This is the first in a series of interviews with Seattle's artistic directors about what they imagine for the future of their theaters. We begin with Kurt Beattie, artistic director for ACT Theatre, housed in the downtown Eagles Auditorium. Built in the 1920s, it's a labyrinthine structure, with three floors, four theaters, eight lobbies, dozens of corridors, and an old safety deposit box vault. Beattie envisions the building's odd structure as the key to its future, functioning as a "cultural engine" where a variety of performance, standard and otherwise, can happen simultaneously, from buskers and street preaching to traditional theater and drag cabaret.

"The subscription model will never go away altogether, but the subscription base for a lot of arts institutions is going to dwindle and will not in and of itself be able to support them. So we need to create more and varied reasons for coming to the theater and ACT is in a perfect position to do that. Because of the variety of spaces, it's possible to do a lot of different forms of theater here and we've only just begun to scratch the surface.

We could do site-specific theater, forms of entertainment that don't need to happen in a traditional way. Where there are more kinds of audiences coming for more kinds of things to a central area, you get the semblance of a real boiling pot, a kind of funhouse. It ought to mimic the world, which has a tremendous amount of variety.

The theater could be like a kind of temple, an idea I take from Joseph Campbell. It's a place where you go to have a transformative experience and undergo various forms of ritual. There are a lot of different rituals, different forms of transformation: Eucharist, immersion--you could be one of the temple priests or visit one of the temple whores. It's a temple of both the sacred and the profane.

We've commissioned a play by Steven Dietz that will happen in two theaters at the same time with the same cast moving between two different audiences. That's still a basically theatrical event, but you can extrapolate a number of situations--you could invite a fundamentalist minister to preach to an audience in one hallway and then have an actor playing a fundamentalist minister preaching to an audience in another hallway. You could do plays in atypical ways for audiences of tremendously varying sizes, putting six people in the vault downstairs, for example. It could be that thematically you could have a lot of events in the building that are related but that have entirely different strategies for conveying their information.

I hope that ACT can become a place where people come with ideas, a semipermeable membrane that admits as many things that are of interest in the world as it exudes. The object of it all is very simple: to have a whole lot of fun, to find some new things in old things, and to create consciousness."

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