1. Their new managing director, Brian Colburn is settling in. His wife and daughter son and dog Briscoe are moving up from Los Angeles this week, to their new house on Queen Anne. He's a baby-faced guy, 35, and wears a a warm coat indoors. "The maternal part of me wants to tell you to take your coat off," said Stephanie Coen, Intiman's communications director, as she introduced me to Colburn. He did not remove his coat.

2. When Colburn talks about theater, he speaks in the language of business. He talks about plays as "products," as in: "Historically, we have a great product, but we've been behind in connecting with donors." That kind of talk makes sense for a managing director, but may grate on Seattle ears.

3. Intiman just finished a $5 million fund-raising campaign, reducing its accumulated deficit $500,000 to $1.6 million.

4. Colburn comes from the Pasadena Playhouse, where he became managing director at the age 24 31—he started in fund-raising and as general manager seven years prior to that—when the theater was on the verge of closing. "The theater thought it only had three months to live," Colburn says. "They said it would be an educational experience for me."

The charismatic black actor and director Sheldon Epps took over and together, he and Colburn radically changed the theater—overhauled its programming, doubled its budget, raised an endowment. "I'd love to attribute that to my own business acumen, but it was Sheldon's change of the programming."

Now he works for a brighter rock-star director, Bart Sher. He says Sher's star status is "geographically challenging, but the benefits far outweigh the costs."

5. Intiman's American Cycle—a five-year project of producing lavish, big-cast plays from great American novels: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Native Son—has been declared a success. Every production sold out performances, school groups bought lots of tickets, and other theaters have begun to imitate the series (Arizona Theatre Company and Indiana Rep, both of which launched with productions of To Kill a Mockingbird).

So they're doing it again, starting the next American Cycle with Abe Lincoln in Illinois, an epic play for around 20 actors by Robert E. Sherwood, directed by Sheila Daniels.

6. Also, Intiman has a new development director named Melaine Bennett.