The decade of the 2020s started with ACT being dark for the entire 2020 mainstage season. While closed
for the pandemic, there was a change in leadership as Anita Shah moved in as Managing Director. The
first play after the pandemic closure was Hotter Than Egypt, written by Core Company member Yussef el Guindi
- a world premiere.
productions
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1986
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On the Razzle (1986)
This Tony-award winning playwright gives us an inspired comic romp from the inventive 19th century farce that also gave us THE MATCHMAKER and HELLO, DOLLY. “There may be no script in English funnier than ON THE RAZZLE” – London Observer. “He is one of the hottest and most literate writers of the English language…brilliant theatricality” – Mel Gussow, The New York Times
Painting Churches (1986)
Painting Churches is a surprising, refreshing story about relationships between parents and adult children. The elderly Churches, Gardner and Fanny, are in the process of moving from their spacious Beacon Hill house into a cottage. Daughter Mags is an artist who lives in Manhattan. Gardner is a Pulitzer Prize—winning poet, once as well known as Frost or Pound. Now he writes incoherent criticism of poetry and tries to teach his parakeet to recite “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Fanny, a proper but eccentric Bostonian, buys shoes in thrift stores and wears wigs under her hat.
Tales from Hollywood (1986)
Tales From Hollywood is an ambitious and witty, yet tragic, story of emigre writers working behind the “silver screen” of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. The story hinges on the ingenious premise that if the popular Hungarian writer Odom von Horvath had not been killed in a freak accident in Paris in 1938, on his way to America, he might have joined the band of prominent European artists who fled from the Nazis and ended up working in the back hallways of Hollywood.
The play imaginatively creates 13 years of von Horvath’s stay in Los Angeles. Through his eyes we meet Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel, Thomas Mann, Salka Viertel, Heinrich and Nellie Mann, Lionel Feuchtwanger, and some of the screen greats of that remarkable era—Johnny Weissmuller, the Marx Brothers, Garbo, and others.
Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)
Brighton Beach Memoirs is a tender yet comic story about a family that embraces life even during hard times. Filled with pointed, wisecracking humor and sentimental memories, Brighton Beach Memoirs is a joyful, enriching experience. The play is an affectionate portrait of Brooklyn-Jewish family life in 1937. Fifteen-year-old Eugene, an aspiring writer and future pitcher for the New York Yankees, is our guide through this delightful story. Eugene lives with his parents, older brother, aunt and two cousins in a modest Brighton Beach home. Together, this extended family faces the daily challenges of life during the Depression. With a skillful mixture of comedy and drama, Simon raises the enduring issues of sibling rivalry and family relationships, while the world approaches the brink of another world war.
Brighton Beach Memoirs is one of a trilogy of autobiographical works by Neil Simon; the others are Biloxi Blues, currently on Broadway, and Broadway Bound, as yet unproduced.
The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1986)
The timely and compelling true story of a white South African lawyer imprisoned twice under the controversial 90-Day Law for his opposition to apartheid. It is based on Sachs’ own writings about his experiences during and after being incarcerated in the early 1960s for a total of 163 days, much of it in solitary confinement. The jail Diary of Albie Sachs brings to life events that shaped the news we see and hear today. It celebrates our spirit of resistance and brings to life the universal struggle of those who oppose repression.
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Off-Broadway’s musical hit for the past four years! A tongue-in-check
musical spoof about the most unusual plant ever to bring fame to a small
florist shop. Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists is the site of events that could
devour the World
“. . .this plant is bent on nothing short of World Conquest! Can it be
stopped? Will it be stopped? Will nothing save Planet Earth from the jaws of this chloro-filled menace?”