Margo Hall does double duty in S.F. Playhouse’s ‘Barbecue’
If you don’t know Margo Hall, you’re missing out. One of the founders of the adventurous San Francisco theater company Campo Santo, the longtime Oakland actor and director is a forceful standout in any play she’s in.
This June she directed “brownsville song” at Shotgun Players, a devastating drama about a young man gunned down almost at random, and then in August played a formidable goddess in California Shakespeare Theater’s production of “black odyssey,” Marcus Gardley’s bewitchingly poetic modern take on Homer’s epic, poignantly suffused with African-American history.
It was just announced last week that she’s been nominated for Theatre Bay Area Awards for both her direction of “brownsville” and her performance in “black odyssey.”
Now Hall is taking on the new challenge of doing both at once, directing and performing in the Bay Area premiere of Robert O’Hara’s play “Barbecue” at San Francisco Playhouse.
“I’ve done it on a small scale before,” Hall says. “Like for Campo Santo, I directed a piece and then someone couldn’t continue a run, or needed a couple days, I would just go in and play the part, if it was a part I could play. But it’s never been on this scale. Luckily my character is only in Act 2 in this play.”
O’Hara’s comedy is a dizzying, challenging piece in the first place, full of twists that upturn the audience’s entire understanding of what’s going on, over and over again. A boisterous family barbecue in the park turns out to be a pretext for a drug intervention for the wildest sibling in a family with more than its share of vices. Soon enough we find out the whole thing is actually something else, until even that turns out to be a fiction of some kind.
When SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English approached Hall about directing “Barbecue,” she had already been curious about the play.
“Colman Domingo directed it at the Geffen recently, that was the West Coast premiere, so we were talking about this crazy play he was doing,” Hall recalls. “I’ve met Robert O’Hara, I actually worked on one of his plays a long time ago at (American Conservatory Theater), when they did ‘Insurrection: Holding History.’ Charles Randolph-Wright directed it, and I was assistant director to Charles. Then when I read the first 20 lines of this play, I was like, ‘I have to do this play! It’s hilarious.’ ”
Although Hall has been directing for many years, when she looks at plays it’s usually first with the eye of an actor.
“When I first read ‘Barbecue,’ I was like, ‘I want to play that part. I would tear that up!’ ” Hall says. “And then Bill was like, why don’t you do it? I was like, no, I couldn’t do that. And then everybody was like, why not? And I was like, ‘Yeah, why not? I guess I can. I might lose my mind, but I’ll do it.’ ”
Not to give too much away, Hall plays a self-described “movie star sanga” (singer) who takes a professional interest in the family’s shenanigans.
“She’s a lot like me in some ways — totally different, but in some ways,” Hall says. “In this concept of doing it all. I think I can be very diva-ish at times — in a good way, though. But I know that feeling of feeling like you’re in control of everything. So some of her is a lot like me. Luckily I’ve never done crack, so I don’t know that part,” she adds with a laugh.
After “Barbecue,” Hall will be in “Skeleton Crew” by fellow Detroit native Dominique Morisseau (who also wrote the Temptations musical “Ain’t Too Proud” at Berkeley Rep), in a co-production that plays Marin Theatre Company in January and moves to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in March.
“I like plays that challenge the audience,” Hall says. “I like big characters, I like plays that are very blunt and to the point. I like plays that are uncomfortable for the audience in ways that can truly change somebody.”