4000 Miles - American Conservatory Theater

INSIDE A.C.T.
What’s New
at A.C.T.
by Cait Robinson
A.C.T. is opening 2013 with three exciting new plays. The
West Coast premiere of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles will be
followed by two world premieres: Canadian playwright George
F. Walker’s dark comedy Dead Metaphor, about an out-of-work
sniper, and Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis’s innovative
musical Stuck Elevator, about a man who is trapped inside an
elevator for 81 hours.
A.C.T.’s commitment to developing new theater often
begins in our world-renowned Master of Fine Arts Program.
We were first introduced to Amy Herzog through The Wendy
Play, which she brought to the Conservatory in 2008; it was
the first coproduction between our M.F.A. Program and our
Young Conservatory.
From the moment they arrive, our M.F.A. Program
students participate in staged readings of scripts by playwrights
we are interested in and intensive workshops with guest artists.
These artists devise work with our students, write work for our
students, and work with our students to explore pieces that are
already under construction. Recent guests include the OBIEwinning
duo Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour, local playwright
J. C. Lee, and Brooklyn-based playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury.
A.C.T. Artistic Associate Beatrice Basso, who specializes in
new-play development, is always on the lookout for engaging
playwrights to match with our students. “We try to create an
exciting synergy between artists,” she says of the process. “We
identify a voice that we’re attracted to aesthetically, a writer
who demonstrates muscularity of thought and language, and
consider the needs of each individual class. I think these
collaborations work best when the playwright has a story that
really needs to be developed. When that is the case, it becomes
an important experience for the students, because they are
involved in the creative process in a realistic way.”
This involvement is key to their development as actors.
Conservatory Director Melissa Smith explains: “Many of
our student actors come to us without ever having had a live
playwright in the rehearsal room. They know what it is to work
with a script, but they don’t always connect that script to a
playwright who had an intention behind it. To work on a new
piece is to see a script develop. Some years ago, when we first
p CREATING SOMETHING NEW Current second-year
M.F.A. Program student Elyse Price (center, in white) holds her
classmates at bay as she toys with her prey, second-year Philip
Estrera, in last year’s world premiere of Steve Yockey’s very still
& hard to see, a darkly humorous new work that incorporates
elements of Japanese folklore, written for the M.F.A. Program
class of 2014. Photo by Kevin Berne.
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