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Rammel Chan, Melissa Canciller, and Francis Jue in “King of the Yees” at the Goodman Theatre. (Photo by Liz Lauren)

A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) Announces 2017 Season

The slate includes Nina Raine, Arthur Miller, Matthew Lopez, ‘Murder for Two,’ Lauren Yee, and a new play about Aristotle.

SEATTLE:  A Contemporary Theatre has announced its 2017 mainstage season, featuring a mix of classic and new plays.

“This year, ACT’s mainstage programming will broaden an ongoing dialogue about the world we live in, and extend an even wider invitation to join in that conversation with all our senses,” said artistic director John Langs in a statement. “One thing I’ve learned over my first year as artistic director is that the ACT audience is hungry for theatre experiences that engage the brain, the heart, and the funny bone. We love a good laugh and a good cry, and to contemplate our complicated contemporary world.”

The season begins with Nina Raine’s Tribes (March 3–26, 2017), about a deaf man born to a hearing family who meets and falls in love with a young woman on brink of deafness.

Next is Murder for Two (March 25-June 11, 2017), in a coproduction with the 5th Avenue Theatre. This musical thriller by Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair features two actors, one playing the detective investigating a crime, the other playing all the suspects—and both playing the piano.

Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride follows (June 9-July 2, 2017). The play follows a down-on-his-luck Elvis impersonator who becomes a winning drag queen in the Florida Panhandle.

Next is Moby Pomerance’s Alex & Aris (July 14-Aug. 6, 2017), a world premiere play about the philosopher Aristotle and a young pupil who would become known to the world as Alexander the Great.

Following is Lauren Yee’s King of the Yees (Sept. 8-Oct. 1, 2017), an autobiographical look at the playwright’s father Larry and his complicated legacy in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Closing the season is a new staging of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (Oct. 13-Nov. 12, 2017), in which the Salem witch trials mirror the paranoia and moral panic of the contemporary age.

ACTLab, ACT’s partnership program for cultivating new ideas through experimentation in one of its five theatre spaces, has a full season in the works, to be announced later this fall.

Located in Seattle’s downtown, ACT is home to five performance spaces under one roof. Since 1965, ACT has been a destination for experiencing new voices, stories, and art.

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