San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Spector-Costello dream team back together for a play about time travel
As we’re all still learning how to come together again, that same theme is prominent on Bay Area stages this fall.
Theater aficionados should look out for multiple high-profile reunions this season: Jonathan Spector and Josh Costello at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company, Brian Copeland at the Marsh and “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations” with the region that helped catapult Dominique Morisseau’s musical to triumphing on Broadway.
Another important reunion is the very making of tradition: the second annual New Roots Theatre Festival, from the visionary youngsters behind San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company.
And speaking of festivals, I imagine my fellow weirdos have felt just as adrift as me without the San Francisco Fringe Festival heralding autumn at the Exit Theatre. Sadly, artistic director Christina Augello just announced plans to move out of her Eddy Street venue by the end of the year, but there will still be one more Fringe. Here’s to one last time furtively comparing notes on our favorite offerings in the theater’s narrow, kinked corridor or over remarkably affordable concessions at the Exit Cafe. Hopefully cafe manager Donna Fujita will still be the one behind the counter filling the pretzel bowls and pouring the drinks. It wouldn’t be fall theater without her.
‘This Much I Know’
The last time Oakland playwright Jonathan Spector and Berkeley director Josh Costello joined forces at Aurora Theatre Company (which Costello now leads) brought about the incisive smash-hit vaccine play “Eureka Day,” which is about to get a production at London’s Old Vic starring Helen Hunt. Now the dream team reunites with another world premiere, a time-traveling piece following a psychology lecturer whose search for answers about his wife leads to philosophical questions about personal responsibility.
San Francisco Fringe Festival:
Fall Bay Area theater only truly gets under way once the Exit Theatre’s annual festival unleashes a motley assemblage of theatrical desperadoes, troubadours, ramblers and conjurers on its Tenderloin theaterplex. Returning for the first time since the pandemic hit, the 2022 festival boasts mad scientists (”Benni Baker’s Monster Show”), an incarnation of Oscar Wilde (”Young Oscar, Wilde in San Francisco” by Eric Wilcox), an exploration of misogynoir (”Angry Black Woman 101” by Kathryn Seabron) and “stand-up tragedy” (”A Scar Is Born” by Lorelei Zarifian), among other treats. Especially since it’s the last Fringe Festival on Eddy Street, let’s all show up in droves to make sure it goes
out with a bang.
‘Grandma and Me: An Ode to Single Parents’
Solo performer Brian Copeland, whose “Not a Genuine Black Man” became the longest-running oneman show in San Francisco history, is fearless with introspection, acute with observation, deadly with wit and compassionate with his audiences. His “The Waiting Period” gave an unflinching portrait of suicidal depression without sensationalizing it. In both pieces, his embodiment of the characters — his younger self, his family members — could stay with you for years. His latest piece — like the others, at the Marsh — weaves together two tales of single parenting: when his grandmother raised him and his siblings and, decades later, when he had his own three kids.
‘Passengers’
Last year, Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider — Bay Area homegirls and co-founders of Montreal circus troupe the 7 Fingers — revitalized former “Beach Blanket Babylon” home Club Fugazi with the edgy ongoing circus show “Dear San Francisco.” This fall, Carroll has another project running simultaneously in another legacy venue: ACT’s Geary Theater. Blending circus, music and theater, “Passengers” explores the tinderbox of drama that is a train car: everyone en route and in between, everyone with a story, everyone stuck together.
Sept. 15-Oct. 9. $25-$110. ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., S.F. 415-749-2228. www.act-sf.org
‘The Red Shades: A Trans Superhero Rock Opera’
Ida might look to the rest of the world like a self-harming trans runaway — bearing cuts on her skin and “illegal” cross-dressing clothing as she’s on the lam from a doctor trying to “fix” her. But in 1960s San Francisco, she finds her people: Tenderloin squatters who happen to have superpowers; they call themselves Majors. Adrienne Price’s new piece fuses concert and musical with comic book aesthetics to dramatize the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. “This is Compton’s Cafeteria,” one character says. “The center of our universe. It’s a place for Majors like us to unite. To make sure we make it through the night.”
New Roots Theatre Festival:
In response to calls to “defund the police” in 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the Dream Keeper Initiative, which redirected a fraction of law enforcement funding to the city’s Black community. (Her latest budget, by contrast, increased funding to the police.) One of the arts beneficiaries was San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, which used its grant to inaugurate the New Roots Theatre Festival, bringing together arts organizations of color for a weekend of joyful experimentation.
The event’s second year boasts eight projects in various stages of develop
ment, including the musicals “Every Saturday Night,” about the Fillmore District in the 1950s, and “Halie,” Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s project about Mahalia Jackson.
‘The Museum Annex'
In 1986, George C. Wolfe’s scorching satire “The Colored Museum” dived into a series of African American tropes and narratives, presented as living museum exhibits: Ebony magazine models with superhuman beauty and no substance beneath, dueling wigs, a flight attendant aboard a slave ship. With this world premiere by new play hothouse Central Works, Los Angeles playwright Mildred Inez Lewis envisions an annex to Wolfe’s work, focused on women. Elizabeth Carter directs.
‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812'
“It’s a complicated Russian novel,” goes the prologue of Dave Malloy’s cult favorite musical. “Everyone’s got nine different names.” But if this theatrical adaptation jokes about its intimidating source material — one section of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” — it introduces its characters delightfully: “Anatole is hot. Marya is old-school. Sonya is good. Natasha is young.” Pierre gets to speak for himself right away, though: “The zest of life has vanished. Only the skeleton remains.” Shotgun Players’ production is one of the Bay Area’s long-postponed projects first planned long before the pandemic; that it remains on the theater’s schedule is a testament to Artistic Director
Patrick Dooley’s persistence, passion and vision.
Nov. 5-Dec. 30. $8-$62. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. 510-841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org
‘Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations'
There’s the keening remorse of “Since I Lost My Baby,” the unapproachable cool of “I Can’t Get Next To You.” There’s agony that’s physical in “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” sorrow that’s bottomless in “I Wish It Would Rain.” It was all delivered with the squeaky clean and butter-smooth falsetto of Eddie Kendricks, the rasp of David Ruffin, too hot to touch. In 2017, Berkeley Rep produced the world premiere of “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations,” which went on to get 12 Tony nominations, winning one. At last the musical comes home to the Bay Area, with a touring production hosted by BroadwaySF.
Nov. 9-Dec. 4. $56-$256. Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., S.F. 888-746-1799. www.broadwaysf.com