By SHARON EBERSON
The new play Sixty Nine — Seventy, among the independent productions sprouting in Pittsburgh this spring, is a throwback to the era of the Vietnam War, the draft lottery that sent young Americans to fight in Southeast Asia, and the antiwar protests of the “flower power” generation.
It was the last military draft in the United States, ending in 1973, but not the last war. Every few years, it seems, the U.S. is embroiled in a violent conflict on foreign soil, and young Americans are sent into harm’s way.
For playwright Michael Eichler, a University of Pittsburgh alumnus, and director/producer Alex Manalo, Sixty Nine — Seventy marks a second collaboration as the play readies for a May 14, 2026 opening. In March of last year, Manalo produced and directed Eichler’s self-funded Repulsing the Monkey, at City Theatre’s Lillie Theatre.
at City Theatre May 14-24, 2026.
The Pittsburgh performer, choreographer, director, producer, and intimacy coordinator, and so on, attributes her partnership with Eichler to her mentors, Kelly Trumbell and Monteze Freeland.
“So, talk about Pittsburgh being such a small and very generous community!,” Manalo said, explaining that she and the LA-based Eichler were introduced remotely, in 2023.
“He wanted to do Repulsing the Monkey at City, and said, ‘I just need a producer-director.’ And through a web of multiple people, I got a phone call with him after emailing back and forth, and it was just … talk about blind trust.
He didn’t know anything about me, never had met me, just kind of went off of some people’s words that I would do his play justice.”
Eichler had set the previous play in Pittsburgh, and was also thinking of a New York director, but Manalo persuaded him, “You would be doing yourself a disservice to do a Pittsburgh show, and not use a Pittsburgh director producer.”
Eichler also was proposing a fully funded production –
“which is pretty unheard of for a playwright to have the accessibility to do that” – and he has done so again for Sixty-Nine-Seventy, which this weekend comes to the City Theatre lobby, for an immersive audience experience.
As with their first collaboration, the play has a beneficiary:
The committee for Community, Organization, and Social Action (COSA) at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work.
The playwright reasoned that the play was about activism in the ’60s and ’70s, and he wanted the beneficiary to reflect his vision.
“As I was reading the script, they’re talking about a war that nobody wanted at the time, a president that maybe some people weren’t too fond of, [and] there’s talk about reproductive rights in it,” Manalo said, explaining the link to COSA. “There’s talk of environmental issues, things that I was like, ‘Why am I also kind of in that similar headspace over a half a century later?’ Here we are, with protests about race and police brutality.”
History keeps repeating itself, from generation to generation, and although there has been “some semblance” of positive change, Manalo said, “Still, we’re not there.”
The script for Sixty-Nine — Seventy left room for Manalo to make decisions about the staging. Working with director/actor/educator Rob James (Stage 62, Front Porch Theatricals, CLO Academy), they decided that, for a monologue play that takes place in a student union, an immersive experience made sense.
“The four actors speak of each other, but they don’t interact until the final scene,” Manalo explained. “We thought, because it takes place predominantly in a student union, and the monologues are broken up with media, an immersive aspect would work.”
While the set for the bar-room dramedy Repulsing the Monkey was traditional, within the Lillie black box, City’s lobby will transform into a student union in Buffalo, N.Y., with the war affecting characters in different ways.
While the actors don’t interact, they are always visible, and always active. Depending on your focus, “you can see different journeys if you go multiple times,” the director said.
There are two casts for Sixty-Nine — Seventy, which will open Friday, May 14, with “CAST 69”: Jack Senske (Barry), Marissa Lily (Naomi), Mal Mackenzie (Sharon), and Thomas B. Andrews (Andy). “CAST 70” comprises Cam Webb (Barry), Naomi Terrell (Naomi), Sarah Altomari (Sharon), and Nick Grosso (Andy).
Manalo said she “implored” each of them to come up with a backstory” for their specific characters.
In her quick description, “Sharon is a home ec major” — now there’s a throwback — “and Andy’s from a rural area, and he’s from the east side of Buffalo and commutes, and he’s like, ‘I don’t think I can hang with these New York City slickers,’ where Barry is the guy that’s always really loud and always like, ‘We need to shut the system down!’ And Naomi is a Black woman who came to the school through the SEEK program [Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge], which was a real program, and it actually wasn’t as helpful as they thought it would be because, she was still discriminated against.”
At 30-something, Manalo, one of the busiest artists on the Pittsburgh theater scene, keeps coming up with contemporary connections between the then of the play and now.
“For example, there’s one section that they’re talking about the draft, and then we show footage on the screen of what the draft lottery looked like in 1969, which every time I watch that clip, it feels like The Hunger Games,” she said. “It’s mind-boggling, that really was a thing that they did to go to war.”
She understands that “reactions to the play are sure to be generational,” for those who lived through those times, and for people of age now who would have been eligible for the draft — in 1969, it was mostly ages 18 to 26, with the legal liability to serve extending until age 35.
There are those who lived through that unpopular war, and its successors, including the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, and, today, what the current president calls a “skirmish” in Iran.
“Each time something happens, you think, OK, this is a war to end all wars, but it never is. I don’t want people to think, and hopefully they wouldn’t, that just because it’s of a certain time doesn’t mean it’s not for everyone. So I hope audiences can think about where they’ve come from and where they’re headed, and just to be present, because they are in it just as much as we are.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The independent production Sixty-Nine — Seventy is at City Theatre, 1300 Bingham Street, South Side, May 14-24, 2026. https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/sixtynineseventypgh/sixtynine-seventy
Categories: Feature Stories, Our Posts, Show Previews
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