ACT Theatre, Contemporary theatre in Downtown Seattle, US

ACT Theatre is a venue for contemporary theatrical works in downtown Seattle, housed within a renovated building on Union Street that contains multiple performance spaces. The facilities are designed to accommodate different formats and production scales, from intimate performances to large-scale stagings.

Gregory A. Falls founded ACT in 1965 as a serious alternative to summer stock, staging the first performance on July 9 at a 454-seat thrust-stage theatre in Queen Anne Hall. Falls led the company until 1988. After a difficult search for larger quarters, ACT moved to Kreielsheimer Place in 1996, and in 2025 it merged with Seattle Shakespeare Company to form the Union Arts Center.

The theater collaborates with local playwrights and shapes Seattle's cultural life by staging contemporary works that reflect diverse perspectives. Its stages serve as a gathering place where community members encounter stories that speak to their own experiences.

The venue sits in the heart of downtown and is easily walkable, with parking and public transportation nearby. Visitors should check ahead for current productions and plan to arrive early to get oriented and settled.

The Allen Theatre's conversion from a proscenium stage to theater-in-the-round was called "the most controversial aspect of the renovation" by Misha Berson. The old proscenium, from which Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke and on which the Grateful Dead performed, survives only as a painted relic in the background.