INSIDE ACT: How Ten Actors Made It-and How You Can Too identifies what sets successful actors apart. It's about the inner choices, the inside acts of working actors-acts that have propelled them to thriving careers in one of the most competitive professions on the planet. Ken Womble interviews actors Debra Monk, Eric Ladin, Krysta Rodriguez, Tony Yazbeck, James Earl, Gary Beach, John Tartaglia, Robert Clohessy, Jose Llana and Richard Portnow about their inside acts. In riveting dialogues he explores the intriguing journeys that have led these actors to successful careers. Each actor interview is followed by two additional interviews with the actor's success team members-the agents, managers, directors, and coaches who know them well. Then Ken Womble identifies the actor's most frequently used actions, skills and beliefs-the keys to the actor's success.

Playwrights from the South have always figured largely in the Actors Theatre of Louisville's contribution of new work to the repertoire of American dramatic literature. What better way to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Humana New Festival of American Plays -- an event that has drawn upon the strengths of the South to garner international acclaim -- than to honor southern playwrights in a collection of works that have premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville, most of which are previously unpublished. By Southern Playwrights makes available for the first time in print Marsha Norman's romantic comedy Loving Daniel Boone, novelist Harry Crews's only play, Blood Issue, and humorist Ray Blount Jr.'s ventures into one-act comedy, Five Ives Gets Named and That Dog Isn't Fifteen. Also included are novelist Elizabeth Dewberry's first play, Head On, Kentucky novelist and essayist Wendell Berry's The Cool of the Day, and Digging In, a remarkable array of Kentucky farm voices adapted for the stage by Julie Crutcher and Vaughn McBride. Southern playwriting is a distinctive voice in the American theater, a point eloquently made in the foreword by Jon Jory, producing director of Actors Theatre of Louisville since 1969. The literary works of the South, he writes, are dominated by "great language, family, strong women, religion, the land, and the past," all of which makes them wonderful for acting -- and for reading. Jory sees the key to the success of southern writing for the stage in this "speakability.... Actors love these plays because you can say them, and that, as they say, makes all the difference." This book is a rare assemblage of southern plays from the 1980s and 1990s by playwrights continuing the tradition of Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and Beth Henley, among others.