Kushner and Donald Margulies. Actors and the Humana Festival became the place for me and my colleagues to learn more about American theatre in one weekend than we could learn in one week on Broadway. That has remained the case ever since, thanks to the theatrical curiosity and hospitality of Jon Jory, Alexander Speer, Michael Dixon and their very smart and engaged co-workers. The contact with Actors Theatre has become an important vehicle for exchange in both directions across the Atlantic for ten years and more. I warmly congratulate Actors and all its friends and supporters, and my toast from Berlin is: All I know about American theatre, I learned in Louisville, Kentucky.