San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Illness leads to creation of theater
When the pandemic hit, Giovanni René Rodriguez hadn’t done theater since the 1990s, focusing instead on his work as a marketing consultant. But after surviving endstage liver disease (he’s one transplant down, one to go), the Santa Clara resident decided to make a change in his life.
In spring of last year, he got the idea to produce Naomi Wallace’s “One Flea Spare,” which is set during London’s Great Plague — and a new company, Remote Theater, cofounded with Tanya Shaffer, was born.
Going on to mount online readings and productions, it’s since worked with some of the Bay Area’s foremost theater artists: playwright Anthony Clarvoe; actors Catherine Castellanos, Safiya Fredericks and Lauren English. Now it’s collaborating with Actors’ Reading Collective and California Shakespeare Theater on Herbert Siguenza’s “El Henry,” a Chicano adaptation of “Henry IV, Part 1,” which runs July 2431.
Rodriguez hopes to continue partnering with larger theaters to hone their online aesthetic (“You’re big when you’re small,” he frequently tells stage actors adjusting to the new medium) as well as use the digital realm to reach new audiences. Many other theaters share his ambition, but he feels his
marketing experience outside of theater, which has included stints with political campaigns, is a unique asset. And the time is ripe, he believes, noting that his family — Puerto Ricans, from the Bronx — tuned in to theater during the pandemic, when they wouldn’t have before.
“The time I loved in theater was when I felt like I was inside a church,” he said, thinking back to Speakeasy Theater, a theater he ran in an actual Berkeley church decades ago (not to be confused with the more recent immersive show in North Beach). “It’s a temple, but it’s a temple that’s been locked up, because it’s too freaking expensive.”