ACT Names New Artistic Director Who Grew Up In Berkeley

Several months after the official departure of its artistic director of eight years, the American Conservatory Theater has announced its next artistic director, Elizabeth Williamson, who is only the fifth person ever to lead the 61-year-old theater.

Elizabeth Williamson succeeds Pam MacKinnon in the artistic director role, and she arrives after serving in the same role at the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York, where she has been for the last four years, following nearly eight years at the Hartford Stage, in Connecticut.

Calling ACT her "hometown theatre," after working their early in her career — including assistant-directing productions of The Constant Wife and Well two decades ago — Williamson says "I couldn’t be more honored to be coming home to ACT."

Known for work as a dramaturg and for cultivating new plays and musicals in that role — including the Tony and Olivier Award-winning play The Inheritance, and the Tony Award-winning musicals, Some Like It Hot and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Dramaturgy, for the uninitiated, is the study of the physical production of theater, and in-house dramaturgy often serve as both historical consultants on productions and in-house critics who help shape new works.

Williamson's resume also includes work as dramaturg on Amazon Studio’s Red, White & Royal Blue, and the list of theater artists with whom she's collaborated includes Matthew López, Bess Wohl, Jeffrey L Page and Stew, DeLanna Studi, Harrison David Rivers, Sarah Gancher, Dan O’Brien, Kaneza Schaal, Doug McGrath, Robert Freedman, Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Octavio Sólis, Baron Vaughn, and Lauren Yee.

Williamson's work as adapter and director adaptations of Molière, and Marivaux, and most recently her adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which has been seen at theaters including Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Alley Theatre, Geva Theatre, and Hartford Stage.

Williamson, 47, was selected following a national search, led by Search Committee Chair Barbara Messing, and she is set to relocate to the Bay Area with her wife (also a Bay native) and cat, in the coming months and begin work in January.

"From the beginning of this search, we were looking for an artistic leader who could honor ACT's extraordinary history while boldly imagining its next chapter," said Messing in a statement. "Elizabeth Williamson stood out for the clarity of her artistic vision, her deep commitment to artists and new work, her passion for training the next generation, and her belief in theater’s power to engage and inspire an entire community."

"ACT is both one of our country’s great flagship companies, and my hometown theatre," Williamson says. "I have always admired its extraordinary mission and programming, connecting international, national and regional artists, communities and students through a body of work spanning the classics, great new work, and major revivals."

Williamson tells the Chronicle that she expects to be able to be more daring in her programming at ACT than at her current company in Rochester, given the more "sophisticated" and "international" audiences here. And, she says, she plans to be guided by a motto at London’s Royal Court Theatre: "Produce classics as though they’re new plays and new plays as though they’re classics."

MacKinnon's time at ACT was, of course, marred by the pandemic and the ensuing stress and chaos in the world of regional theaters. Taking the job not long before the pandemic began, MacKinnon's work at ACT included notable productions like Testmatch, a new play centered on the world of women's cricket, and Edward Albee's bizarre but wonderful Seascape. She also notably used her connections in New York to bring in talent like director Sam Pinkleton (Oh, Mary!) to direct a reimagined Wizard of Oz in 2023, and to attract shows like the Tony-winning musical A Strange Loop. MacKinnon herself won a Tony Award for directing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2013.

Prior to MacKinnon, only three other people had served as artistic director: Carey Perloff, Edward Hastings, and founder William Ball.

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