Stereophonic, Hamnet, and More Announced for A.C.T.'s 2025-26 Season

American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) artistic director Pam MacKinnon and executive director Jennifer Bielstein have announced the company’s 2025-26 season.

The season includes the comedy drama Kim’s Convenience (September 18–October 19); the most Tony Award-nominated play of all time, Stereophonic (October 28–November 23); the Streetcar Project’s A Streetcar Named Desire (January 21–February 1); Paranormal Activity (February 19–March 15), a stage show set in the world of the Paranormal Activity film series; the world premiere of Eisa Davis’s ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| (March 12–April 19, 2026); and the US premiere of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet (April 22–May 24, 2026).

The season kicks off with Kim’s Convenience, a play about a Korean family-run corner store, popularized by the Netflix series. Playwright Ins Choi will also star in the production, directed by Weyni Mengesha, as the title character. Kim’s Convenience is produced in partnership with Adam Blanshay Productions and Soulpepper Theatre Company.

In association with BroadwaySF, A.C.T. will present Stereophonic, written by David Adjmi, directed by Daniel Aukin, and featuring original music by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler. The play takes place in a music studio in 1976 as an up-and-coming rock band recording a new album finds itself suddenly on the cusp of superstardom. Performances will take place at BroadwaySF’s Curran Theatre.

A.C.T. and the Streetcar Project will present Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire using the complete, unabridged text with no props and no set. For the past two years, the Streetcar Project has toured the production, created by Lucy Owen and Nick Westrate and directed by Westrate, to unconventional spaces, such as airplane hangars and warehouses, around the country, and now they bring it, for the first time, to a theater.

Written by Levi Holloway and directed by Felix Barrett, Paranormal Activity is a co-production with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and Center Theatre Group and follows American couple James and Lou, who move to London to escape their past.

In Eisa Davis’s play with music ||: GIRLS :||: CHANCE :||: MUSIC :||, a co-commission with Vineyard Theatre, four highly-gifted teens collab and collide one pivotal summer at a prestigious Berkeley Girls’ Music Program. The production is directed by Pam MacKinnon (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).

A.C.T. will close out its 2025-26 season with the US premiere of Hamnet. Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti (Life of Pi) and directed by Erica Whyman, the play explores what happens when the plague steals 11-year-old Hamnet from his loving parents, Agnes and William Shakespeare, and they must each confront their loss alone.