In the fall of 1987 a semi-professional theatre troupe from Ireland called the Irish Universities Theatre Company (IUTC) visited the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in the middle of their two-month tour of the Northeastern United States. IUTC was a collection of recent alumni from graduate and undergraduate theatre programs across Ireland who had banded together to bring a program of classic and contemporary Irish plays to the U.S. At that time, Seth Rozin, who had graduated from Penn in May, 1986 and worked from 1987-1989 as the Assistant to the Annenberg's Associate Artistic Director, Catherine “Kaki” Marshall, had the primary responsibility of coordinating the administration of student performing arts at Penn and also served as liason between students and some of the professional theatre groups touring through the Annenberg Center.
In the course of working with IUTC’s tour director, Terry Dixon, Rozin became interested in organizing a reciprocal tour of American plays to Ireland as a form of cultural exchange. Following the IUTC’s U.S. tour Dixon – a dual Irish and American citizen -- returned to Philadelphia to work with Rozin on an Irish tour scheduled for the following fall. Rozin helped Dixon get a job in the Annenberg Center box office, and asserting himself as Artistic Director he gathered together three of his college theatre colleagues – Brad Rosenstein, Erica Schwartz and David Goldstein – to help get this Irish theatre tour off the ground. After several meetings in January and February of 1988, the group agreed to start a company whose mission would be to foster cultural exchange through theatre. They agreed on the name InterAct which, for them, evoked the sense internationalism, theatre and the interaction between cultures. InterAct was officially founded in February of 1988.
Kaki Marshall, who had founded the Philadelphia International Theatre Festival for Children, came on as the founding board member, helping to lend credibility to InterAct in its infancy. And for the first few months of its existence, InterAct’s staff of five operated almost entirely on a kind of youthful naivete and adventurousness. Key moments in the planning for the Irish tour included a $1,000 grant from (then) Corestates Bank and an in-kind donation of thirteen roundtrip airfares to Ireland from Aer Lingus airlines.
In September, 1988, InterAct presented five classic and contemporary American plays for one night each at the Annenberg Center’s Harold Prince Theatre, prior to launching the tour to Ireland. The program included Seascape by Edward Albee, directed by Seth Rozin, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Ed Shockley, Seduced by Sam Shepard, directed by Brad Rosenstein, and a double-bill of This Property is Condemned by Tennessee Williams and Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet, directed by Amy Kitz. The ensemble of eight local actors included Bruce Robinson, Lillian Rozin, Frank Wood, Luke Hardt, Elizabeth Cuttrell, Monica Helm, Eric Marshall and Grace Gonglewski. Edward Albee attended the opening night performance of Seascape and met with the company the following morning.
The seven-week tour included forty-two performances in ten towns and cities in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Highlights of the tour included being featured in the Sligo Arts Festival, cancelling a performance in Einiskillen (Northern Ireland) on Black Sunday due to a bomb threat, totaling a rental car on a country road, having our performances of Sexual Perversity publicly denounced by the local Parish in Carick on Suir, and performing Seascape in the billiards room of a hotel. Despite financial problems and the unanticipated stresses and challenges of touring abroad for the first time, the venture was largely successful in fulfilling InterAct’s initial mission.
InterAct's Early Years (1989-1992)
In the first couple of years following the tour to Ireland, Rozin emerged as the driving force behind InterAct, while Terry Dixon elected to pursue law school. Erica Schwartz and her fiance Nick Hall increased their commitment to managing InterAct, and Brad Rosenstein evolved as Education Director. While a tour to Hungary and Poland was planned for the fall of 1989, revolutions across Europe made it increasingly difficult to secure funding, visas and venues abroad, and InterAct’s second season of three plays – Coyote Ugly by Lynn Siefert, directed by David Bassuk, Mud by Maria Irene Fornes, directed by Seth Rozin, The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance, directed by Brad Rosenstein -- was performed over three weeks at the Annenberg Center’s Studio Theatre. Set and lighting designer Peter Whinnery began his long tenure with InterAct in the second season.
Over the next two years InterAct’s mission began to evolve in the direction of more political and contemporary plays. This change came about for two reasons: First, one of Rozin’s jobs to help pay for his extraordinary volunteer commitment to InterAct was running the Children and Mothers Program (CHAMP), an arts program for homeless children and mothers. Through this job, Rozin became acutely aware of what had been a dormant social conscience. Second, Rozin met playwright Thomas Gibbons through the now defunct Playworks new play development organization and directed a reading of his play Pretending to America. Rozin and Gibbons subsequently discovered that they shared a passion for plays that asked difficult questions about the political issues of today’s world.
InterAct produced the world premiere of Pretending to America (directed by Seth Rozin) in repertory with the East Coast premiere of Ntozake Shange’s a photograph: lovers in motion (directed by Lorna Littleway) at Germantown Friends School in the fall of 1990. InterAct’s first world premiere generated uniformly favorable critical reviews and was subsequently invited to be a featured performance at Amnesty International’s 30th Anniversary conference in Washington, D.C. in 1990. InterAct’s third season also marked the initiation of the company’s educational outreach program, InterAction, through which theatre techniques and role-playing were employed to help schools, colleges, non-profit and religious organizations deal with diversity awareness.
InterAct's Middle Years (1992-1998)
InterAct returned to the Annenberg Center for its fourth season, which included the Philadelphia premiere of Morocco by Alan Havis and the U.S. premiere The Bacchae of Euripides by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, both directed by Seth Rozin. The Bacchae was a featured part of Penn’s first freshman reading program and garnered considerable local attention. InterAct was also commissioned in 1992 by Cosa Cosa Art-at-Large to create a moveable site-specific performance piece called Statues. By the end of the fourth season, artistic director Seth Rozin was running the company alone, as others had moved on to better-paying, or even simply paying jobs.
The 1992/1993 season marked a major turning point for InterAct. The company elected to scrap plans for its first three-play season and produce the world premiere of Thomas Gibbons’ 6221 – Prophecy and Tragedy, a three-act epic about the MOVE tragedy in Philadelphia, commissioned by InterAct in 1991. The production proved worth the risk and the investment as it garnered extraordinary critical reviews from local and national press. Opening within days of the standoff between Federal officials and the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, 6221 was the first of many InterAct productions that eerily coincided with current events. 6221 was also InterAct’s first Equity production. It catapulted Rozin, Gibbons and the company into local prominence, perfectly fulfilling InterAct’s mission and aesthetic.
From 1993-1996 InterAct produced several memorable productions at the Painted Bride Art Center (Yankee Dawg You Die by Philip Kan Gotanda, a co-production with the Asian Arts Initiative that was Philadelphia’s first theatre production to be written, directed, designed and performed by Asian American artists), the Annenberg Center (God’s Country by Steven Dietz) and the Arts Bank (Lonely Planet by Steven Dietz and Black Russian by Thomas Gibbons, which garnered InterAct’s first two Barrymore Awards – Frank X for Best Lead Actor and Gibbons for Best New Play, respectively). Behind the scenes, Rozin and Hope Davidson labored to manage all fundraising, accounting, marketing, box office and general administrative activities in the company’s first office at 2209 Walnut Street.
In January, 1997, InterAct moved into its first artistic home at the venue previously known as the home of the Wilma Theater at 2030 Sansom Street in Center City, Philadelphia. InterAct and co-lessee Venture Theatre renamed the venue “The Adrienne” and shared the theatre space for two and one-half seasons, before Venture folded. The 1997/1998 season marked InterAct’s first subscription season, as well as the first of nine consecutive years of funding from the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative, a program of The Pew Charitable Trusts. The same year InterAct hired its first full-time employee, managing director Joe Farina, who immediately elevated Seth Rozin to full-time status. At the end of that season, InterAct was invited to become a charter member of the fledgling National New Play Network.
InterAct mounted its most memorable season to date in 1998/1999, with productions of Mastergate by Larry Gelbart, directed by Robert Smyth, the world premiere of Thomas Gibbons’ Bee-Luther-Hatchee, directed by Seth Rozin, and Lebensraum by Israel Horovitz, also directed by Rozin. Bee-Luther-Hatchee went on to receive over twenty-five productions at professional theatres across the U.S. Lebensraum received critical acclaim from local and national press during the 1999 American Theatre Critics Association Conference in Philadelphia, and went on to win Barrymore Awards for Best Production, Best Direction and Best Ensemble (Catharine Slusar, Scott Greer, Harry Philibosian), along with four other nominations. That same season InterAct inaugurated its Writing Aloud program, under the direction of former board member David Sanders. The staff grew to include Education Director Tom Reing and Literary Manager Larry Loebell. And InterAct’s board of directors began to develop into an active and enthusiastic team of supporters.
InterAct Today (1999-2008)
In the fall of 1999, InterAct hired new managing director James Haskins, who helped strengthen and grow the company’s administrative operations over the next four years. Computer systems for accounting and box office were implemented, along with upgrades in payroll services, venue management, and other key areas of institutional management. The next few years marked significant growth as InterAct successfully solicited funding from new sources, including the Shubert Foundation, the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, and the Independence Foundation.
Programmatically, InterAct initiated an annual Showcase of New Plays in conjunction with the National New Play Network, through which eighteen plays by mostly local writers were developed between 1999/2001. Notable main stage productions during this time included the world premiere of Drink Me by Mary Gail, directed by Whit MacLaughlin, and the Philadelphia premieres of Nixon’s Nixon by Russell Lees and It’s All True by Jason Sherman, both directed by Rozin. It’s All True went on to win two 2001 Barrymore Awards for Best Leading Actor (Scott Greer) and Best Supporting Actor (David Bardeen), while also garnering nominations for Best Production, Best Direction, Best Ensemble and Best Supporting Actor. Through grant subsidies, InterAct’s InterAction program blossomed into a series of several residencies, on-site, with “at risk” youth and special needs populations, including teen mothers, adjudicated boys, and children with visual and/or hearing impairments. This led to InterAct winning the second of two Barrymore Awards for Theatre Education and Community Service (1997 and 2001). At the end of the 2000-2001 season, longtime theatre critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Clifford Ridley, named 6221 and Lebensraum two of the “Top Fifteen” productions of the previous decade.
The 2001/2002 season included the world premiere of Missing Link by Seth Rozin, directed by Harriet Power, and culminated in the first National Showcase of New Plays. This two-week event showcased eighteen plays presented by fourteen theatres from around the U.S. and Canada, and involved over 100 local artists.
Thomas Gibbons’ Permanent Collection, a new play about racial controversies at the storied Barnes Foundation in the Philadelphia suburbs, opened the 2003/2004 season and became InterAct’s best-selling production ever. The play went on to receive over twenty productions at theatres across the U.S. and garnered the 2004 Barrymore Award for Best New Play. 2004 also marked the year in which InterAct successfully competed for a three-year grant award from the Philadelphia Cultural Leadership Program, a program of The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 2004-2005 InterAct expanded its subscription season to include four plays for the first time, generating a new high of 800 subscriptions.
In 2004/2005, InterAct produced the world premiere production of The Beauty Inside by Catherine Filloux, had a successful co-production of Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall with Act II Playhouse, and saw the much-talked about production of Whores by Lee Blessing sneak into InterAct’s top-five selling shows.
The 2005/2006 season brought world premieres of three impressive new plays: The Feast of the Flying Cow… and Other Stories of War by Jeni Mahoney, American Sublime by Patricia Lynch, and Reinventing Eden by Seth Rozin. In conjunction with Reinventing Eden, InterAct co-sponsored with the Bioethics Center at the University of Pennsylvania two panel discussions consisting of high-level scholars and scientists speaking on hot-button issues involved in genetic engineering. This season’s education program, InterAction headed by Tom Reing, won a 2006 Barrymore award for Excellence in Theatre Education and Community Service, sponsored by Harvey & Virginia Kimmel.
The 2006/2007 season included amazing productions of The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig; the world premiere of Sherry Kramer’s When Something Wonderful Ends, an astounding co-production with Actors Theatre of Lousiville’s world-renowned Humana Festival for New American Plays; and Skin In Flames by Guillem Clua, which earned Charlotte Northeast a 2007 Barrymore Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Play. In addition, InterAct’s world premiere production of A House With No Walls by resident playwright Thomas Gibbons, went on to become InterAct’s 3rd best-selling show in the theatre’s history. Nominated for a 2007 Barrymore Award as Outstanding New Play, InterAct’s production was the first of five independent productions of the play over the following year as part of the National New Play Network’s Continued Life of New Play Fund program. In fact, InterAct’s production proved so popular cast members Lavita Shaurice and Bowman Wright were asked to revive their roles as Austin and Ona Judge twice, first for Mayor John Street’s press conference revealing the design of the President’s House memorial and again as part of Welcome America, the city of Philadelphia’s official July 4th celebration, broadcast on ABC Channel 6. In conjunction with the production of A House With No Walls InterAct sponsored a free panel discussion on February 3rd, involving Ed Lawler (the real-life historian featured as a character in the play), Michael Coard (the real-life activist featured as a character in the play), John McWhorter (the real-life scholar featured as a character in the play), Philadelphia City Paper founder Bruce Schimmel and playwright Thomas Gibbons. To finish off the season, InterAct’s education program InterAction, was once again nominated for a Barrymore Award, this time in conjunction with the Mural Arts Program & Art-Reach for the Ted & Stevie Wolf Award for New Approaches to Collaborations, for their combined effort on The Norris Square Project.
In 2007/2008, InterAct Theatre Company celebrated its 20th Anniversary. The year was highlighted by a mainstage season featuring four outstanding new plays – Frozen, the award-winning Broadway hit by Bryony Lavery; the Philadelphia premiere of Steven Dietz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama, Last of the Boys; and two world premieres by Philadelphia writers, Black Gold by InterAct’s own Seth Rozin and House, Divided by former InterAct Literary Manager and critically-acclaimed playwright Larry Loebell. The year also inlcuded events throughout the season celebrating the company’s 20th Anniversary.
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