The River Rolls Deep
There’s almost no point to reviewing The River. It’s not that kind of play. A world premiere play by Richard Montoya of Culture Clash, The River is a tribute to Luis Saguar, the late cofounder of Intersection for the Arts’ resident theater company Campo Santo, written for and performed by that company. As such, it’s an intensely personal project and ultimately feels very much like an in-joke. Maybe you had to have been there, you had to have known him, to understand what the heck is going on here.
Return to ReOrient
It’s been a while since Golden Thread’s last ReOrient festival of short plays about the Middle East. The festival had been going on an almost annual basis since 1999, but after its 10th anniversary in 2009 the company went on a producing hiatus, reemerging last year for the world premiere of Adriana Sevahn Nichols’s Night over Erzinga. But now the festival’s back in a big way, with two programs of short plays (the second batch for two shows only toward the end of the fest) and a forum of panel discussions at Z Space.
Branded for Life
Placas: The Most Dangerous Tattoo is a project that’s been in the works for four years. A coproduction of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, the Central American Resource Center, and Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Placas was conceived as a serious examination of Salvadoran-American gang violence in San Francisco amid nationwide anti-immigrant hysteria. Playwright Paul S. Flores interviewed gang members, parents and intervention workers while working on the piece. The resulting play now premiering at the erstwhile Lorraine Hansberry Theatre at 450 Post Street (which will become the new SF Playhouse this fall) feels very much like it’s designed to educate, with a nuanced view of the social pressures of gang culture but also a lack of dramatic subtlety and tendency toward melodrama.
In Tree City It’s a Pity
When Intersection gave up its Valencia Street home a year ago to move into the Chronicle building downtown, it also gave up its dedicated performance space. Since then it’s had to get creative about reimagining and reinventing its space. Last year’s Nobody Move was staged in a basement meeting room, and for Tree City Legends the Intersection office itself has been transformed into a theater, with the action taking place on all sides and amid the audience. Tanya Orellana’s set has walls full of windows with bare lightbulbs in them, and a stack of cinderblocks filled with candles. A screen up front shows Joan Osato’s video projections of trees, rippling water, cathedrals and Felix the Cat, and from time to time we can see through it to a live band set up for a recording session. Written by Dennis Kim, Tree City Legends is a world premiere developed with Intersection, its company-in-residence Campo Santo, Youth Speaks’s theater company the Living Word project, and Ictus.
Don’t Cockpunch the Messenger
“The god came back. Shortly afterward, the world ended.” That’s what Lauren Spencer tells us as the narrator and sometime bartender in Hermes, a new play playing at the Exit Theater in a No Nude Men production directed by Sleepwalkers Theatre artistic director Tore Ingersoll-Thorp. Spencer says this several times, in fact, handling the poetic repetition with grace and sparkling intelligence.
Missed Connections
Intersection for the Arts and company-in-residence Campo Santo are on a roll. Having debuted Chinaka Hodge’s marvelous Mirrors in Every Corner this February, they’re now introducing another impressive young emerging playwright with Sharif Abu-Hamdeh’s Habibi. This is no coincidence. The result of long development processes through Campo Santo’s new play lab, these plays constitute a sort of trilogy of world premieres by first-time playwrights, along with Dennis Kim’s New Tree Legends next fall.
