Katy Owen and Ewan Wardrop in “North by Northwest,” which opens American Conservatory Theater’s 2026-27 season.
Steve Tanner/Wise Children
Pam MacKinnon might be in her last few months as artistic director of American Conservatory Theater, but the 2026-27 season she’s leaving in her wake bears her distinctive imprint.
The lineup, revealed Tuesday, March 17, leans toward big-tent titles meant to invite in the whole city, not just card-carrying theatergoers. At the same time, it specifically reflects its San Francisco audiences — with our kaleidoscopic diversity, our delight in camp and performativity as well as our intellectual curiosities and appetite for the new.
First up is “North by Northwest” (Sept. 22-Oct. 18) at the Toni Rembe Theater, adapted by Emma Rice. Longtime Bay Area theatergoers might remember when, for “Brief Encounter” at ACT in 2009, Rice had actors magically walk through a giant projection screen (that had invisible slits in it). Similar sorcery is in store for her take on the Alfred Hitchcock film.
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MacKinnon, however, cautioned that spectators should not learn in advance how Rice, who’s also directed “The Wild Bride” and “Tristan and Yseult” at Berkeley Rep, realizes the cropduster or Mount Rushmore scenes, lest they spoil the production’s only-in-the-theater magic.
“She uses a lot of sound when Hitchcock uses the visual,” MacKinnon teased. “There’s a lot of music. There’s a lot of choreography.”
Michael Urie and Jinkx Monsoon in “Oh, Mary!” on Broadway. ATG San Francisco and American Conservatory Theater are teaming up for the show’s run at the Curran Theatre.
Evan Zimmerman/American Conservatory Theater
The season continues with the previously announced “Oh, Mary!” (Oct. 13-Nov. 1), which, like last year’s “Stereophonic,” is presented in partnership with ATG San Francisco at the Curran Theatre.
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Cole Escola’s outrageous comedy envisioning Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic and frustrated cabaret performer continues to make headlines long after its Broadway premiere, thanks in part to a parade of A-list comic performers who’ve cycled into and out of the role. Stars have included Betty Gilpin, Tituss Burgess, Jinkx Monsoon, Jane Krakowski, John Cameron Mitchell and Maya Rudolph.
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But MacKinnon also attributed the comedy’s success to its dumb-on-purpose ethos and total buy-in from the creative team.
“When storytelling knows exactly what it is, and all the collaborators hop on board and to the best of their ability put the oars in the lake and start rowing, the audience can feel it,” she explained.
Fall continues at the Toni Rembe with “John Proctor Is the Villain” (Nov. 12-Dec. 6), Kimberly Belflower’s Tony Award-nominated play about a high school class studying Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”
“That play is taught through a particular lens,” MacKinnon said. In Belflower’s meta-play, by contrast, “the younger generation and in particular the girls in this classroom really need to interrogate that.”
Playwright Kimberly Belflower
Lola Scott
ACT is coproducing the show, directed by Jess McLeod, with Seattle Repertory Theatre and Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group. Each company will contribute three actors from its region to the nine-person cast.
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For MacKinnon, the partnership realizes a dream she said she first brought up in her job interview before getting hired at ACT in 2018.
“I wanted ACT to activate a West Coast corridor of theater making,” she recalled.
The new year also brings a world premiere to the Toni Rembe. “The Bad News Bears: A Musical” (Feb. 26-April 4), presented in association with Paramount Pictures Corporation, adapts the 1976 Walter Matthau movie of the same name about a little league team so bad they get coached to block ground balls with their bodies. Eric Garcia writes the book and lyrics, Brian Feinstein composes the music and Sherri Eden Barber directs.
MacKinnon, who was drawn to “the openheartedness of it all,” is partnering with commercial producers who hope to transfer the show to Broadway after its ACT run.
Then there’s “The Comeuppance” (April 20-May 16), also at the Toni Rembe. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ script, directed by Tina Landau in a coproduction with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is set on a suburban Washington, D.C. porch at a pre-game for a millennial friend group’s 20-year high school reunion. As the old friends roast each other, a mysterious, otherworldly presence keeps popping in in different guises.
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It’s not a full-on horror play, but, citing ACT’s recent box office triumph with “Paranormal Activity,” MacKinnon said, “I’m hoping that some of our newly acquired horror-slash-spooky-story audience members can turn their attention to this.”
Atra Asdou in “Iraq, But Funny.”
Ricardo E Adame/Lookingglass Theatre
The schedule concludes at the Strand Theater with “Iraq, But Funny” (May 13-June 13). Playwright Atra Asdou stars as “a British, brittle low-ranking imperialist,” as MacKinnon put it. The character narrates the lives of five generations of women with roots in present-day Iraq. MacKinnon likened Asdou’s comic charisma to a young Whoopi Goldberg’s. Dalia Ashurina directs.
For the following season, the company is also commissioning a new play by San Francisco native Christopher Chen, whose “The Headlands” was a hit for ACT in 2023. Like that work, the new script will be a noir play set in San Francisco.
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