Inside A.C.T.

By Taylor Steinbeck Artwork for the Young Conservatory's 2018 production of Urinetown: The Musical . Urinetown: The Musical— the Young Conservatory show opening at The Strand this week—is not your typical night at the theater. This Tony Award–winning musical takes place in a city controlled by the corrupt Urine Good Company where you have to pay to pee. Urinetown lampoons everything from capitalism to big industry, while backed by the sounds of Broadway-spoofing songs. We sat down with director Jessica Bird to further crack open this clever comedy. How would you describe this show? Urinetown is comedic satire. It hits you in the gut with how real it is and how it speaks to the state of where we are right now in this country, but it also makes you laugh about it. What's your vision for this production? This show will be set in a dystopian San Francisco since a lot of the themes are relevant to what’s happening in this city. There's so much economic dispari...

By Taylor Steinbeck Over the past year, A Thousand Splendid Suns has moved audiences across Canada and at San Diego's Old Globe. But this story of three resilient Afghan women has also captivated the show's cast, some of whom have been a part of this production since its world premiere at A.C.T. in February 2017. Before Suns 's limited two-week run at The Geary Theater this month, we spoke to three of the cast members to hear what this moving story means to them. (L to R) Denmo Ibrahim,  Nadine Malouf ,   and Antoine Yared in A.C.T. ’ s   A Thousand Splendid Suns  (2018). Photo by Jim Cox. Nikita Tewani (Aziza): The stories of the country, culture, and people portrayed in A Thousand Splendid Suns are largely untold. If they are in the media, the representation is more often than not a negative one. Every time I step on that stage, I am honoring these people: women who normally don’t get to share their stories. This play shows the humanity of what’s real...

By Taylor Steinbeck Searching for a text on the Meisner technique? Wanting to read the latest Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner? Familiarizing yourself with contemporary women playwrights? Look no further than A.C.T.'s Allen Fletcher Library. Located on the 7th floor of 30 Grant Avenue, A.C.T.'s library is a hidden gem packed with books, scripts, theater-related magazines, and more. Head Librarian Joseph Tally has manned its shelves for nearly twelve years while juggling a position as director of development at San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros. We sat down with Tally to talk about the ins and outs of running a library for both a theater company and a graduate school. A.C.T. Head Librarian Joseph Tally. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. How did you become A.C.T.'s librarian? I was taking acting and auditioning classes at Studio A.C.T. and was making use of the library since Studio students get access to the books. A.C.T. was looking for a librarian and it ended up w...

By Taylor Steinbeck Today, the curtain is closing on the 2017–18 season fellowships, giving way to new and exciting journeys to come. For over eleven months, these young theater-makers have played an integral role at A.C.T., taking on tasks that range from evaluating script submissions to organizing donor events to designing mainstage show art. We reached out to a few of the fellows before they departed for their next adventures to find out what the A.C.T. Fellowship Program means to them. (L to R) Some of the 2017–18 fellows at the opening night of the A.C.T. Fellowship Project 2018: Nora Zahn, Bree Willard, Nailah Harper-Malveaux, Miranda Ashland, Taylor Steinbeck, Olga Korolev, Ilyssa Ernsteen (Bottom, L to R) Spencer Jorgensen, Rachel Stuart. Photo by José Parra. Rachel Stuart (Development Fellow): I couldn’t have asked for a better team to spend this past year with! I was able to get a firsthand look into what it takes to fund a large theater company. My team’s supp...

By Taylor Steinbeck Actor and filmmaker Tony Goldwyn originally signed onto the 1999 film A Walk on the Moon as a producer, but once he started working on the script with screenwriter Pamela Gray, his priorities shifted. After two years of rewrites, there was still no director, so Goldwyn—eager to preserve the script's vision—stepped up to the plate. Nearly 20 years after Goldwyn’s directorial debut, with Moon now a successful musical on the Geary stage, we called up the star of ABC’s Scandal to find out why this story remains so close to his heart. Tony Goldwyn, director of the 1999 film  A Walk on the Moon,  joins Pamela Gray, screenwriter of Moon and book writer of the musical ,  at the Toronto Film Festival for the world premiere of their 2010 film Conviction . Courtesy Pamela Gray. What initially drew you to Pamela Gray’s script? The Catskill bungalow colonies was a part of the Jewish experience I was not raised in at all and it was so colorful and fabu...

By Taylor Steinbeck Later this month, 18-year-old Nina Kissinger will not only be crossing her high school stage to receive a diploma, but she will also be gracing the Geary stage for her professional theater debut in A.C.T.’s A Walk on the Moon . We sat down with this over-the-moon emerging actor to ask her about how she got cast and what the character of Myra means to her. Nina Kissinger (Myra) and Brigid O'Brien (Alison) at the first rehearsal of A.C.T.'s 2018 production of A Walk on the Moon . Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. Can you tell us about the audition process? I had heard that A.C.T. was auditioning for a brand-new musical, since I’m in the building a lot for the Young Conservatory's high school musical ensemble. I had auditions for college programs coming up, so I thought it would be good to get some audition practice. I went into the room withmy Carole King song, and casting immediately asked me to read for Myra. They then told me to stay familiar with th...

By Taylor Steinbeck Every summer from age three to fifteen, Pamela Gray was whisked away from the hubbub of New York City to the Catskill Mountains. Paying $250 for the entire season, Gray’s family lived with other working-class Jewish families in bungalow colonies. “These Jewish housewives lived in this matriarchal world,” says Gray, “where they’d be visited by vendors: the blouse man, the dress man, the bathing-suit man.” Seeing the storytelling potential in these childhood memories, Gray wrote about ’60s Borscht Belt life in her first screenplay, The Blouse Man , which later became the movie A Walk on the Moon (1999). More than ten years later, producers approached her to adapt Moon into a musical; she leaped at the opportunity. Before rehearsals in San Francisco, Gray reminisced with us about the Catskills, Woodstock, and the process of creating a new musical. Book writer Pamela Gray at the first rehearsal of A.C.T.'s 2018 production of  A Walk on the Moon . Photo by...

By Taylor Steinbeck In just a few weeks, A.C.T.'s world-premiere musical, A Walk on the Moon , will land on the Geary stage, and with it comes fresh faces, original characters, and new songs for San Francisco audiences to enjoy for the very first time. We caught up with some of the actors in  Moon to get to know their characters. The cast of A.C.T.'s 2018 production of  A Walk on the Moon  at the first rehearsal. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. Brigid O’Brien (Alison Kantrowitz): Alison is a fiery teenager. She's fun to portray because she has a lot of emotions—anger, excitement, passion—I feel like I can relate to her in that way. Also, she’s close to my age, which helps. Sometimes in stories with young people, writers try to dumb them down, but I think our book writer, Pamela Gray, has done an amazing job of creating honest human emotions for this character. Teenage angst is so real! Jonah Platt (Marty Kantrowitz):  Marty is the patriarch of the Kantrowi...

By Taylor Steinbeck Last weekend's third-annual New Strands Festival was four full days of exciting new works read aloud for the first time, festivalgoers mingling and moving to the sounds of female DJs, and audiences rising to their feet. The Strand Theater was packed with San Franciscans and theater-lovers ready to be wowed, and the artists behind the new plays rose to the challenge. From emotional coming-out stories such as Thao Nguyen's Bend with Me  and Dipika Guha and Jeremy Cohen's Malicious Animal Magnetism to larger-than-life epics such as Ngozi Anyanwu's Nike, Or We Don't Need Another Hero , this year's festival was one to remember. Here are some of the highlights: Justin Genna and Clinton Roane in rehearsal for Dipika Guha and Jeremy Cohen's Malicious Animal Magnetism .  Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. Festivalgoer @xle responds on Instagram. Photo courtesy @xle on Instagram. Ngozi Anyanwu ( Nike, Or We Don't Need Another Hero p...

By Taylor Steinbeck For playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, music isn’t just a medium she embraces in her art—it informs the very framework of her life. Growing up in a musical home, she and her siblings jitterbugged to their mother’s favorite jazz standards and belted out Puccini alongside their opera-loving father. These musical forms—along with the blues and show tunes, among others—have stayed with Parks and have influenced how she writes her plays. Embodying the playwright’s lyrical writing style, Father Comes Home from the Wars  has a musicality that recalls the past while retaining emotional immediacy, making it intricately layered and deeply personal. The Musician (Martin Luther McCoy) plays a song in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) . Photo by Joan Marcus. A blues musician herself, Parks composed the music and wrote the lyrics for the songs in  Father Comes Home . Music is a part of Parks’s makeup as an artist; whethe...

By Taylor Steinbeck When the cast and creative team of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) flew in to San Francisco from Yale Repertory Theatre last week, their meet and greet at A.C.T. was more like a reunion than a first rehearsal. In a case of life imitating art, A.C.T. and Yale Rep’s co-production of Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home —beginning performances tomorrow at The Geary Theater—is a homecoming story not just for the characters in the play, but also for the artists involved. (From L to R) Julian Elijah Martinez, Michael J. Asberry, James Udom, Kadeem Ali Harris, Liz Diamond, Carey Perloff, Britney Frazier, Martin Luther McCoy, Eboni Flowers, and Gregory Wallace at the first San Francisco rehearsal of A.C.T. and Yale Repertory Theatre's 2018 production of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) . Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. Actors Steven Anthony Jones (The Oldest Old Man) and Gregory Wallace (Odyssey Dog), who were both a part...

By Taylor Steinbeck From Platoon (1986) to the Rambo series (1982–2008) to Miss Saigon (1989), “the main protagonist is always a white guy going to Vietnam and [the] Vietnamese are the bad guys being shot at or they are the people who need saving,” said playwright Qui Nguyen in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview. So Nguyen created Vietgone as an antidote to the “white savior” tale. Its characters are proudly Vietnamese and fully capable of saving themselves. By giving his characters dimension and agency, Nguyen attempts to reclaim how Vietnamese people have been represented on stage and screen, and makes them the heroes of their own story. Tong (Janelle Chu) flirts with Quang (James Seol) in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Vietgone . Photo by Kevin Berne. In Miss Saigon , “Vietnam is a place not worth saving, and America is a holy grail worth killing and dying for,” writes journalist Diep Tran in her American Theatre magazine article “I Am Miss Saigon , and I Hate It.” The ...

By Taylor Steinbeck For over six months, 13 young theater artists from various departments of A.C.T.’s Fellowship Program have come together to produce not one, but two plays in a project that will culminate in performances this week. Running April 19–22 at A.C.T.’s Costume Shop, the production features the work of Obie Award–winning playwrights Caryl Churchill and José Rivera with Far Away and Brainpeople , respectively. Both these plays tackle war, fear, and oppression through a dystopian lens, speaking volumes about the world we live in today. In celebration of this project marking the fifth consecutive year of the Fellowship Project, we spoke to some of this year's fellows about their experiences. The 2017–18 A.C.T. Fellows involved in The A.C.T. Fellowship Project 2018. Photo by Allie Moss. Nora Zahn (Director of Far Away ): Being a part of this project from beginning to end has taught me a ton, especially when it comes to all the tiny details that go into making a...