Inside A.C.T.

An Interview with Love and Information Director Casey Stangl By Beatrice Basso Scenic designer Robert Brill’s rendering for A.C.T.’s 2015 production of Love and Information Director Casey Stangl returns to A.C.T. after staging David Ives’s Venus in Fur last spring. Now, Love and Information , a play that offered her a blank creative canvas that she describes as simultaneously “exhilarating and terrifying.” Stangl brings her talent for seamless transitions and precise pacing to Love and Information , a play that offered her a blank creative canvas that she describes as simultaneously “exhilarating and terrifying.”     Stangl found her stride in directing new work and reimagining classics through a bold contemporary lens. Her movement background and interest in visual composition have helped her weave the complex fabric of Love and Information . At a new-play festival in Southern California a week before rehearsals began, Stangl was happy to talk about the themes and i

A Fantasy of Fools An Interview with Costume Designer Candice Donnelly By Shannon Stockwell Costume designer Candice Donnelly's rendering of a female member of the Liebeslieder quintet for A.C.T.’s 2015 production of A Little Night Music “For the sheer beauty of all the satin and ruffles, costume designer Candice Donnelly should have bouquets delivered to her sewing room every night,” wrote Washington Post journalist Peter Marks in his review of Center Stage in Baltimore’s 2008 production of A Little Night Music . Seven years later, Donnelly revisits Sondheim’s classic for A.C.T.’s production, directed, as it was in Baltimore, by Mark Lamos.     Donnelly’s vibrant costume designs were last seen on the Geary stage in Indian Ink , Tom Stoppard’s cross-cultural romance about the complex relationship between a poet and a painter, set against the backdrop of the struggle for Indian independence in the 1930s. Donnelly says she has an affinity for designing period pieces: “