Carving out space for theater outsiders
Young playwright, a recent transplant to S.F., pushes inclusivity
The morning before her play, “Apocalypse, Please,” was set to premiere, Noelle Viñas is sipping coffee and talking theater in downtown San Francisco. Her voice, she explains, was too strangely hoarse for the chorus as a kid — so she found a home in theater.
“Theater is the kind of place that accepts everybody,” she says. Then she catches herself. “At least high school theater is.”
The implication was pretty clear: Maybe theater, the grown-up sort that happens in front of big audiences with big budgets, could be a little bit more like the high school sort.
That sentiment is at the heart of most all of the work Viñas is doing with the stage. She is attempting to transform an institution that can be insular and exclusive into one where anybody (in the broadest sense) feels comfortable.
In “Apocalypse, Please,” — a play about an Iranian American programmer who is accused of using cell phones to kill millions in a terrorist plot — Viñas and her partner and co-creator Kevin Vincenti have pulled in people from a wide variety of backgrounds. And not strictly in terms of race or gender identity (though that is true, too), but also in terms of professional backgrounds. The cast and crew are made up of people who have day jobs in business, computer engineering and graphic design. The idea, Viñas says, is that a production is stronger and the audience is more engaged when you have as diverse a crew as possible.
In theater, Viñas says, “we say we’re being inclusive, we say we’re involving people. But we don’t include collaborators in the room that don’t have crazy long resumes. We don’t include people in the room who maybe are amateurs and want to dabble in this and could give their whole souls to it and make something completely revolutionary.”
Viñas is a relative newcomer to the Bay Area theater scene, though she is hardly an outsider. In a couple short years, she has carved out a considerable place for herself. Aside from the premiere of “Apocalypse, Please,” she
is producing for a competition at PianoFight called ShortLived, she is set to act in Shotgun Players’ “The Black Rider,” and she just became a resident playwright with the Playwrights Foundation.
She has also found a place on the board of TheatreFirst, a company in Berkeley, that has dedicated itself to a socially progressive theater space. (Viñas, for her part, immigrated to the U.S. when she was 4 years old, an experience that meant she “always felt otherish.”)
“Whether she is aware of it or not — I certainly won’t make that assumption — Noelle is creating Noelle Inc. right now,” Jon Tracy, the artistic director of TheatreFirst, wrote in an email. “She’s proven in a short time that she can do anything but will only put her time into what she believes in.”
Rob Ready, the artistic director at PianoFight, the theater where “Apocalypse, Please” is playing, put it even more succinctly. “She’s kicking ass and taking names.”
But if you ask Viñas — who, at 25, says pretty plainly that she gets so much done because “I just don’t do a lot of things other people my age do” — it has taken her too long to get here. “I always want things to happen faster than they can.”
Indeed, her pursuit of a career in theater was sidelined for a couple of years. In 2013, a week after she graduated from college with plans to pursue playwriting and acting, her father was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He was 49 at the time. “After some deliberation and angst, I packed up my stuff and moved home.” Home specifically meant her parents’ basement.
Along with helping her mom out, she began teaching theater at a high school that was just 4 miles away from the one she had gone to. Only it was completely different. “It was night and day.” Most of the students — 70 percent, she says — were on free and reduced lunch. The high school she had gone to “had way more privileges and resources and they were just 4 miles apart.”
She would spend two years doing that work, and during her time there she helped integrate the program she was teaching with another that was set up specifically for students who didn’t speak English as their first language. All of this added more fire to her interest in diversifying theater. “I wanted to move here and do theater with people who weren’t normally involved in or invited into theater.”
After her father died and her contract was up, Viñas set her sights on San Francisco, digitally networking so that when she arrived, she had already established connections. Vincenti, who has a background in business and works for a tech startup, had known Viñas from some years back. He started working on “Apocalypse, Please” with her when she moved to San Francisco and watched as she made space for herself in the city.
Vincenti remembers hearing somebody describe her as the “Swiss army knife of theater,” and it rang true. “She has such a theater acumen, passion and ability to do so many things so well,” he says. “She’s producing, she’s a playwright, she’s acting in a play. That’s a lot of things to be doing. I don’t think she’s ever had an empty slate.”