SEATTLE — After more than 30 years of successful acting, Seattle’s Reginald Andre Jackson is ready to fully embrace the hyphen in his title of “actor-playwright.”
Jackson, primarily an actor who has experience with directing and writing, used his pandemic downtime to create “History of Theatre,” his play about the untold stories of African American theater. The project is ambitious, Jackson said, accounting for 200 years of history, but the otherwise empty days of the pandemic allowed him to dig deep and make great progress. In 2021, Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre offered a digital behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the play as a way to draw audiences in, before part one premieres at ACT in January 2023.
“I was an actor who wrote a little bit,” said Jackson, who’s been a regular on Seattle stages for decades. “I’m taking the hyphen now at this point because this project and a few more that have popped up … I feel like I’m growing into owning that, my voice as a writer.”
