CLYBOURNE PARK Completes A.C.T.'s 2010-11 Line-up, Plays 1/20-2/13/2011

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) Artistic Director Carey Perloff announced Bruce Norris's critically-acclaimed Clybourne Park as the final play of the company's 44th subscription season. Home is where the heart-and history-is in Clybourne Park, a "spiky and damningly insightful new comedy" (The New York Times).

In 1959, a couple sells their home in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood to a black family, causing uproar in their all-white community. Fifty years later, the stakes are different but the debate is eerily familiar: negotiations about a white couple's renovation plans for the house-in what has become a historic black neighborhood-whirl into lightning-quick if uncomfortably-revealing repartee. A "buzz-saw sharp new comedy" (The Washington Post) from an adamant provocateur, Clybourne Park riles up the dangerous ghosts of race and class hidden below the contemporary veneer of political correctness.

Hailed by critics as "superb, elegantly written, and hilarious . . . a master class in comic writing" (The New Yorker) and "remarkably perceptive, hilarious, and surprisingly poignant" (Associated Press), Clybourne Park is nominated for a Drama Desk and a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.

Clybourne Park will play January 20-February 13, 2011, completing A.C.T.'s eclectic 2010-11 line-up. Anchored by the world premiere of a musical version of Armistead Maupin's groundbreaking Tales of the City series, which will take over two slots at the end of the season, A.C.T.'s 2010-11 season features works by such artists as Tony Award-winning master clown Bill Irwin, Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter, and celebrated newcomer Tarell Alvin McCraney, as well as an international multimedia production of No Exit that pushes the boundaries of live performance. Season subscriptions are now available and offer incredible savings, unparalleled access, exclusive benefits, and personalized customer service.

To subscribe or to receive a season brochure, please call 415.749.2250 or visit www.act-sf.org.

"Clybourne Park starts with a brilliant premise and weaves it into a deeply provocative play about race and class in America today," says Perloff. "I was startled at how honest and unflinching it was about the fault lines of neighborhood and "community" when those ideas collide with personal history and private pain. Bruce's work has grown more and more complex over the years and this is his fiercest play to date. I am particularly excited to program him between Tarell Alvin McCraney and Harold Pinter. . . It will be an explosive winter at A.C.T.!"

Bruce Norris is a writer and an actor whose play Clybourne Park premiered at Playwrights Horizons in January of 2010. Other plays include The Infidel (2000), Purple Heart (2002), We All Went Down to Amsterdam (2003), The Pain and the Itch (2004), and The Unmentionables (2006), all of which premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. His work has also been produced at Lookingglass Theatre, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, The Royal Court Theater (London), and The Staatstheater Mainz (Germany). Mr. Norris is the recipient of the 2009 Steinberg Playwright Award, the Whiting Foundation Prize for Drama, and the Kesselring Prize, Honorable Mention. He also received Joseph Jefferson Awards for Best New Work for his plays, We All Went Down to Amsterdam and The Pain and the Itch. He currently resides in New York.

A.C.T. subscriptions for all six plays start at $60, and subscribers save as much as 50% off single ticket prices. Educators and administrators are eligible for half-price subscriptions. To make subscriptions more affordable, A.C.T. also offers all subscribers one free seat upgrade and an extended payment plan that allows payment in two easy installments. A.C.T.'s competitive subscriber benefits include easy ticket exchanges up to the day of scheduled tickets, guaranteed best seats, ticket insurance, access to easy prepaid parking one block away from the theater, and discounts for neighborhood restaurants and Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth theater guide for each show. Single tickets for Scapin, Marcus, A Christmas Carol, and Clybourne Park will be available in August 2010. Single tickets for the rest of the plays will go on sale later in the season.
A.C.T.'s season is supported in part by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation New Works Fund, an endowed fund of The Next Generation Campaign; the National Endowment for the Arts; and company sponsors Priscilla and Keith Geeslin, Joan Lane, Nancy Livingston and Fred Levin, The Shenson Foundation, Burt and Deedee McMurtry, Kathleen Scutchfield, Mr. and Mrs. Steven L. Swig, Jeff and Laurie Ubben, and Susan Van Wagner.

A.C.T. 2010-11 SEASON
IN ORDER OF PERFORMANCE
(All titles and dates are subject to change.)

All performances at
American Conservatory Theater
415 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

A.C.T. Subscriptions Office
415.749.2250 / www.act-sf.org

Scapin
by Molière
Adapted by Bill Irwin and Mark O'Donnell
Directed by and starring Bill Irwin

September 16-October 17, 2010
Press Night: Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at 8 p.m.

"The entire world is Mr. Irwin's straight man. . . . This prince of clowns bears a distinctly nonearthly relationship to the basic laws of motion and anatomy." -The New York Times

Two-time Tony Award winner-and A.C.T. favorite-Bill Irwin (A.C.T.'s Fool Moon, Texts for Nothing) returns to the Bay Area in Molière's chaotic classic. The rascally title character balances his penchant for mayhem and mischief with a promise to help two pairs of wide-eyed lovers. Irwin-who adapted, directs, and stars-uses his trademark sophisticated clowning, commedia dell'arte, and live music to turn this 17th-century farce of mistaken identities and theatrical mishaps into a sparkling tour de force perfect for all ages.

WEST COAST PREMIERE
Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet
The Brother/Sister Plays: Part III
by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Directed by Mark Rucker

October 29-November 21, 2010
Press Night: Wednesday, November 3, 2010, at 8 p.m.

"The greatest piece of writing by an American playwright under 30 in a generation or more" -Chicago Tribune

A few days before Hurricane Katrina, the barometer rises and the air below sea level closes in on a young black man, pressured to balance his identity with family creeds and the magical cultural landscape that surround him. Marcus, with its warmth, myth, humor, and Louisiana argot, is the finale of the West Coast premiere productions of Tarell Alvin McCraney's internationally acclaimed trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays-presented in partnership with Marin Theatre Company and Magic Theatre. This fantastical coming-of-age play prompted the New York Times to call McCraney's work "a new, authentically original vision. . . . It's what people must have felt during productions of the early works of EuGene O'Neill in the 1920s or of Sam Shepard in the 1960s."

SPECIAL NONSUBSCRIPTION EVENT
A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens
Adapted by Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh
Music by Karl Lundeberg
Choreography by Val Caniparoli
Directed by Domenique Lozano
Based on original direction by Carey Perloff

December 2-26, 2009
Press Night: Tuesday, December 6, 2009, at 7 p.m.

"The best Christmas Carol ever! A terrific and imaginative production. Highest rating!" -Jan Wahl, KRON-TV
"This is a Carol built to banish ‘bah humbugs' for years to come!" -Oakland Tribune

Scrooge is back, and he's meaner than ever in A.C.T.'s A Christmas Carol, the Bay Area's favorite holiday tradition. Featuring adorable Tiny Tim, those spooky Christmas ghosts, and a multigenerational cast of dozens, A Christmas Carol is a sparkling, music-infused celebration of goodwill that your family will never forget.

Clybourne Park
by Bruce Norris

January 20-February 13, 2011
Press Night: Wednesday, January 26, 2010, at 8 p.m.

"A subtle and well-crafted piece of theater . . . goes for the jugular of P.C. liberals."-New York Magazine
"Completely audacious, architecturally ingenious entertainment" -Entertainment Weekly
"A lively, darkly humorous affair . . . remarkably perceptive, hilarious, and surprisingly poignant"-Associated Press

Home is where the heart-and history-is in Clybourne Park, a "spiky and damningly insightful new comedy" (The New York Times). In 1959, a couple sells their home in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood to a black family, causing uproar in their all-white community. Fifty years later, the stakes are different but the debate is eerily familiar: negotiations about a white couple's renovation plans for the house-in what has become a historic black neighborhood-whirl into lightning-quick if uncomfortably-revealing repartee. A "buzz-saw sharp new comedy" (The Washington Post) from an adamant provocateur, Clybourne Park riles up the dangerous ghosts of race and class hidden below the contemporary veneer of political correctness.

A Harold Pinter CELEBRATION
The Homecoming
by Harold Pinter
Directed by Carey Perloff

March 3-27, 2011
Press Night: Wednesday, March 9, 2011, at 8 p.m.

"Pinter's masterpiece" -The New York Times
"Pinter changed the face of 20th-Century Theater." -Los Angeles Times

A.C.T. celebrates Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter's legacy with his most sexually provocative play. A long-absent son and his attractive wife, Ruth, return to his contentious childhood home in London's East End. In this extraordinary homecoming, father and sons vie for Ruth's attention and affection with outrageous consequences, in a play that changed the landscape of 20th-century drama. Longtime Pinter collaborator and A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff, directs this brilliant classic, which features A.C.T.'s extraordinary core Acting Company along with A.C.T. favorite Andrew Polk (A.C.T.'s November).

American Conservatory Theater presents
The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre's production of
No Exit
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Adapted from the French by Paul Bowles
Conceived and directed by Kim Collier

April 7-May 1, 2011
Press Night: Wednesday, April 13, 2011, at 8 p.m.

"Benchmark of brilliance . . . filled with innovation" -The Vancouver Sun
"Brilliant . . . the bravest theatrical ride I've been on this year." -The Globe and Mail
"Theatrical perfection . . . spectacularly brilliant . . . one of the finest theatrical achievements in recent memory"
-Calgary Herald
"A vibrant, very modern theatrical experience . . . the acting is uniformly powerful and committed, the stagecraft extremely skillful and focused." -The Toronto Star

Fresh from sellout performances across Canada, Jean-Paul Sartre's redefined classic makes its U.S. debut at A.C.T. A mysterious valet ushers three people into a shabby hotel room. As the door locks behind them, an eternity of damnation lies ahead. What they soon discover is that hell isn't fire and brimstone at all-it's other people arguing about their lives. Sartre's 1944 existential classic is skillfully reimagined as a series of hidden cameras turns the stage into a cinema, and the audience into voyeurs, as a thrillingly staged "live film" takes place before your eyes. A.C.T. continues its tradition of welcoming the work of innovative International Artists to the Bay Area with this multimedia event.

WORLD PREMIERE
Tales of the City
A New Musical
Based on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and More Tales of the City
Libretto by Jeff Whitty
Music and Lyrics by Jake Shears and John Garden
Directed by Jason Moore

May 17-July 19, 2011
Press Night: Tuesday, May 31, 2011, at 8 p.m.

"The most sublime piece of popular literature America has ever produced" -Salon.com
"Remarkable . . . delectable and addicting" -The New York Review of Books

Amid the fog-drenched glow of disco lights, bathhouses, and the bustling soul of 1970s San Francisco, a wide-eyed Midwestern girl finds a new home-and a new kind of family-with the characters at 28 Barbary Lane. Three decades after Armistead Maupin mesmerized millions with his weekly column in the City's newspapers, detailing the lives and (multiple) loves of Mary Ann, Mouse, Mona, Brian, and the beloved but mysterious landlady Mrs. Madrigal, his iconic San Francisco saga comes home as a momentous new musical from the Tony Award-winning creators of Avenue Q and the musical minds behind the glam-rock phenomenon Scissor Sisters. The capstone of the 2010-11 season, A.C.T.'s world premiere musical adaptation of Tales of the City is an irrepressible celebration of the spirit that still defines our City by the Bay.

Tickets and Subscriptions
Subscriptions range from $60 to $513 and are now available via the A.C.T. Subscription Office. For more information or to purchase, please call 415.749.2250 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Single tickets for Scapin, Marcus, A Christmas Carol, and Clybourne Park will be available in August 2010. Single tickets for the rest of the plays will go on sale later in the season.