At Actors Theatre, the Game is Afoot!

Keith Runyon Sep 10, 2026

There was laughter again at Actors Theatre of Louisville Wednesday night-- great waves of it rolling through the Pamela Brown Auditorium as Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery raced merrily across the stage. There were gasps, too, and moments when a room full of people seemed to lean forward together, willingly surrendering disbelief to foggy moors, mysterious strangers, ancestral curses and, somewhere out there in the darkness, a legendary hound.

It was an exhilarating evening, but something more than an evening’s entertainment seemed to be taking place. Baskerville, in all its ingenious foolishness, felt like a reminder of what Actors Theatre has meant to Louisville, and what it might mean again.

Ludwig has taken Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, among the darkest and most atmospheric of the Sherlock Holmes tales and turned it into an affectionate romp through the conventions of mystery and theater. The lithe and wry Sheldon Best gives us a classic Holmes, with Crystian Wiltshire, as the faithful Doctor Watson (he must be a marathon runner!). The wonderfully versatile supporting company --Futuba, Vic Leon, Darla Jade Tiller, and José Perez IV -- creates a small universe around them changing characters, costumes, accents and identities with such cheerful abandonment that the mechanics of making theater become part of the fun.

We know, of course, that we are sitting on Main Street in Louisville. We know Baskerville Hall is scenery, the moor ends somewhere beyond the wings, and whatever hound may be lurking in the darkness is unlikely to devour anyone before the curtain call. Yet for two hours we agree to believe otherwise. That ancient bargain between actor and audience is one of the loveliest things human beings can do together.

And together matters.

For much of its history, Actors Theatre has been one of the places where Louisville came together: from its beginnings in 1964, through the extraordinary growth that followed and the years when the Humana Festival made Louisville an important destination in the American theater. ATL became more than another cultural institution. It became part of the fabric of the city.

Today that inheritance rests principally with two women, artistic director Amelia Acosta Powell (who directed Baskerville) and managing director Emily Tarquin. Their leadership is itself a measure of how American society -- and the American theater -- has changed. Yet there is simply something distinctly Actors Theatre about it, too. This has rarely been an institution content merely to preserve what came before.

From the early days of Jon Jory, Trish Pugh-Jones and Sandy Speer, ATL charted a course that could be adventurous, provocative and occasionally unsettling. It introduced generations of Louisville audiences to unfamiliar voices, new plays and different ways of looking at the world. Sometimes it challenged its audiences; sometimes it delighted them. At its best, it did both. Acosta Powell and Tarquin inherit that tradition not as custodians of a museum, but stewards of a living theater.

There is something particularly satisfying, then, about seeing Sherlock Holmes prowling its stage in a thoroughly 21st century incarnation. Baskerville does not approach theatrical tradition as something fragile, to be protected beneath glass. It plays with it, turns it upside down and sends it careening across the stage. Yet beneath all the comic invention lies something reassuringly timeless: actors, scenery, lights, imagination and an audience willing to be transported.

A theater with a distinguished past need not choose between honoring its heritage and reinventing itself. The healthiest institutions do both.

ATL has passed through difficult years. So has almost every regional theater in America. Audiences changed, habits changed, and the pandemic accelerated disruptions already underway. ATL experimented with new forms and new definitions of what a theater might be. Some longtime patrons inevitably wondered whether Actors Theatre they had known still had a place in the Louisville of the 21st century.

Baskerville offers a wonderfully uncomplicated answer: Yes.

Not because Actors Theatre should attempt to recreate some vanished golden age. Nostalgia is a poor foundation for any institution. Heritage is something different. It means understanding what was valuable in the past and carrying it confidently into the future. The laughter filling the Pamela Brown Auditorium suggests that ATL may be rediscovering that balance.

Louisville could use it. We live increasingly solitary lives in a supposedly connected age. Politics divide us, social media sorts us, and much of our entertainment arrives privately on screens small enough to hold in our hands. Even institutions that once gave Louisville a sense of common identity have largely diminished, while downtown itself has struggled to recover its place at the center of community life.

A theater makes a different proposition. It asks us to leave our separate worlds at the door, sit beside people we may not know and give our attention to the same thing at the same moment. Nobody asks whether the stranger laughing three seats away is a Republican or Democrat, or whether that person lives east or west of Ninth, north or south of the Watterson. We laugh because something is funny. We gasp because something startles us. When the illusion succeeds, several hundred individuals become, for a little while, an audience.

That may seem a modest accomplishment. These days it is not.

No play, however delightful, can heal a divided community, and it would be unfair to burden Baskerville with such a solemn responsibility. Ludwig wrote a comedy, and Actors Theatre has given Louisville the pleasure of enjoying it. That is quite enough.

The game, as Holmes would say, is afoot.

For Actors Theatre -- and perhaps for Louisville -- one hopes it has only just begun.

Baskerville runs through September 27 at Actors Theatre of Louisville, 316 W. Main Street, Louisville 40202. For times and tickets, visit www.boxoffice@actorstheatre.org. Phone: (502) 584-1205.