ACT Partners with Icicle Creek Theatre Festival

Another Step in Nurturing New Voices, New Works in Theatre

Seattle, WA – February 12, 2008 – Expanding on its role of developing new works, ACT – A Contemporary Theatre today announces a new partnership with Icicle Creek Theatre Festival (ICTF), a non-profit theatre company that provides new playwrights the opportunity to develop their plays in a workshop environment with professional directors and actors, resulting in partially-staged, script-in-hand presentations read during its annual Festival (August 9-10, 2008) at the Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat n Leavenworth, WA.

“ACT is delighted to be entering into a partnership with the Icicle Creek Theatre Festival. We believe the festival represents a burgeoning artistic community at Sleeping Lady Mountain Resort, showing the sort of forward thinking and vision that ACT is thrilled to embrace. Further, we see Icicle Creek as a golden opportunity to focus on the development of new plays with an artistic concentration that only such an environment can provide,” said Artistic Director Kurt Beattie.

“ICTF chose to partner with ACT because of our great respect for the work that ACT does for the theatre in Seattle. ACT is the theater that strikes us as being most attuned to its local artists, and most dedicated to the promotion of new work,” said Founder of ICTF Allen Fitzpatrick. “We trust that ACT will benefit from the association with ICTF by being able to offer a quiet and creative venue, a short drive away, where new plays of interest to ACT can be workshopped, prior to further development or presentation in one of ACT’s performance spaces. We look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration.”

ICTF benefits from this partnership with ACT by receiving assistance with casting, play solicitation, dramaturgy, audience development and use of ACT’s space for auditions and presentations.

ACT in turn will continue to play a key role in the developmental process of a new work before it is presented in front of a live audience, either at ACT or at other venues across the nation.

“New work is the cornerstone of American theatre, and ICTF is committed to helping writers prepare their scripts for production in regional theatres around the country,” concluded Fitzpatrick. “ICTF makes every effort to see that plays presented at the Festival are seen by those who are in a position to get those plays produced.”

Atomic Farmgirl by C. Denby Swanson, a new play presented at ICTF last year, was produced Off-Broadway last fall by The Drilling Company in New York.