San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Dramas, queer romps and immersive theater
As spring buzzes with new life and blossoms with color, Bay Area theater artists offer abundance as vibrant as any wildflower superbloom. Shattering dramas, queer romps and walk-through immersions are just some of the riches bursting forth this season.
‘Look! We Have Friends! ’
Friendship isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. In the hands of sketch comedy troupe Killing My Lobster, it’s also the unspoken homoerotic charge between two bros. It’s the need to compensate for friendlessness via retail therapy — or writing a solo musical. It’s making plans to hang but secretly hoping the other person cancels them. Directed by Nicole Odell and written by Matthew Beld alongside a team of fellow humorists, “Look! We Have Friends” continues the 27-year-old company’s residency at the freshly rechristened Eclectic Box, formerly known as Stage Werx, in the Mission.
Through Saturday, March 16. $16.50-$50. Eclectic Box, 446 Valencia St., S.F. www.killing mylobster.com
‘Cost of Living’
In Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script, caregiving is not some sentimental, saintly task where the gratitude flows and grit and hard work guarantee recovery, as in a Hilary Swank movie. The play, about two adults with disabilities and the people who reluctantly find themselves in caregiving roles, is plainspoken about the muck of our bodies and the s— show of American health care. (At the top of her script, Majok even includes a helpful playwright’s note: “For the Jersey mouth, the word ‘f—in’ is often used as a comma, or as a vocalized pause, akin to the word ‘like.’ ”) Now
the always-dynamic Oakland Theater Project opens its season with the play, one of the few contemporary pieces to have roles specifically written for actors with disabilities.
Through March 24. $10-$60.
Flax Art & Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. 510-646-1126. oaklandtheater project.org
‘The Twilight Aristocracy’
Built in 1855, the General’s
Residence at Fort Mason has housed all manner of highranking military officers and received U.S Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes. Now, under the auspices of Detour Dance, it hosts a very different select few: the members of a queer secret society. “The deliberate choice to self-ascribe as an ‘Aristocracy’ becomes an act of radical self-love,” director Eric Garcia said in a statement.
Founded by Garcia and Kat Gorospe Cole, the 15-year-old dance theater company has an ongoing interest in building LGBTQ refuges through art. Its last piece, “We Build Houses Here,” about shipwrecked queers, made an actual oasis out of South of Market nightclub Oasis. Like that project, “The Twilight Aristocracy” is walk-through; audiences can move at their own pace among different scenes happening simultaneously.
Friday-Sunday, March 15-17. $35-$150. The General’s Residence, 1 Fort Mason, S.F. www.detourdance.com
‘Pipeline’
In any debate about innercity public schools, Nya lives both sides. By day she’s a high school English instructor whose passion for Gwendolyn Brooks barely sustains her till her next cigarette break in the teachers’ lounge. By night she mothers a teenage boy with a disciplinary record, doing her best to advocate for him among diminishing options.
Dominique Morisseau (“Hippest Trip — The Soul Train Musical,”“Skeleton Crew,”“Paradise Blue”) is one of contemporary American theater’s most empathic writers, and with this script, now in an African-American Shakespeare Company production directed by L. Peter Callender, she insists on and reveals the complex humanity in a dehumanizing system.
March 16-31. $40. Taube Atrium Theater, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-762-2071. www.african -americanshakes.org
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
In case you were wondering how lust-soaked Shakespeare’s fantastical comedy is, consider this line: “I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon.” Or how’s this for a double-entendre? “I could munch your good dry oats.”
The play, whose plot hinges on a thing called “love-juice,” is ripe for queering, for genderexpansive interpretations that trumpet the still-contested notion that love is love is love. Director William Thomas Hodgson brings precisely that to Shotgun Players’ production, whose auspicious cast includes
G Momah, Rolanda D. Bell, Susannah Martin and Radhika Rao, among other rock stars.
March 16-April 14. Free-$40. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. 510-841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org
‘Prose and Confluence’
The theater of nine-year-old queer multidisciplinary ensemble Klanghaus is as intellectual as it is silly. Its first original musical, which tours to San Francisco Playhouse, Z Below and Tamalpais High School following a Shotgun Players premiere, is by writerperformers Teddy Hulsker and Max Abner. In one moment the pair might survey different philosophers’ takes, through centuries, on what constitutes change; in another they might offer the delicious interjection, “Oh Boy over there is a wiggly guy.”
The company’s last piece, “How We Spend Our Days,” was somehow delivered in quotation marks yet terrifyingly serious at the same time. This one, a “queer cowboy musical,” hews not to narrative but is set on a real and metaphorical riverbank overflowing with grief. “We missed our time, and we missed our place,” go some of its gorgeous lyrics. “We forgot to enter into the race. … They ran out of space.”
March 18 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., S.F. • April 22 at Z Below, 470 Florida St., S.F. • May 9 at Tamalpais High School, 700 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. https://klanghaus.art
Audra McDonald
The ephemerality of live performance is a double-edged sword. It makes a show all the more special and magical if you were lucky enough to be there, but it also invokes nostalgia or even a sense of loss when you realize that you’ll never get to see the same thing again.
But now fans of six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald get a rare treat. Mere months after she gave a juggernaut of a performance with the San Francisco Symphony, she’s back in the Bay, this time with just one accompanist: her stalwart pianist Andy Einhorn. Expect musical attacks of breathtaking delicacy, interpretations of translucent emotional vulnerability and craft that reveals the actor and vocalist as a national treasure.
March 22. $80-$225. Bing Concert Hall, 327 Lasuen St., Stanford. 650-724-2464. https:// live.stanford.edu
‘A Strange Loop’
Usher, so named for his lowly front-of-house position answering the same questions about “The Lion King” from ignorant tourists, is trying to write a musical, but his selfrecriminations — personified by a gaggle of actors — keep intruding. “How you doin’? It’s your daily self-loathing!” says one. Another introduces itself as his “financial faggotry.”
Michael R. Jackson’s Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prizewinning musical is in one sense the polar opposite of “The Lion King.” It’s ruthlessly self-aware, it’s proud of its idiosyncrasies, and it actually has a Black person on its writing team. But the show, which comes to American Conservatory Theater, also makes a sly case for shared DNA. What is more “big, Black and queerass,” as opening lyrics go, than a Broadway musical?
April 18-May 12. $25-$137. ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., S.F. 415-749-2228. www.act-sf.org
‘Sunnydale Prom’
Calling all Scoobies. Now fans of Joss Whedon’s trailblazing TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” can immerse themselves in the world of Sunnydale High, where Willow, Xander and of course the demon-trouncing title character are getting decked out for prom night. Pop Culture Immersives (“Pride in Gotham”) and Into the Dark (“Terror Vault”) team up for this walkthrough parody at the San Francisco Mint, and audiences are encouraged to attend in ’90s formal attire of their own, so dust off your chokers, butterfly clips, cameos and velour.
May 23-June 9. $75 and up. San Francisco Mint, 88 Fifth St., S.F. www.sunnydaleprom.com