Home / Chronology / Neon Mirage / About Neon Mirage The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2006 Humana Festival NEON MIRAGE "I like Las Vegas. Admittedly, it is relentlessly vulgar, noisy, money-grubbing, deceitful and repetitive. Granted it screams bad taste from slot parlor to tower block, from gilded faucet to mirrored bedroom, inside and outside…glitz without end…. Despite all that, I like it…. The point about it, which both its critics and admirers overlook, is that it is wonderful and awful simultaneously. So one loves it and detests it at the same time." —David Spanier, Welcome to the Pleasuredome Las Vegas is a place unlike any other in the American landscape: where the Wild West meets Oz, where America’s central myth of unbridled possibility collides with its compulsion for perpetual self-invention. In the middle of the desert, glitz and grit combine in a place that is as narcotic as its consequences are undeniably real. Our shortcut to wealth, to glamour, to happiness (however fleeting); our American fairy godmother: Las Vegas. What better prism through which to view the promises and realities of America? This year, Actors Theatre of Louisville commissioned five writers and a composer/lyricist to take on the challenge of examining American culture through the fantastic possibilities of our most transformative metropolis. What happens at the crossroads of possibility and reality, of unbridled opportunity and the inevitable morning after? What do the stories we tell about Vegas tell us about ourselves? What happens where so much possibility and so much failure meet? This piece will be performed by the 2005-06 Acting Apprentice Company. — Adrien-Alice Hansel.