Women in ACT season spotlight
Female writers and directors will dominate ACT’s 2018-19 season, the first under new artistic director Pam MacKinnon but one she planned in concert with outgoing artistic director Carey Perloff. The company is announcing its 51st season on Tuesday, April 3.
Playwrights include Lynn Nottage, Jaclyn Backhaus, Mfoniso Udofia, Lauren Yee and Kate Hamill, in addition to Edward Albee. MacKinnon says over the phone from New York that she didn’t explicitly set out to get so many women in the lineup. “I read plays, I gravitate toward what I love, and all of a sudden, we hit this amazing number of women playwrights.”
Her priorities, rather, were “to see a widely represented version of America on the stages” from “different generations of voices” tackling both the present-tense and the universal. She sought to honor “ACT’s legacy of language first, but through my lens of American voices.”
And if this lineup skews more contemporary than recent ACT seasons, that doesn’t signify a permanent shift. “The classics aren’t going away,” she says.
The season starts in September with “Sweat,” Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, directed by Loretta Greco at ACT’s Geary Theater. Centering on steelworkers in Reading, Pa., the play was written after extensive interviews with the residents of the city, which in the 2010 census had the highest poverty rate in the country.
Beginning in October at ACT’s Strand Theater is Backhaus’ “Men on Boats,” which is based on the real-life travel diary of John Wesley Powell, who explored Wyoming’s rivers in 1869. Women and gender-nonconforming actors play the whole crew, and the stagecraft conjures the region’s vast landscapes from deceptively simple props and set pieces. Tamilla Woodard directs.
Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh’s adaption of “A Christmas Carol” returns for the holidays, though MacKinnon says a new version of the story is already “in the works” for a future season.
MacKinnon makes her ACT directorial debut in January at the Geary with Albee’s 1975 play “Seascape,” about a bickering retiree couple who encounter a pair of giant, talking lizards on a beach. A longtime Albee interpreter, MacKinnon calls directing his plays “my ongoing, huge spine of my craft and my art form.”
At the Strand in February, the company presents “Her Portmanteau,” one of nine chapters of Udofia’s epic “Ufot Cycle” about multiple generations of a Nigerian family in the U.S. The Magic Theatre, which produced Udofia’s “Runboyrun” and “Sojourners” in 2016, will partner with ACT to produce another play from the cycle at the same time as “Her Portmanteau,” a Magic spokesman confirmed.
March brings the Geary Theater debut of Yee, a San Francisco native. Her “The Great Leap” follows a geopolitically fraught exhibition basketball game between two college teams, one from Beijing, the other from San Francisco. Lisa Peterson, who directed a developmental workshop of the show at ACT’s New Strands Festival last year, reprises her role.
Spring continues at the Geary with Hamill’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” about ruthless social climber Becky Sharp. A final show, to begin performances at the Geary in June, will be announced at a later date.
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