Bay Area theater in fall 2023: Classics, California and category-defying

Highlights this season include Berkeley Repertory Theatre, CounterPulse and We Players.

The We Players perform “Adventures With Alice” in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in April.

Photo: Adam Pardee/Special to The Chronicle

Amid Bay Area theater’s tantalizing fall lineup, a few groups of audience members are especially well served. Want to see the California you know and love reflected onstage? Word for Word, Central Works and Berkeley Rep have got you covered. Or maybe you’re a classicist, finding your place in the world from stories that have stood the test of time? Check out Oakland Theater Project, African-American Shakespeare Company, We Players and Cutting Ball.

Then again, maybe you chafe at the whole idea of categories; if so, direct your nonconformist energy toward Bindlestiff Studio, Stage Werx and CounterPulse.

Matt Standley in Oakland Theater Project’s “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.”

Photo: Ben Krantz Studio/Oakland Theater Project

‘Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus’

Gary used to be a clown, then hangman’s quarry. But just as he was about to be executed, he had a flash of an idea. Shakespeare’s blood-spewing, flesh-eating “Titus Andronicus” has just ended, so Gary points out, “You need a bloke to clean and to dispense of all the dead.” Eureka, a new job. This sequel to Shakespeare’s play, now in an Oakland Theater Project Bay Area premiere and written by the always-metamorphosing and form-splitting performance artist Taylor Mac, is all gallows and post-gallows humor, asking what it takes to wrench comedy from tragedy.

Friday, Sept. 8-Oct. 1. $10-$55. Flax Art & Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr Way, Oakland. 510-646-1126.https://oaklandtheaterproject.org

Stories High XXIII

The first time Filipinos stepped foot on what’s now the United States was in 1587, at Morro Bay in San Luis Obispo County. In Bindlestiff’s page-to-stage workshop series, playwright Yasmine Gomez gives a delicious comedic spin to that moment, as a priest asks a captain if soldiers might not want to land first, “just in casies.” The series of short plays, now in its 23rd outing, showcases rich creative expression. Jordan Idolyantes Guingao’s “Once Upon a Time in Tondo …” creates the dialogue equivalent of “the rhythmic racket that is metro Manila traffic.” Bella Chavez’s “The Trolley Problem,” set on a space station, asks a far-seeing question: “Do you fear human beings will one day impact extraterrestrial cultures the way European colonialism affected cultures on Earth?”

Thursday, Sept. 14-23. $20-$50. Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St., S.F.www.bindlestiffstudio.org

Marga Gomez performs at the Brava Theater in San Francisco in 2019.

Photo: Paul Kuroda/Special to The Chronicle

Solo Sundays

It has been a devastating year for theater closures:Exit Theatre’s Eddy Streetvenue,PianoFight,Bay Area Children’s Theatre,TheatreFirst— and now Stage Werx, the 11-year-old Mission District venue that specializes in solo performance, comedy, improv and more. Its October shuttering will make Bay Area arts less indie, less accessible, less funky. Some small consolation is that there are plenty of opportunities to say goodbye before then, not least with the final two Solo Sundays, Bruce Pachtman’s series of solo performers. Scott Cohen, Kenny Yun, Julia Jackson and Beth McLaughlin perform Sept. 21, and Marga Gomez, Janet Thornburg, Wayne Harris and Pachtman on Sept. 28.

Sept. 21-28. $20. Stage Werx, 446 Valencia St., S.F.www.stagewerx.org

The White Rabbit (Britt Lauer) asks the audience to follow during “Adventures With Alice” performed by We Players in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in April.

Photo: Adam Pardee/Special to The Chronicle

‘Adventures with Alice’

The We Players, which specializes in outdoor, site-specific work that reveals local, state and national parks as theatrical stages, reached a new high point in spring withAva Roy’s glorious adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s beloved stories. It both celebrated silliness and excavated the wisdom within silliness. Brooke Jennings’ costumes were veritable solar systems unto themselves, and performers showed deep understanding of that eternal Carroll insight: For children, nightmare, fantasy and giggle-inducing humor can all coexist in one great big swirl, and that’s not something we need to deny or censor. Whether you missed the romp the first time around or you simply want another go, the piece migrates from Golden Gate Park to the South Bay for an abbreviated fall run.

9月28-Oct。8.55美元。蒙塔沃艺术中心,15400年Montalvo Road, Saratoga. 408-961-5800.https://montalvoarts.org

Annie Danger stars in “The Hands That Feed You” at CounterPulse.

Photo: Matt Bradford

‘The Hands That Feed You’

Annie Danger has created a social justice boot camp for white people (“The White Stuff”) and a religious mass to heal self-loathing of the body (“The Great Church of the Holy F—”), all with the teasing enigma of a tagline, “The joke is it’s not a joke.” This fall the Bay Area performance artist returns to the CounterPulse stage as part of the company’s eponymous festival, once again as a spiritual leader of sorts. Now she hosts a game show, and audience members — in a game of game theory made real and high stakes — can choose to cooperate with or betray each other.

Oct. 6-15. $20-$35. CounterPulse, 80 Turk St., S.F. 415-626-2060.https://counterpulse.org

Central Works resident playwright Patricia Milton in Berkeley in 2018.

图:斯科特Strazzante /编年史

‘The Engine of Our Disruption’

Local playwright Patricia Milton makes dialogue zesty: Each line, however economical, uncovers something cringey, zany or piquant about a fast-talking character. In her latest world premiere with Berkeley’s Central Works, where she’s resident playwright, you might be tempted to keep a running tally of who amasses the most ethical lapses: The Congresswoman who says, “I’m a Republican. We never recuse”? The Palo Alto AI tech bros whose company motto is “Don’t be scurvy”? Or the supposedly ethical woman who takes a job with them to get out of her mother’s house? As the comedy rockets off the starting line, it’s neck and neck.

Oct. 14-Nov. 12. $15-$40. Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave., Berkeley. 510-558-1381.https://centralworks.org

Greg Sarris Photo: George Rose

‘Citizen’

If you’re a short story writer, one of the coolest things that can happen to your work is to have Word for Word translate it to the stage. Not only does the company neither alter nor omit a single word of text; its members also unlock a treasure chest of interpretative possibilities, sometimes within each syllable. Word for Word has a longstanding relationship with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, in Sonoma County, and its latest piece is a story by that reservation’s tribal chairman, Greg Sarris, a fiction writer of fluid pacing and striking imagery. In this story, a young man who just arrived in Santa Rosa pieces together his myth-touched origin story at the same time as he joins a line of 200 fellow day laborers for the first time. Gendell Hing-Hernández directs.

Oct. 18-Nov. 12. $5-$60. Z Below, 470 Florida St., S.F. 415-626-0453.www.zspace.org

Curation Director Chris Steele poses for a portrait at Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco in April.

Photo: Benjamin Fanjoy/Special to The Chronicle

‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’

The word “robot” comes from a play. In 1921, the Czech writer Karel Čapek, with astonishing foresight, envisioned a factory that manufactures the best sorts of workers: “the cheapest ones,” ones who don’t want to play piano, go for walks, be happy or do other “unnecessary” things. Čapek might not have been able to predict the specificities of AI, but his satire chills now, as technological advances seem poised to endanger many more humans’ jobs — which makes Cutting Ball Theater’s production, adapted and directed by Chris Steele, unsettlingly timely.

Oct. 20-Nov. 12. $15-$100. Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor St., S.F. 415-525-1205.https://cuttingball.com

A view of the hills in morning fog off Highway 128 in Boonville in November 2019.

Photo: Erik Castro/Special To The Chronicle

‘Bulrusher’

Part of the gorgeous poetry of Eisa Davis’ 2006 play is its use of Boontling, the dialect peculiar to Boonville (Mendocino County). “Hobbin” means dancing. “Can-kicky” means angry. Its title is a term for an illegitimate child. But another part of the play’s lyricism is the way that Davis, a Berkeley native, finds the godlike in nature. Bulrusher, an 18-year-old multiracial girl in a mostly white town in 1955, can “read” the future in water. She doesn’t know her full story beyond that she was found in a river — not until a stranger comes to town. With Nicole A. Watson directing the show for Berkeley Rep, audiences can fall in love with Mendocino mountains, fog, apple farms and garden patches all over again. They’ll have another chance in 2024, when West Edge Opera premieres an opera adaptation.

Oct. 27-Dec. 3. $45-$134. Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-647-2949.www.berkeleyrep.org

Actor L. Peter Callender poses with his two acting awards at the TBA Awards ceremony at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 2016.

Photo: Amy Osborne/Special To The Chronicle

‘Death of a Salesman’

Willy Loman is one of American theater’s titanic roles — the way Arthur Miller’s protagonist keeps espousing an American Dream that doesn’t love him back, the way the very smallness of his demise stands in for capitalism’s grind. Now African-American Shakespeare Company, whose eternally vital motto is “envisioning the classics with color,” finds the perfect contender for that almighty part in L. Peter Callender, a performer who’s capable of carrying the world on his back. Ted Lange directs.

Oct. 28-Nov. 12. $40. Taube Atrium, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F.www.african-americanshakes.org

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com

  • Lily Janiak
    Lily Janiak

    Lily Janiak joined the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in May 2016. Previously, her writing appeared in Theatre Bay Area, American Theatre, SF Weekly, the Village Voice and HowlRound. She holds a BA in theater studies from Yale and an MA in drama from San Francisco State.