Angelenos getting into the ACT

Four Los Angeles dramatists -- Jon Robin Baitz, Lynn Manning, Alec Mapa and Luis Alfaro -- will have works produced in 2003 at Seattle’s ACT Theatre.

Robert Egan is bringing the L.A. bouquet as he transplants himself from producing director of the Mark Taper Forum to his new job as artistic director at ACT.

ACT’s season -- the first picked by Egan -- will include “Chinese Friends,” a new play by Baitz, whose close friendship with Egan bloomed 16 years ago when Egan directed Baitz’s breakthrough play, “The Film Society,” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. The Taper, where Egan has worked since 1984, has since produced three plays by Baitz -- with a fourth, the Egan-directed “Ten Unknowns,” opening in March. Egan, who will direct “Chinese Friends,” has installed Baitz as ACT’s writer-in-residence for the next three years. Among their other projects, the two plan to co-produce a new documentary theater piece about John Walker Lindh.

Three other Taper-related shows will take up slots in the ACT season. Egan will direct Manning’s “Weights,” which he also staged in 2001 for Taper, Too. Another Taper, Too production, “Mapa Mia,” which opens Jan. 21 at the Ivy Substation in Culver City, will land at ACT next fall. And Egan has tapped his fellow Taper staffer, Alfaro, for “Borderlands,” a primarily solo piece in which Alfaro will be the main performer.

“There is a Los Angeles flavor, definitely,” Egan said. But he also points to some Northwest connections: ACT will collaborate with its Seattle neighbor, the Intiman Theater, on the world premiere of Craig Lucas’ “The Singing Forest,” with Intiman artistic director Bartlett Sher directing. But there’s a Taper connection there too: Sher recently was at the Taper directing “Nickel and Dimed,” an import from the Intiman.

ACT also has announced that Warner Shook, the Intiman’s artistic director from 1993 to 1999, will direct the West Coast premiere of Edward Albee’s “The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?,” winner of the 2002 Tony Award for best play. Egan says he hopes the Intiman collaboration will signal off the bat his aim of bringing a spirit of cooperation rather than competition to the Seattle scene.

Egan is no stranger to that scene: Before joining the Taper, he was associate artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theater. Although he is shuttling plays northward now, more than a few have traveled the opposite route: In 1997-98 alone, the Taper imported four shows spawned in Seattle.

Egan’s other play picks for his first season at ACT are Pamela Gien’s touring one-woman show, “The Syringa Tree,” recently seen at the Pasadena Playhouse and now at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills; “The Little Locksmith,” a new solo piece by Linda Hunt; and Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.”

-- Mike Boehm