ln a nameless totalitarian state, a writer is brought in for interrogation by the police, who believe there may be a link between his macabre fairy tales and a series of gruesome crimes against children occurring in his hometown. Martin McDonagh, the enfant terrible of British theatre in the ‘9Os, emerges here as perhaps the first great playwright of the 215’ century, creating a troubling world that is both frighteningly recognizable and comically surreal, where cruelty and violence live side by side with a dazzling gallows humor that may be the only sane response. Outrageously funny, uncompromisingly original, THE PILLOWMAN is a thrilling, incendiary postmodern fable about the power of storytelling and the role of artists and artistic responsibility in contemporary culture. Winner 2004 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Miss Witherspoon, the latest from the wickedly comic imagination of Christopher Durang, is a free-wheeling comedy about a persnickety dead woman named Veronica who just wants to e left alone in limbo. And who can blame her, when her previous incarnations have included an up-close encounter with the Salem witch trials and repeated association with Rex Harrison?

Wine in the Wilderness, by Alice Childress, is a significant play by the first African American woman to have her work professionally produced on the American stage. In the midst of a riot in Harlem, a college-educated painter clashes with the young working-class woman who arrives to model for him as together they reach toward intimacy, artistic truth, and a vision of community they can share.

ln a contemporary culture so polarized over the issue of abortion that even mentioning the word can effectively end a conversation comes a generous and compassionate new play that dares to explore unflinchingly the many sides of this issue. Seattle playwright Elizabeth Heffron, tells the story of a young woman faced with one of the most difficult and deeply personal challenges a person can face with humor, intelligence, and honesty. Originally commissioned for ACT‘s 2003 FringeACT Festival, and the first recipient of the ACT New Play Award. This timely new play challenges audiences to open their minds and hearts, and to contemplate the theological, medical and political history that has shaped the national debate over abortion.

If you were dissatisfied with your child, would you if you could start over with the same raw material, hoping for a better result? What if you discovered that though you felt like an individual person, you were in fact only one of a number of identicals? From the subtle and innovative mind of Caryl Churchill (Top Girls. Cloud Nine) comes an emotionally compelling, intellectually provocative meditation on the implications of cloning at the most human, most personal level. Through a series of deftly written confrontations between a father and his sons, Churchill invites us to consider the disturbing complexity of a reality not too far in our future. A Number welcomes this major writer of the modern era back to ACT’s stage for the first time in twenty (?) years. Winner, 2002 London Evening Standard Award for Best Play.

A seriously funny adaptation of Carl Sternheim's classic 1910 farce skewering the obsessions and ambitions of the petit bourgeoisie, The Underpants brings together some of Seattle’s finest comic talent in the story of a young wife who becomes a not altogether unwilling celebrity when she loses her lingerie in public -- much to the dismay of her conservative bureaucrat husband! Thinking man’s fool Steve Martin whips up a confectionery new take on an old recipe, mixing bawdy irreverence with elegant wordplay for an evening of giddy, subversive fun.