Inside A.C.T.

posted by Jud Williford, A.C.T. Associate Artist and core acting company member After finishing their run in San Francisco, the company of Rock ’n’ Roll , a coproducti on of A.C.T. and the Huntington Theatre Company , took to Boston, where they are performing at the Huntington through December 13. A.C.T.’s Jud Williford , who primarily plays Ferdinand, took over the role of Jan for Manoel Felciano for two nights in November to enable Mano to make a quick trip back to the Bay Area. Jud sends an update from the road. It has been a wild and crazy first week of performances. The crew here at the Huntington Theatre has been tremendous. Warm and hospitable. I’m finally through the performances where I had to go on as Jan (Mano) and am thrilled that I can now enjoy this city! The audience here is different from the one in SF. Sometimes I feel that they watch me and Mano as if they were watching the “debating cavemen” on The History Channel. But overall they have responded enthusiastical...

posted by Manoel Felciano, Jan in Rock 'n' Roll at both A.C.T. and the Huntington Theatre Company The second most common question I get as an actor—after, “How do you memorize all those lines?”—is usually, “How do you keep things fresh, doing the exact same thing night after night?” [A.C.T. Associate Artist] Jack Willis likes to talk about being a “workman” when it comes to acting, and I appreciate the unsentimental, demystifying instinct in that word. It’s essential to bring what we do down from the lofty aerie of “artist” to a lunch-pail, workmanlike level. We call it “the work” because, well, that’s what it is. Just like anybody working on a construction site, for a nonprofit, or in a huge corporation, we have a job to do, within a larger structure. We have certain skills, both learned and innate. We have coworkers upon whom we depend and who depend on us. We have the same work ethic that you would find on a construction site or in a startup: timeliness, courtesy, res...

posted by Rusty Rueff, A.C.T. Trustee In these trying and turbulent financial days, decisions are being made about where one places one’s financial bets. Do we hang in the market, or do we just retreat and bury Mason jars of money in our backyards? My wife, Patti, and I have been having lots of discussions about this broadly, and personally, as we watch the nonprofit organizations that we support suffer under the pull-back of donations due to the economy and the nearly one billion dollars that have been donated for the presidential election. We are the recipients of many requests for donations, and we are doing our best to dig deep, and in some cases double down from prior year donations, to ensure that the nonprofit organizations that we care about do not implode during this difficult time. Some would say that we are being foolish in continuing to fund the arts at the same level or greater than the past. To many, these look like unreasonable investments. But as the writer and playwr...

posted by Carey Perloff, A.C.T.  Artistic Director Of the many wild and unexpected things that occurred during our rehearsals of Rock ’n’ Roll (like Russian tanks rolling into South Ossetia claiming “fraternal assistance” on the day we began rehearsals, an eerie echo of the August 21, 1968, Russian occupation of Prague), none was more surreal than going with the cast to Slim’s at midnight on October 9 to hear The Plastic People of the Universe play. I couldn’t even fathom that they were still together—this was the group of “long-haired weirdo hippies” that by bizarre circumstance triggered the trial that humiliated the Czech Communist Party in 1977, and led to the formation of Charter 77. So what the hell were they doing in San Francisco in 2008? There’s an incredibly moving moment in Rock ’n’ Roll in which Jan tells Nigel that the Plastics are over—they had been asked to compromise one time too many and finally broke apart. Turns out that 20 years later, in 1997, Václav Hav...