STAGE : Way Off Broadway : Louisville’s Humana Festival has become a creative mecca for playwrights and their works, far from the glare of New York and L.A.

“The Humana Bible,” they call it. Eighty-plus pages filled with rehearsal times, costume fitting hours, technical run-through dates, locations--an indispensable traffic guide for the casts and crews maneuvering backstage at the Actors Theatre of Louisville to mount 11 world premieres in less than a month.

In theater corridors, actors bound head to toe in leather are practicing their lines for David Henry Hwang’s “Bondage,” his first play since the 1988 Tony-winning “M. Butterfly.” Tottering past Hwang’s ominous hooded figures, a pair of elderly actresses lean on one another after a strenuous rehearsal of Mayo Simon’s “The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival.” Down a hall echoes the oom-pah-pah music from John Olive’s “Evelyn and the Polka King,” and now room must be made for the parade of musicians.

No wonder the “Humana Bible” gets quoted like Scripture.

“It’s filled with cartoons as well,” said literary manager Michael Bigelow Dixon, “to remind us that there’s a world beyond the ‘Bible.’ ”

Such reminders won’t be necessary next weekend when the world’s theatrical community makes its annual pilgrimage to this Bible Belt city for the 16th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays.

But the “Bible” will remain gospel. How else to keep track of three different performance schedules and the 14 sets in two theaters for 11 plays, not to mention the all-important parties? It’s a movable feast, a theatrical convention unlike any other in the country.

This festival is to theater what Cannes is to film: a mecca where both business and art meet. Critics from Tokyo and London, media and stage producers from Moscow and Montreal, playwrights and performers and directors and agents from everywhere crowd the Pamela Brown Auditorium and Victor Jory Theater and--perhaps most important--the theater’s basement bar. There deals get done, plays are bought and sold, critics get cornered, and gossip is traded during what’s come to be known as “The Big Weekend.”

It’s an indispensable watering hole on the international theater scene, a stunning achievement for a small two-stage complex feeding on a population base of only 700,000. But despite the relatively small urban market, Actors Theatre has nurtured a support base of 18,000 subscribers for its year-round repertory. Like the late Los Angeles Theatre Center, the Louisville complex surrounds an old bank building, using it for a grand lobby where the public and professional worlds congregate. But that’s where all comparisons end.

“We’re not tied to expensive real estate,” explained Marilee Hebert-Slater, associate director. “Louisville is a haven for being able to experiment.”

Ever since the festival was conceived in 1976, Louisville has acted as a kind of United States Theater Center. What put this tiny complex on the world’s theatrical map?

For answers to this riddle, talk to producing director Jon Jory.

Jory, the son of actor Victor Jory, came to Louisville in 1969 to take over the theater, which had been founded in 1963. “My first order of business was to deal with economics,” he recalled, and he obtained financial support from the Louisville-headquartered health care corporation Humana Inc. Jory’s next goal was to “make a difference.”

“There were extremely limited possibilities for new writers,” he said of the nation’s mid-’70s theater climate. Playwrights were no longer fashionable. The director had eclipsed the writer, and the national trend was toward a “theater of images” (which later permitted designers to rule the 1980s).

“When word went out that we were looking for new plays,” Jory remembered, “there was an explosion of interest. We received 6,000 manuscripts. These writers were expressing years of frustration.”

His inaugural season premiered “The Gin Game,” earning D. L. Coburn a Pulitzer Prize and the festival a reputation as the happy hunting ground for the best of the new. Later seasons debuted the country’s most promising stage writers: Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” William Mastrosimone’s “Extremities,” John Pielmeir’s “Agnes of God,” Emily Mann’s “Execution of Justice,” John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” among them.

But Jory and his company don’t simply talk a good game. The emphasis on playwrights remains the festival’s mandate--the writer comes first. At an introductory meeting of staff, casts and support personnel before one festival, Jory announced: “I want you to meet the stars of the festival--the writers.”

“Our focus is on playwriting,” Jory said. “This doesn’t come from philosophy or intellect or hustle or manipulation. Those can only support you for a short while. Our motivation has to be passion. But with new plays you only get about a 40% success rate, so we’re not building a stairway to paradise.”

After a moment’s pause, Jory jokes at his own expense: “Maybe we should go to New Playwrights Anonymous and get rid of this problem?”

Unlike commercial houses on both coasts, Actors Theatre deliberately avoids casting stars in the Humana Festival. But if Hollywood stars aren’t there, Los Angeles playwrights are. Five of this year’s 11 Humana playwrights have homes in Southern California: Jane Anderson, David Henry Hwang, Ross MacLean, Jose Rivera and Mayo Simon.

How to explain this? Hollywood burnout? Ohio River Valley fever?

Simon, who had a Humana hit in 1987 with “Elaine’s Daughter,” credits literary manager Dixon, at whose request Simon sent his latest play, which had been lying dormant and ignored at the Mark Taper Forum.

“My impression is that there’s a lot of competition between theaters for new plays,” Dixon said. “Here, the accidental meeting between artists is nonexistent. It’s much more of a conscious effort than it would be in Los Angeles or New York. Over the years, we have tried to get plays anyway we can--inviting submissions, calling up playwrights who have worked here before, seeing developmental work around the country, commissioning new work. We’ll do anything to get a good, new piece.”

Such empathy has not been part of Ross MacLean’s L.A. stage experiences. Between performances of “Hyaena,” his play about a hospital death watch, MacLean recalled how “particularly in L.A., directors regard the writer as some kind of accident. They say, ‘Oh, you have this wonderful property but don’t know it, and I’ll show you.’ I don’t believe it’s the director’s job to ‘make your play work.’ Here, they grant me credibility. They accept your script as valid. If I object, they listen. My experience in both New York and Los Angeles is that people don’t take plays seriously. Here they do.”

Jane Anderson’s “Lynette at 3 A.M.” is co-winner of ATL’s annual 10-minute-play award (along with Lanford Wilson’s “Eukiah”). Her previous ATL experiences--”Lynette Has Beautiful Skin” in 1989 and “The Pink Studio” in 1990--made Anderson eagerly anticipate yet another “Big Weekend.”

“Actors Theatre is a good place for playwrights to have their egos stroked,” Anderson said by phone from her Southern California home while recuperating from a difficult rewrite on a screenplay. “There, we’re considered the good guys. Here, when you’re a screenwriter, you get thrown out after the first draft.”

Jose Rivera’s “Marisol” was originally commissioned by New York’s INTAR, a space dedicated exclusively to serving Latino playwrights, but after “artistic differences,” Rivera withdrew the play from INTAR’s control. He then expected the work to premiere at the Taper’s 1991 New Works Festival--but it was rejected. Now the world premiere of his tale about a homeless Puerto Rican woman and her African-American guardian angel must occur on the banks of the Ohio--which is fine with Rivera. (The play will be part of the La Jolla Playhouse’s upcoming summer season.)

“This is my first time here,” Rivera said during a brief break in rehearsals for “Marisol” and while waiting to learn if NBC will commit to another season of “Eerie, Indiana,” the show he co-created and now co-produces. “Louisville reminds me of South Coast Repertory in that it’s a very well-organized institution with a solid base of support from the community. Here, they’re about getting the work done and done well. I feel completely supported.”

This year that support included commissioning “Bondage,” David Henry Hwang’s first new stage work in four years. In fact, without the theater’s passionate commitment to Hwang, his long hiatus from the legitimate stage would still be in effect.

“It’s been a while,” agreed the 34-year-old Hwang of his stage drought. “There’s a feeling (after a hit) that whatever you do next is probably going to be considered a disappointment. There’s something liberating about failure and intimidating about success.”

Aside from an opera libretto for composer Philip Glass, Hwang spent the past few years working on screenplays. He adapted “M. Butterfly” (to be directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jeremy Irons, with production to begin in August) and is working on a screenplay with Martin Scorsese of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.” Hwang also wrote an original telescript, “Golden Gate,” for PBS’ “American Playhouse” series.

But no new Hwang play was on the horizon--until Jory contacted him with a unique proposal. Jory suggested that Hwang write a one-act play, then choose a relatively unknown playwright to write a companion piece.

“I thought this would be a good chance to have an experience with a writer whose style is very different from mine,” Hwang said. “Also, it was an opportunity to work with someone whose work I really respect and who comes from a different cultural viewpoint.”

Hwang selected African-American Suzan-Lori Parks, who won the 1990 Obie for best new American play for “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom.” Now her one-act, “Devotees in the Garden of Love,” couples at Louisville with Hwang’s “Bondage” to form a single evening under the banner title “Rites of Mating.” Together, Hwang and Parks chose Taper resident director Oskar Eustis as their mutual director.

“Bondage” is set in a “by-referral-only” Encino club specializing in sadomasochism. Whereas “M. Butterfly” explored gender-identity issues, “Bondage” now explores racial-identity questions. This work also emerged from Hwang’s public protest over the casting of a Welsh actor as a Eurasian in the Broadway musical “Miss Saigon.”

“The conflict that was created by the complicated ‘Miss Saigon’ episode made me think a lot about these (politically correct), multicultural issues,” Hwang said of the “Bondage” genesis. “So I’ve been playing with various ways of trying to talk about the mythology of race and the arbitrariness of it. I found it interesting to experiment with putting actors head to toe in leather so that you can’t actually see their skin. ‘Bondage’ is basically about ethnic stereotypes and how we define our relationships with one another in this time of ethnic and political change.”

Hwang’s next stage outing is a Broadway-bound farce, “Face Value,” about mistaken racial identity, scheduled for the 1992-93 New York season. But for now, he’s more than content to be working in Louisville.

“It’s been a kind of working vacation and very refreshing, really, to be able to come down and just put on a play for the sake of putting on a play,” he said of his first Louisville exposure. “I didn’t decide to have a low-pressure experience, but it has worked out well in that regard. I think it was a matter of trying to get back to where I could write something that’s important to me, and feeling that I would try to do the best I could, and if people liked it, fine, and if not, there would be another play down the road. Louisville was a fortunate accident.”

Perhaps that’s the key to the theater’s success: being far from the madding crowd and bright lights of Broadway and Hollywood. Instead of relentless media scrutiny, artists can freely relax in a safe, hothouse environment.

“It’s nice to get away from the media aura of L.A.,” playwright Rivera agreed.

And director Eustis echoed his comment: “I’m a long way from anybody that I’m worried about. Most theater people are gypsies on some level, and there is something theater campish about this that is liberating. Above all, there’s a noticeable lack of cynicism, which is kind of extraordinary.”

The Humana Festival is of, for and by the playwright, and that’s what ultimately--but sadly--makes it unique among contemporary theater festivals.

“Writers work completely alone,” Anderson said of her eagerness to attend “The Big Weekend.” “We don’t get office parties at the end of the year. It’s just us and our cat. But the Actors Theatre of Louisville is the one opportunity we get to hang out with other playwrights. It’s kind of like a theater trade show. You get to trade secrets and gossip and do what normal business people do. You feel like a conventioneer. Even though most of us refuse to be in a club, once in a while we writers do get lonely.”