This fall, San Francisco's venerable American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) raises the curtain not only on a new season of productions, but also on its new leadership team, artistic director Pam MacKinnon and executive director Jennifer Bielstein.
As emeritus artistic director Carey Perloff moves on to adventures in freelance directing, Pam MacKinnon makes the reverse swap. Over the same quarter-century that Perloff led A.C.T, MacKinnon established herself as one of the country's most in-demand itinerant directors for hire. A Tony winner for her 2012 direction of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," MacKinnon last directed in the Bay Area in 2015. She helmed Berkeley Rep's Broadway-bound musical "Am�lie," which this paper's Richard Dodds found enchanting, calling it "an amazing enterprise."
In New York this summer, MacKinnon, 50, directed a cast including Jesse Tyler Ferguson and trans actor Ian Harvie in "Log Cabin," a provocative comic drama about divides within the queer community. She's currently at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, mounting a new play by Bruce Norris, having previously directed his Pulitzer-winning "Clybourne Park."
While MacKinnon will direct occasional productions at A.C.T., including Edward Albee's "Seascape" next winter, she welcomes the opportunity to shape something larger and more enduring than any one show.
"For the last 24 years," MacKinnon explains. "My career has been broken into 10-week grabs, each of which has the same three parts: gearing up for rehearsal, getting into the rehearsal room, and putting the work up on stage. Then start over again.
"I'm excited about thinking more broadly," she says. "Planning a season, which is a 10-month grab, advancing the institution, which is a five-year strategic plan. Having an artistic home at A.C.T lets me scale up my skill set. It's not about opening a show, then leaving. It's about opening a show, learning how the audience responds, and then using that information moving forward."
MacKinnon and her partner, an actor, are taking a similarly thoughtful testing-the-waters approach to choosing a place to live in San Francisco.
"Through my first season," she says, "we're Airbnb-ing our way through the city. For the past two months we were at Hayes and Masonic. When I come back from Chicago, we'll be in the Financial District."
It was just two weeks ago that Jennifer Bielstein, 48, and her husband, an events manager, officially moved to San Francisco's South Beach neighborhood from Minneapolis, where she'd been managing director of the Guthrie Theater since 2016. That position followed 10 years in the same role at the Actors' Theater of Louisville, home to the influential Humana Festival of New American Plays. Unlike at the Guthrie, where she reported to the artistic director, Bielstein explains that she and MacKinnon, whose hiring was part of what drew her to A.C.T., will have "a real co-equal partnership. Our roles overlap on key strategic institutional decisions. And we share the charge of being ambassadors for A.C.T., both locally and within the national theater community."
Bielstein feels committed to "getting involved in the arts community as a whole. There are many companies here, and from my perspective we all want to foster a great theater scene." As it happens, A.C.T.'s season-opening production of "Sweat," the Pulitzer-winning Rust Belt labor drama, will be directed by Magic Theater artistic director Loretta Greco.
While working at several Chicago companies, Bielstein was heavily involved with the city's Theater League, advancing collaborative programs including an annual free-admission night and a weekly discount program that rotated from company to company, encouraging audiences to sample widely.
Both Bielstein and MacKinnon point to not just the need, but also the clear value of inclusiveness in programming at A.C.T.
"We need to find ways to attract, engage and inspire new audiences," Bielstein acknowledges. "There's a trend that people buy theater subscriptions later in life, but there are theaters around the country with almost exclusively younger audiences."
"I feel like the Strand can be a gateway," says MacKinnon of A.C.T.'s three-year-old mid-Market venue, with a 283-seat theater and 120-capacity flexible space. "We can program different kinds of work than make sense at the Geary with a thousand seats."
Spanning the Geary and the Strand, MacKinnon's slate of selections for 2018-19 is remarkably diverse. Only "Vanity Fair," a co-production with Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, was scheduled prior to MacKinnon's hiring. In addition to "Sweat" and Albee's "Seascape," it includes "Men on Boats," a gender-bending historical comedy; "Her Portmanteau," a Nigerian-American family story; "The Great Leap," local playwright Lauren Yee's Chinatown-to-Beijing basketball drama; and Ionesco's "Rhinoceros," with its absurd, all-too-timely take on conformism vs. confrontation.
"This is the first time I've ever programmed a season," says MacKinnon, clearly looking forward to many more. "I've thought a lot about what A.C.T. should represent in San Francisco."