Theater News

Works by Yussef El Guindi, Sarah Ruhl and More Set for ACT — A Contemporary Theatre’s 2011 Season

Yussef El Guindi
Yussef El Guindi

ACT — Contemporary Theatre, based in Seattle, has announced its 2011 Mainstage season, which will include two world premieres.

The season will begin with Vanities: A New Musical (April 1-May 11), featuring a book by Jack Heifner (adapted from his play), with music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum. David Armstrong will direct. It will be followed by Neil Simon’s comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue, April 29-May 29. Warner Shook will direct.

The world premiere of Yussef El Guindi’s Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World will be presented June 17-July 17. In this modern romantic comedy, Musa, an Egyptian cab driver who’s been in America less than a year, falls for Sheri, a sassy American waitress. Next up will be Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, to be directed by Kurt Beattie, July 29-August 28. Victor Pappas will direct Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, as adapted by Peter Oswald, September 9-October 9.

The season will conclude with the world premiere of Double Indemnity (October 21-November 20), from the novel by James M. Cain, adapted by David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright. Kurt Beattie will direct the play, set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, where discontented insurance agent Walter Huff encounters temptations too great to resist and embarks on a dark journey to escape his life.

Following the 2011 Mainstage season, ACT will stage its 36th annual production of the Seattle holiday favorite, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted by Gregory A. Falls, November 25-December 24, 2011. Rounding out the Mainstage season is year-round programming presented by The Central Heating Lab at ACT (CHL).

For more information, visit www.acttheatre.org.