Act A Lady by Jordan Harrison, music by Michael Friedman

"The [2006 Humana] Festival's most uproarious comedy, a farce of outlandish proportions, takes on and celebrates the art of theater itself...Part Waiting for Guffman and part Dangerous Liaisons, Act a Lady's dizzying gender-bending explores the theater, the fallibility of stereotypes and the joys of accordion music with a deft wisdom..."

"In Act a Lady...the transforming power of the creative imagination is both a source of camp pleasures and a fount of social commentary...Harrison sweetly revels in anachronistic imaginings. He is no kid simple, but is possessed with a kaleidoscopic turn of mind and a clever sense of how costumes and makeup take on amusing lives of their own."

"Harrison creates a delicious world of ordinary men who dress up as glamorous women for a charity show. His warm, imaginative comedy addresses enduring questions: Who are we really? Can art help us to appreciate our hidden prospects?"

"Although it's a farce, with all the silliness and hyper-drama that implies, Harrison's two-act play has a sophisticated structure and is wittier and more complex than one might expect from a 28-year-old playwright. With "Act a Lady," Harrison ambitiously juxtaposes two kinds of language: the plain-spoken, everyday talk of Midwesterners in the early 20th century; and the exaggerated wordiness of an 18th-century French melodrama... Marvelously constructed."

"'Act a Lady' turned out to be the most smoothly entertaining of the bunch, a good-natured comedy set in 1927 about the men in a small Midwestern town doing drag for a local play. The script shows an appealing imaginative streak."

"For me, the best play of the festival was Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady, a delightful and silly exploration of gender roles that's set in a play within a play in the Midwest of 1927. Harrison's deliciously funny script unveils each of their personalities and motives as each man comes face-to-face with his male persona (which the three actresses portray) while in drag."