现在你听说编年史的艺术批评家give several cautiously optimistic season previews that turned out to be excessively optimistic and insufficiently cautious. But it feels different, for real, this time.
Cancellations and postponements, while still happening here and there, are petering out. Playhouses are no longer mostly empty. And as spring nears, Bay Area theater lovers can look out for a couple of especially exciting trends: artistic directors finally making their long-delayed directing debuts and thrilling musicians trying out a new-for-them medium of musical theater.
‘Water by the Spoonful’
“Pinpoint the first time you really noticed dissonance,” Yazmin (Lara Maria) says early in “Water by the Spoonful.” She’s giving her students a writing prompt inspired by John Coltrane, but she could just as well be opening an interpretive window into the play in which she appears.
现在在旧金山剧场生产中，这个普利策奖得主恢复伊拉克战争兽医和恢复成瘾者是工艺的杰作。由QuiaraAlegría撰写的人（“In the Heights”fame), the play operates by suggestion and juxtaposition, not didacticism; it knows when to slice forward and when to anchor and float.
Through April 23. $30-$100. San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., S.F. 415-677-9596.www.sfplayhouse.org
‘Hotter Than Egypt’
Paul (Paul Morgan Stetler) thinks he can freely ask his Egyptian hosts Seif (Wasim No’mani) and Maha (Naseem Etemad) about politics, religion and culture. Isn’t that why he paid for them to be his tour guides on his anniversary trip with Jean (Jen Taylor) from Wisconsin to Cairo? But inYussef El Guindi’sworld premiere, now in a Marin Theatre Company co-production with ACT Theatre in Seattle, such conversations can’t be candid when there’s such a power imbalance of nationality and class — which becomes all the more fraught as the fault lines in Jean and Paul’s marriage start to rupture.
3月31日至4月24日。25-20美元。Marin Theatre公司，397米勒大道，轧机山谷。415-388-5208。www.marintheatre.org
‘PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute’
This sexy, poetic, hilarious script, now in a rolling world premiere at New Conservatory Theatre Center, opens with epigraphs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021’s“West Side Story”编剧Tony Kushnerand Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong. Lambda Literary Award-winning New York playwright Yilong Liu calls his dramatis personae “fabulous creatures” and presents their descriptions in the form of Grindr profiles.
PrEP (Akaina Ghosh), the pill that helps prevent HIV infection, is one of those creatures, and it’s become a crucible in the relationship of Erik (James Aaron Oh) and Bryant (Matt Weimer), who hail from different generations: one having lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic, the other learning about it as history.
April 1-May 8. $25-$65. New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-861-8972.www.nctcsf.org
‘Intimate Apparel’
The seamstress-client relationship erases barriers. Touching is necessary, disrobing likely. And when Esther makes ladies’ undergarments, she doesn’t just see her customers’ bodies; she sees their hopes and fantasies.
In this play (which, separately, was recently adapted into an opera) by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, the race- and class-crossing intimacy of Esther’s work sets up an unusual collaboration when one of her white customers offers to help Esther, who’s illiterate, write letters to a prospective lover. Now, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre mounts Nottage’s 2003 play, starring the great Bay Area actor Jeunée Simon as Esther.
4月1日至15日。$ 30- 40美元。魔术剧院，梅森堡，2号滨海布尔德，三楼，三楼，S.F。415-474-8800。www.lhtsf.org
‘Gem of the Ocean’
In August Wilson’s 1904-set play, part of his extraordinary Century Cycle of one play for each decade of 20th century African American life, human beings live life at the pace of historical epochs.
Citizen Barlow (Edward Ewell) has been standing outside for a full day in hopes of meeting Aunt Ester (Greta Oglesby); she, at 285 years old, hasn’t left her house in 20 years and has been asleep for four days. She wields spiritual power, sending him on a journey aboard a slave ship to a city of myth, where he reckons with his ancestral history and a crime he’s committed.
“Gem” marks the TheatreWorks directorial debut of the company’s new artistic director, Tim Bond.
April 6-May 1. $30-$100, subject to change. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. 877-662-8978.www.theatreworks.org
‘Drowning in Cairo’
“I remember googling ‘Gay Arab novel’ as a preteen and finding no literature about queer people from where I grew up,” playwright Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, who was born in Cairo and grew up in Dubai, said in a statement.
He envisions this show, now in a Golden Thread Productions world premiere, as a small corrective. It’s inspired by the real-life 2001 incident of the so-called Cairo 52, referring to the men arrested on a gay nightclub on a boat docked in the Nile.
“Drowning in Cairo” is also the first Golden Thread show directed by new leader Sahar Assaf.
“It offers an alternative to the often simplistic and reductive narrative about being gay in the Middle East,” she said in a statement.
April 8-May 1. $20-$100. Potrero Stage, 1695 18th St., S.F. 415-626-4061.goldenthread.org.
'渐进主义'
From her time as a college student to now, as a UC Berkeley vice chancellor, Nina (Cathleen Riddley) has found herself torn between different perspectives on Black activism on campus. One side believes change is possible through dialogue; another believes dialogue is deferral, that the only way forward is to tear down and rebuild.
In this passionate, debate-driven world premiere by local playwright Cleavon Smith at Aurora Theatre Company, Nina notes how far the world has come, that she can hold a position of power, but Raz (Sam Jackson), bearing scars of campus police violence on their body, wonders how many more generations have to suffer.
April 15-May 22. $20-$78. Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-843-4822.auroratheatre.org
'快来了'
Oakland singer-songwriter Rachel Lark pours so much feeling into a single lyric that you might wonder where she finds reserves for the next line, let alone the rest of a number. But her first musical, “Coming Soon” at Z Space, is all about holding back.
Maggie (Lark) has been faking orgasms for a whole eight-year relationship — a manifestation of how #MeToo affects otherwise healthy relationships. Driven by power vocals and fiery lyrics (“You try writing a love song”), the world premiere seeks an honest way to talk about and fulfill desire in a shame-ridden, oppressive world.
April 21-30. $25-$69. Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. 415-626-0453.www.zspace.org
‘Yemandja’
Four-time Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo has a voice that belongs on mountaintops or higher and a fierce, eye-locking delivery that might make you feel like you’ve just been recruited to a movement. Now the genre-spanning, language-hopping Beninese vocalist expands into musical theater as part of a yearlong residency with Cal Performances.
“Yemandja，”谁的书是由Kidjo的女儿撰写的，谁的头衔来自Yoruba宗教，问文化被盗时会发生什么。
April 23. $36-$88. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley. 510-642-9988.calperformances.org