ACT has been finding, creating and sharing contemporary theatre with audiences since 1965.

ACT made history as the first theatre in Seattle dedicated to producing contemporary plays, and we’re still making history as the most welcoming development house for new plays around. With our multiple stages and diversity of work, ACT keeps you intimately involved with new theatre.

The ACT Manifesto

We exist for the same reason that there is public education and public health – to support and raise the quality of life in our civilization.

We believe in the theatre of the moment, this moment, the present, contemporary struggles, issues, ideas, being. If this practice creates light, consciousness, deeper thought, more fellow feeling, both in our audiences and in ourselves, we believe this to be good for something.

ACT seeks to create a conversation with its work, its season, that reaches for something broader, deeper, seeking to create a philosophical view, or a more connected sense of compassion with our fellow beings and the world at large...An investigation, a sense of experiment, of searching for the new idea or synthesis.

The primacy of product - the beautifully fashioned thing, the definitive performance, the astonishing act. We strive for insane excellence. Otherwise, everything is dismissible.

ACT is a reef - A vertical ecosystem of artistic practice. Its job is to create levels of experience through the medium of performance. Its building, its series of performance spaces and intriguing rooms reflect this potential and cry out for its use in this way. The present is multifarious, contradictory, high and low culture, has many guises, ethnicities, and voices. The theatre must reflect this diversity---aesthetically, socially, ethnically, and intellectually.

A reef is a home - A community of mutually sustaining life forms. ACT should be a mutually sustaining community of theatre practices and audiences. It also exists to stimulate and please its audiences, and to sustain its community of theatre workers and artists. Nothing significant can be made without this community, this family. The artist cannot be forgotten.

All forms of theatre represent possibilities for new insight, new experience, new life. Hence, all performance practices and disciplines are fair game. Conventional theatre, performance art, musicals, dance, site-specific pieces, poetry, cabaret, Comedy, and a broad range of theatrical experimentations live side by side.

New art. If the theatre doesn’t press the envelope, it fails its ambition to lead the pack by creating new experience. Risk is essential. Few have ever made anything good without it. All plays can be looked at as simulations of risk for the audience, allowing patrons to experience risk in a risk-less environment. It is the business of theatre to create them and take them.

The dimension of poetry, High Art. If the theatre has no supersensual utility, it is nothing. If it cannot lead its patrons to another plane of experience—metaphorical, abstract, or deeply affective-it remains earthbound and less than pop media. It has no reason to exist. If it does not reflect the complexities of the world, it is false.

Populist art must be part of the overall complexion of the theatre. If it only becomes a palace for High Art, it loses connection with the universal yearning for the redemptive story and the belly laugh.

ACT exists for the community and to strengthen it, for all searchers of all ethnicities and ages. We continually develop deep connections with other likeminded institutions. We produce mutually, interweave and sustain communities of audiences from the socio-politically driven to the sybarites, from the connoisseurs and intellectuals to the fun seekers.

- Kurt Beattie, Artistic Director

Awards & Recognition

From its original base of 300 subscribers in its 400-seat facility in lower Queen Anne, to its present stature as a nationally recognized theatre serving nearly 8,000 subscribers, ACT has received many awards, including:

  • Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays
  • Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund
  • AT&T OnStage Award
  • American College Theatre Festival’s Award of Excellence
  • Washington State Governor’s Arts Award
  • New Play Grant from the Ford Foundation
  • Three sizeable challenge grants from the NEA
  • Annual Shubert Foundation grants since 1977
  • Education Endowment from the Hearst Foundation
  • Continuing support from PONCHO
  • Continuing support from Seattle’s Corporate Council for the Arts
  • Seattle’s Best Theatre – Seattle Weekly

ACT plays live beyond ACT

Since 1998, six of ACT’s world premiere plays have gone on to New York as ACT productions:

  • Scent of the Roses by Lisette Lecat Ross (1998)
  • Power Plays by Alan Arkin and Elaine May (1998)
  • The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien (1999)
  • Temporary Help by David Wiltse (1999)
  • In the Penal Colony by Philip Glass (2000)
  • A Skull in Connemara by Martin McDonagh (2000)

The Crucible, by Arthur Miller (1999), was named one of the Wall Street Journal’s top five productions playing around the country.

Side Man, by Warren Leight (1999), won three Backstage West Garland Awards, including Best Production.

Click here to see ACT’s play history.

A Contemporary Theatre