The 60’s saw the birth of ACT Theatre. Beginning as just an experiment during the summer season,
over the course of the decade Greg Falls’ brainchild bloomed into the established home for bold
contemporary theatre in Seattle.
productions
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1968
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Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1968)
The three characters in the play must answer for a killing; two of which have been committed and the third which is contemplated. The reasons for the killing implicate the world our society has created — Hanley's "killing ground" for they share the guilt. How the characters, (a young, misanthropic Negro man; an unwed, pregnant girl; and a middle-aged German refugee) resolve the agonizing circumstances in which they find themselves, provides an incisive look at contemporary America.
Eh? (1968)
In this British farce, Livings does an anatomy of modern mass man. In the world of machines it still takes someone to press the button, and Livings pushes that button and sets in motion an hilarious examination of today's pop culture. In this new culture, the old sanctions of God, church, state, family, boss, work, all drop out of “modern man's" ethical vocabulary and what replaces them provides a frenetically comic view of his new life.
Royal Hunt of the Sun (1968)
This play is total theatre, in which language, music, masks and dance contribute to the creation of a magnificent and powerful spectacle. An historical drama of the Spanish conquest of Peru, the play expands the limits of the state to depict the clash of armies and the plunder of the Inca treasure. And at its heart is the conflict between the aging Pizarro, leader of the conquistadors, and the young Inca ruler, Atahuallpa, who believes that he is descended from the Sun God and will never die.
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Goldman's comedy takes place in ll83 in the court of King Henry II, which was evidently quite a racy place, abounding in "delivious knifings of one another with words blisteringly well formed". Goldman never pretends the play is sober history, but rather, concentrates on the quality and content of the relationships which “made” history. We all know that Richard the Lionhearted (Henry's son) became King; it‘s how he got there that makes the trip entertaining and often very amusing.
Black Comedy/Captain Fantastick Meets the Ectomorph (1968)
Shaffer's one-act comedy pulls a theatrical switch by reversing dark and light, so that in the brief moments when the lights are "on" for the performers the stage is darkened; the rest of the time it is light for the audience and the characters stumble about in their own darkness. Pritchard takes us to a Southern town and with three men, brought together following a flood, examines their interaction in an amusing and sometimes illusive way.
A Delicate Balance (1968)
This Pulitzer prize winning play portrays, through barbed talk and polished interaction, the prime disease of our time and society, which is neither violence nor materialism nor alienation, but quite simply — emptiness. The brilliantly corroding and lacerating wit, experienced in an earlier Albee play - “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", is again at work as a sextet of very individual individuals search for what reality there may be left in their lives.
Waiting for Godot (1968)
Still considered avant garde by many in the theatre, Godot remains grotesquely beautiful and utterly absorbing theatre. Four men and a boy wait for Godot to join them. Who is Godot? God? Hope? Death? Who he is underlies the whole human perplexity of life. The play brought overnight fame to Beckett and has been produced throughout the world.