ACT Theatre Is on a Roll

Kurt Beattie

Artistic Director

Carlo Scandiuzzi

Executive Director

ACT – A Contemporary Theatre presents

Opening Night

September 16, 2010

Seasonal support provided by:

A Contemporary Theatre
Foundation
Eulalie Bloedel Schneider
Artists Fund

The 2010 Mainstage Season is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend Buster Alvord.

THE LADY WITH ALL THE ANSWERS
By David Rambo
Drawn from the life and letters of Ann Landers
With the cooperation of Margo Howard

Originally produced by The Old Globe, San Diego, California
Jack O’Brien: Artistic Director
Louis G. Spisto: Executive Director
THE LADY WITH ALL THE ANSWERS is presented by arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc. in New York.

encoreartsprograms.comꢀ

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WELCOmE TO ACT

I stumbled on Ann Landers’ column one day when I was an eleven-year-old kid on Long Island, leaﬁng through our daily

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Newsday. Up until then I’d never cared much about anything in the paper other than Yankee box scores, but she hooked me

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Title Page

with a bizarre letter. A woman wrote in about how much she

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Welcome to ACT The Company Up Next

loved her husband, but for one alarming habit of his: when he drank martinis, his preferred cocktail, he couldn’t help taking out the olives, shaking the booze off, then stufﬁng them up his nose. Dear Ann, what am I to do about this, the woman wanted to know. I remember laughing so hard I fell on the ﬂoor. I don’t remember Ann’s reply. I think, on occasion, she just printed a letter for her reader’s amusement. But from that moment on, I became a fan, in spite of myself.
In the 1950s and early 1960, when

Director’s Note Program Notes Who’s Who

Now, in an age of doctoral

newspapers were still numerous and distinct, Ann Landers was a cultural

degrees, accredited gurus,

Giving Message

presence. She was the popular member

and oceans of information,

Ongoing Support, Special Thanks, Special Fund Donors

of a group of middlebrow press personalities and columnists like her sister Abby and the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer. They were

Landers might seem quaint, and even under qualiﬁed.

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Community Partners

& Patrons

the everyday psychologists and advisors sprung from the post-war populist heart of American society, ministering to an outwardly conformist and inwardly crazy America. Their wisdom had the ring of common sense, of intelligence tempered by life. Despite their commercial obligation to entertain, the tone of their ruinations had a democratic inclination, an unspecialized hard won decency, like a good country doctor who’s heard it all. Unlike showbiz and gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell, who were fundamentally contemptible, a coven of gleeful destroyers and liars in the political service of media thugs like William Randolph Hearst, Landers and her cohorts aimed to help people.

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ACT Circle of Donors Board of Trustees, ACT Staff

Now, in an age of doctoral degrees, accredited gurus, and oceans of information,
Landers might seem quaint, and even under qualiﬁed. But I think we should remember that she respected and took seriously the real pain and confusion of her readers in the letters they wrote. She considered her answers with the aid of experts and did her best with wit and care to help them.
What I love most about David Rambo’s “The Lady With All The Answers” is its heart. It captures the struggle of a throaty, optimistic soul like Ann Landers trying to answer the difﬁcult challenges of her life and ours with the truth. And, with a bit of humor when appropriate, how she somehow made us feel that we were capable of changing ourselves and the world for the better.

Kurt Beattie Artistic Director

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ACT THEATRE

ThE COmpANy

CAST

Julie Briskman

Eppie Lederer ("Ann Landers")

prOduCTiON TEAm

Valerie Curtis-Newton

Director

Martin Christoffel
Melanie Taylor Burgess
Robert Aguilar
Scenic Designer Costume Designer Lighting Designer Sound Designer Assistant Lighting Designer Stage Manager
Brendan Patrick Hogan To come/holding space
JR Welden

Verhanika Wood

Production Assistant

Setting:

The study of a luxurious high-rise apartment in Chicago, late June 1975

Running Time:

Two hours. There will be one intermission.
The Actors and Stage Managers in this production are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.

Audience members are cordially reminded to silence all electronic devices such as cell phones, watch alarms, and pagers prior to the performance.

All forms of photography and the use of recording devices are strictly prohibited.
Please do not walk on the stage before, during or after the show.

ACT operates under agreements with the following:

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Welcome to Our Home!

(L to R) Anne Allgood in Das Barbecü, photo by Chris Bennion; Mark Siano & The Freedom Dancers, photo by Stephen Vest; Judd Hirsch in Below the Belt, photo by Chris Bennion; Cast of A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light, photo by Kevin Kauer; Nick Garrison in NEW VOICES, photo by Victoria Lahti.

As we continue the 2010 season of Mainstage plays, we want to recognize, salute, and THANK the people that make this possible: YOU, our audience. Your attendance at ACT represents an important gesture of support, for which we are very grateful. 2010 at ACT is unique in that through our Central Heating Lab initiative, we have grown our mission beyond Mainstage plays, to also produce for our community a vibrant variety of live entertainment spanning theatre, music, ﬁlm, dance, visual art, and more. Since early January, our stages have lit up with partner artists such as 14/48, Shadow & Light,
Seattle Dance Project, Mark Siano & The Freedom Dancers, Young Playwrights Festival, Moisture Festival, New Century Theatre Company, KT Niehoff / Lingo Dance, Short Stories Live, Pinter Fortnightly, and RAWSTOCK to name just a few. Our vision of becoming Seattle's downtown center for the arts is certainly becoming a reality. And how is this all possible? Because of YOU, our dear audience. And for that, we are forever grateful.
THANK YOU for supporting us and our vision for contemporary arts!

Up next at ACT — A theatre of new ideas

Oct 15 – Nov 14

A gleefully gruesome comedy from the Oscar-nominated author of In Bruges.

tickets on sale now! (206) 292-7676 | www.acttheatre.org | 700 Union Street, Downtown Seattle

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ACT THEATRE

A Brief History of

by Stephanie timm

Advice columns

Advice columns can be tracked as far back as 1693, when the ﬁrst British

women’s magazine, The Ladies’ Mercury,

promised to answer questions relating to love with the “zeal and softness becoming to the sex.” According to Guardian reporter Kathryn Hughes, all the readers were instructed to send in details of bafﬂing instances of male behavior like prospective ﬁancés taking too long to propose, to a coffee house near St. Paul’s and wait for “the Ladies Society” there to crack the code, or at least come up with some bracing advice about not bothering.

He afterwards went to Eton, and he afﬁrms that the whippings there were not half so severe as thos of his governess. —Yours obediently, M. Walker

It was also popular for general magazines during the Victorian period to run competitions with prizes for the best letter.
The grandmother of all advice columnists was Dorothy Dix, a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, the daughter of a well-connected Southern family who had come to Tennessee from Virginia who was largely

Eppie Lederer visiting wounded soldiers in Viet Nam.

While most of the topics contained in advice columns were about women’s issues, they were popular in men’s

periodicals as well. The Athenian Mercury

targeted ordinary people from middle and lower classes. Complaints in the magazine about a “Knot of Apprentices misbehaving with a servant maid of no good reputation” were frequent. The magazine warned apprentices that such behavior risked “scandal and danger” to their reputations, and the termination of indenture could be ruinous to a young man prospects, and were a threat to his “Fame, Estate, Body and ‘tis to be fear’d Soul and all.”

One out of four people in this country

is mentally unbalanced. think of your

three closest friends; if they seem ok, then you're the one.

Sir, —On this subject, and in reply to the mother who complains of her untoward boy, I would advise her to read the remarks of a young gentleman in the supplemental conversazione of the Englishwoman’s

self-educated. Gilmer’s ﬁrst columns were amusing, literate social satire, many geared to early women’s issues. They were an instant success, and readers began writing to Dorothy Dix for advice. In 1917 a national syndicate picked up Dorothy Dix. By the 1930s she was receiving 400 to 500 letters a day. Even after achieving wealth and fame, she answered each of her letters personally.
Beatrice Fairfax, another name

Domestic Magazine for April last, and then she will ﬁnd a cure for her troublesome son. After innumerable whippings had failed, the governess took it into her head to dress him in his sister’s clothes, which, though the feat was accomplished after much kicking and plunging, had the desired effect; and he tells us that whenever he transgressed or failed in his lesson, if his governess rang the bell, and desired the housemaid to bring some petticoats, &c,, he either begged pardon for his offences or set to diligently to learn his lesson.

In the Victorian period, some magazines printed entire letters that offered opinion rather than advice, though for the most part, the practice was to print only the answers to readers’ letters, leaving out the question, or only referencing it in the letter. This letter from 1870 was taken from The Lady’s

Own Paper:

inextricably linked to the lovelorn genre, was Marie Manning who originated her column in 1898. Both Dix and Fairfax initially responded to traditional romantic/social problems of the times, but soon dealt with more essential

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ACT THEATRE

One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive

everybody everything before you

go to bed.

One of the last pictures taken of Eppie Lederer, 2001

Chicago Tribune photo by Chris Walker.

Some Landers Lore

No. of years Esther Lederer wrote the Ann Landers column:

47

----------------------------------------------

quandaries as well. Dix and Fairfax provided practical, often progressive advice—

Date of Esther’s ﬁrst Ann Landers column:

counseling women to seek education, and to independently prepare to fend for themselves in a man’s world. Gilmer often spoke of her personal difﬁculties as the basis for her empathy for the problems of others. Both the Dix and Fairfax columns quickly became national institutions, their mutual success also due to their appearance

October 16, 1955

---------------------------------------------- Date of Esther’s last Ann Landers column:

July 27, 2002

(posthumous publication)

---------------------------------------------- No. of newspapers running Ann Landers’ column at the height of its popularity:

T o p: Eppie staying in shape to deal with the daily mail. Above:

in an era when the depersonalization of

Chicago Sun-Times ﬁle photo by Gene Pesek.

urban life was weakening the handling of

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personal and emotional problems within the domestic environment. Help was now being sought outside the family via the printed word, and the Dix/Fairfax columns were an impartial source of advice for many women of the period.
In the 1890s, readers questioned the propriety of receiving gentlemen callers without a chaperone. In the 1930s it had become women’s primary concern. By the 1940s girls were wondering if it was acceptable to take a vacation with their boyfriends. Picking up the rapidly changing thread of public morality in the 1950s were a pair of advice columnists who together cornered a national market that they still dominated into the 1990s, Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, pseudonyms used by twin sisters Esther and Pauline Lederer respectively.

---------------------------------------------- No. of readers at the height of its popularity:

90 million

---------------------------------------------- No. of letters received per day by Ann Landers:

(on average)

2,000

Advice columns now are increasingly online. While printed advice columns are still widely read, modern readers can click on Dear Mrs. Web, which sits online.

---------------------------------------------- No. of letters read by Esther Lederer personally:

200 to 500 per day

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Invest today in Seattle’s most innovative arts organization!

ACT Theatre is on a roll.

First, we started The Central Heating Lab, and now ACT is a year round destination for the arts with theatre, music, ﬁlm, dance, literature, lectures and more.
Next, ACT donors responded by giving more than ever to our Spring Campaign.
ACT is hopping. Join the party.

Go to www.acttheatre.org

and invest today in Seattle’s most

innovative arts organization!

Now, we have a $150,000

matching gift for every current donor who moves up in our listings in the program, and for every new donor to ACT. It’s a perfect reason to give more, give again, or give for the ﬁrst time, and make your gift go further.
Then, we launched a gamechanging, ﬁrst-of-its-kind membership—the ACTPass— that lets you see it all for only $25 a month!

From left to right, top to bottom:

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ACT THEATRE

ONGOiNG SuppOrT
SpECiAL FuNd dONOrS

ACT ENdOWmENT FuNd dONOrS

AC T ’ s endowment is administered by A Contemporary Theatre Foundation.

Buster & Nancy Alvord Joan & Larry Barokas

A Contemporary Theatre
Foundation

Michael Corliss-Investco Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Becky & Jack Benaroya Charles Blumenfeld & Karla Axell The Ewert Family Bruce & Dawn Goto William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education & Outreach Programs Kreielsheimer Remainder Fund Doug & Nancy Norberg Sally Pence Katherine & Douglass Raff Brooks & Suzanne Ragen Herman & Faye Sarkowsky David E. & Catherine E. Skinner Kayla Skinner Estate of Stuart Smailes David & Joyce Veterane The Peg & Rick Young Foundation

NEW WOrKS FOr ThE

AmEriCAN STAGE – A Special Thanks to ACT’s Commissioners

AC T ’ s New Works for the American Stage commissioning program attracts commissioners who want to come in direct contact with the creative process. Donors get to know leading playwrights and hear their earliest drafts, watching as ideas become scripts. Our commissioners are venture capitalists of new ideas, and we commend their bravery and commitment to new work.

SpECiAL ThANKS

Becky’s New Car by Steven Dietz

Commissioned by Charlie Staadecker in honor of Benita Staadecker

ACT gratefully acknowledges the following for their contributions to this production and season:

Desert Birds by Julie Marie Myatt

Commissioned by Art Wahl in honor of Eva Wahl

How to Remove Blood from a Carpet

by Laura Schellhardt

AJ Epstein
Alaskan Copper and Brass Company Keith Johnsen, Daqopa Brands LLC
Moby’s Restaurant

Commissioned by Paul and Paula Butzi

TITLE TBA by Jason Grote

Commissioned by Gian-Carlo and Eulalie Scandiuzzi

Dan Savage

Maggie Cassidy by Chris Jeffries

Commissioned by Dennis Forsyth in honor of Elaine Spencer

TITLE TBA by Keith Joseph Adkins

Commissioned by Gian-Carlo and Eulalie Scandiuzzi

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COmmuNiTy pArTNErS

ACT gratefully recognizes the following corporate, foundation, and government agencies for their generous support of our 2010 programs. Without such tremendous community support, ACT would not be able to offer outstanding contemporary theatre, in-school educational programming, or community based outreach.

This list reﬂects community partners as of June 1st, 2010.

ArtsFund/Mary Helen Moore Diversity Fund Ballinger Family Foundation Columbia Crest Winery* Continental Airlines* Elizabeth George Foundation Harvest Foundation
Emerald City Shoe Repairs & Northgate Cobblers* Epicenter Fitness* Fales Foundation Trust Horizons Foundation Market Place Salon & Day Spa* Marquis Jet Partners

Executive Underwriters ($100,000+)

ArtsFund

Season Sponsors ($50,000 - $99,999)

National Endowment for the Arts The Seattle Foundation Washington Athletic Club* The Peg & Rick Young Foundation
MCSB Inc. Moby’s Restaurant* Paciﬁc Place Pike Brewing Company* Wyman Youth Trust
A Contemporary Theatre Foundation Eulalie Bloedel Schneider Artists Fund Nesholm Family Foundation Ofﬁce of Arts & Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle The Shubert Foundation, Inc. Taproot Foundation*

Stage Partners

($5,000 - $9,999)

Media Partners

Apulent Catering and Special Events Company* Norman Archibald Charitable Foundation The Daily Grill*
KING-FM

Producing Partners ($25,000 - $49,999)

4Culture

Joanie’s Catering*

*Support provided through in-kind contributions

Amazon.Com Inc.

Responza* Tony’s Events & Catering* Tuxedos & Tennis Shoes*
The Boeing Company Getty Images* John Graham Foundation JPMorgan Chase Foundation The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation PONCHO

Benefactors ($1,000 - $4,999)

AC/R Services, LLC* Beim Foundation
Washington State Arts Commission
Bill Speidel Enterprises City Hardware*

Performance Partners ($10,000 - $24,999)

Consolidated Restaurants, Inc.*

Alaskan Copper & Brass Company

ACT – A Contemporary Theatre

Kreielsheimer Place 700 Union St. Seattle, WA 98101

Administrative Ofﬁce: (206) 292-7660

The ACT Legacy Society

honors those who remember ACT in their wills or

Development: (206) 292-7660 x1321

other estate plans. Legacy

Ticket Ofﬁce

Society members ensure ACT’s ongoing tradition of presenting the best of contemporary theatre for future generations. Even persons of modest means can make signiﬁcant future gifts by using tax-advantaged estate and ﬁnancial planning techniques. Notify ACT of your arrangements by calling (206) 292-7660 ext. 1321.

In person: on performance days, the ticket ofﬁce is open from noon until show time. Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Phone: (206) 292-7676, Tue.-Sun., noon – 7:00 p.m.

E-mail: [email protected] Online: www.acttheatre.org

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ACT THEATRE

ACT CirCLE OF dONOrS

ACT would like to recognize and thank all of the individuals who have made contributions to A Contemporary Theatre. The Circle of Donors is invaluable to the success of our mission, ensuring a nurturing environment for the celebration and development of contemporary theatre. Without the generous support of the individuals in the ACT Circle, none of this would be possible.

The following list reﬂects the sum of pledges and gifts made to the Annual Producing Fund by Donors in the ACT Circle between June 01, 2009 and Aug 09, 2010.