Inside A.C.T.

Posted by Emily Hoffman, Publications and Dramaturgy Associate Most Bay Area theatergoers know who Carey Perloff is: the artistic executive of A.C.T. and a director with an enormous body of work to her credit. Fewer know that Perloff is also an award-winning playwright: Her 2003 drama The Colossus of Rhodes was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and Luminescence Dating , which premiered at New York's Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2005, received the 2006 Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Best Original Script. Now comes Higher , Perloff's meditation on love and architecture, which has received workshop productions at New York Stage and Film, Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and was recently honored with the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award. Higher opened to rapturous reviews last week and was just extended through February 25. Click here for tickets. Eternal Flame in...

Posted by Emily Hoffman, Publications and Dramaturgy Associate Every day after rehearsal is over and the actors have gone home, the stage manager types up a summary of the day’s work. Containing general information about the production’s progress, as well as notes and updates for the design team, the rehearsal reports are divided into categories (costumes, lights, sound, props, etc.) and presented as a list of updates and requests for each design department. These reports provide glimpses into the production’s evolution—and into the (occasionally) wacky and wild goings-on in the studios. Many times they’ll contain requests that, to anyone not intimately involved in the creation of the production, can seem both puzzling and entertaining. Looking back, it is fascinating to see where the seeds of some our favorite onstage moments were planted in rehearsal. Here are just some of the interesting (and chuckle-inducing) notes from the 2010–11 season. PROPS 1. As usual, a few pieces of...

posted by Emily Hoffman ,   A.C.T. Publications Fellow  In Shakespeare’s early comic play of mistaken identity, Antipholus and his servant Dromio, in search of their long-lost twin brothers (also, it turns out, named Antipholus and Dromio), arrive in the Greek city of Ephesus (the home, it turns out, of said long-lost brothers), only to be mistaken for the other Antipholus and Dromio (who, it turns out,  are unaware that they have twin brothers). A Comedy of Errors ensues. This is the complex story that the A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program class of 2012 has been taking to ten middle and high schools around the Bay Area this week and last, in its fifth annual Will on Wheels performance tour. And, amazingly, the school kids are totally getting it. Shakespeare’s language can be difficult enough to understand even in plays without twins, let alone multiple sets of twins. But thanks to the combination of director Domenique Lozano’s inventive staging and the M.F.A. Pro...

posted by Emily Hoffman, Publications Fellow Last week, the Master of Fine Arts Program class of 2012 opened Dario Fo’s Archangels Don’t Play Pinball , directed by A.C.T. Head of Movement Stephen Buescher. The play, a zany satire of political bureaucracy, follows the tough-but-tender underdog Lanky from rags to riches and back to rags again. (Check out a plot description here .) Publications Fellow Emily Hoffman served as assistant director for the production, and tells us what it was like to build a physical comedy like Archangels . If you haven’t seen it yet, you can buy tickets for the remaining performances here . —The A.C.T. Intern Blog Quadrumvirate There’s a reason Dario Fo’s Archangels Don’t Play Pinball doesn’t get performed much. It’s long, sprawling, and unwieldy: the action travels from a bakery to a bar, to a streetwalker’s apartment, to a pension office, to a dog pound, to a first-class train car, to the presidential suite of a hotel, back to the bar, and ending ...

posted by Emily, Jonathan, Zach, and Christine—The A.C.T. Intern Blog Quadrumvirate It’s fall in San Francisco, the 2010–11 season is steaming ahead, and it’s back-to-blog time for us here at A.C.T. So much is happening that we want to share with you; the building is packed with artists darting in and out of rehearsal rooms, and we want to grab each one of them, plop them down at a computer and say, “Write! People are listening!” But who is this “we”? Who are the new helmsmen of the A.C.T. blog—the voracious chasers of information, actors, directors, free pastries? Enter the interns: Emily Hoffman, Jonathan Carpenter, Zach Moull, Christine Miller—publications, artistic, dramaturgy, marketing. This intern quadrumvirate will be your eyes and ears backstage at A.C.T. The people we meet! The things we see! You’ll get it all, and without having to do any of the photocopying or coffee-fetching (just kidding—A.C.T.ers get their own coffee). Each week, we’ll bring you the voice of some...