Inside A.C.T.

By A.C.T. Publications Staff Thank you for playing your part in our 50th-anniversary season! Here are our top ten highlights from a year full of mainstage performances, visits from theater legends, new works, conservatory classes, and community days. 1. Kacee Clanton (Janis Joplin in A Night with Janis Joplin ) singing the national anthem at a San Francisco Giants game. 2. Visits from theater legends Tom Stoppard and Peter Brook, M.F.A. Program alumni Annette Bening and Mark Harelik, and stars Georgia Engel and Darren Criss. 3. The Ma-Yi Theater Company's residency at the New Strands Festival. Ma-Yi playwrights included Lauren Yee ( The Great Leap ), Don Nguyen ( The Man From Saigon ), and Dustin Chinn ( Snowflakes, or Rare White People ). 4. Our 50th birthday party at The Geary, complete with our own ice cream flavor, courtesy of Humphry Slocombe. 5. The publication of A Five-Act Play: 50 Years of A.C.T. by our resident dramaturg Michael Paller. A rtwork for A...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff This weekend, A.C.T. celebrates its golden anniversary: 50 years in San Francisco. What better way to honor this milestone than with all of you! A.C.T.'s Geary Theater, 2011. Photo by Drew Altizer. On March 18, A.C.T. will host a 50th Anniversary Open House at the Geary Theater. Festivities will include: a behind-the-scenes tour of our historic theater, the opportunity to sit in on a Young Conservatory class, a performance by our Master of Fine Arts Program actors, and a special ice cream flavor from Humphry Slocombe. In the evening, A.C.T. giants like René Aberjonois and Michael Learned, M.F.A. Program alumni Dan Clegg and Alex Morf, and current M.F.A. Program actors will take part in a reading of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood , a play that was directed by A.C.T.’s first Artistic Director William Ball 50 years ago. The 50th Anniversary Open House and the reading of Under Milk Wood are both free and open to the public, but reservations...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff  Happy New Year! Here are some things to look forward to in the next few weeks: From left: Bill Irwin. Photo courtesy of Concept Artists. Composer David Coulter. Photo by Thomas Moore. Show Artwork for A Thousand Splendid Suns . Photography: ©Shaul Schwarz/Getty Images News/Getty Images.  Design: David Mann Calligraphy/Stephen Raw.  Playwright Ursula Rani Sarma. Author Khaled Hosseini. Photo by Elena Seibert.  Show Artwork for John . By A.C.T. Graphics Team. To see all of our upcoming events, click here .

By Shannon Stockwell Annette Bening and Mark Harelik in Dear Liar 2016. Photo by Stefan Cohen. October has certainly gotten off to an exciting start at A.C.T.—you can really tell that our 50th anniversary is in full swing. In the span of two days, the Geary stage was graced by actors Annette Bening and Mark Harelik, playwright Tom Stoppard, and neuroscientist Linda Wilbrecht. On Sunday, October 2, Bening and Harelik joined up for a staged reading of Dear Liar , Jerome Kilty’s witty two-person play based on the letters between playwright George Bernard Shaw and his muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The two actors have a long history with A.C.T.: Bening graduated from the Advanced Training Program (precursor to the M.F.A. Program) in 1983, and Mark Harelik was a company member in the ’80s. A.C.T. was thrilled to welcome them back for this reading, directed by Nancy Carlin, which they performed with a strong sense of sass in a performance that was free and open to our donors. A.C....