San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Rotating rep is returning at ACT
Discussing American Conservatory Theater’s 2024-25 season, Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon kept using variants of the phrase “see anew.”
The seven-show lineup, which the 59-year-old company revealed March 22, opens at the Toni Rembe Theater with a remade classic: Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” (Sept. 12-Oct. 6), about a divorced couple who find out they’re honeymooning with new spouses in neighboring hotel rooms, but set in Argentina in the 1930s. Director KJ Sanchez’s reenvisioning, MacKinnon said, “takes it out of the expected upper-class British blah-blah-blah,” lacing Coward’s trademark effervescent banter with tango.
Now that the company has retired its long-running “A Christmas Carol,” the holiday season brings another chance to look at the old with fresh eyes. The world premiere of “A Whynot Christmas Carol” (Nov. 26-Dec. 24), written by Craig Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss”), is a backstage drama about a small-town production of “A Christmas Carol.” MacKinnon, who directs, intends it to return for multiple seasons as a new holiday tradition. The Dickens novella, MacKinnon noted, “is pretty devoid of humor,” whereas Lucas’ puttingon-a-show hijinks leaven the solemnity of the play-within-aplay.
“We see this group of theater makers who don’t even necessarily like each other, can’t abide each other, but they’ve committed to a project together, and they learn how to talk across the aisle,” MacKinnon said.
Then 2025 ushers in the musical comedy “Nobody Loves You” (Feb. 28-March 30) by Itamar Moses (“The Band’s Visit”) and Gaby Alter, who both grew up in Berkeley.
MacKinnon, who directs, is working with the writers to update the 11-year-old piece, about a reality dating show, both to better reflect how reality TV has only become more prevalent since then and to acknowledge the ways so many filter their love lives through screens now, thanks to dating apps.
“You don’t have to be a contestant on a reality TV show to be mediating your personal life, and what is the cost of that?” MacKinnon said. (“Big Data,” directed by MacKinnon and one of the most provocative productions in the Bay Area this year, addressed related concerns.) “It also explores the notion: Can you be authentic when you’re performing?”
The season continues with two plays performed in repertory, by the same cast, harking back to ACT’s early years when a single actor might portray vastly different characters in
separate shows in the same day.
Part of August Wilson’s Century Cycle of 10 plays chronicling African American life throughout the 20th century, “Two Trains Running,” directed by Lili-Anne Brown, is set in 1969 in a Pittsburgh Hill District restaurant slated for demolition. William Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” directed by Devin Brain, mines its scenario — two sets of identical twins separated at birth — for slapstick and mistaken identities. The two productions alternate performances April 15-May 4 at the Toni Rembe Theater.
Next up is the world premiere of hip-hop musical “CoFounders” (May 29-July 6) by the Bay Area’s own Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis and Adesha Adefela, whom ACT supported with what MacKinnon called a “finishing commission” to complete the piece. Celebrating the East Bay, it
juxtaposes techies who are firmly ensconced in the industry with Esata, who has to claw her way in.
“It’s about the pressures of the Bay,” MacKinnon explained, “whether those are self-imposed or whether those are imposed on you.”
The season closes with “Kim’s Convenience” (Sept. 18-Oct. 19), starring playwright Ins Choi in the title role at the Toni Rembe Theater. Before it became a hit sitcom on CBS, the stage version — about the generational conflict between immigrant parents and their Western-born children, all against the backdrop of a fluorescent-lit convenience store — was a breakout star of the 2011 Toronto Fringe Festival.
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