Inside A.C.T.

Posted by Edward Budworth, Group Sales and Student Matinee Representative In Maple and Vine , Katha and Ryu leave the modern world to live in a recreated 1955 society. Group Sales Representative Edward (Eddy) Budworth remembers his childhood in 1950s Santa Cruz as a more peaceful, safe, and polite era—but one in which not every person was encouraged toward self-actualization as we know it today. 1955: Five-year-old Eddy wearing the white suit his mother made for him. Photo courtesy Edward Budworth. When Maple and Vine first came up as a possible production for our 2011–12 season, I was intrigued by the concept of going back to the '50 s and reliving my childhood. I was born in 1950 in Santa Cruz, at the time a small friendly town on the California coast. My parents bought the house I grew up in for $7,000 with the help of the G.I. Bill. My father was a veteran of World War II, as were most of my parents' friends. Times were good for them, and my father started the ...

Posted by Dan Rubin, A.C.T. Publications Manager With Jordan Harrison's Maple and Vine in rehearsals, there is a lot of talk in the A.C.T. offices about nostalgia. In the play, an unsatisfied urbanite couple decides to trade in their modern-day lifestyle for a 1950s model of suburban happiness. It is a divisive proposal: is our fast-paced, electronics-driven contemporary society something we need to retreat from—and if it is, would 1955 really be where we would look to find relief? As we see below in a post by A.C.T. Publications Manager Dan Rubin, your answer might depend on when you were born. My first typewriter was my mom's. A heavy, suitcase-like apparatus that in the 1990s already felt archaic and impractical compared to our fancy dot matrix printer—which fed paper through its spindles by clawing at little, evenly spaced holes on the disposable, perforated margins that lined each page. Boomers and Gen-Xers (35- to 65-year-olds) shake their heads at this: "...

Posted by Torange Yeghizarian, founding artistic director of Golden Thread Productions Torange Yeghizarian. Photo by David Allen Studio. As founding artistic director of Golden Thread Productions, a Bay Area theater company focused on the Middle East, Torange Yeghiazarian has traveled widely and seen hundreds of productions that have originated in—or focus on themes surrounding—the Middle East. Below she shares her very personal reaction to A.C.T.'s production of Scorched , which introduces playwright Wajdi Mouawad, a powerful Middle Eastern voice, to the Bay Area. For more information on Golden Thread and a list of upcoming productions, visit www.goldenthread.org . Spoiler alert: Scorched is a mystery about the violent history of a fractured family. The play unfolds as the pieces of the story are reassembled by its characters. The following post reveals some secrets. If you would like to experience the thrill of discovery as the truth is revealed onstage, you may p...