Back in 2003, it looked like ACT, Seattle's downtown theater, was doomed—lots of overhead, lots of debt, not much in the bank, and not a lot of public sympathy about the situation.

The leadership was gone, the board seemed scared stiff, and the few staff members left didn't know which shift would be their last. (At the time, I worked on the theater's skeleton-crew house staff, basically turning the lights on and off for the long-running Late Nite Catechism, selling a few drinks and chocolate bars to the few patrons, and sneaking the occasional beer from the walk-in fridge. It was a gloomy period.)

Two people stepped into that creaking, breaking ship as it sank: new artistic director Kurt Beattie, whose history with the theater dated back to the mid-1970s when its cofounder Greg Falls cast him in a Bertolt Brecht play, and reappointed managing director Susan Trapnell, who'd left the theater three years earlier and agreed to come back to see if she could salvage what looked like a wreck. The short version: They did it. (You can read a longer version called Surviving Crisis, written by Trapnell and then board president Kate Janeway, at the Theater Communications Group website.)

Since then, Beattie put his own stamp on the theater as he helped haul it back to the surface, showing his interest in classical and modern epics (Ramayana, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll); premieres by writers Steven Dietz, Yussef El Guindi, and Elizabeth Heffron; and a style of intelligent civility (Beattie has been known to quote from the classics, sometimes in the original language, at staff meetings and in interviews) that has been alternately celebrated for setting a high bar and criticized for smelling vaguely of mothballs and aloofness.

You can see this tension—and its high-minded mistrust of the popular—in his ACT Manifesto, which declares its allegiance to "theatre of the moment, this moment, the present, contemporary struggles, issues, ideas, being" as well as "High Art... If the theatre has no supersensual utility, it is nothing. If it cannot lead its patrons to another plane of experience—metaphorical, abstract, or deeply affective—it remains earthbound and less than pop media. It has no reason to exist. If it does not reflect the complexities of the world, it is false."

The theater under Beattie's leadership wasn't so high-minded that it refused populist projects like Little Shop of Horrors and plays that were two years or more out of New York and widely circulating among the country's regional theaters. (Sarah Ruhl was a particular favorite, and Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, directed by Beattie, is playing at ACT now.)

But it took someone with a distinct vision—and an understanding of when one has to be stubborn about an intensive project (like Ramayana) and when one has to negotiate with the reality of the theater marketplace—to not only help save ACT, but give it its own identity. (Not to mention paying down the debt, which ACT is still making progress on, and establishing an endowment that provides interest income.)

ACT has also seen exquisitely unsettling work in the past few years, including Will Eno's Middletown and Ayad Akhtar's Invisible Hand, the first directed by John Langs and the second championed by him.

Which brings us to John Langs, ACT's incoming artistic director.

Until he was hired as ACT's associate artistic director in 2012, Langs had been working as a freelance director across the country, but he has roots in Seattle with some well-loved companies and productions: Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at Seattle Shakespeare Company, The Adding Machine and Mary's Wedding with New Century Theater Company, Crumbs Are Also Bread at WET, The Dumb Waiter and Celebration as part of ACT's Pinter festival, and Paul Mullin's Louis Slotin Sonata at Empty Space.

Langs has brought energy, intelligence, and a strong streak of empathy to the projects he's directed—the question is how he'll continue to infuse those qualities in the institution he's just beginning to lead and will formally take over in 2016.

There's also the question of the Central Heating Lab (which was an effort to open up ACT's nooks and crannies to shows outside its season, including rentals and coproductions with groups from the band "Awesome" to choreographer KT Niehoff to the company eSe Teatro) and the Hansberry Project (a black theater project led by Stranger Genius Award–winning director Valerie Curtis-Newton).

Both projects have looked very promising on paper, and have had successes, but there's been some grumbling in the theater community that the Heating Lab isn't as accessible to small companies as originally promised. Meanwhile, Hansberry has begun producing outside ACT at theaters such as Intiman, Seattle Public Theater, and ArtsWest.

But all told, ACT is a hell of a lot healthier now than when Beattie first decided to take the job, which is a testament to him and everyone else at ACT who weathered that storm.

Beattie will still be around after the transition, Langs says, helping guide the theater's artistic choices and perhaps even directing some plays. But after over a decade and a lot of struggle, ACT is under a new regime—and, with Andrew Russell leading Intiman, Braden Abraham leading the Seattle Rep, and Langs at ACT, this may be the youngest cohort in living memory to run all three of those institutions.

We're all looking forward to seeing what's next.