‘Kind Ones’ finally gets its day on the Magic Theatre stage
Play touching on domestic violence has been in the works for years
A lot has changed since playwright Miranda Rose Hall started working with San Francisco’s Magic Theatre on “The Kind Ones” a little over two years ago.
A play about a Montana pig farmer whose chosen solitude is interrupted by an unexpected visitor in need, “The Kind Ones” was previously developed as part of the Magic’s Virgin Play Festival in December 2019, and the theater originally planned to give it its world premiere in early 2021. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed everybody’s productions back, and now it’s finally premiering on the Magic’s stage this week.
During that time since the initial workshop, Loretta Greco ended her 12year tenure as Magic Theatre’s artistic director, erstwhile associate artistic director and dramaturg Sonia Fernandez held down the fort for a season as interim artistic director while the theater was closed due to the pandemic, and then Sean San José took over as the new artistic director.
The belated premiere also comes not long after New Conservatory Theatre Center produced another one of Hall’s plays in San Francisco back in November,
the transgender love story “Plot Points in Our Sexual Development.”
A 33-year-old Baltimore native now living in Brooklyn, Hall says she’s been working on “The Kind Ones” on and off since graduate school.
“There are some stories that come out of you really quickly, fully formed, and there’s some that take a little bit longer for you to figure out,” she says. “And this has been one of those slower burn writing pieces for me that I’ve been traveling with for a number of years now, trying to figure out exactly how I want to tell it.”
In fact, the roots of the play go back further still.
“When I was 22, I joined an AmeriCorps funded volunteer program called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest, and I spent my first year in Anchorage, Alaska, and I spent my second year in Missoula, Montana,” Hall says.
“In Montana I was serving in a domestic violence shelter for women and children who were escaping domestic violence. And this play is really inspired by a woman who came through our shelter and some of the incredible stories that she told me. Her grandmother was working on a ranch, and a hired hand one day assaulted her and got her within an inch of her life.
And she decided that she would defend herself by killing him in his sleep and chopping up his body and feeding it to her pigs. This woman in the shelter would tell me this story and my eyes would get as big as saucers. She would joke, ‘Miranda, if you ever have a problem, get yourself a pig.’ ”
While the play largely centers on these two characters, the rancher and her visitor — played by Anne Darragh and Kian Johnson — it’s very much rooted in contending with domestic violence and what kind of self-defense is feasible or permitted.
“When I was in the shelter with this woman who inspired the play, she was actively trying to process what it would mean for her and her life if she had to kill her abuser,” Hall recalls. “Her abusive husband, when she arrived in our shelter, he had tried to strangle her, poison her and bury her alive. She was actively running for her life and trying to decide for herself if she was capable
of killing him if it came to it and trying to strategize about what the outcomes of that decision would be for her. Because a lot of times, women who commit acts of violence, even if they are in self-defense, are prosecuted very differently than men who commit acts of violence and are judged very
harshly.”
Hall says the play has changed a lot over time, but one thing that’s remained consistent is Magic Theatre’s commitment to working with her on it.
“Magic has really stood by it in the midst of leadership changes and this whole pandemic uncertainty,” she
says. “A lot of my other projects have been canceled, but Magic has really stood by me, and I think that’s really special. It’s been a profound experience.”