ACT creates a stage especially for alumni
American Conservatory Theater has trained the likes of Denzel Washington, Elizabeth Banks and Sharr White. But for every Oscar winner, franchise star and Broadway playwright, there are scores of talented, well- trained alumni who love their craft but get few opportunities to perform or produce new work.
RE: ACT aims to remedy that. Founded by 1996 master’s graduate Josiah Polhemus, the upstart troupe invites alumni of all ages to
write, develop and perform new plays at the Costume Shop, a 49- seat black box steps away from the Strand on Market Street.
“In school, some of the best work I would see was in little studios,” says Polhemus, who got RE:ACT off the ground in 2014 with help from ACT’s late Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker. “We thought maybe there’s a way to have that same excitement in a space where the audience feels like they’re right there with the actors.”
Thursday night, RE:ACT launches its second season with the world premiere of “The Bunner Sisters,” a three- act play adapted by Richard Alleman from an Edith Wharton novella. Departing from the glitterati of “The Age of Innocence,” “Bunner” chronicles working- class spinster sisters living on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1880s. “We think of Wharton in terms of the upper classes,” Alleman says. “But this piece looks at the underside of the Gilded Age.”
Amy Prosser, who attended an ACT Summer Theater Congress, stars as Ann Eliza Bunner, elder sister of Heather Kellogg’s Evelina. Polhemus is the man who upends their lives. “What’s so intriguing,” Prosser says, “is that Wharton is always writing about how close women are to total downfall. That’s still a huge issue, even for women in the middle class and owning class.”
In a departure of his own, Alleman expanded two minor characters, played by Tara Blau and Anne Buelteman, to highlight Wharton’s subtext of bigotry. “The Irish Catholics don’t like the Jews, the Protestants look down on the Catholics,” he says of his version. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing that again in prejudice against Muslims.”
Anthony Newfield, a veteran of Broadway, film and television and a 1975 ACT summer alum, directs this production. The Bay Area native sees parallels between the frothy tech economy and Wharton’s era. “We are living in another Gilded Age,” he observes. “We hear all about income inequality now. This is how these women survived in 1888 — how are we doing it today?”
RE: ACT makes ends meet with support from ACT’s Community Space Sharing Initiative, a shoestring budget and can- do teamwork. “At rehearsal, someone will say, ‘ I can bring the costumes,’ ” Polhemus says, adding that, heedless of pre-Super Bowl traffic, “Richard, Tony and I loaded the truck with borrowed props from Zellerbach ( Hall in Berkeley) and drove it to the theater.”
The young company’s track record suggests that a more- golden era may be on the horizon. More than 30 alums performed to packed houses in last summer’s “five plays in five days” staged readings; Joy and Nancy Carlin participated in a 2014 staged reading of Amy Freed’s “The Monster-Builder,” which Berkeley’s Aurora Theater presented in its current season. Polhemus plans to reprise the readings between “Bunner” and a fall world premiere of a drama written by Prosser.
Although alumni are at RE: ACT’s core, Polhemus welcomes actors and writers of any provenance; the essential criterion is an interest in creating new work. “There is so much talent out there,” Polhemus says. “They’re excited about doing something that is a passion — and getting to be in San Francisco.”