The Magic’s new season marks a milestone
San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, a bastion of creative contemporary theater founded by the late John Lion nearly 50 years ago in a Berkeley barroom, celebrates its forthcoming golden anniversary with a 2016-17 season that mixes now-classic works by two major writers associated with the theater — Sam Shepard and Paula Vogel — and premieres of new plays by other artists with the Magic on their resumes.
They include Han Ong, whose new piece about rap-begetting poet Gil Scott-Heron marks the playwrightnovelist’s return to the theater after a self-imposed 16-year hiatus, and Richard Montoya, of the satirical Latino comedy group Culture Clash, who has written a border-town tale titled “Nogales: Storytellers in Cartel Country.”
The season opens in the fall with Montoya’s timely cross-culture-examining satire, a collaboration with San Francisco’s Campo Santo and Tucson’s Borderlands Theater that Sean San José will direct.
Then comes the Magic’s Virgin Play Series, with workshop perfor-
mances of in-progress plays by a diverse crew of writers that includes Jessica Hagedorn and Mfoniso Udofia (two of the plays in Udofia’s ongoing nine-play Ufot Family Cycle close the current Magic season).
The theater toasts its 50th birthday in 2017 with “legacy revivals” of two important works: Shepard’s fierce and darkly comic “Fool For Love,” which premiered at the Magic in 1983, and “The Baltimore Waltz,” the 1992 tragedy-lined farce by Vogel, who calls the Magic “one of my favorite dance partners in theater.”
Planning the 50th season, Magic Artistic Director Loretta Greco says, “We wanted to look back at the foundation of the Magic and those writers who changed the face of American theater, and look forward at some of the most explosive and exciting writing today.”
Greco will direct “Fool for Love” and Ong’s season-closing ode to the late ScottHeron, “Grandeur.”
The theater has done several Magic-birthed Shepard classics in recent years and was primed to do “Fool for Love” next.
“That piece is inextricably linked to the Magic,” Greco says. “Because it was made in that intimate space of ours, there are so many things from the rehearsals with Kathy Baker and Ed Harris (for the 1983 production) that are baked into the text. There was no way we could do the 50th without celebrating that muscular, super-sexy piece of writing.”