Inside A.C.T.

By Claire L. Wong You still have the opportunity to watch  Toni Stone  from the comfort of your home. Those who have purchased tickets to  Toni Stone  will receive an email with access to the recording. If you missed your chance to purchase tickets, visit bit.ly/ACTStreaming to see our video streaming options, available for a limited time. A.C.T.’s Toni Stone choreographer Camille A. Brown is always reaching. She’s never giving up, and her rapidly expanding body of work proves it. The award-winning choreographer, director, and dance educator’s driving passion is to empower Black bodies to tell their stories in their own languages through movement and dialogue. The New York Times has called her “one of the most expressive, genuine and deeply felt choreographers working today.” Whether she’s exploring ancestral stories and sparking conversations with her dance company Camille A. Brown and Dancers, or choreographing Broadway productions such as Choir Boy , Once...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff Before Pam MacKinnon got a call from her friend Samantha Barrie in 2012, she had never heard of Toni Stone. Barrie, a theater producer and avid baseball fan, urged MacKinnon to read a biography published in 2010— Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League . MacKinnon found the book riveting. “It just works on so many different levels,” says the Tony Award winner and A.C.T. artistic director. “Historically, sociologically, and biographically.” Barrie purchased the rights from author Martha Ackmann, and MacKinnon approached playwright Lydia R. Diamond to dramatize the story of Toni Stone. “I had seen a few of Lydia’s plays,” says MacKinnon. “Even though we’d never worked together before, I felt like we shared the same theatrical sensibility. I felt that for this play to get written and produced, Lydia needed to write it. She can write really hard-hitting things that are also filled wit...

By Ted Sod Award-winning  Toni Stone  playwright Lydia R. Diamond grew up in a family of educators and musicians. She found playwriting in her third year at Northwestern while studying theater, and went on to act professionally for 10 years while writing and producing her own plays. It wasn’t until her first regional theater production of  The Gift Horse  at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Diamond says, that she understood “I was happier and more adept at writing plays than being in them.” Toni Stone  premiered at Roundabout Theatre Company in 2019 before coming here to San Francisco. In addition to Toni Stone ,   Diamond’s playwriting career is expansive. Her other works include Smart People , Stick Fly (Broadway run at Cort Theatre), Voyeurs de Venus , Harriet Jacobs , and The Bluest Eye . She has also worked in television, and was a writer/ consulting producer for Showtime’s fourth season of The Affair , for which she was nominated for a Writer’s Guild ...

By Claire L. Wong “Accents help the audience understand where a character is coming from,” says A.C.T. Head of Text and Dialects Lisa Anne Porter, who is the voice and dialect coach for Testmatch . “Where a character comes from could be in terms of the physical location they’ve lived in, or their status in the world they live in. Status may be socio-economic, it may be how dark their skin is, it may be what they look like—all those elements may explain how they get that status.” The Messenger (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) shares wisdom with Daanya (Avanthika Srinivasan), a talented village cricketer, in Kate Attwell's Testmatch . Photo by Kevin Berne.  The ways the Indian and English characters speak in  Testmatch  provide reference points for the audience. And as this world premiere came into focus in the rehearsal room, shaping those reference points was a team effort, starting with playwright Kate Attwell. “In differentiating the characters of [the three English crick...

By Claire L. Wong  As the world premiere of Testmatch heads into opening night on Wednesday, the buzz about the show keeps growing. Kate Attwell’s new play is already lined up for a run at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2020, and while it’s attracting a lot of attention from East Coast theater-lovers, Bay Area audiences are loving the production. “The play was super funny, insightful, and thought-provoking,” says one audience member. India 2 (Lipica Shah) and England 3 (Millie Brooks) discuss which is the better team in Kate Attwell’s Testmatch .  Photo by Kevin Berne. “I loved it!” says another theater-goer. “I loved that it was an all-female cast and that it featured women of Indian descent in substantial roles, which we almost never see. I loved it that it was written by a woman and directed by a woman—yay Pam! And I loved the production’s sophisticated theatricality and the complicated and nuanced experience it presented. Brava!” To hear from audiences direct...

By Simon Hodgson As soon as director Pam MacKinnon read the script for a new play titled Testmatch , she fell in love with the writing of its playwright, Kate Attwell. Hear from the playwright and director about the journey from script to stage, and catch the world premiere of Testmatch at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater. Left to right: England 3 (Millie Brooks), England 2 (Arwen Anderson), India 2 (Lipica Shah), India 1 (Meera Rohit Kumbhani), and India 3 (Avanthika Srinivasan) discuss which is the better cricket team in Kate Attwell’s Testmatch .  Photo by Kevin Berne Pam MacKinnon:  There are many extraordinary theatrical elements in  Testmatch : the way actors take on other guises to tell the story in different ways; the oversized British accents; the Memsahib character that echoes Ophelia [in Shakespeare’s  Hamlet ]; the clash of contemporary and classical language; the character of Abhi who goes in and out of the scene as both the beleaguered sepoy a...

By Simon Hodgson As soon as director Pam MacKinnon read the script for a new play titled Testmatch , she fell in love with the writing of its playwright, Kate Attwell. Hear from the playwright and director about the journey from script to stage before catching the world premiere of Testmatch at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater. Playwright Kate Attwell. Photo courtesy Kate Attwell.   Pam MacKinnon:  As a South African–born playwright, you might be expected to draw on that experience in your work. What made you choose India as the focal point? Kate Attwell:  What I want to do with this play is challenge the notion of empire and the way it’s historicized. I want to confront the way people talk about empire—to take down the idea that “We British went all over the world, we took so much, we destroyed so much, but now we’re going to talk about it as this wonderful time when we built the railways.” Britain’s colonization of India had a particularly capitalist bent—it was...

By Claire L. Wong As Tops Girls enters previews this week, Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon discusses double casting and director Tamilla Woodard’s vision. “With Top Girls , Tamilla Woodard has at her disposal the ability to double cast, meaning one actor plays multiple roles,” says MacKinnon. “Caryl Churchill wrote this play with seven actors, seven women, who played fourteen roles. Tamilla Woodard decided to do it with nine women to play those fourteen roles. She’s changed how some of those doublings have traditionally been done, because she’s pulling out a story.” Left to right:  Top Girls actors Rosie Hallett, Michelle Beck, Julia McNeal, and MFA Program actor Summer Brown (class of 2020). Photo by Beryl Baker. “The teenage girl Angie isn’t double cast at all,” says MacKinnon. “There is something interesting about doing a play set in the 1980s largely about Angie’s aunt Marlene, a woman in her forties, cracking a glass ceiling. Forty years have passed since then. A...

By Elspeth Sweatman  A year after bringing the rip-roaring adventure  Men on Boats  to the Strand, Director Tamilla Woodard is back at A.C.T. with Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play  Top Girls . Director Tamilla Woodard (left) and A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon (right) discuss  Top Girls . Photo by Claire L. Wong. What’s your process as a director? Do you like to do research? Any play I do, I go as deep as I can. Of course, I think that’s simply part of the job. The more you dig, the more you find and the more you find, the more you need to keep looking. I want to surround myself with as many tools as I can, not out of studiousness but to communicate about the play. First and foremost, I need to satisfy my questions so I go until I run out of time [ Laughs ] which 99.9 percent of the time is what happens. All of that is fuel for my imagination and decision-making. One of the things that I do with a play is I sit down and write just pages and pages...

By Claire L. Wong Rules are made to be broken—and interrogated, rewritten, and overcome. The 2019–20 season at American Conservatory Theater features stories that examine the established rules of engagement, their violent and tumultuous histories, and the people chafing against these constraints. “Told with decorum, rage, spirit, and a wink,” says A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon, “this season’s offerings continue A.C.T.’s tradition of telling stories that provoke responses and lead to debates, dreams, and even action.” Women are pushing back against the rules of oppression in A.C.T.’s first two productions of the 2019–20 season. Tamilla Woodard ( Men on Boats ) returns to A.C.T. for her Geary Theater debut directing Caryl Churchill’s acclaimed modern classic Top Girls . Audiences may remember returning actors Rosie Hallett, who worked alongside Woodard in Men on Boats (2018), and Michelle Beck, last seen at the Geary in King Charles III (2016). In Margaret Thatcher’s d...

By Annie Sears Edward Albee’s Seascape —playing through February 17 at The Geary—is a story of transition. Nancy and Charlie have recently retired. Energized by the possibility of change, Nancy wants to explore the world, but her husband Charlie is reluctant. As a character, Charlie is fearful of the unfamiliar. The same is not true of the actor playing Charlie. If you’ve seen a show at A.C.T. in the last 20 years, it ’ s likely you’ve caught actor James Carpenter. In addition to 12 years as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol , Carpenter has performed in A.C.T.’s Heisenberg (2018), Rock ’n’ Roll (2008),  ’ Tis Pity She’s a Whore (2008), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2005), A Doll’s House (2004), and Glengarry Glen Ross (2001). Now, he’s back as Charlie in Seascape . This familiar face is excited to be collaborating with the newest face of A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon is making her A.C.T. directorial debut with Seascape , exploring this story of transition as she transitio...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff “ Sweat was political,” says A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon, “ Men on Boats was playful, now we’re going personal with Seascape .” As MacKinnon prepared for her Geary debut, she spoke with cast, creatives, producers, and A.C.T. staff about Edward Albee's Seascape and was both optimistic and reflective. Sarah Nina Hayon, Seann Gallagher, Ellen MacLaughlin, and James Carpenter—the cast of Edward Albee's Seascape , directed by Pam MacKinnon. “The Albee project is very dear to me,” said MacKinnon. The director was a thirtysomething theater-maker in New York when she first spoke with Albee about directing The Play About the Baby at Philadelphia Theatre Company. That production in 2002 was the first of many— Seascape will be her 11th production of an Albee play. MacKinnon has become the foremost contemporary interpreter of the great American playwright’s work, winning a Tony Award for her direction of Who's Afraid of Virginia ...

By Simon Hodgson Last month, Pam MacKinnon took the reins as A.C.T.’s artistic director and she has hit the ground running. Before the opening of the 2018–19 season, she gave us an insight into her thinking behind A.C.T.’s upcoming season. A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon. Illustration by Kimberly Rhee. What are you looking forward to with the season opener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sweat ? Sweat is a theatrical testament to the phrase, “The personal is political.” Set in the once prosperous Reading, Pennsylvania, and based on weeks of interviews by playwright Lynn Nottage, this play is about what happens to friends, family, and co-workers when the unions roll up and the American dream seems at an end. I’m excited for Loretta Greco, a director whose work I have admired for more than 20 years, to bring this future American classic to life at The Geary. Why are you drawn to Men on Boats ? As soon as I picked up this play, I was pulled into the world created by play...

By Simon Hodgson This month, Pam MacKinnon officially took the reins as A.C.T.'s artistic director. As she plans for our upcoming 2018–19 season, we sat down with MacKinnon to talk about her own story and what's ahead. A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon at a company meeting. Photo by Beryl Baker. What are you looking forward to at A.C.T.? Having an artistic home. I have always been a freelance director and that is a wonderful thing, hopping from project to project, accruing an artistic family along the way. But I’ve never been part of an institution, let alone a leader of an institution. So to dig into a place and really get to know an audience is very exciting to me. What attracts you to San Francisco? San Francisco is a beautiful and cosmopolitan city, a seat of innovation and higher learning, and a crown jewel of this country. Like a lot of American cities, it’s learning how to deal and manage and live with great new wealth next to people who are strugglin...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff We are thrilled to announce that Jennifer Bielstein will join us as A.C.T.’s next executive director. Bielstein is currently the managing director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and president of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), an organization that represents 74 theaters nationwide. A.C.T.'s next executive director, Jennifer Bielstein. “On behalf of the board of trustees, I am delighted to welcome Jennifer Bielstein as A.C.T.’s new executive director,” says A.C.T. Board of Trustees President Kay Yun. “Her passion and dedication to the arts make her one of the most respected and sought-after arts leaders in the country.” As executive director, Bielstein will work closely with A.C.T.’s incoming artistic director, Pam MacKinnon. “I am thrilled Jennifer will be stepping into A.C.T. with me,” says MacKinnon. “Her knowledge of, commitment to, and passion for theater is unparalleled. I cannot wait!” Bielstein is a graduate of the ...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff  A.C.T.’s Next Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon. Photo by Chad Batka. We are thrilled to announce A.C.T.’s next artistic director, Pam MacKinnon. Tony Award and Drama Desk Award winner MacKinnon is no stranger to the Bay Area, having directed Victor Lodato’s 3F, 4F at Magic Theatre in 2005 and Amélie , A New Musical at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2015. MacKinnon grew up in Toronto, Canada as well as just outside Buffalo, New York. She majored in economics and political science at the University of Toronto and UC San Diego, and briefly pursued a Ph.D. in political science, before turning to her other passion: theater. Since then, MacKinnon has become one of American theater’s most beloved directors, a supporter of new American playwrights, and a leading interpreter of playwright Edward Albee’s work. She is an alumna of the Drama League, Women’s Project Theater, and Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Labs. She is also Executive Board Pr...